Innehållsförteckning för December 2013 från Esquire

I was in Tuscaloosa last spring, where I lived for six years back in the '80s. At one point, I went to my all-time favorite bar, where I ran into a guy who used to sit in that same bar back then. We shook hands, but I don't think he remembered me. "You look good," I told him. "You look a lot like you used to," I said. He was just a little grayer in the skin. "Well, good," he said. "That means I don't have to make a comeback. Besides, I'm moving to New Orleans tomorrow. There's nothing for me to come back from down there." That, I told him, was a second act. "Whatever," he said, raising a glass to New Orleans, where he would now teach French…

ne day not too long ago, Malcolm Gladwell defended himself. He'd been accused of promoting claptrap in the form of the "10,000 hour rule," the primary subject of his book Outliers. He posted a response on The New Yorker's Web site that included this sentence: "There's a reason the Beatles didn't give us 'The White Album' when they were teen-agers." Well, yes. Before the Beatles could give us The White Album, they had to achieve disorienting success. They had to take a lot of drugs. They had to learn to hate one another. They had to experience the centrifugal energies of the '60s. They had to live. What we infer from what Gladwell wrote, however, is that they had to practice, and were able to make The White Album once…

THE LOST ART OF THE HORS D'OEUVRE SNACKING IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF EATING, AND WHAT IS THE HORS D'OEUVRE OTHER THAN A GLORIFIED SNACK? HERE ARE THREE CLASSICS WORTH SPOILING YOUR DINNER FOR. Before tapas and grazing and small plates, there was hors d'oeuvre,1 small and often weird combinations of tasty bits, some packed into tiny tomatoes, others smeared on crackers. James Beard, the dean of American cookery (according to The New York Times in 1954), referred to them as "doots." They are the things men eat too many of before dinner. As the epitome of 20th-century sophistication, an hors d'oeuvre, and exactly what goes into it, can sum up the culture of an era in one bite. And once in a while, one comes along that's so good…

To be zoned for erogeny, I think an area has to be at least 100 yards from a school and it has to serve food. But check your local ordinances, because I'm really not sure. Now then, I don't know who's been filling your ears about ears, but they don't "have more nerve endings than anywhere else." That is misinformation. Tell me who gave it to you and I'll have a word with him. The most sensitive areas are your genitals, lips, and fingertips. "That's where you have the highest density of nerve endings," says neurologist J. Ned Pruitt II of Georgia Regents University, whose testimony I include in case you don't believe me. Also, there are different types of nerve endings, which I'm sure comes as news, and, depending…

'Tis the season of giving. Damn. Seems like we just got through the last one. So you could go to the mall, deal with that mess. Or do some all-night Web shopping. An alternative: the next five pages, which include gifts for every kind of person you know. Everything is available on one Web site, because we had help from a unique company called Bespoke Post, a master of the personalized gift. Together we've scoured the American retail landscape and sifted out the only 34 items you need to look at. You're hearing this right: We have made it possible for you to complete all your holiday shopping in the next ten minutes. Scan any item with your phone using Netpage. Or go to bespokepost.com/esquire. It's all there. Consider this…

The cliché is now established: Television rules. One of its corollaries is that the movies are finished. Why drive all the way to the multiplex, pay a small fortune for tickets, sit in a crowded cellar smelling of coconut oil and adolescents, and try to concentrate with the flashing glare of strangers checking their phones when you can relax at home for free tweeting about Breaking Bad? You know what they talk about at movie parties these days? What they saw on television last night. The cultural dominance once taken for granted by the movies has begun to wane; the prominence of television continues to swell. This fall, two films have appeared to challenge this new state of affairs: Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity and J. C. Chandor's All Is Lost. Both…

