If president-elect Donald Trump learned anything from his mentor Roy Cohn, it was this: punch first and never apologize. Cohn was notorious for going on the attack—as counsel for Senator Joseph McCarthy during the communist witch-hunts of the fifties, and later as a pugnacious attorney for whom the only bad publicity was no publicity. With hooded eyes and a scar running along his nose, Cohn relished playing the intimidating outlaw in a black hat. He was fearless and bullying yet always considere...
Dec 22, 2016•26 min
The question is astonishingly simple: In the year 2015, with GPS and satellites and global surveillance everywhere all the time, how does a massive airplane simply go missing? To find the answer, writer Bucky McMahon boarded one of the vessels searching for Malaysia Air 370 in one of the most isolated and treacherous stretches of ocean on the planet. In telling the story of the search crew and the massive amounts of technology, money, and human capital being spent trying to find this airplane, M...
Dec 13, 2016•26 min
Published in 1992, Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes: The Way to the White House remains the richest and most unvarnished account of the personal price of running for president. The irony, as Cramer pointed out to C-SPAN shortly after the book came out, is that to become president a candidate must sacrifice the entire life that had prepared him or her for office in the first place. Earlier this year longtime Esquire political correspondent Charles P. Pierce joined host David Brancaccio to discu...
Dec 06, 2016•24 min
Norman Maclean published A River Runs Through It when he was seventy-three, and only after his children implored him to write down the stories about fly-fishing, brotherhood, and the wilds of Montana that he’d told them for years. The resulting novella is a classic of economy and clarity. A few years later, Pete Dexter visited Maclean in Montana and profiled him for Esquire in “The Old Man and the River.” Dexter, a National Book Award winner, joins host David Brancaccio to discuss the master cla...
Nov 28, 2016•23 min
Jim Harrison, the novelist and poet who died earlier this year at the age of 78, had a gargantuan, fearless appetite that would make both A.J. Liebling and Anthony Bourdain proud. He wrote about food—about eating, really— in a woolly, baroque style for Esquire’s “The Raw and the Cooked” column. He began one piece with this Hors d’oeuvre: “Distraught, I fled north with little more than a frozen wild pig’s head in the cooler for nutrition.” Our food and drink editor Jeff Gordinier joins David Bran...
Nov 21, 2016•24 min
In 1968, just hours after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, the future Pulitzer Prize–winning author Garry Wills—then a young writer for Esquire—rushed to Memphis, Tennessee, where he watched as King’s body was embalmed at the mortuary; later, Wills traveled twelve hours by bus with mourners to King’s funeral in Atlanta. Nearly fifty years after its publication, Wills’s “Martin Luther King Jr. Is Still on the Case ! ” remains one of the most revealing and lasting portraits of King and his...
Nov 14, 2016•30 min
On November 7, 1991, Magic Johnson held a press conference announcing that he had contracted the HIV virus, effectively ending his Hall of Fame career with the Los Angeles Lakers. The news sent shockwaves through popular culture, as well as the more narrow subculture of millionaire athletes and the woman who pursue them. Magic Johnson was not only one of the most famous men in America on the court and on TV, he was the Hugh Hefner of professional sports. If Magic could get AIDS did that mean the...
Nov 07, 2016•29 min
It was a meeting of two American masters: Robert Noyce, who, in inventing the integrated computer chip and founding Intel, willed Silicon Valley into being, and Tom Wolfe, who, in holding a magnifying glass over the social and class currents that shape America, rewrote the laws of what it meant to be a journalist. Their resulting Esquire story from 1983, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce,” remains one of the most revealing and entertaining portraits of early Silicon Valley and the personalities, i...
Oct 31, 2016•26 min
Reggie Jackson once called himself “the straw that stirs the drink” but there was no question that Thurman Munson was the pride of the Yankees—like Lou Gehrig before him and Derek Jeter after. For Michael Paterniti, consistently one of the most inventive and entertaining magazine writers going—Munson, the gruff All-Star catcher, was the perfect childhood hero. In his 1999 profile, “The House That Thurman Munson Built,” Paterniti recalls the devastation he felt when Munson was killed in a plane c...
Oct 24, 2016•27 min
In 1936, F. Scott Fitzgerald, then a struggling writer battling depression and alcoholism, published “ The Crack-Up ,” a radical series of essays in Esquire about his mental breakdown. Celebrated poet and memoirist Nick Flynn discusses with host David Brancaccio Fitzgerald’s mindset at the time, the ridicule he faced from friends like Ernest Hemingway, and how his essays set off a genre of confessional writing that persists and thrives today....
