Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2015 i Esquire

The National Football League, which begins its ninety-sixth season of play next month, has proven itself to be one of the doughtiest enterprises in the long history of hullabaloo and ballyhoo. (Its history extends back to when people actually used words like hullabaloo and ballyhoo.) That character never has been tested the way it has under the NFL’s current commissioner, Roger Goodell, a man who never has seen a problem he couldn’t turn into a crisis and never has heard dissent he couldn’t turn into a pitchfork-waving mob. Under his occasionally distinguishable leadership, the NFL has found itself, in only the past few years, on the wrong side of domestic violence, child abuse, pharmacology, neuroscience, and, most notably, its own silly rules regarding the Ideal Gas Law. Under Goodell, the…

Over Skype. Johnson in L.A., Raab in Cleveland. SCOTT RAAB: Man, you’re gorgeous. DWAYNE JOHNSON: Awww. SR: That smile speaks a universal human language. Do you ever think about how huge you are right now? DJ: I just came back from the gym, and I’m driving down Sunset and I see a massive billboard that says San Andreas, and I’m like, “Wow, that’s great! This worked out!” I get corny like this. And I swear to God, I turn my head and there’s an even bigger billboard that says Ballers. Man, I can’t believe it. SR: What a path. You look like an old wrestler I used to see every once in a while. DJ: I’ve been fortunate to have had the life I had prior to Hollywood. I wasn’t starving,…

We haven’t been this paranoid since the Vietnam/Watergate era—and no wonder. Drones whir through the air. The NSA eavesdrops on phone calls. The police say one thing, a shaky cell-phone video says another. My neighbor files his taxes and the IRS informs him he already has, the refund sent to a post-office box on the other side of the country. We’ve been Snowdenized—we don’t trust the people we’re supposed to trust—and our stories reflect this age of anxiety and distrust: The first season of HBO’s True Detective resonated with audiences because of its splintered point of view. Showtime’s The Affair employed a similar structure, though in this case you couldn’t trust what you saw or heard. And now comes a slew of fall books with narrators and structures as (possibly)…

Averaging close to 7 feet tall and weighing well over 400 pounds, the contestants of the World’s Strongest Man competition are real-life giants. Their sheer size and strength is admirable without a doubt, though the work that goes into getting to the top level of strongman competition is a whole other story. To learn more about what it takes to be a professional strongman, we’ll dig into the top contenders’ daily regimens, from workouts and meals to sources of inspiration. READ THE COMPLETE STORY AT ESQUIRE.COM/THECODE THE CODE Esquire has partnered with Ford to bring you The Code, a new editorial program inspired by the all-new 2015 Ford F-150, and the men who drive them. From the skills every man should have and the latest in gear to smart news…

WE’VE COME A LONG WAY from Biff and Muffy, those tribal-minded swells who wore argyle and madras, whale-covered belts, and elbow-patched, gold-buttoned blazers so they could both stand out and show they belonged. To channel preppy impulses without looking like an extra from Caddy shack, ease up on Easter-egg colors in favor of deeper, rich shades (the sweater above is teal, the chinos golden brown) and try subtler patterns like this jacket’s shadow plaid. Thinner-wale cords are good. Slim-fit, flat-front chinos are better. Then Gable, S. Banks, C. 3000, A.…

MORE SPECIFICALLY: THE DARK SUIT, plain white shirt, and dark-tie riff that Don and co. worked the first few seasons. For a man looking to project some midcentury, Draperesque elegance, gray suits and tie bars are no longer the answer. In fact, the answer might not even involve a suit at all but rather a jacket and trousers that complement but don’t match; a nonpatterned shirt that isn’t white but rather beige or gray; and a tie with some texture to it. Then The Gray Flannel Suit ,T.M.I. Draper,D Browne, T.…

She is falling, ever so faintly, into age. It is not the slowness of rising in the morning, or the weariness of eyesight, or the chest pains that appear with more and more regularity, but the brittleness of memory that disturbs her now—how the past can glide away so easily, how the present can drift, how they sometimes collide—so that when she sees her torturer on television, she is not sure if her imagination is playing tricks, or if he has simply sifted through the sandbox of memory, slid headlong down the channel of thirty-seven years to tease her into a terrible mistake, or if it is truly him, appearing now on the late Spanish-language news, casual, handsome, controlled. A crisp blue shirt with an open neck. His teeth white…