The world is overflowing with free and open information, and a person equipped with the right tools to sift through that information and perceive the patterns and connections swirling below the surface might be able to see what's coming before it arrives. The future is already recorded, if you only know where to look. Hence the name of a start-up on the sixth floor of an office building in the heart of Harvard Square, in Cambridge, Massachusetts—Recorded Future, notable for receiving venture capital from both the CIA and Google. CEO Christopher Ahlberg today wears the uniform of a forty-five-year-old tech entrepreneur—skinny jeans, bright-green Nikes, and a polo shirt—but he often thinks back to the years he wore the uniform of an army ranger in his home country of Sweden. Some…

In the age of the small—and the digitally evanescent—Tim Heffernan, thirty-five, has carved out a rare and revealing specialty as a chronicler of the big. Especially of the giant machines and tools of the industrial age that have found new, critical life in advanced economies. Heffernan, a former assistant editor of this magazine, has in the last few years written extensively on such reborn behemoths for magazines like The Atlantic, Pacific Standard, and Popular Mechanics, opening a startling window on these oddly invisible monsters, a field of interest that he calls Big Analog. We asked him to show us a few examples. THE FIFTY In 1919, the Treaty of Versailles took many of Germany's iron mines and gave them to France and Belgium—reparations for World War I. By the late…

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Sunday brunch, Stone Park Cafe, Brooklyn. SCOTT RAAB: You're my second Enterprise commander, but my first OBE recipient. PATRICK STEWART: Oh? SR: Should I have said "Sir"? PS: That honorific is mostly discouraged in my profession. When I was sent a program to look at for the Waiting for Godot production, I had to say, "Guys, get this off." Actors do not use that title. SR: Is there an OBE discount, like AARP? PS: No. SR: Nothing? PS: Nothing at all. SR: What do you recommend? PS: I'm going to go with the short-rib hash and eggs. SR: I'm going with that then. You look fantastic. PS: I eat almost no red meat. SR: You still have that newlywed glow. PS: Laurence Olivier said if you have ambition to be…

The woman approaches him and says, "I saw you staring at me. Were you thinking about a mother-daughter thing?" Stunned, the man says, "As a matter of fact, I was." "Is that something you'd be interested in?" she asks. "Are you kidding!? Absolutely!" The woman then nods her head, looks over her shoulder, and says, "Hey, Ma!" ABOUT THE JOKESTER: Addison Timlin acquired her joke from Al Pacino on the set of last year's Stand Up Guys. Even though she's busy with this month's release of Best Man Down, she still makes time for the occasional dinner with her new buddy. "He's not Al Pacino to me anymore. He's like Uncle Al. Which is ludicrous." Next, Timlin begins filming Fallen, a teenage-fantasy movie. At 22, she'll be able to pass…

You could just build a fire somewhere, then put it out when you're done. Or you could buy one of those metal basins at a place like Williams-Sonoma. But by actually digging into the dirt and constructing a pit whose sole purpose is to contain a campfire—by permanently incorporating it into the tiny speck on the earth that belongs to you—you are making a commitment. A commitment to your family, a commitment to your friends, and a commitment to having fun even when it's cold out. YOU WILL NEED TOOLS String A spade A shovel Couple bags of masonry sand About 20 rocks, each roughly the size of a melon (Available at landscape centers and in rivers.) About 110 bricks (If you recently have removed an old chimney from your…

"Confidence is contagious. So is lack of confidence." So said big-balled SOB Vince Lombardi, and though it's been more than 40 years since he stalked the snowy sidelines of Lambeau in his signature camel-hair overcoat, he knew exactly what to wear when he was about to kick someone's ass. Most camel coats today, like this single-breasted version from Boss, are free of the cumbersome patch pockets and belts that typified coats in Lombardi's day, offering instead the sharper fits, shorter hems, and slimmer lapels that work with both three-piece suits and casual blazers and jeans. Even better, they're camel only insofar as they're the color of camels—instead of scratchy camel hair, you get wool and cashmere. Would Lombardi have worn such an overcoat? Hard to say. But he knew a…

