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If the Jeffrey Epstein case has a leading reporter on the national scene, her name is Julie K. Brown. An investigative journalist for the Miami Herald, Brown has interviewed dozens of Epstein’s victims and has meticulously anatomized how Epstein managed to win preposterously favorable treatment in the courts. Brown’s reporting on Epstein is credited with reopening the 2008 case against him. Her book “Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story” was published in 2021.

The millions of documents recently (and chaotically) released by the Department of Justice have left Americans reading myriad e-mails and text messages that seem to describe, in their aggregate, a range of élites eager to curry favor with a criminal beyond the imaginings of the police blotter or the Marquis de Sade. The dreadful cast includes Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Steve Bannon, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Ehud Barak, as well as various Wall Street wizards and real-estate magnates. And yet Brown’s main focus is on the names that fewer people know: the many girls and women who were treated for years with such cruelty.

When I spoke with Brown last week for The New Yorker Radio Hour, she was just about to publish an article in the Herald about President Trump’s telephone call to the Palm Beach police chief around the time of Epstein’s arrest in 2006. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Julie, as somebody who is almost single-handedly responsible for thrusting this terrible subject into the light, what does it feel like to see this gigantic onslaught of files after all this time?

Well, I wish I could say it was somewhat satisfying to finally see some truth in this, but the way that this is being handled right now by the Administration is very chaotic and messy. And it’s very hard to figure out what’s what when half a document is redacted, when the recipients and the person who sent the document are redacted. So I think in some ways this raises more questions and makes the public more distrustful. It was supposed to be an act of transparency. And I don’t see it as that, quite frankly.

Would you say that the release of these documents is purposeful, or chaotic on purpose, or chaotic because of a chaotic Administration?

I think it’s both [purposeful and chaotic]. I actually think part of it was done on purpose because it’s sort of what this Administration does: distract, try to take people’s minds off of things, confuse. So, I think part of it is purposeful. But from what I’ve read so far I also think that it also has to be a reflection of the fact that the Justice Department has never really organized themselves well enough to figure out how to go about this investigation. It is so massive. And I think that it was just something that they just never got a handle on to begin with.

How many documents are there?

They’re saying six million, because they released three million and they say that there are two to three million documents left. Remember, though, part of this is a lot of repetition—some of these documents, you see multiple times. But the other interesting thing is: We haven’t seen any of Epstein’s e-mails from around the time that he was buddies with Trump. Not that Trump used e-mail, but that was when Trump was in his orbit, so to speak. So we’re not getting any view of what was going on during that time period, which would’ve been, like, the early two-thousands.

Well, let’s start with what we know about the relationship between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. What is Trump saying it was, and what’s the reality? What are we learning?

Trump has said that he really wasn’t as good of friends with him, that he had a falling out with him, that they had some events together—he was at Mar-a-Lago at some events, but he’s downplayed that, I think it’s fair to say. From what we have seen, they were much closer—certainly much closer than I thought they were when I did this story originally. I think we’re getting new information that shows that maybe they were closer, but we don’t find any evidence thus far that he was involved in any of Epstein’s crimes.

Can you be a little bit more specific about the relationship, what it consisted of?

Well, I think that they were sort of competitors, in a way. They were both very wealthy, connected men, and I think they competed. We know that there was this real-estate deal in the early two-thousands in Palm Beach, and then Trump jumped on it, and it ended up in a bidding war, and Trump won. And then he sold the property—it was this massive mansion—for oodles and oodles of money. Of course, Epstein was really mad about that. So I think Trump wanted to show off his wealth to Epstein, and Epstein wanted to show off his wealth.

That’s a situation of rich guys, whose is bigger, et cetera.

Yes.

What about their social relationship? And they seem to bond—to put this delicately—over the question of women.

Yes. They definitely did. Trump did an interview saying that [Epstein] likes women and he really likes them young. And so that was the same way they competed over money. They were also, I think, to some degree, competing over their prowess with women.

How did Trump feel about him liking them young? Was he repulsed? Was he jealous? What was his attitude toward that?

He would say he was repulsed, I think, but I think the culture at the time—it probably wasn’t as frowned upon. Not that being with an underage girl is ever something that you shouldn’t frown upon. But it was a different time, and I think that when an underage girl showed up or was in their midst it wasn’t a case where they kicked her out. They were probably just amused by it, and Epstein more so.

What specifically have you been able to look at that surprises you, in all the documents that have come your way? What have you found out?

That this is a lot bigger, and it spans the globe more so than I ever thought before. And I say this because even from my early reporting I had spoken to investigators who looked into Epstein who said that he had recruiters, for example, and scouts in other countries to get him women. We are now seeing from some of these e-mails that he had not just a couple scouts. I mean, he had scouts, it seems like, in almost every country.

What does that mean? He had people looking out for teen-age girls to bring to the United States?

Yes. And he hired lawyers, by the way, who did their visas to get them over here. Or work permits. I mean, he used his modelling agency as a way to get them over here, but it was clear that they were not just here to do modelling. In my original reporting, I reported that there was a bookkeeper for that modelling agency who did a deposition, and she said that that was not what this was about—that there were these so-called parties and events that were held that they would send models to, essentially, to have sex.

You’re publishing a story that has implications for the President of the United States where the Epstein case is concerned. What does it say?

We have found a document in these files that is an interview that the police chief of Palm Beach gave to the F.B.I. And in that interview the police chief, Michael Reiter, told the F.B.I. that back when Epstein’s case had first come to the attention of the police, and Epstein was first reported as a suspect in doing this—

What’s the year?

Around 2006. Around that time period, Trump called the police chief and he said to the police chief, “Thank God you’re doing something about him, because . . .” And I’m just quoting off the top of my head. I don’t have the document in front of me, but he said, “Thank God—everybody knew this.” He also knew about [Ghislaine] Maxwell’s role [as Epstein’s associate], calling her “evil.” We have this F.B.I. report of this interview that the chief gave to the F.B.I. where he is recalling this conversation that he had with Trump many, many years ago about Epstein. So it does raise some questions about how much Trump knew—whether he knew the extent of Epstein’s crimes.

So, in 2006, Donald Trump has what kind of communication with the police chief?

He called the police chief on the phone.

And there’s paper on that?

There is. There’s an F.B.I. report. It’s an interview that the police chief gave to the F.B.I.

So what does that suggest to you about Trump—that he was doing the right thing or that he was complicit in some way?

I think people are going to look at it one of two ways: A) that he was somewhat of an informant for the police, in that he called them after this case became active and he became aware of it, and admitted, “Wait a minute, I know he was doing this.”

Or you could look at it another way, in that he was also one of those people who knew, and really didn’t go to the police before then to tell them what he was doing. The police were sort of hearing that there were things happening at Epstein’s mansion well before this, but, every time they went to investigate, all the women who were coming and going who they saw on the street and stopped were of age. So they couldn’t find any evidence that a real crime was being committed. But if in fact Trump knew that there were some crimes being committed against underage girls, and he knew about it and didn’t tell them ahead of time, I guess people will look at that from a different vantage point, in that he should have told the police sooner.

Your sources are not just law enforcement; you’ve talked to a lot of survivors. How are they reacting to these documents?

