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The rich come here, risking public opprobrium, not to mention the censure of their wives, 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. At Jeffrey’s the rich don’t have to humor the sensitivities of the rest of the world. This is unfiltered power and wealth, which seems not so much crass as efficient: this is the way the world works, no bullshit. Epstein facilitates that conversation without guilt or worry, and, in fact, with great glee and enthusiasm. It is not just the remarkable flow of valuable information before it hits the New York Times (including, while I sat here, notice of the resignation of a cabinet secretary a week before it hit the Times), but Epstein’s almost small-town narrative of the doings of the powerful in the face of this week’s economic trends, a kind of back-fence gossip that just happens to feature the comings, goings, and secrets of some of the world’s most astute players and assorted megalomaniacs. 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 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022906