"WE DECIDED TO COME CLOSE TO THE WINDOWS. THAT WAS OUR MISTAKE." FEBRUARY 15, 9:20 A.M. RUSSIAN METEOR STRIKE OLESYA PEREVYSHINA, STUDENT, CHELYABINSK, RUSSIA I was in my Russian university, South Ural State University. We were in the middle of our linguistics class when we saw an unnatural light outside the window of our fourth-floor classroom. At first it was a white light. It became a little bit yellow and then it was a flash. It looked like a plane, but the tail was like two tails, and it was wider and brighter, colored white and yellow. We thought maybe it was a military plane, because at the end of our city there is a military institute where students are taught to be pilots. We decided to come close to…

Pharrell Williams had gone cold. Last year, when Miley Cyrus was starting work on the album that would launch a million twerks, her then-representation suggested she skip working with the one producer she really wanted to work with. To Cyrus, Pharrell was the man who, as part of the producing outfit the Neptunes, created the sound of the 2000s; who won three Grammys, including 2003's producer of the year; who helped transform Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears from tween idols into adult superstars. To her reps, he'd become irrelevant. Why not work with one of the armies of producers who manufactured hits for Gaga or Bieber or Katy Perry? Why not go with a producer who's actually produced a number-one in the past five years? Why Pharrell? Cyrus got her…

Google Glass may or may not transform the future. But one thing is beyond question: It elicits mighty strong reactions in the present. The first week I got my tiny new face computer, I wore it to a barbecue and sat down at a table to eat pasta salad. "That is the most annoying thing in the world," snapped a mom of twins, pointing at my new gadget from across the table. "I disagree," I responded. "No, really. It is." "One second," I said. I tapped the black frames with my finger to turn the device on. "Okay, Glass, Google 'What is the most annoying thing in the world?' " In the miniscreen perched above my right eye, an article popped up. I clicked on it. I scrolled. She waited.…

On May 7 of this year, I received a Facebook message from a woman named Stephanie Lee: Hey Mark, I found that I have colon cancer today. I go for surgery Thursday morning. Please keep me in your prayers. At the time, Stephanie was thirty-six and lived on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, in the town of Ocean Springs. I had met her eight years before, when I worked with Tom Junod on a story for Esquire ("Mississippi Goddamn," November 2005) about how Hurricane Katrina had affected military families already enduring the calamities of the war in Iraq—the families whose suffering had been doubled by the wind and the rain and the floods. Junod and I met Stephanie at her grandmother's house in Lucedale, Mississippi, where she told her story.…

THE GOLDFINCH BY DONNA TARTT This long-anticipated novel is explosive in more ways than one. Near the opening of Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch (Little, Brown, $30), our narrator—Theo Decker, 13 years old at the time—is wandering through the Met when a bomb detonates, killing his mother and tearing apart the museum and his life. At the time, he is studying the title painting—a goldfinch burnished with light and chained to a perch—"a flickering sun-struck instant that existed now and forever," as does the terrorist attack, imprinting itself on the canvas of his mind, inked in blood and dusted with plaster. In his concussed daze, he comforts a dying antiques dealer and absently makes away with the painting, two acts that will change the course of his life. Over the next…

THE ADVENTUROUS MAN'S GUIDE TO THE HOLIDAYS Eggnog has always been America's holiday drink, at least since the late 1700s, when it first started turning up in travelers' accounts of the drinking habits of the new nation. It wasn't Christmas or New Year's if you didn't have a bowl of the stuff to ladle around. In some ways, it still isn't, although now it usually comes from a carton—a zero-proof concoction of milk, eggs, high-fructose corn syrup, carrageenan, and artificial flavors. If you're lucky, your host will spike it with Bacardi or cheap bourbon. Even thus industrialized, it's still not a bad drink, so long as you're not looking at it from a Skinnygirl perspective. Made fresh, however, eggnog is a whole other story. Less like melted cheap ice cream,…

