Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2016 i Esquire

WHYARE WE ALL so allergic to brand-new fame and the swagger that comes with it, particularly in awoman? This is what I keep askingmyself upon the publication of AmySchumer’s book,The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo (outAugust 16 fromSimon&Schuster,whopaid her a reported $9 million for it), as the inevitable backlash begins. Because at the exact moment Schumer deserves to be on top of theworld—her face omnipresent, her brand bulletproof, and her nascent empire expanding by the millisecond—the vultures are starting to circle. Schumer is,many complain, becoming a “diva” (see also: female person with preferences and free will) because she hasn’t welcomed every single facet of being America’ssweetheart, imaginary best friend, drinking buddy, and fuck doll. Her offenses clearly fall onto an enviable list of achievements:Who else could make a rom-com…

THERE’S SOMETHING deliciously improbable about a fast SUV. It’s a vehicle too often relegated to both Uber and Tiny Terrible Tykes soccer-game carpools. But oh, how times have changed. Now some SUVs put Italian exotics to shame. Two of these new ultra-SUVs have just thundered onto the market, vying for ultimate-speed bragging rights. Well, one of them thunders; the other is electric and hardly makes any noise at all. Let’s start with the Bentley Bentayga [1]. The first SUV from the storied British luxury brand, it’s got a 600-horsepower twinturbo W-12 engine under the hood. When it’s opened up all the way, Bentley says it’ll do 187, besting the Porsche Cayenne Turbo S by 11 mph for the title of world’s fastest SUV. If Bentley’s gasoline-powered behemoth is an opulent…

AT MY CATHOLIC PRIMARY SCHOOL IN Dorset, England, the odd-sounding Saint Walburga’s, shorts were the order of the day. Every day. From age five on, rain or shine, wind or snow, the uniform consisted of a white shirt, striped tie, wool blazer, and wool cap. So far, so good. The bottom half, however, comprised scratchy flannel shorts and kneesocks. Only boys with a doctor’s note could wear trousers. Ten years before me, AC/DC’s Angus Young was probably shivering in his native Glasgow. Who knows what convinced rock’s superannuated schoolboy to climb back into his uniform after enduring such hardship. I admired him but refused to revert—until a recent realization on this side of the Atlantic. Here, shorts emerged in the ’50s as a form of relief from years of, yes,…

FIRST CAME the wheels. Then polycarbonate. Now there’s the smartest era in carry-ons yet: models equipped with charging stations, expandability, and even better locks. Here, our ’port laureates. A. GEO ALUMINUM 2.0 BY ZERO HALLIBURTON The old-school, weightier aluminum case deploys heavy-duty lever latches (rather than zippers) to seal your stuff from the outside world. $750; zerohalliburton.com B. THE CARRY-ON BY AWAY You no longer need to fight for a wall outlet at the departure gate. From a new company founded by two Warby Parker alumnae, this has a rechargeable battery beneath the handle and two USB terminals. $225; awaytravel.com C. LIMBO BY RIMOWA A polycarbonate pioneer, this German brand outfitted its carryon with retractable straps so that you can confidently tow along a briefcase or other bags. $850; rimowa.com…

The Second Annual Culinary Kickoff event, hosted at Michael Mina’s flagship restaurant in San Francisco, featured an evening of incredible food pairings designed by celebrity chefs and elite winemakers. Chefs Michael Mina and Charlie Palmer hosted the evening and brought a few of their good friends to cook including Chefs David Burke, Ming Tsai and Todd English. The entertainment was a star-studded aff air with Emcee and NFL Hall of Famer Marshall Faulk and a live performance by musician Leon Bridges. The event was exclusively produced by The Delisle Group and The Vega Group and proceeds from the event supported The Culinary Institute of America. Featured wine and beer partners included: Kosta Browne, Tuck Beckstoff er, Realm Cellars, Charles Woodson Wines, Mirror, Red Stitch, Freemark Abbey Fiftieth Reserve by Wine…

