Murder and Loathing in Las Vegas |
Robert Telles isn't willing to discuss how his DNA ended up under the fingernails of Jeff German. Or why his wife's car was spotted near the sixty-nine-year-old investigative reporter's house on a warm Friday morning in early September, a day before a neighbor discovered German's lifeless body at the side of his Las Vegas home. Or how an outfit matching the one worn by the suspect captured on security-cam footage wound up in Telles's home. Speaking to me at the Clark County Detention Center, a couple miles north of the Vegas Strip, Telles is serious but engaged. Eager to please, even. But he must be careful about what he says. His court-appointed lawyers at the time made that clear. The man charged with premeditated murder in one of the most sensational cases in recent history here—one that drew the attention of virtually every major newspaper and network in the country—is short and lean, with dark eyes framed by black caterpillar brows beneath a gleaming bald head. He's no longer wearing the thick white bandages that were wrapped around his forearms, covering up what officials described as self-inflicted wounds, when he first appeared in court, six days after German's murder. He faced the judge that day with a wry smile before being led back to jail in shackles. |
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| What I've Learned: Antony Blinken |
I wear a slight variation of the same thing every day: a dark-blue suit, a white shirt, and a dark-blue tie. Occasionally I go to the gray suit, and occasionally I go to a patterned tie. I got this from President Obama, who tended to wear something similar every day. When I asked him about it, he said, "It's another five minutes in my day that I get back, because I'm not spending time thinking about What am I going to wear today?"
My suit brand is a state secret. A lot of the stories I heard at the dinner table were about America as that last beacon of hope. That wasn't mythology. It was a reality for so many of my family members. My paternal grandfather came here fleeing pogroms in Russia; my stepmother fled communists in Hungary, literally in the dead of night on the train as a young girl with her mother; and my stepfather was a Holocaust survivor. My father went off to the Army Air Corps in World War II at the age of nineteen, left college after his freshman year. He was part of a generation that tended to speak less and do more. He didn't necessarily wear his emotions on his sleeve. What he tried to instill is, given the choice, he takes workhorse over show horse. As a kid in the sixties, the first music my parents exposed me to was the Beatles. From day one until today, they remain the summit. |
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The Best Movies to Watch When You're Super Stoned |
You hit the joint and ordered the food. Now, you have to select a movie before the high fades. So, find the joint with the funniest-sounding name, put down whatever else you're doing (like reading while high or scrolling through your phone for memes), and get to choosing the right film for the occasion. We suggest something to blow your mind, like Inception or 2001: A Space Odyssey, or even a good laugh from films like Friday and This is the End. Hell, you can even just binge a favorite show like The Great British Break Off or Planet Earth and just get totally lost in the sauce. Trust me, The World's Most Extraordinary Homes on Netflix will never look more extraordinary than when you're stoned beyond belief. Whatever you're craving, don't risk sobering up while still scrolling through the 'Award-winning Movies' category. Queue these up and enjoy 'em—bloodshot eyes and all. |
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For Kwame Onwuachi, Virtuoso Chef of Tatiana, the Time Has Come |
The oxtails take forever. Four days, really, but the process of preparing and cooking them has so many steps that you lose track when chef Kwame Onwuachi tries to explain it. Better to go down into the basement kitchen beneath Tatiana, Onwuachi's new Afro-Caribbean restaurant in New York City's beloved hub of the performing arts, Lincoln Center, and see for yourself. Over here, cook Jamal Lewis mixes up a Caribbean-inflected marinade—fresh bay leaves and cinnamon and allspice and a ginger-garlic paste and some of Onwuachi's grandfather's hot sauce. Over there, Onwuachi dips a spoon into a cauldron in which vegetables and roasted chickens and hundreds of chicken feet boil and bob for hours as they're rendered into gelatinous, deeply flavored stock. The oxtails soak in the marinade for 24 hours. They're seared. They're braised in the stock. Eventually they're served in a pond of funky, fatty, gleaming sauce that is the result of these flavors combining, converging, cooking down. The sauce is so sticky that it clings to your fingernails all the way to the next morning, and you can't imagine being mad about that, because it's one of the most delicious things you will ever taste. It makes sense that the flavor goes on and on. After all, you're tasting time. Most of the dishes on the menu at Tatiana take days to prepare. Patience pulses through each recipe, from the curried and buttery patties (stuffed with slow-cooked goat shoulder) to the chopped cheese (a riff on a late-night bodega staple found throughout Harlem and the Bronx) made with aged ribeye. "It goes back to my culture," Onwuachi says. "We take our time with food." Factor in the decades it has taken for a restaurant like Tatiana to appear at a place like Lincoln Center and, well, as Sam Cooke once put it, "It's been a long, a long time coming." It's not just that Onwuachi is bringing his culture—the culture of the Bronx, New Orleans, Nigeria, and the Caribbean—to a venue that's associated with the Eurocentric stylings of Mozart and Puccini. It's also that his culture happened to be present on this patch of Manhattan before the opera and the ballet came along to displace it. |
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The Esquire Home Awards, 2023 |
Fuck AI. One thing algorithms still can't do: try out that bed. Once done IRL in department stores and now done online from your sofa (one you probably hate), shopping for home items is a tedious task. With so many competitor retailers, niche categories, and emerging DTC brands, where do you start? What brands are really worth it? That's where we come in. We've spent the past year sleeping on mattresses, grilling on BBQs, fluffing pillows, and drinking (plenty of) alcohol from all types of glasses to find the best of the best for you. This isn't a computer-generated list. This is a list of the 71 things we actually tried, truly loved, and offered permanent spots in our homes. Everything you'll find below was released in the past year by some of our favorite brands. And each item has been vetted and tested by real humans, so you can feel like you know what you're getting before it ever arrives at your doorstep. |
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How Weed Strains Get Their (Amusing, Provocative, Downright Wacky) Names |
I never wondered about who grew my weed or even how it made its way to Danny's older brother. I wondered who named it. Truth is, I still wonder about this every time I walk into a dispensary. And every time I walk out, small glass jar cupped in my hand. I decided to find out. And what I learned from talking to folks up and down the weed chain—rock-star breeders and farmers, boutique retailers and publically traded cannabis corporations, a marketing exec who moved from Coca-Cola to cannabis—is not only who concocts these catchy names and how that concoction happens, but that legalization is quickly changing much about how naming will look in the future. "It's a really complex time for naming," one longtime farmer told me. That's because as more people stream into the legalized market, the customer base is shape-shifting: We're no longer talking about old hippies or young hip-hoppers but, well, everyone, from connoisseurs who focus on trichomes, terpenes, and terroir to juice-cleansed "I'll have the tincture, please" wellness types to, well, my mom. There are no stats on hippie consumers, or on my mom, but in just the last four years, the percentage of women-buyers bumped from 38 to 49 percent. And with the average dispensary customer now dropping $52 a month, retailers are feverishly looking to fill their cases with more SKUs, which means more—and more eye-catching—names. As amusingly goofy as cannabis names often are, a lot of thought can go into selecting a name. |
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