We will all get old one day. Mike Sager’s astonishingly intimate portrait of Glenn Sandberg, age ninety-two, is about what it actually feels like to be close to the end. It’s a story about mortality and love and companionship and the things in life that are most important—and how those things we once held as so important fall away. Longtime Esquire writer at large Mike Sager joins host David Brancaccio to discuss how and why he wrote “Old,” which was published in 1998, and how the story continue...
Apr 04, 2016•29 min
David Foster Wallace’s unforgettable portrait of tennis player Michael Joyce is as much about the intricate physics of hitting a fuzzy yellow ball, as it is about the physical and emotional sacrifices it takes to be the best in the world at something—and how often even the greatest, most gifted, most hardworking among us are still miles away from perfection. Esquire editor in chief David Granger joins host David Brancaccio to discuss David Foster Wallace and why his 1996 story “The String Theory...
Mar 21, 2016•29 min
In 1992, writer Susan Orlean was tired of celebrity profiles. Instead, she wanted to do something bigger, deeper, and much harder: She wanted to profile the inner life of an average American boy. After convincing her editor, Orlean spent 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 intimate and touching portraits of what it feels like to be a boy in America. ...
Mar 07, 2016•27 min
Published in 1991, Richard Ben Cramer’s book What It Takes remains the richest and most unvarnished 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...
Feb 22, 2016•25 min
“It was the moment we were waiting for and the moment we dreaded.” So begins “The Death of Patient Zero,” a story that broke all boundaries and preconceptions—about how we attack cancer; how the most advanced medical care, science, and hopes can fall short; how a writer can fast find himself testing the ethical limits of journalism; and how the love of a single, humble woman—Stephanie Lee—can change so many lives. Esquire writer at large Tom Junod and executive editor Mark Warren join host David...
Feb 08, 2016•30 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, im...
Jan 25, 2016•25 min
In 1968, just hours after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, the legendary historian and 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, then later traveled twelve hours by bus with mourners to King’s funeral in Atlanta. Nearly fifty years later, Wills’s “Martin Luther King Jr Is Still on the Case! ” remains one of the most revealing and lasting portraits of King and his tu...
Jan 11, 2016•30 min
“Oh my God—we hit a little girl.” This was the single, shocking cover line of the October 1966 issue of Esquire. Inside was John Sack’s 33,000-word New Journalism masterpiece, M, in which he followed a single company of American infantrymen from Fort Dix, New Jersey, to the war in South Vietnam. With that story—the longest to ever appear in Esquire—Sack single-handedly invented what it meant to be an embedded reporter and reset the bar for what journalism could be: trenchant, moving, and at time...
Dec 28, 2015•33 min
Back in 1986, Joe Nocera spent a week shadowing Steve Jobs, who was then leading his start-up, NeXT, and attempting to build a new kind of computer. What resulted is one of the most intimate and honest appraisals of the computer visionary ever written. The Steve Jobs we recognize now—obsessed by design and unwilling to bend to anyone or anything—is in Nocera’s profile, but so is a more human Jobs, one rarely seen after he returned to lead Apple a year later. Nocera, a longtime New York Times rep...
Dec 14, 2015•26 min
Before anyone foresaw a time when a television celebrity could become president, 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 Supermarket,” about JFK 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 archivist and biogr...
Nov 30, 2015•25 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 the groundbreaking work of New Journalism came about, the evolution of celebrity, and why his story remains as resonant today as the day it was first published.
Nov 15, 2015•33 min
In 1936, F. Scott Fitzgerald, then a struggling writer battling depression and alcoholism, published a radical series of essays in Esquire about his mental breakdown. Celebrated poet and memoirist Nick Flynn discusses with host David Brancaccio (public radio’s Marketplace , PBS’ NOW ) 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....
Nov 02, 2015•34 min
“A Few Words About Breasts” is Nora Ephron’s famous comic lament from 1972 about how her late onset of puberty gave her a lifelong obsession with breasts. Jessi Klein, comedian and head writer for “Inside Amy Schumer,” joins David Brancaccio to discuss Ephron’s story and its lasting influence on her and the way women perceive and voice themselves today.
Oct 19, 2015•44 min
“The Falling Man”, Esquire’s most-read story of all time, is discussed by host David Brancaccio and Esquire Writer at Large Tom Junod. The story is about an infamous photograph from 9/11 that was published briefly in the days after the terrorist attacks and then largely disappeared. Junod explains why he felt it was his responsibility to bring it—and the falling man pictured in it—to light.
Oct 01, 2015•36 min