Well, they’re disturbed and very upset because their names are still in there. I mean, the F.B.I. had only one job here, and that was to take out the victims’ names, and their names are sprinkled throughout these documents. So they’re quite irate about the fact that they have so many redactions of people—other people—but yet many of the victims’ names are still in these public documents.

Julie, as you know, initially there were a lot of voices in MAGA demanding that these be released. You had the Attorney General saying, The report’s just on my desk, and I’m going through it. And then there was a delay. What do you know about the dynamics of why these things were finally released? Because Donald Trump himself does not seem thrilled about it.

I just think that it got to be such a big story. And, as you know, there’s been sort of a crack in the MAGA movement pertaining to this story. And you have people like Joe Rogan saying, “Why aren’t they releasing it?” It just became this battle cry for people. In some ways, this is the one thing that America agrees on: that these files should be made public. So I just think that it was something that they could not stop from happening without there being an even bigger crack in MAGA.

What are the stakes for Donald Trump? Trump says he wants the country to move on from this story, but, as you report, Trump is on an F.B.I. list of people suspected of possible wrongdoing in connection with Epstein. The D.O.J. says that there is no credible evidence to pursue. So where are we?

Well, I think that they should pursue everybody. That’s all the victims want. They want a credible investigation, and they’re not seeing it. And, quite frankly, thus far, I haven’t seen it. Because you can say that someone’s not credible, but there have to be some kind of notes. There has to be a report. There has to be some evidence that they went and talked to these people. Or if they couldn’t talk to them, why? And we’re not seeing that. And I think that’s part of the problem here. The government can say all they want, “There’s no credible evidence, nothing to see here, nothing more to investigate.” But this case from the beginning has been a thorn in the Justice Department’s side, because the public doesn’t trust that they did what they were supposed to do—that the investigators were thorough.

One of the people in Donald Trump’s orbit, in his Cabinet, who comes up a lot in the new documents is the Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnick. Tell me about that.

He was a next-door neighbor, as I understand it, to Epstein, in New York. And it sounds like he had been invited with his wife to Epstein’s mansion. He mentioned in an interview that he felt creepy when he got into the mansion. I don’t know if you’ve seen photographs of this mansion, but there are some creepy aspects to it: photographs on the wall, paintings, eyeballs, just very weird things in his house. And so he said, after he had that brief tour, he felt like, “This is horrible. I don’t want anything to do with this man again.” And he said this publicly, and then we found documents in these files that showed that not only did he continue to communicate with him after this allegedly happened but that he even got an invite to the island and took his family to Epstein’s island. So you have to wonder, why he would—

This is where I have to stop you. And you have no reason to know the answer, but I have to bring it up. Why would you bring your family to Epstein’s island? There are a lot of islands in the Caribbean and elsewhere. You can take your family anywhere on vacation when you have the money that Howard Lutnick has. Why would you bring your children there?

I can’t answer it. There were plenty of other people in that category, too, that brought their families there.

Not exactly Disneyland.

No. I can’t really answer that question.

Julie, I want to play you a clip of the congressman Ted Lieu, from Southern California, speaking on February 3rd:

Why are Republicans so interested in Bill, Hillary Clinton? It’s because they’re trying to distract from the fact that Donald Trump is in the Epstein files thousands and thousands of times. In those files, there’s highly disturbing allegations of Donald Trump raping children; of Donald Trump threatening to kill children. So I encourage the press to go look at these allegations, and I’m highly disturbed that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche just got the law wrong. Yesterday, he said, essentially, that it is not a crime to party with Jeffrey Epstein. Well, that’s actually not correct. If Jeffrey Epstein was human-trafficking minors for these sex parties and you show up and patronize the establishment at that party? Yes, you’re guilty, because patronizing is part of the law, the federal sex-trafficking law. So Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche just got that wrong, which maybe explains why they aren’t investigating all these folks, including Donald Trump.

There’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s start with Lieu mentioning allegations of Donald Trump raping and threatening to kill children. What is he talking about?

Well, when the F.B.I. arrested Epstein in 2019, they put out a big call. They wanted more victims to come forward. So they put out this 800-number tip line that you can call for the F.B.I. The F.B.I. got, I want to say, hundreds of tips. And there were a couple that mentioned Trump. Now, some of them were a little bizarre—you would sort of think, no way. Eating, I don’t know, babies. Or there’s some strange ones in there that you could see were just crazy.

Who’s saying these things? Who’s making these accusations?

Well, these are people who called the tip line, like, “I have a tip on Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump . . .”

It could be any malicious lunatic out there. Let’s be very clear.

It could be. But my point is, there was one, I know, that involved a thirteen-year-old girl, where they said that she was giving Trump oral sex and she bit him, and he slapped her. This is one of the tips that came in. And what the F.B.I. and the Justice Department are saying—this tip list, by the way, they didn’t mean for it to be put out there in this tranche of documents. My point is that we can’t see whether they followed up on all these tips. And certainly they should have followed up on the ones that had names attached to them.

Well, I guess this has to stay in the category of “we’ll see later what becomes of it,” but it is worrying. One of the most shocking revelations in this document dump was how many prominent people continued to engage with Epstein after—after—he was registered as a sex offender. I’m not asking you as a psychologist or a sociologist. But how do you explain that? And what was known to the general public about his crimes at the time?

Well, that’s really a good question. You have to sort of break it down. You have to remember that when he was in Florida and he served that year, thirteen months, in jail [starting in 2008], he had pled guilty to essentially what was a prostitution-with-a-minor charge. When he came out of jail, he really mounted a P.R. campaign, hired a lot of people who can help him with his image, to point out that this was—

Like Peggy Siegal, the P.R. person.

Yeah. And he did a press release—we could see it, in the history, that he was doing all these things. Donating tons of money to all these causes, and trying to just improve his image. And when you think about it, if all you knew at the time was, “Oh, well, the charge on paper was that he solicited a minor for prostitution . . .” But, as the years wore on, by 2010, 2011, there were more than a dozen underage girls who filed civil lawsuits against him. And there was a huge lawsuit that was filed against the United States government for giving him this plea deal [in which, in exchange for Epstein pleading guilty to state prosecution charges in 2008, the U.S. Attorney’s office ended the federal investigation]—which, by the way, they kept secret for a whole year until he got out of jail. And that was by design, because they did not want the victims to know that they did this deal, because they knew the victims would protest. And then the judge would say, “Well, wait a minute. I’ve got twenty-five victims in court here who are protesting this. I’m not going to approve this plea deal.” So his lawyers were pretty brilliant and figured out a way to make it look like he hadn’t really committed as serious of a crime. They limited the scope of his crimes.

Julie, when you inevitably punched your own name into the search engine of these files, what did you discover?

Well, just like everything, Epstein wanted to control the narrative. And he wanted to meet with me after my series ran.

Your series ran in the Miami Herald. What was the date?

It ran November, 2018.

Did he reach out to you personally?

No.

So he never did try to meet with you?

He was advised that it probably wasn’t a good idea. His idea of doing that was—

For once, he got good advice.

Yeah, and followed it, I guess.

Yeah.

I guess.

