Fifteen years ago, Rebecca D. Costa challenged us all to address the danger we were facing. In her book, The Watchman’s Rattle: A Radical New Theory of Collapse, published in 2010, she said,
“Today, the issues that threaten human existence are clear: an intractable global recession, powerful pandemic viruses, terrorism, rising crime, climate change, rapid depletion of the earth’s resources, nuclear proliferation, failing education.”
Her mentor, the eminent biologist and naturalist Edward O. Wilson, who wrote the foreword to her book summed up our predicament this way:
“We have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and God-like technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
The problems have gotten even more critical since then. Fortunately, Costa offered practical solutions and other experts have offered ideas about what we can do now.
When I was an undergraduate at U.C. Santa Barbara I had the good fortune to experience a class with the great philosopher Paul Tillich. His words have guided my life’s work ever since:
“Every serious thinker must ask and answer three fundamental questions:
What is wrong with us? With men? Women? Society? What is the nature of our alienation? Our dis-ease?
What would we be like if we were whole? Healed? Actualized? If our potentiality was fulfilled?
How do we move from our condition of brokenness to wholeness? What are the means of healing?”
To heal our brokenness and find our way to more vibrant, long-lasting, and satisfying relationships, we need to understand our history and where we got off track.
For most of human history humans recognized that we were fellow beings in the community of life on planet Earth. We were partners, not dominators. In their book Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future, Riane Eisler and Douglas P. Fry, report research demonstrating that
“for more than 99 percent of the approximately two million years since the emergence of a recognizable human animal, man has been a hunter and gatherer.” Eisler and Fry call their way of life, “The original partnership societies.”
As Riane Eisler says in her book, The Chalice & The Blade: Our History, Our Future,
“Underlying the great surface diversity of human culture are two basic models of society. The first, which I call the dominator model, is what is popularly termed either patriarchy or matriarchy—the ranking of one half of humanity over the other. The second, in which social relations are primarily based on the principle of linking, may best be described as the partnership model.”
When did domination systems come into being? Some say it began 10,000 years ago with the advent of agriculture. More recent research by environmental scientist Dr. James DeMeo and reported in his book, Saharasia: The 4000 BCE Origins of Child Abuse, Sex-Repression, Warfare and Social Violence in the Deserts of the Old World, says that it occurred around 6,000 years ago and was caused by a severe climate crisis that lasted for generations. Philosopher and psychologist Sam Keen, author of Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man, describes our situation this way:
“The simple truth, which we have conspired to forget during the last century, is that the human species is an integral part of an incomprehensible unity of being in the process of becoming: a single organ in the body of Gaia.”
Keen goes on to say:
“The radical vision of the future rests on the belief that the logic that determines either our survival or our destruction is simple:
We can only know what we touch.”
The new human vocation is to heal the earth.
We can only heal what we love.
We can only love what we know.
Clearly Keen is referring to our relationships. If humans fail to adapt, life on Earth will go on without us. It is our relationships that must change. There is good news and bad news. The good news is that we have a long history, more than 2,000,000 years, of sustainable partnership practices that can guide us.
The bad news is that many people still refuse to wake up and accept the truth. For those who can handle and embrace the present challenge, this is your time to step up and take action. It’s time for us to get back in touch with who we truly are. It’s time we woke up from the destructive disconnection from the earth, ourselves, and each other, and return to our partnership roots.
As historian Thomas Berry warned:
“We never knew enough. Nor were we sufficiently intimate with all our cousins in the great family of the earth. Nor could we listen to the various creatures of the earth, each telling their own story.The time has now come, however, when we will listen or we will die.”
The Sinking of the Ship of Civilization: What I Learned From The Vision I Was Given in 1993
In 1993, I attended a Men’s Leaders’ Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana. One of the activities offered was a traditional Native-American sweat lodge ceremony where we had the opportunity ask for guidance and support for ourselves and our communities. I had a vision where I saw the Sinking Ship of Civilization as well as Lifeboats for the Sustainable Future. I have written about the vision and what I’ve learned in numerous articles. Here is the most recent.
I continue to learn and get a better understanding of what we can do including the following:
Give “Civilization” its proper name.
As long as we accept the belief that “civilization” is the pinnacle of human achievement we will never take action that can save us. In 1999 world-renowned scientist Dr. Jared Diamond wrote an article, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” in which he said that the advent of agriculture, the first step toward civilization, “may have been our greatest blunder.”
A more accurate name for this stage of humanity, which we have been living during one-half of one-percent of human history would better be named the “dominator model” as described by Riane Eisler.
There is a better way of life beyond “civilization.”
In 1992, I was given the book Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. It offered a clear vision of the two worlds that are competing for our attention: A world where hierarchy and dominance rule (Quinn calls it the world of the Takers) and a world where equality and connection rule (Quinn calls it the world of the Leavers. In his book, Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure, published in 1999, Quinn says,
“Beyond civilization isn’t a geographical space up in the mountains or on some remote isle. It’s a cultural space that opens up among people with new minds.”
Changing our minds is not easy, but there are guides that can help us.
Dr. Eric Maisel is a long-term friend and colleague. He is an internationally respected diplomat coach who specializes in creativity coaching, existential wellness coaching, and relationship coaching. He is the author of more than fifty books including Brave New Mind: The Art of Serene Readiness. Maisel begins by telling us why a brave new mind is absolutely crucial today:
“We’ve all been rushing about with no chance of catching up. We desperately need a brave new mind that can take into account our brave new world, a world at once strange and inhuman, awash with material good and loneliness, orchestrated by feckless billionaires more powerful than governments, where our conversations are with AI chat boxes and our thinking is reduced to refining the questions that we ask AI.”
“There’s a newly discovered, but little known, secret to your brain that is robbing you of y our freedom and power to live the life you long for. It is also causing you to lose your motivation to do what you know is best for you or others, leaving you stuck.”
