Esquire October 2014

Mentors 2014 A SPECIAL ISSUE ON RAISING THE NEXT GENERATION OF GOOD MEN PAGE 98 THE MENTORING DATABASE Boys need men in their lives, and many don't have them. A geographical guide to 89 organizations that can change a life. BY ANDREW CHAIKIVSKY PAGE 112 WHO MADE YOU THE MAN YOU ARE TODAY? A 21-page portfolio with pointed answers from some of the funniest, smartest, most influential men in America. PAGE 110 HOW TO BUILD A MAN Who do we want boys to be when they grow up? A communal answer from generations present and past. PAGE 135 BOYS, MENTOR THIS MAN What half a dozen boys teach a man about being a man. BY TOM CHIARELLA PAGE 144 THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE BOY SCOUTS Can Robert Gates…

SCOTT RAAB HANK AZARIA Lunch at Josie's restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan SCOTT RAAB: I was watching your docu-series, Fatherhood [available on aol.com]. You really opened yourself up. HANK AZARIA: I'm 50 now. We had Hal when I was 45. By the time I was about 43, 44, I was ambivalent about having a child. And my girlfriend—we're married now—she wasn't one of those women who knew she wanted to do it, either. She was very confused as well. And I was really tortured by this. [The waitress comes. For Azaria, the butternut-squash soup and veggie stir-fry. "No rice. No protein. Just veggies."] So, I have a regular poker game with my friends for a long time. They're all dads—and I'm driving them crazy with sincere questions.…

Tell you what, let's see if we can't make the old Camelot metaphor turn handsprings and tie itself into a bowline, shall we? Once upon a time and not that long ago, and don't let it be forgot, there once was a glossy magazine named George. It was founded and edited by the late John Kennedy Jr., who was, by all accounts, a more than decent bloke. Its conceit was that there was no essential difference between politics and show business or between political celebrity and all other forms of celebrity. (I think we all can agree that JFK Jr. was something more than an authority on that last part.) Its first issue featured model Cindy Crawford dressed as George Washington, who once had only Parson Weems as his personal…

The American Dream is a good one, as dreams go. It offers the prospect of comfort, of order in a chaotic universe, of fair play and even happiness. It doesn't promise these things. It raises them as possibilities, dangling them somewhere out there in the middle distance, just close enough to make them seem obtainable. And sometimes they are. But, man, the ground between here and there can be a real bastard for some people. Eileen Tumulty, the protagonist of Matthew Thomas's exceptional first novel, We Are Not Ourselves (Simon & Schuster, $28), is one of those people. She was born working-class in Queens, New York, in 1941, the daughter of "Big Mike" Tumulty, a hardscrabble Irish immigrant who hauls beer barrels for a living and sidelines as a sage…

TORONTO MAYOR Rob Ford's reality show was canceled after just one episode. That's the difference between Americans and Canadians: If you're spinning out in America, your reality show will be renewed for another season. But Canadians just don't want to watch Canadian content. ABOUT THE JOKESTER: Given the chance, Sarah Gadon would like to scare you. For one, the 27-year-old actress stars in Dracula Untold (out October 17), the upcoming action-movie take on the Gothic novel. (She plays Mirena, the wife of the warrior who becomes the titular vampire.) But she also enjoys a more direct tactic. "It's so mean," she says, delighted. "You know how if somebody is coming up stairs and the stairs kind of bend and you scare them? I like to do that." She also has…

An early English chemist once noted that aging a spirit in a barrel turns it into "a dilute tincture of oak." Or, in the case of some Brazilian cachaças, of ipê, balsamo, louro-canela, amendoim, amburana. Cachaça, the Brazilian national spirit, is made in vast quantities, all of it distilled from fresh sugarcane juice (as opposed to molasses, from which the vast majority of rums are made) and almost all of it destined for domestic consumption. The cachaça that does get exported is mostly what Brazilians classify as "industrial," a thin, raw, mostly unaged spirit that's okay in a caipirinha but not for sipping. In Brazil, however, there are hundreds of small, truly artisanal producers whose products rarely see the inside of a shipping container. Many of these cachaças are aged…