8 | F RIDAY, AUGUST 2, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Business
Jeffrey E. Epstein, the wealthy financier
who is accused of sex trafficking, had an
unusual dream: He hoped to seed the
human race with his DNA by impregnat-
ing women at his vast New Mexico
ranch.
Mr. Epstein over the years confided to
scientists and others about his scheme,
according to four people familiar with
his thinking, although there is no evi-
dence that it ever came to fruition.
Mr. Epstein’s vision reflected his long-
standing fascination with what has be-
come known as transhumanism: the
science of improving the human popula-
tion through technologies like genetic
engineering and artificial intelligence.
Critics have likened transhumanism to a
modern version of eugenics, the dis-
credited field of improving the human
race through controlled breeding.
Mr. Epstein, who was charged in July
with the sexual trafficking of girls as
young as 14, was a serial illusionist: He
lied about the identities of his clients, his
wealth, his financial prowess, his per-
sonal achievements. But he managed to
use connections and charisma to culti-
vate valuable relationships with busi-
ness and political leaders.
Interviews with more than a dozen of
his acquaintances, as well as public doc-
uments, show that he used the same tac-
tics to insinuate himself into an elite sci-
entific community, thus allowing him to
pursue his interests in eugenics and
other fringe fields like cryonics.
Lawyers for Mr. Epstein, who has
pleaded not guilty to the sex-trafficking
charges, did not respond to requests for
comment.
Mr. Epstein attracted a glittering ar-
ray of prominent scientists. They includ-
ed the Nobel Prize-winning physicist
Murray Gell-Mann, who discovered the
quark; the theoretical physicist and
best-selling author Stephen Hawking;
the paleontologist and evolutionary bi-
ologist Stephen Jay Gould; Oliver
Sacks, the neurologist and best-selling
author; George M. Church, a molecular
engineer who has worked to identify
genes that could be altered to create su-
perior humans; and the M.I.T. theoreti-
cal physicist Frank Wilczek, a Nobel lau-
reate.
The lure for some of the scientists was
Mr. Epstein’s money. He dangled financ-
ing for their pet projects. Some of the sci-
entists said that the prospect of financ-
ing blinded them to the seriousness of
his sexual transgressions.
The Harvard cognitive psychologist
Steven Pinker said he was invited by
colleagues — including Martin Nowak, a
Harvard professor of mathematics and
biology, and the theoretical physicist
Lawrence Krauss — to “salons and cof-
fee klatches” at which Mr. Epstein
would hold court.
While some of Mr. Pinker’s peers
hailed Mr. Epstein as brilliant, Mr.
Pinker described him as an “intellectual
impostor.”
“He would abruptly change the sub-
ject, A.D.D.-style, dismiss an observa-
tion with an adolescent wisecrack,” Mr.
Pinker said.
Another scientist cultivated by Mr.
Epstein, Jaron Lanier, a prolific author
who is a pioneer of virtual reality, said
that Mr. Epstein’s ideas did not amount
to science, in that they did not lend
themselves to rigorous proof. Mr. Lanier
said Mr. Epstein had once hypothesizedthat atoms behaved like investors in a
marketplace.
Mr. Lanier said he had declined any
funding from Mr. Epstein and that he
had met with him only once after Mr. Ep-
stein in 2008 pleaded guilty to charges of
soliciting prostitution from a minor.
Mr. Epstein was willing to finance re-
search that others viewed as bizarre. He
told one scientist that he was
bankrolling efforts to identify a mysteri-
ous particle that might trigger the feel-
ing that someone is watching you.
At one session at Harvard, Mr. Ep-
stein criticized efforts to reduce starva-
tion and provide health care to the poor
because doing so increased the risk of
overpopulation, said Mr. Pinker, who
was there. Mr. Pinker said he had rebut-
ted the argument, citing research show-
ing that high rates of infant mortality
simply caused people to have more chil-
dren. Mr. Epstein seemed annoyed, and
a Harvard colleague later told Mr.
Pinker that he had been “voted off the
island” and was no longer welcome at
Mr. Epstein’s gatherings.
