Innehållsförteckning för November 2013 från Esquire

Dayum. That Elsa Hosk is so fking bilaterally symmetrical. That makes me think she experienced low oxidative stress in the womb, meaning she is likely to be healthy, meaning she is likely to be fertile. So if I breed with her, I have a good chance of spreading my DNA. And that, my friends, is why Hosk is a woman we love. At least, so goes the argument of evolutionary psychology—perhaps the trendiest of scientific theories about humans right now. Evolutionary psychology says we are ruled by our unconscious caveman instincts. Big lips, big eyes, a small chin, and unblemished skin are all signs of youth. A low hip-to-waist ratio might mean better childbearing capacity. As for our attraction to breasts, one theory says they resemble the buttocks—the real Paleolithic…

You just say Richard Pryor. You don't say stand-up comedian Richard Pryor. Or the late Richard Pryor. Just Richard Pryor. Hasn't worked in 20 years, been dead for 10, and he's still that big. So this is a review of Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World that Made Him (Algonquin, $26), a biography of Richard Pryor by brothers David and Joe Henry, who set out to make a biopic but ended up writing an addictively readable study of the path of this outsize talent who traveled the wide way through recent American history. Richard Pryor. You still know him. And you never really did. There were always two essential truths about Richard Pryor, depending on whom you listened to, even (no, especially) the man himself: He didn't take any…

THE BEST AND WORST (BUT MOSTLY BEST!) OF A BIG YEAR IN GROOMING BEST DEODORANT RECIPE FOR MEN ALCOHOL-FREE ANTIPERSPIRANT DEODORANT ($22; recipeformenusa.com) > Has a mild, pleasant scent, like lemons and flowers. > A liquid applied via roll-on. Not slimy, and it leaves no clumping or visible product. BEST FACE WASH ROYAL APOTHIC HEROES & ARISTOCRATS FACE CLEANSER ($34; royalapothic.com) > Very light. Gentle. > Smells great, like subtle citrus. BEST SHOWER GEL BULLDOG ORIGINAL SHOWER GEL ($10; us.meetthebulldog.com) > Washes away easily. > Smells a lot like rosemary, fruit, and Vicks VapoRub, which is nice. BEST SHAVING CREAM HARRY'S SHAVE CREAM ($8; harrys.com) > Lightweight, sticks to skin. > Smells like a barbershop. BEST SOAP ÊSHAVE MOISTURIZING BATH SOAP…

I JUST BOUGHT A NEW OMEGA SPEEDMASTER [FIG. 1, OMEGA SPEEDMASTER DARK SIDE OF THE MOON SPECIAL EDITION, $12,000] AND I LOVE IT, THOUGH IT SEEMS TO RUN A LITTLE FAST. I'VE HEARD THAT NEW WATCHES MAY NEED TO BE BROKEN IN FOR A FEW WEEKS. IS THAT TRUE, AND IF SO, WHY? ANONYMOUS NEW YORK, N. Y. The experts will tell you the lubricating oils that minimize friction among all the moving parts in a mechanical watch might need a few days to settle into the right nooks and crannies before the watch reaches optimum accuracy. It's worth noting that watchmakers have spent several hundred years laboring to improve the accuracy of mechanical timepieces. A superlative chronometer, certified by COSC, allows a maximum margin of error of a few…

Twenty places you should eat tonight! • Esquire's Chef of the Year • Veal parmigiana • A legendary restaurant family • Chinese food, German food, and bar food • And pretzels • A heated debate about tipping • And Esquire's 2013 Restaurant of the Year There is just too much. There are just too many exciting phenomena happening in the world of American dining right now. Fabulous Peruvian food, a German wurst palace, lots of shrimp and grits, the continued onslaught of Italian. Cronuts. To try to ascribe a singular meaning to it all would be like trying to drink a pork chop. So we've done something far more useful: distilled what's important and innovative and fun right now into a simple list, A to Z. Twenty astonishing new restaurants…

ACTOR, 77, PASADENA, CALIFORNIA INTERVIEWED BY CAL FUSSMAN, AUGUST 23, 2013 > On the morning I had to shoot John Wayne, he leaned in to me with a little Jim Beam on his breath—but sober—and said, "Oh, they're going to hate you for this." I said, "Maybe, but in Berkeley I'm a fucking hero." He put his arm around me, turned to a set of ninety people, and said, "That's why this prick is in my movie. Because he understands bad guys are funny. Otherwise, we wouldn't be talking about them 150 years later." > I'd eat broccoli if it had hollandaise sauce on it. > I've never booed anybody in my whole life. In the arena, they're doing something I can't do. > You can argue to me about…

