We don’t have the Epstein files, but back in 2015 the contents of his little black book were published, and now New York Magazine has gone through his list of contacts and summarized them. Most of them are incidental encounters — Epstein was a pick-me boy who was straining to get the attention of establishment figures, and some of them were happy to get chummy with a rich guy. Unanswered, though, is how he got all his money; what’s clear and unsurprising is that a great many East Coast wealthy socialites were more than willing to overlook his conviction for child trafficking to go to his parties.
There’s a long section on Bill Clinton, for instance. I wouldn’t mind seeing more of the facts about the Bill Clinton/Jeffrey Epstein relationship exposed, and wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that he took advantage of Epstein’s underage “clients,” and that there’s a whole rotten mob of unscrupulous exploiters thriving in the upper crust. Take ’em all out.
One name on the list jumped out at me: John Brockman, agent for scientific “freethinkers.” Brockman was my agent! I contributed to some of his books! I guess I have a very thin, tenuous connection to one person on the Epstein list. (Don’t worry, I never was invited to any of Brockman’s Edge symposia, let alone got a ride on the Lolita Express. I was very bottom-of-the-barrel in the Brockman universe.) Nothing in NYMag about him was a surprise, but I’m relieved to say that the thread connecting me to that group was very thin.
What seems new, in flipping through the reams of society photos of perhaps the world’s most prolific sexual predator that have been circulating over the past few weeks, is not the powerful and the beautiful who surrounded Epstein, but the intellectuals — the Richard Dawkinses, the Daniel Dennetts, the Steven Pinkers. All men, of course. But the group selfies probably shouldn’t have been a surprise — documents of an age in which every millionaire doesn’t just fancy himself a philosopher-king but expects to be treated as such, and every public intellectual wants to be seen as a kind of celebrity.
Cultural shifts like these require visionaries, networkers, salespeople. Brockman is one. A Warhol Factory kid turned freelance philosopher of science turned literary agent to Dawkins and Dennett and Pinker (and many others), in the 1980s he formed a casual salon of like-minded scientists and futurists that came to be known as the Reality Club, a knock against the poststructuralism then dominant in the academy. In the 1990s, he rebranded it as the Edge Foundation, an organization whose central event was an annual online symposium devoted to a single, broad question. In 2000, it was “What is today’s most important underreported story?” In 2006, “What is your dangerous idea?”
Epstein was a regular contributor, and his plane — to judge from the photographs, at least — was an especially appealing way for other contributors to get to ted. They could also catch Epstein at Harvard, where so many of them taught and where he became so prolific a donor that one whole academic program seemed to be run like his private Renaissance ateliers. Epstein had long described himself as a “scientific philanthropist,” and in a press release put out by the Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation announcing its “substantial backing” of Edge, he called it “the world’s smartest think tank.”
Many in Brockman’s Edge community are, or were, inarguably significant figures in the American intellectual Establishment: Freeman Dyson, Jared Diamond, Craig Venter, John Horgan, Paul Bloom (to name a random but representative sample). They are also among the gods and heroes of the Trump-era internet community of “freethinkers,” whom Eric Weinstein, the venture capitalist and regular Edge contributor, memorably called “the intellectual dark web.” The name suggests a self-glamorizing style of dangerous discourse, and as soon as the community was identified, it was criticized as revanchist, an effort to reopen areas of intellectual inquiry — about innate differences between the races, say, or the genders — now considered problematic, at a minimum. But to listen to the IDW warriors themselves — talking about the “war on free speech” as though their universities had sent assassins their way rather than tenured chairs — their crusade seems motivated just as much by a thin-skinned sense of their own world-historical significance. They were special people, deserving of special acclaim and, of course, special privileges.
Many contributions to Edge were plausibly the products of genuinely special minds. Epstein’s were not. In 2008, the year he went to jail for prostitution, the prompt was “What have you changed your mind about?” Epstein replied, “The question presupposes a well defined ‘you’ and an implied ability that is under ‘your’ control to change your ‘mind.’ The ‘you’ I now believe is distributed amongst others (family friends, in hierarchal structures), i.e. suicide bombers, believe their sacrifice is for the other parts of their ‘you.’ The question carries with it an intention that I believe is out of one’s control. My mind changed as a result of its interaction with its environment. Why? Because it is a part of it.”
“Jeffrey has the mind of a physicist,” the Harvard professor Martin Nowak has said, incredibly. But what he really did have was the life of a very rich person — unable to see any world he felt unqualified to enter and surrounded by too many people enamored with his money to ever hear the word no.
At least I can say that I spotted the bullshit of the IDW on day one.
“Intellectual Dark Web” was a terrible bit of self-branding. A red flag, really. The original dark web just meant the corners of the web that were not indexed by search engines. By which standard “IDW” implies not wanting to promote ideas and arguments in the public sphere. Worse, by the time “IDW” was coined, the dark web had already became the hosting strategy of choice for child pornography, illegal business transactions, ransomware development, and so on.
To be fair, there are non-nefarious reasons to keep a website out of search engine indices — whistleblowing support for one — but the “IDW” movement was never about protecting identities.