Then there was Mr. Epstein’s interest
in eugenics.On multiple occasions starting in the
early 2000s, Mr. Epstein told scientists
and businessmen about his ambitions to
use his New Mexico ranch as a base
where women would be inseminated
with his sperm and would give birth to
his babies, according to two award-win-
ning scientists and an adviser to large
companies and wealthy individuals, all
of whom Mr. Epstein told about it.
It was not a secret. The adviser, for ex-
ample, said he was told about the plans
not only by Mr. Epstein, at a gathering at
his Manhattan townhouse, but also by at
least one prominent member of the busi-
ness community. One of the scientists
said Mr. Epstein divulged his idea in
2001 at a dinner at the same townhouse;
the other recalled Mr. Epstein dis-
cussing it with him at a 2006 conference
that he hosted in St. Thomas in the Vir-
gin Islands.
The idea struck all three as far-
fetched and disturbing. There is no indi-
cation that it would have been against
the law.
Once, at a dinner at Mr. Epstein’s
mansion on Manhattan’s Upper East
Side, Mr. Lanier said he talked to a scien-
tist who told him that Mr. Epstein’s goal
was to have 20 women at a time impreg-
nated at his 33,000-square-foot Zorro
Ranch in a tiny town outside Santa Fe,
N.M. Mr. Lanier said the scientist identi-
fied herself as working at NASA, but he
did not remember her name.
According to Mr. Lanier, the NASA
scientist said Mr. Epstein had based his
idea for a baby ranch on accounts of the
Repository for Germinal Choice, which
was to be stocked with the sperm of No-
bel laureates who wanted to strengthenHe saw himself
spreading his DNA
Financier accused
of sex trafficking
pursued fringe scienceBY JAMES B. STEWART,
MATTHEW GOLDSTEIN
AND JESSICA SILVER-GREENBERGE PSTEIN, PAGE 9The financier Jeffrey E. Epstein be-
friended many prominent scientists.AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGESWhat if I told you that one of the best
ways to fix your smartphone-addicted
brain was to buy another gadget?
You didn’t read that wrong. Just
bear with me: I’m talking about a
much dumber gadget, one that is dedi-
cated to being great at just one thing.
It’s an e-book reader.
Think about it. Now that phones are
so fast and capable and social media
has become inescapable, all we talk
about is wanting to unplug from our
tech. An e-reader can be a low-tech
substitute to your high-tech addiction,
similar to the e-cigarettes smokers use
to cut down on nicotine.
The best part? While an e-reader is
still tech, you get to consume books
that provide a respite from the hateful
comments on social media and thestress-inducing news articles we con-
sume on the web.
To make my case for this column, I
tested Amazon’s newly released Kindle
Oasis for about a week. This is the
Cadillac of e-readers. It has a seven-
inch screen and an aluminum body,
and its special feature is an adjustable
light to shift the screen’s color tone
from cooler in the daytime to warmer
at night. It is also waterproof.
For a starting price of $250, the
Oasis is overkill. Its cheaper sibling,
the $130 Kindle Paperwhite, which has
a six-inch screen with an integrated
light for reading in the dark, is per-
fectly adequate for most people; the
only downside is that its color tones
are not adjustable. So treat the Oasis
as an aspirational example for why you
may want an e-book reader.
Here’s more on the product and how
owning an e-reader helped curtail my
own phone addiction.PROS AND CONS
The Oasis is a simple and elegant
product, but with some downsides.
For one, the device is bulkier than
other Kindles. The aluminum back has
a wedge-shaped grip, which Amazon
said was intended to shift the center of
gravity to your palm. It feels reminis-
cent of gripping the spine of a book.That diminishes one of the main bene-
fits of an e-reader, which is that it’s
thinner and lighter than an actual
book.
On the front of the device, there are
two physical buttons for page turning.
The top button turns pages forward;
the bottom one turns pages backward.
They work well but feel superfluous:
It’s just as easy to reach your thumb
over to swipe the screen to flip a page.
The Oasis is, over all, comfortable to
hold. But over several hours of read-
ing, the wedge got tiresome to grip,
and I found myself switching between
hands. Amazon’s cheaper Kindle Pa-
perwhite, with a curved back that lacks
the thick grip, is more pleasant to hold
over long durations.
Now onto the upsides. The Oasis’s
signature feature, the adjustable light,
is a delight. The device has 25 LED
lights — 12 white and 13 amber — to let
you tweak the color tone from cool to
warm manually or automatically on a
timed schedule. I set the device to
adjust its light automatically, and at
night, the warmer color tone felt easier
on my eyes.