( JULY 1990 ) When there is too much going on, more than you can bear, you may choose to assume that nothing in particular is happening, that your life is going round and round like a turntable. Then one day you are aware that what you took to be turntable, smooth, flat, and even, was in fact a whirlpool, a vortex. My first knowledge of the hidden work of uneventful days goes back to February 1933. The exact date won’t matter much to you. I like to think, however, that you, my only child, will want to hear about this hidden work. When you were a small boy you were keen on family history. You will quickly understand that I couldn’t tell a child what I am about to…

( MARCH 1989 ) It was a long straight road through dry fields as far as a person could see. You’d think the sky didn’t have any air in it and the earth was made of paper. Rather than moving, we were just getting smaller and smaller. What can be said about those fields? There were blackbirds circling above their own shadows, and beneath them the cows stood around smelling one another’s butts. Dundun spat his gum out the window while digging in his shirt pocket for his Winstons. He lit a Winston with a match. That was all there was to say. “We’ll never get off this road,” I said. “What a lousy birthday,” Dundun said. MacInnes was white and sick, holding himself tenderly. I’d seen him look like…

( MAY 1998 ) The Hanovers’ party was like all the parties, a ritual that Edison knew well. The kids swam while the adults drank, then the kids ate and went off into the various corners of the house primarily for television, then the adults ate their grilled steaks or salmon or shish kebab and drank a new wine while it got dark and they flirted. It was easy and harmless, and whoever was up was sent to the kitchen or the cooler for more potato salad or beer and returned and gave whatever man or woman whatever he or she had asked for and said as a husband or wife might, “There you are, honey. Can I get you anything else, dear?” And maybe there’d be some nudging, a…

> My definition of the truth is whatever I tell you. > Here’s a piece of advice my dad gave me: You can get a lot more out of somebody if instead of saying “Let me tell you something!” you ask: “Can I share something with you?” > I should think about that more. > A great party room has a horrible rug that you cannot destroy. > My mother didn’t intend to teach me this lesson, but I vividly remember when she told me there wasn’t a Santa Claus. I can still see myself lying in bed around Christmas when she said, “You know, Dad and I talked about it and we think you really should know at this point that there’s not a Santa Claus.” And I was…

AMES WOLK IS NOT actually a James. He’s a Jimmy. He’s always been a Jimmy, even though back in 2010, as a twenty-five-year-old actor without much more than soap-opera and TVmovie credits to his name, he decided to start going by James professionally. This producer says to me, “You know Jimmy Stewart?” Now: I love Jimmy Stewart. I fucking love Jimmy Stewart. “Guess what he was billed as?” Lo, Jimmy Wolk became James. It’s possible that one day he will become the kind of famous person people feel familiar enough with to call by a nickname, and it’s possible that his new “summer event series” on CBS, Zoo, will be the thing that does this for him. But for now Jimmy has been a lead on enough failed shows—the 2010…

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey. They were not love letters, but Lieutenant Cross was hoping, so he kept them folded in plastic at the bottom of his rucksack. In the late afternoon, after a day’s march, he would dig his foxhole, wash his hands under a canteen, unwrap the letters, hold them with the tips of his fingers, and spend the last hour of light pretending. He would imagine romantic camping trips into the White Mountains in New Hampshire. He would sometimes taste the envelope flaps, knowing her tongue had been there. More than anything, he wanted Martha to love him as he loved her, but the letters were mostly chatty, elusive on the matter…

Date of birth: May 2, 1972 Which makes him: 43 Aliases: The Rock; D.J.; the Great One; the People’s Champion; the Most Electrifying Man in All of Entertainment. Birthplace: Hayward, California Kids: One; Simone Alexandra, 13 WWE Hall of Famer heritage: Grandfather “High Chief” Peter Maivia; father Rocky Johnson. A legacy celebrated in: A traditional Polynesian tattoo spanning his back, arm, and chest. Which took: 60 hours to complete. Production company: Seven Bucks Production Which he runs alongside: His ex-wife, mother of his child, and close friend, Dany Garcia. And is named after: The amount of cash in his wallet the day he was cut from the Calgary Stampeders in 1995, effectively ending his football career. Which opened the door to: A wrestling career boasting seven WWE Championship reigns, five…

