When I started reporting on the lives of linemen late last year, I quickly discovered that although linemen are on the front lines of maintaining the power grid—our connection to medical care, drinking water, cell phones, the Internet, emergency services, lights, heat, you name it—no one knows much about them. Most people assumed I was writing about football. But the people who did know what a lineman was kept telling me to talk to the same person: Pack Power’s owner, Jerry Pack. Colleagues told me that he was the quintessential lineman—an Army vet and a biker; rough around the edges, sure, but loyal to a fault. But he was also more than an archetype. Jerry had helped revolutionize the trade and ridden its ups and downs for years.
When I got in touch, Jerry, who looks a bit like the actor Brendan Gleeson if Brendan Gleeson had a graying ZZ Top beard and tattoos down his forearms, invited me to come visit on a Thursday—“That’s when we drink,” he said—and greeted me at the warehouse door with a lit Marlboro Red between his fingers. He had also invited a few other linemen with stories to tell, including Nick Mansfield, from East Texas, who quickly pulled me aside and asked if I wanted to see the “real shit” about being a lineman. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and hit play on a video from Seminole, Florida. I lasted only a few seconds before I had to look away.
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On the fourth day of our first trip to a clothing-optional resort in Costa Rica, my wife and I had sex in the small private pool attached to our suite. It was the middle of the afternoon. The sun was directly overhead. Our suite was set into the side of the resort in such a way that we couldn’t see anyone, but anyone on the walkway above might have seen us. We knew that. We did it anyway.
It was 2019. We had been married for 22 years, but it was the first time we had ever had sex outdoors. Afterward, lying half in the pool and half out of it—the water moving gently against my chest, Mayuri’s wet hair on my shoulder—I had a thought I have not been able to shake since: We almost didn’t make it here. We almost walked away from this.
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About a week before the new season of Beef premiered, Esquire had lunch with Charles Melton, who plays Austin. The 35-year-old actor and his partner, the documentary filmmaker Camille Summers-Valli, had just had their first child ten days earlier, and he was a little tired. We sat outside at his favorite café in his bohemian LA neighborhood and talked about kids and love and the whole season.
What was Austin really thinking in that car during his Graduate moment? And what did audiences misunderstand about the character, who starts the series as a goofball, but morphs into something else? Melton dives into it all, so there are some spoilers.
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There is still plenty of sex in movies, but TV is truly where it’s at in terms of stories that are centered on sex. The longform nature of the medium combined with a more permissive attitude toward what is depicted is a combination that often yields stories that are invested in exploring sexual intricacies.
So far, the year has delivered heartily in this regard, with shows like DTF St. Louis, Vladimir, Margo’s Got Money Troubles, and good old reliable Bridgerton steaming up screens.
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Attending the Kentucky Derby is a sweaty, mud speckled, festooned carnival of contraction. Objectively speaking, there is no draw. You can't get near the rail — too many Joes in their once yearly parade of seersucker, that ocean of big hats, the sickening cling of bourbon in the air and on the breath of frat boys in pink button down shirts. Yuck. If it rains, and it often does, forget it. Your white bucks are shot, your seat is perpetually taken by some denim wearing rube from a ragged Yankee swamp like Syracuse, and the wetness in the air keeps any part of you from feeling elegant, tucked in, managed, in what should be a celebration of Spring. To say things are cheek by jowl at Churchhill Downs on Derby Day, is to do a disservice to the description of any gathering of the porcine. It is impossibly so.
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How long do you expect to live? If you’re an average American man, the number is 76.5 years. But the reality is that many people—in America and around the world—are living deep into their 80s and 90s. More and more, people are cresting the century mark. This has led to the longevity movement, which encourages not only longer lives (life spans) but also better ones (health spans). It’s a stark departure from prior generations, members of which retired in their 60s and slipped into the twilight of life.
Michael Clinton has been at the vanguard of this movement. His 2021 book, Roar: Into the Second Half of Your Life (Before It’s Too Late), was a seminal text for the longevity movement. Next week, his second book on the subject, Longevity Nation: The People, Ideas, and Trends Changing the Second Half of Our Lives, hits bookstores. It is an even deeper look into the way people and systems are redefining the very idea of aging.
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