One quick aside: There’s a debate
over whether the color tones of screens
affect sleep. Some studies have shown
that blue light emitted from screens,
including smartphones and somee-book readers, can act as a stimulant,
disrupting your circadian rhythms and
making it harder to sleep. It’s unclear
whether screens with warmer color
tones help you get better sleep.
As for other benefits, the Oasis
works for both lefties and righties. If
you’re holding the device in your right
hand and rotate it 180 degrees to hold
the grip with your left hand, the screen
automatically reorients itself so that
the book is right side up.Books look fantastic on the Oasis.
Like other e-readers, it uses e-ink
technology, which has matured over
the last decade to make text look
crisper and clearer. As with other
e-readers, the battery for the Oasis
lasts weeks. (I haven’t had to recharge
my test unit since receiving it more
than a week ago.)
All things considered, I recommend
the cheaper Kindle Paperwhite (which
I own) over the Oasis. For roughly half
the price, it has most of the same bene-
fits: weekslong battery life and an
excellent screen. The lack of color
adjustment isn’t a deal breaker.
Rather than degrade the reading
experience, the Paperwhite’s smaller
screen is a benefit. It’s less cumber-
some to hold and fits into most coat
pockets, whereas the Oasis does not.WHY NOW?
About 10 years ago, Steve Jobs told
The New York Times that he felt e-
readers would lose against multifunc-
tion products like the iPhone. He pre-
dicted that people wouldn’t pay to have
a device with such limited features.
“I think the general-purpose devices
will win the day,” he said. “Because I
think people just probably aren’t will-
ing to pay for a dedicated device.”
Mr. Jobs’s prediction was correct.But one thing he didn’t foresee was
that a decade later, public discourse
around tech would center on smart-
phone addiction. One 2016 study found
that 50 percent of teenagers felt ad-
dicted to smartphones, and a separate
study last year showed that 60 percent
of adults ages 18 to 34 had acknowl-
edged smartphone overuse.
Count me among those admitting
they have a problem. Over the last
week, I picked up my phone about 114
times a day, according to my iPhone’s
Screen Time statistics. That’s pretty
bad — but before I owned a Kindle, my
average was about 156. I still have lots
of work to do, but this is progress.
I also got to test the social benefits of
the Kindle Oasis in an unexpected way.
This week, I came down with the flu,
and when I was bedridden and alone at
home, I got stuck in a feverish loop of
incessantly checking Twitter and email
on my phone instead of sleeping.
When I realized this, I picked up the
e-reader and downloaded a book about
dogs. Minutes later, I was out like a
light. When my partner returned
home, she asked, “What did you do
today?”
I replied that I had started reading a
book about dog psychology. “Did you
know dogs don’t like raincoats?” I
asked.Amazon’s Kindle Oasis is like an elixir for smartphone addiction
Brian X. Chen
TECH FIXAmazon’s new Kindle Oasis has a seven-
inch screen and an aluminum body.CAYCE CLIFFORD FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESThey appeal to senior citizens and mil-
lennials, business travelers and back-
packers. And they’re particularly at-
tractive to hotel developers, who can
pack in more guest rooms than in a typi-
cal hotel.
They’re known as microhotels, in-
spired by the Japanese capsule or pod
hotels of 40 years ago that offered
cheap, tiny accommodations to busi-
nessmen.
The new versions — which are most
common in, but not exclusive to, big, ex-
pensive cities like New York, London
and Paris — are designed, as one hotel
expert put it, down to their last square
inch. Their guest rooms are small — of-
ten half, or less, the size of a typical room
in an urban hotel — with furniture that
often can be folded up or stowed away,
and bathrooms that usually have show-
ers and toilets, but no bathtubs. Wall-
mounted TVs are major space savers.
Their rates are substantially less than
those of typical urban hotels. Rates at
Moxy hotels, a Marriott brand, start, for
example, at $159 per night in the United
States.
With décor inspired by Japanese cap-
sule hotels and airlines’ first-class cab-
ins, microhotels are increasingly pop-
ping up worldwide.
