The Joy of Sex with One Woman (My Wife) |
Lately I've been remembering how her room was almost empty and everything was white, how the winter sun washed her slim girlish body in a cool marble light. I remember cupping her small hard breasts in my hands when I entered her from behind and the way she drove hard against my lips when she came. I remember moving in her and thinking, I could marry this girl. She was twenty-four and I was twenty-eight and it was the winter of 1982 on 110th Street in Manhattan. Movies are about romance. Novels are about adultery. This is the stuff that falls between, the stuff we never mention, the stuff we call life and forget. Like the time we were living in a small adobe cabin down a dirt road deep in a curve of the Rio Grande. When we lay on our bed, the cool night air poured over the rim of the window like water, falling to the floor and rising back up again, and sometimes cows would get through the gate next door and wake us by chewing the long grass outside the window. But I don't remember anything we did in that bed. After six months I told her it was over and asked her to move out. She was living in an old building in town. She'd fixed it up nice, comfy tan sofa and warm yellow walls, pictures in frames. I started dropping by just to check in, to make sure she was doing all right. I felt guilty for dragging her all the way to New Mexico and dumping her. Then one night we sat in the yellow kitchen talking and I felt a wave of peace and love wash over me and thought, What the fuck, man, are you crazy? This is a good thing you're blowing here. A good woman who loves you. So we went to bed and it was that warm kind of familiar fucking where everything feels right. I got a sweet little angel, I love the way she spreads her wings. I was still inside her when I decided to ask her to marry me. |
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| Are We Ready for AI to Raise the Dead? |
Eleven years ago, Tupac came back to life. So did Michael Jackson two years later. Okay, they still weren't breathing. But there they were, gracing the stage, digitally reincarnated as "holograms." They caused a commotion the moment they materialized. Some people who saw them thought they were pretty sweet—a nice tribute. Others got queasy. Did the shows' producers have the families' approval? Would the King of Pop even want to be resurrected as a collection of light beams? Could we really make that choice for him? Just a decade later, you can forget about holograms. We're approaching the possibility of digital immortality. Here in 2023, we have witnessed the mainstreaming of artificial intelligence in the space of a few months through the text-to-image generator DALL-E and the "large language model" ChatGPT. There's now AI in your browser with capabilities that seem to have arrived way ahead of schedule. The latest model rolled out by OpenAI, a Bay Area start-up, is called GPT-4, and it draws on a huge amount of data and "machine learning" to answer questions, have a conversation, even write whole essays with citations. Those citations aren't always real, however, and the information isn't always true. The model can't really assess truth or fiction, it just learns how to assemble words in a coherent way. It can construct human speech, but it isn't conscious or self-aware. |
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How The Race to Go Viral Killed Digital Media |
The best way to understand Ben Smith is to understand what he was doing in the midst of our interview about his new book, Traffic. While delivering perfectly cogent answers to my questions, he was also scrolling through his phone and selecting who to follow on the suddenly-buzzworthy Twitter-alternative Bluesky. Smith had just scored an account on the invite-only social network, and he wanted to make his footprint on this fertile new land. Smith confessed to his Bluesky skimming so that I wouldn't think he was doing something more brain-consuming, like sending emails or solving Wordle. We have been associates, lunchmates, and friendly competitors for more than a decade, so I appreciate (maybe even slightly envy,) his multi-tasking abilities. He somehow found time to write Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral while penning a must-read media column for The New York Times and setting up Semafor, a global news startup, where he is the editor-in-chief. Traffic explores the rise—and in some cases the fall—of digital media innovators like Gawker, HuffPost, Breitbart, and one of Smith's own past employers, BuzzFeed, which just last month decided to exit the news business altogether. Smith was the founding editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News for eight years before he became the media columnist for The New York Times. Ahead of the book's release, I spoke with Smith from the Manhattan office of his news startup Semafor. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.) |
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Diplo Has Always Felt Misunderstood |
Last night he partied, this morning he's rallying. Just a handful of hours ago, Diplo was out celebrating the release of Diplo Presents Thomas Wesley: Chapter 2 - Swamp Savant, the 44-year-old's latest foray into country music, at the Los Angeles rooftop venue Desert 5 Spot, a space that embraces the line between western and modern club influences. (A perfect fit for one of music's most prolific, genre-hopping producers, no?) Diplo, born Thomas Wesley Pentz, has seen success producing global hits ("Lean On," "Where Are Ü Now"), launching ancillary projects (Jack Ü with Skrillex, Major Lazer with Ape Drums and Walshy Fire), and dabbling in experimentation (a pandemic-era ambient album). And lately he's been hard at work infiltrating the inner sanctum of the Music City establishment, playing Stagecoach and collaborating with artists like Morgan Wallen and Sturgill Simpson. It's working and, as he says, country music is changing. So is Diplo. Always. While receiving red light therapy, the producer spoke to Esquire about his habit of rule-breaking, recent comments on his sexuality, and a lifetime of being misunderstood. This interview has been edited and condensed. |
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Is It Time to Quit Coffee for Good? |
Petty Officer Second Class Marcus Bivens stood before a panel of U.S. Navy officers, hands cuffed behind his back, facing charges of an unauthorized absence. For his first fifteen years of service, Bivens had been considered a "squared-away sailor"—orderly, competent, conscientious. A sailor officers could rely on. But he had been missing work lately, sometimes for weeks at a time, and now he was standing in front of an ad hoc disciplinary tribunal investigating his rapid and seemingly inexplicable decline in job performance. Bivens could no longer physically complete his work tasks, even though it was an administrative job. Several weeks prior, Bivens was driving home on I-15 from the Coronado naval base in San Diego when his eyesight suddenly went double. "It was terrifying," he recalls. "I literally drove home with one eye closed." Bivens made it to his house safely but immediately collapsed into bed, clothes still on, and slept for eleven hours. When he woke up, the double vision was worse. |
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How Heavy Metal Saved My Life |
Of course it was Gomper who thought up the name. Patrick 'Gomper' Guinness, born and raised in South Buffalo, no relation whatsoever to the family of Irish brewing billionaires, was as close as our little crew had to a man of the world. Gomper owned almost a dozen hardcore and metal records, and most of a drum kit, and had actually been to New York City—all of which made him our lord and commander. When he announced, right before band practice one Sunday morning, that we were going to call ourselves "Asphalt Halo," it never crossed our minds to disagree. The name sounded cool, and it suited our sound—the "asphalt" part, anyway. I'm pretty sure all three of us—Gomper, J.T., and me—understood, even then, that it was better than our bullshit band deserved. The plan was to get together every Sunday in what Gomper's parents insisted on referring to as their "carport"—it was a standard one-car garage—and use our battered pawn-shop instruments to make noises that approximated rock. Ten in the morning on Sundays was the perfect time to play—the only time, really—because everybody else was at mass. We had an hour and a half before someone (Gomper's dad, usually) ordered us to stop on pain of death. We did our best to make those ninety minutes count. There was only one problem: our best was awful. J.T. knew two or three power chords (we didn't realize that the whole point of a "power" chord is that it can be slid literally anywhere up and down the neck of a guitar), so it was usually J.T. who started us off. The riffs he came up with sounded pretty good, as I remember it—right up to the moment when the rest of us joined in. Gomper had been in marching band for a year, and he kept decent time, at least until his attention drifted. |
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