The Strange Thing About Bruce Jenner

One of the greatest athletes of all time faded into the background while his wife and daughters became reality TV stars:

“Fathers suffer a curse, and Bruce Jenner knows this curse better than most: The day you become a father, you stop being who you were. In the eyes of your children, your life began when theirs did.

“The strange thing about Jenner, now that he’s sixty-two years old: It’s not just his glorious past that has disappeared. It’s as though all of him, every previous incarnation of him, has been flooded out of view: by the fame of his adopted family — his third wife, the former-and-sometimes-still Kris Kardashian, her son, Rob, and her collection of daughters, Kourtney, Kim, Khloé, Kendall, and Kylie, the last two also Jenner’s — by the glib demands of reality-TV story lines, by dubious plastic surgery and eyebrows plucked to oblivion. Even in his own home, that familiar Spanish castle with the fountain splashing out front, you have to look hard to find those few traces of his existence. (‘My mom’s house,’ Kim calls it.) All of the photographs are of the children; all of the memorabilia and props are the product of their successes, not his. There is no red singlet in a frame; his gold medal is nowhere to be found. For the most part, Bruce Jenner, Olympian, has been banished to the garage.”

Source: Esquire
Published: May 20, 2012
Length: 13 minutes (3,339 words)

Counter-Terrorism Is Getting Complicated

[Not single-page] The case of the “Waffle House terrorists,” which included 73-year-old Fred Thomas and three other 60-something men charged with plotting to commit acts of terror—and an FBI informant previously arrested on charges of molestation:

“It is the central mystery of the case, one even more perplexing than the mystery of whether the old conspirators would ever have been capable of doing what they were talking about doing, or whether, if they weren’t capable, they could be guilty of any crimes. By all accounts, Fred Thomas had lived an exemplary life of loyalty and leadership, with a devoted wife, a son nearby, a secure pension income, and a dream home to show for it. Joe Sims, by all accounts, had lived a slippery and slovenly life that made him the equivalent of his cell-phone stamp — unknown. He was a man of unsavory associations and catastrophic divorces, a man who when he tells the truth, tells it slant, a man who stands accused of raping his stepdaughter in a house with her old swing set still planted in the backyard.

“And yet Fred Thomas called him and still has his phone number on his speed dial. When Sims called Thomas, Thomas picked up the phone, and even when Charlotte took an icy message, Thomas always called Sims back.”

Author: Tom Junod
Source: Esquire
Published: Jan 18, 2012
Length: 37 minutes (9,457 words)

Six to Eight Black Men

In Holland the children receive presents on December 5, in celebration of Saint Nicholas Day. It sounded sort of quaint until I spoke to a man named Oscar, who filled me in on a few of the details as we walked from my hotel to the Amsterdam train station. … The words silly and unrealistic were redefined when I learned that Saint Nicholas travels with what was consistently described as “six to eight black men.” I asked several Dutch people to narrow it down, but none of them could give me an exact number. It was always “six to eight,” which seems strange, seeing as they’ve had hundreds of years to get a decent count.

Source: Esquire
Published: Dec 1, 2002
Length: 7 minutes (1,893 words)

The Second Coming of Steven Jobs

Now, more than a year later, he insists that he has managed to put Apple behind him. Surely, this is wishful thinking. Apple had always been a reflection of Jobs’ personality, a mirror of his eccentricities and passions. He used to talk, for instance, about making Apple an “insanely great” place to work, but he wasn’t talking about irresistible perks or liberal benefits. Instead, he was talking about creating an environment where you would work harder and longer than you’d ever worked in your life, under the most grinding of deadline pressure, with more responsibility than you ever thought you could handle, never taking vacations, rarely getting even a weekend off . . . and you wouldn’t care! You’d love it! You’d get to the point where you couldn’t live without the work and the responsibility and the grinding deadline pressure. All of the people in this room had known such feelings about work — feelings that were exhilarating and personal and even intimate — and they’d known them while working for Steve Jobs. They all shared a private history of their work together at Apple. It was their bond, and no one who was not there could ever fully understand it.

