What gets me is the unctuous, oozing chumminess — the unembarrassed, hat-in-hand genuflection toward the pedophile rainmaker.

There was Joichi Ito, director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s prestigious Media Lab, with a problem well known to anyone who’s ever labored in academia: He was low on funds. But unlike, say, the thousands of adjunct professors who toil in American universities at poverty wages, Ito was in charge of an institution that had long cultivated a direct line to corporations, billionaires and pretend-billionaires with reputations to launder. So all he had to do to get money to pay for a researcher was dash off an email: “Could you re-up/top-off with another $100k so I can extend his contract for another year?” Ito asked Jeffrey Epstein in September 2014, according to documents published last week by The New Yorker. In response, Epstein snapped his fingers: “Yes.”

[Farhad answered questions about this column on Twitter.]

There is still a lot to unpack in the ties between one of America’s most elite universities and a convicted sex offender — ties that led to Ito’s resignation last weekend from M.I.T. as well as several boards, among them that of The New York Times.