Mike Bloomberg Will Save Us from Ourselves If Only We Let Him
Mike Bloomberg has become important because he represents a great American dream, not the one about owning a home or becoming more successful than your father but the one beneath all of those, the foundational American dream — the dream of freedom from politics. Bloomberg is the ultimate independent, the calm modern technocrat rooted in metrics and cleansed of ideology, come to drain the swamps of government with his amazing modern business-management techniques … unless he’s actually just an old-fashioned autocrat looking down on us from above and tinkering with our lives like a science experiment, stripping our noisy polis of all its native poetry.
Why Does Roger Ailes Hate America?
Does any of us win all the time? Of course not, or else we wouldn’t be average. But Roger Ailes does. And so, Mr. Ailes, Esquire has a question, on behalf of other average Americans: What kind of man wins all the time? What kind of man gives his country, in roughly this order, Mike Douglas, Richard Nixon, Tom Snyder, Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” the Willie Horton ad, the ad in which Michael Dukakis rides around in a tank and looks like a chipmunk, the presidency of George H. W. Bush, CNBC, Fox News (upstart-insurgent edition), Fox News (airwaves-of-the-empire edition), Fox News (“Obama sux” edition), and Fox News (Tea Party edition)? More pointedly, what kind of man figures out at age twenty-seven how to use television to legitimize Richard Nixon and then at age seventy to legitimize Sarah Palin?
Ryan Seacrest: ‘Dark Lord of Hosts’
Napping is for mortals. The Angel of the Bottomless Pit has souls to harvest, a mission demanding as much science as art. Seacrest’s voice — full of wiseass pep — has worked on radio for more than half his present incarnation, dating to his high school days in suburban Atlanta. It is not a versatile or interesting voice — expunged of all traces of any but the most generic middle-American accent, it is the aural equivalent of a bag of fast-food fries — but it is quick and, in a familiar sort of way, engaging.
The House That Thurman Munson Built
Trust me, he said, and the last great brawling sports team in America did. Twenty years after Thurman Munson’s death, Reggie, Catfish, Goose, Gator, the Boss—and a nation of former boys—still aren’t over it. “I give you Thurman Munson in the eighth inning of a meaningless baseball game, in a half-empty stadium in a bad Yankee year during a fourteen-season Yankee drought, and Thurman Munson is running, arms pumping, busting his way from second to third like he’s taking Omaha Beach, sliding down in a cloud of luminous, Saharan dust, then up on two feet, clapping his hands, turtling his head once around, spitting diamonds of saliva: Safe.”
An Imperfect Weekend
The van, a white Ford Econoline, was upside down, planted hood first on a steep slope in a dense thicket of bushes and trees, near the bottom of a ravine, just off the shoulder of the highway. Lee Risler was lying nose to roof. The sharp corner of the dome light was beneath the point of his left hip, digging in, stabbing at the same raw spot. His body, outstretched, was tilted at an angle, feet elevated higher than his head. He was buried in an avalanche of shoe boxes and leather sandals, about eight hundred pairs in eight different styles, each crafted painstakingly by his own hands.
The Final Days of Gary Condit
For almost a year, since the disappearance of Chandra Ann Levy, Gary and his family and his staff had been subjected to intense public scrutiny. “I know what they want me to say … They want me to say that I did her.”
Balance
Five men, one room, and a national crisis. The Esquire Commission to Balance the Federal Budget — Bob Packwood, John Danforth, Bill Bradley, Gary Hart and Lawrence O’Donnell — will now report its findings.
Philip Roth Goes Home Again
There are worse places to be stuck in traffic than midtown Manhattan, worse people to be stuck with than Philip Roth.
Greg Giraldo Before He Was Greg Giraldo
Ten years ago, Esquire profiled several young professionals who, ten years before that, had graduated from Harvard Law School and thrown away their degrees. One of them was comedian Greg Giraldo, who died on Wednesday of a drug overdose. This is the obituary of his first life.
The American Male at Age Ten
Susan Orlean’s classic profile of a ten-year-old boy named Colin Duffy:
“If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks. We would ‘ wear shorts, big sneakers, and long, baggy T-shirts depicting famous athletes every single day, even in the winter. We would sleep in our clothes. We would both be good at Nintendo Street Fighter II, but Colin would be better than me. We would have some homework, but it would not be too hard and we would always have just finished it. We would eat pizza and candy for all of our meals. We wouldn’t have sex, but we would have crushes on each other and, magically, babies would appear in our home. We would win the lottery and then buy land in Wyoming, where we would have one of every kind of cute animal. All the while, Colin would be working in law enforcement – probably the FBI. Our favorite movie star, Morgan Freeman, would visit us occasionally. We would listen to the same Eurythmics song (“Here Comes the Rain Again”) over and over again and watch two hours of television every Friday night. We would both be good at football, have best friends, and know how to drive; we would cure AIDS and the garbage problem and everything that hurts animals. We would hang out a lot with Colin’s dad. For fun, we would load a slingshot with dog food and shoot it at my butt. We would have a very good life.”