Source: Esquire
Published: Dec 1, 1986
Length: 31 minutes (7,780 words)

Jon Stewart and the Burden of History

Stewart isn’t just being a bully here. He is being disingenuous, and he knows it. Worse, he’s tapping into the collective fantasy without knowing it. He’s the gunslinger saying he’s going back to the farm while at the same time putting notches in his belt. More precisely, he’s the presumptive Edward R. Murrow saying that he’ll go back to comedy once he cleans up journalism. But he can’t go back. He can’t go back to the pleasures of fart jokes and funny faces — the pleasures of comedy — because he’s experienced the higher pleasure of preaching to weirdly defenseless stiffs like Jim Cramer. He’s saying once again that he’s outgrown comedy and is no longer a comedian. But he’s not saying what he actually is, because then he’d be judged. And Jon Stewart, to a degree unique in the culture, exists outside the realm of judgment.

Author: Tom Junod
Source: Esquire
Published: Sep 15, 2011
Length: 29 minutes (7,393 words)

Surviving the Fall

Ten years later, Tom Junod revisits “The Falling Man.” “Now Jonathan is buried in Mt. Kisco, next to his mother, who died in 2009. But Gwendolyn doesn’t visit him there, because he is not there, any more than he is there in Richard Drew’s photograph. ‘I believe in the trinity of the human being — mind, body and spirit. And I know that after the death of the body, he’s not there. He’s in God’s hands.’ In the same way, he’s not in the photograph of the Falling Man. ‘People have to get over wondering who this man was,’ she says. ‘He’s everybody. We’re so stuck on who he was that we can’t see what’s right there in front of us. The photo’s so much bigger than any man, because the man in the photo is clearly in God’s hands. And it’s God who gives us the grace to go on.’ ” #Sept11

Author: Tom Junod
Source: Esquire
Published: Sep 9, 2011
Length: 7 minutes (1,889 words)

The Memorial

People talk a lot about the “healing process.” Well, this is New York. In the aftermath of a tragedy of monumental proportions, the healing process has been noisy and rude, with elbows out, redolent of greed, power, and the darker forces that drive human existence. And most of the shouting has been about how to make a fitting monument to what happened here. But in a hundred years, all the shouting and all the politics will be forgotten. What will be remembered is what is built here, now, on these sixteen acres. #Sept11

Author: Scott Raab
Source: Esquire
Published: Aug 16, 2011
Length: 28 minutes (7,085 words)

My Mom Couldn’t Cook

This, however, is not a story of my cooking, or the odd combination of freedom and thralldom it confers. It’s the story of what — or who — inspired my decision to be my family’s cook, gave me the will to do it, and made it both a practical and, apparently, a psychological necessity. It is the story of my mother — of my mother’s cooking.

Author: Tom Junod
Source: Esquire
Published: Sep 1, 2010
Length: 12 minutes (3,248 words)

The Someone You’re Not

Our packed prisons are starting to disgorge hundreds of mostly African-America men who, over the last few decades, we wrongly convicted of violent crimes. This is what it’s like to spend nearly thirty years in prison for something you didn’t do. This is what it’s like to spend nearly thirty years as someone you aren’t. And for Ray Towler, this is what it’s like to be free.

Author: Mike Sager
Source: Esquire
Published: Feb 24, 2011
Length: 29 minutes (7,465 words)

The Hard Luck and Beautiful Life of Liam Neeson

Then Liam Neeson asked me what I remembered about the interview. I echoed him: “You told me about your accident. You told me about your wife’s accident. That was hard for you. You were upset. You got very quiet. So I traded stories. I told you something bad that happened to me. I have the picture of your house right here. I remember that your hand was shaking.”

Source: Esquire
Published: Feb 15, 2011
Length: 20 minutes (5,192 words)