ABOUT THE JOKESTER: Even when she’s not racking up Tony nominations on Broadway (two so far) or starring as prostitute-turned-accountant Betty Dimello on Showtime’s Masters of Sex, Annaleigh Ashford has a tendency toward the theatrical. As a college student in New York City, she skipped a typical work-study job to go-go dance on the Lower East Side, where she was prophetically christened with the stage name “Hollywood Starr.” But “it wasn’t like thumpa-thumpa, club go-go dancing,” she insists. “It was more like performance art.” These days, Ashford has graduated from artistic exotic dancing to artistic public brawling: She and her actor husband have gotten into the habit of running lines from one of their favorite plays, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, on the subway. “If you catch us shouting on…

1 The Field Jacket from Tommy Hilfiger See the faded, lived-in effect? That’s the result of pigment dyeing, and this lightweight, two-tone, deep-pocketed field jacket was built to look like you’ve had it forever. Cotton jacket ($189). 2 The Bag from Shinola An optimally sized tote from the Detroit brand’s new leather-goods capsule collection. The leather is straight out of Chicago’s Horween factory, which means it’s some of the toughest stuff around. Leather bag ($895). 3 The Sweater from Billy Reid We’re not sure what we’d call the pattern on this chunky knit, but as with most things Billy Reid, it will mark the man wearing it in the best possible way. Wool-blend sweater (price available upon request). 4 The Button-Down from Thom Browne Browne has always upended our expectations…

THE BUTTERFLY CENTER AT CALLAWAY GARDENS PINE MOUNTAIN, GEORGIA Wearing bright colors, go at 9:30 in the morning, when the sun shines. Photograph the butterflies before and then as they erupt over the next few hours; they’re most active when the sun is its highest in the sky. Seek out a blue morpho, whose iridescent blue atop its wings flashes and disappears and flashes anew with each flutter. Or wait till September, when the planet’s largest collection of them is here. Hope one lands on the shiny bald dome of your head.…

( JULY 1998 ) The way she finally concluded that something was wrong with her was this: either something was really wrong with her, or something was wrong with her for irrationally worrying so much about whether something was wrong with her. The logic of this seemed airtight. She lay at night and held the conclusion in her mind and turned it this way and that and watched it make reflections of itself inside itself like a fine diamond. Read the rest at classics.esquire.com.…

( DECEMBER 1958 ) On the beach it had been slaughter. He lay in the wet sand—it was dusk—playing dead, listening to the cursing and crying around him, and feeling certain that by the time he counted five he would be dead. Three hours he lay rigid counting off fives and praying that darkness would come. And finally when night and the tide eked in and water soaked inside his boots, he began to crawl, inch by inch, pulling at sand. He did not know where he was headed, but pulled along the beach figuring that moving was better than nothing—gambling in a way, for though he knew he might run smack into death, there was a fifty-fifty chance he was leaving the bastard behind. Read the rest at classics.esquire.com.…

( APRIL 1953 ) In the beginning, Sanford Carter was ashamed of becoming an Army cook. This was not from snobbery, at least not from snobbery of the most direct sort. During the two and a half years Carter had been in the Army he had come to hate cooks more and more. They existed for him as a symbol of all that was corrupt, overbearing, stupid, and privileged in Army life. The image which came to mind was a fat cook with an enormous sandwich in one hand, and a bottle of beer in the other, sweat pouring down a porcine face, foot on a flour barrel, shouting at the K.P.’s, “Hurry up, you men, I ain’t got all day.” More than once in those two and a half…

( AUGUST 2013 ) It’s late, and I can’t sleep. I raise a window for some spring Palo Alto air, but it doesn’t help. In bed, eyes open, I hear whispers, which makes me think of the President because we often talk in whispers. I know the whisper sound is really just my wife, Charlotte, who listens to Nirvana on her headphones all night and tends to sleep-mumble the lyrics. Charlotte has her own bed, a mechanical one. Yes, hearing the President whisper is creepy because he’s been dead now, what—three months? But even creepier is what happens when I close my eyes: I keep visualizing my wife killing herself. More like the ways she might try to kill herself, since she’s paralyzed from the shoulders down. The paralysis is…

