“It is not for us to cool it.”

A conversation between James Baldwin and the editors of Esquire about race relations in the summer of 1968.

Source: Esquire
Published: Jul 4, 1971
Length: 33 minutes (8,321 words)

The Abortion Ministry of Dr. Willie Parker

A profile of Dr. Willie Parker, who tends to the needs of women at the one abortion clinic open in Mississippi. Last week a federal appeals panel voted to block a Mississippi law that would have shut down the clinic.

Source: Esquire
Published: Jul 30, 2014
Length: 33 minutes (8,280 words)

The State of the American Dog

“This is a story about an American dog: my dog, Dexter.” Through his personal story, Junod examines how pit bulls became so feared, so abused, and so neglected in the United States.

Author: Tom Junod
Source: Esquire
Published: Jul 16, 2014
Length: 25 minutes (6,430 words)

Lance Armstrong in Purgatory

John H. Richardson examines the after-life of Lance Armstrong, and our own conceptions about what happens to the great work a man has done, after a great fall.

Source: Esquire
Published: Jul 7, 2014
Length: 34 minutes (8,700 words)

Why Men Love War

Originally published in Esquire nearly three decades ago, Broyles’ essay is an American classic. Drawing from the author’s own experience in Vietnam, “Why Men Love War” is a meditation on the intense, complicated, and at times near-erotic relationship between men and battle.

War is beautiful. There is something about a firefight at night, something about the mechanical elegance of an M -60 machine gun. They are everything they should be, perfect examples of their form. When you are firing out at night, the red racers go out into tile blackness is if you were drawing with a light pen. Then little dots of light start winking back, and green tracers from the AK-47s begin to weave ill with the red to form brilliant patterns that seem, given their great speeds, oddly timeless, as if they had been etched on the night. And then perhaps the gunships called Spooky come in and fire their incredible guns like huge hoses washing down from the sky, like something God would do when He was really ticked off. And then the flares pop, casting eerie shadows as they float down on their little parachutes, swinging in the breeze, and anyone who moves, in their light seems a ghost escaped from hell.

Daytime offers nothing so spectacular, but it also has its charms. Many men loved napalm, loved its silent power, the way it could make tree lines or houses explode as if by spontaneous combustion. But I always thought napalm was greatly overrated, unless you enjoy watching tires burn. I preferred white phosphorus, which exploded with a fulsome elegance, wreathing its target in intense and billowing white smoke, throwing out glowing red comets trailing brilliant white plumes I loved it more–not less –because of its function: to destroy, to kill. The seduction of War is in its offering such intense beauty–divorced from I all civilized values, but beauty still.

Source: Esquire
Published: Jan 1, 1984
Length: 18 minutes (4,604 words)

Naked, Covered in Ram’s Blood, Drinking a Coke, and Feeling Pretty Good

An exploration of the way other cultures treat depression:

And I said, “Oh! What an interesting idea. Well, um, yes, sure. Yeah, absolutely, yes, let’s do that. I’ll have an ndeup.”

“Oh, well, that’s great,” she said. And she gave us some fairly basic instructions, and then we left.

And my translator, the aforementioned then-girlfriend, now ex-wife of my friend, turned to me, and she said, “Are you completely crazy? Do you have any idea what you’re getting yourself into? You’re crazy. You’re totally crazy, but I’ll help you if you want.”

Source: Esquire
Published: Mar 1, 2014
Length: 10 minutes (2,580 words)

An Oral History of ‘Ghostbusters’

The making of a comedy classic, first published in Premiere Magazine:

HAROLD RAMIS: We very quickly came up with a model: Dan was the heart of the Ghostbusters, I was the brains, and Bill was the mouth.

I found my character on the front page of an abstract architectural journal. There was a picture of a guy and an article about his work. I didn’t understand a word, but his image was great. He was wearing a retro three-piece tweed suit, wire-rim glasses, and his hair was standing way up. I thought, “That could be my guy.” I took the name Egon from a Hungarian refugee I went to grammar school with, and Spengler was from [noted historian] Oswald Spengler.

Source: Esquire
Published: Feb 26, 2014
Length: 14 minutes (3,562 words)

There’s a Whole New Way of Killing Cancer: Stephanie Lee Is the Test Case

Stephanie Lee, a 36-year-old Iraq War widow with two children is diagnosed with terminal colon cancer and told she has just a few years to live. A group of pioneering cancer specialists at the Icahn Institute at Mount Sinai use genetic data to figure out alternative treatments to “the standard of care” that could give her her life back:

His name was Ross Cagan. He did not work for Schadt; he worked as a professor at Sinai. But they met every week, and after Schadt called on October 1 to tell Cagan about Stephanie Lee, he listened to Cagan’s idea for her. A month earlier, Cagan had started doing something that he said “had never been done before.” He started creating “personalized flies” for cancer patients. He took the mutations that scientists like Schadt had revealed and loaded them into flies, essentially giving the flies the same cancer that the patient had. Then he treated them. “Why a fly? You can do this in a fly. You can capture the complexities of the tumor.”

A day after Cagan spoke with Schadt, Stephanie became the fifth person in the world to have a fly built in her image—or, rather, in the image of her cancer. In an ideal world, Cagan would have created as complex a creature as possible, burdening the fly with at least ten mutations. He gave Stephanie’s fly three, because “Stephanie is on the shorter course. We’re making the fly as complex as possible given her time.” By October 11, however, Cagan already had “one possible drug suggestion for her”—or one possible combination of drugs, since he always tests at least two at a time. “In this center, the FDA will not allow us to put a novel drug in patient. To get a novel drug into a patient, we have to do a novel combination of [known] drugs. We have to use novel drug combinations that people have never seen before.”

Source: Esquire
Published: Nov 20, 2013
Length: 60 minutes (15,090 words)

‘He has a long neck, upon which his long head, adorned by long ears, wobbles like a tulip’

Tom Junod’s profile of George Clooney, in which the actor takes on Russell Crowe, Tesla and Leonardo DiCaprio:

"And the thing about playing Leo is you have all these guys talking shit. We get there, and there’s this guy, Danny A I think his name is. Danny A is this club kid from New York. And he comes up to me and says, ‘We played once at Chelsea Piers. I kicked your ass.’ I said, ‘I’ve only played at Chelsea Piers once in my life and ran the table. So if we played, you didn’t kick anybody’s ass.’ And so then we’re watching them warm up, and they’re doing this weave around the court, and one of the guys I play with says, ‘You know we’re going to kill these guys, right?’ Because they can’t play at all. We’re all like fifty years old, and we beat them three straight: 11–0, 11–0, 11–0. And the discrepancy between their game and how they talked about their game made me think of how important it is to have someone in your life to tell you what’s what. I’m not sure if Leo has someone like that.”

Author: Tom Junod
Source: Esquire
Published: Nov 12, 2013
Length: 24 minutes (6,061 words)

The Flight from Dallas

Inside Air Force One moments after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963:

2:02 P.M.

“Judge Hughes has been found. She is on her way.

“In the passenger cabin, Stoughton, the White House photographer, approaches Liz Carpenter and Marie Fehmer. He is sweating and ashen. ‘You must go in and tell the president,’ he says, still trying to catch his breath, ‘that this is a history-making moment, and while it seems tasteless, I am here to make a picture if he cares to have it. And I think we should have it.'”

Source: Esquire
Published: Sep 17, 2013
Length: 31 minutes (7,829 words)