Innehållsförteckning för October 2013 från Esquire

57 DAVID GRANGER (b. 1956) EDITOR IN CHIEF, ESQUIRE THE LIFE OF MAN AN EXPLANATORY NOTE Eighty years. It's the life of a man. You live a good long life, you get to eighty. Maybe you don't feel cheated when the bell rings. A great Esquire writer, Tom Chiarella, wrote me something like that when we were trying to figure out what to do to take notice of Esquire's eightieth. The life of a man. It became the notion around which this issue was built. So we set out to create a portfolio: eighty photographs of eighty extraordinary men, from age eighty to one. A portrait of the American man now. Yes, it's a portrait of what we look like, but it's also a portrait that shows how we got…

Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. —Ernest Hemingway, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," August 1936 It tasted like a first—the first time you dove into an ocean wave or made something good or touched her lips. —Michael Paterniti, "Ferran Adrià," July 2001 They danced in the grass, feet squelching, his hands on her throat. —Stephen King and Joe Hill, "In the Tall Grass," August 2012 Any of you gents ever get a hard-on, listening to those guns? —William Styron, "Love Day," August 1985 In adolescence, I had only to say "God," and I would think of my groin. —Norman Mailer, "A Piece of Harlot's Ghost," July 1988 Now a man can crack in many ways—can crack…

DEAD THINGS THAT AREN'T ACTUALLY DEAD Books • CNN • Voice mail • The papacy • Steroids • Kennedys in politics • Don Johnson's career • Mars • "George" • Deleted tweets • PEDs • Bud Selig • Everything we've ever sent or received via e-mail. Including attachments. Especially attachments. The publishing industry's initial reaction to the digital revolution was to mimic it. Paper quality got thinner and cheaper. The design in many magazines got more cluttered, spastic. Often these were not books and magazines people wanted to own. They were soulless facsimiles of the disposable digital medium that was replacing them. Swallow Magazine is different. When you pull it out of the envelope, you can smell the bright blue ink that coats its edges. It has heft. Its pages…

NO. 28 SHTICK OF OUR TIME The comedian and cancer survivor Tig Notaro on Conan O'Brien this year: "I went through a lot last year. Not to be totally intense, heavy, serious, but, you know, I learned that it's important to be present and live your life—sorry, I forgot to turn my phone off… . Love the people you're with and enjoy your life and just to be present. Uh, I'm sorry, my friend sends me the funniest cat pictures." When I say that I believe the best stand-up comics are true prophets, I'm not referring to Albert Brooks warning us all that Saddam Hussein was training "kamikaze" pilots, an alarm he sounded in Esquire in 1999. Brooks wasn't joking, either; we were eating lunch, and he was kvetching about…

NO. 42 THE TOTALLY FED-UP DEMOCRAT "Dr. Furth, I am concerned that your testimony at this committee has been meretricious. And I want an explanation. I want you to sit down and do it in writing." —Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R. I.) to a Heritage Foundation economist during a Senate Budget Committee hearing in June We have a problem with our Republicans. They don't much want to govern anymore, and we can't govern without them. This has been a long time coming, but at some point in recent years, America's Republicans, especially elected officials but also a large part of the rank and file, stopped seeing Democrats and many other Americans as their political opponents and started viewing them instead as the enemy, a nemesis bent on destroying the country. Certainly…

NO. 51 THE SLOW RISE OF "SLAPDICK" Back in 2010, Coach Rex Ryan compared his New York Jets to some symbolic "slapdick team." _ In 2011, a reporter used the term during an interview with the Ohio State University defensive coordinator. _ In 2013, Baltimore Orioles center fielder Adam Jones used it in a tweet to refer to a racist fan. There's a good argument to be made that the rise of professional sports and the decline of organized religion over the last century or so are not coincidental. Once, when we needed relief from our troubles, we looked to the sky. We saw the impossibilities around us and called them reasons and signs. Then science turned men into gods, and up until 1998 or so, they answered our prayers…