From “Muhammad Ali Is the Most Famous Man in the World,” December 1983 “It’s a funny feeling to look down on the world and know that every person knows me. Sometimes I think about hitchhiking around the world, with no money, and just knocking on a different door every time I needed a meal or a place to sleep. I could do it.” IT HAD TO BE 1977. Winter. When the big gray lid is nailed tight over Chicago. My family had landed at O’Hare from points sunny and west. I went with my father for the luggage while the others headed out to the long-term lot for the car. We stood at the belt, waiting; my father had that thousand-yard stare. You could not interact with him at such…

THESE DAYS, Barack Obama resembles a CEO running out his contract. For years, no one could get in to see the guy. Now he’s wandering the halls, looking for someone—anyone—who will indulge him. “Hey, guys, what goes on in here? Mail room? No shit. So, you deliver all of this stuff ? Amazing. What’s that? Yeah, sure, what the hell, I’ll take a hit of weed.” Lately, it seems there is no one Obama will not talk to. If you have a show, a podcast, or a bar mitzvah, dude is avail. Bear Grylls? Done it. Ellen? Done it. Bourdain? Done it. Riding in a car with Seinfeld? Done that, too. Fashion Police BRAD GORESKI: Did you see what Angela Merkel wore to the G7? OBAMA: Yes, I did notice…

IN AMERICA, we drink our coffee in coffee shops and our alcohol in bars, most of which serve coffee only as an antidote, unless it’s Saint Paddy’s Day. The stimulant and the depressant rarely meet—even more rarely with ice. Other parts of the world, though, don’t draw this distinction. We’ve been missing out—there are fine summertime drinks worth knowing. If you’ve ever spent time in the coffee-drinking regions of Europe, where cafés double as bars and bars cafés, you’ve beheld them: coffee drinks in tumblers and even cocktail glasses, each chilled and then perspiring, glinting in the late-morning or midafternoon sun on a white-cloth table in a piazza frozen in history, the edge of its bearer’s energy just slightly rounded off. Mind sharpened; body and time at ease. The greatest…

YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW: Before Abercrombie & Fitch became the clubhouse of hypersexed coed undergrads on Vespas, it was the original heritage sporting-goods emporium. It was also the place that sold snakeproof sleeping bags to Teddy Roosevelt; expedition gear to Admiral Richard Byrd, for his trip into the depths of Antarctica; hunting coats to Hemingway; and fly rods, Magnums (as in guns), roulette wheels, and even 13-foot fiberglass pedalpropelled submarines to whomever else. It offered the equipment required by explorers—even those trapped in concrete jungles. In 1931, E.B. White wrote of Abercrombie that it “carries the clothes men want to wear all the time and don’t; they carry the residual evidences of what men used to be before they became what they are.” The same could be said of the…

INVESTING IN A WATCH like TAG Heuer’s new 2016 Monza— which commemorates the timepiece Jack Heuer gave to Niki Lauda in 1976, the year after he pulled off a memorable Formula One world championship—invariably means cooing over the Calibre 17 movement, the historic cushion-case design, and the distinctive chronograph dial. But such adulation rarely extends to the strap. Yet it is in fact the strap that affords the best way to get more out of such a major acquisition. Rather than buying several watches to alter looks, employ a rotating cast of bands for a single timepiece. Make your watch bolder or subtler, classier or more casual, with a simple switch. And you’ve got options: Nowadays luxury makers abroad specialize in exotic skins and hand-sewn wares; in Brooklyn, designers are…

From “I ’m Sorry, But I ’m Through Fighting Now,” Esquire, May 1970 “We’re just like two slaves in that ring. The masters . . . let us fight it out while they bet, ‘My slave can whup your slave.’ That’s what I see when I see two black people fighting.” TO SAY I WAS RADICALIZED in the 1960s would be putting it mildly. I was the stoner’s stoner, the hippie’s hippie, the protestor’s protestor. Hell no, I wasn’t going to go. No way. The war in Vietnam was a war of independence, first from the French, then the Japanese, then the French again, then us, and just try to argue against that and see what would happen. I’d talk you to death, that’s what I’d do, and maybe I’d…

