Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2013 i Esquire

WRITER-AT-LARGE TOM JUNOD ON PROFILING THE THREE BIGGEST MOVIE STARS OF OUR TIME, BACK TO BACK TO BACK When I was a kid and happened to mention the name of a male celebrity to my father, he would immediately give me the scoop. He would tell me, first of all, if the celebrity had his own hair and teeth or wore a toupee and had "some work done." Then he would tell me if the man in question was a "great cocksman" or the "Queen Bee." Finally, he would assess their talent or lack thereof. The stars he admired—Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Fred Astaire, Frank and Dino—had set a pretty high standard, qualifying each lesser light as "the luckiest man alive." What united them all, though, was the…

USEFUL EQUIVALENTS KEY MEASURES FOR THE MONTH OF AUGUST August July + "Christ" sunny mostly sunny – mostly 100 degrees Fahrenheit 37.8 degrees Celsius Fahrenheit degrees Celsius x 9/5 + 32 gin rickey a little lime juice, a lot of gin, a little club soda, some ice woohoo .. 2 yays beach towel 3 regular towels 7 pool noodles 1 inner tube movie theater 68 degrees Wolverine Hugh Jackman wolverine weasel + bear R.I.P.D. Ghost – pottery + Ryan Reynolds + Jeff Bridges Louis C. K. in Blue Jasmine Larry David in Whatever Works (2009) Alec Baldwin in Blue Jasmine Alec Baldwin Andrew Dice Clay in Blue Jasmine Huh? Kick-Ass 2 Kick-Ass 1 The Smurfs 2 . The Smurfs 1 Grown Ups 2 . Grown Ups 1 + Shaquille…

Unless you're exceedingly meticulous in your mouth care, chances are you've never even looked at an oral irrigator. The little hose used to clean between your teeth and around and under your gums probably seems like just another tool for the 60-plus crowd that you walk by in the drugstore—lost among the denture adhesive, sugar-free candies, and copies of Reader's Digest. But don't be fooled. (And maybe stop being so judgmental. Those candies are delicious.) While an irrigator might add a minute to your evening routine, it could cut 30 off your next visit to the dentist. Granted, not everyone needs one of these things. According to Dr. Matt Messina of the American Dental Association, if your current teeth-cleaning habits keep you and your dentist happy, there's no reason to…

Unlike the flashy evolution of cars and phones, laundry hasn't enjoyed much in the way of notable technological innovation since we all packed up our river washboards and plugged in home washing machines. But recent advances in washers have transformed them from mundane household appliances into, well, mundane household appliances with some pretty impressive (if not always useful) features, which we describe below. Unless you live in Asia, the most promising of those features—things like magical antibacterial silver ions and water-free washers—are still years away. Until then, the rest of us will have to make do with what we've got. And it doesn't sound all that bad. ELECTRICITY SAVINGS! LG's Smart ThinQ washer can wait until energy rates are at their lowest to automatically start your load, courting the coveted…

I believe it was legendary golfer and noted man of style Happy Gilmore who said, "Golf requires goofy pants and a fat ass." We may still have fat asses … but goofy pants? Sure, there are some men whose exuberance can get the better of them on and off the course, but I like to think that more of us exhibit our personalities with a modicum of decorum. Not that I'm perfect. While I've never been one to make audacious fashion statements, the odd wardrobe faux pas has left me the butt of a few jokes. Last year, I wore a neon-orange shirt in Dubai for my final event of the season (below). There is no denying it was pushing the boundaries of convention, and the boys didn't think twice…

MY WIFE AND I were once lucky people. We could give small amounts of money to an esoteric collection of causes, from Amnesty International to a local sanctuary for homeless donkeys. We could do that because we had not yet been intimately connected to a cause, painfully and specifically, by our fates or the fate of someone we love. We rarely said no, but we weren't especially generous or mindful about our giving, because we didn't have to be. Now we give most of our donations each year to the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO), in our former hometown of Ottawa. We do that because the doctors and nurses at CHEO saved the life of our first son, Charley. He was born several weeks early with a heart defect…

> TWO CANNOT LIVE as cheaply as one. Especially if one of those two is a woman. It starts with the critical need for extraneous products like Kleenex and napkins (in addition to toilet paper and paper towels?), moves on to dust ruffles and matching dish-, glass-, and flatware, and spirals out of control from there. > When you've had three boys and you're still "trying" for a girl, remember that either way, you're looking at four college tuitions. > Leasing a car is way more economical than owning. Period. You never have to pay much for service. And you can get a new one every three years. > On big-ticket items, don't ever settle for a discount on an off brand. Buy the thing you want. Amortize. If you…

