$4.

99
IS REAL
MATT
OUR FALL
PREVIEW
A Couple
Days
Drinking
Beer
with This
Guy
A Truly Great Story
From This Years
Winner of the Pulitzer
PAGE 104
PAGE 29
PAGE 116
PAGE 66
10 PAGES
ON HOW
TO MAKE
THE
MOST
OF IT
NIRVANA
JON
STEWARTS
REPLACEMENT
SPEAKS
THE TRUTH
BEHIND EBEN
ALEXANDERS
GIANT BEST
SELLER, PROOF
OF HEAVEN,
PAGE 88
BY TOM JUNOD
PAGE 80
10 PAGES ON
HOW TO MAKE
THE MOST
OF IT
$4 $4 $4 $4 $4 $4 $4 $4 $$4 $$$$$4 $4 $4 $$4 $$$4 $$$4 $4 $$4 4 $$$4 $$4 $4 $$$4 $4 $4 $4 $4 44 $$ .9 .9 .9 9 .9 .9 .99 . 999999
IS REAL
OUR FALL
PREVIEW
A Couple
Days
Drinking
Beer
wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwith This
Guy
A Truly Great Story
From This Years
Winner of the Pulitzer
PAGE 104
PAGE 29
PAGE 116
PAGE 66666666666666666666
111111111111110 10000000 100000000000 10 100 10 10 10 10 11111110 10 10 10 10 11110 100000 10 10 1000 10 10000 10 10 10 11110 10 110 11000 1000 100000 100 10 10 10 10 11110 10 110 10 10 10 10 1111000000 1000 10 10000 100000 10 10 10 110 10 111100 100 1000 10 1000 10 1000 100 10 10 10 10 110 10 10 10 10 10 1000 10000 100 10 10 10 100 10 10 100 10 10000 10 10 110 10 10000 1000 100 10 10 1100000 10 1110 100 10 10 100 10 110 1000 10 10 10000 10 100000 10 110 10 100000000 11000000 110 100 1000 110 10000 11100 10000 11100 100000 PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPAAAG AAG AG AG AAG AG AG AG AG AAG AG AAG AG AG AG AG AG AG AG AG AAGG AG AG AG AG AG AG AG AG AG AGG AG AG AG AG AG AG AGGGGG AG AAAG AAG AAAG AG AG AG AG AG AG AAG AAG AG AAG AAAG AG AG AGGG AG AG AG AG AG AGGGGGGG AG AAG AAAAAAAG AG AG AG AAG AG AG AG AG AG AG AG AG AG AGG AG AGGG AGGG AG AG AG AAAAAAG AAG AAG AG AG AGGGGGG AAG AAAG AAG AAAAG AG AG AG AG AG AGGGGGG AG AG AAG AGG AG AG AAAG AG AAGG AGG AGG AGGG AAAAAG AGG AG AAG AG AAG AG AAAAG AAG AAAGGGG AAAAG AGG AAG AG AAAGG AAAAAAGGGGGGGG AAGGGGG AG AGGGGGGGGGGEEEEES ES ES EES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES EES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES EEES ES EEES EES ES ES ES EEES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES ES EEES ES EES EEEES EES S ES ES S ES ES S ES ES ES EES EES EES EES ES EES SSS ES SS ES S ES ES EES EEES ES EEEEEES ES ES EEEEES SS ES S ES SS ES ES EEEES ES EEEESS ES ES EES ES ES EES EES SSS ES ES ES S ES ES EEEES ES S EES EEEEEES ES ES ES S ES EES EES ES SSSS ES S EEEES ESS ES SS EEEES ES S EEES EEESSS EEES EESSS ES EESSSSS ES SS EES EEESSSS EEEEEESSSSSSS ESSS ESSSSSSS ES ESSSSSSSSSS EEEES SSSSSS
ON ON OOON ON ON OON ON ON ON ON ON ON ON ON ON ON ON ON OON ON ON ON ON ON ON ONN ON ON ONNN ONNNN ONN ON ON ON ON ON ON ON ON ON ON ON ON ON ON OOON OON ON ON ON ON ON ONNN ON ONNNN ON ON ON ON ON ON OON ON ON ON ON ON ONNNNN OOON ON ON ON ON ON OOON ONNN ON ON ON ONN ON ON ON OOON OON OOOON ONN ON OOON ON OON ON ON OON OOOOOON ON ON ONN ONNN ON ON ON ON ON OON ON ON OOON OOOOOOOOOONN ON OON ONN ON OON OOOOOOOONNN ON ON ON ON ON OOOOOOOOONNN ON OOOOOOOONN ON ONNNN OOOON OOON OOOOOOON OON OOOON OOOONNN ONNN OOOOOOOOOONN OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNN OOON OOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNN OOOOOOOOOOOOOONN HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHOW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OOW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OWW OW OWW OWW OW OW OW OWW OW OW OW OW OWW OW OW OW OOOW OOOW OOOOOOW OW OW OWWWW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OOOOW OW OOW OOOWW OW OWW OW OW OW OW OW OWW OW OW OW OW OOW OOOW OW OOOW OW OWW OW OW OW OW OWW OW OOW OW OOW OW OW OW OOW OOOOWWW OWW OWW OW OW OW OW OW OW OW OOOW OW OW OW OW OW OOW OOW OOW OOOWW OWWWW OW OW OW OOOW OWWW OOW OW OOW OW OW OW OW OWWW OW OW OOWW OW OW OW OW OOOOWW OOW OOOW OW OW OOW OOW OW OOOW OWW OOOOWWWWW OOOOOWWWWWWW OWW OWWWWWWWWW OWWWWWWWW OOOWWWWWWWWWW OOWWWWWW
TO TO TTO TTO TO TO TTO TO TO TTTO TO TO TO TO TO TO TO TOO TO TOO TO TOOO TO TO TO TO TO TOOOO TOO TO TO TO TO TO TO TO TTO TTO TO TO TO TO TO TO TO TOO TO TO TOO TOOOOOO TOO TOOOO TOO TO TTTTTO TTO TTO TO TO TO TO TO TOO TO TO TOO TO TO TOO TO TO TOO TO TO TO TO TO TOOOO TTTTTTTO TO TTO TO TO TOOOOOOOOOO TO TOO TOOO TO TTO TO TTTTTO TO TTOO TOOOOOO TOO TOOO TO TO TO TO TOOO TOOO TO TO TO TO TO TO TTTTO TOOOOOOOO TO TO TTTO TTTTO TOO TOOOOOOO TOO TO TTTTTOO TO TOOOOOO TO TO TO TO TOOOOO TTTO TOOOOOOOOOOO TTO TTTTTO TOO TO TTTOOOOOOOOOOO TO TOOOOOOOOOOO TO TO TTTTOOOOOOOOO TO TTTOOOOO TTTTTTOOOOOOOOOOOO TTTTTTTTTOOOOOOOOOOOOOO TOO TOO TOOOOO TTTO TO MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMAK AAK AK AK AK AK AK AK AK AK AK AK AAK AK AAAK AK AK AAK AAK AK AK AK AK AK AKKK AK AK AK AK AK AK AK AKKK AKK AK AK AK AK AAK AK AK AK AAK AK AK AK AK AAAK AAAK AKK AK AKK AK AK AK AK AAK AAAK AK AK AK AAK AK AK AKK AKKK AKK AK AK AK AK AAK AAK AAK AAK AK AAK AAAK AAK AAK AK AKKKKKKK AK AK AK AK AK AAK AAAK AK AK AK AAAK AK AK AKKK AKK AKKKKK AK AK AAK AK AK AK AKKKKK AK AKKKKKK AK AK AK AAK AAKKKK AK AKK AAAKKKKKKKKK AK AK AK AKKKK AK AK AAKKK AKKKKK AKK AK AAKKKKKK AKKKK AKK AKK AKKK AKK AK AK AK AKKKKKKK AK AK AKK AKK AKKKK AK AAKKKKKKK AKKKKK AKK AK AK AK AKKK AAAAAAAKKKKK AAAAKK AAK AAAAAAAAAAKKK AAAAAAAAAK AAAAAKKKK AAKEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEE EE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
TH TH TH TH TH TH TTH TH TH TH TH TH TH TH TH TH TH TH H TH TH H TH TH TH TH TH TH TH TH TH TH TH TH TH TH TH TH H TH TH TH TH TH TTH TH TH TH TH TH TH HHH TH TH TH TH TH TH TH H TH TH TH TH TH H TH TH TH TH TH TTH TTH TH TH TH TH HH TH H TH TH TH H TH TH H TH TH TH TH TTH TH TTH HH TH H TH TH HHH TH H TH TTH TTH TTHH TH TH H TH TTH TTTH TH TH H TH TH TH HH TH TH TH TH HH TH H TH H TH TH TTTTTH TTH HH TH HHH TH HHH TH TH TTH HHHH TH TTTTH TH H TH TH H TH H TH TTTH HH TH H TTH TTTTH THHHH TH HHH THHH TH TTH HHH TH TH TTTH THHHHHH TH THHHHHH TTHHH TH HH TH HHHHH TTTHH TTTH H TTHHHHHEEEEEEE EEEEEE EEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEEEEE EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
MO MO MO MO MO MO MO MO MO MO MO MO MO MMMO MO MO MO MO MO MO MMMO MO MO MO MO OOO MO MO MO MO MO MO MO MO MO MO MO MO MO MO MO MO MO MO MO MO MMO MO MO MO MO MMO MO MO MO MO MMO MO MO MO MO MO MO MO MO MO MO O MO MO MO MO MO MMO MO MO MO MO MO MMMMMMO MMOO MO MO MO MO MO MO MO O MO O MMMMMMMMMMMO MMMMO MMMO MMMO O MO MO OOOO MO MO O MO MO MO MMO MMO MO MMMO MO MO O MO MO MO MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMO MMO MO MO MO MO MMMMO MO MMMO MMMMMO MMMMMMMMMMO MO MMO O MO MO MO OO MO MO MMMMMMMMMMMO MMO MMO MMO MO MMMMO MO MO MMMMMMMMMMO MOO MMMMMMO MOOOO MMMMMO MMMO O MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMO MO MMMMMO MMMMOO MO MMMMOO MMMMMMMMMMMO MO MO MO MMMO MMMMMMM ST ST ST ST SSSSST ST ST ST ST SST ST SST ST ST ST ST ST ST ST ST ST ST ST STT ST ST ST ST STT ST ST ST ST ST ST ST ST ST ST ST ST SSST ST ST ST SSSST ST ST ST ST ST ST ST ST ST ST ST ST SSST SSSSSSST ST ST ST ST STT ST ST ST ST ST ST ST SST ST ST SST ST ST ST ST ST ST ST ST SST ST ST ST SST STT STT STT SSST ST ST ST ST STT ST SSSSST STTT SST SSST STT ST ST STTT ST SST ST SST STT ST SSTT ST SST SST STT SSSST STTTTTTTTTTT ST SSSSSSSSSTTTTTTTTT SSSSSTTTTTTTT SSSTTTTTT STTTTTTTTTTT SSSTT SSSSSTTTTTTTTTTTT
OF OF OF OF OF OF OF OF OF OOOF OF OF OF OF OOF OF OOF OF OOF OFFF OF OF OF OF OF OFF OF OFFFF OF OFFF OF OF OF OF OF OF OF OF OOF OF OF OF OF OF OOF OF OF OF OFFFFFF OF OF OF OF OF OF OOOOF OF OF OOF OF OOF OF OF OF OFFF OFFFFF OF OF OOF OF OF OF OF OOF OFFF OF OF OOOOF OF OF OF OF OF OF OFFFFFF OF OOF OF OF OFF OF OF OF OFFFFF OOF OOF OF OF OFFF OF OF OOF OFFFFF OF OF OOFFF OOOFFFFF OF OF OFF OOFF OF OOOOFFF OFF OFFF OFF OOFF OF OF OOOOFF OOF OOOFFFF OOOOF OOOF OOFF OOF OOOFFF OFF IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTTTTTT TTTTTTT TTTTTTTTTT TTT TT TTTTTTTTTTTTTT TTTTTTT TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT TTTTTTTTT TTTTTTTTTT TTTTTTTTT TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT TTTTT TTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSTEWARTS SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSTEWARTS TS
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRREPLACEMENT RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRREPLACEMENT NT
SPEAKS SPEAK AKSS
BBBBBY BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBB TOM JUNOD
PAGE 80
10 PAGES ON
HOW TO MAKEEE
THE MOST
OF IT
THE TRUTH
BEHIND EBEN
ALEXANDERS
GIANT BEST
MATT
MA MA MA MANNNN AT AT HIS I BBEST AU AUUGU GGUST T 2201 01 01 013333
SELLER, PROOF
OF HEAVEN,
PAGE 88
TH
E M
O
S
T
FA
M
O
U
S
M
EN
IN

TH
E W
O
R
LD
,
PA
R
T 3
I NTRODUCI NG THE RL67 SAFARI COL LECTI ON
RALPH LAUREN
Eyewear
AVAI LABLE AT RALPH LAUREN STORES, RALPHLAUREN.COM AND THE FI NEST EYEWEAR AND SUNGLASS BOUTI QUES
ESQUI RE
FI CTI ON
BY ADAM
JOHNSON,
WI NNER OF
THE 2013
PULI TZER
PRI ZE
PG. 116
VOL . 1 6 0
NO. 1 AUG. 2 01 3
DAMON
HE IS TO REGULAR GUYS AS HE SAYS GERMANS ARE TO AMERICANSABOUT 5 PERCENT DIFFERENT.
BEERS WITH MATT DAMON, BY TOM JUNOD
IS NOT A REGULAR GUY.
9
In life, things
happen twice if
youre lucky.
Theres the father
you get and
the father you
choose.
BY MA RK WA RRE N
AN AMAZI NG STORY
98
80
AN
INVESTIGATIONOF
AUTHOROFTHE
BLOCKBUSTER
BYLUKEDITTRICH
EBEN
ALEXANDER,
96
BY MA
A LOT OF
PARAPLEGICS
HAVE COME
UP TO ME TO
THANK ME
FOR THE SEX
SCENE IN
COMING HOME.
WHAT
IVE
LEARNED
INTERVIEWED
BY CAL
FUSSMAN
JON
VOIGHT
114
THE ESQUIRE GUIDE TO
MAKING, MANAGING, AND LIVING
WITH MONEY
DI D I MAKE A MI STAKE I N
CREATI NG YOU, I N RELEASI NG YOU I NTO
THE WORLD? I ASK. MY WI FE SAYS
THAT YOU RE KEEPI NG PEOPLE FROM
MOURNI NG, THAT THI S YOU KEEPS US
FROM ACCEPTI NG THE FACT THAT THE
REAL YOU I S GONE.
DIANE KRUGER IS
A WOMAN WE LOVE,
BY MATT GOULET
THERE ARE
TIMES YOUD THINK
SHE WAS BORN AND
RAISED HERE IN
THE STATES. SOUTH
DAKOTA, MAYBE.
88
HE IS,
LETS NOT
MINCE
WORDS, A
PROPHET,
BECAUSE
AFTER ALL,
WHAT ELSE
DO YOU
CALL A
MAN WHO
COMES
BEARING
FRESH
REVELA-
TIONS
FROM GOD?

{ continued on page 12 }
ON THE COVER: MATT DAMON PHOTOGRAPHED EXCLUSIVELY FOR ESQUIRE BY MAX VADUKUL. LONG-SLEEVED T-SHIRT AND JEANS BY CALVIN
KLEIN JEANS; T-SHIRT BY CALVIN KLEIN COLLECTION. PRODUCED BY WWW.NOWADAYS.DE. STYLING BY KLAUS STOCKHAUSEN FOR SHOTVIEW
BERLIN PHOTOGRAPHERS MANAGEMENT. GROOMING BY CHRISSIE BEVERIDGE FOR KELLER & VANDERNOTH, INC. HAIR BY KAY GEORGIOU FOR
SCHNEIDER ENTERTAINMENT.
YESTERDAYS PRICE AND VALUE
COUNT FOR
PROOF OF
HEAVEN,
bottl e wi th a vi ew
N E W D E S I G N
FUNNYJOKE!
A BEAR
WALKS INTO
A BAR...
VOL . 1 6 0
NO. 1 AUG. 2 01 3
12 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
CAN YOUR PERVERSION SAY THAT?
I DIDNT THINK SO.
SEX PG. 50
MORE
RECENTLY, IT
SUFFERED
FROM A
DEBILITATING
BOUT OF
RIHANNAS
MUSIC
VIDEOS.
RECENT
OBITS, BY
A. J.
JACOBS
THI S
WAY OUT
131
29
BEFORE
WE BEGIN
15
STYL E
WHEN YOU
START TALKING
ABOUT WEAR-
ING SNEAKERS
WITH TAILORED
SUITS, WE NEED
TO ESTABLISH
SOME GROUND
RULES.
53
ID RATHER
PLAY THE
GUY WHO
ACCIDENTALLY
TAKES ACID
AND IS
NAKED ON THE
ROOF AT A
FUNERAL.
ESQUIRE
STYLE
104
THE ONLY THING THAT
WOULD SATISFY THE TERRORISTS
IS ISRAELS CEASING TO EXIST,
AND ISRAEL, RATHER GAUCHELY,
INSISTS ON EXISTING.
A
THOUSAND
WORDS
BY STEPHEN
MARCHE
FILM!
ITWASASIFI
TOLDTHEPRINCIPAL
NOTONLYTHATI DIDNT
TAKETHEMONEY
BUTTHATIDDONATED
BLOODONTHEWALK
TOSCHOOL.
FOOD!
THE
LOBSTERS
SHOULD
NOT BE
LETHARGIC.
PAGE 62
BEEN
THROUGH TWO
STRAW
SEAT CUSHI ONS.
LETTERS WE WONT
BE RUNNING
DRINKING!
YOU SPIN THE
STICK BETWEEN
YOUR PALMS
AS IF YOU WERE A
BOY SCOUT
MAKING A FIRE.
TECH!
IF YOURE ONLY
MODERATELY LAZY,
WHIRLPOOLS PRECISION
DISPENSE ULTRA HAS
A 12-LOAD CAPACITY.
MAN AT
HI S BEST
34
My 100,000 Facebook
friends gave shrewd counsel
to a guy who wanted to
break up with his girlfriend
because of her hairy arms.
But when asked to self-analyze,
they struggled.
A . J . J A C O B S
JAMESMARSDEN,
ACTOR, INTHE
BESTNEWSUITS
ANDOVERCOATS
FORTHEFALL
For a video preview of this issue, scan here with Netpage.
THOUGH WERE A SMALL COUNTRY...I THINK WE ARE
IN TERMS OF
COMPLETE
INCOMPETENCE.

PUNCHING
SCOTT RAAB
INTERVIEWS
JOHN OLIVER, A BRIT AND NEW HOST OF THE DAILY SHOW, IN THE
ESQ&A.
ABOVE
OUR
WEIGHT
{

c
o
n
t
i
n
u
e
d

f
r
o
m

p
a
g
e

9

}
15
E s s e n t i a l i n f o r m a t i o n f o r t h i s i s s u e a n d y o u r m o n t h
BEGIN
B E F OR E WE
AUG
2 0 1 3
Clip, Save, Share, from any page. Download free from the iTunes App Store or Google Play.
When I was a kid and happened to mention the name of a male ce-
lebrity to my father, he would immediately give me the scoop. He
would tell me, rst of all, if the celebrity had his own hair and teeth
or wore a toupee and had some work done. Then he would tell me
if the man in question was a great cocksman or the Queen Bee.
Finally, he would assess their talent or lack thereof. The stars he ad-
miredClark Gable, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Fred Astaire, Frank
and Dinohad set a pretty high standard, qualifying each lesser light
as the luckiest man alive. What united them all, though, was the
old mans bone-deep conviction that anyone celebrated by the pub-
lic had the world by the balls
and so had but one real obliga-
tion: to be happy.
Over the last few months, Ive
often wondered what my father
would have made of the three
men Ive profiled: Leonardo
DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, and Matt
Damon. After all, these guys are
remarkably similar, at least on
the surface. They have not only
their own hair and teeth; they also have their own charitable foun-
dations and production companies. They have not just gotten lucky;
they humbly acknowledge how lucky theyv e been and character-
ize their fame as an opportunity they cant afford to waste. They
consider themselves hounded if not hunted and rely on small co-
teries of loyal friends. They stress the joys of collaboration and
use their leverage to work with directors of their choosing. They
are three of the most famous men in the world, and they were all
remarkably well behaved.
I kept asking Leoand everyone I talked to who knew Leo if
hed ever had to make a deci-
sion outside the decisions dic-
tated by his fame, and I never
got an answer. I never had to
ask that question of Brad, be-
cause I could see the answer on
his face, and in fact when I was
interviewing him, the woman
with whom he shares his life
was in the process of getting a
preventive double mastectomy.
Max Vadukul has been taking pictures for 29 years. Hes shot
for everyone from Rolling Stone to The New Yorker, but this is
the first time hes done three covers in a row in the same style
and with the same backdrop (a gray screen he had to lug into
the woods of Germany to photograph Damon). Black-and-white
film gives the images an originality and a timelessness, Vadukul
says. With film, he says, no one critiques each image as its shot.
The photographer sees his work a week later and gets a look at
life rather than what a technician thinks is proper focus. The re-
sult is photography almost as iconic as the men it portrays.
ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER
WRITER-AT-LARGE TOM JUNOD ON PROFILING THE THREE BIGGEST MOVIE
STARS OF OUR TIME, BACK TO BACK TO BACK
THE FAME TRILOGY
ASSIMILATION!
f o r m a t i o n f o r t h i s i s s u e a n d y o u r o
ASSIMILATION!
n t h
ASSIM
BANDS AND THEI R PERCEI VED TESTOSTERONE LEVEL
16 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
BEFORE
WE
BEGI N
CONT E XT- F RE E HI GHL I GHT S F ROM L E T T E RS WE WON T BE RUNNI NG
Imagine Mary Tyler Moore doing rails of a strippers abs while Lou Grant mainlines heroin. I dont get knives, but even I find them elegant, exclusive,
and sophisticated. Im a trucker. Been through two straw seat cushions. I want more of the 1970s South Side of Chicago daddy, tired and ornery and
greasy from blue-collar exertion, who yells loud enough to scare of demonic possession.
LETTER OF THE MONTH
I felt a very strong connection to David
Curcuritos article The Day the Music
Died (for Me) (May), and I hope to see
more attention brought to this issue. Kids
are not supposed to listen to the same mu-
sic as their parents. Can anyone name a
guitarist younger than 30 anymore? What
was the last number-one rock album? And
why do I feel drained of my testosterone
every time I listen to most of this stuf? I
propose we name the 2000s rock-music
era Low-T Rock. You know, Low Tfrom
those commercials you see during base-
ball games for men with low testosterone.
Curcurito reminds us that we are what we
listen to, and we arent dandelion-wine-
drinking, tambourine-playing, dirty-beard-
wearing whiners.
RI CHARD WALSH, 35
Vestal, N.Y.
We asked Johnson, who
wrote this months ction
story (page 116), for a fool-
proof plan to win your very
own Pulitzer, as he did this
year for The Orphan Mas-
ters Son, his novel about a
government kidnapper in
North Korea.
1. Be born in Tempe,
Arizona.
2. Be a latchkey kid.
3. Wander the alleys
opening peoples trash
cans, attempting to divine
from their garbage how
real families function.
4. Become a long-dis-
tance swimmer so that
you stay inside your own
head and daydream for
hours in the pool.
5. Work construction in
the Arizona sun. Come
to love air-conditioning
above all else.
6. Go to community col-
lege and fail Introductory
English.
7. Work more in the sun.
8. Retake Intro English
and get a C.
9. Make it to your state
university. Get poor
grades. For an easy A, take
Creative Writing.
10. Have an epiphany that
all your perceived failures
in life actually contributed
to make something good
that your aws come to-
gether to make a story that
matters.
11. Realize the university
system has the coldest air-
conditioning and never
leave. [Johnson is current-
ly an associate professor
of English at Stanford.]
BAN
L
O
W
H
I
G
H
The Lumineers Macklemore & Ryan Lewis Bon Iver Manowar Pink
H
I
WHAT YOU WROTE
ABOUT THIS MONTH
LEONARDO
DICAPRIO
OLIVIA
MUNN
ALISON
BRIE
HOW TO BE
A MAN
MASHED
POTATOES
AND PTSD
SOME RANT
ABOUT DEAD
ANIMALS
OTHER
BY ADAM JOHNSON
HOW TO WIN A
PULITZER
Clip, Save, Share.
1. Be b
Arizo
2. Be
3. Wa
openi
cans,
from
real fa
4. Be
tance
you st
BY ADAM JOHNSON
HOW TOWIN A
PULITZER
Nor did I ask the same question of Matt,
because although he had recently de-
cided to move his family to L. A., he told
me he was doing so in part to be closer
to Ben Afeck. And besides, it wasnt the
kind of question you ask over beers. In
all, if I had happened to, say, pass out
during any of the interviews, Im sure
that Leo would have called his publicist,
Brad would have performed an emer-
gency tracheotomy with a penknife,
and Matt would have tied my shoelaces
together to see what happened when I
woke up. If I had to say anything about
all of them collectively, it would be that
they are better than they have to be and
quite relieved they are not worse.
Indeed, they spoke with such una-
nimity that they made celebrity seem
not so much like an individual achieve-
ment as an economic and social class,
with its own standards and expecta-
tions. It was this that made them ap-
pear less free than their famous fore-
bears, or at least more responsible.
Womanizers? Queen bees? Two are
family men with kids by the bunch,
and one exists in a netherworld of ce-
lebrity privilege that makes even his
romantic triumphs vaguely anodyne.
They are our movie stars, but in com-
parison with my dads movie stars, they
look younger, despite their being mid-
dle-aged, and sound much older, par-
ticularly when they describe the na-
ture of their happiness.
They are all three happy. But its a
different kind of happiness than the
happiness exuded by Gable, Grant, and
Astaire, mostly because they dont feel
called upon to exude happiness. Quite
the contrary: They feel called upon to
portray themselves as earnest search-
ers whose lives have been imbued with
meaning. They arent happy simply be-
cause they wake up as DiCaprio, Pitt,
and Damon, but rather because waking
up as DiCaprio, Pitt, and Damon allows
them to keep learning, to keep helping
people, and to keep working hard at
projects that mean something to them.
It is a contingent kind of happiness,
and all that connects their happiness
to the happiness enjoyed by movie stars
of yore is what it is contingent upon:
the unchanged and unchanging fact
that they have the world by the balls.
PROMOTION
B
Y

I
N
V
I
T
A
T
I
O
N

O
N
L
Y
EVENT PARTNERS
ESQUIRES BIG BLACK BOOK LAUNCH CELEBRATION
Esquire partnered with Los Angeless Innovative Dining Group to host an exclusive celebration event
for Esquires spring 2013 style manual The Big Black Book at Chi Lin, IDGs seductive new modern
Chinese restaurant and lounge.
As guests grooved to the sounds of DJ Chris Carter, they experienced a wide variety of Chi Lins
sophisticated cuisine and Grey Goose and Bombay Sapphire specialty cocktails.
For more information about Chi Lin or to make a reservation, log on to:
www.innovativedining.com/restaurants/chi-lin
2 3
4
6
5
1
7 8
1 Esquires Todd Simons and Blue Microhones Tyler
Barth 2 Chi Lin 3 Alyse Benchia Reilly, Rohini Singh,
Phylicia Jackson, Hayley Buckley 4 Chris Gartin, Nicky
Whelan, Innovative Dining Groups Lee Maen, Ryan
Okum 5 Johnny Matlick, Lee Maen 6 DJ Chris Carter
7 Grey Goose and Bombay Sapphire Cocktails 8 Jess
Crocker, Francesca Pittaluga and Esquires Fashion
Market Editor Nic Screws
Photo Credit: Sean Smith, PhotoSmith.Net
BEFORE
WE
BEGI N
A N OT E F R O M
DAV I D G R A N G E R
P
H
O
T
O
G
R
A
P
H

B
Y

T
A
G
H
I

N
A
D
E
R
Z
A
D
And his list was an obvious one, even if I
had never heard it before. Dick read us
the Boy Scout Law. Here is a slightly con-
densed version:
A Scout is Trustworthy: A Scout tells the
truth. He is honest, and he keeps his prom-
ises. People can depend on him.
A Scout is Loyal: A Scout is true to his fam-
ily, friends, Scout leaders, school, and nation.
A Scout is Helpful: A Scout cares about
other people. He willingly volunteers to
help others without expecting payment or
reward.
A Scout is Friendly: A Scout is a friend to
all. He is a brother to other Scouts. He of-
fers his friendship to people of all races and
nations, and respects them even if their be-
liefs and customs are different from his own.
A Scout is Courteous: A Scout is polite to
everyone regardless of age or position. He
knows that using good manners makes it eas-
ier for people to get along.
A Scout is Kind: A Scout knows there is
strength in being gentle. He treats others as
he wants to be treated. Without good rea-
son, he does not harm or kill any living thing.
A Scout is Obedient: A Scout follows the
rules of his family, school, and troop. He
obeys the laws of his community and coun-
try. If he thinks these rules and laws are un-
fair, he tries to have them changed in an or-
derly manner rather than disobeying them.
A Scout is Cheerful: A Scout looks for the
bright side of life. He cheerfully does tasks
that come his way. He tries to make others
happy.
A Scout is Thrifty: A Scout works to pay
his own way and to help others. He saves
for the future. He protects and conserves
natural resources. He carefully uses time
and property.
A Scout is Brave: A Scout can face danger
although he is afraid. He has the courage to
stand for what he thinks is right even if oth-
ers laugh at him or threaten him.
Though I was never a Scout (early trou-
ble with knots), I cant imagine a much bet-
ter bar for a man to set for himself.
Right around the time I read a rst draft
of Mark Warrens story The Father You
Choose (page 98)about his relationship
with his recently deceased father-in-law
my own father-in-law passed away. Marks
story is remarkable, in part because of the
distance Dieter Weigmann traveled from
a childhood in Nazi Germany to a distin-
guished career and fullled life in the United
States. My father-in-law, Bill Dodson, trav-
eled an equally remarkable distance to his
distinguished career and fullled life, even
if the place of his birth and the place he died
were only a few hundred miles away and in
the same state.
Here at the magazine, wed just nished
closing the June issue, our How to Be a Man
issue, and I ew to Knoxville for the me-
morial. For the last several years, we here
at Esquire have explored that theme every
late spring, and each year it has produced
a rich and satisfying journey into the na-
ture of manhood.
At the memorial, each of Bills children
Dave, my wife, Melanie, Gary, and Dick
spoke beautifully about their father. Dick,
the oldest, was the last one to speak. He
talked about what makes a man and what
makes a man a good man. He talked about
the traits that made his father a good man.
18 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
A Good
Man
Arnold Gingrich (19031976) FOUNDING EDITOR
David Granger
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Peter Griffin Helene F. Rubinstein David Curcurito
DEPUTY EDITOR EDITORIAL DIRECTOR DESIGN DIRECTOR
Lisa Hintelmann Mark Warren
EDITORIAL PROJECTS EXECUTIVE EDITOR
DIRECTOR
John Kenney
MANAGING EDITOR
Mike Nizza
EDITOR, ESQUIRE DIGITAL
Ryan DAgostino, Ross McCammon,
Tyler Cabot, Peter Martin
ARTICLES EDITORS
Jessie Kissinger, Elizabeth Sile
EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS
Anna Peele
ASSISTANT EDITOR
Matt Goulet
ASSISTANT TO
THE EDITOR IN CHIEF
Steve Fusco
DIGITAL IMAGING SPECIALIST
Deb Wenof
PHOTO COORDINATOR
ART
PHOTOGRAPHY
FASHI ON
COPY
WRI TERS AT LARGE
FI CTI ON
CONTRI BUTI NG EDI TORS
RESEARCH
Stravinski Pierre
ART DIRECTOR
Frank Augugliaro
DEPUTY ART DIRECTOR
Tito Jones
SENIOR DESIGNER, E-READERS
Geraldson Chua
DESIGN ASSISTANT
Michael Norseng Alison Unterreiner
PHOTO DIRECTOR PHOTO EDITOR
Wendell Brown Nic Screws
SENIOR FASHION EDITOR SENIOR ASSOCIATE MARKET EDITOR
Aimee E. Bartol Christine A. Leddy
SENIOR COPY EDITOR ASSISTANT COPY EDITOR
Robert Scheffler Kevin McDonnell
RESEARCH EDITOR ASSOCIATE RESEARCH EDITOR
A. J. Jacobs
EDITOR AT LARGE
Lydia Woolever
ASSISTANT RESEARCH EDITOR
Tom Chiarella, Cal Fussman, Chris Jones, Tom Junod,
Charles P. Pierce, Scott Raab, John H. Richardson, Mike Sager
Ted Allen, Thomas P.M. Barnett, Colby Buzzell, Andrew Chaikivsky,
Luke Dittrich, David Katz, Ken Kurson, Andy Langer,
Stephen Marche, Francine Maroukian, Colum McCann, Bucky
McMahon, Brian Mockenhaupt, Mary-Louise Parker, Benjamin
Percy, Barry Sonnenfeld, Daniel Voll, Stacey Grenrock Woods
John Mariani FOOD & TRAVEL CORRESPONDENT
David Wondrich DRINKS CORRESPONDENT
Tyler Cabot
Eric C. Goeres

GENERAL MANAGER, MENS NETWORK,
HEARST DIGITAL
Jonathan Evans

STYLE & GROOMING EDITOR, ESQUIRE.COM
Paul Schrodt

ONLINE EDITOR, ESQUIRE.COM
Mark Mikin (mobile editions) Joe Keohane
ASSOCIATE EDITOR SENIOR EDITOR, ESQUIRE DIGITAL
ESQUI RE I NTERNATI ONAL EDI TI ONS
Li Xiang China Francisco J. Escobar S. Colombia Jiri Roth Czech
Republic Kostas N. Tsitsas Greece Cho Man Wai Hong Kong Dwi
Sutarjantono Indonesia Andrey Zharkov Kazakhstan Min Heesik
Korea Manuel Martnez Torres Latin America Sam Coleman Malaysia
Jeremy Lawrence Middle East Arno Kantelberg Netherlands Erwin
Romulo Philippines Radu Coman Romania Dmitry Golubovsky
Russia Sam Coleman Singapore Andrs Rodriguez Spain Steve
Chen Taiwan Panu Burusratanapant Thailand Okan Can Yantir
Turkey Alexey Tarasov Ukraine Alex Bilmes United Kingdom
Nguyen Thanh Nhan Vietnam EDITORS IN CHIEF
Duncan Edwards
PRESIDENT AND CEO
Kim St. Clair Bodden
SENIOR VICE-PRESIDENT/EDITORIAL DIRECTOR,
HEARST INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS
Astrid O. Bertoncini
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, EDITORIAL
Peter Yates Tony Gervino
CREATIVE DIRECTOR EXECUTIVE EDITOR
Kristen Ingersoll
FASHION AND ENTERTAINMENT DIRECTOR
Luis Veronese

SENIOR INTERNATIONAL EDITIONS EDITOR
Simon Horne
SENIOR VICE-PRESIDENT, CFO, AND GENERAL MANAGER
Michael Stefanov
ASSOCIATE FASHION EDITOR
Gautam Ranji
SENIOR VICE-PRESIDENT, DIRECTOR OF LICENSING AND
BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
Richard Dorment
SENIOR EDITOR
Nick Sullivan
FASHION DIRECTOR
Nate Hopper
ASSISTANT EDITOR,
ESQUIRE DIGITAL
THIS MONTH IN NETPAGE
Remember Netpage? Of course you do. Its the free app for your phone that lets
you make every image and story in the issue interactive. Use it to send full PDFs
of stories to your friends or to save recipes for when youre actually ready to cook.
Or you can always use Netpage to unlock exciting bonus features, like authors
reading their fiction (page 116), instructional videos on lobster cracking (page 44),
and other fun stuf.

ENJOY RESPONSIBLY
2013 A-B, Bud Light Platinum Lager (Ale in OR & TX), St. Louis, MO
At the heart of the most extreme missions are the exceptional pilots who experience daring feats on a
daily basis and are prepared to entrust their security only to the most high-performing instruments. At the
heart of the most extreme missions is the Breitling Avenger. A concentrated blend of power, precision and
functionality, Avenger models boast an ultra-sturdy construction and water resistance ranging from 1,000
to 10,000 feet. These authentic instruments for professionals are equipped with selfwinding movements
chronometer-certified by the COSC the highest official benchmark in terms of reliability and precision.
Welcome to the sphere of extremes. Welcome to the Breitling world.
WELCOME TO OUR WORLD
AVENGER II
BEFORE
WE
BEGI N
T O U C H I N G A DAG E S WI T H Z A N E T E R WI L L E G E R
You cant suck in love handles.
Zane Terwilleger
San Antonio, Tex.

July 26
Woody Allens newest
film, Blue Jasmine, premieres.
Now with Louis C. K.
August 9
The most soothingly voiced
actors in Hollywood star
in Lake Bells* mostly funny
Notable occurrences that,
interested or not, you
should at least be aware of.
directorial debut about
competing voice-over artists,
In a World . . .
August 9
The ever-lovely Rose Byrne
enters into ill-advised nuptials
in the strange British
comedy I Give It a Year.
August 23
Brie Larson runs a
group home for children in
Short Term 12. Sweet and
funny, and youll look cultured
knowing about it.
ELSEWHERE
IN THE CULTURE
August 26
The U. S. Open begins, hopeful-
ly in the televised presence of
Andy Murrays girlfriend.
August 27
The release of Franz
Ferdinands new album,
Right Thoughts, Right Words,
Right Action.
August 30
In a strange pairing,
Morgan Spurlock directs
British pop sensation
One Direction in the concert
documentary This Is Us.
NOT MUCH MAKES US HAPPIER THAN MAKING YOU HAPPIER, SO WHEN YOU SEND
IN REQUESTS, WE TRY TO FULFILL THEM. EXCEPT FOR THE WEIRD STUFF.
ESQUI RE I NDULGES
HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN BITTERS
Youre in luck: There is already a bitters
recipe in this very issue. On page 46,
Esquire drinks correspondent David
Wondrich provides a very simple (if you
consider finding wormwood simple) bit-
ters recipe, best suited to the fairly ob-
scure and delicious cocktail described in
his drinking column. For a more utilitarian
option, Wondrich suggests Stoughtons
bitters, the recipe for which is detailed in
his 2007 guide to American cocktails,
Imbibe, and adapted here. Good luck
foraging for the ingredients. Editors
I very much enjoyed your instructions
for classic manhattans (Man at His
Best, February). In the future, might
I suggest including some recipes for
homemade bitters?
JAI ME VEGA
Bethesda, Md.
STOUGHTONS BITTERS
> INGREDIENTS
oz chamomile
flowers
oz gentian root
oz bitter orange
peel
oz cassia bark
oz calumba root
30 oz brandy
10 oz grain alcohol
burnt sugar
> INSTRUCTIONS
1. Macerate oz chamomile flowers and
oz each gentian root, bitter orange peel,
cassia bark, and calumba root in 30 oz
brandy and 10 oz grain alcohol.
2. After two weeks, stir in 1 oz by weight
burnt sugar, strain through a cofee filter,
and bottle.
Note on ingredients: Burnt sugar can be
purchased in some ethnic food stores, or
you can make your own.
BONUS! A FAIL-SAFE WAY TO
MAKE BITTERS:
Find $9. Go to the grocery store.
Buy yourself a bottle of Angostura.
YOUR
K I T C H E N S
BEST
MORE
WORK!

SI MI LAR
FLAVOR!
YOUR
K I T C H E N S
BEST
MORE
WORK!

