Second Thoughts on Epstein; More on Aristotle and "the Tyrannical Soul"

Reading, Watching 07.20.25

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You can also buy When the Clock Broke, now in paperback, available wherever books are sold. If you are in the UK, it is also available there.

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In honor of Trump’s swollen legs — Philip Guston, San Clemente, 1975, oil on canvas

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I have a piece for Politico about Elon Musk and Ross Perot that should be out tomorrow, so stay tuned for that. And, in case you prefer to read it in print, my review of Maurizio Serra’s biography of Curzio Malaparte is in today’s New York Times Book Review.

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My friend

Vinson Cunningham

, critic extraordinaire and author of the terrific novel Great Expectations, has started a Substack. This is a very exciting development: For my money, Vinson is the best writer on contemporary arts and culture. Don’t take my word for it — he’s been a Pulitzer Prize finalist two years in a row.

Scenes in the City

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I recorded a video with

Jonathan V. Last

of

The Bulwark

this past week. It was a fun and far-ranging discussion, so please do check it out if you haven’t yet!

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I urge you all to read Leland Nelly’s 2020 Mother Jones piece “I Called Everyone in Jeffrey Epstein’s Little Black Book,” which I think is the best thing I’ve read on Epstein. I think it more fully illustrates key parts of the “banality of the Epstein” thesis I tried to develop:

After Epstein’s arrest in 2019, a media narrative coalesced around the question of his strange place in the global elite: Epstein the master salesman, a man who had skillfully conned his way into the world’s most powerful circles, fooling everyone in the process. But after my travels through the book, after hearing more of the petty gossip and childish drama of the people who rule our world, I realized this was obviously incorrect. Built into the premise of Epstein the mastermind scammer is the notion that some kind of legitimate path to a legitimate global aristocracy exists. To call Epstein a grifter is to assume he circumvented some genuine meritocratic world order, where the “real” virtuosos dutifully climb the “real” ranks into the oligarchy, powered by nothing but their native talents.

The truth is that the elite world that Epstein ascended into, the one I tapped into by way of the black book, is populated with hordes of loathsome, boring, untalented people living their bumbling, idiotic lives while just so happening to wield some share of the preposterous global bounty that he and the rest were after. For all the mystery surrounding Epstein’s fortune, its existence is hardly more inscrutable than the wealth of any of his other billionaire peers. He earned it the same way they all did, which is to say precisely not at all.

This wasn’t some masterful hack into the global aristocracy. It’s what everyone does. It’s what the whole thing is. There is no scam here. It’s grifters grifting grifters all the way down.

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This urge to make Epstein’s power sophisticated and complex serves a similar purpose as the elites’ insistence on Epstein’s extraordinary genius–both are ways of squaring the evident smallness of the man himself with the vastness of the world he built and the seemingly outsized influence he possessed. Both of them betray a collective lack of imagination when it comes to just how ludicrously rewarded dumbasses can be in this country. Epstein didn’t have to be anything special to become a key player in an evil conspiracy. He had to be rich, and he had to be useful to people richer and more powerful than he was. The very real possibility is that Epstein was both a rich dumbass and a key player in an evil conspiracy, because evil conspiracies require nothing more.