Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2012 i Esquire

GET TO KNOW THE ESQUIRE ELF ALEXIA FAST Age: 20 Hometown: Vancouver, British Columbia Height: Five foot nine Which makes her how many inches taller than her costar in the upcoming film Jack Reacher (out December 21)? Two Name of that costar: Tom Cruise Age at which she wrote, directed, and starred in her first film (which premiered at the Atlantic Film Festival): Seven Age she later claimed to be when she wrote the film so that people "would believe her": Nine Mother's occupation: TV and movie producer Father's occupation: Songwriter So it's no surprise that she's: An actress and a singer Upcoming TV series she's starring on: ABC's Red Widow On which she plays a character she describes as: "A very shallow hippie chick … a troublemaker." Holiday advice:…

TWO DOG OWNERS are bragging to each other about how amazing their respective pets are. The first says, "My dog is so clever that he waits by the front door every morning for the paperboy to deliver the paper, then brings it to me in the kitchen to read while I eat breakfast." "I know," says the second. "My dog told me." ABOUT THE JOKESTER: Although Jaime Lee Kirchner plays a doctor on the Fox medical drama The Mob Doctor, she is not the mob doctor. Not that that diminishes her role on set. She's still involved in the important decisions: "We once spent time discussing all these standards of what color urine passes as acceptable," the German-born, Tennessee-raised 31-year-old says. "I'm like, 'This is what we're get-ting hung up…

In A Christmas Carol, when Ebenezer Scrooge is presented with the Ghost of Christmas Present, he finds the "jolly Giant" sitting in state on an enormous heap of roast meats and other traditional English Christmas delicacies and flanked by "seething bowls of punch that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam." Charles Dickens knew all about delicious steam. He was a committed English traditionalist in his drinking. He didn't drink the international celebrity's customary champagne, champagne, and more champagne or the trendy drinks of his day—gin cocktails, claret cups, brandy smashes, or the like. Rather, his greatest affinity was for a drink that was fading faster and faster into the past by the time he came into fame. From 1700 to 1830, give or take a couple years on…

Writers have always been whiners. For nearly a hundred years, since at least the time of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the death of the novel has been presaged. And now, egged on by BuzzFeed and video games and just general hypercaffeinated, e-mail-all-the-time ADHD, the book is apparently, finally, about to die. At least we'll have good stuff to read while we wait. This fall alone, the number of big books published by major writers is astounding: Michael Chabon, Zadie Smith, Junot Díaz, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and about a half dozen others. Not that the list has stopped anyone from complaining. Literary circles have been so full of pity for so long that they can't accept the optimistic truth: We're living in a golden age for writers and writing.…

"THERE WILL PROBABLY be a lot of people that die," says Elon Musk. He is sitting at his desk, at the headquarters of his company—of one of his companies—SpaceX. He is eating. He is eating a plate of food that his personal assistant gave him. It is late, and he is eating to stay on schedule. He is a man of scrupulously developed politesse, and he worries that eating his scheduled dinner while completing his scheduled interview might give offense. It does not, because although he eats hungrily, he never succeeds in making his food look appetizing. On his white plate is a turkey leg, a sad bouquet of broccoli, a mound of black beans, and he eats them like an astronaut might eat his rations, with an air of…

He wanted something sweet, he wanted to get out of the apartment for a while. He slid open the glass door of the patio and slipped out into the steamy Florida twilight, an ordinary thing on an ordinary night. Trayvon Martin was three weeks past seventeen that day, which was the day a stranger named George Zimmerman shot him through the heart. He was growing so fast, he'd stretched out like a rubber band, 158 pounds on a five-eleven frame, so long and thin everyone teased him: Boy, you too skinny to take a breath. He was wearing the hoodie he always wore, lost in his music like he always was. People teased him about that, too. Next door to his uncle Stephen's house, a modest ranch house where he…

Everywhere you go, there are the boys. After earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, in the middle of the worst famine, there are always these little pricks calling you names and throwing rocks, taunting you, wanting to live, wanting your stuff. Because you, who have come ostensibly to help them, have lots of stuff, and they have nothing. They are wearing rags and washing themselves in a ditch. If ever you needed proof of how we humans are resilient little bugs, look no further than these boys. And so, somehow, this courtship of rock throwing, name-calling, and pilfering gives way to true friendship. And everywhere you go—after every earthquake, flood, tsunami, and famine—there are the Americans. Lately, when you imagine Americans projected around the world, you think most often of camouflage. This story,…

