I will be hosting an AMA (ask me anything) about the School on the 20th. You can find the free streaming link here.

From Bungacast:

Alex, George, and contributing editor Catherine Liu delve into Barthes’ 1957 classic to understand the form of ideology critique it proposes – and particularly as it relates to left and right.

• If the bourgeoisie generates myth, is revolution a cathartic act that gets us beyond myth?

• Is the direct producer also unable to speak myth, or is this a romanticisation?

• What are predominant left-wing myths today? Is “left vs right” a myth of sorts?

• Is the critic of myths condemned to live a “theoretical sociality”? Should people just be allowed to enjoy things?

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The Palm Springs School for Social Research is an educational initiative that takes its inspiration from the Frankfurt School, whose foundational texts we have been discussing here at CLiuAnon for the past three years.

The School will also be announcing the following grants and award programs: Emerging Writer Fund, Palm Springs School for Social Research Fellows Program and the December 2026 Retreat of the Left, a five day retreat in 29 Palms, focused on “Building the New Subject of Politics.”

On June 12, 2026, we are officially launching the Palm Springs School for Social Research. These are the remarks I will be giving at our inaugural conference in Frankfurt, titled “What is the Social of Socialism?”

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During our CLiuAnon event in LA in December, I read what I’m calling my Thirty-One Theses. Below are the first 16. I’ll publish the rest in a follow up post!

Don’t forget to register for the inaugural launch conference for the Palm Springs School for Social Research ().

1. It is only through the individual that the collective can be reached. The individual is no longer a given in a fully reified society: all relationships except the most primal, preverbal attachments are codified, commodified and open to exploitation, whether through surveillance capitalism, identity liberalism, or carnivalesque conservatism.

2. The saturation of our world with liberal and anti-liberal ideology makes the market, not the marketplace of ideas look like an escape valve.

3. Understanding markets, understanding capital and our relationship to them is necessary to Leftists, because the saddest form of bourgeois escapism is through the broken portal of ‘idealism’ – of any sort, be it religious or political.

4. The rise of Christian nationalism is a function of media consolidation and individual atomization. Their agonistic world view resonates because it does reflect, mythologically on a primal battle, except the actual one, fought on spreadsheets with algorithms and CBAs. The primal war they cannot address is being waged on behalf of capital against workers.

5. Promoting, cultivating and defending absolutely non-instrumental relations between people and people, and people and art should be the goal of Left politics.

6. Remember that you cannot express yourself “authentically” or “professionally” at all times and in all places. The dumb countercultural idea of “speaking truth to power” is a complete cliché: perfectly routinized at faculty meetings and professional conferences illuminated by fluorescent lights.

7. Restraint and understanding of the terrain of our battles is a good and necessary thing.

8. Remember that retreating can be a strategic sign of strength: retreat is not surrender. When a dogmatic liberal or conservative is making outrageous statements in person or on line, a strong “disagree” is often all you have to say or post in response.

9. History is being erased by liberal institutions as much as it is being trashed by conservatives. As the history of class struggle was erased, liberals rewrote the past according to a “fill in the gaps” project of reparation and inclusion.

10. The violence of capitalism in destroying functional market economies, or small holders in the form of farmers or mom and pop shops is inexorable. The abundance bros get this to a certain degree in their attacks on the regulatory state, which impedes local growth, but their prescriptions are designed in the end to promote the interests of capital over small holders.

11. Don’t give into the latest version of dirt baggery on the Left, where we can indulge in making fun of normies again. If our horizon is a massive political mobilization, we need to be able to appeal to everyone, not just college educated people with specialized forms of etiquette.

12. Freud says that the voice of reason may be quiet, but it is not easily silenced. I believe in the ability of all people to find their way to this reason. And that it is reasonable to rebel, in the words of another 20^th century giant, Mao.

13. Liberalism was historically valuable as a set of first principles, but its institutions and ideologies are designed to keep out dissenters, ironically especially those who object on the basis of dialectics to its idea of inclusion.

14. We should learn from the gangster and the clown as outsiders to the system of decaying liberalism. Remember that liberalism is encrypted in a tomb of its making, but its hunger for fresh blood is unabated. Do not give it your blood.

15. The social media ecology of Botoxed influencers and extremely gelled right wing talking heads prospers because there are no good jobs for young people in the content production professions and there are many rewards for being a living ancillary appendage to the app. Always understand context of production, before leaping to political judgment.

16. Most people are not political and to live in an agitated state of political mobilization has been characterized by libs as fascism. Without an organized politics of collective endeavor that leaves people alone not to be political, popular anger inflamed by Red and Blue MAGA produce a lumpen proletariat of opportunists, provocateurs and larpers, especially attracted to demagogues and celebrities.

Stay tuned for the rest!