She goes on to say, “What is this secret? The habenula, an area of the brain that has two superpowers over your behavior. First, it acts as a failure detector anytime you think you failed, even in some tiny way, even subconsciously without your knowing. Second, and more impactful, it is a kill switch for your motivation. This means that whenever you think you have failed at something, you will suddenly find yourself unmotivated to keep going.”
What I learned from my sweat-lodge vision is that most people will remain in denial and go down with the ship. We can’t change people until they are ready to change. No one articulates this wisdom better than Mel Robbins in her podcasts and #1 New York Times bestselling book, The Let Them Theory. She says,
“If you’re struggling to change your life, achieve your goals, or feel happier, I want you to hear this: The problem isn’t you. The problem is the power you unknowingly give to other people.”
There is no one who has offered greater guidance for a return to our partnership roots than Dr. Harville Hendrix and his wife Dr. Helen LaKelly Hunt. They are internationally respected couple’s therapists, speakers, and New York Times bestselling authors. Together, they have written twelve books with more than four million copies sold, including the timeless classic, Getting the Love You Want, which was on the NYTimes best seller list eleven times. The book caught the attention of Oprah Winfrey and they were guests on her show 17 times over a twenty-year period.
In their most recent book, How to Talk with Anyone About Anything: The Practice of Safe Conversations, Harville and Helen describe their audacious global social movement to shift from an individualistic civilization that embodies values like competition, control, domination and winning to a relational civilization that embodies the values of personal freedom, total equality, radical inclusiveness and celebration of diversity.
They propose that the engine of this transformation in civilization is to shift from monological talking that leads to tension, conflict, violence and war to dialogical conversations where people experience safety and connecting. In a relational civilization, the process of social interaction are collaboration, co-creation and cooperation that leads to connecting beyond difference.
Such social cohesion and cooperation transform conflict into safety and facilitates and sustains local and global peace. They estimate that by 2050, the world will contain 9.8 billion people. By then, if they can train the tipping point, which is 30% or 2.4 billion people, in dialogue, the entire world will change the way they relate and replace conflict with peace everywhere. Come join the movement.
I would like to hear from you. My articles appear every week on my website, www.MenAlive.com. Drop me a note at Jed@MenAlive.com.
Best Wishes,
Jed Diamond
Founder and VHS (Visionary Healer Scholar) of MenAlive
Julie Fogliano and Marla Frazee’s “Because of a Shoe” and Beatrice Alemagna’s “Her Muddy Majesty of Muck” address children’s anger with compassion.
From “Her Muddy Majesty of Muck.”Credit…Beatrice Alemagna
By Joshua David Stein
Joshua David Stein’s latest picture book is “Make New Friends,” illustrated by Mariachiara Di Giorgio.
Feb. 20, 2026 (NYTimes.com)
When I was 9, my divorcing parents sent me to a psychologist for a battery of tests. When I was 30, my mother, for reasons known only to her, sent me the report, a dozen pages of yellowed single-spaced type. One line jumped out at me: “While Josh’s anger may be the primary affective expression, it is a blanket for the pain.” I framed that page when I got it and it now hangs on my wall, for it was true then and it is true now.
If only I had had books like Julie Fogliano’s BECAUSE OF A SHOE (Knopf, 40 pp., $19.99, ages 2 to 5), illustrated by Marla Frazee, and Beatrice Alemagna’s HER MUDDY MAJESTY OF MUCK (Hippo Park, 56 pp., $19.99, ages 5 to 8), I might have thrown off my rage blanket sooner.
Bookstore shelves groan with “social and emotional learning” books, bought by anxious (loving) parents for their anxious (loved) children. But too often there’s a stink of fixing, an air of pedantry, to those pages. Few books in that genre treat both their subject and their readers with as much respect as Fogliano’s and Alemagna’s do. These aren’t didactic works. They are art, with soul-stirring depth and resonance.
From “Because of a Shoe.”Credit…Marla Frazee
Fogliano’s is more straightforward. It concerns a shoe. More specifically, the putting on of a shoe. More specifically, some very big feelings about the putting on of said shoe. The shoe itself, a red low top with Velcro fasteners, is harmless, but it’s the catalyst for a fierce power struggle between a mother and her young child.
On the very first spread, a red-haired child tears across the right-hand page, fleeing an unknown pursuer while clutching a pink stuffed bunny by its leg. The text reads, “even when …”
Fogliano is a champion of this type of elliptical, suspense-building opener. Her 2013 book, “If You Want to See a Whale,” uses the “if …” construction to languorously elongate whale-watching’s inherent waiting time.
From “Because of a Shoe.”Credit…Marla Frazee
In “Because of a Shoe,” she coils one very long sentence in tight loops: “even when … because of a shoe (a too-tight shoe a too-loose shoe) you are screaming and you don’t want to be screaming but you just can’t stop screaming. …” The words tumble on as the child’s (and the mother’s) anger increases.
Anyone who has flipped their lid — that is, all of us — knows the feeling: a certain claustrophobia that sets in as the world splits into good and bad, us and them. Here both the mother and her child are refreshingly and realistically dysregulated. As the tantrum increases in potency, Frazee’s illustrations do too. At the apex/nadir of the tantrum, they are literally black-and-white, like dichotomous thought.
Of course, Fogliano doesn’t abandon us in the eighth circle of toddler hell. “Even when” becomes “even then,” a resolution as cathartic as that of Beethoven’s Ninth or Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”: “even then you are still you (funny sweet you) and i am still me (funny sweet me) and we are not a shoe.” The tantrum abates, color returns, the shoe is put on — and then, quickly and because this isn’t about rightness and wrongness, thrown off again.
From “Because of a Shoe.”Credit…Marla Frazee
The road from rupture to repair in Alemagna’s book is more fantastical, and yet it maintains its emotional verisimilitude. “Her Muddy Majesty of Muck,” originally published in Italian, follows its young narrator, Yuki, into a subterranean world presided over by a massive warm-brown blob of a mud princess. Cast there by the internalized critiques seeded by her older brother, Shen — “When I’m angry, I scream/and stomp on the ground./Sometimes I cry. That’s why/Shen doesn’t like me” — Yuki finds Her Majesty, rage personified, to be charming and polite, if a little menacing.