Henry Harteveldt, president of At-
mosphere Research, a travel research
company, said the process of squeezing
more rooms into a hotel resembles what
the airlines have been doing to increase
the number of seats on an aircraft. While
microhotel room rates and basic econ-
omy airfares might be relatively low, he
said, the number of potential customers
makes them attractive to operators.
Stephani Robson, a senior lecturer at
the School of Hotel Administration at
Cornell University, agreed that the con-
cept of a microhotel room “is often more
about meeting the needs of developers.”
Although the size of microhotel guest
rooms is “minimalist,” Dr. Robson said,
“it does not mean they are not comfort-
able or stylish. They’re very well
planned, and they make optimal use of
every square inch.”
Another plus for developers, said
Mark Van Stekelenburg, managing di-
rector of CBRE Hotels Advisory, is that
the design of microhotel guest rooms
makes them cheaper to clean and main-
tain than larger, more traditional guest
rooms.
And the microhotel concept appeals
to companies like Marriott and Hilton,
which recently introduced the Motto
brand, because it allows them “to get
more dots on the map,” said Michael
Bellisario, lodging analyst for Baird.
“The more properties and brands they
have in all cities,” the greater potential
for repeat business.
The idea of small hotel rooms arrived
in the United States in 1989. The Micro-
tel brand, introduced in Rochester,
served value-conscious guests by offer-
ing rooms half the size of traditional ho-
tel rooms, with rates that were also half
the cost. But industry experts do not
consider Microtel, now owned by Wynd-
ham, a microhotel brand by current
standards, since its guest room sizes
tend to be significantly larger than those
of most newer microhotels.
Generally, microhotels today have
guest rooms that range in size from
about 115 to 220 square feet, depending
on the number and size of beds. A typical
room at an urban hotel in the United
States can range from 250 to 300 square
feet.
Other large hotel companies have
rolled out their own brands: Introducedin 2014, Marriott’s Moxy has 44 hotels in
Europe, Asia and North America today
and has signed contracts for another 96.
Hilton’s Motto, announced last fall, has
over a dozen projects under develop-
ment in Europe, the United States and
South America.
While another brand, Mama Shelter
— developed by former Club Med hotel
operators — considers its properties
boutique hotels, its guest rooms can be
as small as 118 square feet. There are
currently nine Mama Shelter hotels,
with 10 more under development. Accor
owns 49 percent of the brand.
Hyatt acquired its own microhotel
brand, Tommie, when it bought Two
Roads Hospitality last October.
Among the earliest independent mi-
crohotel brands were Yotel and Pod,
which opened their first hotels in 2007.
The first Yotels were at airports inLondon and Amsterdam, and their
guest rooms were designed by a British
firm that also designs aircraft cabins.
Today rates typically range from $200 to
$229. Yotel has 12 properties, half locat-
ed in airports and half in cities. Eighteen
more are planned, including a new ex-
tended-stay concept.
There are four Pod hotels in New
York, including one with extended-stay
accommodations in Times Square.
There is also a Pod in Washington, with
others to open in Philadelphia and Los
Angeles by next year.
There are now many more independ-
ent microhotel brands, including Hox-
ton Hotels, based in London; citizenM,
based in the Netherlands; Arlo in New
York; and the Hotel Hive, which opened
in 2017 in a former federal workers’
rooming house in Washington.
Many microhotels feature expansivelobbies, with spaces designed for hang-
ing out; dining and drinking; and co-
working. Hive and Hoxton will soon
open dedicated co-working spaces at
some hotels.
Microhotel lobbies sometimes offer
work by local artists; food and drink
from popular local purveyors; and ac-
tivities for guests and other visitors.
Mama Shelter, for instance, offers free
access to foosball tables and photo and
video booths in the lobbies of many of its
properties, while Arlo offers digital-
detox happy hours, which are free to
guests and available for a fee to visitors.
Guests staying at microhotels often
have access to loyalty program bene-
fits: Customers at Moxy, Motto, Tommie
and Mama Shelter hotels can or will be
able to access the benefits of the pro-
grams of the brands’ parents, whileSkimping on size but not style
The lobby of the Moxy Chelsea, a Marriott-brand microhotel that is expanding fast, with 44 hotels in Europe, Asia and North America.ALI KATE CHERKIS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESMicrohotels offer travelers
savings where space is
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