What follows is a very anecdotal, on-the-ground account of what is happening with the federal mandate passed in June of 2024 by the Biden Department of Justice: all public universities have to meet its new accessibility requirements in an expanded Americans with Disabilities Act. Implementation of the federal mandate has to be completed by April 24, 2026.

I was not paying much attention to this news because my mother passed away in May of 2024 and I was the only one of my siblings who saw my father and oversaw his care that summer. The siblings blamed him for my mother’s death from Stage 4 stomach cancer.

At UC Irvine the Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation began to offer “webinars” about how to make your courses comply with the federal mandate. No major media outlet has covered this news. I typed in “Title II” into my search bar and came up with this story in ecampus.

A new tool in our Canvas course websites, Yujia Panorama tells us how accessible our courses are with a percentage out of 100, as if we were being graded by a tech tool.

All film material must be captioned. All visual material in slides must include alt text that the webinar leaders said could be generated by AI. Analog film runs at 24 frames per second. How will clips, films, or shorts ever be compliant with Title II?

According to the mandate, PDFs are not ADA-accessible, but Word documents are. PDFs are the standard format of academic articles. Word has an accessibility checker and this document passed the check as raw text. I learned that hyperlinks should never be left as raw links, but I would never do that anyway.

In the Title II webinar breakout room, an economics professor shared his screen and was our guinea pig in demonstrating how to use the Yujia Panorama accessibility tool to remediate his Canvas course.

As you can imagine, his slides included many charts and graphs. The AI alt text generator couldn’t generate an adequate description of the charts. Alt text we were told should not be over 125 words. You can keep prompting the alt text generator to produce better descriptions. The trainers showed us an AI-generated image of a smiling goat with giant stained yellow teeth in the foreground of the image and a modern farmhouse style barn in the right-hand upper quadrant. It was superbly ugly. We were told we could adjust the alt text based on our course content: was this an animal husbandry course or a dentistry course? We were told that alt text could be very different based on the context. Like most on line trainings I have taken in the past five years, the pedagogical style is highly infantilizing.

As far as I can tell, alt text cannot handle aesthetically complex images, whether paintings, photographs of sculptures, or film stills, but we had to make good faith efforts to provide them for the visually impaired student who might want to major in Film and Media Studies.

But for the economics course, the alt text generator could not handle complex charts or graphs. The undergraduate accessibility consultant in our group asked for a DTEI staff member to join us to assist with the task. When the staff member couldn’t solve the problem, they had a very lovely upper administrator come into our breakout group to troubleshoot. When they couldn’t figure out what to do with a chart/graph and alt text, they said they would explore the problem and get back to the economics professor later. What we learned was that even the staff members trained to help us comply with the mandate were unprepared to deal with visual complexity and AI-generated alt text.

I show ten films a quarter. My slides are populated with clips and stills. Almost all of my readings are PDFs. As a strange workaround, we were told that if we pass out readings in hard copy, we can bypass the ADA mandate. In addition, if we record our lectures on Zoom and link to the recordings, we can also bypass the mandate.

We are doing this work without significant, experienced support: the tech people are confronting these issues for the first time as well. There are no Title II funds available to disburse. I’m sure they would have been DOGE’d anyway, but the mandate is perfectly emblematic of Democratic Party policy making. Talk about “accessibility” to make powerful lobbying groups and non-profits funded by the hyper-wealthy happy.

The Democrats have passed laws that do not do anything to fund the public institutions that must comply with the mandates. They use “accessibility” as a term that liberal billionaires and their minions can support because the allegedly progressive policy will do nothing to change the economic organization of an increasingly unequal society. Talk about accessibility without talking about economics. They pass unfunded federal mandates: they place the burden of accessibility on individuals without giving them adequate tools to actually comply with federal law. People with disabilities earn less money than able-bodied people: they need higher minimum wages and single payer health care, but no bother. Alt text will make them happy.

The Trump administration hasn’t even paid enough attention to this issue to repeal the DOJ’s mandate. They don’t care. There is a war sucking $1 billion a day out of public coffers. Tech bros don’t believe in public education anyway, but Title II does force everyone to use AI tools a lot more. Lecturers, staff and faculty are scrambling to bring public university materials (like graduate handbooks, etc.) into compliance. Imagine being paid $5K a course as an adjunct lecturer and then having this laid upon you.

I have a friend who is vision impaired who told me that alt text is useless. We want everyone who wants secondary and tertiary education to succeed, but if you have been in a classroom lately, you will know that the working conditions for students and teachers have been transformed by fewer resources, bigger class sizes and COVID era de-socialization. Add to this mix the intimate distractions of the smartphone and social media and you have pedagogical problems that Title II doesn’t care to address at all. And this is why people hate the Democrats. With Title II, maybe even their most stalwart supporters in the Professional Managerial Class reproduction machine will lose faith in their brand of cosmetically liberal, virtue signaling policy making.

