The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room

Walk south for less than ten minutes from the Ghostbusters firehouse in Tribeca and you'll find a pop-up attraction significantly more somber than most storefronts in the area. Since May 8th, 101 Reade Street has been home to 3.5 million pages of the Epstein files, bound and printed in 3,437 individual soft-cover volumes. (One of the organizers told us that several locations and printers backed out once they were told the purpose of the exhibtion.)

The black-and-white books look nearly identical, save for sequential numbers displayed prominently on their thick spines. They are stacked neatly next to one another in rows, packed tightly in simple wooden bookcases that line the walls of the two-level space. The decor is sparse, inspired by actual libraries. Upstairs, you can sit in a black leather wingback chair next to plants on top of patterned rugs; Downstairs is populated with late-90s-style desktop computers, and long wooden tables with green-glass reading lamps.

But there is not much to read or search here—because of the Justice Department's dubious decision to redact only some names and not others, the thousands of volumes sit untouched behind velvet ropes. The computer monitors are dark. Only survivors of the unspeakable atrocities contained within them are allowed to flip through the volumes or search the DOJ's online database if they choose to do so.

According to The New York Times, the exhibition has already hosted several victims including Danielle Bensky, who was a 17-year-old aspiring dancer when she says Epstein abused her. “I had expected walking in [to the reading room] and seeing, you know, all sorts of images or all of our stuff plastered everywhere,” Bensky told the Times. “And it was just so not that.”

A memorial to the victims stands behind drapes in the center of the main room.

The only images are of Trump, Epstein, and a handful of people closely associated with both, including now-infamous photos of the two men alone together and with their respective partners (Melania Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell). A full wall is dedicated to three separate timelines, tracking the men's separate lives as well as when and where they (too often) converged.

Many of the entries are familiar to anyone who has been conscious for the past few decades, including Epstein's acquisition of a private island, and the "grabbed her by the pussy" Access Hollywood tape leak that in a sane world would have ended Trump's presidential aspirations. It's increasingly difficult, however, to believe in the sanity and goodness of humanity the longer you are immerse yourself in the exhibition. Each entry is as—or even more—despicable as the next.

Seeing them all together, and knowing that it's a woefully incomplete record, should outrage everyone into action. And that's part of the exhibition's goal: downstairs the tables are outfitted with cards urging visitors to call the DOJ and demand the release of all the Epstein files (a sample script is provided for the phone-averse).

The mission of The Institute for Primary Facts, the nonprofit behind the reading room, is to advance civic literacy through "the development and operation of immersive, traveling museum exhibits designed to provide accessible, fact-based explorations of the foundational elements of American democracy."

And I think here, immersion is the most important part. 3.5 million pages is such a staggering figure (together they weigh more than eight tons) that it's hard to conceptualize. I can't imagine not being moved by the shear scale of the evidence collected here—nevermind the fact that it's an incomplete record or that as of right now the only person being held accountable for Trump and Epstein's crimes in any real way is Maxwell.

By this point on our hellish timeline, I think most Americans have some broad awareness of the Epstein files and the incidents detailed within. For years we've been constantly bombarded by breaking news headlines and global calamities; we're exhausted. Cynicism and apathy thrive in overwhelm, and that's the point. Remember Steve Bannon's "flood the zone" strategy? The zone has been underwater for years and only the lucky ones are still treading water.

David Garrett, one of the exhibition’s backers, told the New York Times: “When I’m looking at my phone and I see a cat video and an ICE raid and my aunt’s birthday cake and evidence of the worst crime in 250 years of American history, and it’s all kind of in the same feed, it all sort of takes the same weight. You lose context.”

A bulletin board holds index cards on which visitors are encouraged to write their thoughts, impressions, or calls to action: "Power dressed in silk, still leaves bruises in the dark, gold cannot hide the rot." "Men built towers tall, thinking height erased the truth, gravity waited." "Remove, impeach, convict them all."

Or most succinctly, "I'm disgusted."

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The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room has been extended through May 24th. It is located at 101 Reade Street in Manhattan (near the jail where Epstein died) and advance reservations are suggested (a limited number of walk-in slots are available each day).