I'm Getting Buff by Secretly Taking Wegovy |
I did club swimming growing up. That's where my body image issues started. I grew up in California, in a surf town, and all the kids on the team swam, surfed, did water polo. I was the only kid on the team who didn't have six-pack abs. I felt very jealous, starting at 12 years old. My body was different; I was active, but I was always a bit chunky, even when I was 15 and swimming 4,000 yards a day. Even from a young age, I had specific ideas about how I wanted my body to look. I hear similar things from a lot of other gay men. I got the idea from movies, from magazines, from Abercrombie & Fitch. I always remember everybody talking about Brad Pitt in Fight Club, that famous scene with his shirt off. You'd have to be like 3 percent body fat to look that ripped. We've expanded our definition of what attractive is, but the ideal male body was more twink-like then—Leonardo Dicaprio, Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. Very skinny. I never had that slim build. |
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| Chuck Palahniuk Is Not Who You Think He Is |
Four days before I'm supposed to travel to Portland, Oregon to meet Chuck Palahniuk, we're already plotting a murder. Multiple murders, actually. Palahniuk is texting me from a Columbia High School reunion in Burbank, Washington, from which he graduated in 1980 (it wasn't technically his reunion but his older sister's), and among his fellow Coyotes are the bullies who chanted mean shit at him and beat him bloody. "Several will die today," one text reads. This was a conversation that began nine texts earlier with me saying hello, it's the writer from Esquire, wanted to touch base, etc., and now, it's somehow progressed to killing his childhood tormentors. Soon, Palahniuk discovers that "several are dead. I feel cheated." His solution is, of course, obvious: "Must find and piss on their graves." To someone like me, who used to read his work as a twenty-something, this feels quintessentially Palahniukian: darkly funny, shamelessly macabre, and—most crucially—completely straight-faced. In Palahniuk's fiction, twisted violence and sex occur in a matter-of-fact manner. By the time this text exchange is happening, I've spent the better part of a month becoming a Palahniuk completist: miring myself in his menacing diegeses, rife with rape, murder, torture, self-mutilation, suicide, and all manner of gruesome body horror. His latest, Not Forever, But For Now (releasing in early September), is a tour de force of literary debauchery, featuring some truly nasty stuff. Helping him plan the murder of his high school bullies, then, doesn't seem strange at all. As I texted him then: "I would expect nothing less." |
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Oldboy Keeps Feeling Younger |
Like eating a live octopus that wriggles and wraps its tentacles around your face as you chew, viewing Park Chan-Wook's Oldboy is an uncomfortable delicacy. This August, the visceral tale of revenge has been rereleased to American audiences, making over $1 million at the box office—surpassing the cumulative gross of its original 2003 theatrical run. So why, 20 years later, are people lining up to sold-out showings of the film? The action thriller—which follows a wrongfully imprisoned man on a revenge mission against his captors—is a cult classic amongst cinephiles of the highest order, from Roger Ebert to Quentin Tarantino. Over the past two decades, Oldboy has cultivated a loyal group of fans who deem it one of the most fucked-up movies ever made. Oldboy loyalists even warn newcomers to go into the film with no prior knowledge of the film in order not to ruin its plot twists. But the film is so much more than its most violent scenes, sinful fight sequences, and shocking ending. Rewatching Oldboy in 2023 doesn't feel like revisiting a relic of its time. In our all too censored and sexless modern movie landscape, Park Chan-Wook's masterpiece—with its extraordinarily intentional use of explicit imagery—is suddenly a refreshing watch. |
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The Best Golf Clothing to Wear Right Now: A 2023 Year in Review |
It's difficult to understate how relentless 2023's golf apparel influx was. Do you know someone who hits the ball? Of course you do, now. Go ahead and ask any one of them about golf clothes and there's a one hundred percent chance they're gonna mention an Instagram ad they got the other day for a new brand named after a punned-out iteration of a phrase in the golf vernacular. Also a virtual guarantee? It's the fourth ad just like that they were served that day. The beast of the paralysis of choice ate this year, in both the best and worst ways. An age of wisdom and foolishness, if you will. In regard to the roses, the founding fathers of Golf's New Wave—Stephen Malbon and Cole Young of Malbon Golf and Metalwood Studio, respectively—continued to produce with fervor and attitude. Brands like Gumtree Golf & Nature Club, Jain, Public Drip, and Students had breakout and banner years. But it was a tried-and-true menswear legend that stole '23, in my mind. Sid Mashburn, beloved by your favorite Tumblr-era menswear blogger and also PGA Tour pro/human CPR for the visor, Keith Mitchell, blew out his Golf Shop with wool and pleats and keyhole sunglasses and shorts so justifiably hemmed that Sid even explains why on the product page just to put a period on it. Mashburn even got them talking earnestly about jawnz on the telecast. "Cashmere Keith" was a main character on tour, at least for a little while. |
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How Emma Seligman Pulled Off This Year's Best—and Bloodiest—Comedy |
It wasn't until Emma Seligman found themself with a budget for car bombs and mascot penises that the gravity of Bottoms, their sophomore sex comedy, finally set in. Six years prior, the gags had only lived as ideas on the whiteboard of an NYU basement. There, Seligman and their co-writer, Rachel Sennott, mapped out their film school dreams: a multimillion-dollar blockbuster directed by Seligman, starring Sennott and their fellow NYU classmate, Ayo Edebiri. The difference between the trio and most other film school kids imagining similar utopias? They made it happen. When I talk to Seligman over Zoom, days before Bottoms's August 25 premiere, it's clear that the now-28-year-old director—along with Edebiri and Sennott—have treated their craft like it was work long before they were getting paid for it. "I knew Rachel before she posted her 'It's L.A.' video, you know?" Seligman says, referencing Sennott's seminal moment of Internet fame. "Or when Ayo got Big Mouth. These were all such important moments, especially at the beginning of their careers." With the encouragement of Sennott, Seligman adapted their senior thesis short, Shiva Baby, into a feature—gaining Seligman and Sennott critical acclaim for their directing and acting work, respectively. The performance quickly launched Sennott into roles in HBO's The Idol and A24's Bodies, Bodies, Bodies. Meanwhile, after steadily racking up writing and acting credits on Big Mouth, Abbott Elementary, Dickinson, and more, Edebiri landed an Emmy-nominated breakout role as Sydney in FX's The Bear. |
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I Asked a Music Psychologist Why Gen Z Loves Sad Songs |
Let's play a game. If you have a Spotify account, log in and search, "sad." What do you see? My account suggests a myriad of playlists, such as "Sad Crying Mix," "Lonely Sad Mix," "Crying Myself To Sleep," "Sad Bops'' and more—all of which, the streamer claims, were made specifically for me. If it weren't for the surplus of SZA and Frank Ocean songs on each tracklist, I'd roll my eyes at the concept. Alas, the algorithm is correct. It understands exactly what I want to listen to, and it knows what you want to hear, too. To make sure of it, Spotify hired a team of experts to track listening habits and burgeoning trends. This year, the group discovered that crying is all the rage—at least, among Gen Z users. According to Spotify's data, Gen Z's top search in 2023 is simply... "sad." As a fellow Zoomer, I'll admit I've listened to "Sad Bops'" once or twice, but haven't we all? I thought that was a circumstantial experience, not a plague affecting my entire generation. |
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