NO. 62 THE PERFECT SHOE The clean lines and easy curve of the toe; the artful fade of the hand-rubbed patination; the subtle pebbling of the calfskin leather; and the brogueing—oh, the brogueing! The perfect shoe. Leather shoes ($625) by Church's. THE MAN WHO FOUNDED POLO WITH A COUPLE NECKTIES IS STILL ASCENDANT 46 YEARS LATER, AND NO AMERICAN MEN'S-WEAR DESIGNER HAS COME ALONG WHO CAN CHALLENGE HIS INFLUENCE AND ENDURANCE. NOT THAT THERE AREN'T A FEW DESIGNERS TODAY WHO JUST MIGHT HAVE AN EMPIRE IN THEM YET. TOMMY HILFIGER Signature: The Royal Tenenbaums meets Ordinary People In his favor: Strong runway collections and ad campaigns of late. How he might be king: Getting those great suits from the runway onto the streets. JOHN VARVATOS Signature: Detroit Rock City…

"BE BRAVE: LAYER COLOR UPON COLOR TO BUILD A LOOK THAT SAYS YOU HAVE THE SPIRIT TO EXPERIMENT, THE IMAGINATION TO BLEND VIVID COLORS INTO A PLEASING COMBINATION. THE TRICK IS TO BUILD AROUND ONE ITEM. USE YOUR EYES. BE CONFIDENT. WITH GOOD COMMON SENSE YOU CAN PUT YOURSELF TOGETHER IN AS FORCEFUL A MANNER AS THE INTREPID MEN ON THESE PAGES." FEBRUARY 1977 "WATCH THE LENGTH OF YOUR SUIT JACKET. THIS IS A RATHER TRICKY DETAIL. IF IT IS TOO SHORT IT WILL TEND TO SAW YOU IN HALF, AND IF TOO LONG WILL SHORTEN THE APPEARANCE OF YOUR LEGS." APRIL 1940 On Lucas Flores Piran: Double-breasted cashmere coat ($2,350), two-button wool jacket ($2,050), and cotton shirt ($380) by Gucci; cotton jeans ($78) by Levi's; suede monk-straps ($205) by…

"Free-spirited" was what the sporting press called Joe Willie Namath. There were other hard-living, gun-slinging NFL quarterbacks before him—Hall of Famers like Bobby Layne and Sonny Jurgensen—but their careers didn't span the transformation of the NFL into a civil religion, which coincided with the whole damned culture blowing up real good, so good that in the pages of this very magazine, in 1969, you had William F. Buckley writing about Joe W. Namath and opening his piece with Bill sizing up Joe, both of them in the audience at the off-Broadway debut of Oh! Calcutta!, featuring live nude actors plus sketches by Samuel Beckett and John Lennon. Such a scene today is inconceivable—at least until Dinesh D'Souza and RGIII drop Ecstasy and turn up at a Kanye concert. In truth,…

Let me tell you about the men on this page. Starting with the eldest, we have a landscape architect from Villanova, Pennsylvania, named Kevin Bacon. The son of a schoolteacher and a planning commissioner, Bacon moved to New York City at seventeen to pursue a career as an actor, but returned home in 1980 after losing the camp-counselor role in Friday the 13th to superstar Daniel Stern, partly because Bacon ate a bad meatball sub before his audition. Bacon is known for specializing in sustainable rock gardens. To his right, we have Jonathan Franzen, who runs social media for Odwalla fruit juices; Cal Ripken Jr., a hospital administrator in St. Louis; Woody Harrelson, who leads Segway tours in Hawaii; and Matthew Broderick, an account manager at Ogilvy & Mather advertising.…

Circle, straight line, great arc, long walk, horse race, pie—whatever shape you give to your own life, forty is the turn. You turn forty. You don't reach forty, you don't make it there, or even arrive. You turn. In the measure of a life, it is halfway. You turn—into it, around it, through it. So the age is the expression of an action, a verb describing the persistent movement of a life, and a descriptor of that point, implying a correction, a change of angle. You sit there—on your deck with an icy glass, alone or amidst the keenings of children, in a house you bought, or in a field, on land you want, at your desk, or on a plane—with what you have made for yourself, with the people…

