I Think You're Fat
esquire.comI want all the attractive women I knew in high school and college to read it. I want them to be amazed and impressed and feel a vague regret over their decision not to have sex with me, and maybe if I get divorced or become a widower, I can have sex with them someday at a reunion. I want Hollywood to buy my article and turn it into a movie, even though they kind of already made the movie ten years ago with Jim Carrey. I want to get congratulatory e-mails and job offers that I can politely decline. Or accept if they're really good. Then get a generous counteroffer from my boss.
Estimated reading time: 5 min
Thom Yorke: What I've Learned
esquire.comBuild gaps in your life. Pauses. Proper pauses.
Estimated reading time: 4 min
The War Against Youth
esquire.comThere may be no white America and no black America, no blue-state America and no red-state America, but one thing is clear: There is a young America and there is an old America, and they don't form a community of interest. One takes from the other. The federal government spends $480 billion on Medicare and $68 billion on education. Prescription drugs: $62 billion. Head Start: $8 billion. Across the board, the money flows not to helping the young grow up, but helping the old die comfortably.
Estimated reading time: 7 min
I Think You're Fat
esquire.comHere's the truth about why I'm writing this article: I want to fulfill my contract with my boss. I want to avoid getting fired. I want all the attractive women I knew in high school and college to read it. I want them to be amazed and impressed and feel a vague regret over their decision not to have sex with me
Estimated reading time: 19 min
Free at Last: The Robert Redford Story
esquire.comNot his favorite subject, the face. The car got him out of Dodge; the promise of a baseball scholarship got him to the University of Colorado, where the booze helped get him tossed; painting took him to Paris and Italy, acting to New York City, where he attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and began working on Broadway and television. But it was that face that made him a matinee idol and held him hostage.
Estimated reading time: 7 min
The Devil in Greg Dark
esquire.comHe was a pornographer, sure, maybe even the worst pornographer ... but it's not like he sits around plotting to direct Britney Spears, Mandy Moore, and Leslie Carter so that he can corrupt them and the little girls who idolize them. And it's not like he has to worry about making them pornographic, either--about straying over the boundaries of taste, about eroticizing them, about fetishizing them, about doing all the things he used to do as a pornographer. They've already been eroticized and fetishized by the culture itself.
Estimated reading time: 27 min
I Think You're Fat
esquire.com"I advocate never lying in personal relationships. But if you have Anne Frank in your attic and a Nazi knocks on the door, lie....I lie to any government official." (Blanton's politics are just this side of Noam Chomsky's.) "I lie to the IRS. I always take more deductions than are justified. I lie in golf. And in poker."
Estimated reading time: 5 min
elflojo recommended this story.
The War Against Youth
esquire.comBut the choice young Americans face is between a party that claims to represent their interests but fails to and a party that explicitly opposes their interests and actively works to disenfranchise them.
Estimated reading time: 7 min
voidstern recommended this story.
Man Who Killed Osama Bin Laden - Treatment of Veteran Who Shot bin Laden
esquire.comMay 1, 2012, the first anniversary of the bin Laden mission. The Shooter is getting ready to go play with his kids at a water park. He's watching CNN. "They were saying, 'So now we're taking viewer e-mails. Do you remember where you were when you found out Osama bin Laden was dead?' And I was thinking: Of course I remember. I was in his bedroom looking down at his body."
Estimated reading time: 9 min
jocialmedia recommended this story.
How to Build an American Car
esquire.comFirst is the power-train dyno. That's when the engine and transmission are put into the chamber with a bunch of microphones and accelerometers. If something vibrates enough, it's going to make a noise. They expect people to drive the car hard, and so they have to test the engine at that level, they have to push it.
Estimated reading time: 29 min
motech recommended this story.
The Man Who Killed Osama bin Laden... Is Screwed
esquire.comThe blood is your own, not fake splatter and explosive squibs. Movies, books, lore — we all helped make these men brilliant assassins in the name of liberty, lifted them up on our shoulders as unique and exquisitely trained heroes, then left them alone in the shadows of their past. Uncertainty will never be far away for the Shooter. His government may have shut the door on him, but he is required to live inside the consequences of his former career.
Estimated reading time: 1 h 3 min
Erik recommended this story.
More