My mother, Frances Junod, was not just a mother, not just a mom. She was a dame. She was a broad. She went through her entire life as a Harlowesque platinum blond, and I never knew the real color of her hair. She liked to go to the track, and she liked to go out to restaurants. She did not like to cook. That she did it anyway—that she had no choice—owed itself to generational expectations, and to the fact that if my mother was a doll, in the Runyonesque sense of the word, my father was a guy, a pinkie-ringed sharpie who spent many nights going to the New York City restaurants my mother longed to frequent, but who, on nights when he came home, loudly expected food on the table. So my mother put food on the table. She cooked three hundred nights a year. I had to like her cooking, and I did, as long as she observed the Mashed Potato Rule. The Mashed Potato Rule, simply stated, is this: There is no such thing as bad mashed potatoes as long as they're actually potatoes, mashed. We had mashed potatoes a lot—I can still see the blood from my hamburger running into them on my plate—and it didn't matter that they were lumpy and grainy and that my mother had no talent for making them; they were Edenic so long as she did. I loved them, as I loved her. But while on my plate they formed the barrier between the battleship-gray lamb chops and the olive-drab green beans, in my heart they formed the barrier between the discovery that my mother hated cooking and the altogether different discovery that my mother hated cooking so much that she even hated cooking for me. |
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| What's the Point of a Dress Code These Days? |
Altitude, it seems, comes with attitude. The social life at places like Sugarbush and Gstaad is everything. As one rather grand lady I met at high tea in Badrutt's Palace Hotel told me, "I simply don't have time to go skiing when I'm here. There's just too much else to do." And what you look like while you're engaged in all those off-the-slopes activities is every bit as critical as your skill on skis. Which brings me to an invitation I received in St. Moritz this past February for the gala dinner to close proceedings at the Ice, a two-day event that featured impossibly valuable vintage motorcars, driven by impossibly rich owners, drifting sideways across the city's frozen lake. It arrived with the instruction to dress in "Alpine Black Tie." We live in an era when dress codes of any sort seem rather passé. So it was a shock to encounter a new and very specific one. For clarity, I asked my hosts what Alpine black tie actually means. |
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The 2023 Esquire Gadget Awards |
Marketing departments at tech brands have officially reached peak ego (we hope). Everything is Innovation, Ideation, and Products That Will Change the Way We as Humans Live. Truthfully, though, most new releases are just minor upgrades to old products, looking for a new round of buzz. At times, those little alterations can make a difference, but honestly, we're in it for the big launches. The actual cool shit. The shit we haven't seen before. Welcome to the 2023 Gadget Awards. Our editors spent another year testing every new release across tech, wellness, and smart-home accessories to definitively tell you what's worth your money. This year, the standouts included everything from forward-thinking TVs, big smartphone upgrades (iPhone had a good year for once), Therabody's venture into the wellness space, and even a sofa with built-in subwoofers. |
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Inside Fran Lebowitz's Digitally Unbothered Life |
When I wrote "New York Person" at the top of my Instagram bio years ago, I only had one "New York Person" in mind: Fran Lebowitz. And while I recognize the irony of mentioning my Instagram account as I introduce someone notorious for not having so much as an email address, I am confident that Lebowitz will never read this, both because she does not use the internet and because she does not care to seek it out. I went into our phone conversation with great curiosity about Lebowitz's sardonic take on everything from influencer culture (she isn't sure what it is) to the Barbie movie (she hasn't seen it, or Oppenheimer) to AI (it doesn't scare her because she doesn't know what it is). But it turns out—she doesn't care! It's not that she hates influencer culture as I expected her to; rather, she chooses not to know what it is and happily goes about her life. This feels inspired to me, as a millennial who frantically re-watches her Instagram story five times after posting it. I shouldn't have aspired to Lebowitz's level of NYC-specific personhood; I should have aspired to her level of not caring about how the world perceives me. |
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For as long as there has been a United States of America, its highest-ranked somebodies have been white, educated men of means. The nobodies have changed across the ages, but for longer than there has been a U. S. of A., the somebodies have conspired Black people into the ranks of nobodies. Black people have opposed that oppression since they were stolen to these shores, have achieved remarkable gains given the dominion of those oppressors. And those gains were most prolific in the 12-year period following the ratification of the 13th Amendment. History repeats, and the ignorant are bound to repeat it. But some who know their history are dead set on forcing the repeat. Those folks, the anachronistic bigot-hearted generational somebodies who've been big mad about the progress of Reconstruction 2.0, are conspiring a sequel to Jim Crow. |
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The Debate Over the $2,500 Whole-Body Scan Is Tearing Us Apart |
A thing you can ask at a party that is guaranteed to get the blood flowing is: "If you could find out the time and manner of your death, would you?" I go back and forth. Yes, if I found out I'd be dead in six months, of course I would liquidate my (unimpressive) 401(k) and immediately retire to eat drugs on the beach. But what if I knew I was going to die of something normal at the age of 77.8, which is the average age of death for an American woman. What would you do? I ask because Kim Kardashian got a full-body scan recently from a company called Prenuvo, which promises "fast, safe, and comprehensive" screenings for all manner of horrible shit. "Prenuvo turns healthcare upside down," says their marketing copy. "Rather than wait for symptoms to present and disease to progress, Prenuvo provides early insight into what is going on under the skin. Armed with detailed health information, you'll be able to make proactive, informed decisions about your health." |
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