https://www.wired.com/story/an-end-to-pornography-sophistry-and-panty-raids/

Like Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased sex trafficker and child rapist, I was once in John Brockman’s circle of—well, he unfailingly called us “scientists,” though many in the group, a salon known as Edge, have zero training in hard science. The honorific had described Edge’s membership from the start, some 40 years ago, when a small group of technologists set out to reclaim the mantle of “intellectual” from the literary types whom they believed had monopolized it throughout the 1970s.

As a book agent, Brockman has a knack for making introductions. During the last month, while Edge has fallen under a pall for its dealings with Epstein, I’ve learned that Brockman connected his “scientists” with high rollers anxious to seem smart, notably Epstein. Brockman didn’t send a single moneybags my way, but participation in Edge conferred on its members a galaxy-brain mystique that money can’t buy. Still, in March 2016, I dropped out, having come to believe Brockman’s and my politics, and even moral codes, were incompatible.