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I’m sorry for not writing a newsletter earlier this week, but I thought it was important to take a step back and consider how best to respond to some information that has newly come to light. It’s been brought to my attention that my name appears in the most recent batch of Epstein files released by the House Oversight Committee, and I think I owe a lot of people a pretty serious apology.
Not about the Epstein files though! I have nothing to be sorry for there. It’s not obvious if you haven’t looked at the raw data or done some name searches in one of the searchable archives, but there is a ton of random junk included in the 20,000 pages of Epstein files released by the House in November. Whole book manuscripts, a video of a dog chewing on what appears to be the Trump half of a Trump / Hillary plushie set while someone offscreen chides it affectionately in Italian (???), an extremely old Google search results screenshot… all kinds of things. One item among this miscellany is the syllabus for a Harvard Law School course co-taught in the winter term of 2017 by Harvard Law professor and all around tech policy guy Jonathan Zittrain, who, like me, doesn’t appear anywhere else in the files aside from this syllabus, and now-disgraced former MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito, who very much does.
Yikes
The syllabus includes an article I wrote for the New Yorker (dot com) in 2014 about the “Heartbleed” OpenSSL vulnerability. I re-read the story and it’s a great piece and they were right to include it. I have no idea why this syllabus appears in the Epstein files, other than it being Joi Ito related, but I have been described as “something of a Zelig-like figure in internet history," so I’m chalking this up to another example of the kind of thing that happens to me.
This kind of peripheral involvement in the events of the day isn’t cheap! Please become a paid subscriber and help me continue to document my puzzling but ultimately inconsequential brushes with history.
But while Joi Ito faced his professional reckoning shortly after Epstein “““killed himself””” in jail awaiting trial, someone who hadn’t yet been tied so closely to America’s most prolific pedophile was Larry Summers. Despite being an open misogynist for more than two decades Summers was still, until this week, a Harvard professor and a “distinguished senior fellow” at the Center for American Progress where he was busy writing down terrible ideas that would soon become the policy poison the Democratic Party would demand its voters guzzle in 2028’s record-breaking eighth “most important presidential election of our lives” in a row.
In contrast with Ito’s singleminded focus on how much money Epstein could give him, the long-married Summers seems to have mostly relied on his billionaire convicted pedophile sex trafficker pal for an extra creepy version of dating advice. The Harvard Crimson’s Dhruv T. Patel and Cam N. Srivastava, who have been first on every development in this story from the start, report:
In a sequence of texts and emails between November 2018 and July 5, 2019, Summers turned to Epstein for advice on his pursuit of the woman. Epstein was quick to chime in with assurance and suggestions, describing himself in one November 2018 message as Summers’ “wing man.”…
Throughout the seven months of correspondence reviewed by The Crimson, Summers and Epstein referred to the woman Summers was pursuing in some messages by the code name “peril” but never used her name in messages directly describing the relationship. On at least two occasions, the two men discussed Jin’s emails to Summers, which he forwarded to Epstein. In later messages, the two men appeared to joke about the probability that Summers would have sex with the woman, apparently Jin.
Again, if you missed it, these two men in their late 60s are discussing Summers’ hornt-up efforts to seduce or at least entrap a much younger Chinese economic scholar who they refer to only as “peril.” I’d like to outline the moderate position on what should be done with Larry Summers here, and that is: launch him into the sun.
My favorite Tiktok semiotics guy Aidan Walker made an extremely good point in describing Epstein’s services as “emotional labour for rich and powerful men who hated themselves,” comparing Epstein to historical Russian imperial court warlock Rasputin, both of whom were the kind of person who “becomes this… important social node in the court, that is able to do it because the whole thing is decaying around him.”
So far, Summers has been dismissed from his CAP fellowship and his role at the Yale Budget Lab, has stepped down from the board of OpenAI, and after briefly seeming to believe that his unfettered access to undergraduate Harvard students would be the last thing he could hang on to, has also stopped teaching at Harvard. The Onion suggested one further chair he could step down from, but no word on that yet.
So what do I have to apologize for, if not my extremely tangential appearance in the Epstein files? On Monday, Vanity Fair published an excerpt from Olivia Nuzzi’s forthcoming memoir about her affair last year with Trump H.H.S. Secretary and brainworm afflicted fish tank juice aficionado Robert F. Kennedy Jr. I don’t usually provide paywall evading links in this newsletter but I’ll make an exception this time, because this is some of the worst writing I’ve ever seen in my life and I think Vanity Fair owes me money for reading it. This prose hit purple still accelerating hard and got well into the ultraviolet before NORAD tracking stations lost contact with it. The best tonal comparison I’ve seen and one worth visiting before you read the excerpt, if you choose to do that to yourself, is Andrew Paul’s McSweeney’s quiz: “Who Said It: The Hell Priest Pinhead or Olivia Nuzzi?” We have such sights to show you!
9. “He was the mouse and the architect of his maze. The giver of his pleasure and torment.”
10. “Obsolete. Irrelevant in an age when desire has become amplified but where lust can be sated electronically. We need something more than just a wooden box.”
11. “He desired. He desired desiring. He desired being desired. He desired desire itself.”
While having the affair with RFK Jr. in 2024, Nuzzi was engaged to fellow Double Z Media Name and former New Yorker political correspondent Ryan Lizza, who was fired from David Remnick’s magazine in 2017 for unspecified “improper sexual conduct” which has never been explained further that I know of. Timed to overshadow Nuzzi’s big excerpt drop on Monday, Lizza posted an entry to his online diary Telos Dot News titled “Part 1: How I Found Out” where his new claim that Nuzzi had previously, in 2020, had an affair with former South Carolina Governor and alleged hiker Mark Sanford eventually struggled free of an invasive metaphor about bamboo.
This changed the story from what Nuzzi is selling in her memoir—a one-time error of the heart, an unstoppable and unpredictable brushfire of romance between an ambitious young magazine correspondent and a repulsive human garbage disposal who smells like dead bear meat and wants us all to die of measles—into a story more about what now look like a series of inexplicable lapses of personal and professional judgement.
My first apology is to everyone whom I have assured over the years that Nuzzi is an underrated writer and reporter who was unfairly judged for being relatively young, conventionally attractive, and not having a traditional journalism background. I was wrong, and I’m sorry. It turns out that, impossibly cynical though it seemed, the truth is that she is an incompetent writer who obtained scoops by being hot, seeming willing to sleep with sources, and occasionally actually doing so. While very rare in real journalism, this all-too-common trope in movies and TV shows has been sharply criticized in the past by female journalists such as… Olivia Nuzzi.
Who can say.
And my second apology is to Olivia Nuzzi’s editors, who have clearly been doing heroic work to make her readable, if the memoir is any indication of what her first drafts look like. The editor’s work is rarely appreciated except in its absence, and that is even more true here. Ana Marie Cox actually volunteered to take a crack at editing the book excerpt. Vaya con Dios my friend, better you than me.
“Someone” 👀
All of this was a melodramatic haunch beefy enough for everyone to get a bite. No Nuzzi news may pass without Keith Olbermann popping up to remind us that when she was a teenager, he whisked her out of her New Jersey childhood bedroom and into a Manhattan apartment.
“Which four birthdays were those, exactly, Keith?” wondered many. Olbermann is, incredibly, not legally required to disclose any of this.
Among the responses from other women in journalism were Katelyn Burns’ “Olivia Nuzzi is an Embarrassment to Journalism” and Marisa Kabas’ more general take that “Moral rot in elite journalism is killing the whole field.” John Ganz was “not amused,” and managed to get Ezra Pound in on the action.
Slate’s Nitish Pahwa wrote an explainer for those of you who don’t already know way too much Nuzzi lore, as did Drew Magary for SFGate. There is so much Nuzzi lore, you guys. Did you know that Anthony Weiner is involved? Milo Yiannopoulos? Ann Coulter? It’s just endless. This garbage is taking up space in my brain that I could otherwise be using to recognize the faces of my friends and loved ones, or remember their birthdays.
Never mind that Nuzzi refuses to name the "private ways he was mad," which apparently stand in contrast to the many public ways he was mad, because here she delivers the goods, sharing what might be the single direct quote from their sexts:
| “Baby, don’t worry,” he said. “It’s not a worm.”
Baby, don't worry, it's not a worm. These are the words any political reporter yearns to hear from the man whose brain she has come to love, whose brain has now been revealed to have been predated upon directly by something small and slimy and invertebrate, a creature that could have been controlling the Politician like Remy in Ratatouille, tugging at RFK Jr.'s ears so that the mindless automaton could dismantle the very foundations of public health that have, for so many years, helped us live longer and healthier lives. After all, creating the conditions of mass illness and death could only be the agenda of a parasite.
Hell Gate correspondent and Stargate SG-1 fan Nick Pinto also focused on the worm, mostly in its resemblance to a number of plot details from Stargate SG-1 which, I’ll be honest, I only skimmed. Funny concept but I’m not gonna read all that. I’m happy for you though Nick, or sorry that happened.
Even Alexis Coe, who writes a newsletter about presidential history, managed to find an angle by comparing and contrasting the Nuzzi / Brainworm affair with the affair between silent film actress Gloria Swanson and Brainworm family patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. one hundred years ago.
After the affair was exposed, the pattern held: Kennedy mistress suffers. Kennedy man succeeds. Swanson endured a more old-fashioned variety of exploitation in which a powerful man runs through her life, body, and finances. Nuzzi suffered a modern spectacle—there was no sex, just leaked sexts, which, in the end, might have been Nuzzi’s only grace. Her life was otherwise burned to the ground; fired by New York Mag, cancelled book deal, her engagement and affair over…
I’m not sure we need to go that far though? Nuzzi’s life was “burned to the ground” in the sense that she took a year off to live in Malibu and type a memoir’s worth of absolutely terrible prose into her phone before picking up a sweet new gig at Vanity Fair. And the book deal wasn’t cancelled—the book is coming out next month, despite being literally Vogon in quality.
But we’ll see if the new job sticks, I guess, because yesterday Status dot news’s Natalie Korach finally raised one of the most interesting still-unanswered questions in this whole mess. What does Vanity Fair think about all of this?
Vanity Fair staffers, I’m told, were “shocked” by the revelation and have been left wondering whether there will be consequences for Nuzzi. But the latest allegation has also raised a host of questions about the ethical standards of the prestige magazine under recently installed global editorial director Mark Guiducci that, to borrow a term as old as Watergate, boil down to what did the magazine’s leadership know, and when did they know it?
“Leadership seems stressed,” one person told Status.
Vanity Fair still hasn’t made any public statement about whether its new editor, some guy Anna Wintour's daughter liked, knew his recent stunt-hire was quite this ethically radioactive. Ryan Lizza has yet to publish “How I Found Out” parts 2 through ?? So stay tuned, or maybe don’t! Everything is almost certain to get dumber somehow, and I’m also sorry for that.
Thank you to Senior Contributing Editor for Graphics Alison Headley for the Achewood edit. Apparently no one knows what the original Achewood font is, but I think they did a fine job simulating it. And thank you also to Evan Prodromou for alerting me to my Epstein files appearance. I have not asked him how he discovered it, and I shan’t. The song of the day is on vacation in the islands of Greece, and will return when it wants to.
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