HE LIVES IN A TOWN THE LOCALS CALL "RIFLE CITY": Winchester, Kentucky. On one shoulder, there's a tattoo of a skull with a knife in its teeth and a bouquet of grenades dangling under its chin, a tribute to his grandpa's service in Vietnam. But the ribbon for a legend is blank because he never could figure out what he wanted it to say. On his other shoulder he's got a Celtic Green Man made of leaves, and he has a place on his forearm where the skin seems to peel back to show machine parts. His old man used to be a military cop, then a prison guard. His mom hung out with bikers. They divorced. He was homeless for a while then got himself together and went back…

DOUG STANHOPE SCOTT RAAB TALKS TO THE MOST FEARLESS MAN IN COMEDY ABOUT LOUIS C. K., METH, CHARITY, JERRY SEINFELD, DR. DREW, THE DESERT, AND LIES Late afternoon, the balcony of the penthouse suite at the Thompson LES hotel on Manhattan's Lower East Side. SCOTT RAAB: I thought you'd look haggard. You're not haggard. DOUG STANHOPE: I timed my meds right. SR: You want a bottle of something? DS: I got nine shots in my travel bag. You know that quart bag for your liquids? That holds ten shots of vodka. SR: Will that sustain you? DS: Yeah. SR: How old are you? DS: Forty-six. The first thing I think of when I wake up is how close I am to death. But then it gets better during the day.…

A CORGI GOES TO A JOB-PLACEment agency to look for work. The man behind the desk says, "A talking dog! I'll fix you up with a job in no time." After a few minutes on the phone, he declares, "Here you go. You start at the circus on Monday." The corgi replies, "That's no good for me. I'm a plumber." ABOUT THE JOKESTER: Jaimie Alexander, the 29-year-old Texan who plays Sif, Thor's loyal sidekick, in this month's sequel, Thor: The Dark World, enjoys tackling most stunts, but she found one stunt a little unnerving: the use of her likeness to market the movie. "For Thor, there was a Slurpee cup that had my body attached to a straw. It's kind of inappropriate. You can drink out of me." So she…

Q: MY WIFE WANTS TO TRY ROLE-PLAY. CAN YOU GIVE ME A FEW TIPS SO I DON'T COME OFF AS A DOOFUS? First, tell her you can't do anything until you see a script. This will buy you some time to ask for lots of notes (and do say "notes") about your character—his background, his education, his political leanings—anything you think will help put her off the idea completely. If it becomes apparent that she has no specific role in mind for you, it's safe to assume (after throwing a small fit) she simply wants the two of you, or, more specifically, you, to act a little differently during sex. Perhaps she feels one of you (whom I'll call "you") could stand to be a little livelier overall and maybe…

New = Old THE POPULAR CULTURE THAT IS ACTUALLY POPULAR INCLUDING 2 BROKE GIRLS, TWO AND A HALF MEN, AND THREE KINDS OF NCIS The great glory of American culture is that there's always something new on. The poet Ezra Pound defined modernism as a drive to "make it new"; New York and Los Angeles have lived out that injunction with single-minded devotion. Now more than ever, American culture seems to be caught up in a moment of intense innovation: This period in television has been called a golden age often enough that it amounts to a cliché; the Internet has made more music more accessible than ever before; and this past summer, you had to go to the movies eighteen times before having to watch a blockbuster a second…

THE FIRST HOUR: THOUGHTS ON PENMANSHIP, BLOODLESS CAREERISM, AND SLEEPING Four-fifty on a Thursday afternoon, deep in a shadowy bar at a hotel called the Nomad, downtown Manhattan, and Scarlett Johansson actually wants to write. I give her a little hotel pad, maybe four-by-six, which she grabs in her small, ringless fingers. She takes my pen eagerly. "What do you want me to write?" she says. She will write what I tell her, she says. I don't know. "Don't you have a little passage memorized?" I ask. "A little Shakespeare, maybe? 'Oh, for a muse of fire,' something like that?" She clicks her tongue. "I think it should be neutral," she says, shaking her head. "Shouldn't involve any acting. I'm afraid I'll emphasize the Oh or something." As she…

FEATURING: An exclusive Esquire-NBC News survey, cocreated by the Benenson Strategy Group (pollster for Obama for America '08 and '12) and Neil Newhouse of Public Opinion Strategies (lead pollster for Romney for President) that defines the beliefs and attitudes of the New American Center and redefines the entire political spectrum. > A cutting-edge interactive tool that tells you where you and your beliefs fall on the new political spectrum. > But first, some thoughts on the Center. WITH NBC NEWS PRESENTS WHAT WE DON'T MEAN WHEN WE TALK ABOUT THE AMERICAN CENTER BY MARK WARREN Jim Hightower, the legendary hellion populist out of Texas (yes, such a beast once roamed the earth) used to say that the only thing in the middle of the road is "yellow stripes and dead…