IN THE SUMMER OF 2003, Esquire sent me to spend some time with Muhammad Ali for a cover story celebrating the magazine’s seventieth anniversary. I met Ali and his wife, Lonnie, in Dublin, where Ali was a special guest at the opening ceremony of the Special Olympics. There were many memorable moments during this week, but one that I never counted on was being with Ali as he circled the stadium in a golf cart, waving to eighty thousand spectators. All my life I had been seeing Ali from the vantage point of the spectators in the stadium around us. I couldn’t imagine the tidal wave of energy that poured over him. Our ears filled with the roar of Ahhhhhleee! Ahhhhh-lee! Ahhhhh-lee! The energy seemed to climb to the top…

ESQUIRE HAS A LONG HISTORY WITH JAY MCINERNEY. A year after his 1984 debut novel, Bright Lights, Big City, came to represent everything wild and dangerous and decadent and fun about New York City during that decade, we sent him to profile a totem of too many late nights: Mick Jagger. “You can’t really interview him,” McInerney told us at the time. “He’s so good at hiding what’s private, so reticent about the real things. It’s very hard to catch him off guard. He’s divided. His physique is adolescent, but his face is lined.” This description sounds an awful lot like the magazine fact-checker with dark, late-night secrets in Bright Lights. Soon after, he published a pair of short stories, then made a cameo on the cover of the July 1989…

Jay McInerney AUTHOR OF “BLOW: AN ’80S LOVE STORY,” PAGE 98 Credentials: Author of seminal novel Bright Lights, Big City and this summer’s Bright, Precious Days; Town & Country wine critic. Can’t live without: Shakespeare. Could live without: The current election. Collects: Firstedition books. The crown jewel: A copy of Tender Is the Night inscribed by F. Scott Fitzgerald to Dorothy Parker. Ariel Leve AUTHOR OF “UNEASY RIDER,” PAGE 82 Credentials: Author of three books, including the recently published memoir An Abbreviated Life. Favorite place in the world: By the ocean in Bali. Where, fortunately: She lives part time. Can’t live without: Oxygen. Could live without: Loud talkers. Collects: Moleskine notebooks. Doug Inglish PHOTOGRAPHER OF “BRING THE HEAT,” PAGE 114 Credentials: His work has appeared in Elle, Vogue, V Magazine,…

Date of birth: September 17, 1962. Which makes him: 53 Given name: Mark Anthony Luhrmann Nickname: Baz Adapted from: Basil Brush, a cheeky fox puppet from 1960s British TV. Grew up in: Herons Creek, New South Wales. Boyhood hangouts: A pig farm, a highway gas station, and the local movie theater. All of which were: Operated by his father. Speaking of his father, he was: A Vietnam vet who would “drop us out in the middle of nowhere with a piece of rope, and we’d have to find our way home in the dark.” Keep in mind that: Luhrmann is a self-proclaimed “mythomaniac.” First film: 1992’s Strictly Ballroom. Described in a New York Times review as: “Pure corn. But it’s corn that has been overlaid with a buoyant veneer of…

IN ITS FIRST SEASON, the sleeper hit Mr. Robot did the unthinkable: The USA Network show won a Golden Globe, turned cybersecurity into sexy dinner conversation, and, maybe most amazingly, made the world care again about Christian Slater. It also did what now seems obvious: It made Carly Chaikin one of the most watchable women on TV. She plays Darlene, the sister of our protagonist, herself a jaded hacktivist with a penchant for four-letter words (like code and fuck). At the start of season two (coming this month), she’s just helped pull the linchpin from the global economy. This is all a far cry from the vapid, bleached-blond mean girl Chaikin played on the ABC sitcom Suburgatory— but not so far from the real-life 26-year-old Angeleno, who has 12 tattoos…

> I learned very early on that I had to question everything, because what I was seeing wasn’t necessarily the truth or the right thing. It wasn’t right that there was no democracy in Mexico. It wasn’t right that my mother couldn’t go to college. It wasn’t right that Catholic priests would hit me. >Elie Wiesel says that neutrality only helps the oppressor, never the victim. And I think you can apply that to journalism. > You have to show reality as it is, not as you wish it to be. > I sent Trump a handwritten note requesting an interview with my cell-phone number in it. That was a huge mistake. You should never, ever give your cell-phone number to Donald Trump. You know what he did with it?…