Bradley Cooper Scott Raab talks with the actor about his new film And college and his dad and motorcycles. and then David O. Russell stops by. Early evening, David O. Russell's office in Los Angeles. Cooper and Russell have been meeting about their next film. SCOTT RAAB: Yo! BRADLEY COOPER: Whatup! SR: With all the time and lo-cation changes for our inter-view, I thought I might wind up meeting Anderson Cooper at midnight in Bakersfield. And I mean that as a compliment. Thanks for meeting with me. BC: Are you kiddin'? SR: Good meeting with Russell? BC: Yeah. Hopefully David will come in and talk to us. SR: Are you ready to go? BC: Let's go. You want some water? SR: Thanks. You're very kind. It seems that you have…

Although it varies from cook to cook, gumbo is south Louisiana's signature dish—a complex stew pot thickened by a roux, a mixture of fat and flour that's carefully cooked into a paste with color ranging from blond to dark brown, depending on what's going into the pot. When I was growing up, we had chicken-and-sausage gumbo or seafood gumbo, but it was rare to find a combination of the two—probably because the smoked sausage there can be a bit overpowering. However, in this gumbo made with chicken, shrimp, and tasso—spicy smoked pork that's a staple of south Louisiana cooking—the three ingredients complement one another because the distinctive flavor of tasso provides good balance, keeping the shrimp and chicken on an even playing field. Maybe you've heard that only little old…

FEATURING ALEXIA FAST THE 2012 ESQUIRE ELF THE ESSENTIAL MANUAL TO MAKING THE MOST OF YOUR HOLIDAY GENEROSITY. BECAUSE WHAT YOU GIVE IS NEVER MORE IMPORTANT THAN HOW. *OR "BESTOWING." OR "PRESENTING." OR EVEN "GIFT-GIVING." GENEROSITY CALCULATOR This should work for everybody in your life (MONTHLY INCOME – FIXED MONTHLY EXPENSES/TOTAL NUMBER OF PEOPLE YOU NEED TO BUY PRESENTS FOR) + (RECIPIENT'S AGE X YOUR CLOSENESS TO THEM ON A SCALE OF –5 TO +5* ) = YOUR LEVEL OF GENEROSITY *–5 is your employer or a passing acquaintance. +5 is your spouse, your child, a parent. No choosing zero. Negative values: No gift for them this year. Have you considered a nicely worded note? HOW TO SHOP ONCHRISTMAS EVE Remember: Most people count the shopping days before Christmas. You…

The United States has given the world many gifts. Some are intangible—we cover a few of those here. We also cover craftsmanship, timeless style, and real beauty in products made by Texans, West Virginians, Nebraskans, and … people from Connecticut. Look at the collection. Buy directly from our cool new store (madecollection.com/esquire). You will be keeping some fellow Americans employed and enriching your own life in the process. A great deal, only in Esquire. USE YOUR NETPAGE APP (YOU'VE DOWNLOADED IT, RIGHT?) AND YOU CAN BUY ANY PRODUCT IN THESE 12 PAGES FROM THE STORE WE CREATED WITH MADE COLLECTION.* *Except the booze. It's hard to ship legally. 1 FOOTBALL LEATHER HEAD SPORTS • GLEN ROCK, NEW JERSEY When you throw a football to your boy in the backyard and…

Is Building an Empire It's Saturday afternoon and a black Mercedes conveying Lena Dunham pulls up a few minutes late in front of a diner in downtown Manhattan. She's alone in the backseat; the chauffeur's in the front. She doesn't get out right away. For a couple minutes she talks on the phone and runs her hand through her hair. She looks agonized—like she's making a decision, like she might be firing someone. Considering her workload, it's a possibility. She's been in L. A. the last few weeks editing the second season of Girls, her HBO series. The show's creator/writer/director/lead actor, Dunham, twenty-six, has received a remarkable amount of attention from critics who either breathlessly praised it for its honesty about the anxieties of postcollege women or pilloried it for…

The knock on the hotel-room door is gentle but deliberate. The night before, just hours ago, was a respite, a friend's birthday party. But now the knock. It's after 2:30 A.M., July 20. The door opens. "Governor?" a voice says softly. "You'd better turn on the television." He watches the footage, sees the movie theater, the police tape, the weeping victims. And once he's come up with a reasoned plan for the morning, he sits alone on a bed in a hotel room. John Hickenlooper can be forgiven for wondering how much hotter Colorado's summer can get. A month ago, he hovered close to the most destructive fire in Colorado history, blades swirling overhead amid funnels of smoke rising off a hillside like devilish geysers. This was during a worst-in-decades…

Tip No 1 Not every big night calls for black tie: Dark suits or even mismatched jackets and pants can be plenty formal, especially when you look for wool-mohair blends that have a slight sheen. They'll pick up light in interesting and unlikely ways. Tip No 2 The classic tux (black, one-button, wool, peak lapel) is the classic tux because it works, and it works best when you don't cut corners—the cummerbund, for example, remains a critical part of the equation, keeping the front of the shirt (and, by the transitive property, your stomach) flat and smooth. On Neil Blumenthal, eyewear entrepreneur: One-button wool tuxedo ($1,795) by Calvin Klein Collection; cotton tuxedo shirt ($225) by John Varvatos; silk bow tie ($180) by Bottega Veneta; silk cummerbund ($495) by Giorgio Armani;…

