At the end of January, Trump’s Justice Department released what it said was the last tranche of the Epstein files: millions of pages of emails and texts, F.B.I. documents and court records. Much was redacted and millions more pages have been withheld. There is a lot we want to know that remains unclear. But what has come into clear view is the role Epstein played as a broker of information, connections, wealth and women and girls for a slice of the global elite. This was the infrastructure of Epstein’s power — and it reveals much about the infrastructure of elite networks more generally. Anand Giridharadas is something of a sociologist of American elites. He’s the author of, among other books, “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World” and the forthcoming “Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle and Belonging in an American City.” He also publishes the great newsletter The.Ink. Back in November, after the release of an earlier batch of Epstein files, Giridharadas wrote a great Times Opinion guest essay, taking a sociologist’s lens to the messages Epstein exchanged with his elite friends. So after the government released this latest, enormous tranche of materials, I wanted to talk to Giridharadas to help make sense of it. What do they reveal — about how Epstein operated in the world, the vulnerabilities he exploited and what that says about how power works in America today? Note: This conversation was recorded on Tuesday, Feb. 10. On Thursday, Feb. 12, Kathryn Ruemmler announced she would be resigning from her role as chief legal officer and general counsel at Goldman Sachs. This episode contains strong language.

According to the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University, 14.3 percent of Americans — nearly 50 million people — were living in poverty in December. The scale of poverty in the U.S. dwarfs that of most of our peer countries. And it raises the question: Why does so much poverty persist in one of the richest countries in the world? For the Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, the answer is simple: Poverty is a policy choice. It persists because we allow it to. And we allow it to persist because so many of us — whether we realize it or not — benefit from the exploitation of the poor. Desmond’s 2016 book, the Pulitzer Prize winner “Evicted,” was a powerful ethnographic account of what it means to experience the depths of poverty. But his new book, “Poverty, by America,” is less about the poor than it is about the rest of us. It is about the people who are more comfortable with the perpetuation of poverty than with the changes that would be demanded for its abolition. So this conversation is about why poverty in America persists, the choices we could make to end it and why we as a country are so stubbornly resistant to making those choices. We also discuss the heated debate over how to measure poverty in the first place, why Desmond thinks poverty is primarily a product of “exploitation,” why over $140 billion of government aid ends up never making it into the hands of the people it’s intended to help, Desmond’s view that the U. S. does “more to subsidize affluence than to alleviate poverty,” why the daily cognitive cost of poverty is as severe as losing a night of sleep, how the U. S. passed its most successful anti-poverty policy in decades and then let it expire, why Americans seem more willing to tolerate high poverty than high prices, why Desmond thinks sectoral bargaining and public housing are key pillars of any anti-poverty agenda, what it means to become a “poverty abolitionist” and more.