CLiuAnonners, you are the first to know!

I’m thrilled to be able to announce that the website for the Palm Springs School for Social Research is launched. Find out more about it here. The research institute and educational initiative takes its inspiration from the Frankfurt School, the basic texts of which, we have been discussing for the past three years here at CLiuAnon.

The theoretical work that I do and my critique of liberalism owes very much to it major thinkers. With the passing of Juergen Habermas this past Spring, many people including Alex Karp and Martin Jay have contributed to the discourse around the School and its most well know second generation member, Habermas. Gabriel Rockhill has tried to prove that the Frankfurt School after the war was little more than a CIA cutout. In any case, we need critical theory today more than ever.

Ideology critique, education and the rebuilding of the subject of Left politics with the qualities of “fortitude, courage, humor and cunning” are two of the priorities of the School, which aims to liberate critical theory from its academic confines, in a playful, pro-social and serious manner.

Information about our Inaugural Conference, “What is the Social of Socialism?” can be found here. , Roger Lancaster, Lee Jones will join George Hoare, and me in addressing this question.

If you are in the Frankfurt area, please join us in person. The conference will take place in the offices of 1789 Innovations. Space is limited.

If you can’t join us live, the proceedings will be streamed. Information about streaming can be found at the registration link above. Pay what you can to stream it.

Please sign up for our mailing list.

In December, 2026, the PSSSR will also be running a five day all expenses paid retreat in 29 Palms, California on the topic “Building a New Political Subject.” Applications will be open July.

See you on line and in person very soon!

Catherine

We especially want to thank of NEW DISCRETIONS gallery for generously providing the space, of Ocula for co-sponsoring the event, and of for being our AV guy (😇).

Be on the lookout for a full review of the event including the works of Christina Kruse whose exhibit, Field Agents, provided a memorable setting and accompanied us during the evening.

Finally, just a few updates and reminders:

• Don’t miss our virtual seminar on Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History. Calendar reminder here.

• Finally, don’t forget to register for the Palm Springs School for Social Research () Inaugural Conference entitled “What is the Social of Socialism?”. This conference will be held in-person in Frankfurt alongside a virtual option. Conference flyers here:

See you all on Saturday!

Edit: See updated flyers for the PSSSR conference!

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I’m going to be in NYC for an event where I’ll be discussing trauma culture and my Ocula piece on Hamnet and Sentimental Value. We will be doing a Substack Live of the talk. Don’t forget to pre-order my upcoming book!

Confidence in American institutions of higher education is at an all-time low. A 2025 Gallup Poll shows a worrying drop in the value Americans put on a university degree: fifteen years ago 70% of Americans polled thought college was important; today only 35% of Americans felt that a university education could be valued in a positive way. While this might reflect the narrow view of education and the limitations of a question of higher education credentials as “important” or “not important,” the collapse in public opinion is alarming It motivated Yale University to commission a report on what The New York Times calls “the widening discontent over higher education’s” worthiness.

Twentieth-century radicals both liberal and conservative have viewed the American university with great suspicion. However, there has been an intensification of skepticism regarding higher education in the past sixty years: Richard Hofstadter’s concept of mid-century anti-intellectualism has fully metastasized in the contemporary body politics. A general drive to instrumentalize if not weaponize all forms of human knowledge has been dominated by Right wing business leaders, but it was New Left influenced activist/academics like Dylan Rodriguez who led the way for some of the most elite educated twenty-first century radical liberals to push for the abolition of the university as we knew it. Rodriguez has since recanted their most extreme views, but “abolish the university” denounced campuses as sites of policing, colonization, and oppression and in a Foucauldian way, compared them to prisons and other sites of discipliary '“power.” At the apogee of their abolitionist confidence, radical liberals proposed that promoting and preserving forms of knowledge enacted white supremacy and elitism. One meets the occasional academic or graduate student who still holds onto these views even as the American university is being undermined by the Right, with no help from the decolonizers at all.

As Nicolas Lemann reminds us in his recent article in The New Yorker, Richard Nixon told his administration, “The professors are the enemies.” Professors, nutty or not, have long been convenient whipping boys for authoritarians. Today, they stand in for decadent dissenters and swindlers of the people. Research universities in America have won few friends and made many enemies. According to Lemann, the Trump Administration has put the final nail in the coffin of the “Cold War compact” between the federal government and the American research university. The breakup between the federal government and American universities follows the rapid decline in American confidence in its institutions of higher education. In addition to the Gallup poll findings, a 2022 study done by the think tank New America showed that in 2020, 69% of Americans thought colleges had a positive effect on the country. By 2022, that number had dropped to 55% with 37% of Republicans holding positive views of universities. The pandemic happened, but the Age of Epstein and the University’s submission to and celebration of the donor class in Universities compromised research and corrupted the social mission of institutions meant to work for the public good.

