Esquire May 2014

PAGE 92 TOM HARDY SAYS THINGS MOVIE STARS WOULD NEVER SAY AND DOES THINGS MOVIE STARS WOULD NEVER DO Two days in London with the odd mix of ego and low self-esteem that has become Hollywood's new hope. BY TOM JUNOD PAGE 100 CAN OUR COUNTRY STILL LEARN? Senator Elizabeth Warren wants to teach us how not to make the mistakes we seem doomed to repeat. BY CHARLES P. PIERCE PAGE 59 QUIET. THE WOMEN ARE TALKING.A brief interruption in the testosteronic proceedings: We ceded seven pages of this issue to the editors of Elle. Just handed them over and asked them to tell us what women really want men to know. Like what they're thinking when we're fighting and if it's okay to send them away for the weekend.…

Lunch, Union Square Cafe, downtown Manhattan. INSIDE: 25 MEN, WOMEN, BOOZE, JOKES, TV SHOWS, MOVIES, NOTIONS, AND A HANDFUL OF BOLD IDEAS THAT DEFINE OUR TIME. OR AT LEAST THIS MONTH. SCOTT RAAB: I just got back from Ireland. CHRIS O'DOWD: Oh? Where were you? SR: Not far from Westport. CO: Oh, I love it up there. That's a great spot. Matt Molloy's pub is there. SR: We drove out to Achill. You ever go to Achill? CO: I used to go there a lot as a kid. That road out to Achill is gorgeous. It feels like it's the edge of the world. SR: I'd like to live there. CO: That's one of the nicer areas. And not far from where I'm from. I actually spend more time in…

I know the novel you're looking for. It's the thriller that also has interesting sentences. It's the one with a driving plot but fully realized characters as well, the one that flows like it was plotted by Dennis Lehane but feels like it was written by Jonathan Franzen. The high-end potboiler. The literate page-turner. It's a surprisingly rare breed even though it's so obviously the novel we all want. Fortunately, there's Bret Anthony Johnston's Remember Me Like This (Random House, $26). The most interesting books of the past couple years have been fusions of the literary and the genre: high-art science fiction and reappropriated westerns and so on. Remember Me Like This is a similar beast. It has all the features of a trashy psychological thriller, but with all the…

NO. 09 TV IMPROVEMENTS FOR THE REST OF US For those of us who don't mind flat TVs, there's still good news: This year brought substantial across-the-board improvements in image quality, both in terms of dynamic range (the distinction between the lightest and darkest pixels) and color saturation. And unlike most technological improvements, you'll actually see the difference. —P. M. DO YOU REALLY NEED YOUR TV TO BE CURVED? WHAT ABOUT YOUR PHONE? TURNS OUT CURVES OFFER A FEW MINOR ADVANTAGES AND ONE MAJOR ONE: AESTHETICS. 08 Flat was the next big thing. In the early 2000s, we couldn't handle the slightly distorting convex glass of tube television. We needed it to be flat. A few years after that, we didn't want tube televisions at all. We wanted plasmas and…

Small Business is Humbling My Four Mistakes NO. 12 SMALL-BUSINESS MISTAKE NO. 3.5 In some ways, it's the single most important to avoid, if only for its power to screw up the rest of your life: Don't ever sign a personal guarantee for a business loan—and that includes putting up your house as collateral. If a lender insists, walk away. Trust me on this. —K. K. Here's what happens when you write about money: You think you know a little bit. Five or six years ago, the world collapsed. And there I sat with a great job and a pile of cash. So I went shopping. First, I bought a print shop in Hoboken, New Jersey—a mom-and-pop place on the main drag ("An Investment Like No Other," February 2010). Then…

SEXUAL POPULARITY OF FOODSTUFFS NO. 13 DOES THAT MINT TRICK FOR ORAL SEX REALLY WORK? The mint alone is probably not going to be enough. You'll still have to brush, floss, and maybe use a tongue scraper afterward. But if you find yourself with extra mints lying around, you might want to try mentholingus (coinage: mine). It's a wholly sustainable perversion that costs just pennies a year or less if you buy in bulk and never get laid. Really, anything mentholated—mints, balms, even an unlit Kool—will probably work. "I've used Tiger Balm and ginger root," says sex instructor Madison Young before clarifying that "ginger's mostly used for anal." (As if we didn't know that.) "You take some ginger root and peel back some of the skin to create a butt…