In the Summer of 1977, I was a young illustrator, living in the East Village in NY. I would get around town a great deal and wherever I went, working, dating, going to films, dinner, it’s all you heard people talking about: the crazy guy who was shooting people parked in their cars. Strangers in coffee shops would see the Daily News on a table and talk. Jimmy Breslin. There was also an awful blackout. And the Yankees were on their way to the World Series, with TV coverage of the games showing shots of the Bronx burning in the night. It all felt like one single humid, hot, static, lousy thing. But a thing that we all shared. In 1999 Spike Lee made film called, the Summer of Sam.
This is the week this became, for me, the Summer of Epstein. The Congress shut down, the Supreme Court is, though officially in recess, in a faster rate of self- cancellation than the Congress. Likewise the media. The United States is under attack in every conceivable way. They are building concentration camps. We are funding a genocide in Gaza. We are left with a damaged and deranged Trump, making a new spectacular tabloid headline every hour, each more absurd than the last, while the economy sinks, the Earth burns, and AI prepares to destroy whatever Trump doesn’t. Enter the “Epstein.” This dead monster suddenly reaches back through the years to pay Trump back in full. And Trump, for once, can’t dodge the bullets. Like with the Son of Sam.
And we sit and talk, in the heat. Until, perhaps, the weather breaks.
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Onward,
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editor and publisher, The Nation
