The Day I Watched My Brother Drown |
It's still very hard for me to picture certain parts of that day. But one thing I'll always remember is the look on their faces. Panic. It was horrifying. They were so close to me, and there was nothing I could do to help them. It would have been horrible losing just one of them, but all four—I just can't comprehend it sometimes. I always tried to be protective of Dave. As a kid, I let him bunk with me because he was scared of the dark. When he got his driver's license and would be out after curfew, I would tell him, "Just be careful. Just drive the speed limit so you don't get pulled over." And at camp when he went out, I'd nag him about having a designated driver. He was always like, "I've got it under control, Ben." I'm a Baco boy. So were my brother and his friends. Camp Baco is a summer camp in upstate New York. Most of the kids are from Long Island, but you get a couple, like us, from Philly. My brother and I had been going since we were little. Dave, who was eighteen, had been a counselor the past two years, and I came back last year, at twenty-two, to be the head hiking counselor. Outside of my parents, Camp Baco is probably the most important thing to me. A lot of those first things you do in life, you do them at camp. You kiss a girl, you drink your first beer, just those adolescent things. It's a very tight-knit place. Everyone at the camp seems to enjoy the same kinds of things—sports, music, stuff like that. I don't know if anyone could tell you why the bond is so strong, but I can see it with my friends, with Dave's friends. Those are the people you always seem to turn to in crisis. |
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| The Fantasy Football Kingpin |
I didn't expect the first text from Sam. It came on a wholly unremarkable night. Unprompted. Sam had a problem. He needed advice, and didn't really have anyone else to turn to. It wasn't exactly something Sam could broach with friends, parents, colleagues, or peers. So he went to me, a guy he lacked personal history with. That seemed to be the point. Sam's problem was cocaine. I told Sam I'd be there if he needed me. Though I wasn't sure how much help I could be. I cut it off there, intentionally. I'm not Sam's sponsor. I'm not his counselor, nor anyone else's. I'm not a mental health professional, although attention to my own mental health couldn't hurt. I've never claimed qualification in a mental health or substance abuse field of any kind, anywhere. I'm a fantasy football commissioner. I run seventeen leagues, in fact. I fill them with people, collect dues, allocate it all, repeat. Effectively, it's the housekeeping of our hobby, in which we draft NFL players and pit them against each other, week to week. Sam's played in one of the leagues I've run for the past couple years. |
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The Hijab Is a Symbol. The Protests In Iran Are About So Much More. |
The mass demonstrations in the streets of Iran are about the hijab. Well, they are and they aren't. The protests began when the family of Mahsa Amini, a young Iranian woman, said she died in the custody of Iran's morality police after they detained her for wearing hers improperly. But so much of the story has gone unnoticed in the West. Amini was Kurdish, an ethnic minority in Iran that has faced persecution since well before the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Amini could not legally register her true name, Zhina, because Kurdish names are banned by clerical authorities. The Kurds are among Iran's religious minorities, too, and all of this has led to a belief among supporters of the protest movement that Amini's treatment, the ease with which violence was visited upon her, cannot be separated from who she was: a young, female ethnic and religious minority with no ties to the ruling classes. |
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Nearly 200 years before Danearys Targaryen swooped in on her dragon and laid siege to King's Landing, her forebears were similarly engaged in battles over succession, tending to their dragons, slicing each other up with swords forged of Valyrian steel, and marrying their siblings. This is the period that House of the Dragon deals with, specifically the nearly 30-year reign of King Viserys Targaryen (Paddy Considine), Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm, and its immediate aftermath. Owing to the scope of the show, which will reach its Season One conclusion tonight, we see various characters who were introduced as children replaced by older actors in the same role. The new incarnations of these characters have made for some of HOTD's biggest and most delightful reveals. None of those was more anticipated than seeing the flaxen-haired British actor Tom Glynn-Carney as adult Aegon Targaryen, the first-born son of King Viserys and his second wife, Queen Alicent Hightower (Olivia Cooke). Glynn-Carney, 27, found out that he got the role in April 2021, but was forbidden by the producers not only from discussing his character, but mentioning his involvement in the show at all. The actor, who got his big break in Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk, has been attached to productions where a certain level of discretion was required, but "this was different–a complete sort of secrecy," he told Esquire during a Zoom interview from his home in London. So successful were HBO's efforts to keep his participation under wraps that his credit on the show remained absent from IMDb until a couple of weeks ago. "I felt like MI6 were watching," he says. |
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The World According to George Saunders |
Our world is stranger than fiction—but not George Saunders' fiction. After the runaway success of his only novel (Lincoln in the Bardo) and the rousing popularity of his essays on craft (A Swim in a Pond in the Rain), the godfather of the contemporary short story returns to the form that made him a literary sensation in Liberation Day, out this week. The nine stories contained within Liberation Day return us to Saunders' richly imagined worlds, each one painted in varying shades of lightness and darkness. In one memorable story set in a near-future police state, a grandfather explains how Americans lost their freedoms through small concessions to an authoritarian government. In another standout, vulnerable Americans are brainwashed and reprogrammed as political protestors, with their services available to the highest bidder. Writing political fiction, Saunders tells Esquire, has forced him to "personify and particularize" his own belief system. Meanwhile, the unforgettable title novella sees the poor enslaved to entertain the rich, forced to recreate scenes from American history like the Battle of Little Bighorn. In these powerful and perceptive stories, Saunders conjures a nation in moral and spiritual decline, where acts of kindness wink through like lights in the darkness. In a world getting weirder every day, Saunders' stories are the medicine we need. As the author tells us, "I always assumed that the point of someone telling you a story was to help you live better." Saunders Zoomed with Esquire to take us inside his creative process, opening up about everything he knows after decades of writing fiction—and everything that's still a magical mystery. |
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The Militiamen, The Governor, and the Kidnapping That Wasn't |
In these fragile and fractured times, terrible people seek to do terrible things. We reel from one assault to the next, facing down a relentless barrage of devilry and depravity. But—give thanks—sometimes, just in time, the forces of good catch a break. Sometimes those we rely upon to protect us do manage to intervene. Sometimes the terrible people's most terrible deeds are prevented from ever happening. That, in general terms, was pretty much the story unveiled on October 8, 2020, when Andrew Birge, U. S. attorney for the Western District of Michigan, revealed how a group of men aligned with various militias planned to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer. |
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