Given the current moral panic surrounding everything Epstein, about which I am reminded daily, it wasn’t easy to decide to publish this. At least one major outlet actually planned to, and then backed out on the day of publication. I was very pleased that Claire Lehmann and her staff at Quillette were brave enough to publish this. I am including an excerpt here. I urge many of you who want to read the whole thing to consider subscribing to this important outlet for ideas and news.
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America’s Jeffrey Epstein feeding frenzy received renewed sustenance on 30 January when the Trump Justice Department released about 3.5 million documents for public consumption. So far, none of the newly released files has provided new evidence regarding Epstein’s crimes or those supposedly committed by others he knew. The so-called Epstein Files are mostly private correspondence between Epstein and various individuals with whom he associated, from his closest friends to distant acquaintances.
That includes me. I got to know Epstein in the early 2000s, when he provided some support for a major conference I organised on cosmology. He enjoyed thousands of associations like this, and the press has seized upon them, even when the people involved had nothing to do with Epstein’s alleged criminality nor any knowledge of it. But in 2026, evidence of actual wrongdoing doesn’t really matter. Epstein has become a demonic figure, and anyone associated with him in any way is tainted, if only by association and innuendo.
Last December, PBS announced that it was dropping Poetry in America, which had been scheduled to air for a fifth season this year. “PBS is no longer distributing the program and it has been removed from our digital platforms,’’ a spokesperson announced. A week later, the Boston Globe reported that Arizona State University would be terminating its relationship with Verse Video Education, a nonprofit organisation that produced the program. Verse Video was run by Elisa New, a poetry professor at ASU and the second wife of former Harvard president, Larry Summers. In 2024, ASU named New as director of its Educational Media Innovation Studio, which was developed to run her poetry program. Not only has the university now severed its relationship with Verse Video, it has also closed the media studio. All information about the studio and any resources it produced have been scrubbed from the ASU website….
to read more go to
https://quillette.com/2026/02/15/the-price-of-the-epstein-frenzy-jeffrey-epstein-elisa-new-university-of-arizona/