Back when I tended bar, I often served couples, obviously on their first date, as they waited for a table. I took care of them, the way a bartender does, and then retreated to wipe down a highball or cut limes, assessing, all by my lonesome, how the date was going. I figured I could learn from it, get better at charming women, even simply speaking to them. That's how miserable I was at dating then, thinking I might absorb something for my own benefit. I didn't learn much—except don't ever look over a woman's shoulder while she's on a date—so I amused myself by developing my theory that always people dated up or down, from one genetic platform to another. It was my own bar game, to figure out how far off the two people were before they themselves even knew. There were, in the universe I created, no perfect matches. There aren't, on the surface, in any. But for every pair, one of the two people was by necessity "dating up." Usually the man. So I liked to lean on the end of the bar, and determine how far "up" a man could go in terms of whom he'd clamped on his arm for the evening. All this while cutting fruit. So cruel, my assumption that each of us is so limited by the first impression, by what is stock about our appeal or readily apparent in our best efforts. Bloodless. But I was young, I wore a vest to work, and I liked to think I could understand the world in a sidelong glance. I was not a big dater. I tended to go home with waitresses, or charm female friends into sleeping with me. And when I did get up the nerve to ask a woman out to dinner, it was generally driven by a hazy enough mixture of lust and expectation that I myself couldn't tell up from down—that is, whether I was dating up or down. |
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The Re-Taking of Nova Basan |
Nova Basan, a town sixty miles east of Kyiv, was not the first town the all-volunteer Bratstvo battalion liberated from Russian forces, or the second, or the third. It was the fourth. What's more, Sunday's counter-offensive pushed the Russian forces—already in retreat, but still fighting—decisively out of the region. With support from the Ukrainian army, special forces and police, the hastily assembled volunteer unit has had a dramatic effect on the course of battle for Kyiv. The volunteers of Bratstvo, Ukrainian for "brotherhood," are a mix of men who first served during Russia's 2014 invasion of Crimea, and younger men eager to fight alongside on the frontlines this time. Russia's vehicular losses in the battle to liberate Nova Basan speak both to the Ukrainian fighters' skills and their capacity to fight at scale. Just one Ukrainian tank and two infantry vehicles known as BMPs destroyed or captured twenty Russian vehicles. Ukrainian forces lost one vehicle in the battle, which came to rest on a broken fence line, straddling two Russian trenches. |
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Tony Hawk: "I Guess I Flew Too Close to the Sun" |
"He's still trying to skateboard?" asked a friend of Tony Hawk's then-wife, Cindy, in the early 1990s. "Are you fucking serious? Grow up. Get a job." By then, Cindy's gig as a manicurist made her the breadwinner for the household. It was an astounding state of affairs because Tony Hawk had already been to the mountaintop—a skating phenom, the boy wonder-turned-technical master, a winning machine at competitions across his native California and beyond. "What's it going to take to win?" a rival said ahead of one event back then. "You're going to have to beat Tony Hawk." And then the bottom fell out of the skateboarding business, and he went from world tours through Europe and Japan to selling his house and doing odd jobs for cash. It's not a well-known side of Hawk's story to members of my generation, to whom the now 53-year-old is the archetype of all-conquering success in what we've come to know as extreme sports, the one who brought the essential countercultural pastime to the mainstream. But it's one explored in a new documentary on his life from HBO, Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Come Off, out Tuesday. The film traces Hawk's life from his childhood, where he was born many years after his siblings to older parents—his mom would call him "our little mistake"—leaving him feeling like an only child and something of an outcast. |
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The Life and Death of r/Place, Home to the Internet's Greatest Art War |
The Internet brings us together, for better or worse. Whether it's creating beautiful, crowd-sourced art, standing against Wall Street corruption, connecting with old family and friends, or cyber-bullying me about my video game opinions, there are pros and cons of the World Wide Web™. What is the holy spirit of the Internet's yin and yang act, you might ask? Reddit. On April 1, we saw the long-awaited return of a subreddit that embodied the best and worst of the Internet: r/Place. I'm sure you've heard of it, maybe even seen some of it, and wondered what the hell was going on. Well, don't worry, your resident Nerd-in-Chief at Esquire, has you covered. Here's a rundown of r/Place for dummies. |
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The Tecovas Johnny Is the Western Boot You—Yes, You—Should Bring Into Your Stable of Shoes |
I was born in Texas, but I'm a Northern boy at heart. I don't even recall my first few months of life down in the Lone Star State. My memory kicks in where I grew up: Pennsylvania, nestled in the Brandywine Valley between Philadelphia and Wilmington, Delaware. And now? I live in Brooklyn. What I'm saying here is that I have no grand cultural claim to cowboy boots. And yet, I'm about to tell you why I've started wearing them, and why you should, too. |
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The Best Books of Spring 2022 |
Welcome to another season in books, dear readers. And boy, what a dazzling one it's shaping up to be. This spring is a true embarrassment of literary riches, with astounding new novels on offer from some of our greatest contemporary novelists, like Jennifer Egan, Emily St. John Mandel, and Ali Smith. Meanwhile, as is appropriate for this season of rebirth and renewal, we're seeing some of our finest writers turn over new leaves, like filmmaker John Waters taking a stab at his debut novel and sci-fi titan Kim Stanley Robinson wading into nature writing. The season is rich in nonfiction too, with remarkable new books tackling everything from fading greats to the labor movement to Black women in pop music. Whatever your literary persuasion may be, you can't go wrong with any of these twenty phenomenal books. |
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