Oct 17, 2016•33 min
In 1953, a twenty-seven-year old factory worker named Henry Molaison, cursed with severe epilepsy, underwent a radical new version of the lobotomy that targeted the most unexplored structures of the brain. The operation was performed by Dr. William Scoville whose brilliance as a surgeon was only tempered by an adventurousness that bordered on recklessness. It did not cure Molaison’s seizures but left him profoundly amnesiac. This tragic, if revelatory, accident opened the door to our understandi...
Oct 10, 2016•35 min
It’s hard to think of a profession more maligned than the paparazzi, but in 1998 Esquire writer at large John H. Richardson decided to find out for himself what it feels like to hunt celebrities for money in “I, Stalkerazzi.” Two years later, he learned what it was like to be the hunted when he profiled a still-rising and very vulnerable Angelina Jolie for “Angelina Jolie and the Torture of Fame.” Richardson joins the Esquire Classic Podcast to discuss our cultural infatuation with celebrity and...
Oct 03, 2016•28 min
Rudolf Nureyev was one of the most dynamic performers of the twentieth century. “He was Mick Jagger before Mick Jagger,” remembers Elizabeth Kaye, who specialized in writing in-depth profiles of men in power for Esquire in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Kaye spent a full year with the famously volatile dancer, who unbeknownst to the public was dying of AIDS. She joins host David Brancacchio to discuss the defiance he still showed, even at the end of a glorious career, and the sadness she found be...
Sep 26, 2016•29 min
Fifty years after it was first published, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” remains the most influential and talked-about magazine story of all time. Author Gay Talese joins host David Brancaccio to discuss how this groundbreaking work of New Journalism came about, the evolution of celebrity, and why his story remains as resonant as the day it was first published.
Sep 19, 2016•32 min
When journalist Philip Caputo set out to profile William Styron in 1985, it was something of a dream assignment: Styron, then at work on the novel The Way of the Warrior , was one of the towering figures in American letters. The two men’s shared experience as Marines—Styron himself praised Caputo’s 1977 Vietnam memoir, A Rumor of War —formed a connection far stronger than their common bond as writers. But when Styron fell into a clinical depression during the reporting of the story, the nature o...
Sep 12, 2016•25 min
Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001. The story behind it, though, and the search for the man pictured in it, are our most intimate connection to the horror of that day. Thus begins Tom Junod’s “ The Falling Man ,” which over the past fourteen years has become one of the magazine’s most-read stories of all time. It’s a story that is as enthralling and complicated today as when it was first published in 2...
Sep 06, 2016•34 min
In 1992, writer Susan Orlean was sick of celebrity profiles. Instead, she wanted to do something bigger and much harder: She wanted to profile the inner life of an average American boy. After convincing her editor, Orlean spent more than a week going to fifth grade and hanging out with Colin Duffy, a ten-year-old from Glen Ridge, New Jersey. The resulting article—“The American Man at Age Ten”—stands as one of the most surprising and engaging portraits of what it’s like to be a boy in America. Or...
Aug 29, 2016•27 min
Martha Sherrill’s father, Peter, rakish and handsome, was an irrepressible charmer and natural raconteur; when he died, she was flooded with calls from his ex-girlfriends who wanted to pay their respects and share their stories about this man who adored women. This week Sherrill joins host David Brancaccio to discuss her intimate 1999 Esquire essay, “My Father the Bachelor,” one of the most unusual and endearing tributes to fatherhood ever published.
Aug 22, 2016•29 min
“A Few Words About Breasts,” from May 1972, is Nora Ephron’s comic lament about how her late onset of puberty and earliest sexual experiences gave her a lifelong obsession with her breasts. Jessi Klein, head writer for “Inside Amy Schumer,” joins David Brancaccio to discuss Ephron’s famous Esquire story and its lasting influence on the way women perceive and voice themselves in writing and comedy.
Aug 15, 2016•42 min
Between 1977 and 1987, Edwin Moses won 122 consecutive races in the men’s 400-meter hurdles—including his second Olympic gold—in a streak as fantastic and improbable as Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak. In his 1987 interview with Moses, Mark Kram, known for writing penetrating and lyrical boxing profiles, probes the champ’s cool, implacable exterior to discover what kind of person can sustain such excellence—and to measure the toll it took. With the Summer Olympics now under way in R...
