Esquire December 2013

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…

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 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…

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 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…

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,…