A Drinker's Dilemma: Hangxiety |
I'm not a bad drunk. I don't throw fights at the bar. I don't cry when I drink wine. I won't corner you at a family party or force shots down your throat. I'm a lightweight. If I drink too much, I throw up. And as much as I love that immaculate feeling of a drink knocking my lights out–for me, it's my fourth whiskey–I really hate throwing up. But, partly thanks to the pandemic, and the work required to keep a romantic relationship intact during several months in quarantine, I've discovered I have a drinking problem. We call him Gloominick. He's a sneaky little turd. He waits until the next morning to come around. Mean, mopey, futzy, and, during those particularly rough hangovers–you know, those News Year Day-style hangovers–fully apocalyptic. "Go away, Gloominick," my fiancée will say. "Go to your room." Keeping Gloominick at bay hasn't been terribly difficult lately, since it's the dead of winter and there haven't been many gatherings where social lubrication is encouraged. But in July I'm getting married. And a lot of drinking will be happening before, during, and after that event. I feel pretty good when I don't drink at all, but the thought of staying completely sober while the rest of my loved ones are getting smashed is, well, lousy. Especially because I'm such a happy drunk. The bachelor party, the rehearsal dinner, the shots, the champagne, the groomsmen and their expensive scotch–and I haven't even gotten to the wedding itself. Am I really going to drink sparkling apple cider on the biggest day of my life? |
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| The smoking wife gestures to the side of the house, where a gate is propped open. "Meet me in back," she says, and quickly closes the front door. The pool guy crosses the yard toward the open gate. He is nonplussed. The pool guy has seen it all. He comes after the party, after the algae bloom, after the divorce. (Mike took care of the pool, I wouldn't know where to start.) He comes when the cover is torn, when the lining is cracked, when the pump has leaked all over the Tesla charging station. (You'll be hearing from my lawyer.) |
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How to Get Into the Marvel Cinematic Universe |
100 hours of interconnected storytelling. Countless running gags. Multiple versions of super-powered dudes played by Benedict Cumberbatch and Tom Hiddleston. Here's how to tackle the most important franchise in entertainment history. |
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The Great 'Touch of Grey' Debate |
By the summer of 1987, the Grateful Dead and their music had inhabited some strange and notable places, a few of them right here on Earth. In the beginning there were the Acid Tests—those collective experiments in chemically expanded consciousness for which the band provided the soundtrack and established themselves, once and forever, as the pied pipers of the hippie movement in the Bay Area and beyond. There was a legendarily disastrous set at Woodstock. A legendarily amazing tour of Europe. Three shows at the Great Pyramid of Giza, under the implacable gaze of the Sphinx. Over the decades, the Dead played an 18th-century French chateau; a high-school gym in Alaska; a casino in Las Vegas; countless theaters, arenas, racetracks, and public spaces from coast to coast. And once, a buccaneer-themed amusement park called Pirates World. But for all the rambling and rocking, the strangest milieu in which the Grateful Dead ever found themselves may have been near the top of the Billboard Hot 100 charts. |
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The Bed Sheets That'll Actually Give You a Good Night's Sleep |
This is not a sob story. In fact, it's a lighthearted saga of someone—me—who did the impossible of rekindling an old flame with his first and longest crush: bed sheets. As a kid, I lived a typical tragic boarding school lifestyle, and my parents thought taking me out every weekend on overnight trips to fancy hotels was a way of bonding with me (spoiler alert, it wasn't). But I did grow to love those crisp, mushy hotel sheets. I'd dive into them, feel the swoon as they touched my skin, and sleep like a log on them until dad's snoring awoke me. Flash forward to adulthood, I've hunted for sheets that could again Goldilocks my nighttime, sans having me to book a year-long residency at Burj Al Arab. But like how fairy tales work—you don't choose true love; true love chooses you—Casper's Hyperlite sheets were recommended to me by chance. The morning after my first night sleeping on them, I woke up alarmed, like waking up from a 50-year-long limbo in Inception and finally coming home: That was a good sleep |
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80 Books Every Man Should Read |
Back in 2015, Esquire published a list of "80 Books Every Man Should Read." It wasn't our finest moment. The list claimed to be "utterly biased," and indeed it was. We received criticism from every corner of the Internet, and we deserved it. Only one title (A Good Man Is Hard to Find) was written by a woman, and fewer than ten were written by men of color. It was also a pretty boring set. In 2016, we published a new and improved list: "80 Books Every Person Should Read," selected by eight female literary luminaries including Michiko Kakutani, Roxane Gay, and Lauren Groff. It was a good list: surprising, dynamic, and inclusive. But this spring, when we started planning Esquire.com's first ever Summer Fiction Week (a digital spin on the Summer Reading Issues we published back in the eighties), we asked ourselves: should we not just make our own amends? |
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