Her Majesty guides Yuki through a Dantean geography of woe. She walks her through the Wicked Woods and introduces her to a cadre of smelly little creatures called the Boogers who “love making people feel terrible.” They jump into the self-extinguishing Lake Youbegone, sort through the cluttered Museum of Cast-Away Things and visit the Grumporium, a pantry stocked with “edible anger in powders and liquids,” including “freshly squeezed juice from an argument.” Remarkably, the tour isn’t gloomy at all.
Alemagna is one of the greats, up there with Tomi Ungerer, Maurice Sendak and Leo Lionni. She belongs to the distinctly European children’s book tradition of unease and irresolution. It’s easy and neat to say anger is bad or best avoided. But what is that but a second arrow thrust into someone already suffering?
From “Her Muddy Majesty of Muck.”Credit…Beatrice Alemagna
Alemagna suggests we address our anger with compassion. Her Majesty isn’t demonic or even that unpleasant. She is muddy, yes, but we’ve been bathing in mud for eons. The woods are lovely. The Boogers are cute. The sea bunnies in Lake Youbegone are totes adorbs.
Just before Yuki ascends back into real life, she assures Her Royal Muddiness that she’ll return: “‘I’m not leaving forever,’ I say, and hug her. ‘I’ll come back to play, I promise. We’ll make mud pies.’”
Children know, after all, that anger can be, among other things, a comfort, a cozy blanket indeed.
A version of this article appears in print on Feb. 22, 2026, Page 14 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Anatomy of a Meltdown. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
The contrast between Turnbull’s two books is one of the most dramatic in anthropology.
The Forest People
About the Mbuti (BaMbuti) of the Ituri Forest in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Turnbull portrays them as:
Cooperative and egalitarian
Deeply bonded through music and ritual
Emotionally expressive and playful
Living in close spiritual harmony with the forest
The “forest” is almost a sacred presence in the book. He presents Mbuti society as morally cohesive and resilient.
⛰️ The Mountain People
About the Ik of northeastern Uganda.
He portrays them as:
Fragmented and distrustful
Harshly individualistic
Socially and morally “collapsed” under famine
Where the forest book feels warm and lyrical, the mountain book feels bleak and accusatory.
Why the difference?
Scholars suggest several possibilities:
Environmental collapse The Ik had been displaced from hunting lands and were starving. Extreme scarcity can produce radically different social behavior.
Turnbull’s own psychology Some argue his emotional state and expectations shaped what he saw. He admired communal harmony and may have reacted strongly to its absence.
Romanticism vs. disillusionment The Forest People reads almost idealized; The Mountain People reads almost dystopian.
Anthropology in transition These books sit at a moment when anthropology was shifting from romantic cultural portraits toward more critical, reflexive methods.
Many teachers use these two works together to ask a deep question:
Are human beings naturally cooperative, or does social structure collapse under extreme stress?
Gregg Braden Explained Mar 2, 2026 2025 – 2026: The End of One World, and the Beginning of Another | Gregg Braden Explained Explore the remarkable shifts unfolding in 2025–2026 and how they relate to human consciousness, belief, and emotional intelligence. In this educational deep dive inspired by the ideas often discussed by Gregg Braden, we examine how your thoughts, emotions, and beliefs are not just internal—they actively shape your biology, perception, and the reality you experience every day. This video connects ancient wisdom with modern science, revealing how heart–brain coherence, mind–body alignment, and intentional emotional regulation can help you navigate periods of uncertainty and transformation. Learn practical strategies to remain grounded, resilient, and coherent while participating in the collective shift of consciousness. Whether you are interested in spirituality, personal growth, human potential, or quantum consciousness, this video provides actionable insights that you can apply in your daily life. ✨ What you’ll learn in this video: ✅ How your beliefs and emotions shape your biology and perception of reality ✅ The mind–body connection and the influence of emotional states on the nervous system ✅ Heart–brain coherence and simple exercises to stabilize your emotional state ✅ Practical ways to cultivate internal alignment during times of global and personal change ✅ Identity-based transformation to navigate uncertainty with clarity and presence ✅ Daily practices to train your nervous system and strengthen resilience ✅ How ancient wisdom aligns with modern neuroscience in understanding human potential
Timestamps:
00:00 – 40:00 Main Discussion, 41:00 – 47:00 Deep Dive & Summary This video is perfect for viewers curious about consciousness research, human evolution, emotional mastery, manifestation, and personal transformation. Watch until the end to discover how consistent, small internal shifts can reshape your life, influence your external reality, and help you step confidently into the emerging world of 2025–2026. ???? Subscribe for more educational insights on consciousness, human potential, and the science of personal transformation. ???? Like, comment, and share if you found this valuable. Disclaimer: This is a fan-made educational channel. All content is inspired by Gregg Braden’s ideas but is fully original and not affiliated with or endorsed by him. The narration is for educational purposes only. This video is intended for personal growth and informational purposes and is not medical, legal, or professional advice.
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Benedict Vigers and Julie Ray, Senior Global New Writer | Man aging Editor for World News – The Gallup Organization
Stephan: Here is what I think is very good news. I consider gender equality to be one of the key signs ot cultural awakening. Once you understand that there is continuity of consciousness, and that science tells us that the Eternal Self, what religions call the soul or spirit, episodically manifests and incarnates a personality, that’s you and me, and that incarnation by choice of the Eternal Self can be of either gender, any race, geographic location, socio-economic status, or religion. Our Eternal Self has no gender, and when a society recognizes gender equality, it is a sign of cultural awakening. The glaring misogyny and White supremacy of Trump and his administration are signs that these are people who have no interest in fostering social wellbeing.
LONDON, U.K. — Globally, views on how women are treated are more positive today than they have been at most points in the past decade, particularly compared with the lows recorded during the pandemic. While major gaps between women and men persist, perceptions have improved for both.