SI MI LAR
FLAVOR!
July 26
s n
at least s b
Add your name, cut out, paste on a small bottle, and serve.
In a Worl
AAugust 9
he ever lovely Rose By
*If youd like to see Lake Bell tell a great joke (in her underwear), scan here with Netpage.
S BITTERS
A P O MAT l C E X T P E ME L Y A P T l S A N A L
.
ura.
SEE WHAT
YOURE
SHAVING.
THE BENEFITS
ARE CLEAR.
BEFORE
WE
BEGI N
26 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
T H I N G S WE WO N T B E C OV E R I N G T H I S MO N T H
Hammacher Schlemmers new iPad Commode Caddy. PetChatz, a device that lets you video-
chat with your dog (and even give it a treat) when youre away from home. Garbage Pantz, a
fun sticker that makes your garbage cans look like theyre wearing pants.
IF YOUR BACK LOOKS
OLDER THAN YOU ARE
As part of the new Esquire Weekly, a digital supplement of
brand-new articles that comes free every week with an iPad sub-
scription, editor-at-large A.J. Jacobs asks his 100,000 Facebook
and Twitter followers to help him answer pressing questions. To
celebrate the new columnand force some introspectionwe
asked Jacobs to ask his followers a question: When is it a good
idea to go to the crowd for advice and when is it a bad idea?
After consulting his minions, Jacobs responded:
Okay, lesson learned. In the past, my Facebook friends gave
shrewd counsel to a guy who wanted to break up with his girlfriend because of her hairy
arms and to a guy whose wife left the door open while peeing. But when asked to self-an-
alyze, they struggled. Perhaps my favorite analysis came from David Tomlinson: Crowds
are best when there are a range of possible answers, but not nearly as reliable on binary
issues. Catherine Censor noted, Not all crowds are created equal. Ever scroll down to
comments beneath a news story on Yahoo? Josh Reynolds agreed. He was recently at a
festival and didnt see much wisdom in the crowds that surrounded [him]. Luckily, I can
assure readers that my huddled masses are far superior. Just dont ask them why: As Avi
Wachtfogel said, Problem that doesnt lend itself to crowdsourcing: asking what kind of
ideas lend themselves to crowdsourcing.
ASK A. J. (AND HIS MINIONS)
Jack Essig
SENIOR VICE-PRESIDENT, PUBLISHING DIRECTOR &
CHIEF REVENUE OFFICER
Marcia Kline
ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER/ADVERTISING
Jill Meenaghan
ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER/GROUP MARKETING DIRECTOR
Don Perri
GROUP FINANCE DIRECTOR
Hillary Deppeler
SPIRITS, NEW ENGLAND & FLORIDA
DIRECTOR
Stephanie Clement
DETROIT DIRECTOR
Louis F. Coletti
INTERNATIONAL FASHION & RETAIL DIRECTOR
Adam C. Dub Caryn Kesler
EXECUTIVE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
ACCOUNT DIRECTOR OF LUXURY GOODS
Justin Harris Jonathan Homan
MIDWEST DIRECTOR ACCOUNT MANAGER
Todd A. Simons John Wattiker
SOUTHWEST DIRECTOR ACCOUNT MANAGER
ITALY Luciano Bernardini de Pace, Davide Da Rold
(011) 39-02-796-451
SWITZERLAND Daniella Angheben (011) 39-02-764-581
FRANCE Marie Armande de Sparre (011) 33-1-42-84-33-80
CANADA AND TEXAS Adam C. Dub 212-649-4159
SOUTHEAST (EXCEPT FLORIDA) Mandel Media Group
404-256-3800
PACIFIC NORTHWEST Andrea Wiener/Athena Media
Partners 415-828-0908
Bill McGarry
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, DIGITAL ADVERTISING,
HEARST MENS GROUP
Frank A. Bennack, Jr.
EXECUTIVE VICE CHAIRMAN
HEARST MAGAZI NES DI VI SI ON
John P. Loughlin
EXECUTIVE VICE-
PRESIDENT &
GENERAL MANAGER
Ellen Levine
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
David Carey
PRESIDENT

Michael Clinton
PRESIDENT, MARKETING &
PUBLISHING DIRECTOR
Gilbert C. Maurer Mark F. Miller
PUBLISHING PUBLISHING CONSULTANT
CONSULTANT
PUBLISHED AT 300 WEST FIFTY-SEVENTH STREET,
NEW YORK, NY 10019-3797. EDITORIAL OFFICES: (212)
649-4020. ADVERTISING OFFICES: (212) 649-4050
FAX: (212) 649-4303 WWW.ESQUIRE.COM. FOR
SUBSCRIPTION OR CUSTOMER-SERVICE QUESTIONS,
PLEASE VISIT SERVICE.ESQUIRE.COM OR WRITE TO
ESQUIRE, P.O. BOX 6000, HARLAN, IA 51593.
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
MARKETI NG SERVI CES
NancyOlsen, YvonneVillareal, MaryBethYale, AshleyAndrews
INTEGRATION ASSOCIATES
ADMI NI STRATI ON AND PRODUCTI ON
DI RECT RESPONSE ADVERTI SI NG
PUBLI SHED BY HEARST
COMMUNI CATI ONS, I NC.
Dawn Sheggeby Esther L. Kim
INTEGRATED MARKETING DIRECTOR DESIGN DIRECTOR
Christine Hall John Stankewitz
DIRECTOR SENIOR ACCOUNT MANAGER
(212) 649-4201 FAX: (646) 280-4201
William R. Hearst III
CHAIRMAN
Jeri Dack
MARKETING
DIRECTOR
Natasha Zarinsky
INTEGRATED
MARKETING
MANAGER
Rosi D. Gana
ASSOCIATE
BUSINESS
MANAGER
Karen Otto
GROUP
PRODUCTION
DIRECTOR
Terry Giella
ADVERTISING
SERVICES
MANAGER
Callie Barrett
EXECUTIVE
ASSISTANT TO THE
PUBLISHER
Connie Black
GROUP
PRODUCTION
MANAGER
Deidra Robinson
ASSOCIATE
PRODUCTION MANAGER
Peter Davis
RESEARCH
MANAGER
William Carter
CONSUMER
MARKETING DIRECTOR
William Upton
ASSOCIATE
MERCHANDISING
DIRECTOR
Colin H. Stayton
SENIOR INTEGRATED
MARKETING
MANAGER
Scott Lehmann Kate Carrington
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
STRATEGIC PARTNERSHIPS STRATEGIC MARKETING
AND EVENTS
Steven R. Swartz
PRESIDENT &
CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
Rachel C. Lebrun, Meghan Washington
DIGITAL ACCOUNT MANAGERS
Tara Buchalter
INTEGRATED SALES & MARKETING ASSOCIATE
The April issue included a special feature on aging (Stron-
ger, Faster, Better, Older), which featured a photograph
of a shirtless man in his 50s. Many of you claimed that your
backs were in better shape than his. Assuming youre not
lying to us, kudos. For those in need of a little more tone,
Washington, D. C., trainer Stu Carragher recommends the
dead lift, which works everything from hamstrings to lats.
HOW TO DO IT
1. Stand behind a barbell
with your feet shoulder-
width apart. Grab the bar
with an overhand grip just
outside your knees.
2. With your chest angled
forward and your ass out,
slowly lift the bar as you
stand, keeping it as close to
your shins as possible. The
angle between chest and
floor should not change un-
til the bar clears your knees.
3. Once the bar is past your
knees, move your hips for-
ward as you stand up, with
your shoulders back and
down and your chest out.
4. Reverse the movement,
slowly lowering the bar to
the floor.
Carragher recommends
adding this to your rou-
tine two times a week. Ev-
ery two to three weeks,
change the number of reps
and sets. (Five sets of six
with heavy weights or three
sets of 12 to 15 with light-
er weights.) You can also
alter your grip (both over-
hand, both underhand, one
of each) or switch to kettle-
bells. If youre feeling bold,
try one-arm kettlebells
while standing on one leg.
KNEES OVER
YOUR FEET
LOWER
BACK
ARCHED
CHEST
OUT AND
SHOULDERS
BACK
1 2 3
I
L
L
U
S
T
R
A
T
I
O
N
S

B
Y

C
H
R
I
S

P
H
I
L
P
O
T
Scan here for a special public-service announcement from Esquire.
48HR
PROTECTION
PLUS
NON-IRRITATING
FORMULA

2
0
1
3

U
N
I
L
E
V
E
R

PROTECTION AND ONE
DWYANE WADE
Tough Competitor
and Dove

All-Star Dad
TOUGH ON SWEAT,
NOT ON SKIN.
H E A R W H A T Y O U V E B E E N M I S S I N G
The Samsung HW-F750 Audio Bar is a sound masterpiece designed to bring your TV experience to life.
It combines the warmth of Vacuum Tubes with the precision of Digital Amp Technology to deliver incredible
sound across 12 speaker drivers. And with Bluetooth, you can connect to your favorite music, wirelessly*.
*Bluetooth compatible devices

2
0
1
3

S
a
m
s
u
n
g

E
l
e
c
t
r
o
n
i
c
s

A
m
e
r
i
c
a
,

I
n
c
.

S
a
m
s
u
n
g

i
s

a

r
e
g
i
s
t
e
r
e
d

t
r
a
d
e
m
a
r
k

o
f

S
a
m
s
u
n
g

E
l
e
c
t
r
o
n
i
c
s

C
o
.
,

L
t
d
.

A
l
l

o
t
h
e
r

p
r
o
d
u
c
t

a
n
d

b
r
a
n
d

n
a
m
e
s

a
r
e

t
r
a
d
e
m
a
r
k
s

o
r

r
e
g
i
s
t
e
r
e
d

t
r
a
d
e
m
a
r
k
s

o
f

t
h
e
i
r

r
e
s
p
e
c
t
i
v
e

o
w
n
e
r
s
.
AU G U S T 2 0 1 3
29
SCOTT RAAB: Youre bursting
with energy.
JOHN OLIVER: I havent hit
the crash yet. We just finished
the show, so youre getting
the best of me, and then Ill go
back to my wife and shell ex-
perience the crash. Is that not
the recipe for a healthy rela-
tionship? Shell get the worst
of my attentiveness and ener-
gy at the end of every day.
SR: I was surprised to find
out you married an Ameri-
can soldier and that you met
her at the 2008 Republican
Convention.
JO: When youve married
someone whos been at war,
there is nothing you can do
that compares to that level of
selflessness and bravery. I feel
humbled daily by what she has
managed to do with her life
versus how Ive decided to frit-
ter away mine.
SR: Youre not frittering. Youre
bringing enlightenment and
laughs to a desperate nation.
JO: Its just not putting your
body on the line for your coun-
try, thats all.
SR: Its awful how disconnected
military service is from the
reality of day-to-day life.
JO: There are American forces
being shot at right now. Its
C O N T I N U E D
Dinner, Taboon restaurant,
midtown Manhattan.
SCOTT RAAB TALKS TO THE
DAILY SHOWS HOST ABOUT
THE UK, SPORTS FANDOM, HIS
MARRIAGE TO A U. S. VETERAN,
AND GETTING HIS GREEN CARD
JOHN
OLIVER
Clip, Save, Share, from any page. Download free from the iTunes App Store or Google Play.
THE FEEL-GOOD SPECTRUM
In descending order of hopefulness . . .

S
C
O
T
T R
A
A
B
Edward Sharpe and
the Magnetic Zeros
eponymous third album. Self-
described as the rawest,
most liberated, most ram-
bunctious stuf weve done.
The Daughters of Mars,
a reported novel about World
War I nurses by Thomas
Keneally, author of the sur-
prisingly uplifting Holocaust
story Schindlers Ark.
J OHN OL I VE R CONT I NUE D
30 E S QU I R E
C O N T I N U E D
migrant journey, so I went
to talk to an immigration law-
yer who would help out peo-
ple, and I ran into him in Penn
Station about three months af-
ter Id gotten the green card. I
said, I got my green card yes-
terday. And he hugged me
because he understood that
level of relief.
SR: Did you have to study?
JO: I didnt have to for the
green card. Its just an ap-
plication and then biomet-
rics, so you get tested for tu-
berculosis in case they think
youre from the 18th century.
And no one with your name
can have bombed anywhere
in the world over the previous
12 months, and then you just
cross your fingers. You have to
study for the citizenship test.
[Looks at Raabs forearm tat-
too] Chief Wahoo.
SR: John, that is impressive.
Plenty of American baseball
fans dont know thats Chief
Wahoo.
JO: Little flash card for the
test: Whats this? Chief Wa-
hooand also a reminder of
one of the most painful mo-
ments in American history. Did
I get it right?
SR: Is a green card actually
green?
JO: You have to carry it all the
time, and Ive even kept it in
the little pouch that I got it in
see? That side is green.
SR: Thanks for showing that
to me.
JO: The most valuable items in
this wallet are that and an au-
tograph from Ian Rush I got
when I was 12 years old.
SR: Who?
JO: He was a striker for Liv-
erpool. Growing up with that
kind of obsession for sport
I think its why I understand
towns like Cleveland.
SR: Is there a town in England
that has fallen on hard times
in almost every regard and
where the sports clubs have
come to symbolize decay and
ineptitude?
JO: Probably Shefield, which
was a great industry town that
was basically dismantled as a
community by Thatcher. Two
teams, two teams, Shefield
Wednesday and Unitedboth
of which imploded. Their de-
cline as industrial powerhouses
has gone hand in hand with
their decline as football forces.
Both are sad now.
SR: Are the people full of bit-
ter pride?
JO: Of course.
SR: Thats Cleveland.
JO: Shefield should be
twinned with Clevelandcit-
ies of sadness. When England
played Germany in the last
World Cup, I said to my wife
before the game, If and when
we lose this game, Im not gon-
na be good. Nothing funs gon-
na happen. So she watches
the game with me, and the
game is awful. It goes very
badly for England. Then, in the
most loving possible way, after
the final whistle, she sat there
in silence for a minute and
said, Oh, it doesnt matter. Ev-
erythings going to be okay. I
said, I have to go for a walk.
I went to Central Park and I
walked around the park four or
five times, took hours just to
try and get that feeling out of
my system.
SR: Were you raised to be that
kind of fan?
JO: Id never really seen my
dad express emotion of any
depth, and then after Liver-
pool came from behind to
win the Champions League
against Milan, he called me
upthis is a man who does
not phone; Im not sure hes
phoned me before or since
choking back emotion in his
very easy to lose touch with
the fact that we are asking
people to do spectacularly
dangerous things in the name
of something we dont even
think about. We went to the
White House Correspondents
Dinner. [Army Chief of Staf]
General Odierno spoke about
how there are men and wom-
en serving overseas and to
be thankful for it, and people
were talking on top of him.
My wife was rigid with an-
ger. The disconnect between
America and its military is
shocking.
SR: If the gap were not so
great between our pro-
fessed values and our behav-
ior, I dont know that The Daily
Show would work as well.
JO: Thats true. Certainly there
are many sweet spots in that
manner of hypocrisy.
SR: The level of discourse has
gotten significantly worse dur-
ing the course of my lifetime.
People dont read. They dont
think much. They dont listen
to each other. The Daily Show
is a metaphorical gathering
place for a lot of disafected
people.
JO: Were available on a night-
ly basis for some cure-all ca-
tharsis. We tend to completely
ignore the wider ripples of
the efects. Its probably a
healthy thing.
SR: You ever feel badly that
youre stealing a good job
from an American?
JO: As an immigrant, I carry
that kind of guilt.
SR: So when are you going to
become a citizen?
JO: Well, I got a green card.
That was a massive relief. The
day I got it, I realized Id been
Oliver, with
Jon Stewart, as
Daily Show
correspondent.
Not quite familiar with John Oliver? Scan here to see a mash-up of his best-ever Daily Show clips.
WHEN YOUVE
MARRIED SOMEONE
WHOS BEEN
AT WAR, THERE
IS NOTHING YOU
CAN DO THAT COM-
PARES TO THAT
LEVEL OF BRAVERY.

In The To Do List, Aubrey

Plaza satisfies a sexual
checklist before
going to college.
Sci-fi thriller Elysium, in
which a robot-human hybrid
portrayed by Matt Damon
attempts to commandeer an
upscale space utopia.
Eric Bana and Rebecca Hall
play former lawyer lovers
caught up in government
secrets surrounding a terror-
ism case in Closed Circuit.
In The To D
Plaza sati
checkl
going t
That side is green.
d
n
Eric Ba
play fo
caugh
secrets
ism ca
worried about it every day.
And it was dificult. That it
was dificult for me, with ac-
cess to Viacom lawyers, just
shows that the immigration
system is completely barbaric
in this country. Its so intimi-
dating, the whole process. My
first Daily Show piece was pre-
tending I had this terrible im-
GNCBEST PRODUCT. BEST
EXPERI ENCE. BEST RESULTS.
COME I N OR VI SI T US AT GNC. COM FOR
HEALTH AND WELLNESS SOLUTIONS TODAY.
TRIPLE STRENGTH FISH OIL 1240
40% smal l er. 1000mg of t he omega-3s
EPA & DHA promote hear t , j oi nt , brai n,
eye and ski n heal t h. Pur i f i ed 5 t i mes.
Enteric coating helps reduce fishy burps.
^

See t he f ul l l i ne at GNC. com/ Fi shOi l.
^ Each softgel capsule is enteric coated which allows the softgel
to break down and absorb in the small intestine. This controls or
reduces fshy burps. These statements have not been evaluated by
the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to
diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Call 1.800.477.4462 or
visit GNC.com for the store nearest you. 2013 General Nutrition
Corporation. May not be available outside the U.S.
OMEGAS
THE ALPHA OF ALL
J OHN OL I VE R CONT I NUE D
32 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
anything like that with God
Save the Queen.
JO: The only favorite version of
it is when British athletes win
gold medals, because then its
played and its just the music.
Its not words that you dont
connect to. So youll see Brit-
ish athletes tear up, and we all
tear up as well because its just
noise. Its not bad poetry.
SR: Were the London Olympics
meaningful to you?
JO: They actually were. Be-
cause were a nation that over-
values sport and there was an
assumption ever since we won
the bid that wed be terrible
at hosting it. And it was amaz-
ing that from the opening cer-
emony on, there was this com-
plete pivot into Were happy!
Then we had to come back to
terms with the national identi-
ty, which is not outgoing, viva-
cious, and proud.
SR: Did you tear up at any
point?
JO: When Mo Farah won. I felt
this completely misplaced
pride. My favorite-ever sport-
ing moment, though, was Der-
ek Redmond at the 1992 Bar-
celona Olympics. He was a
400-meter British runner who
pulled his hamstring on about
280 meters and he started hob-
bling around. His dad got over
the security barrier, put his arm
around him, shaking of stew-
ards and saying, Thats my
son. Redmonds bursting into
tears and they hobble the fi-
nal 100 meters together. Put
Kate Bushs Dont Give Up be-
hind that and I challenge you
not to be in tears. That is quin-
tessentially British. Your favor-
ite sporting moment is losing
an Olympic final. Not medal-
ing. Losing.
SR: What did you think of all
the hagiography around Mar-
garet Thatchers demise?
JO: I think it was utterly ridic-
ulous, and I think it was very
hard for people to accept. No
one wants to be an asshole.
You understand theres a fun-
damental respect for the dead,
but I think theres also a human
inclination to kick against the
ridiculousbe that with taste-
less jokes or holding up a sign
during the funeral process
that says I AM NOT HAPPYand
then burying those emotions
like volcanoes for the rest of
voice, saying, Remember this
day, son. Remember what hap-
pened here. Then he hung up.
SR: Thats great.
JO: A way to form a relation-
ship and navigate a childhood
with your father is through
sporting events and moments
like that. You see your dad ex-
press joy and sorrow in a way
you havent seen before, and
you learn also to project all hu-
man feelings onto something
that doesnt matter. My dad
honestlyand openlywanted
me to be a football player. A
few years ago at Christmas, he
said to me, You know, youve
worked hard and its going well,
but you do understand that I
wanted you to play for Liver-
pool? I said, Yeah, I know,
Dad. Were both disappointed.
Please understand that we
share this sense of failure.
SR: When you came out
as a comedian, were they
supportive?
JO: They were 100 percent
supportive. They never asked,
What are you actually going
to do? I remember my dad
saying something to me, four
or five years in, when I was
just starting to make a living:
Im impressed about how you
didnt give up. It didnt even
occur to me that that might be
something you could do: give
up. It was almost alarming. I
thought, Well, shit, maybe I
should have given up. All my
eggs are in this basket now,
and there is no fallback plan.
SR: As an Englishman, do you
find the concept of royalty in
todays society as bizarre as
normal folks do?
JO: Its insane. God Save the
Queen. Youre singing it about
a woman you dont understand
or have any connection to.
SR: And we stole it and made
it into a better song. We wiped
our asses with your national
anthem.
JO: Sure did! You know, with
the American national anthem,
its like youre singing to an idea
of what your country is. Its ab-
stract, and its something ev-
eryone can get behind. Youre
not singing to a person you
might not like.
SR: Here we talk about our fa-
vorite versions of the anthem at
sporting events. You dont have
DATE OF BIRTH: April 23, 1977
WHICH MAKES HIM: 36
HOMETOWN: Birmingham, England
WHICH IS LOCATED: About halfway between London and
Liverpool
IMMIGRATED TO THE U.S. IN: 2006
BECAME A DAILY SHOW CORRESPONDENT AND WRITER IN:
2006
OFFICIAL TITLE ON THE DAILY SHOW: Senior British
correspondent
RECENT EXEMPLARY SEGMENT: A three-part series on Austra-
lian gun control
HIGHLIGHTS INCLUDE: A vigil for the dead political careers of
gun-control supporters, a man dressed in a kangaroo suit,
Oliver firing an automatic rifle.
TOOK OVER HOSTING DUTIES FROM JON STEWART ON:
June 10, 2013
EXPECTED TENURE AS INTERIM HOST: Eight weeks
FAR LESS INFLUENTIAL ROLE IN HIS CAREER: Voice of Vanity
Smurf in both Smurfs movies
SPOUSE: Kate Norley
WHO HAPPENS TO BE: An Army medic who served in the
Iraq War
EARNED HIS COMEDIC CHOPS AT: The Cambridge University
Footlights
WHICH ALSO NURTURED: Sacha Baron Cohen, Emma
Thompson, Hugh Laurie, and members of Monty Python
MAKING IT THE BRITISH EQUIVALENT OF: The Second City
or Harvard Lampoon
THE ESQUI RE DOSSI ER
JOHN OLIVER
Clip, Save, Share, from any page.
DAILY SHOW
CORRESPONDENTS
C O N T I N U E D
STEPHEN
COLBERT:
1997 to 2005
Notable mo-
ment: Broke
character
while deep-throating
a banana during a re-
port on Prince Charless
alleged gay afair.
MO ROCCA: 1998 to 2003
Notable moment: Pro-
posed Blackentines Day, a
Black History Month alter-
native to Valentines Day.
STEVE
CARELL:
1999 to 2005
Notable mo-
ment: Ate Cris-
co to get his
recommended daily serv-
ing of vegetables.
ROB CORDDRY:
2002 to 2007
Notable moment: A
14-month hiatus spent
in the airport bathroom
where former senator Larry
Craig was soliciting sex.
RACHAEL
HARRIS:
2002 to 2003
Notable
moment:
Flashed an
all-gay hockey team to
test their homosexuality.
ROB RIGGLE: 2006
to 2009
Notable moment: Imper-
sonated a hippie to inves-
tigate protests at a new
Marine recruitment center
in Berkeley, California.
ED HELMS:
2002 to 2006
Notable mo-
ment: Led an
anti-gay-mar-
riage activist
to connect gay-marriage
legalization in Massachu-
setts to more crime.
STACEY GRENROCK
WOODS (!): 1999 to 2003
Notable moment: Suc-
cessfully made a motion
to get one of those big
malls with a roller coaster
at the 2000 Iowa caucus.
A LOOK BACK AT
THE EARLY DAYS OF SOME
IMPORTANT CAREERS
AMC drama
series Low Winter
Sun explores
cop-on-cop mur-
der in Detroit.
Fruitvale Station, the
dramatized true story
of a relatively innocent
Oakland, California, mans
last day and his fatal
shooting by a transit cop.
Breaking Bads
final season answers the
central question Who
will take down Walter White,
the cancer or his D.E.A.
agent brother-in-law?
The Worlds End, a comedy
from Simon Pegg and
Edgar Wright about a bar
crawl that takes place during
the apocalypse.
C O N U
s
ers the
Who
r White,
D.E.A.
law?
The
fr
Edg
craw
er
s
mur-
oit.
Cra g
RACH
HARRIS
2002 to
Notabl
mome
Flashe
all-gay hhockey t
Contact us at 1-800-PORSCHE or porscheusa.com. 2013 Porsche Cars North America, Inc. Porsche recommends seat belt usage and observance of all traffic laws at all times.
When carving your niche, use the
sharpest instrument available.
The new mid-engine Cayman
Its aggressive sharp lines cut a striking figure. A fitting stance
for a sports car with notorious precision and agilitythrilling
traits born from the remarkable balance of its mid-engine design.
And those drawn to the Cayman are sure to leave an impression
that will never be mistaken. Porsche. There is no substitute.
European model shown CaymanCode.com
J OHN OL I VE R CONT I NUE D
34 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
unior year of high school, my friend ran a cheating ring in our biology class. He was
making a good chunk of money, and it all seemed pretty harmlessa few kids get-
ting As on small-time quizzesso one day, when he asked me to collect the money
for him, I agreed. He said I could keep half of it. That night, I told my older sister
about the plan. She convinced me I was an idiot, and I decided not to get involved.
Really. Then I went to school the next day and everything went to shit. Hed been
caught. Ratted everyone out. I told the principal Id changed my mind about taking the money.
His response? Sure you did. It didnt matter if my story was true or not. It was convenientso
perfectly redeeming that it became unbelievable.
When I walked out of the new movie by director Ryan Coogler, Fruitvale Station (out July 12),
I felt the same way my principal had. And thats not fair to Cooglers subject. His lm tells the
story of Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old who was shot in the back by a transit police ofcer while he
was facedown on the platform of an Oakland, California, BART station in 2009. There is ample
footage of the incident, recorded by BART riders on their cell phones. In the grainy images, you
see Grant, subdued with a knee to his neck, as an ofcer perched above him draws his gun and
res into his back. For the rst few months, the Bay Area was inamed by the killing. After the
ofcer was sentenced to only two years, there were more riots. Soon enough, though, the only
people remembering Grant were his family and the supporters who gathered each year on the
anniversary of his death. The rest of the city, and the country, moved on.
By making this lm, Coogler refused to let that happen. Using the subway footage as an intro-
duction, Coogler pieced together the 24 hours before the shooting by talking to Grants friends
and family. But the result, while moving, feels manipulative. Cooglers portrayal is too tidy to
reect the complexity of an actual life. Instead of watching an unbiased account of a tragedy, I
felt as if I were watching a skillful piece of propaganda designed to provoke the highest level of
outrage. Whenever a aw is revealed in Grants past, it is immediately redeemed. Grant had been
in prison, but hed put all that behind him. Hed been cheating on his girlfriend, but just that day
hed promised her hed be faithful. Hed sold drugs to help pay his bills, but just that day hed gone
straight, dumping his last bag of weed in the bay. Everything felt too rosy. It was as if I told the
principal not only that I didnt take the money but that Id donated blood on the walk to school.
I called Coogler to help me understand his perspective. People will say that the lm portrays
Oscar superpositively, but I disagree, he says. Its catching him on a day when hes trying to
be the best version of himself. It just so happened that [this day was] his moms birthday and
New Years Eve, and that hed recently been released from prison. I think its portraying who he
was to the people he loved most and who knew him the best. And there is the key distinction.
Coogler seems to have an agenda because he does have an agenda, and its one that he poignantly
fullled: to show that Oscar Grants life mattered. Whoever Oscar Grant wasa saint, a fuck-
up, or something in betweenhe was taken from the people who saw him in his best light. He
was shot in the back, unarmed, while being held down by police. Whoever Oscar Grant was be-
fore this tragedy may matter only to some people, but who he is after should matter to us all.
BY PETER MARTI N
THE GOOD, A LITTLE
BAD, AND MORE GOOD
FRUITVALE STATION AND THE MAKING OF A PROPER TRIBUTE
their lifetime. Its a pretty En-
glish response.
SR: I was ashamed of Ronald
Reagan, but when he died I
found myself feeling a certain
sense of sadness and nostal-
gia. Did you feel that way when
Thatcher passed?
JO: Well, only because by the
time she died, she was a very
frail, vulnerable old lady, so
that really does knock most of
your rage out of the equation.
My mom and dad were teach-
ers, so they worked with vul-
nerable kids. And so you see it
the hardest. I grew up watch-
ing what those policies did to
my dad and his surroundings,
and it takes a physical, emo-
tional toll when you are watch-
ing the very painful results of
completely heartless policies.
Yeah. So when you hear some-
one say things like She saved
Britain, thats a dificult pill of
WITH THE AMERICAN
NATIONAL ANTHEM,
YOURE SINGING TO
AN IDEA OF WHAT
YOUR COUNTRY IS.
YOURE NOT SINGING
TO A PERSON YOU
MIGHT NOT LIKE.

politeness to swallow.
SR: Are the politicians in Great
Britain as flat-out dumb as
American politicians?
JO: Theres a quintessentially
low bar here, I think. Probably
because America does every-
thing bigger, I would imag-
ine youve gone for the com-
plete stupidity in politicians
probably a little bigger as well.
I think I may have to concede
that. Though were a small
country, where its a smaller
pool that were drawing from,
I think we are punching above
our weight in terms of com-
plete incompetence.
SR: But would a British politi-
cian say I can see Denmark
from here?
JO: Look, what do you want
me to say? Youre the great-
est country in the world. This
is the greatest democracy on
earth. Its the American Dream.
SR: U-S-A!
JO: And let me finish...
U-S-A!
USEFUL
EQUIVALENTS
KEY MEASURES FOR THE MONTH OF AUGUST
August July + Christ
sunny mostly sunny mostly
100 degrees Fahrenheit 37.8 degrees Celsius
Fahrenheit degrees Celsius x
9
/5 + 32
gin rickey a little lime juice, a lot of gin, a little club soda, some ice
woohoo .. 2 yays
beach towel 3 regular towels
7 pool noodles 1 inner tube
movie theater 68 degrees
Wolverine Hugh Jackman
wolverine weasel + bear
R.I.P.D. Ghost pottery + Ryan Reynolds + Jef Bridges
Louis C.K. in Blue Jasmine Larry David in Whatever Works (2009)
Alec Baldwin in Blue Jasmine Alec Baldwin
Andrew Dice Clay in Blue Jasmine Huh?
Kick-Ass 2 Kick-Ass 1
The Smurfs 2 . The Smurfs 1
Grown Ups 2 . Grown Ups 1 + Shaquille ONeal
The To Do List Aubrey Plaza smirk
Were the Millers Jennifer Anistons ass
Perseid meteor shower (August 11) 70 to 80 meteors per hour
70 to 80 meteors per hour not as impressive as youd think
Labor Day Memorial Day optimism
Florida hell
Florida (for those over 65) still could use a sweater
dry heat heat
shorts still not the best idea for most people
white nose lifeguard
red nose Irish
longsleeves redhead
male bikini European tourist
beach paddle ball fun
1 drink on a boat 2 drinks on a porch
1 drink on a porch 3 drinks inside
pilsner + lime refreshing
pilsner + lime + sun severe blistering
36 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
ALWAYS SOMETI MES NEVER
VISUAL RULE NO.
No. 52
NOBODY
WANTS TO HEAR
ABOUT YOUR
HANGOVER.
No. 86
LEAVE THE
FIRST-INITIAL/
MIDDLE-NAME/
LAST-NAME
THING TO THE
PRETENTIOUS
AUTHORS.
No. 101
WHEN CONSID-
ERING UNIQUELY
OVER-THE-TOP
WAYS TO
PROPOSE TO
YOUR GIRL-
FRIEND, FIRST
ELIMINATE ALL
WAYS THAT
ARE UNIQUELY
OVER-THE-TOP.
No. 206
AT A RESTAU-
RANT, CHECK-
PAYING RESPON-
SIBILITIES MAY
BE CONCEDED
ONLY AFTER SAY-
ING ALLOW ME
FOLLOWED BY
AN I INSIST
AND THEN A
COME ON!
No. 207
SAYING
ALLOW ME
WITHOUT
ACTUALLY
REACHING FOR
THE CHECK DOES
NOT SUGGEST
SINCERITY.
THE
RULES
I
L
L
U
S
T
R
A
T
I
O
N
S

B
Y

W
E
S
L
E
Y

M
E
R
R
I
T
T
THE
RULES
C
U
L
T
U
R
E
Watch the Visual Rule in action by scanning here with Netpage.
KEY VI SUAL
MEASURES
or decades, the peripheries of culture have mat-
tered much more than its center. Literature today
like music, and blogs, and Web videosis an accu-
mulation of niches. The idea of a literary novel that
everybody has read makes sense only if everybody
is your little clique. For true communion, we have to
look to the pastwhere the books that matter live.
David Gilberts & Sons (Random House, $27) is an often funny,
always elegant, lingering gaze back at a world in which writers are
still gods at the very center of culture. A. N. Dyer, the novels ver-
sion of J. D. Salinger, worries about what witticisms to scribble with
his autograph. He struggles with the all-consuming importance of
his life and works. He holes up in his reclusive apartment, far from
prying eyes, and buries his friends in Manhattan cathedrals. In other
words, hes pretty much the exact opposite of the thumb-suck-
ing novelist kids who make up the current literary establishment.
Every character in & Sons is living in
a state in which he knows that the best
thing ever associated with his name
happened 50 years ago. It offers beyond
a doubt the most precise description
that will ever be offered of the trust-
funder no longer satised with simply
reading bank statements. Take this de-
scription of Jamie, A. N. Dyers stoner
son: Because of his fondness for mari-
juana, people assumed Jamie was a relaxed individual, one of
those semiprofessional stoners in high school and college and
beyond, but in reality he was often anxious, not in ways fearful
or perturbed or troubled, certainly not neurotic, but more like
a juggler with too many thoughts tumbling through the air.
Ive met this person beforeuptight, secure about his -
nances and nothing else. Gilberts given the perfect rendering.
The question is whether that matters enough to make & Sons
the kind of massively important novel that its subject is. Ran-
dom House is touting the novel as a cross between Michael
Chabons Wonder Boys and Claire Messuds The Emperors
Children, big books that somehow managed to pull togeth-
er the splinters of our cultural interest. But even these books
likely wont last. The books of the Grand Old Establishment
are still the books at the center: Look at Gatsby, which sells
half a million copies a year. Look at Catcher in the Rye. Look even at
Portnoys Complaint. What book from our own period will be read
in high school 50 years from now? Even the grandest are not cen-
tral enough to the way we live now. They can be enjoyable and often
funny as hell, like Gilberts. But they wont be cultural touchstones.
John Berger, the wonderful British novelist, declared a new era
of storytelling with his famous statement: Never again will a sin-
gle story be told as though it were the only one. And he has been
proven right. Now we have a soup of stories, each as valid as the
othersa culture that suits our egalitarian, democratic ideals as
well as our narcissism. We are grouped in a thousand thousand
communities, and in many ways its a fabulous, glorious time to be
reading and writing. But that single story told as if it were the only
one served some vital purposes: It offered a sense of what mattered
to everybody through a work of art. Maybe even more importantly,
it gave people something to rebel against.
38 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
FATHERS
AND BOOKS
WITH & SONS, DAVID GILBERT HIGHLIGHTS A KIND OF NOVEL
AND A KIND OF WRITERTHAT SEEMS ALL BUT DEAD
BY STEPHEN MARCHE
M
A N A T H I S B E S T
IF YOU READ ONLY ONE BOOK THIS MONTH...
The Sound of Things Falling (Riverhead, $28), by Juan Gabriel Vsquez, is a novel made up of searing images: a hippo-
potamus, recently escaped from Pablo Escobars personal zoo, put down by a .375 bullet, then carved into chunks be-
fore being carried away. An ex-con listening to an unlabeled cassette tape on headphones, tears streaming down his
face. A purple vibrator left on a cofee table as if it were an abandoned babys toy. A womans face, pale eyes and weath-
ered skin, that looks like a party that everyone had left. Vsquezs descriptions are unvarnished and urgent, and often
uncomfortably intimate, one reason hes been heralded by some as the next great South American literary star. This, his
third novel, is about how historyin this case, the violent Colombian drug warnever fully recedes. We may bury our
past, but some part of the burden always remains, festering below the surface like a memory you cant forget.
ving in
hebest
name
beyond
ription
trust-
simply
his de-
stoner
r mari-
as a relaxed individual, one of
inhighschool andcollegeand
To read an excerpt from & Sons, scan here using Netpage.
Everything In One Place

Get a Hold of Your Finances

FREE | ONE PASSWORD | SECURE
UNLIMITED DOCUMENT STORAGE | AUTOMATIC ORGANIZATION
*
Esquire cannot guarantee that
this joke will be funny to everyone.
40 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
AS TOLD BY
AMBYR
CHILDERS
A BEAR WALKS INTO A BAR.
The bartender asks, What can
I get you?
The bear replies, Ill have
a gin, and after almost a minute,
. . . and tonic.
The bartender says, Sure. But
whats with the pause?
The bear says, These? Had
em my whole life.
ABOUT THE JOKESTER: One
of the first things Ambyr Childers
would like to point out: Im about
as funny as wallpaper. Which
counts as a marginally funny thing
to say, so were not convinced.
The 25-year-old, who turned down
a golf scholarship at UC Riverside
to pursue acting, has certainly
been landing more dramatic than
comedic roles in the last couple
yearsincluding her turn as the
daughter of Amy Adamss and
Philip Seymour Hofmans char-
acters in The Master. This month,
shes on the new Showtime series
Ray Donovan, with Liev Schreiber
and Jon Voight. She plays Ashley
Lynn Prescott, a damaged former
child star. Shes into drugs, shes
a sex addict, has epilepsy. Shes
a mess. Its a fun role to play. Be-
cause, I mean, Im a little fucked-
up. . . . Im an actor. Taking the
piss out of her own profession?
Always funny. MATT GOULET
P
H
O
T
O
G
R
A
P
H

B
Y

C
H
R
I
S

F
O
R
T
U
N
A
Scan here with Netpage to hear Ambyr tell another joke on video.
might consider it. That bleeding is often
caused by periodontitis, which, according
to the Centers for Disease Control, nearly
50 percent of adults have. As you age, peri-
odontitis can cause your gums to loosen
their grip on your teeth, creating pockets
that trap food and bacteria that iname
your gums. An oral irrigator addresses the
problem directly.
Cleaning your mouth is about disturbing
plaque, Messina explains. Youll never get
rid of all of it, not even a dentist can, but if
you stir up bacteria every 24 hours, you pre-
vent it from banding together with friends
and causing real damage. With an irriga-
tor, youre not only rinsing away anything
that your brush or oss loosened up but also
getting at that bacteria below the gum line.
I started out with the easiest option, the
[1] Philips Sonicare AirFloss ($90; amazon.
com). As it turns out, the AirFloss is not of-
cially an oral irrigator. And its not that ef-
fective. Its ossing for lazy peoplea blast
of air and water between your teeth. After

nless youre exceeding-
ly meticulous in your
mouth care, chances are
youve never even looked
at an oral irrigator. The
little hose used to clean
between your teeth and around and under
your gums probably seems like just anoth-
er tool for the 60-plus crowd that you walk
by in the drugstorelost among the denture
adhesive, sugar-free candies, and copies of
Readers Digest. But dont be fooled. (And
maybe stop being so judgmental. Those can-
dies are delicious.) While an irrigator might
add a minute to your evening routine, it
could cut 30 off your next visit to the dentist.
Granted, not everyone needs one of these
things. According to Dr. Matt Messina of
the American Dental Association, if your
current teeth-cleaning habits keep you and
your dentist happy, theres no reason to
change them. But if your last few appoint-
ments left your dental bib looking as if you
just nished a plate of barbecued ribs, you
42 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
HOW TO
WASH YOUR TEETH
THE UNDERRATED USEFULNESS OF THE ORAL IRRIGATOR
BY RODNEY CUTLER
Not that its relevant, but scan here for another important public-service announcement.
a couple days, I longed for the clean feel-
ing of oss. And the quiet: Each blast of the
AirFloss arrives with a pneumatic gush and
what sounds like the reloading of a gigan-
tic spring. While it wasnt for me, if youre
the kind of person who hates to oss, the
AirFloss might be a good alternative. Espe-
cially if you dont mind frequently clean-
ing your mirror.
A big step up in terms of effectiveness,
the [2] Waterpik Complete Care ($100 for
toothbrush and irrigator; waterpik.com) is
a combination unit the size of a fat box of
tissues that will take up most of your coun-
ter space. The base serves as a charging
stand for the toothbrush and holds the wa-
ter reservoir and hose. Just be ready when
you turn it on: The water shoots out of the
nozzle until you turn it off, and the pause
button is really more of a slow-down but-
ton. You can select the water pressure from
a scale of 1 to 10, but Messina recommends
never going above 5 or 6. More than that and
you can damage your gums or push bacteria
deeper, where nothing can reach it. When
you use the Waterpik, you have to keep your
head over the sink and tilted to the side with
your lips parted to allow the steady stream
of drool a place to escape. Its grossand not
something my wife would let me do while
she was in the bathroombut effective.
The most convenient option is the [3] Wa-
terpik Showerpik ($70), an add-on for your
showerhead that lets you take care of every-
thing in the splash-proof privacy of your tub.
Since the Showerpik is hooked up to your
water line, you dont need a reservoir. And
since youre in the shower, you dont need
to worry about where youre drooling.
Rodney Cutler is an Ironman triathlete and
the owner of Cutler salons in New York City.
THE EFFECTIVENESS SPECTRUM: WAYS TO CLEAN YOUR TEETH
1 2 3 1
Prayer Small
bird
Whiskey Gum Fingernail Business
card
Toothpick Miswak (Middle Eastern
twig/toothbrush)
Irrigator
H
I
G
H
L
O
W
I l
2 3
Like all one-of-a-kind works of art,
its hand signed and numbered.
Every handcrafted bottle of Patrn is unique, just
like the tequila inside. Whats more, its been inspected
over 40 times before well sign off on it.
simplyperfect.com
Simply Perfect.
T
h
e

p
e
r
f
e
c
t

w
a
y

t
o

e
n
j
o
y

P
a
t
r

n

i
s

r
e
s
p
o
n
s
i
b
l
y
.

2
0
1
3

T
h
e

P
a
t
r

n

S
p
i
r
i
t
s

C
o
m
p
a
n
y
,

L
a
s

V
e
g
a
s
,

N
V
.

4
0
%

A
l
c
.
/
V
o
l
.
44 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
Apr May Jun
Jul Aug Sep
Oct Nov Dec
Jan Feb Mar
MONT H
HOW TO
CRACK
A LOBSTER
C O O KI NG
S C HOOL
ESQ.
I
L
L
U
S
T
R
A
T
I
O
N
S

B
Y

J
O
E

M
C
K
E
N
D
R
Y
[1]
Remove claws. Place
one hand on the body
of the lobster to stabi-
lize it and twist of
each claw.
To minimize the work
and mess of cracking
and picking, do some
breakdown ahead:
[2]
The goal is to remove
the claw meat whole.
Holding the claw at a
45 degree angle to the
cutting board, strike
the center of the shell
with a knife, just until
the blade is set, like an
ax in a tree. Twist the
knife and break the
shell open. Dont use
your best knife.
each claw.
[3]
Remove the tail. Cup
the end of the tail with
your palm (it tends to
curl) and apply pres-
sure with your thumb
to the meatiest part,
then twist the tail from
the body, like youre
giving your brother an
Indian burn.
[3]
Indianbu bbbbb
RECIPE: Boiled Lobster
CHEF: Bill Taibe
RESTAURANT: The
Whelk, Westport,
Connecticut
two 1
1
/4-to-1
1
/2-lb lobsters
(leave claw bands on dur-
ing cooking)
2 gallons water
half bottle dry white wine
3 lemon halves
1 cup kosher salt
4 fresh bay leaves
1 tbsp coriander seed
1 tbsp white peppercorns
handful parsley stems
(optional)
> In a 10-quart pot, com-
bine all ingredients ex-
cept the lobsters and
bring to a rolling boil
over high heat. (The pot
is so deep that by the
time the water comes to
a boil, the spices will be
infused into the liquid.)
Using the lid as a
shield (to avoid getting
splashed with hot wa-
ter), slide the lobsters
into the water head-
first, like a plane taking a
nosedive. (You may need
to use tongs to help keep
them submerged for the
first minute or so.)
> Cooking time: Al-
though the aromatics
may be more concen-
trated after 15 minutes,
lobster already tastes
great. So I go for texture,
pulling my lobsters at 8
minutes. You get really
nice flavor in meat that
is consistently tender.
Use tongs to carefully
remove lobsters from
the cooking liquid. If
you remove them side-
ways instead of pulling
straight up, the trapped
water will drain easily.
Transfer to platter or
cutting board to cool.
> How to tell if lobster
is done: Remove claw
bands, pull back on the
thumb claw, and wiggle
it loose. If the cartilage
pulls out easily and clean,
your lobster is done.
WE HEREBY DECLARE 2013 THE SUMMER WE LEARNED TO COOK LOBSTER RIGHT
As told to Francine Maroukian
THE BOILED LOBSTER,
PERFECTED
ust about 10:00 every morning, I get a
lobster delivery from my local water-
man, Norm Bloom, whose family has
been pulling shellsh out of the Long Is-
land Sound for three generations. When
theres no stopover between their natu-
ral habitat and my kitchen, they retain their potent
salinity, which plays against their natural sweetness.
Its like nothing else in the world. When I boil lobster,
I keep the focus on the sh. You make whats called
a court bouillonjust seasoned cooking watercre-
ating a saltwater base brightened by the acidity of
wine and lemon, then enhanced with softer spices.
But what really makes the difference is fresh bay
leaves, because their piney astringency and citrusy
essential oil are natural matches for shellsh. Its a
simple thing with a big payoff.
If you arent lucky enough to have Norm, nd your-
self a good shmonger and make sure he holds up
the lobsters so you can get a good look. Whether
stored in a tank or on ice, the lobsters should not be
lethargic; they should be alive and kicking. Before
you spend good money on them, those lobsters better
be snapping fresh. CHEF BILL TAIBE
[4]
Cut down the back of
the tail, keeping both
hands on top of the
knife blade. Then
remove the vein, as
you do with shrimp. When you get them home, make the lobsters happy by placing them in the refrigerator
under damp towels or newspapers, which will keep them moist and calm.
Need a little extra help? Scan here with Netpage to see a video showing how to crack a lobster.
TIP:
Patrn and Tonic.
Turn a boring tonic drink into something new
and exciting. Make it a Patrn and Tonic.
simplyperfect.com Cocktails
Simply Perfect
T
h
e

p
e
r
f
e
c
t

w
a
y

t
o

e
n
j
o
y

P
a
t
r

n

i
s

r
e
s
p
o
n
s
i
b
l
y
.