What a delight. Kate Mara and I swallowed up by a couple quicksand cushions, on the open-air back patio of a Manhattan hotel on a Saturday. The weather: coolly humid. The birds: chirping without concern. She seems in a bit of a rush, checking out in between shaking my hand and leading us here. She’s been in New York for five days. Tomorrow she will fly to Belfast to shoot a film for two months. Her plan after this interview is to take a car back to her family’s home upstate. Ah. That’ll be nice. “Well, my family’s dog, Betty Boop, died a couple days ago.” And with that, the birds stop chirping. Not that she seems down. There’s a steady hum to her cadence. “It was kind of crazy.…

Colum McCann, one of the world’s great novelists, was in the building a couple weeks ago. Colum is a longtime friend of Esquire’s. Way back in 2003, we named him one of our Best and Brightest, and he agreed to contribute an original story to that issue to mark the occasion. And so began a long relationship. We’ve held writing contests together; we helped him launch a charitable enterprise, Narrative 4, dedicated to storytelling in the service of what Colum calls “radical empathy”; together we published a collection of stories about being a man. And over the years, we’ve published his stories and pieces of his novels; we’ve also taken great delight in and toasted his many accomplishments, like the National Book Award he won in 2009 for his novel…

Television is reinventing itself so thoroughly and so rapidly that even the most profound changes, inconceivable a few years ago, go almost unnoticed. Take the new season of True Detective, airing Sunday nights at 9:00 on HBO. As far as I know, it’s the first series in American history, or any other for that matter, with an entirely separate cast, a new director, and a stand-alone story line for its second season. Only the creator behind it and the title above it are the same. The tacit acknowledgment is that more than a continuous narrative or an ensemble of characters, True Detective is a style. That style, an overblown, self-conscious, cosmically cool pessimism, is what people will return to watch this summer. True Detective is only the spearhead of a…

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NOW FULLY UPDATED! FEATURING VICTOR CRUZ THE MAN : The wide receiver for the New York Giants and the best-dressed player in the NFL is also an ambassador for the first-ever men’s-only New York Fashion Week. For more on Cruz and his predictions for fall (re: both football and fashion), go to esquire.com/cruz. THE CLOTHES : The latest all-American goods from Todd Snyder, a designer who hails from Iowa and works in Manhattan and stands for everything righteous and good about men’s wear in the U. S. of A. He is also one of the main attractions of the inaugural New York Fashion Week: Men’s, the four-day event this summer that is finally recognizing that there’s more than enough great men’s clothing coming out of New York (and, by extension,…

IT BEGAN AS A WAY for men reeling from the Great Recession to ground themselves in the heritage and craftsmanship and palpable realness of old-school American workwear brands, but lately Americana has become something else. Somethingironic and self-satisfied and possibly even smug. To maintain a safe distance from such perils, look for variations on workwear staples. It's not a chambray or wool-flannel shirt but a softer brushed-cotton button-down. It's not a canvas workwear jacket or even a basic jean jacket but a slimmer hybrid of the two. It's not beat-up shitkickers but refined suede boots. Then Malloy, T. Z, Jay Gyllenhaal, J.…

What with Instagram, why does anybody go to fashion shows anymore? MITCHELL STEVENS LOS ANGELES Look: I love Instagram as much as the next Instagram fiend, but there’s no substitute for seeing clothes with your own eyes. And also, in New York, Milan, et al., the runway shows are only half the story. For every big-budget show there are ten lowkey events where I can see all the clothes up close and actually touch them. To feel their weights and textures and get a good sense of their nuances— you’re never going to get that from a screen. I have friends who make a big deal about wearing only “Made in America” clothes. Are clothes made here actually better made, or what? JOSH WEISS PENSACOLA, FLA. In my mind, “Made…