In 2025, a median of 72% of all adults across 140 countries said women in their country are treated with respect and dignity, marking a nine-percentage-point increase from 63% in 2022, which was the lowest level since Gallup began tracking this measure consistently in 2015.
Overall, perceptions of how women are treated slipped in the years leading up to 2022 and have risen since then. Women’s views trended downward after the rise to prominence of the #MeToo movement and through the pandemic period, while men’s views were relatively steady but dropped in 2022. Since then, perceptions among both men and women have risen, closely tracking each other.
Between 2022 and 2025, 24 countries recorded increases of at least 10 points in the view […]
Nature lives in constant competition. In an ongoing bid for survival, each plant strives to encroach upon any available tract of land, capture any available drop of water, and reach up to any available ray of sunlight. This indiscriminate growth and expansion is the only way to avoid extinction. The more branches a plant grows, the more flowers each branch may yield; the more flowers, the more fruit; the more fruit the more seeds; and the more seeds, the higher the likelihood that enough will propagate a new generation. Quantity is given precedence over quality, resulting in huge levels of waste. Each species scatters countless seeds in the hope that a few will survive and germinate.
Farming introduces a different intention to nature. A farmer can propagate plants reliably without concern for extinction. His more immediate priority is quality. By scaling back the indiscriminate growth of his vines in spring, he redirects the energy they would normally spend on branches and invigorates their fruits.
As part of nature, our functions also operate quite differently left to their own means or when governed by a specific need. Harnessed to a need, they function efficiently: our moving function initiates the precise sequence of actions to get us from one place to another; our thinking function considers and compares different abstract points of view to problem-solve; our emotional function reads our neighbor’s facial expressions and posture to assess their mood. In the absence of a need, however, our functions do not stop; they continue functioning with the same unchecked momentum of nature, and at the same cost of waste. We fidget, not because we need to move, but to eliminate excess energy. We daydream, not because we need to think, but to eliminate energy. We worry, not because something real is at stake, but to eliminate excess energy.
This indiscriminate functioning must now become the object of our observation. A good place to start is during the first hour of our morning. After a night’s rest, our organism wakes up at a higher energetic level. Retaining energy is always more difficult than eliminating it, so at the beginning of our day our functions will be particularly inclined to slip into various momentums. Our challenge here is not only to observe these energy leaks, but also to find ways to remember to observe them. This means that we need to arrange reminders beforehand. If successful, we will witness our moving function persuading us that we are short of time and must hurry, our thinking function bringing to mind a host of topics for daydreaming and our emotional function recalling unresolved concerns. We will observe how these momentums appear on their own and keep wasting our energy, even if we try to interrupt them. Unless we affirm and reaffirm our aim to resist them, they encroach on our inner landscape and overtake it.
Here our farming lays the ground for answering the question, ‘Who am I?’—or at least, ‘Who am I not?’ Before we began to observe ourselves methodically, we took these psychological dynamics at face value and freely called them ‘I’. “I’m late…” “I fancy…” “I fear…” Now, we realize that haste, daydreaming, and anxiety are states in search of objects. Their causes are not outside but within us. Through self-observation, we have begun to see the mechanism by which our false personality—our false ‘I’—establishes itself. When we had no aim to farm ourselves, these identity thefts and energy leaks were inconsequential. But with an aim to weaken personality and uncover essence, we are forced to bring a critical attitude to these indiscriminate manifestations and consider how to minimize them.
This is our third labor.
About the Founder
Asaf Braverman is the founder of the Old New Method, a worldwide community of people dedicated to self-development.
New docs say Jeffrey Epstein collaborated with the Russian mob to loot the New York Daily News, then tried to help Mort Zuckerman discard it when reporting became inconvenient.
New York subway riders read the latest word on the fate of the Daily News, December 6, 1991, following the death of owner Robert Maxwell. Credit: Norman Y. Lono/AP Photo
Almost nobody noticed earlier this month when the New York Daily Newsannounced what felt like a 500th round of layoffs. Not long ago, the venerable working-class tabloid behind “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD” would have been the ideal outlet for demystifying the prodigious evils of the Uptown Epstein network for outer-borough New Yorkers who elected Zohran Mamdani. But the latest iteration of “New York’s Hometown Newspaper” has all of four reporters covering national news.
The “adults in the room” always say a conspiracy theory becomes less plausible for every individual and institution it implicates. But the Epstein network is so vast and so varied it would suggest that the conspiracy is the system, if we had any institutions capable of making sense of it. TheNew York Times is too prissy, too compromised by social standing to reliably narrate the scope of the thing without shifting reflexively into contrarian debunk mode; podcasts and social media are too ephemeral to grasp the magnitude of anything. The organization most ideally suited to the task, Obama-era Gawker, was run out of business by an eight-figure litigation revenge plot masterminded by Peter Thiel, which Jeffrey Epstein generously offered to help bankroll.
Somewhat incredibly, a document in the January 30 Epstein file dump suggests that the New York Daily News was one of these institutions—integral to the Epstein network while grasping to make sense of its tentacles—and that Epstein personally might have played a critical role in exacerbating its wrenching demise.
OUR STORY BEGINS IN 1989, when the Tribune Company, the newspaper conglomerate that had acquired the Daily News in the 1960s, decided to bust its New York unions once and for all. The company hired McKinsey to project that the paper would lose more than $55 million in 1990 alone if no cuts were made, and a Nashville law firm that specialized in busting newspaper unions and advised the company to fly in scabs from Florida and Virginia to put out the paper during the inevitable strike. A Vanity Fair profile depicted publisher Jim Hoge as a courageous figure willing to speak austerity to labor as he had once spoken truth to power.
The paper ended up losing more than $300 million on the strike, including $60 million in cash. Tribune Co. ultimately paid Robert Maxwell, the rotund Czechoslovakia-born mogul who owned London’s Daily Mirror and the book publisher Macmillan, to take the newspaper off its hands. The newsroom was elated. “It was a really, really ugly strike,” remembers LynNell Hancock, a Columbia University journalism professor and former Daily News education reporter whose husband covered sports for the newspaper at the time. “They brought in scabs from the South to put it out, and they were giving it to homeless people in the subways … the poor homeless people were trying to sell the Daily News to make some money.”