The marriage between the government and the University was always one of convenience, not of love. Universities and the federal government got in bed together for reasons of national security and social mobility. Since the end of World War II, this relationship was shaped by the onset of the Cold War and the radical expansion of access to higher education under the G.I. Bill, which covered tuition for veterans who were accepted at any university in America. Returning soldiers, most of them white men and working class or from rural areas found themselves carrying book bags instead of mortars, and eating in dining instead of mess halls.

If universities radically diversified under those auspices, today’s elite universities function as sorting mechanisms that help manage an increasingly unequal society. Universities are ranked on their ability to reject the largest number of applicants. Any university or college with a high admission rate is in financial trouble: selectivity is a function of educational cartelization. Freddie de Boer’s 2020 book The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice offers a sobering account of the ways in which meritocracy and its “cult of smart” fail students who are not academically gifted, allow for the cartelization of educational resources, and justify the grotesque shape of an increasingly unequal society.

American universities of the late Cold War – during the 1970s and 1980s – became hospitable places to New Leftists, who adeptly engineered the “cultural turn” away from the dreaded “canon” and embraced a form of academic populism hostile to both historical materialism and the “great books” tradition. In my 2011 book, American Idyll: Academic Anti-Elitism as Cultural Critique, I argue that this anti-elitism of the New Left was strangely compatible with conservative hostility to intellectual life. The theory-heavy, cultural studies professoriate proved ill-equipped in the face of populist backlash against higher education once the critique of elitism came from the Right.

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CLiuAnonners!

I am working on a longer piece on why everyone on the Left and Right hates the university. One wants it abolished or decolonized; the other wants to starve it into an HR department for anxious white-collar workers.

Thank you for your patience. I thought of submitting this piece to the Chronicle of Higher Education or even the New Yorker, but true to my own self, I am not going to give those gatekeepers the key to CLiuAnon world. I have editors and readers now who are brilliant, and who cares if my reach is not as great as theirs? We make up in intensity what they have in prestige.

On April 23, in New York City, in collaboration with Ocula Magazine, I will be in dialogue with Matt Gardner, talking about Trauma Culture and Film at New Directions, a Gallery in Chelsea. Tickets available on Luma.

I will soon have some very exciting news about the Palm Springs School for Social Research. Watch this space!

For paid subscribers, we will be talking about The Gambler (2014) and “Theses on the Philosophy of History” by Walter Benjamin on May 2, 2026, at 8:30am PST.

For those who are new to CLiuAnon, I run a seminar every month on a basic text of the Frankfurt School. There was a digression into Gangster Capitalism. Now I’m writing the book. It is a bit harder to keep up with ongoing research as I develop more complex ideas about exploitation and coercion, but the book will owe a good deal to the CLiuAnon Gangster Capitalism seminars.

We began by reading The Authoritarian Personality (1950), dove into Freud and then to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. We have been on a tear with Walter Benjamin’s work lately, and May will be devoted to one of my favorite essays by the gnomic master of the form.

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What follows is a very anecdotal, on-the-ground account of what is happening with the federal mandate passed in June of 2024 by the Biden Department of Justice: all public universities had to meet its new accessibility requirements in an expanded Americans with Disabilities Act. Implementation of the federal mandate had to be completed by April 24, 2026.

Read more

Hi All! Below the paywall you will find the Zoom Invite to our monthly seminar on Sunday, March 29 at 8:30am. This week we will be discussing Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Storyteller” and the figure of the gambler in the Arcades Project. Here is a good summary of the references he makes to gambling and the gambler as figures of modernity.

There was also a long piece in The Atlantic by McKay Coppins titled “Sucker” about online gambling and one man’s journey into addiction to making a wager on everything. I will try to make that article available to paid subscribers in the next week.

Hope to see you on Sunday!

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Jeffrey Epstein never fully belonged to the donor class; he merely bought its trappings, and with it, attracted a strange coterie of hyper-credentialed elites with impeccable CVs. They, like Larry Summers (former President of Harvard and Treasury Secretary) were the creme de la creme of the Professional Managerial class and they courted the convicted sex trafficker assiduously, impressed by his vast townhouse, private island, and access to unfathomable wealth. Noam Chomsky claimed to be impressed by Epstein’s intelligence, and by the quality of his conversation. I’m a writing snob: jeevacations@gmail.com could barely produce a grammatically correct, complete sentence across three million emails. Most of Epstein’s missives contain at least one egregious misspelling.