If you had met with him, what would you have asked him?

That’s a good question that I hadn’t really thought about. I guess I would just ask him, “What were you thinking?” I mean, these were girls. Did it ever occur to you—the fact that when they were scared and when they were there and they were uncomfortable, that perhaps this . . . He did this over such a long period of time. Did it ever, at any point, cross your mind that this was not only criminal but it was just amoral? It was just like being a monster?

I have to confess that I punched my name in there, thinking it would come up zero. And there it was, multiple times—it was just articles that people had sent him, my writing about Russia, whatever it was. And then at one point my name appears on a long list assembled by a P.R. person of people you might invite to some sort of social event with, you know, two hundred other people. I never got such an invitation, I’m not worried about it—but it was a bit startling to see that. And I wonder if you think that there are people who are more implicated, who might’ve stupidly gone to a dinner and then never seen him again, who are somehow implicated, injured by this process. What do you think about that?

Yes. I definitely think that there are probably some people in that category who made a bad decision to go to an event where he was a prominent guest, or one of his dinners at his own mansion. And they went because somebody invited them and told them, for example, the Prince was going to be there. But the people in that category aren’t mentioned repeatedly in these files.

Hundreds of times.

Yeah, hundreds of times. It’s different if you just see one person you knew had dinner with them one time and you don’t see anything else in there.

What did the Biden Administration do about all this? Why did the Biden Administration sit on these documents? They had access to these files, too, didn’t they?

Definitely. And one would hope that they would’ve really pressed and continued this investigation. We don’t know that they didn’t. We don’t know that they weren’t still investigating some of this. It’s just not clear from the files whether they did or they didn’t. And the other thing to remember is: they did convict [Ghislaine] Maxwell, and she did appeal that conviction. So technically the case was still an open case. So you usually don’t open your files when you still are investigating or litigating a conviction. So that’s one excuse I guess they could use. But I do think that the Justice Department failed these survivors through almost every Presidential Administration that we’ve had. I mean, this should have been investigated throughout this time.

And now what’s really horrible about it is, as you know, when a crime is committed, especially against young people, children, as they get older, their memories fade, the evidence isn’t as readily available. The diary that maybe these girls kept when they were sixteen about this, they probably don’t have anymore. So had the prosecutors done their job back in 2007, there would’ve not only been far fewer victims here but he could have gone to prison and we wouldn’t even have this happening right now. We wouldn’t even be talking about him.

Let’s talk about the prosecutor, Alex Acosta, who arranged, let’s just put it this way, an extraordinarily lenient plea deal that Epstein made in 2008. Can he be compelled to explain how and why he made that deal? In your 2018 reporting, you speculated that the plea deal could have been linked to Epstein giving information to the government in someone else’s trial for financial crimes.

Well, I don’t think that was it, but it was something that was in the files that I felt a duty to mention—that there was an F.B.I. document that indicated that he was going to provide some kind of inside information on this case, which involved Bear Stearns, who Epstein used to work for, and it was a fraud case. And I just don’t think that Acosta would’ve fallen on his sword for a fraud case that didn’t really have anything to do with him. It would’ve been silly, quite frankly, for him to do that.

Epstein hired some of the most powerful lawyers in America. Kenneth Starr and Jay Lefkowitz were part of Kirkland & Ellis, which was a law firm that Acosta had worked for before. And it is one of the premier law firms, and both Starr and Lefkowitz were part of the Federalist Society. And Acosta’s real goal seemingly was to become a Supreme Court Justice. So if you want to become a Supreme Court Justice, you don’t want to piss off powerful members of the Federalist Society.

And is that an inference you’re drawing on your own, or sources with reason to know helped you to reach that conclusion or possibility?

I think both. I mean, I was told that, and then I could tell from comments that Acosta had made in the past, doing just some research on that, and just knowing how Epstein hired. I mean, he hired every single one of his attorneys for a reason, and he wanted an in. He wanted to be able to understand his adversary very well. And one way to do that would be to hire people who had contact with them one way or another.

What were Epstein’s politics, and do they matter?

Let me tell you why I don’t think it matters. Sexual assault doesn’t discriminate based on political party. There were bad people on all sides here. There was not one party or the other, and it kind of frustrates me sometimes when people try to make this into a Republican versus Democrat issue, because it had nothing to do with that. It had to do with power and money and sex. And it really didn’t matter what your political party was. There were people, as I said, on both sides here who were implicated or have been implicated.

When you look at the array of people who spent time with Epstein, who among the high and the mighty do you come out shocked at how they behaved? I mean, look at Bill Gates’s [alleged] behavior, for example. [Epstein, in a note sent to his own e-mail account, wrote that he had facilitated trysts with married women for Gates and helped him get drugs “in order to deal with consequences of sex with Russian girls.” Gates has denied these allegations.] I don’t know the guy, but I interviewed him on this program, and he’s been in our lives in one way or another for a very long time. And call me naïve, but I was appalled.

Yeah.

Who’s on that list for you?

He’s definitely one of the people I think everybody was a little surprised at, but—

I wasn’t a little surprised. I was a lot more than that.

A lot?

Yeah.

Well, you know what? I’ve been doing this for so long, and I just know from covering, especially sexual-assault cases, a lot of men act completely different—you wouldn’t even know them when they’re among their buddies just talking about women. So in some ways there really hasn’t been a whole lot that has been surprising to me. Like I said, Gates is sort of this guy who seems like a little bit of a geek, quite frankly, so you wouldn’t . . . But you know what? A lot of these men were older men, too. So it’s almost, like, maybe a club of people that don’t normally get the girls, so to speak.

Despite all their wealth and power, they needed Epstein in some way to do what for them? To hook them up with children?

Yes. Yes. Or young women. But it’s important to understand this wasn’t Epstein going to these women and girls and saying, “I’m going to pay you two hundred dollars if you have sex with me or if you have sex with So-and-So.” That’s not what he did. He used fraudulent means, which is one of the elements of sex trafficking. In other words, he said, “I want to hire you as my assistant, and I’m going to pay you a hundred thousand dollars a year,” or “I want to send you to college,” or “You’re a great artist,” or a ballerina or a model. “I know that I can get you into the Victoria’s Secret catalogue.” That’s how he got these women trapped and that’s how he did it. And then they got kind of enamored with him because he acted sort of like this father figure—“I’m going to change your life.” And “you can do this, that.” There are tons of e-mails between him and women in these tranches that show him talking to these women who he wants to sort of snare.

And then there are other e-mails that are clearly after he already had his way with them, or they got too old for him, where he’s saying, “Well, I don’t know what you want me to do about it. This was your choice.” There are these trajectories that you could see with some of these women—that at first he kind of gets them under his wing and makes them believe that he’s going to change their lives. Some of them fell in love with him. And then you could see in later e-mails that he’s essentially just discarding them.

Let’s talk about conspiracies. QAnon, for a long time, has been full of crazy, lurid imagery about God knows what—human sacrifice, and . . . Watching the grotesqueness of Epstein’s world laid out in these documents, one after the other, I have to think that it fuels conspiracy thinking because, in fact, the Epstein world was full of it.

Yeah. And I’ll point out another part of this that isn’t talked about much, but—some of the victims here were really damaged. He wouldn’t have been able to go after someone who had a lot of confidence and had a real life, who had a future. He purposefully targeted vulnerable girls who came from nothing, or they were homeless, or in foster care, for example. And the damage that he did to some of these girls affected them for the rest of their lives.

Those tips that we saw—they come from people who have been really traumatized. That’s why I’m saying that I don’t think you can discount all those crazy tips. I have found that some of the women who had those crazy aspects to their stories—there was still some shred of truth to what they were saying. It’s just that they were so traumatized. And this is common, by the way. I’ve talked to F.B.I. specialists who interview children, especially, who have been traumatized. Your brain is almost damaged when something like this happens to you as a child.

One of the theories that was going around a lot, as you know, Julie, was the idea that Epstein was not only trying to enrich himself all the time, and also have lots of girls underage and otherwise around him for the obvious purpose, but that he was working for some sort of foreign intelligence agency. I assume you’re discounting that.

This is how I look at that: I don’t think it’s impossible, but I haven’t seen any evidence that shows that he worked, as in was employed by, the C.I.A., or Mossad, or any other government. But I do think that he used his contacts in all these places—in Israel, in Russia, and in London, wherever he had a connection—as currency in order to enrich himself, to make money in some way.

Julie, as you go through these documents, as you make your calls, as you make your reporting rounds, what are you still looking for in this case?

I think I’m still trying to understand how he—and this is the bigger picture—how he got away with this for so long. And which people should have held him accountable along the way.

We know that there were several F.B.I. investigations into him over the years. There wasn’t just the 2007 investigation. There were subsequent investigations over the years. He was abusing a lot of young girls, and I don’t understand why they kept, sort of, closing the book on him and moving on all the time, including through the Biden Administration. It might be in the two million or three million files we haven’t seen yet, but it looks to me like they weren’t doing anything, because there would be records showing that they interviewed So-and-So, or that they got some intelligence information about one of these men who was involved.

I can see e-mails there now between Epstein and some of these men, who were clearly working for him in other countries—men and women, by the way, because he used a lot of women. A lot of the women who he abused—when he had nothing left for them and they were older and he was over them—they went to work for him and they helped find him girls. There are tons of e-mails where the woman is saying, “Will you still see me, even though I can’t bring you girls tonight?” It’s just very sad how he manipulated people, and especially girls and young women.

Is there any evidence that you credit that he did not commit suicide in jail?

Well, I don’t think he committed suicide.

You don’t?

No, I absolutely do not think he committed suicide.

What do you think happened and what’s the evidence for it?

Look, I also covered prisons for a very long time in Florida. I did a lot of stories about how crime happens in prisons. And someone who is a pedophile—when you enter that prison, from Day One, you have a target on your back. They’re the lowest people on the hierarchy of any prison—it’s almost a trophy to get rid of them. And so I think that it’s possible he could have been targeted. We also know, for example, the same thing happened with Whitey Bulger. There is a history in our federal prison system.

You’re making a supposition. You don’t have evidence [that he didn’t kill himself].

Well, what’s evidence? Evidence that the guards lied on their reports? That they reported that they made checks on him, and didn’t? Is it that all the cameras didn’t work? They never recovered the so-called noose—the piece of fabric that he allegedly used. They don’t even know which one it was. The fact that if he broke three bones in his neck, which takes a lot of force—this man was a very frail man at the end—even if he was to do that by tying himself to his bunk, every single item on that top bunk was undisturbed. If you’re pulling on a bunk with enough force to break three bones in your neck, wouldn’t you think that the items would have been sort of toppled? I mean, I could just go on and on. The reports are very odd.

He allegedly tried to commit suicide a couple weeks before this, but when he went in to tell them what had happened, when they found him on the floor, the first thing he said was, “My roommate did it to me. He tried to kill me,” and “He had been threatening me for weeks.” An ex-cop who was in jail for killing four people—that was the cellmate who you picked for Jeffrey Epstein? I mean, too many things don’t make any sense. Epstein said he tried to kill him, and then Epstein sort of changed his story and said, “I don’t remember.” But Epstein never said he tried to commit suicide. He only said that he thought that his cellmate had tried to kill him.

Julie, if you had had the opportunity to interview him in prison, what would you have asked him, or what would you have wanted to know?

I think he believed he was above the law, and I think I would have tried to get at that, and why he thought he was above the law. Who are these people who you associated with? Did anybody lead you to believe this? He would have said, “Everybody has a price,” or “I was smart because I got the right people in my corner.” And I think I would have tried to sort of get him to admit that there were other people who were in this to help him get away with these crimes—that it wasn’t just an act of nature that they decided not to go after him.

Julie, you’ve been on this story for years. You’ve spent a lot of time with people who’ve been harmed terribly by Epstein. You’ve been immersed in this, and it’s very hard to explain to civilians what being immersed in a story for year after year can be like, especially something this ugly. What mark has it left on your life?

You have to be a little driven to do this kind of work, and to keep hammering at it. I’ve hammered at it. It wasn’t just the first story. I mean, I’ve hammered at it all this time. And I think really, to be honest with you, it’s the victims—and that’s the case with almost anything that I’ve done. When I covered prisons, I remember some of those inmates who were tortured. And with this story I think about the victims all the time. I just think as if they were a friend of mine, or if it was my daughter. I just feel like they can’t all be lying. This happened, and I just feel driven by the fact that people have covered it up. They’ve covered it up. And I’m going to keep working on it until we find out why they’re covering it up, or who is covering it up. ♦

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Every year, ahead of Oscar night, the film critic Richard Brody joins the New Yorker Radio Hour to discuss his picks for the year’s best films. David Remnick sits down with Brody and the staff writer Alexandra Schwartz to discuss the movies that didn’t get enough credit, the ones that got too much, and the lesser-known gems among the year’s releases.

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For months, the New York Post warned its readers that the city’s next mayor was coming for the schools. “Zohran Mamdani just escalated his war on excellence in NYC public schools,” the Post’s editorial board declared in October, as the mayoral race was entering its final weeks. Three days later, another Post headline: “Zohran Mamdani’s callous school plan steals hope from NYC’s brightest kids.” To mark his Inauguration, on New Year’s Day, the editorial board weighed in again, with “Mamdani’s pick for schools boss spells disaster for city kids.” So far, Mamdani has cheerfully brushed aside these cartoon-villain allegations, announcing an ambitious universal-childcare plan and holding an adorable press conference with constituents in the under-five demographic.

Despite the Post’s tone of sweeping condemnation, each of these editorials was tunnelling in on a tentative and arguably rather niche item on Mamdani’s campaign agenda: ending gifted-and-talented admissions for rising kindergarten students. Mamdani appeared to affirm his campaign stance on G. & T. with his choice for schools chancellor, Kamar Samuels. As a superintendent in Brooklyn, Samuels phased out some gifted tracking in the district he oversaw, citing disproportionately high numbers of affluent white and Asian students in G. & T., and similarly lopsided numbers of Black and brown students in general-education classes. “This administration does not believe in G. & T. evaluation for kindergartners,” a spokesperson for Mamdani told me. “But that’s not the same as eliminating advanced opportunities across all grades.” The other main entry point into G. & T. is in third grade, and Mamdani has no plans to end that option. Nor has he said when he would actually close the lid on G.& T. for kindergartners; the program will remain in place at least through the 2026-27 school year.