I sweated through Army basic training in the sticky heat of summertime Georgia at twenty-seven, which made me an old man in our platoon of infantry recruits. Most of the others were a decade younger, and many had been in high school just weeks before. War would define their entry into manhood. For a young man of twenty-five today, the country has always been at war. So it was for Daniel Rodriguez, the improbable walk-on wide receiver for Clemson University who turned nineteen in Kuwait, twenty in Iraq, and twenty-two in the remote mountains of Afghanistan. He came home from the war soul-wounded, angry, and confused. He drank himself through many low months and thought about killing himself, as two of his Army friends would do. Which sounds a lot…

PROGRESS DOESN'T SAUNTER into the world; it staggers. Grown-ups don't often change their minds about the important political and social questions of their time. Change arrives because their children are born into a whole new set of assumptions different from those of their parents. For the little actors and the prodigies and the immigrants and the sons of Marines who are the future, the presidency of Barack Obama will be no big deal. Presidents, in their mind, will be men like the son of a Kenyan goatherd and, one hopes and assumes, eventually women, like a Kansas single mother. How could it be any other way? He's what a winner looks like. Obama wins. His name and that verb go together. He killed Osama bin Laden. He rammed through health…

Barack Obama's fifty-two-year share of the past eighty years almost precisely spans the profound transformation of American society from the oppression of Jim Crow to the elevation of a black man to the White House. As much as any American alive, he has experienced, and even embodies, the sweep and scope of change during those decades. As with the other prominent men we photographed for this issue, we asked the president a couple questions about his life. We obviously have seen extraordinary changes in the country since 1961. When you were born, for instance, laws in a couple dozen states prohibited interracial relationships. Growing up, were you aware of how recently your own parents' relationship would have been illegal? And what effect did that have on you? I grew up…

THINGS THAT AREN'T ACTUALLY THINGS Millennial incompetence • The Killing • Michele Bachmann • Attachment parenting • The Mumfordization of music • Hurricane Sandy–induced action on global warming • The latest from Maureen Dowd • Steven Soderbergh's retirement • The sorrows of the politician's wife • The 2013 summer-blockbuster-movie slate • The end of meat • "Happy Anniversary!" NO. 01 We live in a time of short attention spans and long stories. The short attention spans are seen as inevitable, the consequence of living our lives in thrall to flickering streams of information. The long stories are the surprise, as is the persistence of the audience for them. I would submit that these are not contradictory phenomena but rather connected. Our attention spans have become shorter because there are more…

IN 1996, CHICAGO COMICS AMY POEHLER, MATT BESSER, IAN ROBERTS, AND MATT WALSH ESTABLISHED THE BEST-KNOWN INCARNATION OF THE UPRIGHT CITIZENS BRIGADE COMEDY GROUP, WHOSE LOOSE, ECLECTIC STYLE HAS INFORMED THE LAST DECADE OF "SMART" SITCOMS Most of the comedians in the chart above should register somewhere between "Amy Poehler" and "that guy from that thing" on the recognizability scale, but if you see an unfamiliar face, he or she is likely a writer or producer on your favorite show. No. 14 Those American People! "The American people have the right to 1 stop leaning forward hungrily for information 2 and hold their elected officials accountable. 3 They understand there are certain things that [are] not appropriate for the bad guys to know, 4 which experts agree 5 will kill…

The Tweeted Recipe @chefhopkins BISCUITS 1c White Lily self rising flour 2T Cold butter ⅓c Buttermilk > Cut in butter, stir in buttermilk > Roll, cut, bake 9m at 500 > EAT (Tweeted on August 7, 2013, by Atlanta chef Linton Hopkins, of Restaurant Eugene) Plenty of chefs know their way around a fish; few, however, know how to navigate an estuary. Estuaries are those murky coastal transition zones where rivers flow into oceans, where fresh and salty water mix to create the kind of habitat that makes the right kind of chef really excited. A chef like Spike Gjerde, who sources from the Chesapeake Bay for his restaurant Woodberry Kitchen, in Baltimore, and then donates all his used oyster shells to construct reefs that enable repopulation. Estuaries,…