I once worked for a university, at the northern fringe of the Adirondacks, regrading a soccer field. Pointless summer work, crafted at the minimum wage. Most of the time there were four of us, walking behind a slow-moving pickup truck, flicking rocks from the large tilled field into the bed of the truck until it was full. Then we drove to a remote spot of land and we dumped out the rocks. Same thing, every day. It was not any kind of hell, though. After work we swam in a cold river, cooked meats on borrowed grills, drank iced-down Canadian beer, drove to distant mountain villages, music bawling from the windows of our cars just because we could. It was summer. Now I stand in the mouth of my garage…

( APRIL 1965 ) Parker’s wife was sitting on the front porch floor, snapping beans. Parker was sitting on the step, some distance away, watching her sullenly. She was plain, plain. The skin on her face was thin and drawn as tight as the skin on an onion and her eyes were gray and sharp like the points of two ice picks. Parker understood why he had married her— he couldn’t have got her any other way—but he couldn’t understand why he stayed with her now. She was pregnant and pregnant women were not his favorite kind. Nevertheless he stayed as if she had him conjured. He was puzzled and ashamed of himself. Read the rest at classics.esquire.com.…

( NOVEMBER 1960 ) On Saturday the doctor told me to stop smoking and drinking and I did. I won’t go into the commonplace symptoms of withdrawal, but I would like to point out that, standing at my window in the evening, watching the brilliant after-light and the spread of darkness, I felt, through the lack of those humble stimulants, the force of some primitive memory in which the coming of night with its stars and its moon was apocalyptic. I thought suddenly of the neglected graves of my three brothers on the mountainside and that death is a loneliness much crueler than any loneliness hinted at in life. The soul (I thought) does not leave the body, but lingers with it through every degrading stage of decomposition and neglect,…

( JULY 1973 ) The girl is twenty-five. It has not been very long since her divorce but she cannot remember the man who used to be her husband. He was probably nice. She will tell the child this, at any rate. Once he lost a fifty-dollar pair of sunglasses while surf casting off of Gay Head and felt badly about it for days. He did like kidneys, that was one thing. He loved kidneys for weekend lunch. She would voyage through supermarkets, her stomach sweetly sloped, her hair in a twist, searching for fresh kidneys for this young man, her husband. When he kissed her, his kisses, or so she imagined, would have the faint odor of urine. Understandably, she did not want to think about this. It hardly…

( APRIL 1998 ) She lied to Louis, telling him she’d picked up a private tutorial in Queens. Shane insisted on paying her to offset suspicions. Maybe that’s why she let him touch her the way she did. He had a signet ring that he liked to press over her eyelids, branding her with his initials so that his ownership would be clear every time she blinked. Read the rest at classics.esquire.com.…

It was the moment we were waiting for and the moment we dreaded. Stephanie Lee had been hospitalized since the day before Christmas Eve 2014, at Mount Sinai, in New York. She had a room on the palliative-care floor. The doctors who cared for her were at pains to say that they could make her more comfortable but that they could not treat her cancer. She was taking massive doses of powerful pain medications. She was eating much less and sleeping much more. When a doctor described his hopes for her in terms not of getting better but simply of getting home to Mississippi, she was at peace with both what he said and what he didn’t say. Then, not quite a week after she was admitted, everything changed. On…

Store Information For the items featured in Esquire, please consult the Web site or call the number provided. Style, p. 45: Todd Snyder jacket, sweater, and sweatpants, toddsnyder.com. Common Projects sneakers, barneys.com. P. 46: Bonobos jacket, sweater, and chinos, bonobos.com. Hamilton shirt, hamiltonshirts.com. Thom Browne shoes, thombrowne.com. Tommy Hilfiger jacket, tommy.com. Shinola tote bag, shinola.com. P. 48: AG jacket and pants, agjeans.com. J. Crew shirt, and Alden for J. Crew boots, jcrew.com. Tommy Hilfiger belt, tommy.com. Billy Reid sweater, billyreid.com. Thom Browne shirt, barneys.com. P. 50: Theory jacket, theory.com. Michael Kors shirt, michaelkors.com. Orley pants, orley. us. Freemans Sporting Club tie, freemanssportingclub.com. Florsheim oxfords, florsheim.com. Public School sweatshirt, barneys.com. Coach bag, coach.com. John Varvatos jacket, trousers, vest, and shirt, johnvarvatos.com. Johnston & Murphy shoes, johnstonmurphy.com. P. 52: Michael Bastian vest,…