When I am found dead in my cell after being arrested for sex crimes, please do not release my personal correspondence because that is the kind of thing that embarrasses people. Ask Larry Summers. The past president of Harvard University repeatedly appears in the latest tranche of Epstein documents, not to pull the strings of world geopolitics but to ask for advice about women. One in particular seems to have put Summers in a state of anguish.

“Think for now I’m going nowhere with her except economics mentor” is a tragic thing for the former secretary of the Treasury to write on his 64th birthday. I will leave questions of morality to his wife; my interest lies strictly with elements of the text, including but not limited to “Sent from my iPad.” Even in 2018, this default signature was a badge of innocence — a phrase that appeared at the end of your dad’s question about which flight you were on and not, one imagined, in the secret communications of the most powerful people in the world.

The intense media attention devoted to Epstein has painted a vivid portrait of his social and criminal life, but it has failed to explain a central mystery: why so many titans of industry and heads of state were drawn to him. Perhaps the most striking thing about the 20,000-file dump of Epstein’s texts and emails released by the House Oversight Committee last week is the number of wealthy and influential people who regarded him as not just a power broker but also the kind of streetwise figure who could tell them how to move through the world. Readers will recognize in this version of Epstein not the sociopathic blackmail artist he is rumored to have been but a more quotidian figure: the nerd whom other nerds regard as cool.

The “you were good” that begins Summers’s message is his response to Epstein’s question “im a pretty good wing man , no?” This sentence is an example of Epstein’s innovative approach to written English, and it illustrates why so many news reports have described the files as “typo-strewn,” an accurate description that nonetheless fails to convey their bizarre essence. One explanation for these typos is that Epstein was a moron who managed to accumulate half a billion dollars and the power........

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