Mamdani would be the fourth consecutive New York mayor to implement major changes to G. & T., which offers accelerated and enriched curricula to qualifying children. Until the mid-two-thousands, a patchwork of G. & T. programs operated all over the city, with widely differing admission criteria. Then, under Michael Bloomberg, the city introduced standardized criteria for G. & T. admissions: exams, administered in testing centers to four- and five-year-olds. A child who landed in a percentile in the high nineties might secure an extremely coveted seat at one of five citywide G. & T. schools. A result in the mere low-to-mid-nineties might qualify a student for one of the more numerous district-level G. & T. programs, which are housed in regular schools. A seat in G. & T. can put a kid on track for admission to New York’s equally coveted specialized high schools and, by extension, to the nation’s élite colleges and universities. But there were always more eligible kids than seats, and final placements were mostly determined by lottery.

Near the end of Bill de Blasio’s mayoralty, in 2021, he announced plans to sunset existing gifted-and-talented tracks, owing to persistent criticism that the programs reinforce inequality and racial segregation. During the 2018-19 school year, for example, Black and Latino kids made up sixty-three per cent of the over-all kindergarten class, but only sixteen per cent of G. & T. students. Kids in this underrepresented cohort were less likely to take the G. & T. exam than their white and Asian peers, and their families were less likely to accept a seat if one was offered. (At the same time, research shows that Black and brown students who do enroll in New York City’s G. & T. programs also make some of the largest academic gains.) The G. & T. class itself represented just 2.4 per cent of all kindergartners that year—but G. & T.’s low share of students has never matched its outsize effects on public-education discourse.

Eric Adams, entering office at the beginning of 2022, quickly reversed de Blasio’s decision to end G. & T. admissions for kindergartners, and even added some seats. Most consequentially, Adams, in a bid to improve equity, permanently scrapped the high-stakes qualifying exam in favor of the current, somewhat free-for-all process in which pre-K teachers can nominate an unlimited number of their students, who are then entered into a (now larger) lottery. But representation of Black and Latino kindergartners in G. & T. has inched up only modestly under the new system, and parents and educators have questioned whether a more subjective nomination process returns fairer results than a standardized test.

G. & T. admissions have always hinged somewhat on luck and happenstance: the happenstance of birth and environment, of the mood a four-year-old was in on the morning of a high-stakes test. The exam model for G. & T. was never popular—in fact, it was likely the only one of its kind in the country—and even the kids who aced the test could end up drawing the short straw in admissions. Under Adams, however, G. & T. increasingly resembled a citywide raffle. If Mamdani ends G. & T. for the youngest kids, it may be an acknowledgement that a lottery can’t evaluate whether a child might benefit from an accelerated curriculum. What it can do is divide its young participants into a small group of winners and a much bigger group of losers.

New York’s many iterations of G. & T. have traditionally carried the aura of the golden ticket; the G. & T.-hopeful parent might be forgiven for imagining her child to be a Charlie Bucket in a world of Veruca Salts. Allison Roda, an associate professor of education at Molloy University, sees the city’s gifted-and-talented programs as exemplary of “a zero-sum mind-set,” in which parents in an underfunded, overcrowded public system are compelled to compete against each other for scarce resources. Who gets in, Roda told me, mainly “reflects parents’ advantages and knowledge of the system.” When G. & T. admissions were decided by exam, parents who wanted a spot for their child could invest in expensive test prep; under the current system, they can inveigle preschool teachers for recommendations. Roda has interviewed hundreds of G. & T. parents over the years, many of whom, she said, “will acknowledge that they wouldn’t even call their kids gifted.”

When the field of gifted education was first coalescing in the early twentieth century, it was mostly oriented toward children whom anyone would call gifted: your Mozarts and Doogie Howsers, your Little Men Tate. They were not merely bright and precocious but true outliers who, not unlike kids with dyslexia or other learning differences, needed a tailored curriculum and classroom setting in order to thrive. Troublingly, many of the early psychologists and educators who took the lead on studying and developing curricula for these children were steeped in eugenics, including the belief in intelligence as hereditary, race- and class-dependent, and largely fixed. For these thinkers—including Lewis Terman, who developed the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale—an exclusive gifted classroom logically doubled as a tool of racial and socioeconomic segregation.

In the mid-nineteen-thirties, the New York City Board of Education and Teachers College at Columbia University launched a five-year program in Harlem known as the Speyer School experiment, which, as a Board of Education representative later explained, was intended “to determine a desirable program of education for intellectual deviates.” There, kids who had earned either lower-than-average or exceptionally high scores on the Stanford-Binet test were divided into groups of “slow” and “rapid” learners.

The Speyer experiment wound down in 1941; one of its unofficial successors was Hunter College Elementary School, in Manhattan, founded as “an experimental and demonstration center for intellectually gifted pupils.” Prospective kindergarteners at Hunter must score off the charts on a modified I.Q. test just to get past the first round of the admissions process, which is, as the Times once wrote, “probably one of the most competitive in the world.” A Daily News piece from 1988 reported on the dilemma of “middle-class parents trying to make it in Manhattan” whose kids weren’t admitted to Hunter, despite I.Q. scores in the top one per cent. Many of these disappointed parents enrolled their children in private schools; others likely decamped to the suburbs. But a few instead began recruiting and fund-raising for what became one of the five ultra-élite citywide G. & T. programs, at the Anderson School on the Upper West Side. (Even today, Anderson is regarded among G. & T.-savvy parents in Manhattan as an exceptionally prestigious consolation prize, the Yale to Hunter’s Harvard.)

It’s easy to caricature some G. & T.-curious parents as grasping, status-obsessed, or slightly deluded about their child’s special brand of specialness. But research shows that the kinds of kids who might just miss a shot at Hunter or Anderson—not necessarily geniuses or savants, just very bright, driven, academically oriented kids—are likely to become inattentive, frustrated, or disruptive in a gen-ed classroom, with possible long-term effects on their academic performance and social-emotional development. Karen Rambo-Hernandez, a professor of education at Texas A. & M., told me that students suffer “when they show they need the challenge and are not challenged. They need opportunities to fail and learn from failure. They need the chance to say, ‘Oh, yeah, there’s an edge to what I know.’ ” These students, Michael Matthews, an education professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, told me, “keep sailing through school without having to do much of anything—until all of a sudden they do, and then they don’t know how to respond.”

Gifted class sizes are not necessarily smaller than their gen-ed counterparts, but they can feel that way because students’ level of academic attainment is more homogeneous. “In your typical neighborhood school, a fifth-grade classroom has everything from kids who can’t read at all to kids who are reading at a high-school or almost-college level,” Matthews said. “Asking a teacher to meet the learning needs of all those kids is an impossible order. What tends to happen is that the teachers focusses on the kids who need the most help. They figure that the ones who are achieving above grade level will be O.K. on their own, and we know that’s not the case.”