2
0
1
3

T
h
e

P
a
t
r

n

S
p
i
r
i
t
s

C
o
m
p
a
n
y
,

L
a
s

V
e
g
a
s
,

N
V
.

4
0
%

A
l
c
.
/
V
o
l
.
PROMOTION

n the summer months, we need drinks that arent just
cooling but that are tall and cooling. The hydrating mojito.
The swamp-cutting Gin Rickey. The heat-desensitizing
julep. Or most cooling of all: the mighty swizzle, a drink
invented just as soon as Caribbean islanders had the ice
to make it with.
A little history: Ice began making it to the islands in the middle of
the 19th century, and it quickly found its way into the local version
of switchel, an Anglo-American drink involving molasses and
lots of cool water. (In Guyana, Barbados, and Trinidad, they dis-
tilled the molasses rst.) To incorporate the ice, they pounded or
scraped it into powder and mixed it with a swizzle stick, which
was originally, as one traveler described it, a long stem with four
or ve short prongs sticking out from it [horizontally] at the bot-
tom. You spin the stick between your palms as if you were a Boy
Scout making a re and the ice and booze and sugar and whatnot
whirl into a supercold slurry that frosts the outside of the glass
thickly with condensation and cools the inside of the drinker with
whatever it is that keeps you from minding the heat and the hu-
46 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
THE SWIZZLE
EMERGES
A LITTLE LOVE FOR A QUINTESSENTIALYET STRANGELY
OBSCURESUMMER COCKTAIL
midity. (You can buy authentic Carib-
bean swizzle sticks at cocktailkingdom.
com, or just use a barspoon or a chop-
stick or some other thing.)
There are three main styles of Ca-
ribbean swizzle, all based on booze,
ice, and a splash of Angostura bitters:
the Guyanese (ca. 1870; without cit-
rus), the Barbadian (ca. 1880; with cit-
rus and soda), and Trinidads peerless
Green Swizzle (ca. 1890), which adds
a couple more exotic ingredients, like
falernum (a lightly alcoholic almond-
lime-peel syrup) and wormwood bit-
ters (strong rum infused with worm-
wood; you can substitute absinthe).
Recipes for each differ somewhat,
but weve found these to be effec-
tive enough that if someone brought
them to us in rotation all day (and we
didnt have to work for a living), wed
be tempted to give up the AC entirely.
BARBADIAN SWIZZLE
> In a Collins glass, stir 1 barspoon su-
perne sugar (or more to taste) with
1
/
2 oz lime juice. Add 2 oz good Barbadi-
an rum, such as Cockspur or Mount Gay Eclipse, or Dutch genever,
such as Bols (very popular in the islands back in the day). Fill glass
all the way with nely cracked or shaved ice. (If youre lazy, crushed
ice from the ice maker will work.) Add seltzer to ll. Swizzle until the
glass frosts or you tire of swizzling, whichever occurs rst. Shake in 6
to 8 dashes Angostura bittersenough to cover the top. Add a straw.
> For a Guyanese swizzle, use an aged demerara rum, such as Lemon
Hart or El Dorado 5-year-old, and omit the lime juice.
GREEN SWIZZLE
> Combine in a Collins glass: 2 oz mellow dry gin, such as Plymouth
or Fords, or avorful white rum, such as Banks 5-Island; 1 oz Vel-
vet falernum;
1
/
2 oz fresh-squeezed lime juice; 1 barspoon wormwood
bitters or absinthe.* Fill glass all the way with nely cracked or shaved
ice (see above). Add seltzer to ll. Swizzle until the glass frosts or
you tire of swizzling, whichever occurs rst. Shake in 6 to 8 dashes
Angostura bittersenough to cover the top. Add a straw.
*If using absinthe, use a non-anisey Czech-style one, such as Mata
Hari, rather than a French or domestic one. If youre the maker sort,
the bitters are ridiculously easy to make: Steep half an ounce or so
of dried wormwood in a pint of Wray & Nephew White Overproof
rum for 2 days, strain through a coffee lter, and bottle.
D
AV
I D
W
O
N
D
R
I C
H
M

H
A
B
Learn how to make these swizzles on video by scanning here with Netpage.
LESSON
THE SUMMER MONTHS
When considering
what to drink when
its very hot, try
what they actually
drink where it gets
very hot.
BRAZIL
Caipirinha
CUBA
Daiquiri (The rum,
lime, sugar, and
thats all kind.)
Cuba libre (Dont
forget the lime
juice.)
MARTINIQUE
Ti Punch (aka the
Caribbean
old-fashioned)
ITALY
Watery white
wine, cold and in
quantity
SSON NO. 37
Based on USDA data for total fat using a 3 oz. serving of cooked
Tenderloin Filet compared to a 3 oz. serving of cooked skinless chicken thigh.
Get the recipe and 10 essential nutrients all in
one delicious meal at BeefItsWhatsForDinner.com
THAN 3 OZ. OF SKINLESS CHICKEN THIGH.
MAY WE SUGGEST A WAY TO CELEBRATE?
FILET HAS
Funded by The Beef Checkoff
requires barely any water and uses polymer
beads to massage dirt out of your clothes. Look
for it in the next couple years.
STEAM!
Electroluxs Perfect Steam ($1,199), GEs Steam
Assist ($999), and Maytags Steam for Stains
($1,099) options all use steam to remove stains
from your clothing. Apparently, steam is more
effective than just water. Greener, too, if thats
something you prize in home appliances.
DRY CLEANING!
Boschs Axxis Plus ($1,399) has special settings
for silk and wool, minimizing trips to the dry
cleaneror, for most of us, providing a way to wash fancy things
that isnt putting them back in the closet.
AUTOMATED SOAP DISPENSING!
Many washing machines now have detergent dispensers that hold
multiple loads worth of soap. Unlike traditional washers, which
dispense liquid soap all at once in the beginning, these machines
dispense soap throughout the wash cy-
cle, which engineers who study such
things claim is a better way to clean
clothes. GEs SmartDispense technol-
ogy ($1,299) holds enough soap for two
months worth of loads. If youre only
moderately lazy, Whirlpools Precision
Dispense Ultra ($1,449), pictured, has
a 12-load capacity.
ENORMITY!
If you run an orphanage or own 40
dress shirts that you would like to wash
all at once, the Axxis Plus can t it all
and uses only 40 percent of the water
and energy that a typical load of that
size would require.
APPS!
Samsungs touchscreen LCD front-
load washer ($1,499) lets you con-
trol your washing machine from your
phone. You can see what cycle the load
is currently on or even pause the wash
if you dont have much hot water and
just cant wait to take a shower.

nlike the flashy evolution of cars and phones,
laundry hasnt enjoyed much in the way of
notable technological innovation since we all
packed up our river washboards and plugged in
home washing machines. But recent advances
in washers have transformed them from mun-
dane household appliances into, well, mundane household ap-
pliances with some pretty impressive (if not always useful) fea-
tures, which we describe below. Unless you live in Asia, the most
promising of those featuresthings like magical antibacteri-
al silver ions and water-free washersare still years away. Un-
til then, the rest of us will have to make do with what weve got.
And it doesnt sound all that bad.
ELECTRICITY SAVINGS!
LGs Smart ThinQ washer can wait until energy rates are at their
lowest to automatically start your load, courting the coveted de-
mographic of people who will pay $1,600 for a washing machine
yet wait until the middle of the night to do their laundry in or-
der to save 12 cents.
SILVER ATOMS!
Samsungs SilverCare technology uses charged silver atoms to
kill 99.9 percent of bacteria. No threat of mildew, no lingering
stench in your gym shirt. Too bad you cant get them in the U. S.:
Since silver nanotechnology kills bacteria, the Environmental
Protection Agency would, technically, consider it a pesticide.
And that means the EPA would have to regulate it. Not impossi-
ble, but certainly not convenient for any of us.
MINIMAL WATER USAGE!
Xeros is developing a domestic version of a commercial wash-
erused primarily by hotels, hospitals, and restaurantsthat
48 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
THE FUTURE
OF LAUNDRY!
ITS EVEN MORE EXCITING THAN YOU THINK
BY ANNA PEELE
Clip, Save, Share, from any page.
HOW LONG YOU
CAN GO BETWEEN
WASHES
SHEETS
one week
BATH TOWEL
one week
DISH TOWEL
two weeks
PAPER TOWEL
n/a
T-SHIRT
one wearing
SWEATSHIRT
two wearings
JEANS
five to 400
wearings
TOQUE
three shifts
YARMULKE
three seders
or two thirds of
one Hanukkah
The Whirlpool
Duet with Precision
Dispense Ultra stores
enough detergent
for 12 cycles and then
automatically dis-
penses just the right
amount whenever
you run a load. It
also self-adjusts the
water level.
50 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
blaring mediocrity.
The best way to spice up
your sex life, according to peo-
ple who think about your sex
life, is to simply start your se-
duction earlier in the day. Im
not sure if that will work, but I
think you could certainly bene-
fit from the extra time. Sexolo-
gist Dr. Rachael Ross suggests
you start by taking out the
trash. That is not a metaphor.
Its as simple as taking the
trash out, buying something
nice, or doing something shes
been asking you to do all this
time that you havent done,
she says. Guys sometimes
dont understand that a wom-
ans sex drive is tied right to
that. After youve done all your
chores, Ross says you can text
your intended lots of compli-
ments throughout the day and
perhaps buy her something.
Why? Women like gifts. Gifts
come, sex follows. Lead with
a gift, and/or go down on her.
Very well. I will note that on
your chart.
Foot fetishism, or podophilia,
as its called at the annual fund-
raiser, has been thoroughly
studied by skilled profession-
als. In fact, I think it was the first
thing they studied, or one of
the first. In any case, everyone
was satisfied and went home.
The prevailing theory, and the
one that Im going with, is that
podophilia is the result of an ill-
timed collision between feet
and sex in the mind of a young,
usually weird boy. There are
many ways this can happen:
It could be that the young lad
was thinking about feet when
a sexual thought overtook him,
or that a random thought about
feet occurred to him while he
was jerking of into his mothers
shoe. Really, its hard to say.
Theres no tried-and-true path
to foot worship. Once the con-
nection is made, though, the
preference is lovingly honed
over the years until it becomes
a full-fledged fetish and en-
dowed with all the rights there-
of. And while it does seem, as
you say, gross, podophilia
is probably the worlds best-
known fetish, with represen-
tatives all over the world and a
strong Web presence. Can your
perversion say that? I didnt
think so.
I get keeping sex new and in-
teresting, but how the hell do
I spice up foreplay?
I dont know how you missed it,
but sex and foreplay have been
operating as one entity for a
long time nowsince at least
the mid-1970s. You hardly ever
see them apart outside of pris-
on. I think what youre really
asking is how to spice up your
sex life. Dont be ashamed:
How can I spice up my sex
life? is a fine sex question from
the old school. You should not
be at all embarrassed by its
Got a sex question of your own?
E-mail it to us at sex@esquire.com.
Now, read that quote again and
write it down if you have to. You
will find it to be an indispens-
able bit of wisdom as you go
through life. Then, when you
feel ready, you can try incorpo-
rating pornography and toys
into your sex life. I know that
seems easier said than done,
but remember that you live in
an age when these things have
never been more efortlessly
attainable. (And again, please
dont take that to mean any-
thing about your intelligence.)
Just try to take her taste into
consideration when select-
ing titles, and for toys, use the
same rule you would for put-
ting together a cheese plate: a
hard one, a soft one, and some-
thing blue-veined. Good luck,
and if you need any more help,
please dont hesitate to ask.
And what about afterplay?
Should I be doing that, too?
Well, now youre pushing it.
Afterplay isnt really a thing.
My suspicion is that the peri-
od after sex got jealous and
wanted its own name. After-
play was chosen over Leave-
mealoneplay. All you really
need to do during this time is
remain at ease and await or-
ders to ship out. If you must
talk, I suggest you keep your
comments light and positive.
Also, if you have done any of
this correctly, both your brains
should be flooded with chem-
icals that enhance bonding,
so if you want to ask for a loan,
now would be the perfect time.
How do strangers
always seem to know
youre staring at them?
Well, they wouldnt if
you didnt insist on
finishing on their legs.
Can you overcook
a hard-boiled egg?
Isnt that how pearls
are formed?
How important
is it to wash my
hands after
blowing my nose?
Depends what you
blew it into.
. . . AND
OTHER
TOPI CS
T
O
P
:

I
L
L
U
S
T
R
A
T
I
O
N

B
Y

J
O
H
N

C
U
N
E
O
Is it necessary to
reply to a thank-
you e-mail?
Yes, with a youre
welcome e-mail. Then
it has to end.
Why do Game of
Thrones characters
speak with English
accents?
Nerds prefer it.
HAS ANYONE EVER STUDIED WHY SOME PEOPLE LIKE
TO LICK TOES? IT JUST SEEMS GROSS TO ME.
r, has been thoro
by skilled p
I thin
raise
or
S LI
er
oo
ann an an an
ha Ver Ver Very w y w y well ell ell. III wi wi will ll ll not not note t e t e tha ha ha
you you your c r c r char har hart. t. t.
Foo Foo Foot f t f t feti eti etishi shi shism, sm, sm, ooo
as as as it it its c s c s call all alled ed ed at at at the the the an an an
rai rai raiser ser ser, h , h , has as as bee bee been t n t n thor hor hor
bbby s y s y skil kil killed led led
III th th thin in in
53
Style Rule Number 646: Reliable is underrated. Sharp is great, and stylish is a fine and no-
ble goal, but if what youre wearing isnt reliable, then you might as well stay home in your
sweatpants. That goes double when youre talking about a diving watch, i.e., the thing that
can mean the diference between making it to the surface with oxygen to spare and...not.
Fossil knows this, having made reliable its watchword for more than a quarter century
part of the reason, no doubt, why luxury brands like Burberry and Emporio Armani have
turned to Fossil to make watches under their nameand for its first foray underwater, Fos-
sil is focusing on afordable, dependable functionality. Water-resistance to 200 meters, a
screw-down crown for added durability, superluminous watch hands, a 360 degree uni-
directional top ring: All come together in one midsize 45mm case with three interchange-
able bandsnylon, rubber, and stainless steel. A reliable companion for wherever the rest
of your summer takes you. What more does a man need? Steel limited-edition Breaker dive
watch ($445) by Fossil.
The Essential:
The Fossil Breaker
Dive Watch
AUG
201 3
Use Netpage to buy select items from this section.
54 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
E
S
Q
U
I
R
E

S
T
Y
L
E

0
8
.
2
0
1
3
Golf
THE GOLF
SHOE THAT
DOESNT
LOOK LIKE A
GOLF SHOE
1
2
THE ENDORSEMENT
YES, THIS IS A
GOLF SHOE. NO,
IT DOESNT LOOK
LIKE A GOLF SHOE.
YES, THIS IS A
GOOD THING.
ECCO HAS TRADED
IN STANDARD
SPIKY CLEATS FOR
SPECIAL TRACTION
SOLES (GREAT FOR
GRIPPING TURF)
WHILE OPTING FOR
A MORE SNEAKER-
LIKE SHAPE AND
FEEL. IT DELIVERS
EQUAL PARTS PER-
FORMANCE AND
STYLE FROM YOUR
HOUSE TO THE
CLUBHOUSE.
BIOM HYBRID
GOLF SHOE ($190)
BY ECCO.
1. TRADITIONAL: Less Ted Knight in Caddyshack and more Arnold Palmer in the 60s. Leather wing
tips, an understated polo, and conservative chinos form a solid foundation, and an unexpected twist,
like a brightly colored V-neck or cardigan sweater, will help you stand out. Wool sweater ($125) by
Dunning Golf; cotton-and-polyester polo shirt ($78) and polyester golf pants ($108) by Maide; leather
golf shoes ($295) by Allen Edmonds Honors Golf Collection.
2. SPORTY: Light, bright, and streamlined options take away any hint of stufness, and given the
stretch and cooling properties of next-generation fabrics (like the polyester in this polo shirt), you
can nd a great t that wont slow down your swing. Polyester polo shirt ($89) by Dunning Golf; polyes-
ter golf pants ($145) by J. Lindeberg; hybrid golf shoes ($190) by Ecco.
3. WOW. NICE PANTS: Nobody wants to be the a-hole throwing off everyones game in Technicolor
plaid, but a little bit of pattern and color can go a long way. (Eighteen holes, to be exact.) No neon, no
polka dots, and no wearing anything you wouldnt want photographed for posterity. Polyester-blend
pullover ($99) by Dunning Golf; cotton piqu polo shirt ($70) by Boast; polyester-blend shorts ($165) by
Boss Green; leather golf shoes ($145) by FootJoy.
1
333
for
COMMENT
THE SNEAKER SI TUATI ON
S
U
I
T
N
O

S
U
I
T
S
U
I
T
Weve got nothing against sneakers
around here. Honest. But when you start
talking about wearing sneakers with tai-
lored suits, as so many men have started
doing in the artsier areas of cities and
towns around the world (see: Guglielmo
Miani, right, the Milan-based CEO of luxury-
tailoring operation Larusmiani), we need
to establish some ground rules: Nothing
too bright. No gaudy air pockets or super-
thick soles. And nothing that distracts from
the obvious care youve taken with the tai-
lored clothing youre wearing above the an-
kle. From left: By Asics ($110); New Balance
($180); Nike ($115); Converse ($60); Billy
Reid for K-Swiss ($95).
How to Dress
DOESNTTTTT
LOOK LIKE A
GOLF SHOE
YES, THIS IS A
GOLF SHOE. NO,
IT DOESNT LOOK
LIKE A GOLF SHOE.
YE YY S, THIS IS A
GO OOD OD OD TTTHING
Clip, Save, Share, from any page. Download free from the iTunes App Store or Google Play.
56 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
E
S
Q
U
I
R
E

S
T
Y
L
E

0
8
.
2
0
1
3
Five Great Suits
The Upgrade:
Weve come full circle with the bathing suit. After years of oversized board
shorts spackled with obnoxious prints, designers are presenting altogether more
attering swim trunks that, regardless of body type, look good on pretty much
anyone. The ts are trim. The colors are some pattern-free play on ROYGBIV.
And the cloths are some variation on a fast-drying nylon blendthey hug the leg
but have some give to them. Clockwise from top: By Ambsn ($125); Boss ($59); Pen-
eld ($65); Tommy Hilger ($59); Lacoste ($95).
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
QQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQ
UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
IIIIIIIIIIIII
R
E
S
T
Y
L
E
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
QQQQ
UUUUUUUUUU
R
E
S
T
Y
L
E
EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
QQQQQQQQQQQQQQ
UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
I
R
E
S
T
Y
L
E
QQQQQQQQQQ
0
8
.
2
0
1
0
8
2
0
1
0
8
.
2
0
Outdoorsin, the technical term for all
manner of warm-weather pursuits, can be
a bitch on eyewear, so leave your precious-
metal aviators at home and opt for perfor-
mance-engineered sunglasses. Features
like floatable plastic frames, glare-reducing
polarized lenses, and sun-blocking wrap-
around contours will stand up to blinding
sunlight, choppy waters, and the occasional
drop on the ground. From top: Hard Kore by
Kaenon ($224); Wave by Julbo ($190); Racer-
Americas Cup Edition by TAG Heuer ($375).
IN ADDITION TO INTRODUCING
THE WORLD TO MILA KUNIS,
THE INTERNET, AND THE
CHICKEN MCNUGGET, 1983
SAW THE BIRTH OF NAUTICAS
TECHNICAL-MEETS-TRADI-
TIONAL SAILING AESTHETIC.
THREE DECADES AND ONE
GLOBAL EXPANSION LATER,
THE BRAND HAS RELEASED
A CAPSULE COLLECTION OF
HERITAGE-STEEPED SAILING
GEAR. GOOD FOR ANOTHER
30 YEARS. POLYESTER WIND-
BREAKER ($138), COTTON-AND-
POLYESTER POLO SHIRT ($50),
AND COTTON-AND-NYLON
SHORTS ($80) BY NAUTICA.
NAUTICA TURNS 30
THE ANNI VERSARY
SUNGLASSES
THE PURPOSE-
DRIVEN SHADES
C S 0
THE ANNI VERSARY
Outdoorsin, the technical term for all
manner of warm-weather pursuits, can be
E
S
Q
.

S
T
Y L E T
I
P

N
O
.
Yellow and orange
for the very tan.
Blue and green for
the traditional. Red
for the Hasselhof
inside us all.
THE MAN
Hunter S. Thompson.
In his early 20s.
At the beach. Drinking.
Writing. Wearing a
bathing suit.
Clip, Save, Share, from any page.
Ask Nick
Sullivan
Keep em, Sam. Paisley is
very strong for the coming
fall in ties [Fig. 1a, by Etro,
$154 each], scarves, and even
iPad cases [Fig. 1b, by Etro,
$413], and the ties in partic-
ular make for an easy way to
liven things up. Also, should
it ever come up: The term
paisley derives from the name
of a town in Scotland where,
by the mid-19th century, a
sizable industry had grown
around the manufacturing of
cashmere shawls that were
woven in Scotland yet in-
spired by popular embroi-
dered scarves imported from
India (then a British colony,
of course). You know, in case
it comes up.
IVE SEEN A LOT OF MEN
WEARING DRESS SHIRTS BUT-
TONED ALL THE WAY TO THE
TOP WITH NO TIE. WHAT OR
WHO STARTED THIS TREND?
AND WHATS YOUR OPINION?
DYLAN MACLEAN
NEW YORK, N. Y.
The buttoned-up, no-tie
look of which you speak was
popular rst in the 80s with
pseudo-rebellious arty types
who presumably thought that
the absent tie was some sort
of subtle questioning of the
establishment and its codes.
It was a looka uniform in
itselfthat became associ-
ated mostly (though not
exclusively) with German
architects, Italian industrial
designers, English musicians,
and American lm directors.
With regard to the last, David
I HAVE SEVERAL PAISLEY-PRINT TIES BUT
RARELY IF EVER SEE ANY WORN IN YOUR
MAGAZINE. HAS THAT FASHION BOAT SAILED
WITHOUT ME? SAVE OR PITCH THEM?

SAM GOODWILL

GIG HARBOR, WASH.
THE ESQUI RE FASHI ON DI RECTOR
WI LL NOW TAKE YOUR QUESTI ONS
Lynch [Fig. 2] would seem
to be the longest-standing
adopter, and I like the look
personally.
WHEN YOU RECOMMEND
BOOTS THAT COST $500,
IT UPS THE ENVY IN MY
BLOODSTREAM A BIT. WHAT
SAY YOU FOR THE MAN
WHOSE RANGE FOR BOOTS
IS FROM $80 TO $150?
MICHAEL GRADY
PLYMOUTH, MASS.
I get asked this all the time,
Michael. Im reminded of
my student days, when hefty
copies of LUomo Vogue of-
fered visions of fashion so
stratospherically out of my
league that even traveling to
a shop that had such clothes
was beyond my budget. As-
piration (call it envy) is the
driving force in style, an ex-
hortation to betterment, and
when your wallet cant keep
up with your eye, you have
to get crafty. Figure out how
to nd clothes online for
less than youd pay in stores.
Buy vintage. Get to know the
brands that do passable ver-
sions of designer stuff. Club
Monaco, Banana Republic,
and J. Crew all produce
excellent of-the-moment
fashion at very clever prices,
and some budget-friendly
brands have launched a
capsule line (like Mr. Bs col-
lection from Aldo) that offers
elevated styles, including
boots [Fig. 3, by Mr. Bs for
Aldo, $150], at thoroughly
reasonable prices.
IM IN MY MID-20S AND I
WANT TO UPDATE MY WARD-
ROBE SO THAT I LOOK LESS
LIKE AN ANGST-RIDDEN TEEN,
ALL METAL AND HARDCORE,
AND MORE LIKE AN ADULT.
HOW CAN I MAKE THE TRANSI-
TION WITHOUT FORGOING A
BADASS PERSONA?
DOUG DISTEL
LOS ANGELES, CALIF.
You might like to consider
the hardcoreness of fashions
preeminent rocker, John
Varvatos. His collections
always have a grown-up
rock n roll sensibility about
them, and even in his per-
sonal wardrobe [Fig. 4],
he manages to dance lightly
between the elegant and
the disheveled. Simple.
And, perhaps, badass.
IS IT EVER OKAY TO PLACE
A SMARTPHONE IN A SHIRT
POCKET?
JOE MUTSCH
WASHINGTON, D. C.
It cant look terribly good
even the lightest smartphone
would cause an unsightly
sag [Fig. 5] in a pocket. Better
instead to put it in your
trousers. You are wearing
trousers, arent you?
GOT A QUESTION
FOR NICK SULLIVAN?
E-MAIL HIM AT
ESQSTYLE@HEARST.COM.
I
L
L
U
S
T
R
A
T
I
O
N

B
Y

B
E
R
N
D

S
C
H
I
F
F
E
R
D
E
C
K
E
R
58 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
E
S
Q
U
I
R
E

S
T
Y
L
E

0
8
.
2
0
1
3
fig. 2
fig.
1a
fig.
1b
fig. 3
You
the ha
preem
Varvat
alway
rock n
them,
sonal w
he ma
fig. 3
fig. 5
fig. 4
PERFORMANCE
NOW IN PRESCRIPTION
IN THE LATEST SUN FRAMES

2
0
1
3

L
e
n
s
C
r
a
f
t
e
r
s
,

I
n
c
.

A
l
l

r
i
g
h
t
s

r
e
s
e
r
v
e
d
.
All the best sport frames are now available in prescription.
Now you can perform better and see better too.
I believe it was legendary golfer and noted man
of style Happy Gilmore who said, Golf requires
goofy pants and a fat ass. We may still have fat
asses . . . but goofy pants? Sure, there are some men
whose exuberance can get the better of them on
and off the course, but I like to think that more
of us exhibit our personalities with a modicum
of decorum.
Not that Im perfect. While Ive never been
one to make audacious fashion statements, the
odd wardrobe faux pas has left me the butt of a
few jokes. Last year, I wore a neon-orange shirt
in Dubai for my nal event of the season (below).
There is no denying it was pushing the boundar-
ies of convention, and the boys didnt think twice
about letting me know. You should have told me I
needed my sunglasses today was directed my way
on more than one occasion while warming up on
the range. And when my caddy likened me to an
air-trafc-control grounds-crew mem-
ber on the rst fairway and proceeded
to make runway signals throughout the
round, I knew that was the last outing
that shirt would ever make.
On more typical days, I like to nd a
balance between feeling comfortable
and looking good, and with technology
advancing at a rate of knots, all us golf-
ers are able to take advantage of lightweight per-
formance gear. (When you play in Malaysia with
humidity levels reaching 90 percent and the heat
index touching 100 degrees, you need all the help
you can get.) For polo shirts, I like a slim, athletic t
and moisture-wicking microber, both of which I
nd in Ralph Laurens RLX range. And for pants, I
need something lightweight that doesnt hug my
legs or pull at my waist. Shoes can be trickier: My
wife always reminds me you can tell a lot about a
man by his choice of footwear, so in an attempt to
bring conventional ofce fashion to the golf course
(which is, after all, my ofce), my shoe of choice is
the brogue-esque leather FootJoy FJ Icon Shield
Tip. While new shoes often ll men with trepi-
dationever play 18 holes with fresh blisters?
the built-in memory foam provides a custom t
to make things just a bit more comfortable. (Full
disclosure: Yes, I am a brand ambassador for both
Ralph Lauren and FootJoy, but given
that I wear their clothes to compete in
golf tournaments worldwide, I clearly
trust their products.)
Those are just my preferences, and
there is a ton of great gear out there.
Whatever you choose to wear, try to
remember this: We golfers have a rep-
utation to maintain. Dress accordingly.
THE BEST-DRESSED MAN ON THE PGA TOUR ON DRESSING FOR THE
OFFICE. WHICH HAPPENS TO BE A GOLF COURSE.
LUKE DONALD
H O W I D R E S S N O W
60 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
E
S
Q
U
I
R
E

S
T
Y
L
E

0
8
.
2
0
1
3
F
O
R

S
T
O
R
E

I
N
F
O
R
M
A
T
I
O
N

S
E
E

P
A
G
E

1
3
0
.
A FEW THINGS
TO IMPROVE YOUR
(STYLE) GAME
Hat ($35) by J. Lindeberg.
FIG. 3
Stand bag ($180) by
TaylorMade.
FIG. 4
Sunglasses ($220)
by Oakley.
FIG. 1
Golf glove ($17) by
Fila Golf.
FIG. 2
Approach S2 golf watch
($250) by Garmin.
FIG. 5
L
I
N
K
S
E D
I T
I
O
N
10%
THE
EXTRA
Stand bag ($180)
Taylor
FIG. 4
1
Pandora, the Pandora logo, and the Pandora trade dress are trademarks or registered trademarks of Pandora Media, Inc. Used with permission. Compatible with select smartphones.
See: www.pandora.com/everywhere/mobile. Not all devices compatible with USB connection. Your wireless carriers rate plans apply.
2
Compatible with select phones with Bluetooth.

Your wi rel ess carri ers rate pl ans appl y. State or l ocal l aws may l i mi t use of texti ng feature. Onl y use texti ng feature when condi ti ons al l ow you to do so safel y.
3
The Bl uetooth

word
mark and l ogos are owned by the Bl uetooth SI G, I nc., and any use of such marks by Honda Motor Co., Ltd., i s under l i cense.
4
The USB Audi o I nterface i s used for di rect connecti on
to and control of some current di gi tal audi o pl ayers and other USB devi ces that contai n MP3, WMA or AAC musi c fi l es. Some USB devi ces wi th securi ty software and di gi tal
ri ghts-protected fi l es may not work. Pl ease see your Honda deal er for detai l s. EX-L model shown. 2013 Ameri can Honda Motor Co., I nc.
We made the best Civic even better.
Introducing a funner, smarter, techier Honda Civic. Funner, wi th Pandora

compati bi l i ty.
1
Smarter,
wi th a customi zabl e mul ti -i nformati onal di spl ay and SMS texti ng functi onal i ty.
2
Techi er, wi th standard
features l i ke Bl uetooth,
3
USB i ntegrati on
4
and rearvi ew camera. Basi cal l y, i ts everythi nger.
Jerusalem is everywhere. No matter where you are,
Jerusalem is. The power of that holy city intrudes
into the strangest and most profane of places. I re-
member once driving to the Hustler Casino in Los
Angeles, draped in the paper they give you at In-N-Out Burger,
the kind that covers your whole lap while you gorge and drive,
and I turned on the radio to hear a local Christian preachers
extensive, in-depth analysis of Israels latest settlement poli-
cies and their relation to the Book of Acts. For some reason, it
made me think of Pearl, a re-
ligious allegory written seven
centuries ago, the subject of
which is also Jerusalem. The
Middle East has always been a
place for Anglo-Saxons to pro-
ject their various fantasies onto,
no matter how far away, no mat-
ter how dim the dreamers grasp
of its reality. And yet, after Iraq
and Afghanistan, America and
the West in general already have
been disengaging from the Mid-
dle East intellectually as well as militarily. That blessed time
when we dont care anymore cant come soon enough.
Because what is there really to talk about anymore? The
issues that originated the obsession with the region have all been
either solved or stalemated. North American energy indepen-
dence is within reach. The hope for a blossoming Arab demo-
cratic movement leading to stability
and prosperity has withered to ashes.
American political and military in-
volvement do not seem to decrease the
chance of terrorism at home or abroad.
As for whether America will go to war
on humanitarian grounds, Syria has
put that question to the ultimate test,
and the answer so far has been a res-
olute no. Israel has made it clear that
it will deal with a nuclear Iran itself,
and frankly, when all is said and done,
Israel probably knows best. Its exis-
tence is at stake. As for the notion of a
peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Pal-
estinian struggle, there is no hope and
62 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3 Clip, Save, Share, from any page. Download free from the iTunes App Store or Google Play.
( I TS NOT DOI NG ANY GOOD)
I
L
L
U
S
T
R
A
T
I
O
N

B
Y

L
E
O

J
U
N
G
Peter Beinarts convinced that
young Jewish liberals no longer
care about Israel. But is this
really a problem when nearly
every other constituency does?
How ridiculous has the
symbolic tug-of-war
gotten? Groups have
boycotted SodaStream
because some of its
machines are built in
contested territory.
Meanwhile, the com-
pany employs hundreds
of Palestinians.
WHY ARE WE SO OBSESSED
WITH ISRAEL?
I miss my mothers voice.
I miss her gentle kindness.
Despite my loss, my mom would love to
know that her battle with colon cancer
helped save other lives.
Please, if you or someone you love is at high
risk, age 50 or older or, if colon cancer runs
in your family, get screened it saves lives.
Early detection is vital up to 90% of
colon cancer cases can be prevented with
appropriate screening. Colon cancer is one
of the most detectable and, if found early,
one of the most treatable cancers.
P
h
o
t
o
g
r
a
p
h

b
y

N
i
g
e
l

P
a
r
r
y
/
C
P
i
Terrence Howard | CCA National Ambassador
Visit ccalliance.org or
call our toll-free helpline
at 877-422-2030.
therefore no pressing reason for intervention. So why
bother? Why talk about it?
And yet the obsession continuesand not merely for
the religious. Israel as a symbol transferred into the realm
of secular politics during the rise of political correctness
in the 1980s. For the Left, distancing itself from Israel is a
way of working through issues of colonialism in a safely
remote space. Israeli Apartheid Week is now a xture on
American campuses, even though any historical com-
parison between South Africa and Israel cannot sur-
vive even the slightest scrutiny. Support for Israel can often be
equally dubious: born of apocalyptic fantasies borrowed from
Revelation or the Book of Mormon, a counterreaction to liberal
elitism, or a way to be on the side of the powerful. Israel has no
shortage of enemies, and with friends like these . . .
Peter Beinarts recent book, The Crisis of Zionism, argues that
young American Jews are falling out of love with Israel, which
may well be true, but their new-
found indifference doesnt partic-
ularly matter one way or the other.
The political choice faced by Amer-
ican voters is between a party that
is really quite pro-Israel indeed and
another that is so pro-Israel it hurts.
The inuence of the Israeli lobby
on Democrats and of the evangeli-
cal lobby on Republicans are nearly
total; they cant grow any greater
and show no sign of abating. The
foreign-policy debate surround-
ing the Middle East is increasing-
ly a phantom one politically. Try
explaining that to the preacher on
the radio.
Scott Andersons new book, Law-
rence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial
Folly and the Making of the Modern
Middle East, renders painfully clear
how deeply the political structure of
the Middle East has been born of ec-
centric fantasies. Those can include
Lawrences irresponsible self-dei-
cation and Gertrude Bells drawing
of the borders of Iraq: The Middle
East has always been a moving token
in a game of transcendence.
The time has come to step away
from this game altogether. This
summer, John Kerry will do what
John Kerry went to Israel
four times in the spring
alone. There is nothing he
could be doing that would
be a bigger waste of time.
Including windsurfing.
One reason the press loves
covering Israel: Its one of
the cushiest, most beautiful
locales from which to
report. Id take this beach
in Tel Aviv over Beijing or
Baghdad any day.
A history of dreams whose
ferocious passion consumed the
dreamers. And now us.
64 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
American secretaries of state have wasted fty years doing:
try to x the Israeli situation. In the spring, the poor man went
four separate times to Israel, each a special mission, a historic
opportunity to make peace. President Obama, during his rst
campaign, dened political insanity as doing the same thing
over and over again and expecting a different result. Americas
Middle East policy is the comical extreme of this descrip-
tion, a zombie exercise undertaken in the name of hope for its
own sake.
The obsession has gone on long enough. Journalists tradi-
tionally do not report suicides, even though its perfectly legal
for them to do so, because of what is known as the Werther Ef-
fect. If you report suicides, more people take their own lives.
The worlds obsession with Israel and Palestine has had a sim-
ilar effect. Israelis and Palestinians believe they are iconic of
something global, something larger than their own limited, mo-
mentary concerns. They reason that peace, when it comes, will
be imposed by some distant, deferred force beyond their bor-
ders. Therefore the important thing is to win the war of global
symbolism. That war, because it is ethereal, ghostly, can never
be won, and because it can never be won, it will never end.
Standard foreign-policy wisdom holds that Israel is the key,
that once the crisis there is solved, everything else in the whole
of the Muslim world will im-
prove. The terrorists will no lon-
ger have the necessary symbol-
ism for recruitment. But the only
thing that would satisfy the ter-
rorists is Israels ceasing to ex-
ist, and Israel, rather gauchely,
insists on existing. The sym-
bolism cannot be solved; only
its power can be diminished.
The real historic opportunity
at the moment is for the secre-
tary of state to stop going to Isra-
el, and for everybody else to stop
talking about what theres no
point discussing.
POLITICAL PILGRIMAGE
For decades, presidents and presidential hopefuls
have visited the Western Wall. Theyve achieved many
photo ops and zero years of actual peace.
Clip, Save, Share, from any page.
Stephen Hawking recently
boycotted a conference in
Israel. Thomas Friedman used
that as an opportunity to rally
for a modern, economically
thriving, democratic, secular
state where Christians and
Muslims would live side by
sidenext to Jews. And the
cyclesymbols, peacemaking,
failurebegins anew.
Insurance plans are offered and administered by Veterinary Pet Insurance Company in California and DVM Insurance Agency in all other states. Underwritten by Veterinary Pet Insurance Company (CA), Brea, CA, an A.M. Best A rated company
(2012); National Casualty Company (all other states), Madison, WI, an A.M. Best A+ rated company (2012). 2013 Veterinary Pet Insurance Company. Nationwide Insurance is a service mark of Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company
see why happy owners love VPI at AHealthierPetToday.com
From routine shots to unexpected emergencies, VPI Pet Insurance helps you provide
the best care possible for your pet. VPI healthy pet, happy owner.
NEVER PAY CASH FOR A CAR Not while
interest rates are zero to 1 percent.
NEVER CATCH A FALLING KNIFE Or,
Youre less knowledgeable than whoever
sits on the opposite side of all investments.
The only thing that can save you is your
knowledge of that fact.
Two guys are watching a roulette wheel.
Red comes up four times in a row. The rst
guy concludes, Red is hot. Im putting it all
on red. The second guy says, Black is due.
Im putting it all on black. The fair end to
this story would be the wheel landing on 0 or
00, so they both lose. In real life, the ending
is equally grim: Both guys shufe their chips
around, making opposite bets until the casi-
nos 5.26 percent advantage leaves them both
poorer. In real life, that house edge is a com-
mission or a transaction cost or a fee that eats
away your principal (and your winnings) in
identical fashion. If something is a good idea,
it is not because of what happened in the past.
It is because you are making an informed bet
on what is going to happen.
B Y K E N K U R S O N
THINGS YOU CAN
HAGGLE OVER, IN ORDER OF
APPROPRIATENESS:
USED CAR ANYTHING AT A
MOROCCAN BAZAAR
A YARD
OF GRAVEL
APPROPRIATE
66 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
T
H
E

