You're thirteen years old. Your emotions rocket from total devastation to euphoria and back—all day, every day—but today, right now, life is pretty fucking bad. It's November 2015 and you're eight-hundred-some miles away from home, living with your mom in a god-awful extended-stay hotel. Two doors in this glorified closet—one goes outside, the other to the bathroom. Your family can't afford anything better. New Jersey misses you, but you're a young actor with real talent, and it's taking you places. He did multiple nights on Broadway, including a stint in Les Misérables. Then a different sort of audition came along—for a sci-fi show called Stranger Things, which hailed from the ascendant streaming service Netflix—and you actually got the part. Gaten Matarazzo and I have been together for about an hour when he tells me about the extended-stay hotel. For Matarazzo, the stakes of the final Stranger Things season are much less about whatever fate befalls his character, the good-hearted, fast-talking Dustin. Even he knows that Stranger Things needed to end. |
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What is a sports bar? Are there, for instance, specific criteria a bar must meet to earn this distinction: number of televisions, number of games, memorabilia on the wall, wings on the menu? Or is it more a vibe—is the bar at an Olive Garden a sports bar if you go there to watch the game? As I learned, this question seems to preoccupy many men. The debate comes as the number of sports bars in America continues to climb. Between 2018 and 2024, the number of them grew 2.7 percent on average each year. The trend is driven partly by the rise of drinking establishments that play women's sports only. |
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You're ready to graduate from your reliable Tuesday night companion, the $20 bottle of wine. Maybe it's time for a special occasion vino. Maybe you received a pay bump, which means you can permanently upgrade. Either way, congratulations, and welcome to the deep end. There's good news here. "Now is the best time to buy premium wines in the past 25 years," says Will Harlan, managing director of Harlan Estate, a prestigious Napa Valley winery where the allocation list runs years deep. "The quality of wine has improved drastically, and there's a pandemic price correction where producers are lowering their prices." |
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"Don't you just love New York in the fall?" That's what Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan said to each other in the effervescent rom-com classic You've Got Mail (written and directed by former Esquire columnist Nora Ephron, by the way). But you don't have to live on the cold East Coast to love the cooler months. From now until spring, it's a time for cozier style, layers upon layers, and a wider breadth of colors. This time of year, I rely on Todd Snyder's sweats to make me look my best on pumpkin-spice-fueled errands. When I first got on board with the brand, it was its sweaters that upgraded my everyday ensemble. Impressed by the more formal options, I moved to the athleticwear, specifically the mid-weight sweatshirt that's part of Todd Snyder's long-running collaboration with Champion. |
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Almost fifty years after its release in 1977, Fleetwood Mac's Rumours is somehow still one of the most popular albums in the world. Created in a cauldron of intraband romantic turmoil and fueled by voracious drug intake, this very week, it sits at Number 19 on Billboard's album chart. In 2023, Rumours was the most streamed album of the twentieth century on Spotify—more than any Beatles album, more than Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction, more than Nirvana's Nevermind or Dr. Dre's The Chronic or anything else. In 2024, it was the year's biggest-selling rock album, old or new. These numbers are being powered not by the Boomers and older Gen-Xers who grew up with the album in real time and made it the seventh-best-selling album in US history, but by younger generations. There is something in the music—or, maybe more precisely, in the experience of Rumours that separates it from the pack, even from the most elite. But does that allure revolve around the sound, the emotion, the mythology, or some combination of all its elements? Why does one album survive and even thrive when others—even those that felt much more influential at their peak—inevitably become dated? |
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"I'm going to end my life by the end of the year," he said over a call one morning, as casually as if discussing weekend plans. I was sitting on my sofa, the same place I'd been while we shared countless conversations about faith, doubt, and the meaning of it all. But this wasn't philosophy. It was a declaration. The autumn light suddenly felt colder, as if the season itself had paused to listen. I waited for the qualifier—the "just kidding." Instead he added, "Please don't try to convince me otherwise. Everyone else is. I just need one person who can be with me, without trying to fix me. Someone who can witness this. If you can't, I understand. But I won't take this trip with anyone who won't honor it." That was the moment our friendship became something entirely different. |
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