What’s missing
The weekend despatch: The Epstein files, read cold. The Pope’s reflections on sports. + What’s Anatolian folk-rock?
Developments
- “Bring your harem.” “Expect trouble.” The “wildest party” on the island. Three million more pages from the Epstein files. But what do they actually prove?
- Putin halts strikes on Ukraine’s grid for five days, then hits it with 450 drones on the coldest night of the year. As the last nuclear-arms treaty expires, Washington reopens communications with Moscow. & The Pope issues a letter on athletics—and what he takes to be one of their most awesome instances: the tennis rally.
Features
- As America pulls back from global development, is China taking over? Pritish Behuria on what doesn’t change when the lender does.
Books
- Syria’s dictator is long gone. But now what? Rime Allaf’s It Started in Damascus: How the Long Syrian Revolution Reshaped Our World.
Music
- What’s Anatolian folk-rock?
- & New tracks from Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek, Groove Armada, Marta Del Grandi, Dutch Interior, & Father John Misty.
+ Weather report
- Record rainfall drenches Ireland and the U.K.—and the jet stream isn’t done …
Developments
A detective’s inventory
Last week, the U.S. Justice Department released nearly 3 million pages of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender who died by suicide in a Manhattan jail in 2019. The files showed a network that didn’t dissolve when its central figure became a registered sex offender but instead continued—casually, extensively, in writing. Powerful men kept visiting, kept emailing, kept asking about “harems” and “trouble” and the “wildest parties.” They kept coming back. It was the most remarkable thing.
Now, members of Congress are demanding prosecutions. Online, every newly surfaced email seems to land like an indictment. And when Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Sunday that no further charges are anticipated, many heard a cover-up. Which it may be.
But it may also be accurate—for a reason that’s easy enough to state but tough to process: The documents, for all their volume and vividness, don’t appear to contain any new evidence of crimes.
Three million pages …
What do they actually show?
- ‘Bring your harem.’ The emails, flight logs, and correspondence reveal the social architecture of Epstein’s world in extensive detail—who visited, who wrote, who kept coming back after 2008. Richard Branson asking Epstein to visit, “as long as you bring your harem.” Steve Tisch asking whether to “expect ‘trouble’” at a late-night invitation. Elon Musk asking about the “wildest party.” The language is coded but casual—the register of people who understand each other. It is also, in every instance, legal. Damning, yes. But not criminal.
- A filing is not a finding. Millions of pages of Justice Department material include witness statements, tips, allegations, and correspondence collected over two decades. Some claims are corroborated. Many are not. A limousine driver telling an investigator what he overheard on a phone call is a claim—not proof. Someone files a dossier of allegations with the FBI before an election—that’s a filing, not a finding. The files are the record of an investigation, not its conclusions. That distinction has largely vanished from the public conversation, where documents are being shared as if their contents are self-proving.
- ‘Awful but lawful.’ The former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade used a phrase on PBS this week that prosecutors apparently share among themselves. Writing gross emails to a convicted sex offender is “awful but lawful.” Visiting his island after his conviction: awful but lawful. Maintaining a friendship with a man whose predation was public knowledge: awful but lawful. So much of the conduct documented in these files is indefensible. And yet. Whether any of it meets the appropriately legal standard of a crime—trafficking, conspiracy, sexual abuse—is, whether we might like it or not, a different question. And so far, the answer appears to be no.
- No case. A number of thoughtful commentators, American and otherwise, have described the evidentiary picture as “unclear” or “hard to say at this point.” But the presumption of innocence doesn’t ask whether the evidence is ambiguous. It asks whether there is evidence of a specific crime committed by a specific person, sufficient to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. If there isn’t, the answer isn’t “it’s complicated.” The answer is that there’s no case. That can change. But separately from how anyone might understandably feel, it’s where the public record stands today.
- The Russia thread. Epstein’s name appears alongside Vladimir Putin’s more than a thousand times in the latest release—mostly in news clippings forwarded to his inbox, but also in correspondence showing persistent efforts to arrange a meeting with the Russian president. He corresponded with Sergei Belyakov, a former Russian deputy economy minister and graduate of the Academy of the Federal Security Service—who helped arrange a visa for Epstein and planned introductions to senior Russian financial officials. A 2017 U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation report, marked SECRET, described Epstein as a “wealth manager” for Putin. Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said this week that the evidence suggested Epstein’s operations were “co-organized by Russian intelligence services.” He offered no proof. Norway has opened a parliamentary inquiry. The Kremlin dismissed the claims. The documents show Epstein’s persistent interest in Russian power. They don’t establish what that interest produced. The thread is live, and it resists the same rush toward resolution that has overtaken the rest of the conversation.
The file isn’t closed. Roughly 200,000 pages remain withheld on privilege grounds. The redactions are extensive and, by the Justice Department’s own admission, unevenly applied—exposing victim names while obscuring possible enablers. Lawmakers from both parties are pressing for access to unredacted materials.
None of this is settled.
But the public record, for now, points somewhere specific: not to a criminal conspiracy, but to a world in which none of this—the island visits, the chummy emails, the years of casual association with a convicted sex offender—needed one.
Meanwhile
- Five days, then the missiles. On Tuesday, Moscow launched approximately 450 drones and 70 missiles at Ukrainian energy infrastructure—one of the largest strikes of the war, in temperatures below minus 20 degrees Celsius. Thermal power plants in Kyiv, Kharkiv, Dnipro, and Odesa took hits; Kharkiv’s mayor reported 820 high-rise buildings without heat. DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, called it the worst attack of the year. The timeline is what matters. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin had agreed, five days earlier, to pause strikes on the energy grid—a “personal request” from U.S. President Donald Trump, billed as a confidence-building gesture ahead of trilateral talks in Abu Dhabi. The pause held for five days. The strike landed on the eve of those talks, on the coldest night of winter, with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte crossing into Ukrainian territory. Whether the pause was operational cover or a genuine gesture that something disrupted, the sequence speaks for itself. … See “Minus twenty.”
- Midnight Thursday. The last nuclear-arms treaty between the United States and Russia lapsed as of Thursday, February 5—and on the same day, the Pentagon announced it had restored high-level military communications with Moscow, suspended since 2021. New START capped each side at 1,550 deployed strategic warheads and 700 delivery systems. Nothing replaces it. For the first time in more than 50 years, no binding constraints govern the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals. Yet in Abu Dhabi, where trilateral talks on the war in Ukraine entered their second day, U.S. General Alexus Grynkewich met his Russian counterparts and agreed to reopen direct contact. The formal architecture is gone. The informal channels are back. What those conversations produce—a bridge to a successor treaty or a quieter arrangement, tacit restraint without real structure—may not be clear to either side yet. … See “After the treaty.”
- A reconciled world. Hours before the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Milan on Friday, Pope Leo XIV issued a papal letter on the value of sports—a formal designation, and one of the most significant Vatican statements on the subject in decades. Leo called on nations to pause military conflict during the Games as “a symbol and promise of a reconciled world,” and warned against yoking athletic achievement to “the mentality of power, propaganda or national supremacy.” The letter arrived in a week of 450 drones over Ukraine, an expired nuclear treaty, and the U.S. vice president in Milan for meetings on the margins. Leo wrote about doping, artificial intelligence in athletics, financial corruption. But he also wrote about joy—the joy of a tennis rally, which he called one of the most satisfying moments in sport, because each player pushes “the other to the limit of his or her skill level,” where self-consciousness disappears—“a fusion between action and awareness.”
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Features
One more great power
As America pulls back from global development, is China taking over? Pritish Behuria on what doesn’t change when the lender does.
