Ezra Klein

Why so many famous and powerful people from so many walks of life orbited around him and

even after he was convicted in 2008 of soliciting a minor for prostitution.

What has come into clear view is the infrastructure of Epstein's power, and maybe through that, the infrastructure of modern power and elite networks more generally.

Anand Giridharadas is a journalist who has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and many other outlets.

He publishes the great newsletter, The Ink, and is the author of, among other books, Winners Take All, the elite charade of changing the world, which he published in 2018, and the forthcoming Man in the Mirror, Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City.

I often think of Anand's work as a kind of sociology of American elites and power.

And that's been the perspective he's brought to his coverage of these files.

And I think it is revelatory and worth hearing.

As always, my email, ezraklineshow at nytimes.com.

Anand Giridharadas, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

So there have now been literally millions of pages of Epstein files released.

There are possibly millions more that we have not seen, so we don't know everything.

There are redactions that we don't yet understand.

But when you try to step back from what we have seen, what is the picture that emerges?

One of the things that is the most striking thing about the files

is the range of Jeffrey Epstein's elite network.

I mean, you have someone here who is intimate with not just, at different times, Steve Bannon and Donald Trump, but Emirati businessmen, Elon Musk, Noam Chomsky, and Peter Thiel at the same time.

It crosses ideologies, it crosses industries, it crosses professions.

It is an extraordinary range of contacts of Republicans and Democrats, globalists and anti-globalists.