Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 50. Sunrise is 6:58 and sunset is 4:24 for 9 hours 26 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 16.2 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School Board meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President John F. Kennedy, is killed by Jack Ruby on live television. Robert H. Jackson takes a photograph of the shooting that will win the 1964 Pulitzer Prize in Photography.
A New York Times story, focusing on the men corresponding with Jeffrey Epstein, captures the changes to New York — and one can infer reasonably many other places — in the decade or so since some of those emails were written. Without question, the paramount moral question in the Epstein emails is what they might show about nonconsensual sexual conduct (minors cannot consent, and adults cannot morally be subject to contact without consent). Reporter Shawn McCreesh also notices, however, the truth that the social scene in which Epstein lived has withered:
The emails are like a portal back to a lost Manhattan power scene. Mr. Epstein’s inbox was larded with boldface names — many of them now faded or forgotten — that once meant everything to status-obsessed New Yorkers. It was the world that Donald Trump came out of, and the one that Mr. Epstein had so effectively beguiled after having grown up in a middle-class household in Coney Island.
As the emails stretch through the years, they show how that protected realm vanished into the mists of time, pulled under by the rising forces of the internet and the #MeToo movement. Mr. Epstein and some of his male correspondents seem to squirm as they notice society changing around them…
The emails show how the clubby nature of the old media suited Mr. Epstein. R. Couri Hay, a well-connected press agent, was another of Mr. Epstein’s correspondents. In 2011, Mr. Hay sent an email to warn that Tina Brown (the former editor of The New Yorker and Vanity Fair, who was in charge of Newsweek and The Daily Beast at the time) had assigned a story on Mr. Epstein to the writer Alexandra Wolfe (whose father was Tom Wolfe).
“This is for Newsweek, the magazine that is on the stands, not the website,” Mr. Hay explained.
See Shawn McCreesh, Epstein Emails Reveal a Bygone Elite (‘The disgraced financier’s recently released documents are steeped in a clubby world that is all but gone’), New York Times, November 17, 2025.
These observations apply, in their own way, to small towns as much as Manhattan — newspapers have collapsed, the present generation looks for information elsewhere, and the older generation of dissolute social climbers and schemers now looks simultaneously repulsive and pathetic. These are people who lived as though they were appetitive primates, hooting, grabbing, and signaling to others.
A person of sound morality and outlook would not compromise his or her views to associate with that ilk. Empty, needy men climbing and grasping — and injuring any and all along the way — are rightly objects of contempt and derision.
They should be remembered for any misconduct proved against them. Their world has faded in significant measure, and everyone is better off for it.
A theme here at FREE WHITEWATER: these are ideological times, regardless of one’s ideology. Men and women should climb ladders for reasons beyond being noticed. There’s good work to be done, and bad work to be opposed. A life well lived is more than preening, more than headlines, more than press releases. See Hyper-Local Politics is Finished (It’s Just That Not Everyone Sees it Yet) (“Anyone who ever said – and so many men in this city have said – that the goal of local politics was merely to place adults in the room underestimated the possibilities for politics and over-estimated his own importance”).
No one in this city hopes more than this libertarian blogger that the next generation does better than the last. This consolation reassures: the next generation cannot possibly do worse.
Ethiopia’s Hayli Gubbi volcano erupts for first time in recorded history, sending ash plume sky high: