Esquire December 2014

ADDITIONALLY … HOW TO RAISE ASTRONAUTS Richard and the late Patricia Kelly are the only parents to raise astronaut siblings, identical twin brothers Mark and Scott. When Scott rockets to the space station in March for the first one-year mission in American history (see story on page 144), Richard Kelly will witness a record eighth launch of a son into space. The author of our story, Chris Jones, explains how he and Patricia did it: RAISE ADULTS, NOT CHILDREN: Their boys were given free physical rein and frequently did damage to themselves and each other. "The hospital knew us," Richard says. One summer, when Mark and Scott were teenagers (above), Richard sent them to live on a boat 80 miles from home. He gave them just enough grocery money not…

Scott Raab meets the pro-ducer, writer, outgoing Daily Show "senior black correspondent" on a Monday night at Porter House steakhouse, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Wilmore is preparingfor the premiere of The Minority Report, which is taking over the Colbert Reportslot on Comedy Central. LARRY WILMORE: Now, my favorite is the porterhouse, but that's a lot of food. SCOTT RAAB: I'd be happy to go porterhouse with you. LW: Oh, you don't have to do that… . It is my favorite, though. SR: Well, then, why don't we do that? LW: Let me ask you this: Do you like it medium-rare? SR: Yes, I do. LW: Well, then, I think this is meant to be. SR: When do you take over the 11:30 slot? LW: January 19, Martin…

Norman Mailer was a boiler-hearted factory. He wrote 44 books and however many essays and stories and, in his spare time, between all the wives and all the children, at least 45,000 letters. In J. Michael Lennon's introduction to Selected Let- ters of Norman Mailer (Random House, $40), he estimates Mailer's outgoing mail included more than 20 million words. Just 2 percent of them are in this book, yet it is still as massive as the life they document. Only last year, Lennon produced a big and loving biography of his friend, Norman Mailer: A Double Life. So this collection of letters might seem like an unnecessary duplicate, at least until page 29, or May 14, 1945, when Mailer writes his first wife, Beatrice. He was at war in the…

1. 1998–2000 She was skinny and pale, jittery and raw. Nothing would reassure her. "It's not okay! That's what everybody always tells me, 'It's okay' and 'It doesn't matter,' and it does matter." This was a few months before she became an international star. Her spectacular performance as a doom-hungry junkie supermodel on HBO's Gia had won the critics, and now she was about to win an Oscar and a mass audience playing another feral renegade in Girl, Interrupted. Off-screen, she'd been a cutter, she had tattoos, she did drugs, she had sex with women as well as men, and she talked about it all. The result was an image of erotic power and recklessness that was almost aggressive: She may have chosen to turn the tools of destruction on…

ABOUT THE JOKESTER: There is a bullet-punctured human-shaped target in the trunk of Emily Wickersham's car. But all the 30-year-old actress will say about the tattered piece of paper is that it's the remains of the gun training she underwent to become the newest agent/genius on CBS's NCIS, the biggest drama on TV, and that she uses it, somehow, "for intimidation purposes." Her character joined the show's investigative team from the (fictional, exceptionally cheery) NSA last season, and in another phase of Wickersham'spreparation, she video-chatted with a group of(real, perhaps less cheery) NSA analysts. So, with all of this inside knowledge, does she think she'd make a good analyst herself? "I don't know. Would I?" Okay, how close did she become with the ones she talked to? "I can't tell…

When the writer Dorothy Parker defined eternity as "two people and a ham," she wasn't kidding. Once the plate-sized portions are carved out, you're still left with a mountain of meat (and bone) too good to go to waste. And yet many just walk away. Maybe they're daunted by all that ham. Maybe they don't understand the near-infinite possibilities it offers to the bold, the willing. So, as both service and challenge, we devised a step-by-step, dish-by-dish, day-by-day guide to consuming an entire ham. Ideally with other people. But, you know, the world loves a dreamer. Long slicerand meat fork ($122 a set) by Wüsthof. The knife flexes to maneuver around the bone. The fork assists. crateandbarrel.com This is a "city ham." Get acquainted. You're going to have a…