2
0

I
M
M
U TA B L E
L
A
W
S

O
F
WHAT TO INVEST IN
WHAT NOT TO INVEST IN
HOW TO BUY A CAR
WHAT REALLY NOT TO INVEST IN
SOME NEW THINKING ON DEBT
POTENTIALLY SHOCKING ADVICE
ABOUT RETIREMENT
ADVICE FROM A FINANCIER
HOW MUCH OTHER PEOPLE MAKE
ALSO: GOLD?
Apple provides a perfect example. Is it now
a great investment because it has fallen so
much? Or is it smart to sell because the mar-
ket hates it? The smartest analysis is what
you think Apple is worth based on its price
right now. All investing is price versus value.
Yesterdays price and value count for zero.
DIVERSIFY YOUR INVESTMENTS This
is not to improve your results. In fact, if you
do nd that once-in-a-lifetime long shot that
comes in, diversication will prevent you
from taking full advantage. But diversica-
tion reminds you that its usually fruitless to
spend the energy trying to outperform pro-
fessionals at their game. Consequently. . .
YOUR BEST INVESTMENT IS IN A BROAD
BASKET OF U.S. EQUITIES The 00s were
brutal on U. S. stock markets1.41 percent
over ten years. But even including the worst
collapse in both equity prices and the very
markets themselves that occurred in 2007
and 2008, its not even close. The last thirty
years, from the beginning of the 80s through
the end of 2010, the compound annualized
return of the S&P 500 was 10.71 percent.
Last twenty years, it was 9.14 percent. Last
forty years, it was 10.14 percent. And its my
personal belief that the teens are going to
be (continue to be, actually) a great decade
for U. S. equities. With government policies
that encouragepractically commandcash
hoarding, and even the biggest innovators in
the country forced to pay giant dividends or
stoke the share price with buybacks, theres
really nowhere else to go. The best invest-
ment an American can make when factoring
both returns and quality of life (i.e., not try-
ing to outperform professionals while paying
ludicrous trading fees) is a low-cost, highly
rated index fund of American equities.
BUT YOUR REAL BEST INVESTMENT
DEFINITELY IN TIME, POSSIBLY IN MON-
EYIS IN YOURSELF You are a sucker in
most investment markets. Unless you become
a professional, youre an underdog to outper-
form them. Apply most of your time, effort,
and money to your business or career, where
you are the professional and the favorite.
SAVE FOR RETIREMENT Ive grown ob-
sessed with a concept introduced by Morn-
ingstar as it moves into the money-manage-
ment business. Youve probably heard of
the investing concepts alpha and beta,
which are used to measure the riskiness of
your portfolio and its performance variance
from a like basket of investments. Sudden-
ly, in 2012, theres gamma, which measures
the benets that can be taken simply by plan-
ning smartly. The results are unbelievable
as much as 28.8 percent in additional retire-
ment income by observing optimal curves for
ve areas: asset allocation, withdrawal, annu-
ities, tax efciency, and liability protection.
It is amazing to me that the most considered
eld of investing can still yield surprising re-
sults, but Ive been studying the concept and
its effects, and theyre real. Theres not space
to go into it here, but consider every Ameri-
can you know whos over sixty. The ones who
saved enough and prepared for retirement
are going to live longer and more happily than
the ones who did not.
BUT NOT UNTIL YOUVE PAID OFF YOUR
CREDIT CARD Half of Americans carry a
credit-card balance, and theyre paying
roughly 14 percent on it. Startlingly, a lot
of that 50 percent are also saving for retire-
ment, including many who stock their 401(k)
or IRA money in xed-income funds that are
doing 5 percent. According to Morningstar,
a guy who pays off his credit-card balance
and then invests for retirement will increase
his 401(k) at retirement by 14.1 percent. (The
math changes here when considering retire-
ment plans that include free money from
an employer in the form of a 401(k) match,
which brings about a sub rule: Always take
free money, even when it hurts to do so.)
DONT GET DIVORCED Same: Dont have
kids to save your marriage. Dont buy a house
to save your marriage.
GET A HOUSE The interest is tax deduct-
ible, and for a thirty-year mortgage, most of
your initial payments are interest. It could be a
good investment if you choose wisely. And you
can live in it and have your life more posi-
AN UPGRADE TO
FIRST CLASS
THE RENT GARAGE-SALE ITEM
($4 OR LESS)
DINNER SEX
INAPPROPRIATE
THINGS ARE LOOKING UP,
ECONOMICALLY. THE MARKETS.
HOUSING PRICES. EMPLOYMENT.
HOG FUTURES (WE THINK).
IT APPEARSFINALLYTHAT ITS OKAY
TO START THINKING ABOUT GETTING
RICH AGAIN. BUT YOU HAVE
TO ACT BEFORE EVERYONE ELSE
DOES. ON THE NEXT 10
PAGES YOU WILL LEARN HOW.
I L L U S T R AT I ON B Y MA R TA C E R D 67
er ways to do them. Theres
no reason not to do your
own taxes if theyre simple
enough. My kids do theirs.
But you reach a point, as I
did, whereeven though
I like to think of myself as
a financially literate per-
sonwhen you sit down
and try to do them, you re-
alize there are accountants
for a reason. Its often a
function of how complicat-
ed your situation is.
DO REGULAR PEOPLE
REALLY INVEST IN
GOLD? My first rule of
investing is not to invest
in things I dont under-
stand. And I dont under-
stand gold.
HOW MUCH DEBT IS
TOO MUCH DEBT?
WHICH IS GOOD AND
WHICH IS BAD? WHERE
DO I START CHIPPING
AWAY? Very simple: Start
getting rid of your most
expensive debt first.
Thats the closest thing to
a formula I can give you.
APPLE. SHOULD I BE IN
THERE? Its a terrific com-
pany, and their stock has
come way down. But what
Apple really amounts to
is whether you believe it
can continue to introduce
groundbreaking products.
If you do, then the stock
is a pretty good buy at the
moment. If you think that
because Steve Jobs isnt
around or theyve lost their
mojo for one reason or an-
other, theyre not going to
have the next great idea,
then you should stay away.
That said, the average
American should not be
buying individual stocks.
Its crazy for anybody. I
dont even feel as though
I understand whats go-
MY WIFE ANDI were once lucky people. We could
give small amounts of money to an esoteric collec-
tion of causes, from Amnesty International to a lo-
cal sanctuary for homeless donkeys. We could do
that because we had not yet been intimately con-
nected to a cause, painfully and specifically, by our
fates or the fate of someone we love. We rarely said
no, but we werent especially generous or mind-
ful about our giving, because we didnt have to be.
Now we give most of our donations each year to
the Childrens Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO),
in our former hometown of Ottawa. We do that be-
cause the doctors and nurses at CHEO saved the life
of our first son, Charley. He was born several weeks
early with a heart defect that caused his heart to beat
too rapidly. After weeks of in utero efort to gear him
down, they finally cut Charley out of my wife and
saved him with electricity, and then a nurse watched
over him for twenty-four hours a day, and then we
got to take him home and, not long ago, watch him
DISCOVERNEWTHINGSWITH PLAY MONEY
Its hard to call this a rule because I think it speaks
to my particular money psychology as a gambler,
but Ive found that my management skill is en-
hanced when I divide my mental wallet into real
and play money. I observe all the rules above with
the money my family and I depend on. But Ive al-
ways set aside some dough for stuff that interests
me and might result in a big score but wont dev-
astate me if it goes to zero. My thing right now is
Ripple, a bitcoin-related alternative currency, but
its ranged from speculative real estate investing
to just plain gambling, some of which has actual-
ly turned a prot. The main value of this pressure-
release valve is that its kept me from dipping into
my real money to chase some white horse.
HOW TO GIVE TO
become seven years old.
Contrary to whatever corpo-
rate devilspeak youve heard about
Canadian health care, Charley re-
ceived beautiful, perfect attention
from beautiful, perfect people,
and it did not cost us a cent. Our
fellow Canadians paid for Char-
leys profitless care with their tax-
es and donations, for which we will
remain forever grateful. It became
important to my wife and me that
we give money to CHEO, as much
as we could every month for the
rest of our lives, in some futile at-
tempt to repay the debt that we
owe. It is a nonnegotiable com-
mitment, charged automatically
to my credit card so that we can
never forget or make an excuse to
skip a stretch. Seven years later, its
become as routine as a mortgage
payment, but we never just do it.
Every month I look at my cred-
it-card statement, and CHEO FOUN-
DATI ON OTTAWA is the one charge
I always feel good about. I return
to the place Charley was born, to
the best and worst day of my life;
I think about the medicine they
poured into my wife and the ti-
ny twin burns on Charleys chest;
I think about the nurse who ap-
peared out of the walls to ease
me into a chair when she could
see, after it was over and we
knew Charley had been saved,
that I was going down. I think about all of it again
whenever we get a letter from CHEO telling us that
weve reached some new level of donorbecause
even small regular donations can really add upor
that Charleys name will now go on a wall or we can
come for a tour. While we have never mustered the
strength to go back to that building, those little mes-
sages never fail to transport me inside it, to those
moments when I looked through fogged glass or the
lid of Charleys little plastic box and felt powerless,
helpless, and all I was left with was hope.
Today, a whole economic system has been put in-
to place so I can do more than hope. I can work, for
which I receive money, which I can give to CHEO,
where I know it will help make sick children well. It
isnt thoughtless money or guilty money or invisible
money. I wouldnt even call it money well spent. Its
the reason money exists for me, so that I might do
the single best thing I do with it, and it makes me feel
lucky again, luckier than Ive ever been.
BY CHRIS JONES
WHAT
PARTS HAVE BEEN
REPLACED?
FOR EXAMPLE:
THE TIMING
BELT?
DO YOU
HAVE A REGULAR
MECHANIC?
MAY I SEE
THE MAINTENANCE
RECORDS?
WHY HAVE WE, AS A SPECIES,
BECOME SO DEPENDENT ON THE
AUTOMOBILE, DO YOU THINK?
RATTNER CONT.
69 I L L U S T R AT I ON B Y T H E H E A D S OF S TAT E
WHEN MY FATHER lived in Florida,
he won the lottery.
Twice.
He did not, however, reap the
profits, and more times than I can
count he told me why. The first
time, he gave the winning numer-
ical combination to my nephew,
who forgot to bring it to the lo-
cal newsstand where my father
bought his lottery tickets. The
second time, he...well, I think
he did the same thing.
Twice, he would repeat, when-
ever I sat with him at the beach
and he, in a habit he was help-
less to resist, recited the vaga-
ries of fate that kept him from re-
alizing his true fortune. Twice I
win the lottery, and twice I dont
see a dime. My luck. My mazel.
Well, then, Dad, Id say in re-
ply, you should never play the
lottery again.
Why not?
Because the numerical odds
against you winning the lottery
once are overwhelming, let alone
twice. And to think that you can
win it three times...
He looked at me like Id gone
crazy. But Ive won it twice!
My father, Lou Junod, was a
gambler. He lived in hock not
only to his bookmakers but al-
so to the dream of a big score
that would give him what he
called fuck you money. It was
not enough for him to winhe
had nothing but contempt for the
two-dollar Charlies who went
to the track and bet favorites
and so he favored the hopeless
long shot over the sure thing, and
the penny stock over the blue
chip. He did not believe in God,
but obeyed the compulsion to
push his luck with an almost re-
ligious fervor, as a way of estab-
lishing his favored place in the
universe. On his lottery tickets,
he played nothing but combina-
tions of his lucky numbers, of
which he had hundreds or thou-
sands, so many that losing pink,
blue, and orange tickets filled his
car like confetti. One of the most
vivid memories of my childhood
is the morning after one of his
long shots placed in the money,
when he covered the enormous
bed he shared with my mother
with a checkerboard arrange-
ment of hundred-dollar bills to
prove to her he wasnt a loser
after all.
For the most part, he made
enough money to cover his bets,
and never faced the violence
due to deadbeats. But he had
no chance to recover his loss-
es in the stock market. Ive of-
ten said that he played the mar-
ket as a gambler rather than as
an investor, and so was doomed.
But it was worse than that. In the
stock market, he won the lottery
twice. Around the time I was
born, someone gave him a tip to
buy stock in a Japanese compa-
ny that made photographic film.
His stockbroker, who happened
to be my mothers uncle, laughed
at him; a friend who lived down
the block, who happened to be a
veteran of the Pacific war, pulled
up the corners of his eyes and
crowed, in pidgin Japanese, Fuji
Photo! Fuji Photo! For fifty years,
I lived with the sound of my fa-
ther repeating that refrain, al-
ways ending his performance
with these words:
You know what I would have
made if Id bought that fucking
stock? Millions. And then Id show
you how to live.
He did not make millions.
During the tech boom of the
late nineties, he had a brief run
of luck, and at one point had
$180,000 in the market. He
promised not to be greedy; he
promised to get out as soon as he
doubled his money, but of course
he stayed in when he should have
gotten out, and one day he called
with the news that his stake was
down to $60,000.
Dad, you gotta get out. You
gotta keep something for you and
Mom to live on.
Get out? How can I get out?
He wound up putting all of it,
every last dime, on what he later
called some shit stock, which
was the equivalent of going to the
casino and putting it all on black.
When he died, six years later, he
left mein addition to the confet-
ti of a thousand worthless lottery
ticketsa half a jar of peanut but-
ter, some Gold Bond powder, and
a couple of cans of Edge.
I say all this not in bitterness,
but as preamble to a discussion
of the most important invest-
ment decision Ive ever made.
A few years ago, I was assigned
to profile a man taking over as
CEO of a company notorious for
its corruption. The stock of the
company had been in the low
60s; when I began reporting my
story, it was at 10. I bought it at
15 and then became so obsessed
with itits minute-by-minute
vacillationthat I was relieved
when my editor told me that to
publish a story about a compa-
ny in which Id invested would
be a breach of ethics. I sold the
stock at 14 and then went back
to leaving all my investment de-
cisions, every last one of them,
to my wife.
I have no idea where my mon-
ey is or what she does with it, and
of course if she were so inclined
she could rob me blind. But I not
only trust her; I dont trust myself,
and I never say a word when she
puts our money in an index fund
or some conservative instru-
ment boasting a guaranteed re-
turnthe two-dollar window of
finance.
I also dont a say word when I
open the business page of the
newspaper and see that Ive
won the lottery, in the same way
my father didthat the stock I
bought at 15 and sold at 14 has
not only made it back to where
I bought it.
Its pushing 35.
BY TOM JUNOD
E S QUI RE S GUI DE TO F I NA NCI A L E NL I GHTE NME NT
MOTOR OIL
THATS SLUDGY AND
TOO DARK
WORN-OUT
TIRESTHE RUBBER HAIRS ON THE
TREADS INDICATE WEAR
UNEVENLY WORN
TIRES, WHICH SUGGESTS BAD
ALIGNMENT
. . . AND RED FLAGS TO
LOOK FOR YOURSELF:
70 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
W
H
Y
MY W
I
F
E
Clip, Save, Share, from any page.
I
L
L
U
S
T
R
A
T
I
O
N

B
Y

T
H
E

H
E
A
D
S

O
F

S
T
A
T
E
was sitting watch in the corner of a dis-
tant gate in the Atlanta airport. Across
from me sat a guy wearing expensive
denim, bright pink socks, a blazer that
was beautifully, almost comically, blue,
and a white belt. There he sat, laptop
hinged upon his folded legs, arms up on the seats
next to him as if he were embracing two invisi-
ble pals. Hed slipped his shoes off, tucked them
beneath his seat. Eating pistachios and watching
Braveheartso relaxed, so unstressed by the termi-
nal bustle, that it looked like he owned the world,
or at least the little part of it that concerned him.
All that, and the backs of his hands were conspicu-
ously tan. After a while, I named him, as if he were
a character in my movie: He was the yachtsman.
It was just the two of us in the corner. Eventu-
ally we made eye contact, and I asked him: What
do you make?
The yachtsman jerked an earbud free. Excuse
me?
How much you make?
You mean money? He narrowed his eyes. He

BY TOM CHIARELLA
tilted his head. What kind of question is that?
Okay, I said. You dont have to tell me.
Are you talking to me about money? Are you
actually asking me about money? the yachtsman
said. His other earbud fell out.
Just asking, I said.
He sniffed and then sighed, and leaned forward.
His shirt pocket was monogrammed. (The yachts-
man!) Are you kidding?
I was not. In fact, it was the only thing I wanted
to know about him.
The fuck with you, he said. He punched his
space bar, folded the computer, packed up his stuff,
and left. He went to the opposite gate, to stare at
me. Then stood and went to the gate agent and
complained. I could hear only snatches of what
he said. He used the word solicitation. He called
me this guy and that guy both.
Way more than half a million, I gured, or some-
thing less than 75K.
Ask someone about their job and theyll gladly
say, Im a schoolteacher. A systems analyst. I sell ad
space. I make drums. Whatever. Its a bland and
ing on with Apple, and I
pay a lot of attention to it.
IS SOCIALLY RESPONSI-
BLE INVESTING STILL A
THING? I think some peo-
ple do it. My view of this is
you should keep your in-
vesting and philanthropy
separate. Invest to max-
imize your returns and
to achieve your material
needs. Once youve
done that, feel free to give
money away. Theres no
evidence that socially re-
sponsible investing helps
returns, and intuitively
you have to believe that
it hurts them, because
youre trying to achieve
two objectives, and thats
a hard thing to do.
IS MY HOUSE AS WORTH-
LESS AN INVESTMENT
AS EVERYONE NOW SAYS
IT IS? No, you have to put
your house in perspective.
If you look back at houses
over a long period, youll
see they typically appreci-
ate at the rate of inflation,
maybe a little more. The
early 2000s were com-
pletely anomalous. They
ran way up, then came
crashing down. You should
really look at your house as
a low-returning investment
that will appreciate over
time. It isnt going to match
the rate of appreciation of
stocks, and it isnt going
to be huge. But youre go-
ing to get something, and
there are tax advantages,
too. Look at it as a store of
value, but not as a huge in-
vestment opportunity.
WHATS THE BEST WAY
TO ASK MY PARENTS
IF THEY HAVE ENOUGH
MONEY TO RETIRE
COMFORTABLY? Thats
not financial advice,
PLACES TO HIDE LARGE
AMOUNTS OF MONEY, IN ORDER
OF EFFECTIVENESS:
Ireland Ofshore account Literally ofshore, in
a box buried under a sandbar
INEFFECTIVE EFFECTIVE
E S QUI RE S GUI DE TO F I NA NCI A L E NL I GHTE NME NT
RATTNER CONT.
72 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3 I L L U S T R AT I ON B Y T H E H E A D S OF S TAT E
GRILL ON.
It isnt just about pressing a button.
Its about pushing the boundaries of what can be.
Its about fnding the true goodness of the grill.
And knowing it will last.
So rise up. Pick up the tongs. Raise your spatulas. The time is now.
GRILL ON.
thats psychology. I dont
know your parents, so I
dont know the best way to
ask them, but heres some-
thing to consider: Ive seen
a bunch of research re-
cently that says that as you
look across the older gen-
erationsparticularly the
people who came of age in
the Depression and have a
certain mentality because
of ittheyre much bet-
ter prepared financially
than younger generations
seem to be if you look at
assets relative to where
they are in life. Its impor-
tant to try, depending on
how old your parents are,
to have them see clearly
what some financial issues
might be. But more impor-
tantly, think about them
for yourself.
DO I NEED TO WORRY
ABOUT THE EURO CRI-
SIS? In a general sort
of way. First it depends
on how active an inves-
tor youre going to be. If
youre going to start pick-
ing parts of the world to
invest in, youre going to
have to worry about it a lit-
tle more. If youre not, then
probably worry about it
less. It has already had and
will continue to have an ef-
fect on the U.S. because
we export a lot to Europe,
and those exports have
been negatively afected
by the economic situation
there. Part of why our eco-
nomic recovery has been
slower than wed like is that
the rest of the worlds eco-
nomic situation has been
more challenged. So yes,
you should worry about it
just as a part of being gen-
erally well informed, and
you should worry about it
because it does have con-
sequences for us. But un-
less youre picking stocks
familiar conversation starter. Ask What do you
make?not do, not craft, not produce, but make,
as in pull downand people smile wryly or look at
you like you bit them. Its a violation of code, mo-
res, convention. But the response, or more often
the lack of one, tells you something. And theres
always an answer, for every one of us. Standard
or surprising, humiliating or completely secret.
Last month I was approached about a job. Out
of the blue, the way it goes. We started talking and
next thing I know, were all the way to the salary
discussion. The number. I took it in, pretty certain I
was supposed to be happy. Not bad at all, either. But
hold on, I thought. Should I be happy? The number
seemed good, but that was only relative to myself.
When it comes to salary, my entire frame of refer-
ence was me. One person. What I make now, what
Ive made before, what I think I should make. How
do I even make a judgment on what that should
be? Not enough data. So I did what you would do. I
made a couple callsto friends, former colleagues
and tried to weasel some hard numbers. But then
one afternoon, I asked a kid at a car-rental counter,
got an answer, then turned to his boss, who was my
age, and asked him. With that, I just started asking
everyone. How much do you make? is a question
maybe the only question remainingthat youre not
supposed to ask. It poses a risk for both parties. But
if theres really power in knowing things, certain-
ly theres power in knowing another mans salary.
And when it comes to money going into my bank
account, I like as much power as possible.

ots of people answered with rules.
You dont ask a woman what she
makes, a colleague at my university de-
clared. Its just rude. Thats just locker-room talk,
where you guys compare dick size and that stuff.
Never ask a friend what he makes, a guy I play
cards with told me. Never. You can ask your fam-
ily. Your brothers. Your mother. But otherwise, no
go. He was looking at a cribbage hand, dropping a
card in the crib. Unless theyre retired. Then you
can ask. Whys that? Because its helpful then,
he said. Because then were all in that together.
My father never told me what he made, a plas-
tics-plant manager said to me. And Im never go-
ing to tell my daughter. Thats the family thing.
And then he told me: But I make a $90,000 base
salary plus a programmed bonus structure based
on a performance and safety record.
How much is the bonus?
He goosed his eyebrows and gave me a rule.
Never tell your bonus! he declared.
A golf pro said, Isnt there a saying? Assholes
and elbows? Something like that. No, I said.
There isnt a saying. Still, he said, assholes and
elbows about gets it, right? He charged me sixty
dollars for the next hour.

ine-seventy an hour, plus tips, a
barista told me in Houston.
Thirty-four ve, a reman said.
Minus my freaking union dues.
Depending on overhead, a contractor told me,
I might make a quarter million. But I always say
might. Might. I might make eighty. Depends on
weather. Everything is might.
You can nd out online, said a woman at the
DMV. There are no secrets here.
I make a lot less than you think, said a high
school teacher in Boulder, Colorado.
I make a lot less than you think, said a nurse
practitioner in Indianapolis.
I make so much less than you think, a pulmo-
nary specialist in my hometown told me while I
was getting a breathing test. Breathe.
How much do you think? a guy painting curb
stops in a parking garage asked me. Im down on
my knees here. Its about killing me. Ten bucks
an hour? Not even, he said, shaking his head.
At the interstate exit near my home, I asked a
guy holding a sign saying hed work for money. He
looked up the off-ramp to see if he had a moment,
answered me with an algebra equation. When
someone gives me a twenty, I usually double up
and call it a day. I was sorry to ask, I told him. Its
all right, he said. I get asked that a lot. I get asked
that probably more than anyone you know. People
want to know. Its natural. He held his hands out
helplessly. None of it lasts long, right?
But I gave him a twenty and said, Can you quit
for the day?
He squinted at the thought. Not hardly, he said.
I gotta ll a prescription. I mean, I just got out
here. And I have to be in New Mexico to meet my
daughter by Wednesday. I asked what he meant
did he have to get moving, or did he have to get
more money?
What do you make? he replied. I thought it
was quid pro quo, but it might have been a threat. I
didnt say. Then he asked for a ride to the pharmacy.
There are ways to goose the question so people
are more likely to answer. Take out the particulars.
Lose the you. Couch it in terms of a job, a career,
an employer. Whats this sort of job pay? Or, Could
I make a decent living working for Nordstrom? Of-
ten enough, people will answer with what you
really want to knowthe number. Conspiring is
always more fun than confessing.
I make thirty-two thousand, a science teach-
er at a private boarding school told me. Its really
THINGS YOU
CAN BUY FOR
A NICKEL
ONE DIRECTION
SILICONE WRISTBANDS
(PACK OF 3)
TROPICAL FRUIT REPTILE
FOOD MIX-IN FROM TOMS REPTILE
SUPPLIES (ONE 4-OZ CAN)
E S QUI RE S GUI DE TO F I NA NCI A L E NL I GHTE NME NT
A DUM DUM
32 SPONGEBOB
SQUAREPANTS VALENTINES
RATTNER CONT.
74 E S QU I R E Clip, Save, Share, from any page. Download free from the iTunes App Store or Google Play.
every day, thats as far as
you need to go.
IS TRACKING EVERY
PENNY I SPEND WORTH
THE TIME AND EFFORT?
I think to be conscious of
where your money is go-
ing is a good idea. When I
was younger, I kept a close
watch, and even now I
look at what I spend mon-
ey on, although certain-
ly not to the penny any-
more. I think doing it at
least for a while to get
a feeling of where your
money is going is a good
way to get a better sense
for how to allocate what
you have. Theres no oth-
er way that I know to bud-
get thoughtfully. Plus, its
easier these days, with on-
line bankingits all right
there. When I was young-
er, we wrote checks out,
kept track of our account
balances, and didnt have
automatic overdraftsany
of that.
MY FIFTH GRADER IS
BEING TAUGHT ABOUT
THE GREAT DEPRES-
SION, AND SHE ASKED
ME, WHEN THE STOCK
MARKET CRASHED
AND PEOPLE LOST ALL
THEIR MONEY ON WALL
STREET, WHERE DID IT
GO? HOW WOULD
YOU ANSWER THAT?
It didnt go anywhere be-
cause those people never
had the money. What they
had were shares of stock
in companies. The prob-
lem in 1929and again
in 1999was that people
paid more for the shares
than what the assets that
were represented by the
shares were worth. So
eventually people stopped
buying shares and the
prices collapsed.
criminal. I have a masters degree. But I tell myself
I dont care about the money. But really. Its pretty
shocking, no? Thirty-two thousand? You wouldnt
do it, would you? Right. And maybe not. But I got
the number. At least I thought I did, until he said,
Luckily, I have the Air Force pension.
Whats that make? I asked.
This time he shrugged. Enough, he said.
The most common answer of them all, this
foot in the door, the exclamation point of limits.
Enough. It is a kind of command to stop with the
questions and a declaration of being okay with the
world. True or not, it ends things, every time.

f course, it didnt always work. Many
people simply refused. A few people
walked right past me. And more than
once I lost my nerve. With the richest people I
asked, I was often the least bold, because it always
sounded like I was asking out of envy. I tried to be
bloodless and anthropological, but I know it wasnt
a scientic, nor even particularly persistent, study.
Its a question people never hear. Most often, the
response becomes a question: Are you crazy? Why
would I tell you that? Why do you want to know?
At a valet-parking stand at a hotel in Cincinnati,
I asked a woman. No particular reason, no appar-
ent clues other than a decent pantsuit, nice shoes,
and a laptop slung over her shoulder.
Dont you mean What do I do? she said.
No, I said. What do you make?
I dont make anything, she said. I work for
a health-insurance provider, running program
checks for in-service compliance of home health-
care workers and blah, blah, blah . . . Not what I
asked. So, what? I said. Like thirty-eight?
She looked at me when she realized I was talk-
ing about money and said exactly what we were
both thinking. Youre really annoying.
Im just asking.
Her car wheeled around, bags loaded. She set
her coffee on top of the car, drivers side, took out
her phone, and texted someone. I created a pro-
prietary program, she said. I own it. She plucked
her coffee and hipped down toward the drivers
seat. So its more than that.
More than what? Owning it?
More than thirty-eight, she said before she
ducked away. She rolled down her passenger-side
window. A lot more. Really annoying, that answer.
Is it a smart question to ask? A smart one to an-
swer? Yes and no.
Years ago, I was asked by a colleague at a job I
loved. He was sheepish, even apologetic with the
ask, but I didnt care. We were in a cab, returning
from a burger place he liked, which turned out to
be not all that good. Hed contritely offered to pay.
And maybe I was left with that, the pose of modes-
ty, but Ill admit that it seemed refreshing that he
would inquire, kind of honest and clear. So I an-
swered with my number after he promised to tell
me his in return. It all felt silly to me, like a big ex-
ercise in You show me yours, Ill show you mine.
He made more than I did. Two and a half times
more. But since I wasnt working full time and he
was well established, I didnt think my number
was all that bad. And I thought it was gracious that
I didnt get upset. It may seem weird that I was
happy enough with the knowledge that I made so
much less. But I was. He, however, spent the rest of
the ride speaking mostly to himself about a set of
inequities I did not quite understand. Im going
to have to speak to someone about this, he said.
Thanks, man, that really helps me.
What a mistake. I knew that before the cab
stopped. He walked in and got a raise that year.
He had his math. I spent years trying to forget his
number, and for a time became consumed by mine.
Truth is, he asked an excellent question, which I
answered like a blind goat. So: Is it a smart question
to ask? A smart one to answer? Yes and no. Those
are my exact answers. Respectively. Precisely. Yes
and no. And this is how rules are born.
I didnt take that job, the one that set this whole
experiment into motion. I became so obsessed with
the offerwhether the job would pay me enough
compared with some phantom determination of
good moneythat I lost sight of what the job would
be. In another state, for one thing, and requiring ad-
ministrative duties I didnt want. It wasnt for me. I
looked at what I already make. And I looked at the
life I already live. I didnt want to change things for
a better number. I like my life. There is no number
that would describe it.
HOW MUCH DO YOU MAKE? MAY BE THE
ONLY REMAI NI NG QUESTI ON YOU RE
NOT SUPPOSED TO ASK. BUT THERE S POWER
I N KNOWI NG. I ASKED EVERYONE.
FIVE 3-INCH BOX NAILS
AT JOHNSON HARDWARE
IN OMAHA
25 OFFICE MAX
PENCIL-
CAP ERASERS
100 2-MILLIGRAM
SEALABLE BAGGIES, THE
KIND USED FOR DRUGS
ANDY GRIFFITH
COLLECTOR CARD
JOHN KERRY
COLLECTOR CARD
RATTNER CONT.
75 I L L U S T R AT I ON B Y J OE MC K E N D R Y
FOUR APARTMENTS, TWO HOUSES,
36 ONE-YEAR CONTRACTS, 1 8 YEARS OF
MARRI AGE, ONE SON, ONE DI VORCE,
SEVEN CARS, TWO MOTORCYCLES, AND THE
HOME- OFFI CE DEDUCTI ON:

BY MIKE SAGER
E S QUI RE S GUI DE TO F I NA NCI A L E NL I GHTE NME NT
> TWO CANNOT LIVE as cheaply
as one. Especially if one of those
two is a woman. It starts with the
critical need for extraneous prod-
ucts like Kleenex and napkins (in
addition to toilet paper and paper
towels?), moves on to dust rufles
and matching dish-, glass-, and
flatware, and spirals out of con-
trol from there.
> When youve had three boys
and youre still trying for a girl,
remember that either way, youre
looking at four college tuitions.
> Leasing a car is way more eco-
nomical than owning. Period. You
never have to pay much for ser-
vice. And you can get a new one
every three years.
> On big-ticket items, dont ev-
er settle for a discount on an of
brand. Buy the thing you want.
Amortize. If you keep something
for a long time and youre hap-
py with it, youve made a wise
purchase.
> Try to think creatively. Dont fol-
low the other lemmings.
> Dont build in components. Tele-
visions, microwaves, high-fidelity
audio, intercom systems: Designs
change and youre left with a hole
in your wall or cabinet.
> Buy a house youre going to
grow into (though never at the top
of the market); dont move around
so much. The best way to realize
an increase in the value of your
house is to stay there for a de-
cently long period of time. And
remember: Not only will your in-
vestment grow; youll have some-
where to live.
> Dont try to tell everyone that the
pricey addition to your house (the
hot tub, the kitchen or bathroom
remodel, the tennis court, the
back deck) was done to raise the
value of your house. Shut up! You
did it because you wanted to do
it. And in the end its probably not
going to make much diference
to the sale pricethe next buyers
are going to think you were a luna-
tic with terrible taste and will tear
down everything and renovate.
> An extra room makes for a better
marriage. Couples need neutral
corners. One of them cant be the
bedroom. Once youre locked out
of the bedroom, youre fucked.
> Retirement is wasted on the old
the same way youth is wasted on
the youngdont wait till the end
to eat the best piece of candy; you
might not have any teeth left.
> If youre going to be that guy
who works at home and wears
schlumpy clothes all the time, al-
so be the guy who has in his clos-
et a small but classic wardrobe.
On occasion, someone should be
heard to remark about you: He
cleans up real nice.
> If you are relatively healthy, you
can aford your own health insur-
ance if you raise the deductibles
for noncatastrophic expenses.
A PPO with a reputable insur-
er can cost less than six grand a
year. A policy for a healthy child
can run about $1,200 a year. You
dont need big brother to provide
health insurance. Have you ever
even looked into it?
> Dont shop because youre
bored. Things dont help. They
just pile up. Then you have to
buy new and bigger things to
put them in.
> Just because they have it, do
you need it?
> Less is more. Unless youre talk-
ing about money.
AGE 23
Erase credit-card
debt. Start your finan-
cial life clean.
Save 15 percent of
your income. For the
next 42 years.
Savings vehicles, in
order of importance:
401(k), IRA, online sav-
ings account. Watch
management fees: 1%
versus 1.5% can add up
to hundreds of thou-
sands of dollars.
If you still have school
loans, dont miss a pay-
ment. Shit sucks.
33
Considering father-
hood? Best of luck!
Oddly, a baby isnt
something you save up
for. Hell fit impossibly
into your life, and your
budget.
Home buying: Set
an outside price limit.
Youll pay a bit more.
If retirement is on
track, open a 529 pre-
tax college-savings ac-
count. Compare plans at
savingforcollege.com.
Build a cash reserve
of three months ex-
penses. Six is better, but
who are we kidding.

Six-month reserve.
A wise man said: Any
time you get unexpect-
ed moneybonus, div-
idend, etc.put half
away, use half for fun.
By now you should
know how to live with-
in your means. Things
to cut: bank fees, ATM
fees, two-drink mini-
mums. Pay cash for gas.
You can still buy your
expensive latte.
45
Buy a vacation house.
You work your ass of.
And it might make you a
dollar some day.
Make an extra mort-
gage payment each year.
Look into the personal
bankers that large insti-
tutions are ofering. An
actual person handles
your investments, bank-
ing, estate planning,
and insurance. Read the
fine print on fees.
50

Canny investments:
hedge fund (most
have a $1 million entry
point); real estate in-
vestment trusts (REITs),
tax-advantaged struc-
tures that own income-
producing real es-
tate; managed futures,
a way to make target-
ed investments in com-
modities; international
funds; and exchange-
traded funds (ETFs),
which let you invest in
things like gold.
57

Downsize your home
if theres equity for the
taking. Alternative: a re-
verse mortgage, which
lets you draw equity
without selling. Risky.

Travel. We earn mon-
ey for a reason.

You, too.

Less-aggressive in-
vestments. Maybe half
securities.
66

Get a retirement ca-
reer in a field you en-
joy: nursery, ski resort,
bookstore. Youll draw
less from your savings,
allowing it to grow. Plus,
you wont be sitting
around watching old
movies and playing golf.
82

Just watch old mov-
ies, play a little golf.
THE MI LESTONES
KEY: UNIVERSAL ADVICE YOU DONT MAKE LOTS OF MONEY YOU MAKE LOTS OF MONEY
I
L
L
U
S
T
R
A
T
I
O
N

B
Y

T
H
E

H
E
A
D
S

O
F

S
T
A
T
E
76 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
GIVES YOU MORE OF WHAT YOU LOVE.
Each issue of Car and Driver is lled with all you need to know
about the latest automotive news, styles, and technology.
Subscribe today and youll nd everything when you want it and
how you want iton our new digital edition.
PROMOTION
Order online: my.caranddriver.com
SUBSCRIBE
& SAVE 67%
OFF THE
COVER PRICE.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MAX VADUKUL
P A G E 8 0 A U G U S T 2 0 1 3
BY TOM JUNOD
FOR ELEVEN HOURS OVER THE
COURSE OF TWO DAYS, DRINKING BEER
AND TELLING STORIES
IN WHICH SITS AROUND
ets face it, the guy is ridiculous.
Hes ridiculously handsome. Hes ridic-
ulously accomplished. Hes ridiculously
smart. Hes ridiculously kind to those in need
of his kindness. Hes ridiculously funny.
Hes ridiculously magnetic, with a ridicu-
lously white movie-star smile and a ridic-
ulously resonant voice-talent voice. Despite his ridiculous sense of
ease and casual aplomb, he cannot go anywhere without making an
entrance for the simple reason that people who feel ridiculous star-
ing at him feel even more ridiculous not staring at him. All he has
to do is smile and open his mouth and he switches on an inner light
that turns every head, even Matt Damons.
Now, just to be clear, Matt Damon is also ridiculous. Indeed, Da-
mon is so ridiculousso ridiculously handsome, accomplished,
smart, funny, etc.that he has been holding forth on the subject
of German Holocaust awareness while drinking beer and eating
steak on the patio of a hotel restaurant in Germany without sound-
ing ridiculous himself. Damon does this a lot. He holds forth. He
drinks beer. He holds forth while drinking beer, often with mem-
bers of the crew of the movie he happens to be making, which in
this case is The Monuments Men, the story of the American soldiers
charged with recovering the vast stashes of priceless art stolen by the
Nazis. Damons the most social of movie stars, the most easily con-
versant, and so he holds forth lightly, his knowledge of history just
as much a social lubricant as the beer he keeps ordering for the ta-
ble. Hes sitting with a young actor, a military consultant, a script
supervisor, and me, and with a ridiculous lack of anything resem-
bling effort he keeps all eyes trained upon him until
Ah, hes back!
Its Clooney. Its the boss. Its the guy whos directing The Monu-
ments Men as well as starring in it, and its the guy whose unabashed
incandescence makes Damons feel suddenly like the light from a
sustainable bulb. Did I say Clooneys ridiculous? Clooneys ridicu-
lous. Hes back from a weekend in Berlin, nearly three hours away,
and he looks as though he just stepped out of the shower. Hes skin-
ny, almost gaunt in a T-shirt and baggy belted jeans, but with the el-
emental sheen of his swept-back gray hair and his gray mustache,
he looks like Clark Gable, circa The Mists, which is to say a mov-
ie star in any era, Americas gift to the world. Theres a small lake
next to the hotel patio; earlier, Damon had changed places and put
his back to it, because on the other side there gathered a host of
photographers and German townspeoplecivilians. Now Clooney
walks over to him and says, Hey, you folks are the entertainment.
There are photographers, Damon says, because in the world he
shares with Clooney, starstruck civilians are symptoms of a disease;
photographers are active agents of infection.
Yeah, I know, Clooney says. I saw em all. One guys got a lens
like this. He spreads his hands around an imaginary object the size
of a beach ball.
Theyre all back because youre back, Damon tells him. To-
day, I literally walked out the back door and walked up the street.
Nobody was there.
They dont follow you, but they follow him? I ask.
Clooney leans over slightly and put his hand on Damons shoulder.
His smile is like the cleaver that chefs use in Japanese steakhouses
it looks too big and too sharp to handle, but hes tossing it around
for fun. You have to get your second Sexiest Man Alive, he says to
Damon. You get your second Sexiest, they follow you like crazy.
n the forthcoming movie Elysium (out August 9), the
boy who plays Matt Damons character as a little boy
looks a lot like Matt Damon must have looked when
he was a child. When I rst saw the photos, I thought
someone photoshopped Matts face on them, says
director Neill Blomkamp. When Matt saw them, he
said, Jesus, that looks like me.
In the movie, the boy spends most of his time on earthwhich is,
of course, hellishly postapocalypticstaring into the sky at the
enormous wheel of a satellite that provides refuge for the rich, who
have abandoned the planet. The satellite is called Elysium, and when
the little boy who grows up to become Matt Damon stares at the sky,
he vows to get there. He winds up with a shaved head, a shitload of
tattoos, a ash drive jacked into his brain stem, and an exoskeleton
of body armor screwed into his very bones. He also winds up en-
gaging in the kind of expertly choreographed yet relatively realis-
tic ghts Damon mastered in the Bourne series but that the pres-
ence of the exoskeleton made challengingbut get there he does,
fomenting revolution in the process.
Blomkamp wrote the movie after his District 9 turned into one of
the surprise hits of 2009. Let Damon tell his story, because Damon
likes to tell stories: When I rst met him, Neill said, I grew up in
South Africa. I grew up in a nice neighborhood in Johannesburg,
but wed drive a few miles and see poverty as abject as any place on
earth. Then, when I was eighteen, we moved to Canada and the ex-
82 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
perience of moving to the First World so
shocked me that all my life, everything I
do, all my work, is a rumination on that in-
credible difference.
Now let Blomkamp: I wanted to make
a lm that separated rich and poor in a sci-
ence-ction way. And I thought it would
be really interesting to take a corn-fed
American white boy and put him in a
Third World environmentto take someone that America knows
well and put him in an America as run-down as possible. And Matt
was the right guy for that, not only as an actor but as a persona.
He did not lm Elysium in the run-down parts of America. He
lmed it, as he says, in the most poverty-stricken parts of Mexico
City. I very specically scouted the areas because I wanted them to
be as run-down as possible. That was Matts only trepidationthe
security in Mexico City. Hes very game, but the whole thing there
is kidnapping, and its different with him than it is with you or me.
Hes internationally recognized. People know hes in the country.
We had to hire a security rm. Our security guys would run differ-
ent routes to the set in the morning, do reconnaissance, make sure
there were in-and-out routes everyplace we went.
Elysium is an interesting movie. But one of the most interesting
things about it is that in order for it to exist, it had to be made by peo-
ple from Elysium. Elysium is not just a metaphor for apartheid or for
the growing divide between rich and poor in this country. It is a met-
aphor for celebrity and the privileges it bestows. Matt Damon plays
a man who is willing to sacrice everything in order to get there, and
his portrayal is complicated by the fact that he lives there already.
ould you like a small beer? a waitress asks.
No, Matt Damon says. A big beer.
We are sitting at a table in a hotel lobby two
and a half hours outside of Berlin. The table is
small and round and high, the chairs tall and
wobbly. We are meeting in the lobby because were supposed to go
out on a journalistic version of a date, Matt and I. Were supposed
to go for a hike and then have a conversation over dinner. But then a
waitress comes by and asks the persistent German question: Would
you like a beer? She is very short, under ve feet tall, with jet-black
hair and sharp, dark features inked on very white skin. She is wear-
ing the traditional folk costume that every waitress in Germany who
works outside a major city has to wear in disconcerting ubiquity. Its
just after ve oclock. Dinner is scheduled for eight. Theres plenty
of time for each of us to drink a beer before the hike, even a big beer.
The thing that I like about Germany is that Germans are so much
like us, he says when the beer arrives in tall clear glasses. Its not
like going to some other countries, where the differences are over-
whelming and you walk around in a fog. Germans are so similar to
Americans. Theyre, like, only 5 percent differentbut then that
difference makes all the difference. It makes everything that much
stranger. You think that everything is going to be exactly the same,
and when its not it seems much stranger to you, and you realize that
you must seem stranger to them. Its clarifying, man.
Damon is forty-two years old, married, father of four. Along with
unfaded jeans, he is wearing blacka black V-neck T-shirt, big black
punk-rock boots, a black ball cap imprinted with a pattern of four
black stars. He has short brown hair haunted by a blond ghost. He
is a shade under six feet tall, in shape but not in action-movie shape,
not in ass-kicking Elysium shape. He has what Neill Blomkamp saw
in him, what everybody sees in him: a broad, friendly American face,
not so much youthful as still boyish, interesting primarily for what
can be imprinted upon itthe tabula rasa of its blue eyes, turned-up
nose, and perfectly even white teeth. In the movies, he has the most
useful smile since Tom Cruises, but whereas Cruise uses his smile to
overpower, to silence doubters, and to get out of trouble, Damon uses
his to express nuance, as both beacon and shadow. In person, he does
the same thing. He smiles a lot, but he has a smile that can operate at
cross-purposes with his eyes. Hell, he can smile while turning down
the corners of his mouth; more precisely, he can turn down the cor-
ners of his mouth and still smile, without appearing to smirk or frown.
Its either a trick or a talent, but in any case its nearly impossible to
do, and it shows why, when Blomkamp says Hes almost like a regu-
lar guy whos a global celebrity, almost is the operative word.
He is not a regular guy. He is to regular guys as he says Germans are
to Americansabout 5 percent different. For comparisons sake, lets
say George Clooney is about 15 percent different. Brad Pitt is about
12.5 percent different, and Leonardo DiCaprio has never been a reg-
ular guy, so he offers no basis for calculation. But Damon is so close
to being a regular guy that he can pass as a regular guy onscreen and
off. He can be the same guy onscreen and off, and so he offers audi-
ences the rarest of combinationsthe satisfaction of reliability and
surprise. It was a surprise when he was able to both write and star
in Good Will Hunting. It was a surprise when he was able to pull off
the Bourne series. It was a surprise when he was so funny on Jimmy
Kimmel and 30 Rock. It was a surprise when he wore a thong for Mi-
chael Douglas in Behind the Candelabra. (Though Ive seen Matts
ass quite a lot, it was nice to get an update, says his friend Ben Af-
eck.) But he can be continually surprising in his performances be-
cause he is so reliably unsurprising in his lifebecause he fullls ex-
pectations instead of confounding them. Matt Damon is a movie star
because he always delivers on being Matt Damon. He is a movie star
not only because he makes us want to have a beer with him but also
83 View an outtakes slide show, featuring captions by the photographer, using your Netpage app.
Even out in the
sticks in Germany,
in a quaint little
village almost
three hours from
Berlin, people
stood around for
hours to get a
glimpse of Damon.
because he makes us think that, alone among movie stars, he might
actually want to have a beer with us. . . .
And then he orders his second big beer ten minutes after his rst.
We never go on the hike. We never go out to dinner. We never even
stand up, except for the necessities. As soon as we start drinking, mem-
bers of the crew and cast of The Monuments Men start stopping by. The
hotel is a refuge, with tall, black iron gates and security guards with
walkie-talkies. Our table is not. When the actor Bob Balaban walks
by, Damon says, Hey, man! When the lead gaffer walks by, Damon
says, Hey, man! When a military advisor named Billy Budd walks
by, Damon says, Hey, man! And he says the same thing to a young
actor named Diarmaid Murtagh. Budd is a Brit, a former marine in
the service of the Queen, with a silver brush cut, a big hawk nose that
casts a shadow on his scorched face, and arms scrawled with endish
tattoos. Murtagh is an Irishman, with an explosive laugh and an Irish
thirst. Theyre both rst-class storytellers, and when they sit with
us, they sit with us for the next seven hours. I never get the chance to
do a long interview with Matt Damon because Matt Damon is never
alone. But thats okay. Ive talked to movie stars before. Ive never had a
chance to hear what movie stars talk about, inside the gates of Elysium.
eres a story. Matt Damon told it. But its not about
Matt Damon. Its about Bono. But its not really
about Bono, either; its about Paul McCartney.
But Damon heard it from Bono. One day, Bono
ew into Liverpool. Paul was supposed to pick
him up at the airport, and Bono was shocked
when Paul picked him up at the airport alone,
behind the wheel of his car. Would you like to go on a little tour?
Paul said. Sure, Bono said, because Bono, you see, is a fan of Pauls, in
the same way that Damon is a fan of Bonos. Bonos obsessed with the
Beatles, Damon said at the table in the lobby of the gated hotel in the
little town in Germany. Hes, like, a student of the Beatles. Hes read
every book on the Beatles. Hes seen every bit of lm. Theres nothing
he doesnt know. So when Paul stops and says Thats where it hap-
pened, Bonos like, Thats where what happened? because he thinks
he knows everything. And Paul says, Thats where the Beatles started.
Thats where John gave me half his chocolate bar. And now Bonos
like, What chocolate bar? Ive never heard
of any chocolate bar. And Paul says, John
had a chocolate bar, and he shared it with
me. And he didnt give me some of his choc-
olate bar. He didnt give me a square of his
chocolate bar. He didnt give me a quarter
of his chocolate bar. He gave me half of his
chocolate bar. And thats why the Beatles
started right there. Isnt that fantastic? Its
the most important story about the Beatles,
and its in none of the books! And Paul tells
it to Bono. Because he knows how much
Bono loves the Beatles.
Now, George Clooney is rightPeople has
named Matt Damon Sexiest Man Alive on-
ly once. He is not the biggest global celebri-
ty. Hes not the biggest movie star, and its
a matter of debate whether hes the most
handsome in Jimmy Kimmels Handsome
Mens Club. But hes pretty damned close
close enough to be on the inside, close
enough to hear the stories, close enough
to tell the stories, close enough to tell sto-
ries about those who tell the stories. And
the storieswell, theyre delicious, sweetened by their exclusivity
and by the fact that theyre strictly rationed. Theyre in none of the
books, and for good reason: Theyre occasionally too good to be true.

