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confirm everyone’s worst fears about power and the powerful: it’s all insider stuff. But the conversations at Epstein’s are the conversations, I suspect, that rich men dream of, but in the real world, such a buttoned-down and agenda-driven place, are actually hard to have. “That’s Jeffrey,” says Mort Zuckerman, (whose paper, the Daily News, is ever vitriolic in its coverage of Epstein), with a twinkle in his eye. On Epstein’s part, there is the wink: 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 elephant 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). Epstein has a yet more structural explanation as to why, after prison and with continuing tabloid infamy, he can maintain his valued place. It comes back, not unexpectedly, to the nature or the needs of money: “At a certain level of finance, almost everyone is allied with an institutional interest. You are part of government, or you want to be in government, or you are connected to a bank or other portfolio, or you have key relationships with certain corporations or industries. Because of my situation, I have none of that. I have no institutional ties which makes me in some sense one of the few wholly independent sources of information and actual honest HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_024240