In this post, I will discuss Epstein and his court. In a follow up post, I will discuss what I observed at UC Irvine during the Epstein years. My personal experience of the institutional distortions produced by the imperative to secure external funding. That experience, while I was Director of the UC Irvine Humanities Center led directly to the writing of Virtue Hoarders.

In my quest to find evidence of Epstein’s much-vaunted intelligence, I found that Nature magazine reported his interests as including mathematical biology, the development of a horny drug for women, and, as reported by Futurism, schemes to “improve” human DNA through genetic engineering and the propagation of his own DNA.

Epstein also expressed interest in the work of University of California, San Diego professor V. S. Ramachandran on human intelligence. The email tranche reveals that Ramachandran was introduced to Epstein by New Age guru Deepak Chopra, and that Epstein later invited the UCSD researcher to a conference on “superintelligence.”

Epstein was not an engaging correspondent. His jokes and witticisms rarely rose above middle-school references to sexual activity. He did not engage in wordplay, puns, allude to historical, literary, cultural, or aesthetic questions that might have garnered the admiration of say, an alleged devotee of high culture – the classical music maven Leon Botstein, President of Bard College and director of the American Symphony Orchestra who later claimed to have been the victim of Epstein’s broken promises. Botstein was nonetheless besotted with financier. The college president was moved to sign off an email on a plangent note: “I miss you.”

I admit to being incapable of producing complex spreadsheets or parsing deltas on financial instruments. The mechanics of shorting stocks still puzzle me. Crypto lies beyond my ken; I am too literal-minded about “mining.” Epstein’s reputed skill in asset management and investment is something I am not qualified to judge. He seemed to have been a math genius, or at least very good with handling large sums of money.

Elisa New, formerly Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard and the wife of Larry Summers, maintained a prolific correspondence with Epstein. He donated to her American Poetry Project and encouraged Leon Black of Apollo Global Management to do the same. New expressed extraordinary gratitude and remarked that the Harvard administration appeared to take her project more seriously following the external donations.

Perhaps the most notorious of New’s emails, dated 25 November 2018, contains the following paragraph:

Dear Jeffrey…

I’m going upstairs to hunt for my copy of Lolita, or will get on my kindle and reread on our way to Australia. I may have lent it to one of my kids. I would recommend reading My Antonia by Cather next time you’re on a long plane trip. The prose is gorgeous, and the book has – come to think of it – similar themes to Lolita in that it’s about a man whose whole life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl.

Lolita is about a uselessly erudite man, Humbert Humbert, who falls in love with a twelve-year-old girl, but it is also a novel narrated by a sociopathic cultural elitist – a European exile whose life is degraded by an uncontrollable erotic obsession and a hatred of the vulgarity of American popular culture. My Ántonia concerns the hard frontier life shared by the narrator and a young girl, Ántonia, whose friendship he cherishes even as he moves east to pursue an easier vocation than farming. Between thanking Epstein profusely for various favors he had meted out to Larry [Summers], New’s literary recommendation seems to fall short as flattery, since Epstein was already using Lolita as a how-to-desire-and-use-underage-girls manual and displayed not one iota of interest in Willa Cather.

How did professors at the most prestigious universities in America fall for Epstein’s unctuous seductions? Martin Nowak, a mathematical biologist, received $30 million for a research institute that Harvard has since shut down. Former MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito concealed the sources of funding he received from Epstein and was forced to step down in 2019. Ito had previously served on the boards of the New York Times, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the James L. Knight Foundation. Dan Ariely, a behavioral scientist at Duke University who studies dishonesty, reached out to Epstein to discuss his research on forgiveness, including his finding that victims of sexual crimes are the least likely to forgive their violators. What followed was a prolific correspondence that included Ariely’s request for Epstein’s financial support for one of his startups.

It is obvious that, in the drive to make academic research “relevant,” professors who were meant to enjoy the freedoms of tenure instead used their positions and capacities to attract wealthy donors, to court the billionaire class, and to derive profit from what are ostensibly disinterested professional activities.

Epstein was not a bug in the system; he was a feature of it. He understood the vulnerabilities of credentialed academia and exerted pressure and control over some of its most powerful players. It’s possible that because he lacked a college degree, he craved power and recognition. By tantalizing academics with financial support, he played a game that has rendered research – and researchers – susceptible to the whims of the donor class. With the sexual exploitation of women and minors functioning as an adjunct to his ambitions for power and sovereignty over the direction of human evolution, he made explicit what the wealthy and powerful really want: the biological and behavioral domination of the species. That, in the end, is the ultimate sign of both his intelligence and his stupidity.

Hi everyone!

Two items for this week:

First, thanks to LA CLiuAnonner Annah for the plug for a one person show by Alex Tatarsky at RedCat. One man show about a sad clown? I can’t resist, but no one in my world wants to go with me, so I’m putting this out to you all.

Just got my ticket for March 21st.