ou want to know what famous people talk about?
They talk about you and me, rst of allthe people
on the other side of the lake, the people peering in-
side the window, the extent to which theyll go to
get a look or a photograph. Then they talk about one
another. Those are the best stories, because theyre
also performances. Damon is famous for his Matthew McConaughey
imitation, but three or four or ve or six big beers into the night,
he did quick imitations of nearly everyone he talked about. He did
Scorsese and Spielberg and Clint Eastwood. He did Russell Crowe
and he did Tom Cruise. He did Russell Crowe talking about his rela-
tionship with director Ridley ScottRids the general, Im the sol-
dier, and when we make a movie, we go to war!and he did Tom
Cruise talking about the stunt director for one of the Mission: Im-
possible movies who refused to let him climb the side of a building
without a stunt double. I asked Tom, Well, what did you do? And
he looked at meand here Damon reproduced the Thetanic xity
of Cruises stare and the martinet hysteria of his voiceand said,
I red him, Matt.
He told the Tom Cruise story for two reasons. Number one, it is
a Tom Cruise story. Number two, Damon doesnt climb buildings.
Hes afraid of heights, and, he says, Thats what stuntmen are for.
Thats what green screens are for. But Toms incredible. I said, You
have the title. Nobodys ever going to take the title from you. You
win. He laughed. But he also goes, It was worth it. And it wasfor
him. Its not for me. Im way too old to do all my own stunts.
And thats the other thing about the stories famous people tell.
They tend to tell stories about people more famous than they are.
Matt Damon tells stories about Tom Cruise and George Clooney. He
tells a story about Bono telling a story about Paul McCartney. There
are rings of fame, like some kind of obverse Inferno, and the people
inside one ring tell stories about people in anotherthe ones who
are farther inside, closer to some kind of impossible absolute. Its a
form of gossip, sure, and also of adulation, but its also an education,
often the best education theyve received.
Damon left Harvard without graduating,
but hes something of a polymath who, no
matter the subject, can tell you what hes
learned about it not just from the book hes
read but also from the person who wrote
the book hes read. He drops names like
crazy, but hes not so much a name-drop-
per as he is a student citing his sources. He
talks about talking to Tom Cruise, Jodie
Foster, Michael Strahan, Tom Brady, Mar-
tin Scorsese, Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix,
Emily Blunt, and his friends Ben and Casey
Afeck, but he also talks about talking to
Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Sachs, Paul Farmer,
Ray Kurzweil, Dave Eggers, and other as-
sorted writers, economists, scientists, and
advocates. He has access to them all in the
same way that he has access to tables at the
most exclusive restaurants, and it no lon-
ger matters that he dropped out of Har-
vardfame has become his Harvard. In the
globalized world, the false currency of ce-
lebrity has turned out to be the only one
84 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
TURNS OUT
THAT AT LEAST
SOME OF THE
STORIES MATT
TOLD ABOUT
FAMOUS
PEOPLE DIDNT
STRICTLY
HAPPEN.
HE MIGHT HAVE BEEN
MISTAKEN. OR HE MIGHT
HAVE BEEN MESSING
WITH US. BUT WHAT
DOES IT MATTER? THEYRE
STILL DELICIOUS.
85
that resists devaluation, because it has become the price of access
and access has become the price of knowledge. We like to think that
fame insulates its denizens from the real world. It is painful to con-
template what everyone drinking beer in that hotel lobby seemed to
knowthat fame brings the famous closer to the heart of things, or at
least closer than the people clustered outside the gate can ever get.
y mother thought it was child abuse, he
says. She literally did. She was a professor
who specialized in early childhood devel-
opment, and she thought putting a child on-
stage or in a commercial or in a movie was
child abuse. So when I did Elysium with
Jodie Foster, I asked her. I mean, shes ba-
sically been acting since she was born. I gured if anyones going to
know, it should be her, right? So I asked her. And she sort of smiled
and said, It depends on the child.
Matt Damon was not a child actor. He was a child and then an ado-
lescent enriched by progressive education in Cambridge, Massachu-
settsby Howard Zinn as his neighbor, by Cambridge Rindge and
Latin as his high school, by immersive-language study with Mom in
Mexico and Guatemala as his summer vacation. But his friend Ben
Afeck was a child actor, and acting became the ambitious way Matt
separated himself from his mothers ambitions. He not only acted
in school plays; he also worked as an extra in Boston and can do an
imitation of the guy who was, like, the king of the extras, because
hed worked on Scorsese movies. And he was like, Me and Marty,
were like this. I give Marty exactly what he wants. And Im sitting
at this guys feet, thinking, Hey, one day, maybe that could be me.
At the time, Afeck was the star, both in school plays and at audi-
tions. But Damon permitted himself to learn from him, and they be-
came not just friends but also a team. The summer after freshman
year in college, we got a job together. I was eighteen. There was a the-
ater in Harvard Square called the Janus. They had only one screen,
and Ben and I got a job there. We were ticket takers and served pop-
cornwe basically did everything. But the kicker was that the movie
we showed that summer was a movie Ben and I got relatively close
onDead Poets Society. We got down the line; we got called back. Ben
got even closer than I did. And that was the one movie they showed
that summer. It was a constant reminder. Wed sit there, these young
ambitious guys in our maroon vests, our black pants, our white shirts,
and our fucking name tags, watching people coming out of the the-
ater bawling their fucking eyes out.
It was like, Whatever doesnt kill you makes you stronger. But
it underscored the difculty of breaking in, enough that we were
convinced we had to start writing.
Good Will Hunting began as a lark, the fanciful idea of two kids
who loved to learn but didnt want to go to school. We were like,
Wouldnt that be cool if you could read every book in the world
and remember everything you read? But it became, Damon says,
an act of desperation. Multiple drafts, written in multiple rented
apartments over multiple years, developed by multiple studios: We
had an unlimited amount of time. It wasnt like anybody cared. It
wasnt like anybody was waiting to see what we were doing. . . .
But then, of course, it changed everything. The Best Screenplay
Oscar changed everything. Being known as a writer did change the
relationships I had with directors. The rap on actors is that they al-
ways want to inate their parts. But when directors know you write
screenplays and have a different view of things, you really get invited
into the huddle in a much fuller way. And those collaborations end
in friendships. Thats how it works. It really is all about relation-
ships. If you enjoy working with someone, youll nd a way to work
with him or her again. Its human nature.
When Damon was in high school and in college, he had a Mickey
Rourke poster on the wall of his bedroom. (Afeck: I dont remem-
ber that. I remember the Michael Jackson.) Mickey Rourke was his
favorite actor; he wanted to be Mickey Rourke. And so when he was
still very youngbefore Good Will Hunting made him a starand he
got the lead role in The Rainmaker alongside Mickey Rourke, I was
really excited just to meet him. And then the rst day of lming, he
pulls me aside and just reads me the riot act. We were shooting in a
really bad neighborhood in Memphiswe had security and every-
thingand Im standing on a street corner and my boyhood idol is
yelling at me. Hes saying, Francis Ford Coppola wanted you for this
moviethats a big deal. That sends a message to everyone in Holly-
wood that you have a future. So dont do what I did. Dont fuck it up!
And Damon hasnt. He might give the appearance of being a reg-
ular guy, but he hasnt done what regular guys always dohe hasnt
fucked it up. He understands better than anyone else that celebrity is
a social contract, and he has fullled it to the last jot and tittle. Hes
passed every possible test of citizenship that fame could offer, and
what you understand when you spend time with him is simply this:
Hes a member of the club.
heres a young actor with a big role in The Monuments
Men. His name is Dimitri Leonidas, and he was, until
Clooney cast him, a so-called unknown. Hes not one
of the cast members who walk through the hotel lobby
on either night that Damon is drinking beer. But Da-
mon talks about him and says how bright his future is. He doesnt
say that his future is bright as an actor, though. He says, He could
be a movie star.
What does that mean, exactly? Its uttered by a movie star, so it
must mean somethingit must mean that there are some quali-
cations for the job, and you dont know what they are until you get
it. It must mean that Matt Damon recognizes some kindred qual-
ity in Dimitri Leonidas, some degree of difference that only those
with their own inexplicable difference can see. It also means that
Damon thinks about these things a lot. He thinks about stardom and
he thinks about fame, not to glory in them but to assess his own de-
gree of difference and dislocation. He talks about what happened to
him when he became a movie star as though its irrevocable:
When it happens to you, its not that you change. Everybody says
you change, and you do eventually. But what happens, almost over-
night, is that nothing and everything changes at the same time. Youre
aware that everything that mattered yesterday still matters today.
Everything is the same, and intellectually you understand that. But
the world is completely differentfor you. Everybody has changed
their relationship to you, but you still live in the same world. So when
people talk about the surreality of fame, thats what theyre talking
about. Thats what it was for me. Its walking into a restaurant and
everybody turns their head and starts whisperingand youre like,
But I ate at this restaurant last week. And so the world is still the
sameits just never going to be the same for me. And thats a real
mind-fuck. The world is one degree stranger. Its not like the houses
have suddenly turned to gingerbread and you go, Oh, it wasnt like
that before. You live in the same house, you go to the same market,
you get coffee in the same place. Its just that somebody has hired an
unlimited amount of extras and given them very specic directions
for you. Its as if a director has gotten there before you and grabbed
a bullhorn and said, Okay, when he comes in, if your name begins
with A through M, count to ten and then notice him. N through Z,
notice him right away. Its very strange.
eres another story. Matt Damon tells it, but its
not about Matt Damon. Its about Brad Pitt.
But it is also about Matt Damon, because its
about fame, and Matt Damon is famous. But is
he as famous as Brad Pitt? Is he as big a mov-
ie star? In some ways, hes biggerwith the
Bourne movies, he created the action franchise
that Pitt hopes to create with World War Z. But there are measures
of stardom other than weekend grosses, indices of which ring you
occupy other than money. One is your degree of convergence with
Bono. Another is pain.
If you can control the celebrity side of celebrity, Damon says,
then its worth it. I look at Bradand I have for yearsand when
Im with him I see the intensity of that other side of it. And the pa-
parazzi and the insane level of aggression they have and their will-
ingness to break the law and invade his spacewell, I wonder about
that trade. I remember telling him that I walk my kids to school, and
his face just fell. He was very kind, but he was like, You bastard. Be-
cause he should be able to do that, too. And he cant.
Damon can. He lives in New York, and he walks his kids to school.
Photographers occasionally dog his steps, but generally from a dis-
tance, and if he asks them to back off, they will after they get their shots.
He can do this because of what he didnt door whom he didnt mar-
ry. I got lucky, he says. I fell in love with a civilian. Not an actress
and not a famous actress at that. Because then the attention doesnt
doubleit grows exponentially. Because then suddenly everybody
wants to be in your bedroom. But I dont really give them anything. If
Im not jumping up and down on a bar, or lighting something on re,
or cheating on my wife, theres not really any story to tell. They can
try to stake me out, but theyre always going to get the same story
middle-aged married guy with four kids. So as long as that narrative
doesnt change too much, theres no appetite for it.
The narrative, however, is about to change. Damon and his wife, Lucy,
and their four children are about to move to L. A., despite knowing
they will lose some of their privacy to an entrenched apparatus of
snoops. There are a few reasons for this. First of all, Ben Afeck and
Jennifer Garner live there, and even though there are ve or six pho-
tographers outside their house all the time, Damon and his family
have bought a house on the same street. Second, Damon and Afeck
have started a production company, Pearl Street Films, and we nally
just rented ofces and its like, Lets get serious. And third, Most of
our old friends with kids live in L. A., and their kids dont know me. I
dont like that. (Afeck: Its like being in the neighborhood again.)
But the fourth and nal reason is the most interesting. Damon is
buying a house in Los Angeles because he couldnt buy one in New
York. We tried to nd a place for four years and couldnt nd one.
We made ve offers, and we had two places where we had a verbal
agreement, the last of which I absolutely loved. And in both cases,
they used my name to sell to someone else. In a lot of transactional
situations, fame is a good thingpeople are much nicer to you. But
in this case, it worked against me. Or maybe people think Im an ac-
tor, so I must be stupid.
drank beer for seven hours with Matt Damon on one
night and four hours on another. I learned a lot of
things. Because Damon knows the director Doug
Liman, I learned that Tiger Woods kept missing the
ball in that famous Nike commercial until the cam-
era was turned on, whereupon he bounced it on the
face of an iron and then whacked it two hundred yards. Because
he knows Casey Afeck, I know that Joaquin Phoenixs break-
down really was a piece of performance art intended for the Af-
eck-directed documentary Im Still Here, and that David Letterman
really was pissed off when Afeck and Phoenix revealed the hoax to
The New York Times instead of on his show. And because he knows
Christopher Hitchenss agent, I know the last thing Hitchens said
before he died.
I found out like this. Damon was talking about going to watch a
TED Talk in the company of Paul Farmer, the great physician to the
poor and one of Damons heroes. They went to see Gordon Brown,
the former British prime minister and, as Farmer told Damon, one
of the handful of people who know how the world works. Damon
went and was amazed that every single one of Browns sentences
was complete and every single one of his thoughts conformed to
the shape of a paragraphand that he didnt use a teleprompter.
Christopher Hitchens was like that, I said. I saw him speak
once, drunk, and if someone had written the whole thing down, he
could have handed it in as an essay.
I know his agent, Damon said, for he is both possessor and ha-
bitual proprietor of upstream knowledge. And he told me Hitch-
enss last words.
We all waited. It was our chocolate bar.
They were capitalism fail.
When I came home, I discovered that Andrew Sullivan knows the
same agent and wrote on the Daily Beast that Hitchenss last words
were capitalism downfall. I have no idea which version is correct.
But thats not the end of the story. The end of the story comes the
next day, when Damon returns to his hotel room after a morning of
lming and is inspired by the words capitalism fail to go online
and watch a lecture by one of his former professors at Harvard, Mi-
chael Sandel. I took his class twenty-three years ago, and now Im
taking it again, he says a few hours later on the patio. The same tiny
waitress in the same traditional frock asks him if hed like a beer,
and this time he says, Yes, a large beer and begins speaking about
what he learned from Sandel.
He was asking about the things that money cant buy, Damon said.
He was saying that weve gone from a market economy to a mar-
ket society, where were essentially trying to monetize everything.
He gave all these examples, like this jail in Santa Barbara where you
can pay for a nicer cell and better treatment. The world changes in a
fundamental way when you can buy your way out of any situation.
I mentioned an experience Id had over the
87
O
P
P
O
S
I
T
E

P
A
G
E
:

L
O
N
G
-
S
L
E
E
V
E
D

T
-
S
H
I
R
T

B
Y

D
O
C
K
E
R
S
;

J
E
A
N
S

B
Y

J

B
R
A
N
D
;

B
O
O
T
S

B
Y

W
O
L
V
E
R
I
N
E
.

P
A
G
E

8
1
:

L
O
N
G
-
S
L
E
E
V
E
D

T
-
S
H
I
R
T

A
N
D

J
E
A
N
S

B
Y

C
A
L
V
I
N

K
L
E
I
N

J
E
A
N
S
;

T
-
S
H
I
R
T

B
Y

C
A
L
V
I
N

K
L
E
I
N

C
O
L
L
E
C
T
I
O
N
.

P
A
G
E

8
2
:

H
O
O
D
I
E

B
Y

P
O
L
O

R
A
L
P
H

L
A
U
R
E
N
;

J
E
A
N
S

B
Y

J

B
R
A
N
D
;

B
O
O
T
S

B
Y

W
O
L
V
E
R
I
N
E
.
[continued on page 128]
Clip, Save, Share, from any page. Download free from the iTunes App Store or Google Play.
89
ON DECEMBER 18, 2012, the set of
Fox & Friends was both festive and
somber. Festive because it was the
Christmas season. The three hosts, two
men in dark suits anking a woman in a blue
dress, sat on a mustard-colored couch in
front of a cheery seasonal backdrop: a lit-up
tree, silver-painted twigs, mounds of tinsel,
blue and red swatches of fabric, and, here
and there, multicolored towers of blown
glass with tapering points that made them
look surprisingly like minarets. Somber because a terrible
thing had happened just four days earlier, in an elementa-
ry school in Newtown, Connecticut. All three hosts looked
sad, but the woman, Gretchen Carlson, looked the saddest.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRI AN FI NKE
BEFORE PROOF OF HEAVEN MADE DR. EBEN ALEXANDER
RI CH AND FAMOUS AS A MAN OF SCI ENCE WHO D
EXPERI ENCED THE AFTERLI FE, HE WAS SOMETHI NG ELSE:
A NEUROSURGEON WI TH A TROUBLED HI STORY AND
A MAN I N NEED OF REI NVENTI ON
BY LUKE DI TTRI CH
90 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
When Alexander
got sick in late
2008, he hadnt
practiced sur-
gery in a year and
faced a $3 million
malpractice law-
suit. He now has a
best-selling book
and a movie deal.
Opposite: UNC
yearbook, 1976.
The shot of the three hosts occupied most of
the right three quarters of the screen. A guest
was joining them by satellite from another lo-
cation, and a shot of his head and shoulders
occupied most of the rest of the screen. This
was his third appearance on the program in
the last few months. He wore a dark blazer
and a button-down shirt with blue stripes.
He was middle-aged and handsome in an
old-fashioned way, with tanned skin and thick hair parted on the
right. The banner below the video feeds read, HOPE IS NOT LOST:
NEUROSURGEON SAYS HEAVEN IS REAL.
Dr. Alexander, Carlson said, if people dont know your sto-
ry, you, you were ill, you were in a coma, you left this earth for
a week, you were in heaven, and then you wrote about your ex-
periences there, and you were told that you were supposed to
come back to the earth.
She paused. She looked into the camera and then looked up
toward the studio ceiling and rocked slightly forward.
As people are grappling with the horrible nature of this trag-
edy, she said, her voice cracking, her lower lip trembling, will
these children forget, when they are in heaven, what happened
to them?
It was, lets be clear, an unusual question. One imagines the host
of a national news program would feel comfortable posing this
question to only a very few guests. A priest? A bishop? The pope?
But lets be clear about something else: Dr. Eben Alexander was pre-
sented as more qualied to answer this question than all of them.
His authority on heaven hadnt come from prayer or contempla-
tion or a vote taken at some conclave. He had been there. And al-
though a lot of people might make similar claims concerning visits
to heaven and the receipt of personal revelations from God
and be roundly dismissed, Dr. Alexander was different. He
was, as the Fox News Web site declared, a renowned neu-
rosurgeon. A man of science at the summit of the secular
world. And when he answered the unusual question, he did
so without hesitation, without hedging, and with the same
uency and authority he might exhibit when comforting a
patient about an upcoming operation.
Well, they will know what happened, Alexander said,
and a hint of sadness swirled in his own eyes for a moment.
But they will not feel the pain. His voice was southern and
smooth, soft and warm. The shots of the studio and of the sat-
ellite feed faded away, and a heartbreaking tableau faded in, a
grid of photographs. Fourteen children, each just six or sev-
en years old, each smiling, each now, the viewer knew, dead.
Alexanders voice, soothing, heartfelt, poured on. They will
feel the love and cherishing of their being back there. And
they will know that they have changed this world.
Now the views of the studio and of Dr. Alexander faded
back in, and the host to the left of Carlson, Brian Kilmeade,
a compact and gruff guy with a sheaf of papers stacked on
the table in front of him like a prosecuting attorney, asked
a question. It was another unusual question and perhaps
thats why Kilmeade prefaced it with a reiteration of what
made their guest uniquely qualied to answer it.
So Dr. Alexander, he said, your book, your bookand
youre a neurosurgeon, you never believed in this until it
happened to you, and you were brain-dead for a week, and
your friends who work in your business say that theres no
way you could have possibly come back, there was no ac-
tivity there. Where is the shooter?
Alexander nodded along as the man posed the question and again
answered without pausing. The shooter is in a place of reviewing
his own life, he said while the camera showed Gretchen Carlson
wiping the tears from her eyes. Its a very real phenomenon, of re-
living all of the events of ones life and reliving the pain and suffer-
ing that weve handed out to others. But from their point of view.
This is a story about points of view.
e meets me at the door of his home and in-
vites me in. He and his wife purchased the
house in 2006, and it sits on a half acre of land
in Lynchburg, Virginia, near a hospital where
he used to work. Its exterior is red brick, and
there are eleven windows along the front, each
with white trim and black shutters, making the
house look sort of Jeffersonian, sort of Monti-
celloesque, though its actually only forty-nine
years old, which makes it ten years younger
than Alexander himself. Hes wearing jeans and a button-down
shirt and a sweater vest, and he leads me through a wood-pan-
eled study to the kitchen, where he asks if Id like a cup of coffee.
While the coffee brews, he explains how caffeine works. It kind
of affects the second transmitter system, part of the ght-or-ight
mode. And it gets you more into kind of an active state. It bypasses
some of the primary transmitters there, kind of activates the whole
system, so it revs you up. It works very effectively. So, you do not
take sugar? Once the coffees ready, we return to the study. The
room is homey and lled with family pictures and some paintings
by friends of his wife, Holley, whos an artist and art teacher. Alex-
I
L
L
U
S
T
R
A
T
I
O
N
S

B
Y

J
O
E

M
c
K
E
N
D
R
Y
91
ander met her in college when she was dating his roommate, and
now they have two sons. She comes into the study and sets a plate
of cookies and apple slices down on a coffee table for us to pick at.
Im starting to get a little more practice with these interviews,
Alexander says. It might not show, but I should be learning from
it all. Its been quite a journey.
We talk for hours. We talk about his past life and his present
one, and about the strange voyage that divided the two. We talk
about some of the stories he tells in Proof of Heaven, which has
sold nearly two million copies and remains near the top of the New
York Times best-seller list nearly a year after its release. We also
talk about some of the stories you wont nd in the book, stories
Ive heard from current and former friends and colleagues, and
stories Ive pulled from court documents and medical-board com-
plaints, stories that in some cases give an entirely new context to
the stories in the book, and in other cases simply contradict them.
From one point of view, the point of view that Fox & Friends
and Newsweek and Oprah and Dr. Oz and Larry King and all of
his other gentle interrogators have helped perpetuate, Dr. Eben
Alexander is a living miracle, literally heaven sent, a man capa-
ble of nally bridging the chasm between the world of spiritu-
ality and the world of science. From this point of view, he is, lets
not mince words, a prophet, because after all, what else do you
call a man who comes bearing fresh revelations from God? This
point of view has been massively protable for Dr. Eben Alex-
ander, has spawned not just a book sold in thirty-ve countries
around the globe but a whole cascade of ancillary products, in-
cluding a forthcoming major motion picture from Universal.
But there is another point of view. And from this point of view,
Dr. Eben Alexander looks less like a messenger from heaven and
more like a true son of America, a country where men have al-
ways found ways to escape the rubble of their old lives through
audacious acts of reinvention.
By the end of our interview, theres a note of unease in Alex-
anders voice. He pulls out his iPhone and puts on the voice re-
corder. He tells me he is concerned that some of the stories Ive
brought up could be taken the wrong way by readers.
People could denitely go way off the deep end about irrel-
evant stuff as opposed to focusing on what matters, he says.
efore he was Eben, he was, briey, Richard.
His biological parents, young, unready, created him,
named him, and then gave him away. The Alexander fam-
ily of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, adopted him and
gifted him with a new name, one with an illustrious pedigree.
The rst Eben Alexander, his great-grandfa-
ther, was the U. S. ambassador to Greece in
the 1890s, helped create the modern Olym-
pic Games, carried on an occasional corre-
spondence with Mark Twain. His father, Eb-
en Alexander Jr., a great neurosurgeon, was
permanent president of his class at Harvard
Medical School.
Eben Alexander III attended Phillips Exeter
Academy, where he read lots of science ction,
grew a shaggy mop of hair, learned how to pole-
vaulthe loved the feeling of propelling him-
self skyward with physics and muscle. While
his high school classmates saved up for cars,
he bought himself sailplane lessons.
He went to college at the University of North Carolina at Cha-
pel Hill. He studied chemistry. He contemplated astrophysics. He
joined the Sport Parachute Club and spent his weekends ying
to great heights in perfectly good Cessna 185s and jumping out
of them. He felt drawn to medicine but worried that if he became
a doctor, hed never escape his fathers shadow. He agonized.
He graduated from UNC in 1975 and enrolled in Duke medi-
cal school. He was still worried about not living up to the stan-
dards set by his father. Even after he began his neurosurgery
residency, he almost jumped ship, changed careers. He sent
in a job application to NASA. He dreamt of ying on the space
shuttle, of helping to build the International Space Station. But
when he told his father, his father convinced him to withdraw
the application. Wait till youve nished your residency, he told
him. Then, if youre still interested in the whole NASA thing,
by all means. By the time hed nished his residency, the Chal-
lenger had exploded and the shuttle program was on hold. He
chose not to reapply.
His path seemed set.
headache. November 10, 2008.
He has a headache. Not a bad one at rst, but it
gets steadily, rapidly worse. He tells Holley that he
just needs to rest, that hell be ne.
Escherichia coli bacteria have insinuated them-
selves into the lining of his central nervous sys-
tem, the membranes that protect his brain and spi-
nal cord, he writes in Proof of Heaven. It is unclear how they got
there. Spontaneous cases of bacterial meningitis are rare but not
unheard of, and the transmission vectors are the same as those of
other common infectious diseases: tainted water supplies, poor
hygiene, dirty cooking conditions. Regardless of where these par-
ticular E. coli came from, now that theyre here, they proliferate.
E. coli populations are incredibly fertile, and under ideal circum-
stances will grow exponentially, doubling in size every twenty min-
utes. Theoretically, given limitless food and zero resistance, a sin-
gle 0.000000000000665-gram E. coli bacterium could in nineteen
hours spawn a megacolony weighing as much as a man. But our
bodies are not defenseless. Alexanders immune response kicks in
immediately, deploying eets of white blood cells to kill the invad-
ers. His cerebrospinal uid, the uid that supports his brain in ev-
ery sense, buoying it and nourishing it, becomes a terrifying bat-
tleeld. While the invaders consume his CSFs brain-sustaining
sugars, the defensive onslaught of white blood cells causes the vol-
ume of uid to swell, raising the pressure inside his skull.
By the time the EMTs wheel him into the ER
at Lynchburg General Hospital, his besieged
brain, choked and starving, is severely dysfunc-
tional. He is raving, thrashing, incoherent.
Then he slips into a coma.
is path seemed set.
He nished his neurosurgical residen-
cy and, in 1988, was hired at one of the
most prestigious hospitals in the coun-
try, Brigham and Womens, in Boston. While
practicing there, he taught at his fathers alma
mater, Harvard Medical School. The prestige
of these institutions gave him access to some
92 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
of the most remarkable new medical technology in the world. He
became an expert at something called stereotactic radiosurgery,
a type of treatment that burned away the problems inside a pa-
tients brain, cauterizing aneurysms, cooking tumors, without the
skull even needing to be opened.
He was on the rise. His fathers shadow no longer seemed so
long. And he was charming. Larger than life, thats how his resi-
dents viewed him. A charismatic barrel of energy, with an endear-
ing habit of always wearing a bow tie. He would play rock music
in the operating room: classics like Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin,
and the Doors, newer stuff like Massive Attack, Five for Fighting,
Goo Goo Dolls. And no, hed never quite gotten over his obsession
with space, with ight. Sometimes, when he wasnt around, the
residents would even crack that he would have made a better as-
tronaut than a brain surgeon. Theyd noticed that some of the at-
tending surgeons could completely lose themselves in an oper-
ation, standing there for hours, peering into a tiny little hole and
meticulously extracting bits of tumor. But Dr. Alexander wasnt
like that. Hed come rushing into the OR, talking to the nurses
and the residents and anyone else whod listen, rambling about
near-earth asteroids or dark matter or
whatever other topic in astrophysics
hed been reading about in his spare
time. It would take him a while to get
down to business, to focus on the mat-
ter at hand.
It wasnt that he wasnt smart. Four
different former residents of Alex-
anders use the word brilliant to de-
scribe him.
But he often just seemed to be
somewhere else.

e is somewhere else.
Where, he doesnt know.
He doesnt know, really, any-
thing. Not where he is, not
even who or what he is. He is pure
awareness, pure present, no past, no
future. Just this little speck of con-
sciousness adrift in a vast and mysterious place. It is an unpleas-
ant place, brown and rank and suffocating, but he doesnt even
know enough to dene a term as advanced as unpleasant.
And then he sees the light.
A bright light, swirling above him, accompanied by the most
beautiful music. He is rising up toward it. Up through it. The un-
pleasant place is gone, somewhere below him, and now he is in
a place that even if he had the power of vocabulary, of words,
he would nd almost indescribably beautiful. It is a green and
verdant place. A green, idyllic place lled but not crowded with
men and women in peasant garb. Here and there a dog cavorts
among them. And he, he is ying! He is on the wing of a butter-
y. Perhaps it is an enormous buttery or perhaps he is really
tiny, but size and scale dont really mean anything. There are oth-
er butteries all around him, millions of them, perhaps an in-
nite number of them, colorful and iridescent, all ying in loose
formation over this impossibly beautiful place.
And he is not alone. Beside him on the buttery, a beautiful girl!
Like the green countryside, her beauty is so intense, so overpow-
ering, that the word beauty itself seems insufcient. He becomes
While in heaven,
Alexander rode
a butterfly with a
beautiful girl. He
realized later that
she was the bio-
logical sister hed
never met.
aware that she is speaking to him, saying something, though she
doesnt even need to move her lips to speak.
You are loved and cherished, she tells him.
You have nothing to fear.
There is nothing you can do wrong.
e didnt do anything wrong.
He destroyed the womans acoustic neuroma, a be-
nign brain tumor, burned it to oblivion with focused
beams of radiation. Thats what he set out to do, and
thats what he did. And yes, there had been postoper-
ative inammation, and yes, the surgery had left the
woman with permanent paralysis on the left side of her face,
but remember were talking about brain surgery here, not splin-
ter removal. Bad things can happen that are completely out of
your control.
The womans lawsuit, however, didnt accuse him of doing
something he shouldnt have done. It accused him instead of not
doing something he should have done. Specically, it accused
him of not informing the woman that
permanent facial paralysis might re-
sult from the operation.
And so, because exactly what he
had told her prior to the operation
was at the heart of the case, thats
what the lawyers asked her about dur-
ing the deposition a few years later.
She was an elderly woman from Ari-
zona. She had initially consulted with
Dr. Alexander by telephone after see-
ing an episode of a PBS television pro-
gram called Scientic American Fron-
tiers that was narrated by Alan Alda
and had highlighted Dr. Alexander
and his remarkable stereotactic ra-
diosurgery operations. She sent him
her medical records, scheduled a time
for the operation, and then ew with
her husband and her son to Boston.
Patient: I was in a wheelchair, and we
went down to this room and waited. At 8:30,
approximately four or ve men came into the
room, and they didnt say not one word to me.
They just came over and started sticking me
with a needle for anesthesia. And then they
started screwing this thing in my head. And I
was bleeding and I was scared and I was shaking. I went into shock,
and nobody said one word. . . .
Lawyer: What happened next?
A: Then they put that bell on mythey tried to, and it wasthey
had to get a different one, because the one they had went clear down
on my shoulder. I have a very short neck and theymaybe they had
it with them. I dont know. I dont remember that. All I remem-
ber is the excruciating pain when they started screwing that into
my head. I had four screws, two in the back and two in the front.
Q: Okay.
A: And I suppose it was an aide came in, and she knew that I
was in shock, evidently, because she got a blanket and wrapped it
around me, and she kind of held me. I was still in the wheelchair. . . .
Q: During that whole time, none of these four or ve men said
93
anything to you, is that right?
A: Yes. When they started putting
the novocaine or whatever it was in my
head, I said, Is one of you Dr. Alexan-
der? and this voice in back of me said,
Yes, I am. And I said, Please come
around so I can see you. I would like to
see what you look like. And so he did.
And we might have shaken hands. I
dont remember that. And then he went
back to doing whatever they were do-
ing, screwing this thing into my head.
But none of this, again, is an in-
dication of wrongdoing. A cold or
distracted bedside manner is not
criminal. The question was wheth-
er he had ever warned her about the
possible complications. When the
womans lawyer asked to see the
two-page informed-consent form
that laid out the risks, Alexander
could nd only the rst page, the page without the womans
signature. And that page, as the lawyer noted, had multiple
punch holes and fray marks, indicating that it had been led in
[the patients] chart, extracted from the le, and later reled.
Further, he said, additional documents also had gone missing,
including a letter that the patients primary neurosurgeon had
sent to Alexander, notifying him of her postoperative facial pa-
ralysis. The womans attorney argued that it is reasonable to
infer that this pattern of disappearance of probative evidence
was not coincidental, but was in fact deliberate. The attorney
was arguing, in other words, that when Alexander found things
that didnt t the story he wanted to tell, he changed them, or
made them disappear altogether.
Alexander settled.
e soars on the butterys wing for who knows how long.
Time is different. Space, time, self, everything: differ-
ent. Above the butteries, sentient orbs of light oat. An-
gels? Who knows.
But eventually he rises, even higher. Or deeper. Further.
He enters a new realm, one of innite depth and innite black-
ness. And at the center of it all, a light. Bright, pulsating, warm,
loving, wise. The embodiment, the denition, the source of all of
those things and everything else.
The all-knowing and all-loving creator at the center of all
existence.
He approaches God. God approaches him. God is everywhere.
Above. Below. Beside. Inside.
He and God are One.
And although he still doesnt know who he is or where he is,
though he still has no concept of language itself, of present, of
past, none of that matters.
He knows. He knows . . . everything.
He knows the unknowable, the great mysteries, the answers
to the ultimate whys and wheres and whats.
Why are we here? Where did we come from? What do we do now?
He knows it all.
And then he falls away. Down through the valley of swirling but-
teries. Back into the ageless muck where his journey began.
o he settled that suit.
But these things happen.
Youre trying to fix people
who would otherwise be
hopelessly broken, and sometimes
you dont succeed, or things just go
a little awry. And too often there are
lawyers waiting in the wings.
It didnt really affect him. He was
still teaching at Harvard, still prac-
ticing at the Brigham. He was still
on the rise. There were some ten-
sions at work, though. He and the
man he worked for, Dr. Peter Black,
the Brighams chair of neurosur-
gery, werent getting along. Why that
is depends on whom you ask. Alex-
ander thinks its because Black had
assigned him to head up the hospi-
tals stereotactic-radiosurgery pro-
gram, and initially that technology
was used only to treat aneurysms. The technology had devel-
oped quickly, though, and soon Alexander was using it on tu-
mors, too. Hed also begun using the hospitals new intraoper-
ative MRI machine to do tumor work. Problem was, Black was
known worldwide as the tumor guy. For instance, when Ringo
Starrs daughter was diagnosed with a brain tumor, her doctors
sent her across the Atlantic, because only Black would do. Alex-
ander thought Black was maybe worried that Alexander was en-
croaching on his turf, and this was straining their relationship.
Black, for his part, has no comment.
But all in all, more than a decade into his career at the Brigham,
things were looking great. He coauthored a lot of journal articles
and two academic textbooks, one about stereotactic radiosurgery
and the other focusing on the intraoperative MRI machine. And
then, in 2000, he served as the inspiration for a best-selling novel.
His friend wrote it. The Patient, by Michael Palmer. A medical
thriller, the kind travelers snatch up in airports and devour on air-
planes. A French terrorist dying from a brain tumor takes a pres-
tigious Boston hospital hostage in order to force the staff to save
his life. Initially, the terrorist wants the operation performed by
the chief of the neurosurgery department, Carl Gilbride, but Gil-
bride soon reveals himself to be a venal and incompetent blowhard
whose true forte was self-promotion. The real star of the neu-
rosurgery department, the terrorist deduces, is a young rebrand
named Jessie Copeland, who is everything a patient could hope
for: brilliant, seless, compassionate, ercely devoted to her charg-
es, and a wizard with a scalpel. When the terrorist chooses Cope-
land to perform his operation, it rankles Gilbride so much that he
begins trying to thwart and sabotage her at every turn.
Palmer had learned everything he could about neurosurgery
from Alexander and channeled it into the book, into Copeland.
Alexander had even passed along to Palmer the idea for ARTIE,
the robotic assistant that could crawl straight up someones nose
and into their brain and, when combined with an intraoperative
MRI machine, resect even the most stubbornly embedded tu-
mors. When folks at the Brigham read The Patient, it took them
about a half second to realize that Copeland was a stand-in for
Eben Alexander (albeit under the diaphanous disguise of a sex
change). And it didnt take much longer than that for them to
realize that the vile, venal chief of neurosurgery, the ctional
THE DALAI LAMA WAGS A
FI NGER AT ALEXANDER. WHEN
A MAN MAKES EXTRA ORDI NARY
CLAI MS, HE SAYS, A
THOROUGH I NVESTI GATI ON
I S REQUI RED, TO ENSURE THAT
PERSON I S RELI ABLE, HAS
NO REASON TO LI E.
Clip, Save, Share, from any page. Download free from the iTunes App Store or Google Play.
94 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
Carl Gilbride, was supposed to be the Brighams real-life chair
of neurosurgery, Eben Alexanders boss, Peter Black. As one for-
mer resident of Alexanders puts it, the animosity and dynamic
is eerily identical. Alexander, he says, poured all his frustra-
tion in there through Palmer, though he cautions the resulting
portraits of Alexander and Black are open to interpretation and
tinted with jealousy.
In the ctional world of the book, Carl Gilbride gets whats com-
ing to him. He is pistol-whipped and roundly humiliated, and by
the end is so entirely emasculated and subservient to Copeland
that he seeks praise from her like a four-year-old announcing he
had picked up all his toys.
In the real world, things turned out differently.
On April 13, 2001, almost exactly a year after the publication
of The Patient, Dr. Eben Alexanders employment as a surgeon
at the Brigham was terminated. Rumors ooded the hospital
hallways and break areasa problem with a patient? simply too
much ego in one place?but none were ever substantiated. The
administrators, as is their bureaucratic wont, stayed silent. Only
one fact was indisputable: Dr. Eben Alexander III was moving on.

e falls and rises and falls and rises.
Back in the muck and murk of the realm be-
low the verdant place, below God, he eventu-
ally, after seconds or hours or days or years or
millennia, discovers that he is in control. That
he can ascend again. All he needs to do is sum-
mon the melody, the one that accompanied the
initial portal, and then hell oat up and through
it and be back on the buttery again, with the
beautiful girl, ready for another encounter with God. He repeats
the pattern, falling down, rising up, countless times.
But eventually the melody stops working. Eventually the mel-
ody no longer summons the glowing gateway. It doesnt both-
er him, really. Even there, in the writhing brown and grime, he
knows that he is loved, eternally, that he can do nothing wrong,
that nothing truly bad can ever happen to him.
Secure in this knowledge, and in all his other newfound wis-
dom as well, he slowly becomes aware of another realm. Faces
emerge from the murk and present themselves to him, and al-
though he doesnt recognize them, although he doesnt know
who they are, he senses their concern for him. Their love. They
come from where he comes from.
He begins to wake up.
Its time to go back.

