Friday, December 19, 2025 |
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One of my favorite songs as a teen was called "I'm Going Big" by a small-town band called Trees Above Mandalay. The band never actually made it big, and anyway, the song wasn't about that kind of thing. It was about televangelism and the oddball characters behind Christian cable TV shows; the song's chorus aptly ended with the lyric: "Lying our way into honest men's homes." Esquire's most recent feature examines a particular family of televangelists who, despite their holier-than-thou media personas, had a heaping pile of skeletons in their closet. Read more about the Trinity Broadcasting Company below. —Chris Hatler, deputy editor Plus: |
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Over four decades, millions of Americans tuned into the Trinity Broadcasting Network and stuffed its founders' pockets with donations. Behind the cameras, courtroom battles threatened to tear Paul and Jan Crouch's business—and family—apart. |
In 2004, the men of the inner circle watched in approval as twenty-year-old Brittany Crouch chugged expensive wine from an oversized glass. Around them, the crowd buzzed at Del Frisco's, the white-tablecloth steakhouse in midtown Manhattan populated by Wall Street guys wearing expensive suits and tourists spending a few hundred dollars pretheater. Brittany's rite of passage—not dissimilar to a fraternity hazing—was supervised by her grandfather, Paul Crouch Sr. (known to all as "the Godfather"), his handlers, and numerous powerful officials of Trinity Christian Center, the sprawling evangelical church they presided over. Brittany was being indoctrinated into the family business. In 1973, long before she was born, Paul and his wife, Jan, had founded the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), a small Christian TV station in southern California. In the five decades since, TBN has become the world's largest international Christian-based TV network. According to an onlooker, after the men cheered her on, Brittany was encouraged to vomit in the women's room. When she returned to the table, the fuzzy lights of Sixth Avenue blazing outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, she was no longer a young woman watching the family business from the sidelines. Around the same time that Brittany Crouch was initiated in New York, the family relations behind the TBN empire started to crack in ways that could never be fully repaired. First, public reports surfaced accusing Paul Crouch Sr., who was by then a millionaire many times over, of sexual harassment, and spread among the Christian community of which he had long been a pillar. |
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While initially popularized by Malden Mills (now Polartec) and Patagonia as a lightweight yet warm alternative to heavy wool, the fleece jacket has since taken on a journey of its own. They are among the most transcendent fashion pieces, knowing no bounds. You are equally as likely to see one on a hiker in Acadia as you are on an NBA player during his tunnel walk or on Dior's runway. The fleece jacket can truly do no wrong, and there really is a style for everyone. Naturally, we've found said style. From The North Face's classic retro style to Canada Goose and Moncler's luxe pieces, the 14 best fleece jackets await. And do us a favor—don't wait any longer. Once you have one of these in your wardrobes, you'll never have to realize that winter is here the hard way again. |
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Kumail Nanjiani has night thoughts. You have them, too. They are the things that arrive unbidden in your head in the middle of the night. Do my coworkers like me? Who's my ex seeing now? Whatever happened to my high school varsity jacket? The things that keep you up until 3 am. "As soon as I came up with the term 'night thoughts,' I was like, That's funny and interesting," Nanjiani tells me. "As soon as I say it, people know exactly what I mean. People have them and don't talk about it." Night thoughts are funny and interesting, yes, especially if you are a comedian. Until they turn on you. After spending a year working on a major superhero movie that didn't quite pan out as he'd hoped, Nanjiani's night thoughts began skewing deeper than worrying about people sneaking into his backyard pool. Today, Nanjiani debuts Kumail Nanjiani: Night Thoughts, his newest stand-up special on Hulu and his first solo show in over a decade. The special already earned Nanjiani his first Golden Globe nomination, for Best Performance in Stand-Up Comedy on Television. Turns out, night thoughts make for damn good standup material—but it's not just because they are funny. |
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