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ENIGMATIC ACTRESS, INCLUDING FOUR COUNTRIES, FOUR ACCENTS, TWO NICOLAS CAGE MOVIES, AND ONE NEW TV SHOW TECHNICALLY, SHE'S GERMAN. Although Diane Kruger's voice would have you think otherwise. A slight German accent will slip in during conversation, but she can sound almost British. French, too. And there are times you'd think she was born and raised here in the States. South Dakota, maybe. Really, you can hardly call her German. She started splitting her time between a small village in Lower Saxony and London to study ballet at the Royal Academy when she was about six. With ballet ended because of an injury, she moved to Paris at fifteen and started modeling there and then in New York. "Then modeling became boring, so I went…

ACTOR, 74, LOS ANGELES > Let your recreations be manful, not sinful. > When a man does all he can, though it succeed not well, blame not him that did it. > Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience. > Fantastic, aren't they? They come from one of young George Washington's exercise books—a collection of maxims called "Rules of Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company & Conversation." > The myth of George Washington is so great you can hardly believe a human embodied that myth. But the myth is worthy of the man. > If you're not sure of your path, think about it overnight. Something happens when your subconscious goes to work. Your soul will point the way. That's why Sleep…

John Oliver SCOTT RAAB TALKS TO THE DAILY SHOW'S HOST ABOUT THE UK, SPORTS FANDOM, HIS MARRIAGE TO A U. S. VETERAN, AND GETTING HIS GREEN CARD Dinner, Taboon restaurant, midtown Manhattan. SCOTT RAAB: You're bursting with energy. JOHN OLIVER: I haven't hit the crash yet. We just finished the show, so you're getting the best of me, and then I'll go back to my wife and she'll experience the crash. Is that not the recipe for a healthy relationship? She'll get the worst of my attentiveness and energy at the end of every day. SR: I was surprised to find out you married an American soldier and that you met her at the 2008 Republican Convention. JO: When you've married someone who's been at war, there is…

For decades, the peripheries of culture have mattered much more than its center. Literature today—like music, and blogs, and Web videos—is an accumulation of niches. The idea of a literary novel that everybody has read makes sense only if "everybody" is your little clique. For true communion, we have to look to the past—where the books that matter live. David Gilbert's & Sons (Random House, $27) is an often funny, always elegant, lingering gaze back at a world in which writers are still gods at the very center of culture. A. N. Dyer, the novel's ver-sion of J. D. Salinger, worries about what witticisms to scribble with his autograph. He struggles with the all-consuming importance of his life and works. He holes up in his reclusive apartment, far from prying…

Just about 10:00 every morning, I get a lobster delivery from my local waterman, Norm Bloom, whose family has been pulling shellfish out of the Long Island Sound for three generations. When there's no stopover between their natural habitat and my kitchen, they retain their potent salinity, which plays against their natural sweetness. It's like nothing else in the world. When I boil lobster, I keep the focus on the fish. You make what's called a court bouillon—just seasoned cooking water—creating a saltwater base brightened by the acidity of wine and lemon, then enhanced with softer spices. But what really makes the difference is fresh bay leaves, because their piney astringency and citrusy essential oil are natural matches for shellfish. It's a simple thing with a big payoff. If you…

Q: HAS ANYONE EVER STUDIED WHY SOME PEOPLE LIKE TO LICK TOES? IT JUST SEEMS GROSS TO ME. Very well. I will note that on your chart. Foot fetishism, or podophilia, as it's called at the annual fund raiser, has been thoroughly studied by skilled professionals. In fact, I think it was the first thing they studied, or one of the first. In any case, everyone was satisfied and went home. The prevailing theory, and the one that I'm going with, is that podophilia is the result of an ill-timed collision between feet and sex in the mind of a young, usually weird boy. There are many ways this can happen: It could be that the young lad was thinking about feet when a sexual thought overtook him, or that…