t was time to go back, to head back home to the South.
New England hadnt quite worked out. After the Brigham,
hed taken a job at the UMass Memorial Medical Center,
in Worcester, thirty-ve miles west of Boston. Hed run its
deep-brain-stimulation program, implanting electrodes in-
to patients, helping alleviate their Parkinsonian tremors by
means of corrective shocks. But there had been more law-
suitsin one case, a bit of plastic was left behind in a womans
neckand there had been another boss he didnt get along with.
In August 2003, UMass Memorial suspended Alexanders sur-
gical privileges on the basis or allegation of improper perfor-
mance of surgery. (The specics of the case leading to the sus-
pension are condential, though Alexander claims it resulted
from a very complex repeat operation I did around the brain
stem of a patient in which the patient had more difculty re-
covering after the operation I would say than I anticipated and
than I led them to believe.) His suspension technically ended in
November of that same year, but he never went back to work at
UMass Memorial. He resigned. The following year he did a lit-
tle freelance consulting for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a com-
pany that matches corporations with experts in various elds,
and also led an unsuccessful lawsuit against the Brigham and
Womens Hospital, claiming it improperly withheld more than
$400,000 of his retirement and deferred-compensation plans.
He had been more or less out of work for fteen months when, in
March 2005, he received a letter from the Massachusetts Board
of Registration in Medicine asking him to respond to a complaint
form theyd received from a former patient who was upset that
Alexander had stopped responding to phone calls. Alexander
wrote a letter back, explaining that the complaint was invalid
because he was no longer practicing and that, furthermore, he
would soon be leaving the state altogether.
I wanted to stay in Massachusetts, but [the UMass chair of
surgerys] campaign against me has made that impossible, he
wrote. He added that he was a very good neurosurgeon, and that
Massachusetts would be most fortunate to have the benet of
my skills as a physician and surgeon over the next fteen years,
but they wont have it, because I am leaving this state for a more
hospitable and welcoming environment. It will be nice to be ap-
preciated for all that I have to offer.
The board ultimately took no disciplinary action. Still, one year
later, he moved his family back south, into a big redbrick colonial
house in Lynchburg, Virginia, not far from where he grew up, and
Lynchburg General Hospital hired him as a staff neurosurgeon.
He got back to work.

hen he comes back, when he opens his eyes,
when the new-old realm with all its fresh-fa-
miliar sensations comes washing over him, he
is at rst very confused. For the better part of
the next week, he experiences what is known
as ICU psychosis. He hallucinates. Some of the
hallucinations are very strange. At one point he
believes he is running through a cancer clinic in south Florida, be-
ing pursued by his wife, a pair of policemen, and two Asian ninja
photographers. His vocabulary is incomplete. Parts of his brain
are still dysfunctional.
But slowly his brain comes back online. Reality imposes it-
self. He becomes aware of who the people around him are. His
family, his friends. He becomes aware of exactly where he is. He
remembers this place.

he sorts of operations Alexander performed at Lynchburg
General Hospital were old-fashioned, as far as neurosur-
gery goes. But that doesnt mean they were unimportant.
For example, on March 1, 2007, a fty-four-year-old
tobacco farmer from a small town outside of Lynchburg
visited Dr. Alexander, complaining of pain in his neck and trape-
zius and upper arm. Alexander conducted a physical examina-
tion and inspected some MRI imagery and told the patient that
he recommended a spinal decompression surgery that would in-
volve fusing his fth and sixth vertebrae. The patient agreed to
95
the surgery, and several months later, on June 27, 2007, Alexan-
der performed it.
He did something wrong. Instead of fusing the farmers fth
and sixth vertebrae, he fused his fourth and fth. He did not re-
alize his mistake at rst. When he dictated the operative report,
he recorded that the MRI scan showed signicant disk bulge
and disk osteophyte complex compression at C5-6 mainly the
left side, and then described an operation on those vertebrae,
instead of the vertebrae he had actually operated on.
On July 12, he had his rst follow-up appointment with the farm-
er. He reviewed the postoperative X-rays. He noticed his mistake.
He didnt tell his patient. Instead, after his patient went home, he
pulled the operative report up on his computer and edited it. Now
the report read that the MRI scan had showed disk bulge at both
C4-5 and C5-6, and that we had discussed possible C5-6 as well
as C4-5 decompression, nally deciding on C4-5 decompression.
Then he simply found every subsequent reference in the report
to C5-6 and changed it to C4-5.
After he nished editing the report, it read as though he hadnt
done anything wrong at all.
During a third follow-up meeting, in October, Alexander nally
confessed, and told the patient that if he wanted another opera-
tion he could have it for free. It is unclear exactly when Lynchburg
General Hospital learned of Alexanders mistake, but by the end
of October he no longer had surgical privileges at the hospital.
On August 6, 2008, the patient led a $3 million lawsuit against
Alexander, accusing him of negligence, battery, spoliation, and
fraud. The purported cover-up, the changes Alexander had made
to the surgical report, was a major aspect of the suit. Once again,
a lawyer was accusing Alexander of altering the historical record
when the historical record didnt t the story he wanted to tell.
By the time the lawsuit was led, Alexander had found anoth-
er job, with a nonprot called the Focused Ultrasound Founda-
tion in Charlottesville, Virginia, an hour-and-a-half drive from
Lynchburg. His new job did not involve the practice of neuro-
surgery. His boss, the neurosurgeon Dr. Neal Kassell, who was
also a professor of neurosurgery at the University of Virgin-
ia medical school, had known Alexander for many years. He
had high respect for Alexanders intelligencelike Alexan-
ders former residents, he described Alexander as brilliant. He
had less esteem for Alexanders surgical abilities. Neurosur-
gery requires the ability to intensely concentrate on one thing
for a long period of time, he says. And thats not Ebens MO.
The tobacco farmers lawsuit was still in its preliminary stages,
hanging over Alexanders head like a $3 million hammer, when
the E. coli started their terrible multiplication.
e goes home from the hospital just before Thanksgiving.
He is sixteen pounds lighter and still foggy, but getting
stronger and sharper every day. He had been scheduled to
give a deposition in the case of the tobacco farmer in De-
cember, but the court allows it to be pushed back. He keeps him-
self busy. He writes thank-you postcards to some of the medical
staff that took care of him. He takes notes about his memories of
his strange comatose journey, the murky place and the butter-
ies and the countryside and the dazzling epiphanic light at the
center of it all. He imagines there is probably a neurological ex-
planation for what he experienced. Eventually he starts going
back to work at the Focused Ultrasound Foundation.
On March 18, 2009, Alexander gives his deposition in the tobacco-
farmer case. He testies that when he learned of his error, he felt
like [hed] been hit by a truck, but that he refrained from telling the
patient because he was intrigued by postoperative improvements
he claims the patient had made despite the botched operation.
I thought that I would end up telling him about it, he says,
and I think my overwhelming curiosity about why he had got-
ten betterI wanted to see if his symptoms came back quickly
because people sometimes will have a placebo effect to surgery.
Soon after his deposition, Alexanders lawyers urge him to set-
tle, and he does. They also urge him to settle another case, stem-
ming from an operation he performed only two weeks after the
farmers, when he again operated on the wrong vertebra of a pa-
tient. He settles that case, too. The Virginia Board of Medicine
allows him to keep his license, but levies a modest ne and or-
ders him to take continuing education classes in ethics and pro-
fessionalism. By the time all his pending cases are resolved, Al-
exander will have settled ve malpractice cases in the last ten
years. Only one other Virginia-licensed neurosurgeon has settled
as many cases in that time period, and none have settled more.
But really, in the wake of his coma, his perspective on his legal
troubles has shifted. Hes just lucky to be alive. The mere fact of
it, the mere fact that his brain survived that vicious bacterial as-
sault, well . . . some might even call it a miracle. He starts reading
a lot about near-death experiences, books like Life After Death, by
Dinesh DSouza; Embraced by the Light, by Betty J. Eadie; and Ev-
idence of the Afterlife, by Jeffrey Long. These books all argue that
experiences such as the one he had were not hallucinatory quirks
of a brain under siege. They were real. One morning, maybe four
months after his coma, hes in his bedroom reading one of these
books, called On Life After Death, by Elisabeth Kbler-Ross. He
comes to a story about a little girl who has a near-death experience
during which she meets a deceased brother she had never known.
Alexander, who had recently received a photo of a deceased
daughter of his birth parents, a sister he had never known, puts
the book down and lets his eyes wander to the photo. And then,
suddenly, he recognizes her.
The girl on the buttery wing.
e cant sleep.
For days and weeks and months in a row, he wakes
at two in the morning and cant fall back asleep, so he
goes to the den long before he needs to start his long
commute to work, and he writes and reads and thinks.
He knows he has a story to tell, but the question
is how to tell it.
He eventually decides to start with the story of his rst near-
death experience.
Its a story from his skydiving days back in college. He logged
more than three hundred jumps during his college career, and most
of them were thrilling but otherwise uneventful. On one autumn
day in 1975, however, something went wrong. On that particular
day, he was the last of a group of six jumpers to exit the airplane. The
group had intended to form a six-man star formation, but one ew
in too fast and knocked the formation apart before Alexander could
come in to complete it. After recovering their bearings, the briey
discombobulated jumpers tracked away from one another, prepar-
ing to deploy their chutes. Alexander did the same, rocketing off
to stake out his own untrammeled patch of sky. He was about to
pull his rip cord when he noticed with a start that a jumper named
Chuck had tracked to a spot directly [continued on page 125]
A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE ENIGMATIC ACTRESS, INCLUDING FOUR COUNTRIES, FOUR ACCENTS,
TWO NICOLAS CAGE MOVIES, AND ONE NEW TV SHOW
DI ANE
KRUGER
97
TECHNICALLY, SHES GERMAN. Although Diane Krugers voice would
have you think otherwise. A slight German accent will slip in during
conversation, but she can sound almost British. French, too. And there
are times youd think she was born and raised here in the States. South
Dakota, maybe.
Really, you can hardly call her German. She started splitting her time
between a small village in Lower Saxony and London to study ballet
at the Royal Academy when she was about six.
With ballet ended because of an injury, she moved to Paris at fifteen and
started modeling there and then in New York. Then modeling became
boring, so I went to drama school in Paris. In French. Think of learning
English through Shakespeare. For about twenty yearsshes thirty-six
nowKruger has shuttled between shoots and film sets, never settling
anywhere for long. Ive got commitmentphobia. She has a home base
in Los Angeles with her longtime partner, former Dawsons Creek star
Joshua Jackson, and goes to Paris to do at least one French movie a year.
Her biggest role so far was the part of a brusque German actress, Bridget
von Hammersmark, the double agent aiding Brad Pitts character in Inglou-
rious Basterds. But there was also Troy, in which she played Helen, a role
the director, Wolfgang Petersen, purportedly went through three thou-
sand faces to cast. And for the two National Treasure movies, she managed
to ground Nicolas Cages insanity while schooling us in American history.
In her latest role, on FXs The Bridge, she plays a detective on the U.S.
side of a murder investigation split between El Paso, Texas, and Jurez,
Mexico. The detective has Aspergers, a syndrome that can present it-
self as, well, uhhow do you say?a little German. I wouldnt go that
far, Kruger says. But all of my life, people have told me Im very direct
and can come across as blunt. There are some things where Im like,
This characterof course they wanted to cast me. As if the talent and
beauty and voice had nothing to do with it.
BY MATT GOULET
Please scan here with Netpage for a special public-service announcement from Esquire.
98 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
IT WASNT
UNTIL I MET
THE WOMAN
WHO WOULD
BECOME MY
WIFE THAT
I MET THE MAN
WHO WOULD
BECOME
MY FATHER
THE FATHER
YOU CHOOSE
B y MARK WARREN
99

One
DIETER LAY IN THERE SOMEWHERE, peacefully turning
yellow and gray, his troubles over.
An hour before, the phone had rung. It was Princeton hospital.
My mother-in-law was on the line, her voice ragged. She quickly
handed the phone to the attending doctor, who told me that my fa-
ther-in-law was septic, his body run through with infection, that
he was having trouble breathing, and without intubation he would
die momentarily. What do you want to do? the doctor asked me,
her voice taut. As my wife, Jessica, and I quickly talked through the
options with the doctor, Dieters heart stopped. Oh . . . oh . . . his
heart just stopped, she said. Im . . . Im sorry.
It is what he would have wanted,
for although hed been an Ameri-
can citizen for decades, he was
still German enough to have no pa-
tience for the manic clinging to life
that happens here, as if the mere
beating of a heart made for a life.
All the frenzy at the end seemed to
him so foolish and undignied. He
was a scientist. He wasnt religious.
People die. Let them die.
But he wasnt supposed to die
yet. He was too needed, too vital at
a youthful eighty-two. Jessica was
shattered at the suddenness of it all,
and so was I. Things hadnt gone so
well with my own father, but in life,
things happen twice if youre lucky.
Theres the father you get and the
father you choose. When I met Die-
ter, I understood what I had been
missing all those years. I guess you
might say that I got to know a fa-
thers love for the rst time at age
thirty. I liked it quite a lot.
It was a Sunday, the last day of
September, 2012. We parked under
a tree at the hospital, left the dog in
the car with all the windows cracked, stretched for a moment from
the drive, wiped our faces of the dried tears, and then began the hard
walk inside. I tried to make a joke, and we went slowly, as if maybe
if we didnt see what waited for us inside, it wouldnt be real. Our
son, Zeke, who would turn thirteen in a week, walked with us, still
in his soccer clothes from that morning. Zeke plays in goal, and had
made three spectacular saves in the days game. His Opa, who had
been everything to him, would have been very proud. I stopped,
faced him, put my hands on his shoulders. Zeke, you dont have to
do this, I said. It might be scary.
I want to, he said, his face hard. He turned back toward the emer-
gency-room entrance and kept walking. We couldnt be too slow if
we wanted to see him before they came and took him away for good.
I was very proud of Zeke for braving the unknown like this, but I was
a little worried, too. My father had died less than a year before, but he
had been an abstract gure to my kids, quite old for all of their lives,
quite inrm, rendered opaque by a stroke. But Dieter was the best
storyteller in the world, the builder of epic sand castles, expert chess
teacher, passionate tennis and soccer fan, fearless guide on many for-
est adventures and snorkeling expeditions, tender of the goose every
Christmas, knew all the birds in the sky. A kind, patient, funny man.
Slow to anger, slow to judge. Brilliant smile. Opa was dead.
Nothing of this size had ever happened to Zeke. Nothing had ever
been this nal before. I tried to explain that it was death that made love
possible, that if things lasted forever, then nothing would be as beautiful
or meaningful or good. It was a moment that called for fatherly consola-
tion, but to me it just came out sounding like bullshit. This didnt make
any more sense to me than it did to Zeke. Instead, I just wanted to cry.
By the time I was my sons age, my brothers and I had been dragged
to what seemed like thousands of funerals and death scenes. Its one
of the liabilities of having a large family and no money. We never went
on vacation, we went to open-casket funerals instead, all horrify-
ing, all accompanied by operatic grief. To see the adults in your life
losing their shit was perhaps even
more terrifying than being forced
to reach up and touch the scaly
embalmed hands of grandparents,
uncles, aunts, and family friends,
which, from my earliest memory,
is what we did in my family. I learned
the word formaldehyde and what
it was used for early on. Luxuriat-
ing in death is, or at least was, the
southern way. When I was six, a
much older cousin, Sara Lee was
her name, died or killed herself (I
was never quite sure) with a drug
overdose in Biloxi, and my parents
tossed me in the car and we went.
I remember that on the drive from
Texas to Mississippi, the radio was
full of news that Judy Garland had
done the very same thing to her-
self, on the very same day, and so it
seemed to me that bodies were ev-
erywhere, and from then on, when
I would conjure a picture of Sara
Lee in my mind, she would come
up as Judy Garland. Nobody back
then thought much about having
six-year-olds around fresh corpses.
No one was to be spared, I guess was the thinking. (Or maybe, more
generously, no one was to be excluded.) And as if to be sure that this
point was thoroughly made, I got to sleep in Sara Lees bed on that trip
to Biloxi. I remember staring at the ceiling for three straight nights
as the wind blew the magnolia shadows back and forth across it.
I didnt want Zekes last memory of Dieter to be so gothic and ter-
rifying. But then suddenly we were signing in at the front desk and
making our way past the nurses station, where life seemed so very
normal. A nurse was eating lunch and casually talking on the phone.
People were laughing. Didnt they know what had just happened
here? Didnt they realize what a life had just nished?
We met my mother-in-law, Christa, outside Dieters room. Her
shoulders slumped when she saw us, as if she had been holding her
breath for a long time. He looks so beautiful, she said.
And then, there he was.
His skin was smooth and cool as Jessica and I touched him and
talked to him. His face was placid. I became aware of a sound I wasnt
used to hearing, something between a cry and a wail, and realized
it was coming from me. I turned to look for Zeke and saw that he
was pressed into the back corner of the small adjoining bathroom,
his back turned toward us, as far away as he could get without leav-
ing the room altogether.
Two
FEBRUARY 21, 1942
My dear little Dieter,
You too will have earned your own letter as payment for your own
long and detailed letter. Although mine wont be as long because Im
so exhausted from todays battalion exercises. Imagine, I wake up ev-
ery day at 6 am!! Then outside of my room my mount is waiting for
me to nish my coffee. I wait for a gigantic crane to pull up and I am
attached to a hook and am slowly but surely lifted onto my horse. The
stableboy stands at his head and spins the propeller, and soon I am
zooming all over the place like a crazy monkey. The whole thing looks
like a speeding motorboat, and the snow ies to the sides like in a giant
wake. This is how it goes in this godforsaken place until I come upon
my company walking in the woods. Naturally, from afar I look like the
big bad enemy and the company runs into the woods so as not to be
discovered. They are of course horribly afraid of me because I can yell
very loud and often run around like a wounded goat-monkey (your
mother knows this animal). After Ive screamed the whole afternoon
away, I turn around and zoom in the same way back to the encamp-
mentin the afternoon I walk over to the barracks and watch them
do their studies and do my own work. In between I direct the paper
war on my desk, which means that its far more exhausting than any
real war. Thats how one day follows another, and every night I dis-
cover that my bed is the nicest place of all.
I hear that you are pale and look small and are often tired. Natu-
rally this cant stay like this, you hear me? You have to get more fresh
air, instead of always reading. You cant neglect and misuse your body.
Youll pay for it later. So be good and live healthily!! Lots of kisses and
hugs from your Vati
The soldier was worried about his son. He had been away at war
for much of the previous three years, and parenting from the front
is rather hard to do. This letter to the boy came from East Prussia,
in what is now Poland. Dieters father, a battalion commander in
the German army, wrote home to Berlin every couple of days, full of
worry about his oldest son, whom he considered to be too soft. He
kept with him a picture of the skinny boy in his lederhosen, beam-
ing with his mother, as evidence that Dieter wasnt developing as
he should. All head, no body. But there was only so much he could
do, as he had eighteen hundred men under his command and would
soon be marching across Belarus into Russia.
His letters home show him to have been whimsical and clever, as
well as a erce German nationalist who viewed the English and French
as the enemy and was eager that the German push for the oil of the
Caucasus and the breadbasket of the Ukraine be successful. An econ-
omist at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Hans Weigmann had lied
about his age to join the army at sixteen during World War I and had
been held as a French prisoner of war until well after the armistice,
an internment that killed thousands of Germans and almost killed
him. He would be sickly for the rest of his life from the starvation and
forced labor he experienced during that period. But as a veteran and
a reservist, Dieters father was, by the time of Hitlers war, an ofcer,
rst serving at the Maginot Line, commanding a heavy-machine-
gun company of 150 men, before being asked to join the regimental
staff as an adjutant, with the rank of captain. France fell quickly, and
his division was moved to eastern Poland as an occupation force. He
would spend the next couple of years going back and forth between
home in Berlin and Poland, where his unit would prepare for its part
in Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia.
It was from there that he wrote his son, who at twelve had become
the man of the house, and his father was certain that he was not up
to the task. He spent too much time reading, he spent too much time
on the toilet, he wasnt properly tough.
Like all boys, Dieter joined the JungvolkHitler Youthin Feb-
ruary 1940, the month after his tenth birthday. And it was only af-
100 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
Dieter at age seventy-five in Marathon, Texas, and on previous page in 2011, a year before his death.
Scan here with Netpage for an extended photo slide show.
ter he excelled and was promoted over the next few yearsrst to
Jungenschaftsfhrer, then Hordenfhrer, and nally, on April 20,
1943, Hitlers birthday, to Oberhordenfhrerthat his father began
to recognize the change in his son. In a letter to Dieters sister, Nati,
he allowed himself to imagine the proud moment when he, Hans,
would walk through Berlin with Nati on one arm and Dieter, in full
Oberhordenfhrer uniform, on the other.
And it is the uniform that Dieter liked most of all, with its ker-
chief and its braids, its belt with a knife holder and big buckle, its
jagged Siegrune on the armband. Having been born in 1930, Dieter
had spent virtually his entire life in Hitlers highly militarized state.
In a family book, there is a picture taken in 1934, when he was four.
In it, he is in full uniform, saluting, and the caption reads Soldier
Dieter. The biggest disappointment of his life as a young man was
that he was too young to join the navy, because it was the naval uni-
forms that he favored most.
Schooling during these years was irregular. At one point, because of
the bombing, Dieters entire school, students and teachers, left Ber-
lin for Zakopane, in the high Tatra Mountains of Poland, to a school
housed in a former tuberculosis sanitorium. The boys would leave
there at the start of the Russia campaign for another school in Slo-
vakia, and all schools would close for good in the summer of 1943.
Dieters family moved around much during these years as well,
to escape the enveloping war. With his father gone, Dieter was re-
sponsible for moving his sister, mother, and younger brother ev-
erywhere they went. Each place they moved would be destroyed
in turn. Staying with relatives in Wels, Austria, during an allied air
raid, Dieter went on the front porch to watch the bombing and was
blown down the stairs into the cellar of the house they were living
in. The jolt saved his life, as seconds later the concussion bomb was
followed by an incendiary bomb.
Since Dieters schooling had been interrupted, in Wels his mother
hired a Latin tutor for him. The man was so dirty and smelly that Die-
ter could hardly stand to be around him. And he had eas. Dieter would
come home itching and complaining about the man, but his mother
didnt believe him. She went to see for herself, and also came home with
eas. It wasnt until after the war that they realized that the tutors lth
was a ruse to make him seem crazy and keep him out of the ghting.
It was also in Wels that Dieter witnessed his rst atrocity. Late in
the war, he and his family were living in an apartment house in the
town center when a column of Nazi soldiers made its way down the
main street, marching Jews westward through the town, from one
of the camps the Nazis were evacuating in the east. From the high
window of their apartment, the familys housekeeper tossed a loaf
of bread down to the street for the prisoners. As Dieter watched,
the procession stopped, entered the building, brought the house-
keeper downstairs, and executed her on the spot.
In 1944, at age fourteen, Dieter was conscripted into the Ger-
man army, rst as a runner conveying messages between units.
During air raids he would dive into craters for cover, next to sol-
diers deliriously praying the rosary. His next assignment was in a
machine-gun unit of the Bavarian ski patrol. As the Americans ad-
vanced after D-day, they came upon Dieters unit and sent a note
into the Alps, ordering the boys to surrender. They did, and were
set loose to walk home. Along the way, Dieter encountered German
soldiers separated from their units, who were taking off their uni-
forms. They moved through the woods like ghosts. Run, they told
him. Disappear. Its over. Arriving back in Wels, Dieter was imme-
diately compelled to reenlist with a group of bitter-enders, who
vowed never to stop ghting for the fatherland. But Dieters moth-
er had had enough. She went and retrieved Dieter from this group,
101
telling the commandant, You have my husband, I need my son.
The irony is that Hanss war might have been over, too, but for a
fateful decision. In early 1944, he had returned home from Russia
to convalesce from pneumonia. He could have stayed with his fami-
ly and considered his service completed, but he felt an obligation to
the men under his command to return to the front, which he did in
the spring. By this time, the German front in the east was collapsing,
the Nazis were in full retreat, and his unit was already surrounded
by the Russians. To rejoin his battalion, Dieters father had to y in
across enemy lines. Within a few months, he would disappear and
never be heard from again. For decades after the war, Dieters mother
would receive detailed accounts from her husbands men, precisely
identifying his last known position and telling of how he covered his
battalions retreat outside Babruysk in Belarus, turning with his of-
cers to walk back toward the advancing Russians as he sent his men
in retreat. The last time Dieter saw his father, it had snowed, and as
his father walked away from the house for the last time, Dieter gath-
ered a snowball, cocked his arm, and hit him square in the back of his
head. His father turned, shook his st, and was gone.
In the months after the war ended, Dieter took to stealing food to
support his mother. He looted the unattended storage depots with
throngs of others, looking for anything to eat. Hed nd cans of pa-
prika, worthless as food, and once found a fty-pound bag of sugar,
which he struggled to carry on the handlebars of his bicycle, eventu-
ally being forced to dump half of it, which was traumatizing, as no one
had seen sugar in years. His mother took in laundry from the Amer-
Dieter, aged eleven, with his mother
in Zakopane, Poland, 1941.
After the war, Dieter and his
mother were forced to visit
a nearby concentration camp.
She was so traumatized that
he had to hold her tightly
until she stopped shaking.
Dieter, aged eleven, with his mother
in Zakopane, Poland, 1941.
icans in exchange for rations, and Die-
ter and Nati would scrounge in plowed
elds for forgotten potatoes.
In Wels after the war, Dieter and his
mother were forced by the allies to clean
the nearby concentration camp and see
for themselves what the Reich had ren-
dered. By this time, his mother was in
a state of nervous collapse, and for the
rest of her life (she would live until 1992)
would rely on Dieter for emotional sta-
bility. At the camp, she was so trauma-
tized by the experience that he had to
hold her tightly until she stopped shak-
ing. He would not ever be able to speak to
his family about the things he saw there.
With all Germans expelled from Aus-
tria, Dieter would make his way back
through Germany on foot and in the
back of a truck, sitting on an oil drum,
watching the shattered continent go by,
on his way to nd family in a small town
on the Baltic coast. There followed a pe-
riod of years in which he would think
deeply about how German society had
gone mad, and about how he, although
just a boy, had been susceptible to this
madness. From his earliest memories, Hitler was all he knew.
And so when word came that Hitler was dead, I wanted to die,
too, he told me once. It would take a long time for us to realize the
horror of what had happened.
The slow reeducation of my father-in-law as he completed his
schooling, became a chemist, and, in 1961, came to America to do
his postdoctoral studies, would dene him for the rest of his life.
He would become slow to judge, and slow to anger. Never would he
again be subject to the irrational passions of the day. And as Dieter
Weigmann became the man who would teach me some of the most
important lessons of my life, this is the prism through which I would
see himextremely deliberative, cautious, fair, enlightened. A sci-
entist, a man of reason. Being myself quick to judge, quick to anger,
too ready to believe in stupid things, I wanted to be around Dieter
on the chance that some of what he had might rub off on me. When
I got over my amazement at the essential facts of his life, it would
slowly dawn on me that these traits he possessed came to dene him
not in spite of his experiences but because of them.
For Dieter the war would never be far away for the rest of his life.
And he would be vexed by a persistent question: How much of a
Nazi had his own father been?
Three
THERES DIETER NOW, sitting in his wingback chair down by
the re, next to the massive ancient cabinet that he uses for storing
liquor. He sees me, closes his book, looks over. Can I interest you
in a whiskey? he says, eyes wide with pleasure. He nods his head
as if to say, Whatll you have?
The rst time I met him was in this room. He was sixty or so then,
thick white hair, deep voice, very handsome without a trace of vanity.
His English was spoken with a slight
accent, as if he had learned to speak it
in London. He was loose in his limbs
and had an easy grace. I never knew my father to enjoy a whiskey,
or a nice re, or a conversation, or to read a good book, though he
would sometimes carry around a small missal in the breast pocket
of his shirt. Dad never enjoyed a good laugh, either. I never knew
him to turn his head as a beautiful woman walked by.
How are you, Marcus? Dieter says as he passes me my drink. It is a
simple question, most often not meant to elicit an answer. But Dieter
somehow always seems to mean it. Have you heard from Russ? Russ
is my old friend from Texas, who grew up on the borderland along the
Rio Grande, who had over the years become a friend of Dieters and
Christas, too. We all rafted through the Santa Elena Canyon in the Big
Bend together, spending nights camped at the bottom of its sheer f-
teen-hundred-foot walls. When youre down there, youre just ecks
of stardust in the immense night, and so moved were my in-laws by
the blanket of stars you nd in remote west Texas that they bought a
little adobe house in the Marathon Basin, and before we knew it they
were spending half their time in the high desert of my home state.
Out there Dieter was right at home, which is not necessarily the rst
thing you expect from someone of his accomplishments in Prince-
ton. One of the rst things I learned about Dieter before we even
met was that he was a scientist. My father is a scientist, Jessica
would tell me. Dieter was by then one of the foremost ber scien-
tists in the world, having won the Olney Medal, which is sort of the
Nobel Prize for textile science.
The very next thing I learned about Dieter was to be wary of ac-
cepting food from him. If something spoiled in the refrigerator, any-
body else in the family would just throw it away, but Dieter would
follow right after them, sh it out of the garbage, wash it off, and ei-
ther eat it himself or feed it to some poor unsuspecting bastard. In
this way, a compulsion rooted in horrible wartime privation became
a family joke. He would enjoy the joke, too, as he would never think
of lecturing us about his hard times. But I have eaten more garbage
than I ever meant to, and I have not suffered, which of course in-
stills Dieters point more than any lecture ever could.
102 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
Hitlers war
would haunt
Dieter for most
of the rest of
his life. And he
would be vexed
by a persistent
question: How
much of a Nazi
had his own
father been?
His father, Hans, a captain in the
German army, disappeared on the
Eastern front in 1944.
A man doesnt go and announce, I am going to be an example for
you, I will show you how to live. He just carries himself through the
world. And the most important lessons arent declared or obvious,
but more likely come along in the commonplace.
One time in Marathon, I woke up late, walked out into the back-
yard, and was immediately hit with an overpowering stench. The
sewer pipe had backed up into the yard, and there was Dieter, lean-
ing on a spade, standing ankle deep in shit, laughing.
He saw me, and the look on my face.
I knew youd like it! he said. Youve got to stop and smell the
roses sometimes, Marcus. That kind of equanimity was new to me,
in terms of fatherly experiences. For my father, this would have been
the end, the absolute abyss. Darkness would have descended and
never lifted. But when youve already been through the end of the
world, not everything is the end of the world.
A few years ago I was working on a book project, and the deadline
was crushing me. I hadnt given myself enough time to write, and I was
panicking, so I left Jessica and the kids in New York and moved out to
Princeton with Dieter for a month, to race the clock. I quickly estab-
lished a routine of working day and night, and without a word being
said, Dieter made himself my twenty-four-hour valet. Every morning
as I awoke, hed bring me a cup of coffee. Would you like to see the
menu? hed ask. Or shall we just have the chef whip up something for
you? If I fell asleep on the couch, he would cover me with a blanket. It
was the fall, and every morning he and I would take a walk in the chang-
ing colors, and we would talk through the days writing, and every cou-
ple days, Dieter would read pages for me and tell me what he thought.
He knew that Id given up on my own father, and he looked on me
with a kindness for which I was not at all prepared, that it seemed he
had been waiting for just this moment to bestow. Sometimes it was
almost too much for me to bear. As he made us dinner, he would ask
me about my life and say such encouraging things with love and with-
out qualication, and I would look at him and think, Are you real?
Dieter had come to the United States in 1961, telling his family in Eu-
rope that hed be back in two years, but its just the way of the world that
he would stay and raise two American daughtersJessica and her sis-
ter, Stefaniehave American grandchildren, and become an American
citizen (at least in part so that he could vote against Ronald Reagan).
Similarly, he began his postdoctoral work at a research institute in
Princeton and never left, staying for thirty-ve years and becoming
one of three senior scientists who ran the institute. When it came
time for him to retire, Christa arranged a surprise party for him, and
since it was a surprise, Dieter didnt have the chance to prepare any-
thing to say. But at the end of the evening, he stood to address the
quiet room. And at the end of his talk, he paused, and began to get
emotional. In closing, he said, I particularly want to thank Lud-
dy Rebenfeld and Bernie Miller, my Jewish colleagues, who fteen
years after the war welcomed this young German like family. Any-
one would have understood if they hadnt done that. But they did.
They embraced me. I dont have words to express my gratitude.
It is the great irony of my life that the two essential men in it, my
father and my father-in-law, fought against each other in the war. At
the end of 1944, at the same time that Dieter manned his machine-
gun position in the Alps, my father was at the Battle of the Bulge.
It is an even greater irony that the man who would become my fa-
ther-in-law was on the wrong side. But these two men were on op-
posite sides of an even larger existential war that rages house to
house, family to family, life to life. Each would learn far too young
that the world can be exceptionally brutal and utterly indifferent to
human suffering. Ill never forget one of the rst times they met. It
was just after Zeke was born, and my parents came up to meet him.
Everyone gathered at the house in Princeton. As my parents arrived,
Dieter and Christa greeted them warmly, Dieter shaking my fathers
hand and embracing my mother. This simple show of affection was
too much for my father, by then in his late seventies. He would spend
the entire trip saying that he wanted to punch Dieters lights out.
Somehow, in spite of it all, Dieter turned the brutality of his ear-
ly life into its opposite, and created a life of exquisite tenderness. My
father would choose instead toor, more generously, would have no
choice but topass along the brutality in daily parcels. When my fa-
ther would make himself an outcast, when he would have everybody
wanting to leave him by the side of the road, me most of all, it was Dieter
who counseled patience and compassion. Let it go, Marcus, hed say.
Hes so unhappy that he cant help himself. Dont you be unhappy, too.
Dieters library and bedroom in Princeton are still lled with books
on the Second World War. He became a scholar of its massive move-
ments, its madmen, its heroes, and all its pain and folly. Almost as
if to explain himself to himself, almost as if somewhere in all those
books, he might nd his father.
In the time that I knew him, he set himself to the task of translating
the incredible wartime correspondence between his parentshun-
dreds of lettersfrom the High German of the Reich into contem-
porary German. He intended to take the further step of translating
them all into English, but he wouldnt live long enough.
May 4, 1942
. . . I feel physically incredibly healthy and vigorous. My cold has com-
pletely disappeared. I nd myself mostly in a satised disposition, even
when I occasionally feel in this bleak landscape an incredible longing for
home and to be with you. In the everyday pace here the loathsomeness of
war manifests itself with every passing day more distinctly. One hears
of hanged or shot Partisans, and in the ranks
103
In formation (circled, top) with the Jungvolk
Hitler YouthPoland, 1941. Above, in
his Jungenschaftsfhrer uniform, 1942.
[continued on page 130]
Clip, Save, Share, from any page. Download free from the iTunes App Store or Google Play.
Hard as it might be midsummer to
imagine the need for a turtleneck,
your favorite stores are about to get
lousy with em. Turtlenecks edge the
line between casual and dressy, i.e.,
exactly where designers like Guccis
Frida Giannini think a man should be
right now, and when you go with a
darker, thinner iteration, it slims the
torso and frames the jaw, like so.
A guy could do a whole lot worse.
Double-breasted wool coat ($2,590),
cashmere turtleneck sweater ($995), and
wool trousers ($635) by Gucci; leather
shoes ($700) by Churchs; leather gloves
($195) by Paul Smith.
AUGUST 2 01 3
104
C O N S I D E R
PG.
THE STAR OF, LIKE, NINE NEW MOVIES THIS YEAR (AND LATE OF 30 ROCK ) SHOWS OFF THE BEST OF THE COMING SEASON
PHOTOGRAPHS BY PHIL POYNTER
S T A R R I N G
Wool coat ($1,595)
and wool trousers
(part of suit, $1,195)
by Polo Ralph
Lauren; cotton shirt
($350) and silk tie
($155) by Ralph
Lauren Black
Label; leather boots
($1,875) by Tods;
leather belt ($98) by
Coach; leather
gloves ($268) by
John Varvatos.
107
Youll see it in the shoulders of overcoats
and the shape of suits both single- and
double-breasted: A softer, less rigid sil-
houette. Embrace that softness but avoid
any appearance of slackness. Everything
should still be in its rightful place.
Double-breasted wool suit ($3,320) and
cotton shirt ($345) by Giorgio Armani; silk
tie ($157), MP by Massimo Piombo.
L O O K F O R S O ME T H I N G WI T H
Clip, Save, Share, from any page.
108 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
Neither rain nor snow nor poor
choice in outerwear should
slow you down when the weath-
er turns, and many labelsin-
cluding Ermenegildo Zegna and
Salvatore Ferragamoare dou-
bling down on substantial coats
that reach all the way to the
knee and beyond. And thanks to
expert tailoring and construc-
tion, they still flatter and fit.
Cashmere coat ($4,395), two-button
wool-and-silk suit ($2,950), and
cotton shirt ($435) by Ermenegildo
Zegna; silk tie ($155) by Ralph
Lauren Black Label; leather boots
($570) by Santoni.
B U S T O U T
Clip, Save, Share, from any page.
IF YOURE NOT IN THE MOOD TO CINCH
A BELTED COAT CLOSED, CONSIDER
LOOSELY KNOTTING TOGETHER THE
TWO ENDS OF THE BELT AT THE BACK
OF THE COAT. THIS OBVIATES ANY
BELT FLOPPING AND PRESENTS AN
ALTOGETHER NEATER PICTURE.
Rubberized-leather
trench coat ($5,700),
cotton shirt ($370), and
wool trousers ($630) by
Salvatore Ferragamo;
wool turtleneck sweater
($585) by Marc Jacobs;
leather boots ($395)
by Grenson.
STYLE TI P NO.
512
THE WAY JAMES MARSDEN TELLS IT, HIS EVOLUTION
from would-be leading man to character actor
wasnt so much planned as it was kind of inevita-
ble. One of the biggest misconceptions about ac-
tors is that we get to choose everything we do, he
says. The truth is that we get the roles we get. And
it turns out that Im better at playing weird, messed-up, funny characterslike, charactersthan
leading men. It was always tough for me to be the good-looking, got-his-shit-together guy. Id
rather play the guy who accidentally takes acid and is naked on the roof at a funeral. That part,
in 2010s Death at a Funeral, was one of the rst to show audiences there was more to him than
the haircuts hed played in The Notebook and Superman Returns. But it took his recurring role on
the last two seasons of 30 Rock (as the only goofball for Liz Lemon) to banish his tin-man perfor-
mances in the early X-Men movies from memory. Today, Marsden is near forty and skews funny,
and his full range is on display in four movies arriving over the next four months: 2 Guns, a Lethal
Weaponstyle action-comedy with Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg; The Butler, a White
House drama in which Marsden plays JFK in a few pivotal scenes (Im either really brave or really
dumb); Walk of Shame, a raunchy romantic comedy opposite Elizabeth Banks; and, come Decem-
ber, Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, in which he joins the all-star comedy cast as Ron Burgun-
dys nemesis on San Diegos Channel 4 news team. They were talking about casting Ben Afeck or
Jon Hamm [in the role], because they needed someone to play a great-looking guy who everyone
wants to be friends with but whos also a buffoon. Afeck and Hamm didnt work out. Marsden
did. Which, when you think about it, seems kind of inevitable.
111
Cotton shirt ($395) and wool trousers
(part of suit, $1,295) by Calvin Klein
Collection; wool-and-silk tie ($157), MP by
Massimo Piombo; steel G-Timeless
automatic chronograph ($1,950) by Gucci.
Deep blacks and ashy grays
and inky blues can be the
most flattering and acces-
sible colors in a mans ward-
robe. And what makes to-
days dark tailored suits and
separates so distinctive is
there is nothing funereal or
drab about them. They rely
on nuance, shading, and
subtle tones, textures, and
patterns to create a sense of
depth and dimension.
Double-breasted cotton coat
($1,945) and two-button wool-
and-silk suit ($2,520) by Dolce
& Gabbana; cotton shirt ($80)
by the Mens Store Blooming-
dales; silk tie ($155) by Ralph
Lauren Black Label; leather
shoes ($575) by OKeefe.
THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A
BAD TIME TO WEAR A WHITE
SHIRT. BUT WHAT WAS ONCE
CONSIDERED A SYMBOL OF
ANONYMITY HAS BECOME A
SURE WAY TO STAND OUT IN A
SEA OF SAFE BLUE BUTTON-
DOWNS AND PREDICTABLE
STRIPES. YOUR GRAND-
FATHER WOULD BE PROUD.
A N D N OW A F E W WO R D S O N
STYLE TI P NO.
641
Three-button wool-and-
mohair suit ($3,245)
by Prada; cotton shirt
($325) by Hamilton
Shirts; silk tie ($150) by
Burberry London.
113
FOR STORE INFORMA-
TION SEE PAGE 130.
GROOMING BY
RHEANNE WHITE FOR
SEE MANAGEMENT.
PROP STYLING
BY SHAWN PATRICK
ANDERSON FOR
BRIDGE ARTISTS.
Voight stars on the new
drama Ray Donovan,
now playing on Showtime,
about a Hollywood fixer
with a sadistic father. He
plays the father.
WH AT I V E L E A R N E D
ACTOR, 74, LOS ANGELES
I NTERVI EWED BY CAL FUSSMAN, APRI L 30, 201 3
Scan here with Netpage to hear Voight read his own poem, Quibble Quam.
> Let your recreations be manful, not sinful.
> When a man does all he can, though it succeed not well, blame not him that did it.
> Labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial re called conscience.
> Fantastic, arent they? They come from one of young George Washingtons exercise booksa collection of maxims called Rules of
Civility and Decent Behaviour in Company & Conversation.
> The myth of George Washington is so great you can hardly believe a human embodied that myth. But the myth is worthy of the man.
> If youre not sure of your path, think about it overnight. Something happens when your subconscious goes to work. Your soul will
point the way. Thats why Sleep on it is an adage thats been passed on for thousands of years.
> Very early on, I had a teacher who wasnt a good teacher, and he mixed me up.
> Heres a moment from Midnight Cowboy: We nished the lm in Texas with myself and the director and a couple of camera peo-
plethat was it. We just had to do some pickups with this little crew. Its about 115 degrees, you know, hot, hot day. I come back to the
van and see John Schlesinger, the director, standing there, almost shivering, and his face is red. I think: My God, hes having a heart at-
tack. I said, John, are you okay? John?! He looked up at me and said, What have we done? What will they think of us? After all, we
had made a lm about a dishwasher who lives in New York and fucks a lot of women. In the moment hed nished it, he was shaking. All
of a sudden, he saw it as banal and vulgar. Hes having an anxiety attack and I grabbed his shoulders to shake him out of it. I said, John,
we will live the rest of our artistic lives in the shadow of this great masterpiece. He said, You think so? I said, Im absolutely sure of
it. The only reason I said such an extravagant thing was because I wanted to get him out of it and nothing would take him out of it but
that. But the statement turned out to be true.
> Sometimes you try to do something that sheds some light on something that needs to be shared.
> I made a lot of mistakes as a young father. I made a lot of mistakes as a young man. I paid dearly, and my children paid dearly.
> I went to Russia in 1991, right in the middle of glasnost. It was an amazing experience, to see what socialism and communism does
to people. People have no enthusiasm. Guys in hotels would not look up, they would not look at you. Once you see that, you cant for-
get it. I dont want people to have the feeling of hopelessness I witnessed there, when youre working for the government and you dont
have the freedom to do the things that you love. Oh, my God. Then I saw capitalism come in fteen years later, and it was a totally differ-
ent place. There was no longer an iron grip on everything, and life was exploding. I never knew the beauty of a neon sign until I saw it in
what used to be the Soviet Union. I said to myself, Holy God, look at how colorful it is.
> A lot of paraplegics have come up to me to thank me for the sex scene in Coming Home. The lm came down to that moment.
It dened the lm, so we couldnt cheat from it.
> One thing thats great about seeing your kids is you see things that you admired in your parents. Everyones unique, no ones ever
alike. But my son has the same good cheer as my father. Hes capable of making a room happy with a few words. And if Angie sets out to
do something, she rolls up her sleeves, rubs her hands together, and does it, and she gets it done today. A little bit like my mom. Maybe
thats why in Judaism you put the grandfathers name on the child.
> I had a high school teacher, a priest, Father Bernie McMahon. One of the rst assignments was to write a poem. When I started to
write, the rascal in me wanted to create something crazy. So I wrote a nonsense poem with words that werent English words mixed
with other words. O quibble quam, why sit you so deterring feeble fonds. / In trachus foo, an ethos grow, and tide the easel gams. / In deven
rat, the seething soul sat twill. / Oh quibble quam seeth no by far do sake a fool dee dull who trach and foo and golar gar takes no vigela fo.
I cant remember the last line. Oh, yes. Transcend the dart and led the gare heart nil. That was the poem. I turned it in with a drawing of
a quibble quamthis bizarre creature sitting on a rock like The Thinker. The moment I turned it in, I thought: What have I done to my-
self? I can remember the papers coming back, awaiting his response. A++! Fantastic! And what did that teach me? It taught me that my
wild imagination and sense of humor was a talent. Thats a great teacher. A great teacher! Go forth, young man!
> Moral means right behavior. What is proper behavior? Some people think were adrift without any guidelines. I dont. I think weve
had instruction on how to live.
115
I raise a window for some spring Palo Alto air, but it doesnt help. In bed, eyes open, I hear
whispers, which makes me think of the President because we often talk in whispers. I know
the whisper sound is really just my wife, Charlotte, who listens to Nirvana on her headphones
all night and tends to sleep-mumble the lyrics. Charlotte has her own bed, a mechanical one.
Yes, hearing the President whisper is creepy because hes been dead now, whatthree
months? But even creepier is what happens when I close my eyes: I keep visualizing my wife
killing herself. More like the ways she might try to kill herself, since shes paralyzed from the
shoulders down. The paralysis is quite temporary, though good luck trying to convince Char-
lotte of that. She slept on her side today, to ght the bedsores, and there was something about
the way she stared at the safety rail at the edge of the mattress. The bed is voice-activated, so if
she could somehow get her head between the bars of the safety rail, incline is all shed have
to say. As the bed powered up, shed be choked in seconds. And then theres the way she stares
at the looping cable that descends from the Hoyer lift, which swings her in and out of bed.
What can really keep a guy up at night is the knowledge that she doesnt need an exotic exit
strategy, not when shes exacted a promise from you to help her do it when the time comes.
I rise and go to her, but shes not listening to Nirvana yetshe tends to save it for when
she needs it most, after midnight, when her nerves really start to crackle.
I thought I heard a noise, I tell her. Kind of a whisper.
Short, choppy hair frames her drawn face, skin faint as refrigerator light.
I heard it, too, she says.
She spent months two, four, and seven crying pretty hardtheres no more helpless feel-
ing for a husband, let me tell you. But this period thats come after is harder to take: Her eyes
are wide, drained of emotion, and you cant tell what shes thinking. Its like shes looking
at things that arent even in the room.
In the silver dish by her voice remote is a half-smoked joint. I light it for her and hold it
to her lips.
Hows the weather in there? I ask.
Windy, she says through the smoke.
Windy is better than hail or lightning, or, God forbid, ooding, which is the sensation she
felt when her lungs were just starting to work again. But there are different kinds of wind.
I ask, Windy like a whistle through window screens, or windy like the rattle of storm
shutters?
A strong breeze, hissy and buffeting, like a microphone in the wind.
She smokes again. Charlotte hates being stoned, but she says it quiets the inside of her.
She has Guillain-Barr syndrome, a condition in which her immune system attacks the in-
I TS LATE, AND I CAN T SLEEP.
117
ESQUIRE FICTION
WI N N E R O F T H E 2 0 1 3 P U L I T Z E R P R I Z E F O R F I C T I O N
B Y A D A M J O H N S O N
lophane, a tiny infrared engine throbs with warmth.
I look at Charlotte.
Now will you listen to me? she asks. Now will you stop this
President business?
Its too late for that I tell her and release the drone. Together,
we watch it bumble around the room, bouncing off the walls, run-
ning into the Hoyer lift. Is it autonomous? Has someone been op-
erating it, someone watching our house? I lift it from its column of
air and, turning it over, ip off its power switch.
Charlotte looks toward her voice remote. Play music, she tells it.
Closing her eyes, she waits for me to place the headphones on
her ears, where she will hear Kurt Cobain come to life once more.