OTOH, I don’t think we should drag people under the IDW umbrella just because they appeared in Edge or had Brockman as their literary agent.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see the likes of Dumb Idiot Ken Ham among the people involved with Epstein in one way or another. After all, he uses the Dark Web to get money from oil lobbyists, mining operations, Epstein style prostitution rings, etc. to fund his so-called “creation ministries” along with donations coming from his gullible followers.
I am reminded of this tidbit from 2021:
Bill Gates Thought Jeffrey Epstein Was His Ticket to a Nobel Prize, Ex-Staffer Says
Jared Diamond? Say what?
Kind of surprised and not surprised at the same time. Though I suppose the surprise part was having this bit of evidence in a tidy package, rather than diffused.
I really hope the Epstein files become something to put a dent in the wealthy elite, but I suspect the topic of rich pedophiles will become like the topic of school shooting: Sensible solutions at hand, public outrage, but no concerted action by the people in power to stop it.
….. Freeman Dyson has never been associated with the IDW anywhere else I’ve seen it discussed — is that merely a blind spot on my part?
PZM,
“We don’t have the Epstein files,”
I have them on my phone. You can download them from Google Drive. The question is, what files might still be missing. Everyone knows Clinton, Barak, the pervert English Prince etc are all guilty. You don’t even have to kill Ghislaine to know that anymore, the victims united yesterday, and they know the names and the cock sizes. You can’t kill them all.
Reiterating chrislawson @1:
Without more information, I would apply this to Jared Diamond, Freeman Dyson, and PZ Myers.
Being in Epstein’s book does not mean you are an Epstein crony — Epstein was a glad-handing suck-up who tried to cultivate an image with every famous person he heard about.
“Being in Epstein’s book does not mean you are an Epstein crony”
Hm. I better not comment on this one.
Everyone knows Clinton, Barak, the pervert English Prince etc are all guilty.
Funny how you neglect to mention Trump there…
Freeman Dyson is an AGW denialist and way too comfortable with fascists. Also like Jared Diamond he is a bit of a bullshit artist. I read Jared Diamonds book Collapse – definitely a guy with hammer who sees nails everywhere.
Militant Agnostic, Freeman Dyson is dead.
Isn’t it funny (ha. ha.) how none of these guys ever come up with a theory that there is an innate difference between the races / genders / hair colors that would cast themselves in the disadvantaged group? Not that that would make it any better, but somehow the not-very-underlying not-very-subtext seems to always be “Me! Me! Glorious me!”
Troll
You can’t even spell Barack correctly while spewing nonsense, which is quite a tell. Just for the record, neither Bill Clinton or Barack Obama are in the Epstein Files, though the disgusting Andrew is indeed guilty.
They also mention Michael Jackson and David Copperfield as visitors, though neither of them have been accused of anything untoward.
I don’t know what killing the groomer Ghislane would prove irregardless. Silencing her after she’s been convicted won’t change the court transcripts. She is known to lie her ass off under oath in any case.
@15 Tethys, he probably did spell Barak correctly. He surely meant Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel, who was an associate of Epstein and reportedly sent him a birthday letter.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/05/jeffrey-epstein-letters-photos
@1 chrislawson
False. You’re confusing the dark web with the deep web, which indeed is the sum total of the web not indexed by search engines. The dark web additionally requires special protocols to access that are not found on the typical out-of-the-box web browser.
@7 rorschach
The files with the names of Democratic and Republican party megadonors in them. They’re the ones who hoped this would all blow over and are currently slowing the process to a crawl, not merely Trump.
beholder, if you reckon you’re correct, you might care to fix the Wikipedia entry, because it does not say what you say.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_web)
Here’s the Bubblebot: The term dark web originally referred to content hosted on darknets—overlay networks requiring specialized software, configurations, or authorization to access. It emerged around 2009 as a way to distinguish these encrypted, anonymized spaces from both the surface web (publicly indexed) and the broader deep web (unindexed but not necessarily hidden).
However, the infrastructure predates the term:
Freenet (2000): Developed by Ian Clarke, it offered anonymous communication via a decentralized network.
Tor (2002): Created by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory to enable secure, untraceable internet use—later adopted for public anonymity and became the backbone of what’s now considered the dark web.
So while the label “dark web” is relatively recent, the concept—an encrypted, anonymized sublayer of the internet—has roots in early privacy-preserving technologies.
—
“The files with the names of Democratic and Republican party megadonors in them.”
They are fractally encoded; connections can be made.
@17 and @18–
Actually, John, beholder is right here and I was wrong. The deep web is unindexed, the dark web is a subset of the deep web requiring special tools to access.
Bah. A logon or account is special access, but nobody called or calls that stuff the dark web.
(Browsers are not special tools? You mean Tor?)
@16,
yes, thanks.
Epstein gave research money to George Church, quite possibly in hopes of immortality. I disagree with some of Church’s research goals and sometimes his language but it’s not his fault if he gets mentioned in Epstein’s sorry attempts at renting legitimacy.