She's in the Epstein Files

About this episode

Virginia and Cy discuss Virginia's discovery of her appearance in the Epstein files and the implications of her experiences in the intellectual salon culture.

Welcome to Omnishambles! Please subscribe (it’s free!) She’s in the Epstein files. It’s fine. She’s fine. This week, Virginia and Cy are back together to dig into Virginia’s latest piece for The Nerve —Carol Cadwalladr’s new media venture—and it drops some bombs. Virginia recently discovered she appears in the Epstein files, thanks to her time as a client of literary agent John Brockman and his organization, Edge. You know, the “intellectual salon” secretly bankrolled by Jeffrey Epstein. The one with no women, no cameras, and a whole lot of evolutionary psychology. Totally cool & normal stuff. Virginia takes us inside how it happened—the pick-me dynamics, the billionaire dinners dangled like bait, the former Playboy Club office—and what it means that so many of the people we were supposed to think of as The Serious Thinkers were, it turns out, neck-deep in all of this. We get into: * How Virginia ended up in the Epstein files (and the surprisingly upsetting moment she realized it) * John Brockman, Edge, and the intellectual-salon-as-grooming-operation pipeline * The “pick me” trap: why smart women signed on, and what it cost them * Social Darwinism dressed up in a blazer: the…

People in this episode

Hosts: Virginia Heffernan, Cy Canterel

Topics covered

• Epstein files
• intellectual salons
• evolutionary psychology
• social dynamics
• grooming operations
• prestige science
• relational ontology

Keywords

• Epstein
• intellectual salon
• John Brockman
• Edge
• social dynamics
• evolutionary psychology
• grooming
• prestige science

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Edge, Jeffrey Epstein

Books & works: The Nerve

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