on and is hovering above my body, mapping me with a beam of soft
red light. I toss a sweater over it, dropping it to the oor. After mak-
ing sure Charlottes asleep, I pull out my iProjector. I turn it on and
the President appears in three dimensions, his torso life-sized in an
amber glow.
He greets me with a smile. Its good to be back in Palo Alto, he
says.
My algorithm has accessed the iProjectors GPS chip and searched
the Presidents database for location references. This one came
from a commencement address he gave at Stanford back when he
was a senator.
Mr. President, I say. Im sorry to bother you again, but I have
more questions.
He looks into the distance, contemplative. Shoot, he says.
I move into his line of sight but cant get him to look me in the
eye. Thats one of the design problems I ran across. Hopefully, Ill
be able to x it in beta.
Did I make a mistake in creating you, in releasing you into the
world? I ask. My wife says that youre keeping people from mourn-
ing, that this you keeps us from accepting the fact that the real you
is gone.
The President rubs the stubble on his chin. He looks down and
away.
You cant put the genie back in the bottle, he says.
Which is eerie, because thats a line hed spoken on 60 Minutes,
a moment when he expressed regret for legalizing drones for ci-
vilian use.
Do you know that Im the one who made you?
We are all born free, he says. And no person may trafc in
another.
But you werent born, I tell him. I wrote an algorithm, based
on the Linux operating kernel. Youre an open-source search en-
gine married to a dialog bot and a video compiler. The program
scrubs the Web and archives a persons images and videos and data
everything you say, youve said before.
For the rst time, the President falls silent.
I ask, Do you know that youre . . . that youve died?
The President doesnt hesitate.
The end of life is another kind of freedom, he says.
The assassination ashes in my eyes. Ive seen the video
so many times it plays without consentthe motorcade is
slowly crawling along while the President, on foot, parades
past the barricaded crowds. Someone in the throng catches
the Presidents eye. The President stops and turns, lifts a hand
in greeting. Then a bullet strikes him in the abdomen. The im-
pact bends him forward, and his eyes lift to confront the shooter, a
THE DRONE HAS SOMEHOW TURNED I TSELF
sulation around her nerves, so that when the brain sends signals to
the body, the electrical impulses ground out before they can be re-
ceived. A billion nerves inside her send signals that go everywhere,
nowhere. This is the ninth month, a month that is at the edge of the
medical literature. Its a place where the doctors no longer feel qual-
ied to tell us whether Charlottes nerves will begin to regenerate
or whether Charlotte will be stuck like this forever.
She exhales, coughing. Her right arm twitches, which means her
brain has attempted to tell her arm to rise and cover the mouth.
She tokes again, and through the smoke she says, Im worried.
What about?
You.
Youre worried about me?
I want you to stop talking to the President. Its time
to accept reality.
I try to be lighthearted. But hes the one who talks to me.
Then stop listening, okay? Hes gone. When your time
comes, youre supposed to fall silent.
Reluctantly I nod. But she doesnt understand. In the third month
of paralysis, she did nothing but watch videos, which made her cra-
zy. It made her swear off all screens, so shes probably the only per-
son in America who didnt see the video clips of the assassination.
If shed beheld the look in the Presidents eyes when his life was
taken, shed understand why I talk to him late at night. If she could
leave this room and feel the nation trying to grieve, shed know why
I reanimated the commander in chief and brought him back to life.
In regards to listening to the President, I say, I just want to point
out that you spend a third of your life listening to Nirvana, whose
songs are all from a guy who blew his brains out.
Charlotte tilts her head and looks at me like Im a stranger, like
I dont know the rst thing about her. Kurt Cobain took the pain
of his life and made it into something that mattered, that spoke to
people. Do you know how rare that is? What did the President leave
behind? Uncertainties, emptiness, a thousand rocks to overturn.
She talks like that when shes high. I decide to let it go. I tap out
the joint and lift her headphones. Ready for your Nirvana? I ask.
That sound, I hear it again, she says.
She tries to point, then gives up and nods toward the
window.
Its coming from there, she says.
At the window, I look out into the darkness. Its a normal
Palo Alto nightthe hiss of sprinklers, blue recycling bins,
a raccoon digging in the community garden. Then I notice
it, right before my eyes, a small black drone, hovering out-
side my window. Its tiny servos swivel to regard me. Real
quick, like Im snatching a cookie from a hot baking sheet,
I steal the drone out of the air and pull it inside. I close the
window and curtains, then study the thing: Its shell is
made of black foil, stretched
over tiny struts, like the
bones of a bats wing.
Behind a propel-
ler of clear cel-
I WAKE LATER A I N THE NI GHT.
119
person the camera never gets a look
at. A dawning settles into the Pres-
idents gaze, a look of clear recogni-
tionof a particular person, of some
kind of truth, of something he has fore-
seen? He takes the second shot in the
face. You can see the switch go offhis
limbs give and hes down. Men in suits con-
verge, shielding him, and the clip is over. They
put him on a machine for a few days, but the end had already come.
I glance at Charlotte, asleep. Still, I whisper, Mr. President, did
you and the First Lady ever talk about the future, about these kinds
of possibilities?
I wonder if the First Lady was the one to turn off the machine.
The President smiles, The First Lady and I have a wonderful re-
lationship. We share everything.
But were there instructions? Did you two make a plan?
His voice lowers, becomes sonorous. Are you asking about bonds
of matrimony?
I pause. Yes.
In this regard, he says, our only duty is to be of service, in any
way we can.
My mind ponders the ways in which I might have to be of ser-
vice to Charlotte.
The President then looks into the distance, like a ag is waving
there.
Im the President of the United States, he says, and I approved
this message.
Thats when I know our conversation is over. When I reach to
turn off the iProjector, the President looks me squarely in the eye,
a coincidence of perspective, I guess. We regard one another, his
eyes deep and melancholy, and my nger hesitates at the switch.
Seek your inner resolve, he tells me.
its just suddenly happening? The woman you love gets the u. Her
ngers tingle, her legs go rubbery. In the morning, she cant grip a
coffee cup. What nally gets her to the hospital is the need to pee.
She has got to pee, shes dying to pee, but the paralysis has begun:
The bladder can no longer hear the brain. After an ER doc inserts a
Foley catheter, you learn new wordsaxon, areexia, dendrite, my-
elin, ascending peripheral polyneuropathy.
Charlotte says shes lled with noise. Inside her is a storm.
The doctor has a big needle. He tells Charlotte to get on the gur-
ney. Charlottes scared to get on the gurney. Shes scared she wont
ever get up again. Please, honey, you say. Get on the gurney. Soon,
you behold the glycerin glow of a fresh-drawn vial of spinal uid.
And shes right. She doesnt get up again.
To begin plasmapheresis, a femoral stent must be placed. This
is performed by a tattooed phlebotomist whose headphones buzz
with Rage Against the Machine.
Next comes high-dose immunoglobulin therapy.
The doctors mention, casually, the word ventilator.
Charlottes mother arrives. She brings her cello.
Shes an expert on the
Siege of Leningrad. She
has written a book on the
topic. When the coma is in-
duced, she lls the neuro ward with the saddest
sounds ever conceived. For seven days, there is
nothing but the swish of vent bafes, the trill of vi-
tal monitors, and Shostakovich, Shostakovich, Shosta-
kovich. No one will tell her to stop. Nervous nurses appear
and disappear, whispering in Tagalog.
Two months of physical therapy in Santa Clara. Here are dunk tanks,
sonar stimulators, exoskeletal treadmills. Charlotte is tted for AFOs
and a head array. She becomes the person in the room who makes
the victims of other afictions feel better about their fate. She does
not make progress, shes not a soldier or a champ or a trouper.
Charlotte convinces herself that I will leave her for a wom-
an who works. In the rehab ward, she screams at me to get
a vasectomy so this other woman and myself will suffer a
barren future. My refusal becomes proof of this other
woman and our plans.
To soothe her, I read aloud Joseph Hellers mem-
oir about contracting Guillain-Barr syndrome. The
book was supposed to make us feel better. Instead, it
chronicles how great Hellers friends are, how high Hellers spir-
its are, how Heller leaves his wife to marry the beautiful nurse who
tends to him. And for Charlotte, the books ending is particularly
painful: Joseph Heller gets better.
We tumble into a well of despair, which is narrow and deep, a
place that seals us off, where we only hear our own voices, and we
exist in a uid thats clear and black. Everything is in the well with
uscareers, goals, travel, parenthoodso close that we can drown
them to save ourselves.
A doctor wants to oat Charlotte on a raft of antidepressants. She
will take no pills. Lightheartedly, the doctor says, Thats what IVs
are for. Charlotte levels her eyes and says, Next doctor, please.
The next doctor recommends discharge.
Home is unexpectedly surreal. Amid familiar surroundings, the im-
possibility of normal life is amplied. But the cat is happy, so happy to
have Charlotte home that it spends an entire night sprawled across
Charlottes throat, across her tracheal incision. Goodbye, cat! There
comes, strangely, a vaudevillian week of slaphappy humor, where bed-
pans and withering limbs are suddenly funny, where a booger
that cant be picked is hilarious, where everyday items drip with
bizarre humorI put a hat on Charlotte and we laugh and laugh.
She stares in bafement at the sight of a bra. There are lots of cat jokes!
This period passes, normal life returns. The cap to a hypodermic
needle, dropped unnoticed into the sheets, irritates a hole into Char-
lottes back. While I am in the garage, Charlotte watches a spider slow-
ly descend from the ceiling on a single thread. Charlotte tries to blow
it away. She blows and blows, but the spider disappears into her hair.
Still to be described are tests, tantrums, and silent treatments. To
come are the discoveries of Kurt Cobain, marijuana, and ever shorter
haircuts. Of these times, there is only one moment I must relate. It was
a normal night. I was beside Charlotte in the mechanical bed, holding
up her magazine and turning the pages, so I wasnt really facing her.
She said, You dont know how bad I want to get out of this bed.
Her voice was quiet, uninected. Shed said similar things a thou-
sand times.
I ipped the page and laughed at a picture whose caption read,
Stars are just like us!
Id do anything to escape, she said.
Charlottes job was to explicate the intricate back-
stories of celebrities, showing me how their narra-
HOW DI D WE GET TO THI S PLACE?
CAN YOU TELL A STORY THAT DOESN T BEGI N,
ESQUIRE
FICTION

To download a recording
of Adam Johnson reading
Nirvana, visit esquire.
com/nirvana, or stream it
via Netpage.
120 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
I N THE MORNI NG, BEFORE THE NURSES
So what did the President say?
Which president?
The dead one, she says.
I articulate the plantar fascia. How about this?
Feels like a spray of cool diamonds, she says. Come on, I know
you talked to him.
Its going to be one of her bad days, I can tell.
Let me guess, Charlotte says. The President told you to move
to the South Pacic to take up painting. Thats uplifting, isnt it?
I dont say anything.
Youd take me with you, right? I could be your assistant. Id hold
your palette in my teeth. If you need a model, I specialize in reclin-
ing nudes.
Shes thirsty. We use a neti pot as a bedside water cup. Charlotte,
lying down, can drink from the spout. While she sips, I say, If you
must know, the President told me to locate my inner resolve.
Inner resolve, she says. I could use some help tracking down
mine.
You have more resolve than anyone I know.
Jesus, youre sunny. Dont you know whats going on? Dont you
see that Im about to spend the rest of my life like this?
Pace yourself, darling. The days only a couple minutes old.
I know, she says. Im supposed to have reached a stage of en-
lightened acceptance or something. You think I like it that the only
person I have to get mad at is you? I know its not rightyoure the
one thing I love in this world.
You love Kurt Cobain.
Hes dead.
Too bad hes not alive for you to get mad at.
Man, I would let him have it, she says.
We hear Hector, the morning nurse, pull up outsidehe drives
an old car with a combustion engine.
I have to grab something from work, I tell her. But Ill be back.
Promise me something, she says.
tives rightfully adorned the Sistine Chapel of American culture. My
job was to make fun of the celebrities and pretend that I hadnt also
become caught up in their love battles and breakups.
But I could never do that to you, she said.
Do what? I asked.
Nothing.
What are you talking about, whats going through your head?
I turned to look at her. She was inches away.
Except for how it would hurt you, she said. I would get away.
Get away where?
From here.
Neither of us had spoken of the promise since the night it was
exacted. Id tried to pretend the promise didnt exist, but it exist-
edit existed.
Face it, youre stuck with me, I said, forcing a smile. Were des-
tined, were fated to be together. And soon youll be better, things
will be normal again.
My entire life is this pillow.
Thats not true. Youve got your friends and family. And youve
got technology. The whole world is at your ngertips.
By friends I meant her nurses and physical therapists. By fami-
ly I meant her distant and brooding mother. It didnt matter: Char-
lotte was too disengaged to even point out her nonfunctional n-
gers and their nonfeeling tips.
She rolled her head to the side and stared at the safety rail.
Its okay, she said. I would never do that to you.
study the drone in the early light. Most of the stealth and
propulsion parts are off the shelf, but the processors
are new to me, half hidden by a Kevlar shield. To get
the drone to talk, to get some forensics on who sent
it my way, Ill have to get my hands on the hash read-
er from work.
When Charlotte wakes, I prop her head and
massage her legs. Its our morning routine.
Lets generate those Schwann cells, I
tell her toes. Its time for Charlottes body
to start producing some myelin membranes.
Look whos Mr. Brightside, she says. You
must have been talking to the President. Isnt that
why you talk to him, to get all inspired? To see the
silver lining?
I lift her right foot and rub her Achilles tendon.
Last week, Charlotte failed a big test, the DTRE,
which measures deep tendon response and sig-
nals the beginning of recovery. Dont worry, the
doctor told us. I know of another patient that also
took nine months to respond, and he managed a full
recovery. I asked if we could contact this patient, to
know what he went through, to help us see whats ahead.
The doctor informed us this patient was attended to in France,
in the year 1918.
After the doctor left, I went into the garage and started making the
President. A psychologist would probably say the reason I created
him had to do with the promise I made Charlotte and the fact that
the President also had a relationship with the person who took his
life. But its simpler than that: I just needed to save somebody, and
with the President, it didnt matter that it was too late.
I tap Charlottes patella but theres no response. Any pain?
ARRI VE, I OPEN THE CURTAI NS AND
121 Clip, Save, Share, from any page.
the pulse visible in her desiccated wrists, from all the
fates she sarcastically paints. Its when Im away from
her that it comes crashing inits in the garage that
it hits me how scared she is, its at the store when I
cross tampons off the list that I consider how cruel life must seem to
her. Driving now, I think about how she has started turning toward the
wall even before the last song on the Nirvana album is over, that soon,
even headphones and marijuana will cease to work. My off-ramp up
ahead is blurry, and I realize there are tears in my eyes. I drive right
past my exit. I just let the Google lane carry me away.
have an intern deliver the hash reader, but here is the man himself,
item in hand. Theoretically, hash readers are impossible. Theoretical-
ly, you shouldnt be able to crack full-eld, hundred-key encryption.
But some guy in India did it, some guy Sanjay knows. Sanjays sensi-
tive about being from India, and he thinks its a clich that a guy with
his name runs a start-up in Palo Alto. So he goes by SJ and dresses
all D school. Hes got a Stanford MBA, but he basically just stole the
business model of a company called Reputation Defender. You cant
blame the guyhes one of those types with the hopes and dreams of
an entire village riding on him.
SJ follows me into the garage, where I dock the drone and
use some slave code to parse its drive. He hands me the hash
reader, hand-soldered in Bangalore from an old motherboard.
We marvel at it, the most sophisticated piece of cryptography on earth,
here in our unworthy hands. But if you want to curate the reputa-
tions of Silicon Valley, you better be ready to crack some codes.
Hes quiet while I initialize the drone and run a diagnostic.
Long time no see, he nally says.
I needed some time, I tell him.
Understood, SJ says. Weve missed you is all Im saying. You
bring the President back to life, send fteen million people to our
Web site, and then we dont see you for a week.
The drone knows something is suspiciousit powers off. I force
a reboot.
Got yourself a drone there? SJ asks.
Its a rescue, I say. Im adopting it.
SJ nods. Thought you should know the Secret Service came by.
Looking for me? I ask. Doesnt sound so secret.
They must have been impressed with your President. I know
I was.
SJ has long lashes and big, manga brown eyes. He hits me with
them now.
Ive gotta tell you, he says. The President is a work of art, a
seamlessly integrated data interface. Im in real admiration. This
is a game-changer. You know what I envision?
I notice his ashy glasses. Are those Android? I ask.
Yeah.
Can I have them?
He hands them over, and I search the frames for their IP address.
SJ gestures large. I envision your algorithm running on Reputa-
tion Curator. Average people could bring their personalities to life, to
speak for themselves, to customize and personalize how theyre seen
by the world. Your program is like Google, Wikipedia, and Facebook,
all in one. Everyone with a reputation on the planet would pay to
have you animate them, to make them articulate, vigilant . . . eternal.
You can have it, I tell SJ. The algorithms core is open source
I used a freeware protocol.
SJ ashes a brittle smile. Weve actually looked into that, he says,
No.
Come on. If you do, Ill release you from the other promise.
Far from being scary, the mention of the promise is strangely
relieving.
Still, I shake my head. I know she doesnt mean itshell never
release me.
She says, Will you please agree to be straight with me? You dont
have to make me feel better, you dont have to be all fake and opti-
mistic. It doesnt help.
I am optimistic.
You shouldnt be, she says. Pretending, thats what killed Kurt
Cobain.
I think it was the shotgun he pointed at his head, but I dont say that.
I only know one line from Nirvana. I karaoke it to Charlotte:
With the lights on, I sing, shes less dangerous.
She rolls her eyes. You got it wrong, she says. But she smiles.
I try to encourage this. What, I dont get points for trying?
You dont hear that? Charlotte asks.
Hear what?
Thats the sound of me clapping.
I give up, I say and make for the door.
Bed, incline, Charlotte tells her remote. Her torso slowly rises.
Its time to start her day.
company called Reputation Curator. Basically the company bribes/
threatens Yelpers and Facebookers to retract negative comments about
dodgy lawyers and incompetent dentists. The work is labor intensive,
so I was hired to write a program that would sweep the Web to con-
struct client proles. Creating the President was only a step away.
In the vehicle next to me is a woman with her iProjector on the
passenger seat, and shes having an animated discussion with the
President as she drives. At the next overpass, I see an older black
man in a tan jacket, looking down at the trafc. Standing next
to him is the President. Theyre not speaking, just standing
together, silently watching the cars go by.
A black car, driverless, begins pacing me in the next lane.
When I speed up, it speeds up. Through its smoked win-
dows, I can see it has no cargotheres nothing inside but a
battery array big enough to ensure no car could outrun it. Even
though I like driving, even though it relaxes me, I shift to automat-
ic and dart into the Google lane, where I let go of the wheel and sign
on to the Web for the rst time since I released the President a week
ago. I log in and discover that fourteen million people have download-
ed the President. I also have seven hundred new messages. The rst
is from the dude who started Facebook, and it is not spamhe wants
to buy me a burrito and talk about the future. I skip to the latest mes-
sage, which is from Charlotte: I dont mean to be mean. I lost my feel-
ing, remember? Ill get it back. Im trying, really, I am.
I see the President again, on the lawn of a Korean church. The
minister has placed an iProjector on a chair, and the President
appears to be engaging a Bible thats been propped before him
on a stand. I understand that he is a ghost that will haunt us until
our nation comes to grips with what has happened: that he is gone,
that he has been stolen from us, that it is irreversible. And Im not
an idiot. I know whats really being stolen from me, slowly and ir-
revocably, before my eyes. I know that late at night I should be go-
ing to Charlotte instead of the President.
But when Im with Charlotte, theres a membrane between us, a layer
my mind places there to protect me from the tremor in her voice, from
I TAKE THE 101 FREEWAY SOUTH TOWARD
MOUNTAI N VI EW, WHERE I WRI TE CODE AT A
WHEN I ARRI VE HOME, MY BOSS, SANJAY, I S
ESQUIRE
FICTION
WAI TI NG FOR ME. I D MESSAGED HI M TO
Clip, Save, Share, from any page. Download free from the iTunes App Store or Google Play.
I roll my eyes and the drone does a back ip.
My emotion is simple, SJ tells me. Its time to come back to work.
I will, I tell him. Ive just got some things to deal with.
SJ looks at me. Its okay if you dont want to talk about your wife.
But you dont have to be so alone about things. Everyone at work,
were all worried about you.
rolled to the window so she can see outside. Shes wearing old yo-
ga tights, which are slack on her, and she smells of the cedar oil her
massage therapist rubs her with. I go to her and open the window.
You read my mind, she says and breathes the fresh air.
I put the glasses on her, and it takes her eyes a minute of ashing
around before the drone lifts from my hands. A grand smile crosses
her face as she puts it through its paceshovering, rotating, swiv-
eling the cameras servos. And then the drone is off. I watch it cross
the lawn, veer around the compost piles, and then head for the com-
munity garden. It oats down the rows, and though I dont have the
view Charlotte does in her glasses, I can see the drone inspecting the
blossoms of summer squash, the fat bottoms of Roma tomatoes. It
rises along the bean trellises and tracks watermelons by their
umbilical stems. When she makes it to her plot, she gasps.
My roses, she says. Theyre still there. Someones
been taking care of them.
She has the drone inspect every bud and bloom.
Carefully, she maneuvers it through the bright pet-
als, brushing against the blossoms, then shuttles it
home again. Suddenly it is hovering before us. Char-
lotte leans slightly forward and sniffs the drone deeply.
I never thought Id smell my roses again, she says, her face ush
with hope and amazement, and suddenly the tears are streaming.
I remove her glasses, and we leave the drone hovering there.
She regards me. I want to have a baby, she says.
A baby?
Its been nine months. I could have had one already. I couldve
been doing something useful this whole time.
But your illness, I say. We dont know whats ahead.
She closes her eyes like shes hugging something, like shes hold-
ing some dear truth.
With a baby, Id have something to show for all this. Id have a
reason. At the least, Id have something to leave behind.
You cant talk like that, I tell her. Weve talked about you not
talking like this.
But she wont listen to me, she wont open her eyes.
All she says is And I want to start tonight.
in the gold of afternoon light, the President rises and comes to life.
He adjusts his collar, cuffs, runs his thumb down a black lapel as if
he exists only in the moment before a camera will broadcast him
live to the world.
Mr. President, I say. Im sorry to bother you again.
Nonsense, he tells me. I serve at the pleasure of the people.
Do you remember me? I ask. Do you remember the problems
Ive been talking to you about?
Perennial is the nature of the problems that plague man. Partic-
ular is the voice with which they call to each of us.
and, well, it seems like you coded it with seven-layer encryption.
Yeah, I guess I did, didnt I? Youre the one with the hash
reader. Just crack it.
I dont want it to be like that, SJ says. Lets be partners.
Your concept is brilliantan algorithm that scrubs the Web and
compiles the results into a personal animation. The President is the
proof, but its also given away the idea. If we move now, we
can protect it, it will be ours. In a few weeks, though, every-
one will have their own.
I dont point out the irony of SJ wanting to protect a
business model.
Is the President just an animation to you? I ask. Have you
spoken with him? Have you listened to what he has to say?
Im offering stock, SJ says. Wheelbarrows of it.
The drone offers up its rewall like a seductress her throat. I de-
ploy the hash reader, whose processer hums and ashes red. We sit
on folding chairs while it works.
I need your opinion, I tell him.
Right on, he says and removes a bag of weed. He starts rolling
a joint, then passes me the rest. Hes been hooking me up the last
couple months, no questions.
What do you think of Kurt Cobain? I ask.
Kurt Cobain, he repeats as he works the paper between his n-
gers. The man was pure, he says and licks the edge. Too pure for
this world. Have you heard Patti Smiths cover of Smells Like Teen
Spirit? Unassailable, man.
He lights the joint and passes it my way, but I wave it off. He sits
there, staring out the open mouth of my garage into the Kirkland
plumage of Palo Alto. Apple, Oracle, PayPal, and Hewlett-Packard
were all started in garages within a mile of here. About once a month,
SJ gets homesick and cooks litti chokha for everyone at work. He
plays Sharda Sinha songs and gets this look in his eyes like hes back
in Bihar, land of peepul trees and roller birds. He has this look now.
He says, You know my family downloaded the President. They have
no idea what I do out here, as if I could make them understand that I
help bad sushi chefs ward off Twitter trolls. But the American Pres-
ident, that they understand.
The mayor, barefoot, jogs past us. Moments later, a billboard
drives by.
Hey, can you make the President speak Hindi? SJ asks. If you
could get the American President to say, I could go for a Pepsi in
Hindi, Id make you the richest man on earth.
The hash readers light turns green. Just like that, the drone is
mine. I disconnect the leads and begin to synch the Android glasses.
The drone uses its moment of freedom to rise and study SJ.
SJ returns the drones intense scrutiny.
Who do you think sent it after you? he asks. Mozilla? Craigslist?
Well know in a moment.
Silent. Black. Radar deecting, SJ says. I bet this is Mi-
crosofts dark magic.
The new OS suddenly initiates, the drone responds, and,
using retinal commands, I send it on a lap around the garage. Lo
and behold, I say. Turns out our little friend speaks Google.
Wow, SJ says. Dont be evil, huh?
When the drone returns, it targets SJ in the temple with a green
laser.
What the fuck, SJ says.
Dont worry, I tell him. Its just taking your pulse and
temperature.
What for?
Probably trying to read your emotions, I say. I bet its a left-
over subroutine.
You sure youre in charge of that thing?
LATER I N THE DAY, I CARRY THE i PROJECTOR
OUT BACK TO THE GARDENI NG SHED. HERE,
I NSI DE, CHARLOTTE I S SUSPENDED I N A SLI NG
122 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
FROM THE HOYER LI FT, WHI CH HAS BEEN
123
tells others how much more you
have to give. It marks you for-
ever as one who can be count-
ed upon, as one who in times
of need will lift up and carry those who have
fallen. Proudly, he stares into the empty space
above my shoulder. He says, Now return home to
your wife, soldier, and start a new chapter of life.
placed her in a negligee. Charlotte lowers the bed
as I approach. The electric motor is the only sound
in the room.
Im ovulating, she announces. I can feel it.
You can feel it?
I dont need to feel it, she says. I just know.
Shes strangely calm.
Are you ready? she asks.
Sure.
I steady myself on the safety rail that separates us.
She asks, Do you want some oral sex rst?
I shake my head.
Come join me, then, she says.
I start to climb on the bedshe stops me.
Hey, Sunshine, she says. Take off your
clothes.
I cant remember the last time she called
me that.
Oh, yeah, I say and unbutton my shirt, un-
zip my jeans. When I drop my underwear, I feel
weirdly, I dont know, naked. Im not sure whether
I should remove my socks. I leave them on. I swing
a leg up, then kind of lie on her.
A look of contentment crosses her face. This is how
its supposed to be, she says. Its been a long time since
Ive been able to look into your eyes.
Her body is narrow but warm. I dont know where to put my hands.
Do you want to pull down my panties?
I sit up and begin to work them off. I see the scar from the femoral
stent. When I heft her legs, there are the bedsores weve been ghting.
Remember our trip to Mexico, she asks, when we made love on
top of that pyramid? It was like we were in the past and the future at
the same time. I kind of feel that now.
Youre not high, are you?
What? she asks. Like Id have to be stoned to remember the rst
time we talked about having a baby?
When I have her panties off and her legs hooked, I pause. It takes
all my focus to get an erection, and then I cant believe I have one. I
see the moment coldly, distant, the way a drone would see it: Heres
my wife, paralyzed, invalid, insensate, and though everythings the
opposite of erotic, I am poised above her, completely hard.
Im wet, arent I? Charlotte asks. Ive been thinking about this
all day.
I do remember the pyramid. The stone was cold, the staircase
steep. The past to me was a week of Charlotte in Mayan dresses, coo-
ing every baby she came across. Having sex under faint and sleepy
stars, I tried to imagine the future: a faceless someone conceived
on a sacricial altar. I nished early and tried to shake it off. That
person would probably never come to be. Plus, we had to focus on
matters at hand if we were going to make it down all those steps in
My problem today is of a personal nature.
Then I place this conversation under the
seal.
I havent made love to my wife in a long time.
He holds up a hand to halt me. He smiles in a know-
ing, fatherly way.
Times of doubt, he tells me, are inherent in the com-
pact of civil union.
My question is about children.
Children are the future, he tells me.
Would you have still brought yours into the world, know-
ing that only one of you might be around to raise them?
Single parenting places too much of a strain on todays
families, he says. Thats why Im introducing legislation that
will reduce the burden
on our hardworking
parents.
What about
your children?
Do you miss them?
My mind goes to them
constantly. Being away from
them is the great sacrice of the
ofce.
In the shed, suspended dust makes
his specter glitter and swirl. It makes
him look like he is cutting out, like he
will leave at any moment. I feel some urgency.
When its all nally over, I ask, where is it that we go?
Im no preacher, the President says, but I believe we go where
we are called.
Where were you called to? Where is it that you are?
Dont we all try to locate ourselves among the pillars of uncom-
mon knowledge?
You dont know where you are, do you? I ask the President.
Im sure my opponent would like you to believe that.
Its okay, I say, more to myself. I didnt expect you to know.
I know exactly where I am, the President says. Then, in a voice
that sounds pieced from many scraps, he adds, Im currently posi-
tioned at three seven point four four north by one two two point one
four west.
I think hes done. I wait for him to say Good night and God bless Amer-
ica. Instead, he reaches out to touch my chest. I have heard that you
have made much personal sacrice, he says. And Im told that your
sense of duty is strong.
I dont think I agree, but I say, Yes sir.
His glowing hand clasps my shoulder, and it doesnt matter that
I cant feel it.
Then this medal that I afx to your uniform is much more than
a piece of silver. It is a symbol of how much you have given, not
just in armed struggle and not just in service to your nation. It
WHEN DARKNESS FALLS, I GO
TO CHARLOTTE. THE NI GHT NURSE HAS
ESQUIRE
FICTION
Adam Johnson is the author of Parasites Like Us and
The Orphan Masters Son, which won the 2013 Pulitzer
Prize for Fiction. For more about him, see page 16.
the dark.
I think I feel something, she says. Youre
inside me, right? Because Im pretty sure I can
feel it.
Here I enter my wife and begin our love-
making. I try to focus on the notion that if
this works, Charlotte will be safe, that for
nine months shed let no harm come to her,
and maybe shes right, maybe the baby will
stimulate something and recovery will begin.
Charlotte smiles. Its brittle, but its a smile.
Hows this for nding the silver liningI
wont have to feel the pain of childbirth.
This makes me wonder if a paralyzed
woman can push out a baby, or does she get
the scalpel, and if so, is there anesthesia,
and suddenly my body is at the edge of not
cooperating.
Hey, are you here? she asks. Im trying
to get you to smile.
I just need to focus for a minute, I tell her.
I can tell youre not really into this, she
says. I can tell youre still hung up on the
idea Im going to do something drastic to my-
self, right? Just because I talk about crazy
stuff sometimes doesnt mean Im going to
do anything.
Then whyd you make me promise to help
you do it?
The promise came early, in the beginning,
just before the ventilator. She had a vomiting
reex that lasted for hours. The doctors said
it can happen. Imagine endless dry heaves
while youre paralyzed. The doctors nally
gave her narcotics. Drugged, dead-limbed,
and vomiting, thats when it hit her that she
was no longer in control. I was holding her
hair, keeping it out of the basin. She was pant-
ing between heaves.
She said, Promise me that when I tell you
to make it stop, youll make it stop.
Make what stop? I asked.
She retched, long and cord-rattling. I knew
what she meant.
It wont come to that, I said.
She tried to say something but retched
again.
I promise, I said.
Now, in her mechanical bed, her negligee
straps slipping off her shoulders, Charlotte
says, Its hard for you to understand, I know.
But the idea that theres a way out, its what
allows me to keep going. Id never take it. You
believe me, dont you?
I hate that promise, I hate that you made
me make it.
Id never do it, and Id never make you help.
Then release me, I tell her.
Im sorry, she says.
I decide to just shut it all out and keep going.
Im losing my erection, and my mind wonders
what will happen if I go softdo I have it in me
to fake it?but I shut it out and keep going and
going, pounding on Charlotte until I can barely
feel anything. Her breasts loll alone under me.
From the bedside table, the drone turns itself
on and rises, hovering. It ashes my forehead
with its green laser, as if what Im feeling is that
easy to determine, as if there would be a name
for it. Is it spying on me, mining my emotions,
or executing old code? I wonder if the hash
reader failed or if the drones OS reverted to
a previous version or if Google reacquired it
or if its in some kind of autonomous mode.
Or it could be that someone hacked the An-
droid glasses, or maybe . . . thats when I look
down and see Charlotte is crying.
I stop.
No, dont, she says. Keep going.
Shes not crying hard, but they are fat, la-
menting tears.
We can try again tomorrow, I tell her.
No, Im okay, she says. Just keep going
and do something for me, would you?
All right.
Put the headphones on me.
You mean, while were doing it?
Music on, she says, and from the head-
phones on her bedside table, I hear Nirva-
na start to hum.
I know Im doing it all wrong, I say. Its
been a long time, and . . .
Its not you, she says. I just need my
music. Just put them on me.
Why do you need Nirvana? What is it to
you?
She closes her eyes and shakes her head.
What is it with this Kurt Cobain? I say.
Whats your deal with him?
I grab her wrists and pin them down, but
she cant feel it.
Why do you have to have this music?
Whats wrong with you? I demand. Just
tell me what it is thats wrong with you.
drone wanders lost along the walls, look-
ing for a way out. I turn on a computer and
search online until I nd one of these Nir-
vana albums. I play the whole thing, just sit-
ting there in the dark. The guy, this Kurt Co-
bain, sings about being stupid and dumb and
unwanted. In one song he says that Jesus
doesnt want him for a sunbeam. In anoth-
er song, he says he wants milk and laxatives
along with cherry-avored antacids. He has
a song called All Apologies, where he keeps
singing, What else can I be? All apologies.
But he never actually apologizes. He doesnt
even say what he did wrong.
The drone, having found no escape, comes
to me and hovers silently. I must look pret-
ty pathetic because the drone takes my
temperature.
I lift the remote for the garage-door open-
er. Is this what you want? I ask. Are you
going to come back, or am I going to have to
come nd you?
The drone silently hums, impassive atop
its column of warm air.
I press the button. The drone waits un-
til the garage door is all the way up. Then it
snaps a photograph of me and zooms off in-
to the Palo Alto night.
I stand and breathe the air, which is cool
and smells of owers. Theres enough moon-
light to cast leaf patterns on the driveway.
Down the street, I spot the glowing eyes of
our cat. I call his name but he doesnt come.
I gave him to a friend a couple blocks away,
and for a few weeks the cat returned at night
to visit me. Not anymore. This feeling of being
in proximity to something thats lost to you,
it seems like my whole life right now. Its a
feeling Charlotte would understand if shed
just talk to the President. But hes not the one
she needs to speak to, I suddenly understand.
I return to my computer bench and re up a
bank of screens. I stare into their blue glow
and get to work. It takes me hours, most of
the night, before Im done.
Its almost dawn when I go to Charlotte.
The room is dark, and I can only see her out-
line. Bed incline, I say, and she starts to rise.
She wakes and stares at me but says nothing.
Her face has that lack of expression that comes
only after its been through every emotion.
I set the iProjector in her lap. She hates the
thing but says nothing. She only tilts her head
a little, like shes sad for me. Then I turn it on.
Kurt Cobain appears before her, clad in
a bathrobe and composed of soft blue light.
Charlotte inhales. Oh my God, she
murmurs.
She looks at me. Is it him?
I nod.
She marvels at him.
What do I say? she asks. Can he talk?
I dont answer.
Kurt Cobains hair is in his face. Shifting
her gaze, Charlotte tries to look into his eyes.
While the President couldnt quite manage
to nd your eyes, Kurt is purposefully avoid-
ing them.
I cant believe how young you are, Char-
lotte tells him. Youre just a boy.
Kurts silent, then he mumbles, Im old.
Are you really here? she asks.
Here we are now, he sings. Entertain
us.
His voice is rough and hard lived. Its some
kind of proof of life to Charlotte.
Charlotte looks at me, lled with wonder.
I thought he was gone, she says. I cant be-
lieve hes really here.
Kurt shrugs. I only appreciate things
when theyre gone, he says.
Charlotte looks stricken.
I recognize that line, she says to me.
Thats a line from his suicide note. How does
he know that? Has he already written it, does
he know what hes going to do?
I dont know, I tell her. This isnt my con-
versation to have. I back away toward the
door, and just as Im leaving, I hear her start
to talk to him.
Dont do what youre thinking about do-
ing, she pleads with him. You dont know
how special you are, you dont know how
much you matter to me. Please dont take
yourself from me, she says carefully, like
shes talking to a child. You cant take your-
self from me.
She leans toward Kurt Cobain, like she
wants to throw her arms around him and
hold him, like shes forgotten that her arms
dont work and theres no him to embrace.
Esquire Fiction
124 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
I GO TO THE GARAGE, WHERE THE
below him. He de-
scribes the moment:
He must not see me. The thought barely had
time to go through my head before Chucks col-
orful pilot chute blossomed out of his back-
pack. His pilot chute caught the 120-mph
breeze coming around him and shot straight
toward me, pulling his main parachute in its
sleeve right behind it.
From the instant I saw Chucks pilot chute
emerge, I had a fraction of a second to react.
For it would take less than a second to tumble
through his deploying main parachute, and
quite likelyright into Chuck himself. At that
speed, if I hit his arm or his leg I would take
it right off, dealing myself a fatal blow in the
process. If I hit him directly, both our bodies
would essentially explode.
Instead, Alexander managed to react in
the most perfect way possible to the scenar-
io, instantaneously and without conscious
effort angling his body so that it rocketed
away from Chuck, avoiding disaster by mi-
croseconds. At the time, he marveled at what
he believed must have been his brains un-
tapped capacity for preternaturally quick
thinking. Now he interprets this incident
differently.
This book is about the events that changed
my mind on the matter. They convinced me
that, as marvelous a mechanism as the brain
is, it was not my brain that saved my life that
day at all. What sprang into action the sec-
ond Chucks chute started to open was anoth-
er, much deeper part of me. A part that could
move so fast because it was not stuck in time
at all, the way the brain and body are.
He has his beginning.
There was a man named Chuck in the Uni-
versity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Sport
Parachute Club. He wont return phone calls.
But his sister-in-law does.
Shes read Proof of Heaven. She immedi-
ately thought to herself that the Chuck in
the book must have been her brother-in-law.
She sends Chuck a few e-mails. Finally he re-
sponds. He remembers Alexander. He says
he doesnt remember anything like the inci-
dent Alexander describes.
Alexander can understand the confusion.
Its not Chuck, he says today. I probably
should have put a disclaimer in the front of the
book saying that Chuck is not Chuck. It is ac-
tually somebody not named Chuck. Because
I cannot give the name of the person it was.
Because the attorneys at Simon & Schuster
would be mad at me. Because potentially they
did something wrong. Potentially they were
liable for causing trouble, etc., etc. So I am un-
der very strict advice from the Simon & Schus-
ter attorneys not to divulge who that was.
But if the man whod opened the chute be-
low him had done something wrong, it was
something wrong that hadnt caused any per-
sonal injury. There wouldnt have been any
legal liability there, right?
Right, he says. Well, that was my argu-
ment, but these attorneys, it was kind of sur-
prising to me, that was one of the few things
they focused on. They said, Do not, under
any circumstances, divulge who that was!
So he had changed the characters name to
Chuck, which happened to be the real name
of someone he did skydive with?
Its not Chuck, he repeats. Its not
Chuck.
Is he still in touch with Chuck?
No.
And fake Chuck?
No, I dont know what happened to fake
Chuck.
Is there anyone else who was part of the
jump that day who might be able to verify
his story?
You know, theres not. Because I cant
tell you exactly which day it was. And my
logbookthose pages in my logbook I dont
have right now.
The book progresses. He starts to hone
his argument and to shape its presentation.
He is, he writes, a practicing neurosur-
geon and is familiar with the most ad-
vanced concepts in brain science and con-
sciousness studies. His decades of research
and hands-on work in the operating room
put him in a better-than-average position to
judge not only the reality but also the impli-
cations of what happened to me.
He introduces his central thesis.
During my coma, he writes, my brain
wasnt working improperlyit wasnt work-
ing at all. This is the key. His brain wasnt
working, and yet he had these vivid memo-
ries of voyaging through these other realms:
the murky dark, the butteries, the vast dark-
ness, and the luminous, all-knowing creator.
How could he have memories from a time
when his brain wasnt working at all? From
a time when, as he writes, my mind, my spir-
itwhatever you may choose to call the cen-
tral, human part of mewas gone.
The answer is simple and logical. It is al-
so, he writes, of stunning importance. Not
just to me, but to all of us.
Alexander writes, The place I went was
real, real in a way that makes the life were
living here and now completely dreamlike
by comparison.
As he nears the end of his tale, every part
of his story seems to be connected to every
other part in mysterious ways. For instance,
his coma began on Monday, November 10,
and by Saturday, it had been raining for ve
days straight, ever since the afternoon of my
entrance into the ICU. Then, on Sunday, af-
ter six days of torrents, just before he woke
up, the rain stopped:
To the east, the sun was shooting its rays
through a chink in the cloud cover, lighting up
the lovely ancient mountains to the west and
the layer of cloud above as well, giving the gray
clouds a golden tinge.
Then, looking toward the distant peaks, op-
posite to where the mid-November sun was
starting its ascent, there it was.
A perfect rainbow.
It was as though heaven itself was cheer-
ing Alexanders return.
Dave Wert, meteorologist in charge at the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin-
istration ofce that encompasses Lynchburg,
reviews the weather records for the week of
November 10 through 16. There was noth-
ing on the tenth, he says. Nothing on the
eleventh . . . two hundredths of an inch on
the twelfth. The next three days, he says,
were rainy and miserable. Then the storm
appeared to break on the evening of the f-
teenth. The sixteenth was another clear day.
Could there have been a rainbow on the
morning of the sixteenth?
No, he says.
Unlike weather records, Alexanders medi-
cal records are all condential. Alexander does
not plan to make them public, though he did
offer to allow three of the doctors who treat-
ed him to speak about his case. Two of them
declined the opportunity. The other, Dr. Lau-
ra Potter, was on duty in the ER of Lynchburg
General Hospital on the morning of Novem-
ber 10, 2008, when the EMTs brought him in.
Both Alexander in his book and Potter in
her recollections describe Alexander arriv-
ing in the ER groaning and ailing and rav-
ing and having to be physically restrained.
In Proof of Heaven, Alexander describes Dr.
Potter then administering him sedatives
to calm him down.
Heres how Dr. Potter remembers it:
We couldnt work with Eben at all, we
couldnt get vital signs, he just was not able
to comply. So I had to make the decision to
just place him in a chemically induced coma.
Really for his own safety, until we could treat
him. And so I did. . . . I put him to sleep, if you
will, and put him on life support.
After Alexander was taken from the ER
to the ICU, Potter says, the doctors there ad-
ministered anesthetics that kept him in the
coma. The next day, she went to visit him.
And of course he was still in an induced
coma, she says. On ventilator support.
They tried to let him wake up and see what
he would do, but he was in exactly the same
agitated state. Even if they tried to ease up,
a little bit even, on the sedation. In fact, for
days, every time they would try to wean his
sedationjust thrashing, trying to scream,
and grabbing at his tube.
In Proof of Heaven, Alexander writes that he
spent seven days in a coma caused by a rare
case of E. coli bacterial meningitis. There is
no indication in the book that it was Laura
Potter, and not bacterial meningitis, that in-
duced his coma, or that the physicians in the
ICU maintained his coma in the days that fol-
lowed through the use of anesthetics. Alexan-
der also writes that during his week in the ICU
he was present in body alone, that the bac-
terial assault had left him with an all-but-de-
stroyed brain. He notes that by convention-
al scientic understanding, if you dont have
a working brain, you cant be conscious, and
a key point of his argument for the reality of
the realms he claims to have visited is that his
The Prophet
[continued from page 95]
125
The title of the book, according to Alexan-
der, is generated during a meeting he doesnt
attend, a meeting between executives at Si-
mon & Schuster and, according to him, ex-
ecutives at various ABC television programs,
including Good Morning America, 20/20, and
Nightline. During the meeting, the Simon &
Schuster executives, who are trying to line
up coverage for the book, are making their
pitchthis renowned neurosurgeon visits
the afterlife, comes back with wondrous sto-
ries to telland toward the end of the meet-
ing an ABC executive asks if the Simon &
Schuster execs can summarize what makes
the book important.
Its proof of heaven! someone blurts.
In his study, toward the end of our conversa-
tion, Alexander distances himself from the title.
When they rst came to me with that ti-
tle I didnt like it at all, he says. Because I
knew from my journey that it was very clear
to me that no human brain or mind, no kind
of scientic philosophical entity will ever be
able to know enough to say yes or no to the
existence of that realm or deity, because its
so far beyond our human understanding.
It is, he says, laughable and the high-
est form of folly, of hubris to think that any-
one could ever prove heaven. I knew, he
says, that proof in a scientic sense was ri-
diculous. I mean, no one could have that.
We talk five weeks later by Skype. Hes in a
hotel in Vancouver, at the beginning of a one-
and-a-half-week stint of speaking engage-
ments and book signings. He looks relaxed,
serene, wearing another button-down shirt,
smiling into the Internet. Hes excited to be
on the road, he says, eager to spread his mes-
sage of hope. He hasnt had surgical privileg-
es since October 2007, but he still views him-
self as a healer.
I remind him of what he said about his
books title during our previous meeting,
and ask whether there were any parts of the
books contents he would concede are sim-
ilarly hyperbolic. He says no, there are not.
And he now says that not even the title is,
strictly speaking, inaccurate. It just doesnt
go far enough. This is so much more than a
proof of heaven, he says. Proof of heaven
is kind of a minuscule little claim compared
to what is really there.
We talk about rainstorms and intubations
and chemically induced comas, and I can see
it in his face, the moment he knows for sure
that the story Ive been working on is not the
one he wanted me to tell.
What Im worried about, he says, is that
youre going to be so busy trying to smash out
these little tiny res that youre going to miss
the big point of the book.
I ask whether an account of his profession-
al struggles should have been included in a
book that rests its authority on his profession-
al credentials.
He says no, because medical boards in var-
ious states investigated the malpractice alle-
gations and concluded he could retain his li-
cense. And besides, thats all in the past. The
memories could not have been hallucinations,
since he didnt possess a brain capable of creat-
ing even a hallucinatory conscious experience.
I ask Potter whether the manic, agitated
state that Alexander exhibited whenever
they weaned him off his anesthetics during
his rst days of coma would meet her de-
nition of conscious.
Yes, she says. Conscious but delirious.
Potter hasnt read Proof of Heaven, al-
though she did get an advance look at a few
passages. About a year after his recovery, Al-
exander approached Potter at a track meet
that both of their sons were competing in
and told her that hed started writing a book,
and that he wanted her to take a look at some
parts in which he described her thought pro-
cesses in the emergency room. He wanted,
he said, to make sure that youre okay with
what Ive done. He later e-mailed the pas-
sages to her, and when she read them, she
found that they were sort of what a doctor
would think, but not exactly what was going
through my head. She told him so, and ac-
cording to Potter he responded that it was a
matter of artistic license, and that aspects
of his book were dramatized, so it may not
be exactly how it went, but its supposed to
be interesting for readers.
One of the books most dramatic scenes
takes place just before she sends him from
the ER to the ICU:
In the nal moments before leaving the
emergency room, and after two straight hours
of guttural animal wails and groaning, I be-
came quiet. Then, out of nowhere, I shouted
three words. They were crystal clear, and heard
by all the doctors and nurses present, as well
as by Holley, who stood a few paces away, just
on the other side of the curtain.
God, help me!
Everyone rushed over to the stretcher. By
the time they got to me, I was completely
unresponsive.
Potter has no recollection of this incident,
or of that shouted plea. What she does re-
member is that she had intubated Alexan-
der more than an hour prior to his departure
from the emergency room, snaking a plastic
tube down his throat, through his vocal cords,
and into his trachea. Could she imagine her
intubated patient being able to speak at all,
let alone in a crystal-clear way?
No, she says.
He finds an agent, and the agent shops
his book proposal around, and soon Simon
& Schuster offers him a book deal. They put
it on the fast track for publishing, want to
get it out that same year. A writer named
Ptolemy Tompkins, who has written oth-
er books about near-death experiences, is
brought in to help chop down the manuscript
by more than half. Alexander meets in New
York with the publishers and his editor, but
once the deal is struck, the gears of the pub-
lishing world grind on even when hes back
down south.
fact of the matter, he says of the suits, is they
dont matter at all to me. . . . You cannot imag-
ine how minuscule they appear in compari-
son to what I saw, where I went, and the mes-
sage that I bring back.
His survival is a miracle, he says. His doc-
tors told him that he is alive when he should be
dead, and he believes intensely that he is alive
for a reason, to spread the word about the love
awaiting us all in heaven. To heal.
By focusing on the inconsistencies in his
story, on recollections that dont seem to add
up, on a court-documented history of revis-
ing facts, on the distinctions between natu-
ral and medically induced comas, he says,
is to miss the forest for the trees. Thats all
misleading stuff, irrelevant to his journey
and story.
Toward the end, theres a note of pleading
in his voice.
I just think that youre doing a grave disser-
vice to your readers to lead them down a path-
way of thinking that any of that is, is relevant.
And I just, I really ask, as a friend, dont . . .
The walls are light blue at the bottom and
darker blue toward the top, like the May sky.
There are owers everywhere, purple and
pink and white, sprouting from pots and
oating in clear glass bowls. On a bright or-
ange altar at the rear of the room, multiple
swatches of cloth, yellow and red and green,
hang from a life-sized golden statue of Bud-
dha. The Dalai Lama reclines in a cushioned
throne in front of the altar, under the Bud-
dha. Hes wearing a red robe with a yellow
shoulder band that loops around and drapes
over one of his arms, leaving the other arm,
which is as smooth and hairless as a childs,
exposed. Alexander is wearing a robe, too,
but its a standard black convocation robe.
Hes sitting a few feet to the left of the Da-
lai Lama, in a smaller chair. Both are here to
speak at the graduation ceremony of Maitri-
pa College, a Buddhist college in Portland,
Oregon. Alexander is slated to speak rst,
and when he begins, the Dalai Lama cocks
his head in a quizzical way and peers at him
through his thick glasses.
Alexander tells his story like hes told
it so many times before, in his soft, south-
ern, condent burr. He tells the audience
about the wondrous realm he visited, about
the all-powerful and all-loving God he en-
countered there, and about some of the les-
sons hes brought back to earth. He says that
among those lessons is the fact that reincar-
nation is real, and that knowing death is on-
ly ever temporary has helped him under-
stand how a loving God can permit so many
tragedies and hardships and hurdles in the
physical realm. As he did a few months ago,
when Gretchen Carlson asked him wheth-
er the dead schoolchildren from Newtown
remembered their slaughter, he offers com-
fort and hope. I came to see all of those hard-
ships as gifts, he says, as beautiful oppor-
tunities for growth.
The Dalai Lama is not a native English
speaker, and when its his turn to speak, he
126 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
The Prophet
The quietest dishwasher,
even with a jam-packed upper deck.
Invented to change the game. Leave it to Bosch to gure out a way to make a good thing
better. Our third rack
2
adds up to 30% more loading area
3
, to t more steak knives, more burger
spatulas, more bbq tongs, more silverware. And we accomplished all this while still delivering
German-engineered machines as quiet as 39 dBA
4
. Theyre dishwashers that are rewriting
the rules. Theyre dishwashers invented for your life. See yours at your nearest Bosch retailer.
www.bosch-home.com/us
2013 BSH Home Appliances.
1
Based on an average of sound ratings contained in major brands websites. Major brands dened as Traqline Top 10 Brands, March 2013.
2
500 series and up models only.
3
Compared to a Bosch dishwasher with two racks.
4
Model SH_9PT57UC/XXX. Ask your Bosch dealer for details, or visit bosch-home.com/us
13BDW35-14-108305-3
The quietest dishwasher brand
1
in the U.S. introduces
a new third rack for more capacity and exibility.
128 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
does so much less smoothly than Alexander,
sometimes stopping and snapping his ngers
when a word escapes him, or turning to his
interpreter for help when hes really stuck.
He is not using notes, and the impression he
gives is that of a man speaking off the cuff.
He opens with a brief discourse about the
parallels between the Buddhist and Shinto
conceptions of the afterlife, and then, after
glancing over at Alexander, changes the sub-
ject. He explains that Buddhists categorize
phenomena in three ways. The rst catego-
ry are evident phenomena, which can be
observed and measured empirically and di-
rectly. The second category are hidden phe-
nomena, such as gravity, phenomena that
cant be seen or touched but can be inferred
to exist on the basis of the rst category of
phenomena. The third category, he says, are
extremely hidden phenomena, which can-
not be measured at all, directly or indirect-
ly. The only access we can ever have to that
third category of phenomena is through our
own rst-person experience, or through the
rst-person testimony of others.
Now, for example, the Dalai Lama says,
his sort of experience.
He points at Alexander.
For him, its something reality. Real. But
those people who never sort of experienced
that, still, his mind is a little bit sort of . . . He
taps his ngers against the side of his head.
Different! he says, and laughs a belly laugh,
his robes shaking. The audience laughs with
him. Alexander smiles a tight smile.
For that also, we must investigate, the
Dalai Lama says. Through investigation we
must get sure that person is truly reliable.
He wags a nger in Alexanders direction.
When a man makes extraordinary claims, a
thorough investigation is required, to en-
sure that person reliable, never telling lie,
and has no reason to lie.
Then he changes the subject, starts talk-
ing about a massive project to translate an-
cient Tibetan texts.
Alexander listens quietly, occasionally
dgeting with the program in his hands. Hes
a long way from home, and even further from
the man he once was. Its been a dizzying
journey, but his path forward seems set. Hes
told people that God granted him so much
knowledge, so much wisdom, so many se-
crets, that he will have to spend his entire life
unpacking it all, doling it out bit by bit. Hes
already working on the follow-up to Proof
of Heaven. In the meantime, anyone can pay
sixty dollars to access his webinar guided-
meditation series, Discover Your Own Proof
of Heaven, and hes been consulting with a
pair of experts in archaeoacoustics to re-
create some of the music that he heard while
on his journey. You can even pay to join him
on a healing journey through Greece.
In his past life, Alexander went through
some hard times, but those hard times are
far behind him now.
He is in a better place.
The Prophet
summer, when I
took my daughter to a water park wed been
to many times and found it transformed by
the availability of a Fast Pass, which allows
visitors to pay an extra forty-ve dollars to go
to the head of the lines. It changed every-
thing, I said, because people were now pay-
ing to cut the line, and everybody knew that
it was unfair. I knew it, my daughter knew
it, and so did the people doing the cutting.
Damon nodded. If you really want to know
what its like to be famous, all you have to do
is go to that water park and pay your forty-
ve bucks. Go to the water park and thats
what its like.
You jump the line.
Heres one last story. Matt Damon tells
it, but its not about Matt Damon. Its about
George Clooney. But its not really about
George Clooney, either, because Damon
wouldnt be telling it if it werent also about
Russell Crowe. Damon loves telling Russell
Crowe stories, in Russell Crowes voice. But
the storys all about the questions of selling out
and hypocrisy, so maybe its about Damon af-
ter all. Hes been wrestling with these things
because he recently began lending his ridic-
ulously believable speaking voice to commer-
cials. It frankly seems an unnecessary inner
struggle, given that everybody in his business,
from Jeff Bridges to Jon Hamm to Denis Leary,
is allowing himself to be used as voice talent.
I know, he says. but its still a commer-
cial. Whats the line that Paul Newman used
to sayshameless exploitation in pursuit of
common good? I tell myself that. I mean, I
give all the money to [Damons foundation]
Water.org. I couldnt imagine keeping it. But
lets face itthe money I contribute from the
commercial is money I dont have to contrib-
ute from my pocket. One way or another, Im
getting paid. So maybe Im a big hypocrite.
Of course, Clooney does a lot of voice work,
too, especially in Europe. And one day, Da-
mon says, Russell called him out for doing
a commercial in Italy. He called him a sell-
outGeorge, who never got full boat. George,
whos always cutting his deal to work with the
directors he wants to work with. So George
said, Wait a minute. The only way I could
live is if I do this fucking espresso commer-
cial. What the fuck? Why are you attacking
me? Youre calling me a sellout? Look at your
fucking movies, man!
And George is the best prankster. But he
doesnt do anything. Hes furiousbut he sits
on it. And then Russell wins a [British Acad-
emy of Film and Television Arts] award, and
he goes up in front of the BAFTAs and reads
a poem he wrote. He goes on for so long that
when they show it that night, they edit it.
Theyre at a party and theyre all in tuxedos
and theyre playing the thing back, and Rus-
sell sees that his speech is truncated. And he
famously grabs the producer of the show and
throws him against the wall, and it has to be
broken up.
So the next year, George gets nominated.
Hes got Good Night, and Good Luck and hes
got Michael Clayton, and hes up for, like, f-
ty fucking BAFTAs. And he wins one of them.
So he gets onstage. But a few weeks before, he
was in a bookstore and saw a book by Russell
Crowe. Its called My Heart, My Song, and its
a book of Russells poetry.
So George gets up in front of the BAFTA
audience, and theyre cheering him on, and
he goes, I hear you like poetry. And instantly
the place goes dead quiet. Then he just reach-
es into his tux and pulls out the book, and he
goes, My Heart, My Song, by Russell Crowe.
And the place instantly goes wild. He picks a
poem to read, and every line people are falling
out of their chairs and hes gotta hold twenty
seconds for their laughter.
And he reads the whole thing and he says,
Thank you. Good night, good luck.
And he walks off.
Its a delicious story, too good to be true.
Russell Crowe did, in fact, read a poem at
the BAFTA awards in 2002, but not one of
his own. He made a CD called My Hand, My
Heart, but he has never published a book of
poems. George Clooney never won a BAFTA
until this year, when he won as a producer of
Afecks Argo. Does any of this make the sto-
ry any less delicious? It does not, because the
storys avor does not derive from its verac-
ity. It derives from proximityfrom the fact
that you are listening to Matt Damon tell it on
the patio instead of watching him tell it from
the other side of the lake.
The suns going down when his BlackBerry
pings. He pulls it out of his pocket, and when
he looks at it he almost seems to inch, but its
the quick jolt of his smile snapping his head
back an inch. Hes at a table full of people, but
he does not take his eyes off the screen. His
face lls with light, and what can be heard,
in the sudden silence, is the voice of a little
girl reporting the news from home: the fact
that one of Damons other daughters has lost
a tooth. Then we hear what he hearsI love
you, Daddy!and his smile deepens as his
shoulders sag, and we see that look of pride
and pain common to every father in the world
who has to experience the love of a child from
a helpless distance. He cant answer, because
what hes just seen is a video that his children
made and his wife attached to an e-mail. So
he doesnt say anything, just slides the Black-
Berry back in his pocket, and for the rst time
since Ive met him, Matt Damon is, for the
moment, alone.
There are a few more stories and a few more
beers, but the dusk deepens to darkness, and
he stands up to go back to his room. George
Clooney is long gone, but along and across
the lake they are still clustered, and now they
wave to him. They have been waiting for him
to go before they disperse, and he waves back.
They are all Germans, 5 percent different from
him, but he is 5 percent different not just from
them but also from everyone else. When he
turns his back on them one last time, they call
Goodnight to him, in English.
Matt Damon
[continued from page 87]
$
19
95
Compare at
$
56
MONTECRISTO
Top-Rated 4 Premium
Cigar Sampler, PLUS a
Windproof Torch Lighter and
Stainless Steel Cutter.