Number 46 A Brief Intermission Brought to you by Alyssa Miller SUGGESTED ALTERNATIVES TO "HOT" (In ascending order of danger) Lovely • Gorgeous • Alluring • Enticing • Exquisite • Striking • Stunning • Fetching • Tempting • Captivating • Radiant • Millerian • Smokin' • Deadly A TAXONOMY OF TWITTER JOKES ON TWITTER, WE HAVE ENTERED THE AGE OF METAHUMOR AND ANTIJOKES. #KNOCKKNOCK #WHOSTHERE #POSTMODERNPUNCHLINES #DRIVESAFELY #TRYTHEVEAL. HERE, A SHORT GUIDE TO DIFFERENT SUBSPECIES OF TWITTER NONJOKES. The Extraordinarily Banal Observation About Life "Whistling is okay" —Michael Ian Black (@michaelianblack) Intentionally Bad Word Play Followed by Acknowledgment of Said Badness "Doctor Who??? You got that right! So many actors have played him I don't know which way is up! More like Doctor Huh?? #TVjokes #lol #humour." —Rob Delaney (@robdelaney)…

NO. 55 A DEFINITIVE NOTE ON THE XBOX ONE At some point, you might own an Xbox One. And you probably won't use it to play many games. Microsoft is turning its gaming system into a whole-home media hub. That you can play Madden on it is just a bonus. If you're into such things. A TABLE OF TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENTS THROUGHOUT TIME Fire Wheel Horse Electricity Penicillin Steam engine Sliced bread Facebook 1. You'll be hearing even more about "wearable tech." Google Glass, health monitors, the iWatch, the everybody-else watch … as much as you'll be talking to your gadgets in the next five years, you'll also be wearing them. 2. OLED isn't going to happen. The newish TV technology, which lets TV sets be millimeters thin with fantastic light…

OTHER KEY BRITISH IMPORTS One Direction • The Hobbit • Top Gear • The Guardian • Cadbury Fruit & Nut bar • A glass of Lagavulin, neat • "Cumberbatch" jokes • The word bloody of late for some reason • Our whole language, actually • The smirk • Another Lagavulin, thanks. THE BRITISH ARE BECOMING MORE AMERICAN THAN THE AMERICANS. BASTARDS. ICONIC AMERICANS PORTRAYED BY BRITS Clive Owen as Hemingway in Hemingway & Gellhorn Stephen Graham as Al Capone on Boardwalk Empire Freddie Highmore as Norman Bates on Bates Motel Christian Bale as Batman Henry Cavill as Superman Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln Piers Morgan as Larry King CULTURAL IMPORTS Downton Abbey Luther James Bond Doctor Who Harry Potter Sherlock Holmes…

THE LIFE SPAN of Esquire is now roughly the same as the life span of a man: eighty years, from our birth in 1933—when Franklin Roosevelt was inaugurated to his first term as president—to 2013, when Barack Obama was inaugurated to his second. It is in fact the life span of the modern history of America. That history is inside us. It is in the faces of those around us. To celebrate the eightieth anniversary of Esquire, we have photographed eighty prominent Ameri-can men (and boys and squirts), one born in each year of the magazine's history. Most, even some of the youngest, have left their mark on the country, and together their faces are a breathing timeline—from those born into the astonishments and traumas of the last century to…

1998 It was a big year for Osama bin Laden. And for the impeachment of a president. But if Clinton's enemies hadn't been so determined to remove him from office, might September 11 be just another date on the calendar? 67 BILL CLINTON (b. 1946) FORTY-SECOND PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES; FOUNDER OF THE CLINTON FOUNDATION AND HOST OF THE ANNUAL CLINTON GLOBAL INITIATIVE Best advice he's gotten: "It was in a conversation with Nelson Mandela. I talked to him about how he overcame his bitterness and hatred and resentment, and he said, 'You know what? People can take a lot from you. They can take everything except your mind and your heart. Those things you have to give away. I decided not to give them away, and neither should…