A precocious kid who is bored in a gen-ed classroom might need gifted education, but decades of data and research suggest it’s more likely that he and everyone else simply need fewer classmates, so that his teacher can give each student more individualized attention. Even Mamdani, who has not made K-12 education a focus of his campaign or early mayoralty, lamented “crowded classrooms” in his inaugural address. In 2022, Governor Kathy Hochul signed a law requiring public schools in New York City to limit classroom sizes to between twenty and twenty-five students by 2028. But funding, construction, and teacher hiring may be lagging behind the goal. As of last year, according to reporting by Chalkbeat New York, the city had reached its legally mandated benchmark only by juking the stats: more than ten thousand classrooms had been temporarily exempted from the law, including in schools that did not request the exemptions.

Gifted-education scholars point out that there is no standard definition of giftedness. (I.Q. tests, for one, are no longer seen as a flawlessly scientific measure of intelligence, as they were when the field of gifted education was emerging.) Nor is there a standardized curriculum for gifted students. “The whole notion has been thrown into some question in terms of solidity and coherence as a construct,” James Borland, a professor at Teachers College, at Columbia, told me. Without a firm definition of terms, Borland went on, educators are ill-equipped to address the central question of “what should these kids be doing in school that we can ethically and otherwise agree is worth their time, but not worth the time of other kids.”

Borland was disappointed, he said, that moving away from the test and toward teacher recommendations for G. & T. admissions “doesn’t seem to have made a difference in terms of the equity questions that these classes raise.” These questions go back decades. According to reporting by New York magazine, among the inaugural cohort of students at the citywide gifted school NEST+m, which opened in 2001, on the Lower East Side, one grade was divided, shockingly, into an “A-class” of five kids, “most of them white,” and a “B-class” of about twenty kids, “nearly all of them Hispanic or black.” Asian representation greatly increased in G. & T. programs over time, but representation of other communities of color did not keep the same pace.

In gen-ed schools that reserve space for gifted programs, the demographic divide between the children filing into one classroom versus another can be stark. “You can also see it in terms of, like, the gifted classroom has a printer and a fancy rug and an air conditioner, and the gen-ed class doesn’t,” Roda said, adding that G. & T. parents sometimes do their own fund-raising—money which is then siloed from the rest of the school.

These discrepancies illustrate how a field of education with roots in eugenics, that developed on behalf of a small number of prodigies and brainiacs, became, in effect, a way to keep a critical mass of well-resourced families and their kids from leaving New York’s often chaotic and threadbare schools. A 1979 New York magazine cover story speculated that some districts prioritize G. & T. “if for no other reason than to offer a lure to the white middle class.” Nearly a half century later, the doomsaying Post put it only somewhat differently, declaring that the end of early G. & T. under Mamdani would contribute to “the emptying of classrooms, as parents continue to jump ship on the city’s failing public school system.” A parent advocate for gifted programs, Yiatin Chu, told the Times that, in signalling a lack of support for early G. & T., Mamdani had stepped into “a hornet’s nest.”

Enrollment in New York City’s system—the largest by far in the nation—has indeed plunged since the COVID-19 pandemic, from just over a million students in the 2019-2020 school year to about eight hundred and eighty-four thousand in the fall. But those trends have little connection to G. & T., and much more to do with the affordability crisis driving young families out of the city, and with disillusionment in the city’s public schools that arose from COVID-era closures and remote learning. Seen in this context, G. & T. seems symbolic of a larger malaise, and of a scarcity mind-set. How badly parents want it reflects how poorly they regard the rest of the system. How much attention we pay to G. & T.—at the expense of the vast majority of students G. & T. doesn’t touch—might be, in itself, an equity issue.

In a practical sense, “gifted and talented” is perhaps less an honorific or a diagnosis than an escape hatch, or the passcode that unlocks a magic door. The application of the term arguably signifies less about a child than a system. “I think we should forget about labelling kids as gifted,” Borland told me. “It’s become meaningless. Our field has been existential rather than educational, in that we ask the question, Is this child gifted? That’s the wrong question. We should be asking, What does this child need?” ♦

Illustration by Bill Bragg

At the end of this month, Mohonk Mountain House, a grand Hudson Valley lodge founded in 1869, will hold its fiftieth annual Mystery Weekend, in which guests gather for a few days of sleuthing around the property, examining staged rooms and interviewing actors playing characters, in an attempt to solve a fictional crime. The event has a storied history among mystery buffs; some of its first scripts were written by the celebrated author Donald E. Westlake, along with his wife Abby, and they often collaborated with notable writer friends, including Stephen King, Edward Gorey, and Isaac Asimov, on everything from performing to graphic design. A half century ago, few, if any, hotels offered “immersive theatre” as an amenity, and the Mystery Weekend became a hot ticket for city dwellers—the first weekend, in 1977, drew more than two hundred participants. Soon, mystery-solving events were de rigueur at many rural hotels, whose owners found that staging crime scenes was a surefire way to lure cosmopolitans to the country during the off-season. In 1992, the Times reporter Alessandra Stanley noted that the swelling glut of mystery parties came in three categories: serious, “in which participants form teams and spend two to three days”; semi-serious, which “take place in large hotels, over meals, and are meant to be more entertaining than challenging”; and those on cruise ships, which are fully unserious. (Many people on cruises, an expert clucked to Stanley, “have never even read a mystery.”)

The Mohonk Mountain House Mystery Weekend was conceived as—and is still considered—a wonky, knotty game for mystery obsessives who enjoy puzzling out a problem over the course of multiple, often vexing days. But, for those looking for a slightly less intensive experience, the semi-serious murder party—which tends to take place, and to wrap up, during one dinner—has come roaring back in popularity. According to one marketing study released last year, murder-mystery games will be a $2.14-billion retail category by 2031. It makes sense—people are desperate for any form of entertainment that is both escapist and interactive, with nary a smartphone allowed. I recently found myself intrigued by a new mystery fête of the semi-serious variety, taking place, one night per month, at the upstate hotel the Six Bells, in the teeny hamlet of Rosendale.

The Six Bells, which opened last July, has the homespun feel of an olde English inn, but its roots are, in reality, not so quaint; it is the brainchild of the serial entrepreneur Audrey Gelman, who, at just thirty-eight years old, has achieved a striking level of New York notoriety. Gelman is perhaps best known as the co-founder of the women’s co-working empire the Wing, which opened its first location in 2016 and which, with its powder-pink interiors and bathrooms stocked with Glossier products, represented a kind of zenith of the millennial girlboss ethos, before it shuttered after six years, amid employees’ accusations of poor working conditions. Gelman, who stepped down as C.E.O. in 2020, tiptoed back into public life in 2022 with her next venture, a comparatively humble Brooklyn home-goods boutique (also called the Six Bells) that she stocked with countrified wares like Shaker quilts and ruffled gingham pillows.