Second, the next Walter Benjamin Seminar will take place Sunday, March 29 at 8:30am PST and we will be discussing the essay, “The Storyteller” and the idea of the Gambler (I will find the references) in Benjamin’s work.

Links to follow. Zoom invite for paid subscribers only!

Also watch out for my review of Iron Lung, out in Ocula this month!

My next book, Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering, is out September 29th. Preorder here.

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Dear Subscribers Old and New,

One of the things paid subscribers get from CLiuAnon is access to monthly seminars about critical theory. They take place alternating Saturday and Sundays.

We have covered the Authoritarian Personality, Gangster Capitalism and we’re now into our second meeting on Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Our next meeting is this Saturday, Feb 28 is at 8:30 am PST.

Zoom link below the paywall. A copy of the essay can be found here.

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Jeffrey Epstein never fully belonged to the donor class; he merely bought its trappings, and with it, attracted a strange coterie of hyper-credentialed elites with impeccable CVs. They, like Larry Summers (former President of Harvard and Treasury Secretary) were the creme de la creme of the Professional Managerial class and they courted the convicted sex trafficker assiduously, impressed by his vast townhouse, private island, and access to unfathomable wealth. Noam Chomsky claimed to be impressed by Epstein’s intelligence, and by the quality of his conversation. I’m a writing snob: jeevacations@gmail.com could barely produce a grammatically correct, complete sentence across three million emails. Most of Epstein’s missives contain at least one egregious misspelling.

In this post, I will discuss Epstein and his court. In a follow up post, I will discuss what I observed at UC Irvine during the Epstein years. My personal experience of the institutional distortions produced by the imperative to secure external funding. That experience, while I was Director of the UC Irvine Humanities Center led directly to the writing of Virtue Hoarders.

In my quest to find evidence of Epstein’s much-vaunted intelligence, I found that Nature magazine reported his interests as including mathematical biology, the development of a horny drug for women, and, as reported by Futurism, schemes to “improve” human DNA through genetic engineering and the propagation of his own DNA.

Epstein also expressed interest in the work of University of California, San Diego professor V. S. Ramachandran on human intelligence. The email tranche reveals that Ramachandran was introduced to Epstein by New Age guru Deepak Chopra, and that Epstein later invited the UCSD researcher to a conference on “superintelligence.”

Epstein was not an engaging correspondent. His jokes and witticisms rarely rose above middle-school references to sexual activity. He did not engage in wordplay, puns, allude to historical, literary, cultural, or aesthetic questions that might have garnered the admiration of say, an alleged devotee of high culture – the classical music maven Leon Botstein, President of Bard College and director of the American Symphony Orchestra who later claimed to have been the victim of Epstein’s broken promises. Botstein was nonetheless besotted with financier. The college president was moved to sign off an email on a plangent note: “I miss you.”

I admit to being incapable of producing complex spreadsheets or parsing deltas on financial instruments. The mechanics of shorting stocks still puzzle me. Crypto lies beyond my ken; I am too literal-minded about “mining.” Epstein’s reputed skill in asset management and investment is something I am not qualified to judge. He seemed to have been a math genius, or at least very good with handling large sums of money.

Elisa New, formerly Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard and the wife of Larry Summers, maintained a prolific correspondence with Epstein. He donated to her American Poetry Project and encouraged Leon Black of Apollo Global Management to do the same. New expressed extraordinary gratitude and remarked that the Harvard administration appeared to take her project more seriously following the external donations.

Perhaps the most notorious of New’s emails, dated 25 November 2018, contains the following paragraph:

Dear Jeffrey…

I’m going upstairs to hunt for my copy of Lolita, or will get on my kindle and reread on our way to Australia. I may have lent it to one of my kids. I would recommend reading My Antonia by Cather next time you’re on a long plane trip. The prose is gorgeous, and the book has – come to think of it – similar themes to Lolita in that it’s about a man whose whole life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl.

Lolita is about a uselessly erudite man, Humbert Humbert, who falls in love with a twelve-year-old girl, but it is also a novel narrated by a sociopathic cultural elitist – a European exile whose life is degraded by an uncontrollable erotic obsession and a hatred of the vulgarity of American popular culture. My Ántonia concerns the hard frontier life shared by the narrator and a young girl, Ántonia, whose friendship he cherishes even as he moves east to pursue an easier vocation than farming. Between thanking Epstein profusely for various favors he had meted out to Larry [Summers], New’s literary recommendation seems to fall short as flattery, since Epstein was already using Lolita as a how-to-desire-and-use-underage-girls manual and displayed not one iota of interest in Willa Cather.