A LITTLE SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE CAPITAL BY JOHN LANCHESTER The name of the central street in John Lanchester's Capital (W. W. Norton, $27) is Pepys Road, which is almost too much of a giveaway. Just as Samuel Pepys's diary offered the definitive guide to the material reality of 17th-century London by describing the quality of a maid's breasts or the value of a round of Parmesan cheese, so Capital describes the £100,000 basement renovations and the ludicrous variety of chocolates available for purchase today. The novel's plot develops around a series of menacing postcards left in all the houses on Pepys Road with the simple message "We Want What You Have." This premise is really not much more than an excuse for Lanchester to offer intensely observed, fascinating portraits of…

Q IS PENIS SIZE HEREDITARY, OR DID I JUST GET LUCKY? Though the size of related men does appear to be commensurate (and thanks to everyone who participated—your vouchers are in the mail!), there's been no definitive ruling on this. Unlike, say, a widow's peak, no single gene is responsible for making your penis a certain size. (I did know a Big Dick Gene some years ago, but I don't think he's involved.) One's ultimate size is really determined by a confluence of heredity and the slew of hormonal, environmental, and behavioral factors at play during puberty—often loudly and well into the night. Therefore, I can't say for sure that your future son will be as blessed as you've been, but from what I remember, your dad's a bit bigger.…

The Upgrade: The Moncler Tweed Down Jacket George Mallory, one of the ballsiest mountain climbers since Moses, climbed Mount Everest wearing a tweed coat. A few decades later, Lionel Terray wore a down-filled jacket for his trek through the Himalayas. We tell you this not to make you feel bad about not having climbed any mountains lately but to reinforce that in the matter of winter outerwear, you don't need Kevlar-and-nylon hijinks to keep warm. Nature, as usual, can provide. Ditto Moncler. Now celebrating its 60th anniversary, this mountaineering label has helped generations of men (including Terray) weather the elements while looking their level best, and this new jacket combines a waterproof wool tweed shell with goose-feather-down filling. Thanks to the high quality of the down (with a little bit…

AMERICANS OF THE YEAR THEY FLEW TO THE FAR REACHES OF SPACE AND BROUGHT BASEBALL TO THE POOREST SLUMS OF HAITI. THEY BROKE WORLD RECORDS IN LONDON AND ACHIEVED THE IMPOSSIBLE AT HOME. THEY EPITOMIZE—IN THEIR WILL, DRIVE, COMPASSION, AND HUMOR—THE BEST OF AMERICA. AND IN DOING SO, THEY DEFINED A YEAR MARKED BY MORE DRAMA AND TRIUMPH THAN JUST AN ELECTION. SO LET'S BEGIN WITH… JANUARY 13, 2012; 9:40 P.M. "GET US TO SHORE! " COSTA CONCORDIA CRUISE SHIP SINKS DR. STEVEN LEDTKE, PASSENGER We were three hours into the cruise, at a late dinner with two other couples. About 9:40 P.M., we heard and felt a thud. The whole ship shook. Glasses started tipping, and it became obvious that the boat was tipping to the port side. Everybody…

I was sorry when they stopped making Pontiacs. They were good only for cranking up the FM and shit-screaming music while peeling around looking for a place to smoke out. I learned to argue music in a Pontiac. I learned to love Bruce Springsteen songs there. I defended those songs by developing a sense that every word mattered. In a Pontiac, a rolling church with ashtrays in the door, his words became my earliest catechism in writing. My friends liked Rush, Genesis, Zeppelin, so we argued about them. This was FM, before tape decks, even. We never had a choice. But I used to wait it out, driving around until Bruce came on, a teenager trying to be a spirit in the night. All night. There's too much music now,…

When Tom Rivellini was finishing his master's degree in aerospace engineering, he declared on his résumé, somewhat ambitiously, that he was seeking a job in "advanced spacecraft design." This was 1991; the Berlin Wall had recently fallen, the so-called Evil Empire was kaput, the space race and Star Wars weaponry were looking a lot less mission critical. President Bush and Congress had pulled back funding for the aerospace industry; it was a hard time for a guy who admittedly loved difficult math problems and groan-worthy puns and pocket protectors full of colored markers. After a few months of hearing "No, we don't have anything," Rivellini revised his CV. Advanced spacecraft design? That's kind of cheesy, he told himself. Nobody actually calls it that in the real world. Then one day,…