2
0
1
3

T
h
o
m
p
s
o
n

C
i
g
a
r

C
o
.
Order Now
Limited
Supply
Call 1-800-646-0216
www.thompsonspecials.com
Add $4.95 for shipping #J16936.
Promo Code T9866 OFFER GOOD FOR 30 DAYS
Not available to minors and good only in the USA.
One per customer, Florida residents ADD 7% sales tax
SUKI LEATHER
BRACELETS & NECKLACES
R
AVAILABLE WITH HIDDEN MAGNETS
Handsome braided leather available in
many sizes and colors. Ultra-strong
magnetic clasps in aluminum
or sterling silver.
$30 to $125 Made in USA
www.suki-usa.com
CRAVE
MORE.
liberator.com
1.866.542.7283
c
r
a
v
e

s
e
d
u
c
t
i
o
n
.
c
r
a
v
e

d
e
s
i
r
e
.
crave creativity.
crave
desire.
c r a v e
t h e u n k n o w n .
crave
surprises.
c
r
a
v
e

s
a
t
i
s
f
a
c
t
i
o
n
.
crave
adventure.
crave
originality.
c r a v e f u n .
crave
thrills.
c
r
a
v
e

p
a
s
s
i
o
n
.
crave lust.
c
r
a
v
e

n
e
w
.
www.ColsenKeane.com
ColsenKeane Leather
American made custom leather goods for
the vintage-minded in the digital age.
Style, p. 53: Fossil watch, fossil.com. P. 54: Dun-
ning Golf sweater, polo shirt, and pullover, dun-
ninggolf.com. Maide polo shirt and pants, maide-
golf.com. Allen Edmonds Honors Golf Collection
shoes, allenedmonds.com. J. Lindeberg pants, ny-
golfcenter.com. Ecco shoes, eccousa.com. Boast
polo shirt, boastusa.com. Boss Green shorts, hu-
goboss.com. FootJoy shoes, footjoy.com. Sneak-
ers: Asics, asicsamerica.com. New Balance, newbal-
ance.com. Nike, 212-226-5433. Converse, converse.
com. Billy Reid for K-Swiss, billyreid.com. P. 56: Bath-
ing suits: Ambsn, ambsn.com. Boss, hugoboss.com.
Peneld, peneld.com. Tommy Hilger, 212-223-1824.
Lacoste, shop.lacoste.com. Sunglasses: Kaenon, kae-
non.com. Julbo, julbousa.com. TAG Heuer, shop.tag-
heuer.com. Nautica windbreaker, lordandtaylor.
com, and polo shirt and shorts, nautica.com. P. 58:
Etro ties and iPad case, etro.com. Mr. Bs for Aldo
boots, aldoshoes.com. P. 60: Oakley sunglasses,
oakley.com. Fila Golf glove, shoplagolf.com. J. Linde-
berg hat, nygolfcenter.com. TaylorMade stand bag,
taylormadegolf.com. Garmin watch, garmin.com.
Fall Fashion Preview, p. 104: Gucci coat, sweat-
er, and trousers, gucci.com. Churchs shoes, church-
footwear.com. Paul Smith gloves, 646-613-3060. P.
106: Polo Ralph Lauren coat and suit, and Ralph
Lauren Black Label shirt and tie, ralphlauren.com.
Tods boots, tods.com. Coach belt, coach.com. John
Varvatos gloves, johnvarvatos.com. P. 107: Giorgio
Armani suit and shirt, armani.com. MP by Massimo
Piombo tie, barneys.com. P. 108: Ermenegildo Zeg-
na coat, suit, and shirt, zegna.com. Ralph Lauren
Black Label tie, ralphlauren.com. Santoni boots, san-
tonishoes.com. P. 109: Salvatore Ferragamo trench
coat, shirt, and trousers, 866-337-7242. Marc Ja-
cobs sweater, 212-343-1490. Grenson boots, grenson.
co.uk. P. 111: Calvin Klein Collection shirt and suit,
212-292-9027. MP by Massimo Piombo tie, barneys.
com. Gucci chronograph, gucci.com. P. 112: Dolce
& Gabbana coat and suit, dolcegabbana.it. The
Mens Store Bloomingdales shirt, bloomingdales.
com. Ralph Lauren Black Label tie, ralphlauren.
Photos & Illustrations
Contents, p. 9: Kruger: Jason Merritt/WireImage;
p. 12: Bear: Douglas McCartney Photography/Flickr/
Getty. Before We Begin, p. 15: DiCaprio, Pitt, Da-
mon: Max Vadukul; p. 16: The Lumineers: Schultz:
Tim Mosenfelder/Getty; Ulvang: George Pimentel/
WireImage; Fraites: Monty Brinton/CBS/Getty; Pe-
karek: Fernando Leon/Getty; Wahamaki: Kevin Win-
ter/Coachella/Getty; Macklemore & Lewis: Jeff Fus-
co/Getty; Bon Iver: Andy Sheppard/Redfens/Getty;
Manowar: Fin Costello/Redferns; Pink: Nigel Wal-
dron/Getty. Man at His Best, p. 29: Oliver: Justin
Jay; p. 32: Colbert: Jim Spellman/WireImage; Carell:
Jeffrey Mayer/Getty; Harris: Astrid Stawiarz/Getty;
Helms: Valarie Macon/Getty; p. 36: Car seat: Ping
Han/Alamy; griddle pan: Bob Ingelhart/Getty; cruise
ship: Holger Leue/Getty; norovirus: Photoresearch-
ers/Getty; p. 38: Book family: Ben Goldstein/Studio
D; p. 40: Styling by Constanze Lyndsay Han; hair by
Yuji Kojima for the Rex Agency; makeup by Yuriko
Bondies; prop styling by Nick Faiella; bustier and
panties by Pleasure State; p. 42: Teeth: Jeffrey West-
brook/Studio D; p. 44: Chris Collins/Corbis; p. 46:
Ben Goldstein/Studio D. Style, p. 53: Jeffrey West-
brook/Studio D; p. 54: Clothing, shoe, sneakers: Jef-
frey Westbrook/Studio D; Miani: Lorenzo Bringheli/
Trunk Archive; p. 56: Bathing suits, sunglasses, Nau-
tica: Jeffrey Westbrook/Studio D; Thompson: Hunter
S. Thompson Collection, copyright the estate of Hunt-
er S. Thompson; p. 58: Ties and iPad case: Deb Wenof;
Lynch: Jerod Harris/WireImage; Varvatos: Fairchild
Photo Service/Cond Nast/Corbis; pocket: Deb We-
nof; p. 60: Donald (bottom): Karim Sahib/AFP/Get-
ty. A Thousand Words, p. 62: Beinart: David Gold-
man/AP/Corbis; p. 64: Obama: Paul J. Richards/AFP/
Getty; Clinton: Reuters/Stringer; Bush Sr.: David Rub-
inger/Time Life Pictures/Getty; Romney: Menahem
Kahana/AFP/Getty; Bush Jr.: Mati Stein/AP Photo;
McCain: Uriel Sinai/Getty; Kerry: Barry Chin/Bos-
ton Globe/Getty; Tel Aviv: Adoma Tovy/Getty; Hawk-
ing: John Phillips/Getty. Damon, pp. 8283, 85
86: Photographed at National Park Harz. Kruger,
pp. 9697: Gavin Bond/Corbis Outline. What Ive
Store Information
For the items featured in Esquire, please consult the Web
site or call the number provided.
Credits
(ISSN 0194-9535) is published monthly (ex-
cept a combined June/July issue) by Hearst Commu-
nications, Inc., 300 West 57th St., NY, NY 10019 USA.
Steven R. Swartz, President and Chief Executive Of-
cer; William R. Hearst III, Chairman; Frank A. Bennack,
Jr., Executive Vice-Chairman; Cath erine A. Bostron,
Secretary; Ronald J. Doerer, Senior Vice-President,
Finance and Administration. Hearst Magazines
Division: David Carey, President; John P. Loughlin,
Executive Vice-Pres ident and General Manager; John
A. Rohan, Jr., Senior Vice-President, Finance. 2013
by Hearst Communications, Inc. All rights reserved.
Esquire, Man at His Best, Dubious Achievement
Awards, The Sound and the Fury, and are regis-
tered trademarks of Hearst Communications, Inc. Peri-
odicals post age paid at N. Y., N. Y., and additional entry
post of ces. Canada Post Inter national Publi cations
mail product (Canadian distribution) sales agree ment
no. 40012499. Editorial and Advertising Ofces: 300
West 57th St., NY, NY 10019-3797. Send returns (Cana-
da) to Bleuchip International, P. O. Box 25542, London,
Ontario N6C 6B2. Sub scription prices: United States
and possessions, $7.97 a year; Canada and all other coun-
tries, $19.97 a year. Sub scription services: Esquire
will, upon receipt of a complete subscription order,
undertake fulllment of that order so as to provide the
rst copy for delivery by the Postal Service or alternate
carrier within four to six weeks. From time to time, we
make our subscriber list available to companies that
sell goods and services by mail that we believe would
interest our readers. If you would rather not receive
such mailings, please send your current mailing label
or an exact copy to Mail Preference Service, P. O. Box
6000, Harlan, IA 51593. For customer service, changes
of address, and subscription orders, log on to service.
esquire.com or write to Customer Service Depart ment,
Esquire, P. O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593. Esquire is
not responsible for un solicited manuscripts or art.
None will be returned unless accompanied by return
postage and envelope. Canada BN NBR 10231 0943 RT.
Post master: Please send address changes to Esquire,
P. O. Box 6000, Harlan, IA 51593. Printed in the USA.
Learned, p. 114: Courtesy Kent Smith/Showtime.
Nirvana, pp. 116117: Cobain: Julian Broad/Con-
tour by Getty; smoke (throughout): Michael Banks/
Getty. This Way Out, p. 131: Handcuffs: Medioim-
ages/Photodisc; Travolta: Elisabetta A. Villa/Getty.
130 E S QU I R E AU GU S T 2 0 1 3
com. OKeeffe shoes, mrporter.com. P. 113: Pra-
da suit, prada.com. Hamilton Shirts shirt, hamil-
tonshirts.com. Burberry London tie, burberry.com.
of the Jews death
strides in, if the accounts are to be believed, a
less than pleasing, even a loathsome reality. I
cannot go along with that, and nd that this will
damage the regard for our people. . . .
Hans wrote that letter to Dieters mother,
Jessicas grandmother, Zekes great-grand-
mother, on the road between Baranovichi and
Barysaw in Belarus. His unit had been on the
march to the front since April 9,

and, being
infantry, Hans would observe, nothing had
changed in 150 yearsthey walked into Rus-
sia just like Napoleon, still relying on horses
to pull their guns.
Dieter was amazed at the bare fact of this
letters existencethat his father would have
risked writing something so potentially per-
ilous, given the strict monitoring of the mails
at the time.
In his years of research, Dieter would come
to believe that his father, as both an economist
and a German nationalist, had been a commit-
ted Nazi in that he was a committed socialist,
and approved of the vigorous rebuilding of the
German economy and state. But it was this let-
ter, in addition to a few others, that gave him
some succor that his father wasnt a monster.
He would toil over the letters steadily for a
decade or so, until he began to slow a little in
the past couple of years, and stacks of them
occupied a prominent place on the shelves in
the little ofce he had set up in his bedroom in
the house out in the woods in Princeton, next
to the books on birds and dogs and sailing and
adventure, and the spy novels and biographies
and poetry and all the other books and pic-
tures and things that fed an interesting mind.
It was in that room late last summer where
he lay propped up on his bed, reading, when I
went in to say goodbye, as I was leaving to head
back into the city. He closed his book, took
off his glasses. By this time, he wasnt getting
around easily, and he had very suddenly start-
ed looking old. In a month, he would be dead.
I leaned down, kissed him on the forehead.
I love you, Dieter, I said.
I love you, too, son, he said.
Four
I left Dieters hospital bed and walked to-
ward Zeke. He was afraid, and who could
blame him? He may be ve-eight, and this
year he will be the same age as Dieter was
when he was drafted into the German army,
but he is still just a kid. A kid with a death-
ly fear of zombies who was at that moment
seeing his rst dead body.
His back turned to me, I wrapped my arms
around him. Its okay, Zeke, I said. Dad-
dy, Im all right, he said, ghting to get away.
His face was hot and wet. He didnt want me
to see that he was crying. I was worried that
this was far more gothic than wed bargained
for. Why did we do this?
Slowly, though, after the rst wave of blind
grief passed, the room changed. The sobbing
quieted. The lunatic adults in the room re-
turned to their normal role as Zekes parents.
We sat around the bed, tired now, and start-
ed telling stories about the life that had just
nished. And then suddenly, there was Zeke,
sitting right next to his grandfather.
He leaned in close. Goodbye, Opa.
That evening, I drove into New York to
pick up our daughter, Oona, who is nine. She
had been occupied all day at a play date and
hadnt yet heard the news. As I told her, she
began to cry and immediately said: Nothing
will ever be the same.
The night before had been Oonas birth-
day sleepover, which had been a lot of fun,
but now the frivolity and nality crashed to-
gether in her head, and her face was pure an-
guish. If I had known that while I was laugh-
ing and having fun, Opa was dying, I never
would have done it, Daddy!
Over the next couple of days, Jessica and I
both consoled her, telling her that there was
no one in all the world who more approved of
laughing and having fun than her Opa.
Theres a park down the road from the lit-
tle adobe in Marathon, nestled in the primor-
dial exposed rock of the Ouachita Range. Its
called the Post, and the lonely and beautiful
stretch of road out to the Post is crawling
with wild turkeys and javelinas and the oc-
casional cougar, and from there at night you
can see the Milky Way brilliantly. This sum-
mer, Dieter will become part of those moun-
tains. It looks nothing at all like Germany.
Father You Choose
[continued from page 103]
BDSM, an alternative erotic lifestyle
centered on pain and humiliation, died
Wednesday. It was 248.
The cause was a fundraiser for the
Tucson chapter of the Lady Elks at which
lottery entrant Rachel Barstow won a
leather corset, a ball gag, and a signed
copy of E. L. Jamess best-selling Fifty
Shades trilogy. Barstow, who said, This is
an absolute hoot! later spent 45 minutes
on the Internet trying to gure out how to
strap the ball gag on her husbands head.
BDSM, short for Bondage-Domina-
tion-Sadism-Masochism, had its scan-
dalous roots in the writings of the Mar-
quis de Sade, an 18th-century French
aristocrat who was jailed for his erotic
adventures involving pain and disci-
pline. BDSM thrived on the fringes of
culture for centuries, appearing in se-
cret clubs and the ads in the back of
alternative weeklies.
But it had become increasingly ex-
posed to toxic mainstream culture, par-
ticularly since the use of latex codpieces
in Joel Schumachers Batman & Robin
in 1997. More recently, it suffered from a
debilitating bout of Rihannas music
videos. Reports surfaced last week that
Houston grandmother-of-two Janice
Falker dabbled in BDSM for her 50th
wedding anniversary, choosing Diane
Rehm as her safe word.
It is survived by millions of book
groups.
BDSM, 248

The honest head of male hair died quietly Wednesday. The cause was the thick black thatch that enveloped John
Travoltas scalp at the opening of a new luxury watch boutique in Orlando.
Born in the late Pleistocene era, the Credible Male Head of Hair spent millennia following a natural cycle: The hair
would start out dark and full, then turn gray, thin at the temples and crown, then fall out completely. It appeared on
the skull of millions of accomplished men, from Erik the Red to Henry Fonda.
But the Credible Male Head of Hair had been severely ill for several years, especially in Hollywood and Washington and executive
suites everywhere, as it battled hair plugs, weaves, dye jobs, Propecia, toupees, and Jeremy Pivens boundless vanity. Its death was pre-
ceded by the passing of Credible Female Hair in the mid-20th century.
The Credible Male Head of Hair, 25,000, Is Dead
The word freedomwhich for centuries referred to an absence of tyranny and the im-
portance of self-determinationnally lost all meaning Tuesday. It was 2,367 years old.
The cause was John McKenzie, a regular commenter on the Daily Caller Web site, who
wrote that the Founding Fathers guaranteed his freedom to carry shoulder-launched
missiles when picking up his son from daycare. Born in ancient Greece, where Aristotle
wrote about the value of voluntary choice, freedom as a word and a category proved cru-
cial to human progress for millennia, helping to topple dictators and abolish slavery.
Freedom had shown surprising resilience recently, even as it was used in increasing-
ly bizarre contexts. Among them: The freedom to teach scientically disproven theo-
ries, to avoid taxes, to obstruct access to voting and contraception, to prevent citizens
from marrying, to dump toxic chemicals in reservoirs, and to exclude gay people from
an organization in which members wear green sashes, sew on badges, and learn about
basket weaving and theater. There were no close survivors.
Freedom, 2,367, Dies
The realm of my private thoughts and feelings
generated without external stimulation died
Tuesday. It was 44.
The cause was a combination of text mes-
sages, Twitter Vine videos, my sons urgent de-
mands for a mango fruit roll, LinkedIn endorse-
ment requests, my other sons demand that I
nd out the release date of The Smurfs 2, the
broken hinge on the kitchen cabinet, Hulus
clips of Swamp People, the sheela-na-gig entry
on Wikipedia, and a bunch of other stuff.
My inner life, though never achieving the
majestic heights of Steven Pinkers or Philip
Roths, still had a relatively robust and pro-
ductive existence. It contemplated such top-
ics as the limits of knowledge and the objectivi-
ty of ethics. It once sustained a train of thought
about the Darwinian implications of robotics
for seven full minutes.
It is survived by eeting impressions, fre-
quent nausea, and the knowledge that Smurfs 2
opens on July 31.
My Inner Life, 44
BY A . J. J AC OB S
RECENT OBITS
The worlds oldest person died
again Thursday. He or she was
between the ages of 115 and 122.
The cause of death was being
really old.
He/she worked in a job that
is obsolete, perhaps a vendor of
some sort, and credited his/her
longevity to a positive outlook
and drinking alcohol every day.
Or else refraining from drinking
altogether.
This person lived through
a lot of presidential adminis-
trations and different kinds of
transportation.
He/she is survived by the new
worlds oldest person, who will
likely die within a few weeks
and have his/her own obituary
on CNN.com and Fox News, and
in the pages of USA Today.
Experts remain bafed as to
why these seemingly healthy in-
dividuals are at such a high risk
for mortality.
The Worlds
Oldest Person,
About 118
alternative erotic lifesty
nd humiliation
BDSM, 24
The honest head
Travoltas scalp
Born in the lat
would start out d
the skull of millions of accomplish
But the Credible Male Head of
suites everywhere as it battled ha
The Cre
Clip, Save, Share, from any page. Download free from the iTunes App Store or Google Play. 131
ADVERTISEMENT
OUR CONVICTION Believing that we could make a difference.
OUR CREATIVITY Turning play into a social solution.
OUR COURAGE Founding Uncharted Play to convert our college project into a real product.
WANT TO HEAR THEIR STORY? DOWNLOAD THE FREE BLIPPAR APP FROM YOUR APP STORE.
THEN HOLD YOUR PHONE OVER THE PAGE TO WATCH THEIR EXCLUSIVE VIDEO.
JULIA SILVERMAN
& JESSICA O. MATTHEWS
As Harvard students, Julia Silverman
and Jessica O. Matthews received an
assignment to develop a product that
would solve a social issue. They combined
play with cutting edge technology to
make the world a better place, producing
the SOCCKET

, an energy harnessing
soccer ball that yields up to three hours
of electricity after only 30 minutes
of activity. In 2011, they co-founded
Uncharted Play to produce their agship
product that today, is used as an off-grid
power source all over the world, with more
than 1,500 SOCCKET

balls in existence
and counting.
CONVICTION, CREATIVITY, COURAGE.
IT CAN CHANGE THE GAME SOMETIMES IT CAN EVEN CHANGE THE WORLD.
THIS IS THE MAZDA WAY.
Reference to any trademark, proprietary product, or company name is intended for description only and does not constitute or imply any endorsement or recommendation.