Esquire

At Esquire, Bruce Springsteen talks to Michael Hainey about Trump’s divisive politics, raising kids to become solid citizens, how to learn to deal with the baggage of your upbringing to be the person you truly want to be, and how, at age 69 after two serious bouts of depression, he’s still figuring it all out, just like the rest of us.

Six years after a mass shooting at the local High School, Libby Copeland visits with survivors and observes various ways they live and cope with lasting trauma.

Stained, neglected, nearly thrown away, a million-dollar Salvador Dalí painting spent forty years hanging around the Riker’s jail complex until someone decided to steal it.

How a happy accident has gone on to make men happy the world over.

Twenty-five years after releasing her debut album Exile in Guyville, Liz Phair’s early music is still helping define peoples’ lives, dudes included.

Ten of every eleven psychiatric patients housed by the government are incarcerated. Here’s what this crisis looks like from the inside—a series of lost lives and a few rare victories—as reported by a prisoner-journalist.

After two siblings got kidnapped on the Navajo reservation, jurisdictional issues and a structural breakdown of the Amber Alert system slowed the search. Trying to protect Indigenous children on tribal lands requires increased police training and federal funding, but funding often means compromising some tribal sovereignity.

A personal essay in which writer and producer Rebecca Carroll catalogs her experiences with not only sexism, by racism as well, as the only black woman on Charlie Rose’s staff in the late 90s.

In an incredibly moving feature, journalist Libby Copeland spends time with a couple in their 60s, Kate and Deloy Oberlin, as they very consciously prepare for Kate’s death from metastatic breast cancer, and again in the aftermath of her passing. Deloy honors his wife’s wishes that once she’s gone, for three days while her body is chilled with dry ice and frozen water bottles, a gathering his held where family and friends can visit with her body. Afterward, also per her wishes, he delivers her body to a site where it is composted as part of a study in “green” burial.

For Esquire, Robert P. Baird talks to Kevin Young, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the recently appointed poetry editor at the New Yorker about the future of poetry.