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with trying to “describe cancer mathematically.” Epstein preempts Nowak’s explanation (which I’m not quite getting): “Think of cancer the same way as you think of a terrorist group. The NSA has been able to thwart a great number of terrorism acts by intercepting communication signals from one terrorist to another. That same dynamic, a form of signal intelligence, of finding a terrorist in Europe, can be used to intercept communication between cancer sells. Cancer cells merely communicate in protean code rather than electronic code. If you can decode what the signals are saying you can jam those signal between terrorist calls—essentially wipe out their cell phones. Likewise if you can decode biological signals you can jam them too, that’s the holy grail.” Then Richard Azel, a Nobel prize winner in physiology. Then Ron Baron who, in his Baron Fund, has $26 billion under management. Then Josh Harris the co-founder of Apollo Global Management ($164 billion under management) and owner of the New Jersey Devils and the Philadelphia 76ers. Perhaps it’s just the ultimate feminist nightmare: Men (and a few opportunistic women) continue to come to Epstein’s because—no matter their public bows to modern manners—they simply don’t care that he offends every aspect of reconstructed gender and political sensibilities. In private, it remains a man’s world—a rich man’s world. Or, it’s a guilty pleasure. People who know Jeffrey exchange “Jeffrey” stories. “That’s Jeffrey,” says Mort Zuckerman, the real estate billionaire and publisher of the Daily News (ever vitriolic in its coverage of Epstein), with a twinkle in his eye and obvious enjoyment, to tales of Epstein escapades. It is an outréness that Epstein seems delighted to cultivate. In his Paris apartment, 10,000 square feet on the Avenue Foch, a neighborhood otherwise occupied by foreign potentates, there is a stuffed baby elephant in his living room—that is, the e/ephant in the room. (Epstein says too it’s a reminder that elephants have 23 copies of tumor suppressor genes and humans have only 1.) The single book on his bedside table is Lolita (he is, beyond the joke, a great Nobokov fan). Or, in a more sophisticated view, it’s a two tier understanding of the world. There is a media version of the world, which most of us live in and largely accept, and are certainly influenced by. And then there are those people who live in the media itself and therefore know that it’s mostly bunk. If the media says it, as likely some version of the opposite is true. I might guess too that for many of his visitors there’s an order of identification: there but for the grace of God. Any hyper-prominent person might, at any time, HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022753