Any birth year, of course, can claim its world-beaters and its notorious. But you can't help but be struck by the unique spirit of the men born in the year of "I Want to Hold Your Hand," the March on Washington, and the assassination of President Kennedy. He turns fifty this year, and he is the greatest basketball player ever, a hard-ass Republican, a bearded musical mystic, a B-movie genius, a genial leading man, an Irish Catholic who made his name in politics by rising to lead a black city, a fashion designer who makes clothes "so crazy-bananas beautiful that the air gets sucked right out of the room." He is Brad Pitt. And Conan O'Brien. Johnny Depp and Rick Rubin. He is Michael Jordan. He is Eric Cantor. "He's…

THE REAL RICK ROSS IS NOT A RAPPER. That's what it says on his T-shirt, silk-screened attractively in two colors. The bold letters in black ink frame his image—bald, bearded, and somewhat bug-eyed with the fervor of his comeback. The gold ink requires a second stencil. Depicted on his head is a crown, cocked just so and perfectly aligned, the kingpin in exile, and below that his autograph, the excessively flamboyant signature of a man who once made millions a day selling cocaine but only began learning to read, behind bars, at age twenty-eight. Eventually he would read himself to freedom. On a sunny morning in southern California, Rick Ross is driving from his cramped but rent-free apartment along tony Ocean Avenue in Long Beach toward some pressing new business…

THE LIFE OF MAN 16 GREYSON CHANCE (b. 1997) SINGER; YOUTUBE SENSATION Best advice he's gotten: "So I performed at the White House, right? It blew my mind. And I remember Michelle Obama said, 'Hey, kid, keep on doing what you're doing because it's working out. I like it.' And so that's my favorite piece of advice: The First Lady told me to keep on making music." 15 RICO RODRIGUEZ (b. 1998) ACTOR, ABC'S MODERN FAMILY Best day so far: "I think the best day of my life would probably have to be when my son was born. Ah, I remember it like it was yesterday. . . . Nah, I'm kidding." 14 THOMAS SUAREZ (b. 1999) APP DEVELOPER; CREATOR OF "EARTH FORTUNE" AND "BUSTIN JIEBER" Best advice he's gotten:…

There is a boy in Baltimore whose name is Rubin. He is a year and a half old. He lives in a small apartment with his father and mother, three sisters, and a brother. His father works a variety of shifts at a hotel. His father's car has been stolen twice in as many years. Many of the cars parked in front of their building bear bumper stickers with the exhortations against violence and crime common in violent and crime-ridden cities. Yet look at Rubin Bieleli. Listen to his father and mother, Mbunza and Kalanga. They will tell you something about America and America's chances. For Mbunza, Baltimore is not violent or crime-ridden. For Mbunza, Baltimore represents one word—"Peace. There is no fighting. There is no gunfire at night." For…

If it weren't for a woman on a train, Mark Mann would have been a potter. Maybe a painter. But one day, at 16, happy with his potting or painting future, the Glasgow native found himself on a train to Edinburgh, sitting next to a beautiful woman. They got to talking. The woman studied photography at Manchester Polytechnic. Which meant that soon after, Mann was studying photography at Manchester Polytechnic, too. Things didn't work out with the woman, but after that day Mann's path was set—and the Life of Man project became much less reliant on clay. Mann moved to New York, where he shot celebrity portraiture for magazines such as Vibe, Spin, Billboard, and Complex. After two decades of traditional film and digital photography, he traded in his equipment…

INEXPLICABLY PERSISTENT TRENDS Zombies • Fun rednecks • Porn as a gateway to fame • Kardashiana • Racism as joke material on prime-time shows • Mixology • Poetry tattoos • The supposed rash of sluttiness among college-aged women • Nickelodeon-borne sex symbols • Folk rock 05 The Broken illuminate the unbroken. I wrote that line a couple years ago, in an article about a man named Henry Molaison, whose brain my grandfather partially destroyed. The destruction was well-intentioned: My grandfather was a neurosurgeon, and Henry came to him in the early 1950s suffering from a terrible case of epilepsy. My grandfather decided that the best way to treat Henry would be to perform an experimental resection of a large portion of his medial temporal lobes, including a small seahorse-shaped structure…

