With everything that has been going on as the world seeks to weigh the chances of a nuclear war and a realignment of nations across the globe, fans of the media may have failed to tune into the real news that broke in recent weeks. Forget Ukraine, there is another drama whose suspense is building....
The criminal justice system in the United States may not be the best imaginable model for producing effective crime control. Given the numbers of people incarcerated, neither does it appear to be an effective tool of dissuasion. Its rate of 629 people incarcerated per 100,000 is five times as high...
A society that depends on sophisticated media to construct standardized mental images of the world inevitably loses the ability to perceive reality. It replaces reality with an increasingly hyperreal construction. Even if reality resists, well-managed hyperreality invents a response. If reality...
In the days following the announcement of Bill and Melinda Gates’ divorce, it has become clear that Melinda was the force behind it. In this column, we speculated that Alexander Zaitchik’s devastating critique of Bill’s role in the enduring drama of vaccine inequality may have been a...
Two fundamentally ambiguous events concerning the Jeffrey Epstein affair have left many people wondering how far the web of influence around the convicted sex offender extended. The first was the trial that ended with a sweetheart deal allowing Epstein, an American financier, to be virtually free...
Ghislaine Maxwell’s arrest opens a new act in a drama that some may one day hail as the “Tragedy of Jeffrey Epstein.” According to Shakespearean logic, Maxwell’s arrest in this ongoing drama would mark the opening of Act IV. Like Julius Caesar, whose murder took place in Act III of the...
During the last two years of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the news media focused on one story: the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The developing and probably lingering story that may dominate the news cycle for the remaining 18 months of Donald Trump’s first presidential term may turn out to be...
Editor’s Note: Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy American financier, was found dead in his prison cell in an apparent suicide on August 10, 2019. He had been awaiting trial on sex trafficking and conspiracy charges, to which he pleaded not guilty in July. This article by Ellis Cashmore, author of...
The New York Times has delved into what might be called the scientific side of US financier Jeffrey Epstein’s cultural empire, which for all its apparent luminous rationality appears to be as somber and disturbing as the rest of his actions in the realm of sex trafficking. Among the...
After US financier Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest for underage sex trafficking, USA Today asked the vital question that every American desperately wants to see answered: “Who is Jeffrey Epstein? It turns out that the descriptor most used to identify him over the past decades — billionaire — may...