The Six Bells—the store and the hotel—comes with a quirky concept: a fictional mid-century English village called Barrows Green, complete with its own map and historical lore, invented by Gelman; both the boutique and the inn are meant to exist simultaneously in our reality and in Gelman’s storybook paracosm. (The concept is rapidly expanding: Gelman recently announced a $3.8-million fund-raising round “to build more magical places and things.”) For a mystery dinner I attended last month, Gelman partnered with the theatre troupe What May Come Immersive to devise a saucy plotline involving characters of Gelman’s creation: a bickering, aristocratic married couple as hosts, a handsome local psychiatrist who studied under Freud, a nosy local news reporter, a bitchy gossip columnist. Amid a meal of beet salad, mushroom potpie, and chocolate cake, a murder disrupted the convivial proceedings, and the thirty or so guests attempted to suss out the culprit. The whodunnit wasn’t hard to solve, but the challenge wasn’t the point. The evening was more about the vibe; Gelman encourages all guests to dress up in fancy cocktail attire. Some guests got very into it—one adopted a fake British accent for the duration. Another attendee found herself less immersed; she realized that she’d recently matched with one of the actors on a dating site. Would they eventually go out? It remains a mystery.

Cupid gets his main-character moment this weekend. We asked New Yorker staffers to help build a playlist befitting his romantic mission.

For a classic piece of nineties Brit pop, Oasis’s “Slide Away” is basically an absurdly romantic ballad of plain devotion and yearning—which “Wuthering Heights” has established as the emotions of the season. May your Valentine’s Day be all about both!—Noreen Plabutong

I listen to jazz on Newark’s WBGO all year long, but in February, when last week’s snow is frozen high and gray along the sidewalk, nothing makes me feel luckier to be inside, with someone I love, than jazz. I turn on the radio in the bedroom and stir up an Old-Fashioned, the music playing down the hall like conversation at a party I’ve stepped away from. During dinner with my husband the other night, when the Miles Davis Quintet’s “You’re My Everything” came on, I recognized the first seconds of the rendition’s famous false start, intimate and inviting, before Davis introduces the song’s name. As my husband leaned in to scoop salad onto my plate, I spoke the words in time with Davis: “You are my everything.”—Jenny Blackman

The languid sounds of “Lipstick Lover,” from Janelle Monáe’s excellent album “The Age of Pleasure,” practically insist on a seductive shimmy.—Hannah Jocelyn

John Darnielle, of the Mountain Goats, spent a large part of his early songwriting career describing broken couples, even creating a fictional pair, nicknamed the Alpha Couple, whose marital strife he repeatedly mined. But when he closed the book on the duo, on the 2002 album “Tallahassee,” he included “Old College Try,” a hopeful, delusional paean from one broken spouse to another. They were in this together, all the way to the end, no matter how much it hurt.—Luis A. Gómez

When you’ve been unlucky in love, finally finding someone great feels like entering an alternate dimension—wait, this actually exists? In “Liquidize,” Wet Leg is just as bewildered as you, singing “Love struck me down / The fuck am I doing here?” But once you get used to this new reality, its tenderness wins out, and another, gentler question soon arises: “How did I get so lucky to be loving you?”—Jane Bua

Cuddle Magic’s 2020 album, “Bath”—so named because the band’s six members squeezed into a bathroom to record it—is necessarily about togetherness. But what I enjoy most about the lead single, “What If I,” is the intimate balance of romance and desperation conveyed by the duetting Bridget Kearney and Benjamin Lazar Davis—that, and the gorgeous strains of pump organ and bass clarinet nestled underfoot.—Jasper Davidoff

The best part about being in love, I think, is the constant, overwhelming sensation of looking at another person and wondering in awe, How are you mine? Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, and Sammy Davis, Jr., have all done renditions of “I’ve Got a Crush On You,” but it’s Ella Fitzgerald’s version, with her rich and confident voice, that best captures that heart-pounding feeling of an everlasting crush.—Erin Neil

When my toes are losing feeling in my ski boots, I turn on “My Love,” by Metronomy x Nourished by Time. It spontaneously appeared one day (kind of like an Aperol spritz in the hand après-ski) on my “Slopes” playlist. The bassy, buzzy song enters through the ear but resounds somewhere closer to the knees—a perfect tune for carving out turns on a mountain or cuddling in the lodge.—Ryan Gellis

“In Spite of Ourselves” is one of the only karaoke duets a couple can perform without making me want to hurl. Many love songs idealize; here, John Prine and Iris DeMent sweetly rattle off a list of each other’s endearing imperfections. Let’s embrace realistic romance this holiday season!—Kristen Steenbeeke

Some of the best love songs are cheating songs, and there are few sweeter or sadder than “The Dark End of the Street,” an ode to meeting in the secret shadows. This soul standard has been performed by Percy Sledge, Aretha Franklin, Linda Ronstadt, Ry Cooder, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Cat Power—cue ’em all up. There isn’t a bad version. But the most achingly beautiful recording is the original, from 1967, by James Carr, the son of a Mississippi Baptist preacher.—Ian Crouch

If you’re a subway performer and you play Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” I promise you, I will give you all the cash I have on my person.—Lauren Garcia

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

• We’ve been handling the cold all wrong
• The trial of the Sycamore Gap killers
• The Whole Earth archive

Virginia Woolf and her husband, Leonard, bought Monk’s House, a small Sussex cottage, in 1919, for seven hundred pounds. It had no electricity or running water. They improved it, adding modern amenities and two rooms. A modest shed at the bottom of the garden became a writing lodge, where Woolf worked on novels including “Mrs. Dalloway” and “To the Lighthouse.”

Today, it’s possible to visit the house and the lodge, which belong to Britain’s National Trust. “I have an image in my mind of the place where writers work,” Katie da Cunha Lewin explains, in “The Writer’s Room: The Hidden Worlds That Shape the Books We Love.” Arriving at Woolf’s lodge, she finds this image largely confirmed. Light flows in from the garden, and quiet reigns. Woolf’s desk holds crumpled sheets of paper, books, and a vase of daffodils. It looks like the perfect writing retreat. There’s only one problem: although Woolf worked in the lodge, she did much of her writing in the main house, sitting in a low chair. On her knees she balanced a wooden board, to which she’d affixed an inkstand and notebook. While bent over this laptop contraption, she generated what Lytton Strachey called “filth packets”—little bundles of old nibs, paper clips, and balled-up paper. She was, in other words, an ordinary writer, as undignified as the rest of us.

“There is something about the writer as a character or an archetype that enthrals us,” da Cunha Lewin observes, and the same goes for the rooms in which writers work, or in which we imagine that they work. For aspiring writers, in particular, writer’s rooms are talismanic sites. Making a pilgrimage to some writer’s space, we might want answers to practical questions about their process. But we also want, more abstractly, to gain insight into “the route of creativity,” as da Cunha Lewin puts it, from inspiration to text. “What is writing?” she asks. Contemplating someone’s long-unused desk, staring through the window through which they stared, we hope to see the writing process externalized, so that we can understand “what it actually is.”

Da Cunha recalls her own fascination with writer’s rooms: “I wanted to fashion my own creative space, as if, by getting it just so, I would become a writer.” She describes buying a new desk, picturing it laden with “notebooks and tea and candles and mess.” With such a desk, she thinks, she’ll adopt new habits—getting up early, then writing all morning and reading all afternoon instead of watching TV. On her way to Monk’s House, she muses about buying “some gorgeous Woolf paraphernalia, like a beautiful illustrated image of the house,” even “a tea towel”—a relic she might add to her own study, bridging the distance between Woolf’s space and hers. (She settles for using her phone to take a photo of Woolf’s desk.) Back at home, she arranges her own “piles of books, proofs, notebooks, pencils, and bowls of dried fruits.” And yet her writerly tableau is always getting disrupted: eventually, her desk is taken over by her infant son’s changing mat.