How did professors at the most prestigious universities in America fall for Epstein’s unctuous seductions? Martin Nowak, a mathematical biologist, received $30 million for a research institute that Harvard has since shut down. Former MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito concealed the sources of funding he received from Epstein and was forced to step down in 2019. Ito had previously served on the boards of the New York Times, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the James L. Knight Foundation. Dan Ariely, a behavioral scientist at Duke University who studies dishonesty, reached out to Epstein to discuss his research on forgiveness, including his finding that victims of sexual crimes are the least likely to forgive their violators. What followed was a prolific correspondence that included Ariely’s request for Epstein’s financial support for one of his startups.

It is obvious that, in the drive to make academic research “relevant,” professors who were meant to enjoy the freedoms of tenure instead used their positions and capacities to attract wealthy donors, to court the billionaire class, and to derive profit from what are ostensibly disinterested professional activities.

Epstein was not a bug in the system; he was a feature of it. He understood the vulnerabilities of credentialed academia and exerted pressure and control over some of its most powerful players. It’s possible that because he lacked a college degree, he craved power and recognition. By tantalizing academics with financial support, he played a game that has rendered research – and researchers – susceptible to the whims of the donor class. With the sexual exploitation of women and minors functioning as an adjunct to his ambitions for power and sovereignty over the direction of human evolution, he made explicit what the wealthy and powerful really want: the biological and behavioral domination of the species. That, in the end, is the ultimate sign of both his intelligence and his stupidity.

In case you missed it, my new book comes out September 29th. Preorder here!

On February 28, 2026, we will be discussing sections in the Work of Art essay about film, starting in the older versions of the translation with the section X. I want to talk about Benjamin’s writing about film. especially in relationship to what he sees as revolutionary about the medium with regard to the changing modes of production under industrialization. Famously, Benjamin was optimistic about the role that film would play in building class consciousness. He sees in films ability to convert ‘everyman’ [sic] into a quasi-expert. This proximity to knowledge, the democratization of visibility however has turned the techno-populism of Benjamin’s viewpoint into reactionary politics, not because of anything inherent in film or the technologies of visual reproduction, but because of the failure of socializing the means of that reproduction.

Also, I’m going to be publishing a monthly column about film in Ocula !

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Trigger Warning! The full title, cover, and release date for Traumatized are finally here:

Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering will be available on September 29 via Verso. Preorders are live at your favorite bookseller. Just follow this link. From the publisher:

Trauma culture didn’t just describe pain – it reorganized politics around it. From PTSD discourse to Oprah and the influencer economy, suffering became identity, currency, and moral authority. The result: a politics of false consensus, enforced accommodation, and the quiet erosion of liberalism itself.

This release is serendipitous given ’s recent announcement of his upcoming book, All in Your Head: Illness as Identity, Trauma as Fashion, and the Desire to be Disordered. Let’s call it unplanned synergy!

Greetings from London. Earlier this week I was interviewed on Al Jazeera and participated in the Doha Debates. More on that soon. Stay tuned!

I’m also excited to announce that we’re now accepting submissions for guest essays. If you have a draft, reach out and we’ll take a look. We plan to publish subscriber-submitted essays on a limited basis.

Our very first guest essay was written by Brooklyn-based woodworker Darren Gardner. Enjoy!

- Catherine

The Robber Baron and the Radical

By Darren Gardner

On a cold winter afternoon in NYC, seeking a warm respite, I found myself at The Frick Collection, newly reopened after a major renovation. My memory of Turner, Vermeer, and Rembrandt had guided me there, and the splendor of these masters did not disappoint. But it was something else that grabbed my attention: the Portrait of Thomas More (1527), by Hans Holbein the Younger. He stares obliquely out from his portrait as if avoiding our gaze, adorned in regal garb. One might walk past More without much thought; after all, he appears to fit the decor – a powerful Tudor in a lush velvet robe matching the voluptuousness of the room. But Holbein is a master, and More cuts a very sophisticated figure.

The author of Utopia (1516), More argued that the root of evil lay in private ownership and that gold was best used for chamber pots because of its worthlessness. Ironically, Holbein’s portrait of More has resided for decades in the former home of Henry Clay Frick, the capitalist robber baron. What would they say to each other? In Utopia, More argued against the inequality of his time: “wherever you have private property, and money is the measure of all things, it is hardly possible for the commonwealth to be justly governed or to flourish in prosperity.”1 By contrast, Frick made a fortune in steel and responded to the basic demands of workers with disdain, anti-union tactics and direct violence.

Consider Frick’s involvement in the 1892 Homestead strike. When workers went on strike for better wages and worker safety, it fell to Frick to address the unrest and restore productivity. His response was to hire three hundred Pinkerton detectives with Winchester rifles. On July 6, the Pinkertons arrived by barge, but because the strikers had been warned, they came prepared to meet force with force. The bloody confrontation of a private security force against working Americans ended with the loss of seven workers and three Pinkertons. Frick defeated the workers, and the union was broken.

