Wednesday, March 04, 2026 |
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I know, we've seen this one before: a Promising Young Democrat (PYD) in Texas gains national attention (Hello, Beto O'Rourke!) and people on the left believe the PYD can turn The Lone Star State blue. Except they don't. Last night, the latest PYD emerged: Texas State Representative James Talarico, who beat Rep. Jasmine Crockett in the Democratic Senate primary. (The Republican race went to a runoff.) Talarico should be a competitive candidate in November, and a lot will happen between now and then that may affect the race. So you never know! What would a Talarico win mean for America? Esquire's Chris Hatler asked him this question last year. His answer speaks volumes. You can read it below. —Michael Sebastian, editor in chief |
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The Texas state representative is now the Democratic nominee for Senate. Depending on how the Republican runoff goes, we could be in for quite the November. |
In a very closely watched Senate primary election, state representative James Talarico beat firebrand (anyone else tired of that adjective?) House member Jasmine Crockett to become Texas's Democratic nominee.
Politics ain't the kind of game in which everybody wins, and it's unfortunate that the Lone Star State had two rising Democratic stars pitted against each other. As Esquire political columnist Charles P. Pierce wrote yesterday, "This is a matchup that nobody should lose, but somebody is going to lose, and that's going to be too bad in the long term. In other words, Democrats. Boy, I dunno."
Talarico found his winning strategy by reaching across the aisle to recruit independents and Republicans. In addition to touting his Christian faith, he's been focusing on one issue everyone in Texas seems to agree on: "I've been outspoken about the billionaire mega donors who basically run our state government. And if that's true in Texas, it's certainly true at a national level, increasingly so," he told Esquire last August, a month before he announced his plan to run for Senate. |
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When you're heading somewhere for a long weekend, which, as a New York City resident, I try to do as often as I can, packing and the luggage you use for it is always a Goldilocks situation. If you're heading up Thursday night and coming back Sunday, you've got a pretty minimal checklist: clothes, pajamas, toiletries, and a laptop (if you lied and said you plan to "work from home" on Friday). A duffel bag or small suitcase has some room to spare, which is cool until until you're wrestling it into the trunk of your car and trying to make it fit with everyone else's luggage like a cruel game of Tetris. But your everyday backpack or tote bag is bursting at the seams as you try to stuff in the pajamas you almost forgot to pack.
My answer to this predicament will always be Portland Gear's Cascade backpack.
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"Blues music changed my dad's life, and it made him put a guitar in my hands," Göransson tells us. The young Metallica fan would grow up to work with some of the most celebrated directors of the 21st century, composing award-winning music for films such as Black Panther and Oppenheimer—both of which aggressively defied genre conventions. His latest, for Sinners (in which he teamed up again with Panther director Ryan Coogler) will most likely earn him another Oscar, which will sit next to his Best Original Score trophies for Panther and Oppenheimer. "I'm working with the best storytellers, not just filmmakers, and it takes a lot out of you when you're really giving it your all," Göransson says. "I become so obsessed because I love the work so much." |
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 Back when Wikipedia was new, my college roommate and I huddled around my gigantic laptop and looked up all the awesome historic events that had taken place on our dates of birth. I had high hopes for mine, April 10. Turns out that was the day the Titanic set sail. And something even worse: in 1970, Paul McCartney announced he was leaving The Beatles, effectively ending the band. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how that cosmic connection has affected my life. You know who's thought about it more? Paul McCartney. The excellent new documentary Man on the Run captures Paul in the aftermath of the breakup, a period of time that's never really been explored in depth. Esquire's Josh Rosenberg talked to director Morgan Neville about delving into a painful time in the life of the rock legend. Check it out below. —Kevin Dupzyk, contributing editor |
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Morgan Neville, the director of the new Prime Video documentary about McCartney's post-Beatles life, told us why the legend still has his demons. |
Let this sink in: Paul McCartney was 27 years old when the Beatles broke up. By the age LeBron James was when he won his first NBA championship, Paul McCartney had written, recorded, toured, and released 13 albums—each and every one of them a hit. Given McCartney's astronomical early success, it's a wonder why so much of the world turned on the artist when he escaped to Scotland in 1969 to sort out the end of the Beatles.
Peter Jackson's The Beatles: Get Back docuseries showed the band's demise unfold over nearly eight hours of footage in 2021, minting another generation of Beatles obsessives. Turns out, the now-83-year-old songwriter isn't done processing that era either. According to Morgan Neville, the director of a new documentary about McCartney titled Paul McCartney: Man on the Run, the decade that McCartney spent processing the end of the Beatles is still something that has the musician racking his brain today. "Paul started to understand that the reality was not what everybody told him it was: that the end of the Beatles was all horrible and they all hated each other," Neville says. "A lot of the '70s was painful. There's still this process of Paul reevaluating what he did in that time. When he saw the film for the first time, he was very emotional. When you hold up a mirror to people and say, 'This is what I see,' then they can see themselves in a different way." |
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Something strange is happening with young people in our AI obsessed world. Instead of unplugging completely, zoomers and millennials are embracing analog retro tech, often leaning into nostalgia for eras they don't remember or never experienced. And while CRT TVs are cool, there is one piece of analog tech I find genuinely useful—the digital notebook.
Digital notebooks keep the art handwriting alive with all the forgiveness and convenience of working on a digital document. That includes cloud storage, converting handwriting to test, and the ability to hit copy, paste, or undo. They tend to sport e-ink screens, popular in e-readers and called by different names such as e-paper or ePaper, which are a lot friendlier on our eyes than our phone screens. Tablets like the Kindle Scribe and the Remarkable let you read, take notes, sketch, doodle, and everything else you'd be able to do with traditional pen and paper. Using the smart pens that come with these devices, you have all the advantages of writing with a pen or pencil, including an eraser, plus the added freedom of digital tools.
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As a Catholic Christian from birth, I have come to wish devoutly that two things had happened in the early days, when the Jesus Movement was just getting rolling. First, that Saul had gotten back on his horse and hightailed it back to Tarsus and never written a word about this charismatic carpenter he never met. And second, that Patmos had been destroyed in a massive volcanic eruption an hour before John in his cave had set stylus to papyrus. We could have avoided a lot of extra-Jesus foolishness down through the millennia. |
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