Hancock was at The Village Voice at the time while raising two kids in the Bronx. “It was just a very scary time,” she said. “Most people on strike didn’t think their jobs were coming back. Then in comes this great savior, Robert Maxwell, with his bowtie and his big jolly belly, and there wasn’t any serious time to do the kind of digging that needed to be done in order to expose what he was actually doing. We all just wanted to believe it was real.”
By 1992, Zuckerman had painstakingly built a personal brand around being a kind of thinking man’s Donald Trump.
But eight months after buying the paper, Maxwell was dead, the result of something that happened on the 190-foot yacht Lady Ghislaine he’d just purchased from the nephew of Adnan Khashoggi and taken on a suspiciously timed solo trip to the Canary Islands in early November. Two experts consulted by Paris Match said photographs of the corpse Spanish authorities found floating in the Atlantic suggested he’d been “struck by a violent blow to the back of the skull” or perhaps a “blow to the face leading to a fall and a loss of consciousness.” Maxwell’s youngest daughter Ghislaine, the infamous convicted procurer and groomer of hundreds of Epstein victims (after whom the yacht had been named), brought a Mirror reporter along to retrieve the body and load it onto a plane to Jerusalem, where Maxwell was buried and eulogized at a funeral by both the prime minister and president of the country he had served as an intelligence asset before it even existed.
Just before Ghislaine and her entourage departed the islands, however, the reporter was dispatched to find the grieving daughter and finally located her “in the main lounge of the yacht grabbing pieces of paper and ordering the crew to shred all documents laying around.” Within days, it would emerge that $1.4 billion had gone “missing” from the coffers of the Mirror. What exactly became of all the money is one of the oldest enduring sub-mysteries of the Epstein scandal. The insolvent mogul had clearly bought the Daily News in some kind of time-buying scheme, as bankruptcy judge Tina Brozman observed, so that “the Maxwell newspapers could function as a money-laundering device through which Robert and his confederates could siphon funds to and from” entities he controlled in “a great circular ride.” But where had they socked away the siphoned funds?
A British former telecom executive and apparent intelligence agent named James Hatt approached the Justice Department in 2020 and said that he might have a clue. As it turns out, between the late 1980s and the late 1990s, Hatt regularly socialized with Epstein, Ghislaine, and Ghislaine’s older brother Kevin Maxwell. Hatt had been given a job at the British telecom giant Cable & Wireless PLC and instructed, he says, to “give the UK ideas on how the USSR operated.” At some point, he started work on a project that involved privatizing a Soviet telecom operator on ostensible behalf of the Soviet Union, a task that introduced him to a Canadian Alcatel executive named John William Manconi, who had an impressive seven phone numbers listed under his name in Epstein’s black book and who introduced Hatt to the Maxwell siblings in London.
It’s important to note here that Kevin Maxwell’s approval ratings in early-’90s London were something akin to Bernie Madoff’s in the 2010 Hamptons. Kevin had not only been the most trusted lieutenant to his father during the period he’d siphoned hundreds of millions of dollars from the pension funds of printing press workers, he had authorized numerous transactions out of Mirror coffers and loans to family slush funds secured by the publishing company’s assets after his father’s November 5, 1991, death. Between 1992 and his surprise 1996 acquittal, he lived in constant fear of bugged phones and hidden paparazzi. “UK authorities believed that ROBERT MAXWELL and KEVIN had hidden a great deal of money somewhere in the world (possibly Bulgaria, Russia or satellite states),” the federal prosecutors’ memo on their interview of Hatt states. But had they?
The memo reads almost as if Hatt’s interviewer did not think to ask this question, but Hatt, who did not respond to messages left with his then-attorney or a phone number registered in his name, told prosecutors that Robert Maxwell had instructed his son to approach Epstein about safeguarding the funds the family was extracting from its publishing empire. Then, in the “months after Robert Maxwell’s death,” according to an accompanying summary of the interview, the family “had no bank accounts and no access to money. KEVIN and IAN MAXWELL were declared bankrupt … All kinds of freezing orders. Had to find ways to get money EPSTEIN had held … Had to oversee it be managed and distribute to family members.” Kevin deepened the family’s relationship with Epstein when he “negotiated some kind of understanding with [Epstein] and [Ghislaine] in which [Epstein] would become involved in the Maxwell financial businesses.”
And so, Hatt explained to investigators, Ghislaine and Kevin went to work for Epstein, and the cash provided her (and presumably, the other Maxwells) came primarily from a certain supposedly money-hemorrhaging tabloid. “So much money with EPSTEIN came from the New York Daily News,” the memo reads.
BY THAT POINT, THE DAILY NEWS had ostensibly been acquired in a heavily scrutinized transaction out of bankruptcy court by Mort Zuckerman, a Canadian real estate developer and retired Sunday talk show pundit perhaps best known at that time for having recently dated Gloria Steinem. Given the legal and media scrutiny that accompanied the Maxwell collapse and the depth of the financial hole in its balance sheet, it’s a bit astonishing to imagine that Epstein found a way to turn the newspaper into an illicit cash spigot to support the extravagant lifestyles of Ghislaine and her eight siblings. But in a message to Epstein in his 50th birthday book a decade later, Zuckerman seems to hint at just such a scenario, joking that he had searched the Daily News archives for dirt on his mysterious friend and learned that he had actually been born in Liechtenstein, the tiny European country with notoriously opaque banking laws that had hosted the international headquarters of Maxwell Group Ltd. and most of its hundreds of subsidiaries and shell companies.
