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because there aren’t, in this leveled age, too many places where they don’t have to pretend that they are something other than rich and powerful. The conversations at Epstein’s are the conversations, I suspect, that rich men dream of, but in the real world are actually hard to have. That’s the implicit Epstein view of the world, not, in most venues, comfortably expressable, not in positive and practical terms anyway: that the rich do have quite an autonomous control over events, and the wherewithal to effect the outcome of what they can’t entirely control. Epstein faciliates that conversation without guilt or worry, and, in fact, with great enthusiasm. His lack of PC--the rich man’s world he has created is flagrantly non PC--is a serious part of the draw. Wealth is the bond and the experience. Once, at lunch in the Epstein dining room with Bill Richardson, the former Governor of New Mexico, and past Presidential aspirant, when Epstein left the room for a few minutes, I asked the obvious question, the one everybody asks each other, “How did you meet Jeffrey?” Richardson seemed surprised: “Jeffrey,” he said, as though stating what should have been perfectly obvious, “is the biggest landowner in New Mexico.” 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: “Ata certain level of finance, almost everyone is allied with HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022875