Jerusalem is everywhere. No matter where you are, Jerusalem is. The power of that holy city intrudes into the strangest and most profane of places. I remember once driving to the Hustler Casino in Los Angeles, draped in the paper they give you at In-N-Out Burger, the kind that covers your whole lap while you gorge and drive, and I turned on the radio to hear a local Christian preacher's extensive, in-depth analysis of Israel's latest settlement policies and their relation to the Book of Acts. For some reason, it made me think of "Pearl," a religious allegory written seven centuries ago, the subject of which is also Jerusalem. The Middle East has always been a place for Anglo-Saxons to pro-ject their various fantasies onto, no matter how far away,…

WHEN MY FATHER lived in Florida, he won the lottery. Twice. He did not, however, reap the profits, and more times than I can count he told me why. The first time, he gave the winning numerical combination to my nephew, who forgot to bring it to the local newsstand where my father bought his lottery tickets. The second time, he … well, I think he did the same thing. Twice, he would repeat, whenever I sat with him at the beach and he, in a habit he was helpless to resist, recited the vagaries of fate that kept him from realizing his true fortune. "Twice I win the lottery, and twice I don't see a dime. My luck. My mazel." "Well, then, Dad," I'd say in reply, "you should…

Let's face it, the guy is ridiculous. He's ridiculously handsome. He's ridiculously accomplished. He's ridiculously smart. He's ridiculously kind to those in need of his kindness. He's ridiculously funny. He's ridiculously magnetic, with a ridiculously white movie-star smile and a ridiculously resonant voice-talent voice. Despite his ridiculous sense of ease and casual aplomb, he cannot go anywhere without making an entrance for the simple reason that people who feel ridiculous staring at him feel even more ridiculous not staring at him. All he has to do is smile and open his mouth and he switches on an inner light that turns every head, even Matt Damon's. Now, just to be clear, Matt Damon is also ridiculous. Indeed, Damon is so ridiculous—so ridiculously handsome, accomplished, smart, funny, etc.—that he has been…

One DIETER LAY IN THERE SOMEWHERE, peacefully turning yellow and gray, his troubles over. An hour before, the phone had rung. It was Princeton hospital. My mother-in-law was on the line, her voice ragged. She quickly handed the phone to the attending doctor, who told me that my father-in-law was septic, his body run through with infection, that he was having trouble breathing, and without intubation he would die momentarily. "What do you want to do?" the doctor asked me, her voice taut. As my wife, Jessica, and I quickly talked through the options with the doctor, Dieter's heart stopped. "Oh … oh … his heart just stopped," she said. "I'm … I'm sorry." It is what he would have wanted, for although he'd been an American citizen for decades,…

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 quite temporary, though good…

Junior year of high school, my friend ran a cheating ring in our biology class. He was making a good chunk of money, and it all seemed pretty harmless—a few kids getting A's on small-time quizzes—so one day, when he asked me to collect the money for him, I agreed. He said I could keep half of it. That night, I told my older sister about the plan. She convinced me I was an idiot, and I decided not to get involved. Really. Then I went to school the next day and everything went to shit. He'd been caught. Ratted everyone out. I told the principal I'd changed my mind about taking the money. His response? Sure you did. It didn't matter if my story was true or not. It…

The bear replies, "I'll have a gin," and after almost a minute, "… and tonic." The bartender says, "Sure. But what's with the pause?" The bear says, "These? Had 'em my whole life." ABOUT THE JOKESTER: One of the first things Ambyr Childers would like to point out: "I'm about as funny as wallpaper." Which counts as a marginally funny thing to say, so we're not convinced. The 25-year-old, who turned down a golf scholarship at UC Riverside to pursue acting, has certainly been landing more dramatic than comedic roles in the last couple years—including her turn as the daughter of Amy Adams's and Philip Seymour Hoffman's characters in The Master. This month, she's on the new Showtime series Ray Donovan, with Liev Schreiber and Jon Voight. She plays Ashley…

In the summer months, we need drinks that aren't just cooling but that are tall and cooling. The hydrating mojito. The swamp-cutting Gin Rickey. The heat-desensitizing julep. Or most cooling of all: the mighty swizzle, a drink invented just as soon as Caribbean islanders had the ice to make it with. A little history: Ice began making it to the islands in the middle of the 19th century, and it quickly found its way into the local version of "switchel," an Anglo-American drink involving molasses and lots of cool water. (In Guyana, Barbados, and Trinidad, they distilled the molasses first.) To incorporate the ice, they pounded or scraped it into powder and mixed it with a "swizzle stick," which was originally, as one traveler described it, "a long stem with…