Zuckerman had bid against Robert Maxwell to acquire the paper in 1991 and even been photographed with him at a black-tie event around the same time; he won the second auction despite a superior bid from future convict Conrad Black and an embarrassing lawsuit involving his flat-out refusal to pay $2.8 million out of an agreed-upon $3.5 million purchase price for The Atlantic Monthly magazine in 1980. (Zuckerman claimed the magazine’s owners had not been up front about its financial precarity; a jury determined otherwise and forced him to pay.)
Media magnate Robert Maxwell on May 11, 1990, with the first edition of The European, launched in London. Credit: Press Association via AP
By 1992, Zuckerman had painstakingly built a personal brand around being a kind of thinking man’s Donald Trump. Born in Montreal to Ukrainian-born owners of a candy and tobacco wholesaler, he spent his first two decades south of the border in Boston with a brief detour in Philadelphia to get a Wharton MBA. He went to Harvard Law, got a job developing suburban industrial and office parks with a prestigious firm, taught urban planning classes at Harvard, filled a Beacon Hill mansion with status paintings and a Chinese houseman, and bought The Atlantic Monthly and the building that housed it in 1980. When he moved south in 1984 to build glitzy skyscrapers and bid against Trump for a project to redevelop Columbus Circle, he dated the aforementioned Steinem (and judged the Miss America pageant after they broke up) and quickly became a ubiquitous presence on political talk shows.
It’s not known how Zuckerman initially met Epstein, but Steinem could have connected them: Prior to Zuckerman, she dated J. Stanley Pottinger, the Republican fixer-turned-novelist who went into business with Epstein selling tax shelters to wealthy clients shortly after the latter was fired from Bear Stearns in 1981.
Though it is on one hand outrageous to imagine that the Maxwell family continued to loot the Daily News while hundreds of attorneys and forensic accountants were ostensibly scouring the globe for the missing $1.4 billion, it might also shed light on how Zuckerman was able to snag the newspaper despite a substantially lower and hazier offer than that of the conservative media baron Black, who ran more than 100 newspapers at the time. Throughout the summer of 1992, Black was portrayed in the bankruptcy’s extensive media coverage as the almost certain new owner of the newspaper. But the purchase kept getting stymied by the newspaper’s blue-collar labor unions, specifically the Newspaper and Mail Deliverers Union, whose president Doug LaChance (who had served 55 months in federal prison on extortion and racketeering charges in the early 1980s and served more time for failing a drug test later that year) was a reported no-show to three straight scheduled meetings with Black, according to a July dispatch in the Montreal Gazette. (So deep were the union’s organized-crime ties that the Manhattan district attorney would indict the union in pursuit of a virtually unprecedented federal takeover of the NMDU that November, though the union fought the case and maintained its autonomy.)
Zuckerman promptly broke most of the promises and assurances he’d made to the unions. One afternoon after deadline, the staff was called to the front of the newsroom and told they would find envelopes in the basement that would contain either applications to reapply for their jobs or termination notices; the latter group was instructed to leave the premises immediately. As Hancock remembers, columnist Juan González stood up on a desk and called the newsroom over. “Hold up, folks, we’re not going to the basement. Who wants to spend the night in the office?” It wasn’t a plan, per se, but an expression of the solidarity the strike had engendered among the newsroom staff. “We would sneak people down to collect the envelopes, and I was the one who was basically tasked with taking the death list,” Hancock says. “People were coming to me in tears, and by the end of the evening it was 175 people who were axed, and these were our friends, and we were managing phone calls to other newspapers, and then they cut off our phones … it was very traumatic. I didn’t really want to work there anymore, but there was a sense then that we could still fight this.”
Meanwhile and perhaps completely by coincidence, the New York Post was embroiled in an eerily similar crisis. Then-Gov. Mario Cuomo began looking for a “savior” for the Post and supposedly fixed his sights on Steven Hoffenberg, the owner of a predatory lender and debt collection firm that served as a front for a complex and multilayered Ponzi scheme/money-laundering operation whose right-hand man was none other than Jeffrey Epstein. The SEC had been investigating Hoffenberg’s operation for at least five years at that point, but accelerated its probe in response to the Post bid, while Zuckerman, much to the incredulity of the hundreds of reporters who’d been forced to reapply for their old jobs, began giddily poaching the Post’s top talent with $200,000 and $300,000 job offers in what Hoffenberg described as “a crazy kamikaze attack to kill off The Post”; he even sued Zuckerman and two defectors. Ultimately, Rupert Murdoch would return to the paper after winning a special waiver from the merger guidelines that had forced him to divest back in 1987, while Hoffenberg negotiated what he believed would be a wrist-slap from the agency in exchange for his assistance locating investors’ funds and helping the feds navigate the shocking financial underworld his conspirator Epstein inhabited.
The Hatt memoranda give enticing new details about the nature of Epstein’s milieu during this time, including a Georgia-born, Vienna-based Israeli billionaire named Grigory Loutchansky, whose company Nordex—co-founded with fugitive oil trader Marc Rich—served as something of an insurance policy for Hatt’s Latvian telecom business and many other business ventures of the era, and who hired Maxwell’s Bulgarian Africa affairs adviser Ognyan Doynov around the time of his death. Loutchansky was a figure of much awe and admiration among the Maxwells, whom Hatt describes acting as international “fixers” for the oligarch, procuring him a meeting with Bill Clinton in 1993, showing him around Wall Street, and procuring young sex partners for his business partners and a certain “General Ivanov.”
Hatt also gave an indication of how the sex trafficking business might have collided with newspapers, mentioning that the late Swedish media mogul Jan Stenbeck, who founded a company called Modern Times, Inc., that published free tabloids distributed outside subways, had privately admitted that it “had kept Russian girls” who had been sold into prostitution before his sudden death in 2002. The Prospect could find no evidence that the company, which merged its tabloid into amNY in 2020, had ever been accused of such a thing.