For More, this might have seemed an inevitable clash. He suggests that private ownership and concentrated power over workers are a recipe for unrest, and that commonwealths in his day that appear to flourish are ‘common-wealth’ in name alone. “When I consider and turn over in my mind the state of all commonwealths flourishing today, so help me God, I can see nothing else than a conspiracy of the rich, who are advancing their own interests under the name and title of the commonwealth.”2

The museum, of course, says nothing about Utopia’s powerful views on private property. The audio guide notes More’s eventual sainthood and how he was beheaded by Henry VIII for refusing to acknowledge the King’s supremacy over the church. But it does not mention Utopia. It does not acknowledge that More envisioned a society where everything Frick stood for would be abolished.

Frick proudly displayed his acquisition, but did he see it as a commodity, a masterwork for a collection without recognizing the ideology that such a figure stood for? Or was the purchase of the portrait a kind of victory over the ideology of shared resources and redistribution in Utopia? The private display of such art, particularly by titans of industry, reflects a desire to own great works; such a display of power and exclusivity is matched only by the royalty that Holbein often served. And the painting hangs there not because the museum endorses More or publicizes his humanism, but because Holbein is a master, a draw for the many travelers to marvel at, essentially glossing over everything he stood for.

Such a gloss, where aesthetic sparkle can obfuscate deeper meanings, appeared again when I returned home and came across Ezra Klein’s New York Times column comparing Donald Trump’s governing style to the anarchist idea of the “propaganda of the deed.” Klein argued that the Trump administration operates through spectacular acts like mass deportations and problematic military incursions rather than through the rule of law and public bureaucratic processes. Apparently, he muses, spectacle is a propaganda of the deed. To illustrate this thought, Klein reached for a historical parallel, but I think he reached for style over substance. The anarchists of the late 19th century did believe, but only for a short time, that an act of violence could galvanize the working class. But this was not intended as spectacle, but rather as a reaction to oppression and a flawed but sincere form of solidarity.

Klein’s analogy may seem seductive, but it is wrong. Not because Trump doesn’t govern with the use of spectacle from power, but because Klein uses an anarchist idea the way that Frick uses More’s portrait: stripped of its political content and depth and reduced to an aesthetic device.

The anarchist use of attentat or the propaganda of the deed was a specific tactical response to a set of conditions: a state that used violence to protect capital, and workers who had no other means of resistance. Emma Goldman, Johann Most, and Alexander Berkman, great anarchists of turn-of-the-century New York, didn’t advocate a kind of theater – they fought for solidarity.

On July 23, 1892, just a few weeks after the Homestead massacre, Alexander Berkman walked into Frick’s Pittsburgh office with a revolver. He shot Frick and stabbed him. Astonishingly, Frick survived. Berkman was arrested, tried, and sentenced to twenty-two years in prison, where he wrote Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist (1912), which includes not only a critique of the American penal system but Berkman’s maturing thoughts on the use of violence and his turn away from the propaganda of the deed.

Berkman’s assassination attempt was not random violence and certainly not mere spectacle. It was a response to Homestead. The attentat was intended to challenge men like Frick directly, who otherwise would appear above the law and beyond reproach.

The assassination attempt failed. It failed tactically and strategically: Frick survived and was stronger than ever, and the anarchist movement lost credibility and momentum. The American labor movement did not rally to Berkman’s cause, and public opinion soured on anarchist views. Within a few years, anarchists including Berkman himself not only reconsidered the propaganda of the deed, but also continued to develop new ideas for effective labor organizing, education, and collective action. Attentat was never a fully mature idea, let alone a sustained view for Berkman.

This is what Klein’s analogy gets wrong. To compare this to Trump’s theatrics, his extrajudicial cruelty performed for ego and applause is not just historically inaccurate, it is appropriation. Klein takes the language of a solidarity movement, even a flawed one, that fought for basic worker rights and repurposes it to explain authoritarian state power, and in doing so, the propaganda of the deed becomes like a portrait stripped of the content of its subject.

Perhaps it is easier to have our political and philosophical thinkers dead, framed, gilded, and on display, particularly if they held ideas that might challenge the status quo arrangements of power and labor. But More, Goldman, and Berkman didn’t risk their lives so we could admire them as mere figures, or flatter our own virtue by placing their books on our shelves without reading them. If, as a society, we agree that one should read political and philosophical works, in this case the humanists and the anarchists (both of whom argue for a form of human dignity and equality), we ought to engage with them over and above a commodity fetish like hanging great works in private mansions or libraries. If we must be collectors, let us be collectors of ideas, and let us share them until such time as More and Berkman are seen as visionary rather than radical.

Darren Gardner is a woodworker in Brooklyn, NY, and holds a PhD in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research.