As Duncan Black Says, Time for Another WebLogger Ethics Panel!
As Axel Oxenstierna wrote to his son Johan in 1648: ”Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?” Perhaps the biggest reason to reject the idea of meritocracy is the extraordinary absence of merit of any sort, including, indeed of basic ethical standards, among those who claim to be its exemplars…
Michael’s Restaurant in Long Beach appears to seat 40 people in its upstairs dining room.
Nathan Myhrvold’s pictures <https://web.archive.org/web/20170419075524/https://www.edge.org/event/the-edge-billionaires-dinner-2011> of the 2011 Edge Dinner show 28 people, including New York Times columnist David Brooks—and Jeffrey Epstein, recently released from jail.
A New York Times spokesperson not named because they were not willing to be named says:
As a journalist, David Brooks regularly attends events to speak with noted and important business leaders to inform his columns, which is exactly what happened at this 2011 event. Mr. Brooks had no contact with [Epstein] before or after this single attendance at a widely-attended dinner…
Note that “widely-attended” is here a term of art. A typical New York Times use of the term refers to the 500,000 people who attended a Renoir exhibition, or the 2000 who attended the Las Vegas SALT conference Not 40.
But we are here because this dinner meeting of Brooks and Epstein—part of John Brockman’s attempt to rehabilitate him post-sentencing—is not mentioned a month ago, when we had:
David Brooks: The Epstein Story? Count Me Out <https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/21/opinion/epstein-trump-conspiracy.html>: ‘What has America’s political class decided to obsess about over the last several months? Jeffrey Epstein. This is a guy who has been dead for six years and who last was in touch with Donald Trump 21 years ago, Trump has said….
America can’t get itself back on track if the culture is awash in distrust, cynicism, catastrophizing lies and conspiracymongering….. The smart play, I’d say, is to rebut conspiracymongering, not abet it. When the giant issues like A.I. and Chinese dominance come crashing down on us, we will look back on the Epstein moment and ask: “What the hell were we thinking?”…
If you had asked me, I would have replied “zero” to the question:
What are the chances that Brooks attended a relatively small dinner with Jeffrey Epstein after his conviction, and yet did not mention it in his column?
Because there is nothing more likely to raise the credibility of conspiracies than to be one degree of separation from a pedophile, and yet pretend that you are a dispassionate, disinterested observer of the whole situation.
And it is not as though David Brooks could have believed that his one degree of separation from Epstein would go unnoticed.
This had already been out there, from BuzzFeed, for six years:
Peter Aldhous & Ryan Mac (2019): In 2011, Jeffrey Epstein Was A Known Sex Offender. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, And Sergey Brin Dined With Him Anyway <https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-bezos-musk-billionaires-dinner>: ‘After pleading guilty to charges of soliciting prostitution from an underage girl, Jeffrey Epstein spent part of 2011 reintroducing himself to elite society. A March 2011 dinner [the Edge dinner]… was an exclusive gathering, dominated by tech industry leadership. A gallery of photos… named 20 guests, including just one media representative: New York Times columnist David Brooks…. Brooks…said he had not heard of Epstein in 2011…. A manager at the Italian restaurant that hosted the 2011 billionaires’ dinner in Long Beach said she dealt directly with Brockman and was the only one allowed to check people in for the “hush hush” event. She wasn’t even allowed to save the list of attendees. “After the event, they took the guest list and shredded it,” she said…
And can be reached from the second page of pre-November 2025 Google searches for “‘David Brooks’ and ‘Jeffrey Epstein’”.