THE NEW MONEY DIGITAL CURRENCIES CAN BREAK THE TYRANNY OF BANKS. BUT BITCOIN IS SCARY AND COMPLICATED. NOW THERE'S A SIMPLER ALTERNATIVE. Don't roll your eyes. I know—another article about bitcoin. But I promise this one's different. I'm not a fanboy who theorizes about the identity of secret creator "Satoshi Nakamoto." And I'm not a throwback who believes that since money creation has largely been left to government fiat over the past hundred years, this must always be so. I'm a believer. But not so much because I understand or care to understand the complexity underlying the creation of math-based currency. It's more because I have seen all kinds of things turn into money and have also seen things that are already money deployed so irresponsibly that it enabled new…

"What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger … [If] you invented him, you, the white people, invented him, then you've got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that." James Baldwin threw down that challenge to his country in a 1963 interview. Fifty years later, America marked the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington by basking in the soaring rhetoric of his cherished universal dream, but Baldwin's painful question continues to sting. Why did white people need to invent the "nigger"? A pressing, urgent, ugly, difficult, necessary question, and one that America has been avoiding since its inception. At least we can now say that the…

You must love him. FOR ONE THING, HE'S LOVABLE, professionally so. For another, he leaves nothing to chance. If he can't win you over with his fame, his charm, and his good looks, he will win you over with preparation. It's not that he's needy, like an actor; it's that he's competitive, like an athlete. He's always been good at making people love him; he's not about to give up his edge now. Of course, he is not often challenged, and risks the fate of a fighter whose dominance is tainted by a lack of worthy opponents. A few years ago, however, he lost one of his dogs to a rattlesnake. He is a dog guy—a little sign about men and dogs adorns a living-room wall otherwise dominated by…

SURE, THINGS CHANGE. BUT DAMN—MARIJUANA GOES FROM LOCO WEED TO MIRACLE DRUG, TV FROM WASTELAND TO THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL. IT'S HARD TO KEEP TRACK. SO WE'VE STARTED A LITTLE LEDGER … POOTIE TANG THE HELL IS THIS SHIT? AMERICA'S CONSCIENCE LOUIS C. K. POOTIE TANG BRILLIANT ELON MUSK PAYPAL JON STEWART TOPICAL COMEDIAN MAD MAN AMERICA'S OMBUDSMAN KEITH OLBERMANN ESPN SAINT BILL GATES CEO LEFT-WING NEWSMAN … NO, WAIT … ESPN! 21ST-CENTURY POPES NO REDSKINS REDSKINS YES SHHH BRYAN CRANSTON 3-D HOLLYWOOD PROFIT-PADDER HAL WALT GRAVITY MANNING BRADLEY OLIVIA MUNN FHM PANTY-THUMBER CHELSEA BEST PART OF THE NEWSROOM…

It's trite by now: An actress who wants good roles—main roles with depth and arc and clothing—has to write them herself. But it's trite only because of how often it still turns out to be necessary. When Brit Marling, thirty, was trying to break into acting, her only real choices were characters whose wardrobe was blood-spattered or whose lines ended primarily in exclamation points. So she wrote better ones. Much better ones, like a woman who kills a family while driving drunk and then enters a contest to visit a parallel planet in 2011's Another Earth, and a private-security employee who infiltrates a cult activism group in this spring's The East. What links her films, aside from the weighty dialogue and unique, high-concept plots, is the absence of pat messaging.…

OLD RULE Maximize the contrast in color between your sport coat and trousers. NEW RULE Minimize the contrast (without exactly matching), the better to up the visual interest. On Eric Villency: Three-button mohair-and-wool jacket ($2,540) and mohair-and-wool trousers ($735) by Prada; cotton shirt ($99) by Banana Republic; silk tie ($155) by Ralph Lauren Black Label. OLD RULE: NO WHITE JEANS IN WINTER. NEW RULE: ANY COLOR JEANS WORK ANY TIME OF THE YEAR. EXCEPT YELLOW, WHICH WORK NEVER. JOSEPH COLEMAN, 47 SECOND ACT: POET; PRESIDENT OF THE FIT REPORT Booked for his first big gig (a Guerlain ad) by photographer Peter Lindbergh after a chance meeting at a hotel, Coleman modeled for a decade before starting the Fit Report, a sizing consultant for fashion brands, in 2006. He is also…