It was 1980, and I was covering the presidential campaign between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter for The Boston Phoenix. (While I am not at the moment dead, Reagan, Carter, and the Phoenix all are.) As part of our coverage of the homestretch, the newspaper rented me a car and sent me on the road to take the temperature of what was still charmingly called the New Deal coalition. I was to drive to various stops throughout the newly deindustrialized Midwest and see how the children of the people who’d benefited from the New Deal itself were doing. My first stop was in Youngstown, and the first—and last—answer was “not well at all.”
I stopped by a steelworkers union hall to talk to the president of a local and to some of the members. On the way, I passed closed steel mills, vast and faceless and empty beyond empty. Bits of rusted metal flaked off the plant buildings and drifted on the breeze like dirty snow in October. The crowd in the union hall was sparse and grim. The first thing I noticed was that every bit of furniture was marked with numbers written in chalk. Every chair. Every desk. Every file cabinet. I asked the local president whether they were moving. He said no. That Saturday, they were going to have a giant garage sale, and those numbers were the prices on the various items. They were selling off the union hall piecemeal. This should have told me something. In fact, it did, but I forgot about it.
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On September 21—forty-three days before the midterm election—we went fishing at Palo Pinto Mountains State Park, an hour and a half west of Dallas. Fly-fishing, in particular. Luke Metzger had only been a couple times, and the closest I’d gotten to it was a funny numbness in my jaw at “I am haunted by waters.” But Doug Deason had been fly-fishing for fifty-four years, so he took it upon himself to teach us.
We’d left Dallas, where Deason is based, at 5:30 a.m. and arrived at the park to find a perfect morning. I’d flown in from New York girded for 100 degree days, and this might still have become one, but the morning was cool. “Cool”—70 degrees. We parked above the park’s boat ramp and the fishing pier and walked down carrying rods and tackle. The pier arced a couple hundred feet between two points on the shore of Tucker Lake. The water was calm, gently bunched by ripples of wind or rent by the oscillation of a water snake. The lights were on and the sky was beginning to grow big by then, the way the sky does in Texas.
If only the fish were biting.
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This year, Christopher Abbott took on two roles that many actors have struggled to bring something new and meaningful to for the past seventy years. He was nominated for a Tony Award for playing Death of a Salesman’s Biff Loman as a character to be feared instead of pitied. The revival wrapped up in August following 167 shows. Abbott also starred on Netflix’s critically acclaimed East of Eden miniseries, adapted from John Steinbeck’s sweeping 1952 novel, as Adam Trask—a despondent father far more beaten down by the world than previous portrayals would ever allow.
Still, it’s more than just that he earned the parts, or that he has seemed suddenly ubiquitous. Where others failed to leave a mark, Abbott found a deeper humanity in roles that few in Hollywood could unlock before. Even when the industry feels like it’s eating itself and spitting itself back out, churning out content and forgetting to care about the result, Abbott is a reminder that great performances are still waiting to be discovered. If we let him, he knows the way to take us there.
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For years, I never spoke about my childhood—or my home life, or my education—because I was embarrassed by it. I wanted Patrick Stewart to be my own adult creation, not the product of my actual childhood. But the fact that I hid so much was doing more harm than good.
My advice to young actors, which may sound corny and trivial but nevertheless means something very potent to me, is to be brave and trust others. If I had done that earlier in my life, maybe everything would have changed.
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"You can’t hide in this room,” Tony Gilroy says.
The Andor creator and Michael Clayton filmmaker is standing amid rows of orchestra musicians in the center of the historic Newman Scoring Stage on the 20th Century Fox lot in Los Angeles, California. It’s where the music for Jaws, The Sound of Music, and countless other classic films was recorded. But on this day, the recording session is part of the actual movie. Pedro Pascal straddles a cello among the dozens of co-stars—who are actual violinists, cellists, French horn players—as they all shoot the opening scene of the musical drama Behemoth!
Gilroy points at the ornate web of microphones dangling from above, and then to the glassed-in control room where a team of engineers are attuned to every whisper. “When that red light goes on, there’s 23 people listening in that room,” he says. “You can hide in a philharmonic. If you’re off. If you’re sick. A concert keeps going and doesn’t stop.” But here, in this historic space, the precision equipment doesn’t just expose every false note—it records each one for posterity.
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According to a recent and deeply unscientific poll conducted by yours truly, some guys are confounded by corduroy. They like it. They want to wear it. But they’re not quite sure how it figures into their wardrobes. This is a pity, because corduroy is great. It’s warm, it’s hard-wearing, it delivers texture galore, and it can work beautifully in the context of all different types of personal style.
So in the interest of getting these guys—and you!—properly outfitted, I’m offering this crash course in corduroy. It’ll give you the key information you need in order to understand the fabric’s history and how you can wear it now. Let’s dive in.
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