Style Rule Number 646: Reliable is underrated. Sharp is great, and stylish is a fine and noble goal, but if what you're wearing isn't reliable, then you might as well stay home in your sweatpants. That goes double when you're talking about a diving watch, i.e., the thing that can mean the difference between making it to the surface with oxygen to spare and … not. Fossil knows this, having made reliable its watchword for more than a quarter century—part of the reason, no doubt, why luxury brands like Burberry and Emporio Armani have turned to Fossil to make watches under their name—and for its first foray underwater, Fossil is focusing on affordable, dependable functionality. Water-resistance to 200 meters, a screw-down crown for added durability, superluminous watch hands, a…

THINGS ARE LOOKING UP, ECONOMICALLY. THE MARKETS. HOUSING PRICES. EMPLOYMENT. HOG FUTURES (WE THINK). IT APPEARS—FINALLY—THAT IT'S OKAY TO START THINKING ABOUT GETTING RICH AGAIN. BUT YOU HAVE TO ACT BEFORE EVERYONE ELSE DOES. ON THE NEXT 10 PAGES YOU WILL LEARN HOW. WHAT TO INVEST IN WHAT NOT TO INVEST IN HOW TO BUY A CAR WHAT REALLY NOT TO INVEST IN SOME NEW THINKING ON DEBT POTENTIALLY SHOCKING ADVICE ABOUT RETIREMENT ADVICE FROM A FINANCIER HOW MUCH OTHER PEOPLE MAKE ALSO: GOLD? NEVER PAY CASH FOR A CAR Not while interest rates are zero to 1 percent. NEVER CATCH A FALLING KNIFE Or, You're less knowledgeable than whoever sits on the opposite side of all investments. The only thing that can save you is your knowledge of that…

I was sitting watch in the corner of a distant gate in the Atlanta airport. Across from me sat a guy wearing expensive denim, bright pink socks, a blazer that was beautifully, almost comically, blue, and a white belt. There he sat, laptop hinged upon his folded legs, arms up on the seats next to him as if he were embracing two invisible pals. He'd slipped his shoes off, tucked them beneath his seat. Eating pistachios and watching Braveheart—so relaxed, so unstressed by the terminal bustle, that it looked like he owned the world, or at least the little part of it that concerned him. All that, and the backs of his hands were conspicuously tan. After a while, I named him, as if he were a character in my…

ON DECEMBER 18, 2012, the set of Fox & Friends was both festive and somber. Festive because it was the Christmas season. The three hosts, two men in dark suits flanking a woman in a blue dress, sat on a mustard-colored couch in front of a cheery seasonal backdrop: a lit-up tree, silver-painted twigs, mounds of tinsel, blue and red swatches of fabric, and, here and there, multicolored towers of blown glass with tapering points that made them look surprisingly like minarets. Somber because a terrible thing had happened just four days earlier, in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. All three hosts looked sad, but the woman, Gretchen Carlson, looked the saddest. The shot of the three hosts occupied most of the right three quarters of the screen. A…

CONSIDER THE TURTLENECK Hard as it might be midsummer to imagine the need for a turtleneck, your favorite stores are about to get lousy with 'em. Turtlenecks edge the line between casual and dressy, i.e., exactly where designers like Gucci's Frida Giannini think a man should be right now, and when you go with a darker, thinner iteration, it slims the torso and frames the jaw, like so. A guy could do a whole lot worse. Double-breasted wool coat ($2,590), cashmere turtleneck sweater ($995), and wool trousers ($635) by Gucci; leather shoes ($700) by Church's; leather gloves ($195) by Paul Smith. Wool coat ($1,595) and wool trousers (part of suit, $1,195) by Polo Ralph Lauren; cotton shirt ($350) and silk tie ($155) by Ralph Lauren Black Label; leather boots ($1,875)…

My Inner Life, 44 The realm of my private thoughts and feelings generated without external stimulation died Tuesday. It was 44. The cause was a combination of text messages, Twitter Vine videos, my son's urgent demands for a mango fruit roll, LinkedIn endorsement requests, my other son's demand that I find out the release date of The Smurfs 2, the broken hinge on the kitchen cabinet, Hulu's clips of Swamp People, the sheela-na-gig entry on Wikipedia, and a bunch of other stuff. My inner life, though never achieving the majestic heights of Steven Pinker's or Philip Roth's, still had a relatively robust and productive existence. It contemplated such topics as the limits of knowledge and the objectivity of ethics. It once sustained a train of thought about the Darwinian implications…