Loutchansky, who was believed to have arranged under-the-table Russian oil sales and other illicit commerce from Latvian ports dating back to the 1970s, was a central figure in a theory Western intelligence agencies hatched during the collapse of the Soviet Union that what seemed like an uncontrolled and anarchic descent into kleptocracy was actually the result of a deliberate strategy, in which the KGB “transferred abroad large sums from funds owned by the government and the Communist Party through private companies” for the purpose of “funding political activities” but also creating a global network of organized financial crime and espionage. This theory forms the structural foundation of both Russiagate and many Zionist conspiracy frameworks, because the “schemes were often handled by people [in] possession of networks of companies and contacts abroad, like Soviet citizens who, due to their ethnic or religious background, were allowed to leave the USSR in the 1970s”—almost invariably, Jews headed west by way of Israel, though a smattering of Armenians and Germans were also allowed to travel during that time. At that point, however, the great “conspiracy theory” of the Washington intelligence consensus was that Loutchansky and his ilk were trafficking nuclear materials to Iran. (Imagine if they had succeeded!)
What they were actually doing was setting the stage for a midsized global financial crisis in 1998, when a multibillion-dollar wire transfer from the IMF to Russia went somehow “missing” into a financial black hole with assistance from a rogue Bank of New York employee, and the Russian government was forced to devalue the ruble, which triggered a credit crunch exacerbated by the collapse of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management. The crisis led to a marked souring in relations between Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov and the Clinton administration, which put none other than Mort Zuckerman, who had recently launched a newspaper in Moscow with the investigative journalist Artyom Borovik, to operate as a back channel between Primakov and National Security Adviser Sandy Berger.
ALTHOUGH HIS DIPLOMATIC EFFORTS were ultimately fruitless once the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia commenced, Zuckerman has described this stint in top secret diplomacy as the most thrilling gig of a long and storied career. He was also richer than ever, having made $550 million selling Fast Company, a magazine his publishing team had developed with two former Harvard Business Review editors, in 2000. Sadly, in November 1999 his publishing empire lost Kimberly Jensen, the executive credited with masterminding Fast Company’s success, to a very strange death in an Ocean City, Maryland, motel room. Borovik died in a potentially suspicious plane crash four months later, and Zuckerman parted ways with his right-hand man Fred Drasner not long after that.
The death of Kimberly Jensen was one of the only discernible occasions on which anything ever seemed potentially amiss in the black box of Zuckerman’s privately held publishing empire. A housekeeper found her corpse with a plastic bag over her head 500 miles from her home in Vermont, two days after her husband reported her missing. She had attempted suicide just days earlier in Rhode Island after her bosses had accused her of siphoning company funds to cover expenses she had incurred in a side hustle running a fledgling indie rock label. But her husband Steve Fuchs told TheWall Street Journal that the accusations were overblown, and made in retaliation over some “problems” she had discovered in the way Zuckerman properties were being run. While he was hazy on the specifics, he distinctly remembered her saying she “could save them $22 million”—allegations that were echoed by her friends at the company, according to the New York Post’s original dispatch on the strange death. Weirdly, follow-up stories on Jensen, including an admiring 2,000-word Boston Globe feature published three weeks later, made no mention of the financial improprieties she’d supposedly found, and reached by phone, Fuchs denied he had made any such statements to the Journal, then asked if he could postpone the conversation; he later texted to suggest that the reporter had misinterpreted a story he had told about Jensen’s work on one of Zuckerman’s lawsuits in the 1980s.
Mort Zuckerman leaves a memorial ceremony for Walter Cronkite, September 9, 2009, in New York. Credit: Stephen Chernin/AP Photo
In 2004, Zuckerman decided to go into business with Epstein and launch a new glossy celebrity magazine called Radar, but Epstein’s attorney Darren Indyke internally suggested Zuckerman was using the magazine as a vehicle for collecting rent, utilizing underworked U.S. News staffers and possibly engaging in arbitrage with the magazine’s supply of unused paper. But the two men’s mutual trust appears to have deepened following Epstein’s 2006 arrest and subsequent yearlong semi-imprisonment. In May 2009, Epstein emailed to ask if 32 was too young for a “beautiful, multilingual” Italian architect with whom he wanted to set up his then 72-year-old buddy; “Sign me up asap,” came the reply. A few months later, Zuckerman learned Daily News staffer George Rush was writing an item on Epstein’s settlement with the victim now known as the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre, and stepped in to broker an “off the record” interview between his friend and the longtime gossip columnist, the former of whom spent the conversation predictably smearing his victims as drug addicts and gold diggers, demonstrating an “utter lack of remorse” and most strangely, claiming that the same offense in New York would have been punishable with a $200 fine, according to a private investigator hired by Giuffre’s attorney. Rush had published the item without fanfare, but was apparently sufficiently skeeved that he mentioned it to a handful of friends and even played portions of the recording for two of them.
Word of the recording dribbled out to victims’ attorneys, one of whom asked Epstein in a February 2010 deposition whether he was familiar with Rush; he claimed not to know who the attorney was talking about. The lawyers smelled perjury, and asked a judge to force Rush to hand over the recording or potentially face jail time for contempt. Epstein emailed Zuckerman with another idea: He was thinking about pressing charges against Rush for recording the interview without his consent, a perfectly legal act in most states that happens to be a felony in Florida, which Epstein, who directed his staff to install hidden video cameras throughout his Palm Beach estate, would have known as well as any journalist.
Rush retired that May after 30 years at the Daily News, by which point the whole enterprise of journalism had begun what seemed like an inexorable slide into terminal decline. When the MTA began outfitting underground stations to receive cellular service in 2011, it became virtually impossible to justify buying a paper or celebrity magazine on one’s commute to and from the office. Hundreds of newsstands shut down entirely. Former staffers say Zuckerman never invested in the project of converting the Daily News into something readers consumed on their phones, though neither did virtually any other newspapers other than The New York Times.