IN THE SUMMER, your jacket needs to travel well—from the half day at work to the beach and into the night. The outerwear most capable of pulling this off? The new generation of chore jacket. Paired with an oxford, even a tie, it’s a solid foundation for dressing up at the office: It buttons up but carries neither a blazer’s structure nor its suity implications. With a T-shirt, it’s an extra layer of warmth by the campfire—a grown man’s denim jacket. In its native France, it’s known as the bleu de travail (“worker’s blue”) and has been the go-to of sharp tradesmen for decades. It’s utility-driven—cut short, often cotton, and equipped with four patch pockets—but has some art history, too. In the ’40s and ’50s, its proletarian heritage attracted painters…

UNLESS YOU ARE actually trying to look like this guy, you know you need to integrate sunscreen into your daily grooming ritual. The [1] Lab Series Daily Moisture Defense lotion ($48; labseries.com) is a moisturizer hybrid worth adding to your morning routine—even when the only time you’ll spend under the sun is during the drive to and from the office. (Car windows don’t block UVA rays.) For a full day outside, there’s the [2] Clarins SPF 15 Oil-Free lotion spray ($36; clarinsusa.com), which, since it’s a spray, saves you from soliciting the assistance of a stranger on a solo excursion. The [3] SkinCeuticals Sport UV Defense ($40; skinceuticals.com) is the workhorse— built for marathoners. With an SPF of 50 and an 80-minute water resistance, it protects you as well as…

From “What I’ve Learned: Muhammad Ali,” January 2004 “Lighting that torch in Atlanta didn’t make me nervous. Standing up to the government—that made me nervous.” NOT SO VERY LONG AGO, as the years of a human life are counted, there were only two major sports in New York City: baseball and boxing. My neighborhood was packed with Brooklyn Dodgers fans. Nobody had money for spiked shoes, uniforms, leather gloves. We used stripped broom handles instead of bats and small pink balls we called Spaldeens (a corruption of A. G. Spalding, who made the balls). Home plate and second base were steel sewer tops. First and third were marked with chalk. Usually, it was one strike and you were out. Our summer games were filled with laughter, joy, affection, and surprise.…

In 2005, Liev Schreiber was at the Met Gala in New York, a glamorous event where he felt, characteristically, out of place. He was there with the actor Elijah Wood, who was starring in Everything Is Illuminated, a movie Schreiber had just written and directed. Years earlier, in a hotel lobby in Toronto, Schreiber had met the actress Naomi Watts. It was a cursory meeting; mutual friends had since been trying to set them up. When he saw her again that night in Manhattan, in the midst of his social tumult, he says she was “a ray of light.” “She said, ‘What are you doing later on— you want to go dancing?’ And I was like, yeah. So I went down to this club that she told me to meet…

HOW CAN I describe my wife’s face the first time she saw me shove a fat hog of chewing tobacco into my lower lip? Picture the face Rosemary made when she first glimpsed her demon baby. Revulsion, nausea, incomprehension. Or else imagine the face your spouse might make if you said, “Would you try on these panties I found in my sister’s closet?” Furrowed brow, curled upper lip, squinty eyes. It was a face that gave me far too much immature glee. But I get it. In my social circle, chewing tobacco elicits universal disgust. It brings to mind marrying your second cousin, jaw cancer, and cups of warm brown spit at awful frat parties long ago. That’s because I live in an artsy-fartsy low-testosterone bubble. In much of the…

Edgar Ramirez could use a drink. The thirty-nine-year-old Venezuelan actor has just spent five days mugging for the cameras and working the crowds at the Cannes Film Festival, where he was promoting his new boxing movie, Hands of Stone, alongside costar Robert De Niro, and a man can put up his dukes in mock pugilistic fury only so many times before a chilled manhattan starts sounding pretty good. As Ramirez settles into the Frank Sinatra booth at La Dolce Vita, a temple of dark wood, leather banquettes, and red-sauce Italian in Beverly Hills, he sur veys the scene and sips that manhattan. “Classic, solid—gravitas,” he says. “This is my turf. This is what I like.” The stares of the restaurant’s other guests linger on Ramirez—some for the fraction of a…