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I stopped snarking about movies a few years back. No epiphany, no turning point, no defining insight, but in 2009, during an interview with Jeff Daniels, he talked about visiting a hospital and meeting wounded vets who loved Dumb and Dumber: "If it connects with people, and 25 out of 25 soldiers want to talk about it because it made them laugh? The defense rests." I more recently pondered this matter of art versus entertainment while writing a profile of Robert Redford (April), whose work as both an actor and director has long been derided and dismissed by film critics, beginning with the late Pauline Kael, who spawned hundreds of twits wasting millions of words mocking movies that don't meet aesthetic criteria wholly irrelevant to the filmmakers. Beyond a pro…

We're well into the dark-spirit months, the time of year when G&T's and daiquiris and Trinidad gin swizzles yield to manhattans, sidecars, and old-fashioneds; when rum, gin, and tequila traditionally step aside in favor of whiskey, brandy, and more whiskey. Okay, the margarita is pretty much a year-round drink these days, and if G&T's fade there's always the martini, which knows no season. So really, it's only rum that gets lost in the seasonal shuffle. It doesn't have to. Rum is a shape-shifter: Whatever type of booze you prefer, there's likely to be a sugarcane-based analog, something with the same weight, texture, and intensity of flavor. That's not to say they're exactly the same (although some white rums are pretty damned difficult to tell apart from vodka), but when it…

THE ESSENTIAL: THE TUDOR HERITAGE CHRONO BLUE Earlier this year, Rolex announced that its little-brother brand, Tudor, would be returning to America after a near ten-year absence, and watch geeks around the country just about lost their minds. Founded in 1946, Tudor first made a name for itself by reaping the benefits of the Rolex association—the craftsmanship and prestige—while maintaining its own sporty aesthetic and slightly lower price. But then, in the early 2000s, Rolex pulled Tudor from the U. S. market, leaving fans to get their Tudor fix overseas or at vintage auctions or not at all. No longer. The new Heritage Chrono Blue is an update of the brand's classic chronograph, the 1973 Montecarlo. Like the slight tweaking of the Porsche 911 over the years, this edition nudges…

THE SPECS ENGINE: 455-HP V-8 PRICE: $51,995 0 TO 60: 3.8 SEC. THE AUTOMOTIVE EVENT OF THE YEAR 2014 CHEVROLET CORVETTE Like its perennial rival, the Porsche 911, Detroit's only real sports car has followed the same blueprint for decades: V-8 up front, drive wheels in the back, a snout that conjures up cruise missiles and submarines. This one, the 2014 model, is all-new for only the seventh time in the car's sixty-year history. And it's the single biggest deal in cars this year. Corvettes used to be blunt hammers—questionable interior and build quality, big power that took a firm hand to keep on the road. Body panels were first fiberglass and then composite plastic, and the cars always smelled vaguely of glue. This one is different. It's fast, but…

FIVE MINUTES. THAT'S ALL IT TAKES FOR HER TO REDEEM A MOVIE LIKE CAPTAIN AMERICA OR REMIND US THAT THE BEST CHARACTERS ON GAME OF THRONES ARE AS CHARMING AS THEY ARE RUTHLESS. SHE NEEDS ONLY FIVE MINUTES, BUT NATALIE DORMER CAN HAVE AS MUCH TIME AS SHE WANTS. First, a story: Picture Ron Howard—director, Oscar winner, Opie. He's just offered a role in his new movie, Rush, to a young British actress. She's on the fence. Instead of moving on, finding one of the countless young actresses who would trip over themselves to appear in a Ron Howard movie, Howard flies to London. He sits in the front row of a small play the actress is doing. Then he asks her to reconsider. That actress, as you may have…

CUMBERBATCH (OF SHERLOCK, STAR TREK, AND SO MUCH MORE) SHOWS HOW ANY MAN CAN UP HIS STATURE WITH SOME WELL-CHOSEN CLOTHES STYLE TIP NO. 846 SEE THAT? THE CONTRASTING COLLAR ON THIS TRIM CHESTERFIELD COAT? A SURE SIGN OF A MAN WHO CAN CARRY THE WORLD ON HIS SHOULDERS AND THINK NOTHING OF IT. Wool-and-cashmere coat ($3,290) and two-button wool suit ($1,920) by Prada; cotton shirt ($250) by Burberry London. STYLE TIP NO. 235 THE TURTLENECK IS A PARADOX: IT CLINGS AND CONCEALS, YET IT ALSO SHOWS THAT YOU HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE. SWAP IT IN FOR A STANDARD-ISSUE SHIRT AND LAYER UNDER A BLAZER FOR A COMBINATION THAT IS PURE MENACE. Two-button wool jacket ($3,795) and wool trousers ($325) by Giorgio Armani; cashmere-and-silk turtleneck sweater ($1,020) by Brunello Cucinelli;…