From left: Cotton shirt ($148) by J. Crew; cotton khakis ($68) by Dockers; suede boots ($198) by Sperry Top-Sider; leather belt ($128) by Coach. // Two-button wool-and-cashmere jacket ($2,250) by Ermenegildo Zegna; cotton shirt ($198) by Paul Stuart; cotton jeans ($165) by J Brand; leather shoes ($1,120) by Esquivel; leather belt ($225) by John Varvatos. // Two-button wool suit ($995) by Hugo; cotton shirt ($348) by Alessandro Gherardi; wool tie ($70) by J. Crew; leather shoes ($720) by Fratelli Rossetti; leather belt ($380) by Ermenegildo Zegna. NO. 22 THE MALE ANKLE In the increasingly permissive culture of men's style, the ankle has emerged as the male equivalent of cleavage. Some men don't want to be taken seriously. The ample flash of ankle is their silent rebellion, and for their efforts…

"GUESS WHAT TASTEMAKERS OF THE WORLD, DAFT PUNK IS NOTHING BUT ELECTRO EURO DISCO. I WOULD PAY TO WATCH @SLAYER EAT THEM." —@RAINNWILSON BECAUSE EVERY MAN SHOULD HAVE A RELIABLE MENU OF SMALL DELIGHTS AT HIS DISPOSAL: THINGS THAT MAKE HIM SMILE, THINGS THAT MAKE LIFE MORE TOLERABLE—ENJOYABLE EVEN! DRUNK REESE WITHERSPOON Yamazaki 12 C+ Ice THE RADIANT SMILE OF JUSTICE SONIA SOTOMAYOR The utter superiority one feels—even over 18-wheelers—when one drives a very large pickup truck. A Chevy Silverado, for instance. THE FRANTIC INTERIOR MONOLOGUES OF GEORGE SAUNDERS'S CHARACTERS "Was she special? Did she consider herself special? Oh, gosh, she didn't know. In the history of the world, many had been more special than her. Helen Keller had been awesome; Mother Teresa was amazing; Mrs. Roosevelt was quite chipper…

Ten years ago at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, California, I sat across from Steve Jobs and suggested that asking a generation of music fans raised on Napster and Kazaa to pay 99 cents a song was going to be a tough sell. He argued that for practicality and karma, people would rather pay for music than steal it and that, until the release of the just-launched iTunes Music Store, stealing had been their best option. In retrospect, we were both right: 25 billion downloads later, the iTunes Store thrives, yet the perception that music is free hasn't waned. The notion of stealing music seems quaint now; stealing implies something has value in the first place. What Jobs and the major players in the record business did a decade ago in…

I picture them in Laguna Beach kitchens eating toaster pizzas. Standing at Formica counters with moms in blue eye shadow. With kittens on the floor or old cats. I don't know why, but all these girls, even the ones I know are from New York, I think of with palm trees outside their middle-class windows. They're 27, and they were all born in 1986, which is the year of the tiger. And like the tiger, their spirits are hot-striped. Like Bill Buckner in 1986, their mistakes are elegiac. Like Top Gun, their vrooms through America are iconic and sunglassed. Like Ronald Reagan, they are political after they weren't. You've got Lady Gaga, Lena Dunham, the Olsen twins, Megan Fox, Lindsay Lohan, Lauren Conrad, Heidi Montag. Then there's Amanda Bynes: I…

Changes in Assholery (1933 to 2013) ASSHOLES SONS OF BITCHES JAMOKES NO. 78 When I was a kid, I knew who the assholes were. My father would tell me. The guy renting an apartment from us who ran up the account at the hardware store then refused to pay his last four months' rent because of an argument over an auger. A drunk pro-lifer who refused to stop talking at cocktail parties. The menagerie of people who wrote to the newspaper arguing their hobbyhorse passions: gun control, commingling of the races, taxes, uncontrolled blaring of music from car windows. "Asshole," my dad would mutter as he folded the paper on them, or closed the door on them, or turned away from a conversation over a mutual fence. And when prodded,…