In touring the history of writerly spaces, “The Writer’s Room” elegantly describes the rooms kept by Maya Angelou, Charles Dickens, Joan Didion, John Keats, and other luminaries. It finds that, a lot of the time, the quest for the perfect room is self-defeating: tormented by sounds in his neighborhood (among them a neighbor’s rooster), Thomas Carlyle tried to construct a soundproof chamber, but it turned out to be “the noisiest in the house.” Many people, meanwhile, don’t have room for a writer’s room, or live lives that preclude solitude, or just don’t like to sit still. They work in libraries or cafés; they write on subways, in hospital beds, or in Google Docs. Da Cunha Lewin notes that, although we often picture a writer within a room, there’s also “the writer with another job,” “the writer who is in a queue,” “the writer who is a carer,” “the writer who is in prison.”

There’s a sense, she comes to think, in which the image of an inward-focussed writer concentrating at a desk might be fundamentally misleading. Emily Dickinson, for instance, had a little writing table by her bedroom window, but the dress on display at her house museum also possesses a small, added outside pocket—what the poet Mary Ruefle calls a “workman’s pocket.” (It appears to be well-sized for a pencil and paper.) Dickinson might have spent almost all her time inside the house, but it still seems as though she wanted to write while away from her desk. There is “an undeniably romantic and alluring quality to the desk space,” da Cunha Lewin writes, but bodies, like minds, are always in motion. We might do better to imagine a writer as someone conversing, exercising, socializing, and interacting, instead of merely observing—someone who is out in the world instead of shut away in a room.

In “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” from 1899, the economist Thorstein Veblen explored the purchase of luxurious and unnecessary goods. We buy nice things because we like them, and because they’re better, and because we want other people to admire and envy us, he argued, but we also do it to influence ourselves. Consider hunters: “Even very mild-mannered and matter-of-fact men who go out shooting are apt to carry an excess of arms and accoutrements in order to impress upon their own imagination the seriousness of their undertaking,” Veblen wrote. If you buy a Birkin bag, or an over-specced rifle scope, or an expensive new camera, you may or may not be trying to wow other people, but you’re certainly trying to wow yourself. This is why it can actually be embarrassing when another enthusiast notices your splurge and wants to talk about it. You didn’t necessarily want to be seen by others; you wanted to see yourself.

How do artists come to see themselves as artists? Any piece of art begins in triviality. The first note, brushstroke, or sentence is meaningless; an unfinished first paragraph is humiliating. The circumstances in which many creative efforts arise are rarely propitious. Da Cunha Lewin reports that, with a small child at home, she now writes while “slumped on a chair in the living room.” Everything tells a creative person to give up. And so writers must assert their own seriousness to themselves—perhaps by sitting down at a nicely curated desk, or by strolling into a cool coffee shop dressed in what da Cunha Lewin calls a “uniform of middle-class artistry” (chore coat, round glasses, wide-legged pants).

An elevating writer’s room can strike a blow against triviality. But how powerful is that blow? When I was in college, I struggled to write short stories in my dorm room, while my roommate snored behind me in his bed; I did better once I found, in the basement of the building, a kind of closet that had been accidentally left unlocked, and turned it into my study. The next year, when a few friends and I created a tech startup, I often spent nights writing fiction in the office we rented, surrounded by computer servers. It wasn’t exactly a writer’s room, but it was one for which I was paying, and its very existence signalled my own capability.

As a graduate student, then a lecturer, and then a journalist, I sought out a series of better writing spaces. I’ve worked in numberless coffee shops, academic offices, and libraries; I’ve rented an office within a law firm, and today I work from one with a water view—exactly the sort of place in which I once envisioned writing. I’ve been equally devoted to curating my digital drafting environment: having tried all the word processors and writing apps, I now rely mostly on a niche e-ink tablet made by a Norwegian company called reMarkable. When I deign to use a computer, I write in a program called Ulysses, styling the type in Sabon—a typeface I purchased for myself decades ago—and setting it up so that the text appears in a narrow, magazine-like column.

Having access to these spaces and resources has been a privilege. There’s no question that they’ve helped me write. And yet, if I look back over my career as a writer, the value I’ve derived from carefully controlling my environment has paled in comparison to my main source of motivation: scary e-mails from editors. When I wrote mainly on my own, I did all right. But the quality and quantity of my output increased substantially once I started receiving terrifying notes about how, if I didn’t submit my draft immediately, a magazine issue might not come together. After getting such messages, I’ve completed projects swiftly and effectively, in all sorts of places—on trains, in cars, once in a bar, writing on my phone. The fact that I sent such notes as an editor myself, often with an eye to inspiring productivity in my writers, hasn’t diminished their power over me. “The problem of the writer’s room is that not everyone has one,” da Cunha Lewin concludes. Yet the scarcest resource for writers may not be space but expectations.

“The Writer’s Room” takes a dim view of the writerly experience today. Thanks to housing crises in big cities, many aspiring writers can’t afford rooms of their own, and contractions in the media industry have made writing as a profession less tractable. Literacy is in an over-all decline, and artificial intelligence threatens to undermine the value of human writing and thinking. And yet, against this picture, there’s the somewhat troublesome fact that, for better and worse, it has never been easier for a writer to find an audience. Anyone can self-publish a book or start a Substack. Physical space is scarce, and editors are elusive, but readers are everywhere.

What would it mean, da Cunha Lewin asks, if we tried “making ourselves at home in the very act of writing,” no matter where and how it happens? Her answer, broadly, is that we might develop a sense of the writing life that’s centered on reception, rather than on production. She quotes bell hooks: “Even though writing is a solitary act, when I sit with words that I trust will be read by someone, I know that I can never be truly alone.” Arguably, in the age of social media, more people have experienced this feeling than ever before. And so da Cunha Lewin suggests that we might replace the image of a writer alone in a room with that of “an unknown person, a reader, sitting with and living with the ideas over which someone else has spent countless hours.” Increasingly, she explains, “this beautiful sense of intimacy is how I want to envision being alone when I write.”

The tools for writing are cheap and omnipresent; an audience is waiting; the room is optional. If all that’s true, then what’s stopping you? The challenge has to do with language. Words have to refer; writing has to be about something. The fantasy of a writer in a room can be glamorous, conjuring writing as a kind of life style. It also has a dark side: a writer with her head in her hands, bereft of inspiration, blocked. Both aspects of the fantasy leave out the writing itself—its subject, content, intention, meaning. Da Cunha Lewin is inclined to agree with the English writer Geoff Dyer, who thinks that writer’s block is a myth. If he hasn’t written anything, Dyer says, it isn’t because he’s blocked. It’s because he’s in the default state from which all writers must extricate themselves, wherever they are: “I just haven’t had anything to say.” ♦