Aug 08, 2016•26 min
Published in 1992, Richard Ben Cramer’s book What It Takes remains the richest and most detailed account of the personal price of running for president. The irony, as Cramer pointed out to C-SPANN when the book was first published, is that to become president a candidate must sacrifice the entire life that prepared him or her for office in the first place. Longtime Esquire political correspondent Charles P. Pierce joins host David Brancaccio to discuss how Cramer’s book—which was excerpted in th...
Aug 01, 2016•25 min
In Raymond Carver’s masterful short stories, what goes unspoken between characters—what can’t or won’t be articulated—carries more weight than what they say. In the 1984 essay “My Father’s Life,” Carver turns his unforgiving eye on his own life, and with heartbreaking frankness he examines the seemingly unbridgeable gap between him and his own father. The novelist Jay McInerney, who studied under Carver at Syracuse in the early eighties, joins host David Brancaccio to talk about his mentor’s app...
Jul 25, 2016•27 min
Before anyone foresaw a time when a television celebrity could become president— hello, Cleveland —Norman Mailer wrote in Esquire that John F. Kennedy was a mythical hero who could finally unite the business of politics with the business of stardom. His legendary 1960 reported essay, “Superman Comes to the Supermart,” about J.F.K. and the Democratic political convention, changed the rules for how we understand our political candidates as brands, and how we’re allowed to write about them. Mailer ...
Jul 18, 2016•25 min
For two decades, the Four Seasons was the epicenter of culture in America. Jackie Onassis, Henry Kissinger, and Nora Ephron were just some of the regulars at the New York City restaurant, but the real stars were the creative power brokers in publishing, fashion, architecture, and advertising who convened in the massive, elegant bar room to make the decisions about what books we read, wine we drank, and clothes we wore. In his 1979 feature on the Four Seasons, former Esquire editor in chief Lee E...
Jul 11, 2016•22 min
In 2001, director Michael Bay was one of Hollywood’s most successful commercial filmmakers when he took on the daunting task of directing an epic about Pearl Harbor. How would his testosterone-laden, explosive-style adapt to a serious subject? (Hint: the critics hated it but the movie made $450 million at the box office.) Jeanne Marie Laskas joins host David Brancaccio this week to discuss her sympathetic but piercing—and often hilarious—profile of Bay, who rages at his critics, complains about ...
Jun 27, 2016•20 min
Norman Maclean published A River Runs Through It when he was seventy-three, and only after his children implored him to write down the stories about fly-fishing, brotherhood, and the wilds of Montana that he’d told them for years. The resulting novella—published forty years ago last month—is a classic of economy and clarity. A few years later, Pete Dexter visited Maclean in Montana and profiled him for Esquire in “The Old Man and the River.” Dexter, a National Book Award winner, joins host David...
Jun 13, 2016•23 min
It’s hard to find a profession more maligned than the paparazzi, but in 1998 Esquire writer at large John H. Richardson decided to find out for himself what it feels like to hunt celebrities for money in “I, Stalkerazzi.” Two years later, Richardson found out what it was like to be the hunted when he profiled a then still-rising and very vulnerable Angelina Jolie for “Angelina Jolie and the Torture of Fame.” Richardson joins the Esquire Classic Podcast this week to discuss our cultural infatuati...
May 31, 2016•27 min
In March 2013, the man who shot and killed Osama bin Laden came forward to tell his story for the first time in “The Shooter,” by Phil Bronstein. It is a report of the celebrated mission by turns captivating, astonishing, and visceral, but also heart-breaking: The shooter decided to break his silence because, now a civilian, he feared for the safety of his family, was concerned about a life without a safety net, and he wanted to shine a light on a little-known and worrisome aspect of Special For...
May 16, 2016•24 min
The question is astonishingly simple: In the year 2015, with GPS and satellites and global surveillance everywhere all the time, how does a massive airplane simply go missing? To find the answer, writer Bucky McMahon boarded one of the vessels searching for Malaysia Air 370 in one of the most isolated and treacherous stretches of ocean on the planet. In telling the story of the search crew and the massive amounts of technology, money, and human capital being spent trying to find this airplane, M...
May 02, 2016•26 min
Richard Ben Cramer’s masterful profile of Ted Williams from 1986 is often cited as one of the greatest magazine stories of all time. It’s about a sports idol who wanted fame but hated celebrity, who shouted louder than anyone but demanded privacy, who wanted to be the best at everything, always, and thus wanted to be immortal. Former Esquire editor David Hirshey joins host David Brancaccio to discuss the enigmatic and bigger-than-life Teddy Ballgame and the journalist who finally uncovered his e...
Apr 18, 2016•28 min