12:30 P.M., CENTRAL STANDARD TIME Colonel James Swindal, a handsome forty-six-year-old carpenter's son from Alabama and the pilot of Air Force One, sits in the communications shack behind his cockpit, pushing back a roast-beef sandwich. Two million dollars' worth of the latest technology buzzes around him, teletype machines and radios and three separate phone patches. He's half-listening to the radio, Charlie frequency, to the chatter of Secret Service agents narrating the progress of President John F. Kennedy's motorcade through Dallas. Swindal's copilot, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Hanson, has left the plane, taking advantage of the short stop at Love Field to pay a quick visit to his ailing mother-in-law. As Swindal waits, he brings on only a light load of fuel for this afternoon's scheduled flight to Austin, part of the…

56 (b. 1957) anchor, today, 1997–present INTERVIEWED BY CAL FUSSMAN > I was always more interested in asking people about themselves than I was telling them about me. > There's a difference between good chemistry and a bond. Chemistry is something you have with somebody you meet—or you don't. It's an intangible. It may be superficial. It's much harder to put your finger on than a bond. Broadcasting through 9/11 together, like Katie Couric and I did, creates a bond. > It's a weird characteristic, and I don't know where it comes from, but the bigger the interview, the calmer I get. > I learned more from my dad by osmosis than by any talk we ever had. He was the most reliable person I've ever met. > There was…

(b. 1969) ESQUIRE INVITED A GROUP OF PREEMINENT FORTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLDS TO A MASS BIRTHDAY PARTY TO CELEBRATE THE YEAR THAT GAVE THE WORLD WOODSTOCK, A MAN ON THE MOON, AND THEM. THE FORTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLDS DECLINED, AND WE WERE LEFT TO IMAGINE THE CONVERSATIONS AND COCKTAILS THAT MIGHT'VE BEEN. Front row, from left: Cory Booker, Jennifer Lopez, Zach Galifianakis, Tucker Carlson, Christy Turlington, Matthew McConaughey, and Vern Troyer. Middle row, from left: Ice Cube, Paul Rudd, and Sheryl Sandberg. Back row, from left: Peter Dinklage, P. Diddy, Jennifer Aniston, Mariano Rivera, Jay-Z, Wes Anderson, Cate Blanchett, Patton Oswalt, Tyler Perry, and Brett Favre. We also imagine that Bobby Brown, Jon Meacham, and Dr. Sanjay Gupta had to leave the party early.…

26 (b. 1987) DIPLOMAT, LAWYER, ACTIVIST INTERVIEWED BY CAL FUSSMAN The son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, Farrow graduated from Bard College at fifteen with a double major in philosophy and biology. In 2009, he graduated from Yale Law School, where he edited the Yale Journal of International Affairs. He has served as a UNICEF spokesman in Angola, Nigeria, and Sudan, and as special advisor for global youth issues to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. As a Rhodes scholar, he studied international development at Oxford. He also writes and records country songs. > My earliest memory is nursing and struggling to see the colored lights making up the map of the world, the famous backdrop for Larry King's TV show. There's an I-want-to-do-all-things-at-once kind of theme to it. The…

On February 7, 2011, four-year-old Logan Parker had a new immune system donated to him. For six weeks at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, he holed up in a tiny antiseptic room not much smaller than the living room of his family's cramped Ocean Township, New Jersey, apartment. Logan was already withered and poisoned by chemotherapy. This transplant would hopefully be the last treatment for his leukemia. His parents slept beside him as the new bone marrow acclimated to his body. They played Xbox with him and comforted him and prayed. And Logan got better. Then came the lesion. November, right around his fifth birthday. It was small and dark, a sign that the leukemia was back. Chemotherapy had slowed the growth of the cancer swarming his blood but his…