"Call Us When He Kills You"

For the last eight years I've been stalked by a man I do not know. I don't know how it will end, but this is how it began.

View in Browser Find the Perfect Gift This Holiday Season SHOP NOW Find the Perfect Gift This Holiday Season SHOP NOW Call Us When He Kills You For the last eight years, I've been stalked by a man I do not know. I've never had a conversation with him. I know his name, but I won't say it. I know what he looks like as well as I know the stoops and curbs of my own neighborhood, but I don't know where he comes from, how he lives, or why he chose me. As I write this, he's in jail, but he still sends me pornographic magazines, and he still calls me almost every day. I don't know how it will end, but this is how it began.   Early one Sunday morning, I'm jolted awake by pounding on my front door. I roll into my robe and rush to discover Leslie, my four-hundred-pound, not-quite-right neighbor from down the hall, dressed as usual in a rumpled, food-stained shirt and blue jeans so filthy they've acquired the texture of greasy canvas. There's another guy with him, standing slightly behind, an oddball in a ridiculous getup—dark sunglasses and an aviator cap. "My friend wants to meet you," Leslie pants. Read the Full Story Lenny Kravitz Wants To Clear a Few Things Up It feels like Lenny Kravitz has been the epitome of cool forever. But when Let Love Rule debuted, it did so to a lukewarm response stateside. You could argue that people didn't get it. Didn't get him. As hip-hop was exploding in popularity, here was a twenty-four-year-old Black man from New York making rock music using vintage recording techniques and old-as-hell equipment. At the same time, the rock charts he was trying to hit—almost wholly white in makeup then—were rattling with pumped-up LPs from the likes of Aerosmith and Mötley Crüe. Raw and insular, at times even delicate, there was nothing else like his sound gaining traction.   But even after his next two albums—Are You Gonna Go My Way (1993), whose title track became a pop-culture statement, and Circus (1995)—did better and then better again, cracking the top twenty and then the top ten of the all-genre Billboard 200 albums chart, Kravitz struggled to be taken seriously by the rock-critic establishment. Maybe it wasn't that they didn't get it. Maybe it was that they didn't want him to have it. "There was this one article that, at that time, said, 'If Lenny Kravitz were white, he would be the next savior of rock 'n' roll,' " he recalls.  Read the Full Story The Most Random Things On the Internet That Make For Great Holiday Gifts I've spent a decade covering holiday gifts, and the selection of actually cool things can be bleak at times. Sure, get them a candle, some slippers, whatever and it'll work—but it won't blow them away. Lately, I've found that my gifting taste has taken a turn. When I can't sleep at night and I've had just enough doom scrolling, I find myself in an even deeper darker place on the Internet: Page 58 of Amazon Top Sellers. Some of the items on there seem so insanely random, but I do find myself thinking what great gifts things like an automatic bird feeder with a video recorder might be.   This made me realize that the best gifts of all aren't the basic ones you can read in every roundup you can find on Google. The best gifts are the quirky, eccentric things people don't own and probably didn't even know existed until you found it for them. And this one gift you choose for that special someone is highly specific and based on their unique personality, making it a more thoughtful way to go too. So this year is different, instead of more slippers (even though they really are a great gift), they're getting something more unique. Read the Full Story The Best New Restaurants in America, 2023 Realness can be thrilling. And fortunately, radical authenticity is surging in the world of American dining. Perhaps chefs are becoming braver and more willing to put their personal stories on the plate. Or maybe there's an unconscious impulse afoot to fend off the existential threat of artificial intelligence and virtual worlds. Whatever the reason, we're all the beneficiaries of a culinary moment that revels in raw honesty. The collective dining experience right now is visceral, vulnerable, downright weird at times—and so very human.   Nothing is more real than a whole fish, a dish that makes an appearance, in various forms, on many of the menus featured in the forty-first edition of our Best New Restaurants—reported, as always, by real humans: Jeff Gordinier, Joshua David Stein, Omar Mamoon, and yours truly. Over the past year, we crisscrossed the nation, sampling some two hundred new dining establishments that serve almost every conceivable type of cuisine. After a series of spirited debates, we settled on fifty restaurants that stood out from the rest, below, in alphabetical order by state. Read the Full Story In the War Room with Steve Bannon "Donald Trump won the 2020 election," Steve Bannon pronounces. "Of that there is not even a question." Obviously you expect me not to agree with you, I say. "Of course I expect you not to agree with me," he says. "And I'm also not looking for you to agree with me. And I also don't give a fuck who in the mainstream media agrees or disagrees with me."   And so off we go—about this and about Covid (the Bannon view: "It's 100 percent a bioweapon—fucking not even a question") and about vaccines ("I would never in ten million years get this vaccine," Bannon says, and asks if I would; I simply hand him my vax card, which he looks at with apparent amazement: "I've never...") and about what I view—but naturally Bannon doesn't—as his incessant anti-Semitic dog-whistling. At one point, he rhapsodizes about the range of information available to people these days. Or misinformation, I say. "A wide range of information," he counters. "One man's misinformation may be somebody else's Holy Grail, right?" Read the Full Story A Candle Made to Last a Lifetime I always have a candle burning in my home. Day or night, you can count on one being lit in my bedroom; sometimes, I'll put an extra out in the living room, too. They turn a house into a home, give your space a signature aroma, look pretty, and feel cozy.   Naturally, burning candles as often as I do, I go through them pretty quickly. When I'm done with a candle, I toss it out, open a new one, light it, and repeat the cycle. I've been doing that for years. Hell, humans have been doing that for as long as candles have existed. Recently, though, I did something brand new. I finished a wax candle. I softened the wax with hot water and removed it from the glass candle jar with a butter knife. I threw the melted wax away, and popped a new block of candle wax—wick and all—into my glass candle jar. And I was able to do so thanks to Diptyque's newest, sustainable, refillable candle collection: Les Mondes de Diptyque. Read the Full Story Follow Us Unsubscribe | Privacy Notice | CA Notice at Collection Esquire is a publication of Hearst Magazines. ©2023 Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 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