Conrad Black, who would also, surely by coincidence, be accused of using his clout to kill damaging stories on Epstein, had been indicted the year before Epstein’s arrest for looting $80 million out of the company that owned the Chicago Sun-Times. The one exception was Rupert Murdoch, who ran most of his media properties like a sprawling intelligence operation, in which hidden surveillance cameras captured Fox News employees’ every move, executives spied on competitors’ customer databases, and editors systematically hacked into the voicemails and emails of royals, politicians, celebrities, and anyone in the headlines. When the Post broke the story of Giuffre’s allegation that Epstein and Maxwell had trafficked her to Britain’s Prince Andrew, Epstein sent Zuckerman a cranky email complaining that Giuffre “is the exact same type as Strauss Kahns maid,” that the tabloid had hacked his phones, and that he needed his “advice” about “bringing a rico claim against murdoch and the post in NY” given that “I am not the most sympathetic figure however.”
But by then it was Zuckerman who needed Epstein’s advice. Around 2012, the billionaire was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, and he wanted to make sure his financial affairs were in order. He had sired a second daughter named Renee in 2008 with an anonymous mother believed to be a donor/surrogate combination; Epstein was in prison at the time, and the two did not appear to have discussed the details. Zuckerman also had two nephews working as executives in his publishing company whom he believed he could entrust to help, but Epstein offered to give his numbers a look, just in case.
THE YEAR OR SO THAT FOLLOWED in Zuckerman-Epstein correspondence is some of the most nuanced and psychologically illuminating stuff in the entire Epstein data dump. Epstein believed, or claimed to believe, that his mogul friend’s finances were a mess, that the JP Morgan private bankers he’d personally recommended were a bunch of rubes, that “significant sums” of Zuckerman’s $2 billion fortune were “in the wrong pockets,” and that it would cost Epstein “between 30 and 40 million dollars” and about 15 months to redesign Zuckerman’s various trusts, but that he could easily save him “literally hundreds of millions.” Epstein affectionately ribbed Zuckerman over his pathological cheapness: “The good news is that I can say with certainty that the cost of your personal dry cleaning has been accounted for perfectly, to the penny, and recorded properly.” But Zuckerman had woefully underbudgeted expenses associated with family members: “pay 15 million to settle not 3,” Epstein advised, regarding unspecified ambiguity in his settlement with his ex-wife.
He also advised Zuckerman to devote himself single-mindedly to preserving his health and sell everything he owned that was “illiquid,” starting with his art and helicopter and the Daily News, whose state of affairs was being undermined, he claimed, by “bad numbers.” This seems at least somewhat likely: In Zuckerman’s annual financial performance materials, the estimated value of the newspaper actually grew slightly, to $505.6 million from $454.6 million, between 2012 and 2013, which seems wildly implausible for a property that was losing tens of millions of dollars every year.
As with everything involving Epstein, it is hard to parse the good-faith advice from his inescapable predatorship. For example, he repeatedly advises Zuckerman to get married because “many of the more tricky issues would be solved. no estate tax. basis step up. guardianship for rene. 100s of millions saved.” But a younger, financially unsophisticated wife of the sort Epstein had proven so expert at both procuring for his friends (Eva Dubin) or merely ingratiating himself to (Soon-Yi Previn, Valeria Chomsky) would also likely entail a lifetime of “commissions” for Epstein in the form of “advice” on elite colleges and charities to which to donate, securities fraud attorneys and reputation managers to retain, social functions to underwrite, and comely au pairs and receptionists and executive assistants to import from former Eastern Bloc countries. Similarly, selling off assets without haggling too much over price might have been sound advice in a year of 30 percent stock market returns, but it also would have provided ample opportunity for Epstein to play both sides of the transaction somehow.
It’s not in the end entirely clear whether Zuckerman signed the contract with his old friend. Email exchanges with Zuckerman’s nephews Eric and James Gertler depict his condition worsening precipitously in 2015, and suggest Epstein had begun working directly with them to steer donations to Zuckerman’s favored causes, namely Israel and Alzheimer’s research. But Epstein was proven right about one big thing: The DailyNews had needed to find a lucid buyer immediately. Instead, the Gertlers attempted to run it, and for a year the newspaper seemed to be experiencing a renaissance as the Page Six of Resistance Liberalism.
But the brothers could not stop or stomach the bleeding, and in September they finally “sold” the thing, to the detritus of Conrad Black’s old newspaper empire, which had since been commandeered by a two-man private equity firm that was billing the papers $2.7 million to charter its private jet and $5 million for the services of its founder, who had renamed the company “TRONC” (for Tribune Online Company), of all things.
The Gertler brothers sold New York’s hometown newspaper to TRONC for $1, even though its workforce was no longer unionized and its pension liabilities were minimal, even though its staff had been gutted beyond recognition yet it was still collecting $50 million in annual ad revenue, even though the purchase came with a 49 percent interest in a 25-acre tract of land in Jersey City overlooking the Hudson River. TRONC would soon be re-renamed by an even worse pack of private equity guys, the villainous Duke bros of Alden Global Capital, which has optimized what is now a tradition of strip-mining local newspapers.
But a 2018 email from Epstein to a friend who appears to be Steve Bannon about an embittered ex-business partner suggested the transaction was potentially not what it seemed, though the Prospect could find no evidence substantiating or even explicating the claim.
“Fyi, there is a guy, totally nuts, out of jail after 20 years that has been sending letters re me to all agencies, stalking, etc. wants a billion dollars,” he wrote in the middle of an exchange otherwise focused on monitoring the legal maneuvering of various Russiagate conspirators. Journalists had been sniffing around Epstein’s own scandal for the first time in years that year, and perhaps his relish over Trump’s misfortunes had reminded him he had enemies, too. “No real threat, just one more pain.”
Then:
“Steven hoffenberg,” Epstein continued. “He bought the ny daily news for 1 dollar.”
Hoffenberg was found dead in a ratty apartment outside New Haven almost three years to the day after Epstein’s death, after one of Epstein’s most tenacious early victims contacted local police to check in on him. There were reportedly no signs of foul play.
Edward Hopper, Sun in an Empty Room, 1963, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art. The chamber, rigorously purged of human presence, stands as the spatial analogue of Orwell’s 1984, where dangerous memories vanish and institutional erasure governs the space.
(Courtesy of wendy664@substack.com)
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