Esquire April/May 2021

LOVE AND SEX HAVE ALWAYS been part of Esquire’s DNA. In the first issue, from October 1933, tucked in with Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, was a humor essay, “What a Married Man Should Know,” by Montague Glass. “The husband gives and the wife takes, and she is especially prone to take one of your new green soft hats.” No offense to Monty—I’m sure that essay killed in the thirties—but we did get funnier, thanks to writers like Helen Lawrenson and Nora Ephron, and we got racier. In December 1969, we published a photo essay on “The New Aesthetics of Sex”; there was a surprising amount of nudity! We’ve put countless images of scantily clad women in the magazine as well as reams of advice. The question of how…

HANDS DOWN THE MOST JOYFUL political event I ever attended was an election-night party in Alabama back in 2017, when Democratic Senate candidate Doug Jones beat Republican Roy Moore. It had been a freakish election. First, the original incumbent, Jeff Sessions, had been hoisted out of the Senate and installed, after a bloody confirmation fight, as the attorney general of the United States. It was a spectacularly bad choice even by the standards of the Trump administration, and a few months later it left everybody in Alabama politics scrambling for candidates. Jones, a former U. S. attorney and the man who put away the last of the Klansmen who killed four little girls with a bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, won the Democratic primary. The Republicans,…

A RESIGNATION LETTER_A HEMINGWAY DOCUMENTARY_DIVORCED-DAD DECOR_ERIC ANDRE’S MERRY PRANKS_ PRINCE’S LEGACY_DAY-TRADING BROS_IN DEFENSE OF THE BATH IF YOU’VE BEEN STUCK IN A NETFLIX FEEDBACK LOOP for the duration of the pandemic, you may’ve seen me on TV. I appear in the Montreal episode of Somebody Feed Phil. At some point in the fall of 2019, my friend Phil Rosenthal, the host of the show, sent an email asking whether I wanted to fly up to Canada and eat a ridiculous amount of food. Naturally I said yes. But even as a professional food writer, even as a hearty eater, even as someone who once watched a TV episode in which Anthony Bourdain crawls through a veritable decathlon of foie gras in Quebec, I wasn’t prepared for what was about to…

Thousands of meals. Millions of calories. Most of it? A blur—devoured and forgotten along the way. But some dishes, like some songs, burn an impression into your memory. These are the bites that, for me, have become a sort of mental soundtrack to the past few years. GAENG BUMBAI AUBERGINE Nari, San Francisco BRAISED ARTICHOKE Green Almond Pantry, Washington, D. C. LEAH’S CABBAGE WITH SMOKED SAUSAGE AND PORK-NECK BISQUE Leah & Louise, Charlotte PORK JOWL WITH CHAYOTE SQUASH, KABAYAKI BUTTER, AND KALAMATA AIOLI Mokyo, New York City ROASTED TOMATOES WITH HOT HONEY Misi, Brooklyn OYSTER MUSHROOM KEBAB Bavel, Los Angeles BISCUITS WITH CANE SYRUP JuneBaby, Seattle NANCY CAKES WITH CULTURED BUTTER, SMOKED TROUT ROE, AND CHIVES Nancy’s Hustle, Houston CALABASH CRAB CLAWS Alewife, Richmond SOFT EGG WITH CAVIAR Alter, Miami…

If you see Eric Andre on the street, run the other way. In the 38-year-old comedian’s new prank movie, Bad Trip, he gets attacked by a gorilla at the zoo and is chased at knifepoint while his penis is stuck in a finger trap—all in front of unsuspecting marks on camera. Since the 2012 debut of The Eric Andre Show on Adult Swim, the “benevolent attacker” (as he calls himself) has been flinging his (usually naked) body into potentially life-threatening situations for the sake of comedy. Andre’s 2020 stand-up special, Legalize Everything, elevated his demonic sense of humor to mainstream status, and with the Netflix release of Bad Trip in March, he is well on his way to becoming a household name. In Bad Trip, Andre and costars Lil Rel…

THE LAST TIME I INTERVIEWED PRINCE, HE ASKED ME ABOUT MY SON. THIS was in 2004, and my son was a toddler at the time. When he got a bit older, Prince said, I should bring him to a sound check so that he could learn “what real music is.” “That was him wanting to teach,” says British singer-songwriter Lianne La Havas, who performed and collaborated with Prince in his final years. “He wanted to share his knowledge and create a community that could help each other.” Throughout his career, Prince surrounded himself with other musicians whom he supported, mentored, and studied. Early on, he was writing so much music that he recruited or assembled other acts to play his songs—the Time, Sheila E., Vanity 6. The “Minneapolis scene” of…