A No-Bullshit Guide to Annoying Habits that Actually Work |
To be a middle-aged man in southern California is to find yourself saying, with alarming frequency, "Yeah, I'm one of those assholes now." If you've come from somewhere else—somewhere more corn-fed and homespun and other synonyms for unhealthy—you may adopt a wholesome habit out here. You may reap physical and emotional benefits, and you will be clowned to death by your friends from home. CrossFit, breath work, bullshitting through a gratitude journal—I've tried them all. Some have had a positive impact on my life; others have given me items to sell on OfferUp. (I'm looking at you, matcha stirring bowl.) This past has been especially busy on the humiliatingly-healthy-habits front. Maybe it's a post-Covid focus on fitness, or a more robust wellness marketplace, or the fact that I hit my 50s and need to get that shit started now if I want to live forever. Whatever the reason, it has been a boom time for people who want to sell wellness stuff to Dave Holmes, and the truth is that a lot of it works. Here's an incomplete list of the kinds of assholes I am now. |
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Paul Newman would have been 100 years old this past year, but even harder to accept is that he's been gone for more than seventeen of them. His icy-blue gaze and wry smile have never been far from the pop culture consciousness, however. Newman remains the ideal of a man from the last century—funny, brilliant, charming, adventurous. A good husband, a great dad, a fearsome race car driver who also made pretty good salad dressing. And he was one hell of an actor. That above all. Cool Hand Luke. The Sting. The Hustler. Hud. The Verdict. Slap Shot. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The Color of Money. You either stop at random, or just run through the whole filmography, because he hardly ever missed. On top of that, he tried to make the world a little better than he found it. The food company he started, Newman's Own, donated all its profits to charity and is still going strong—as is the SeriousFun Children's Network, the array of summer camps he founded for kids with serious medical issues. To mark the anniversary of Paul Leonard Newman's birth way back in 1925, his youngest daughter Clea Newman opened up her family albums to share photographs of her famous pop. |
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"You have to answer your email," Finn Wolfhard's father tells him. The young actor is home in Vancouver in 2017 for a break after filming IT and Stranger Things season 2 back-to-back. In another life, he'd be preparing to enter high school or searching for a summer job that would pay him enough cash to take his crush on a date to the mall. Instead, he's hearing it from his father for neglecting an email from his agent. Wolfhard is just fourteen years old, and he's having trouble articulating to his parents that he just wants to pretend like he's a normal kid—if only for a day. Eventually, the two sides formed an unwritten parent-child handbook for navigating Hollywood in your teens. Wolfhard's parents were always supportive—that was never the problem. His dad always said, "If you were a math geek, I would have driven you to whatever mathletes thing." But from the very first second that Stranger Things hit Netflix in 2016, Wolfhard's father wasn't driving him to math competitions—it was more like television premieres and film festivals. "No one can prepare anyone for it," Wolfhard, now twenty-three, tells me about becoming a child star in the streaming age. "It was incredibly exciting, and it still is, but there was a period in my teenage years where it was just hard. I wanted the people in my life to just be chill." |
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On his newsletter Public Notice, Paul Waldman wrote something very important that every Democratic elected official, and anyone who would like to become one, should clip and save and hang on the refrigerator. (Hey, I'm old here.) It's also something that should not be restricted to righteous and well-deserved physical vandalism. "It goes beyond an exercise in branding," Waldman wrote. "Trump is seeking a physical legacy, a collection of signs and structures that will pay eternal tribute to his greatness. Which is why it is so important—and why it will be so rewarding—for the next Democratic president to tear it all down and smash it to bits." |
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What is the most iconic sneaker of all time? The shoes that often enter the conversation are usually ones that resonate with people beyond their intended audience. Converse Chuck Taylor All-Stars and Adidas Superstars were designed for basketball players, but became icons through the Ramones and Run-D.M.C. Onitsuka Tigers were for runners, but Bruce Lee found them ideal for practicing kung fu. (He wore a yellow pair in his final film, Game of Death.) The same is true for one other iconic sneaker that Esquire stands behind today, decades after its creation. In 1987, Nike and architect-turned-sneaker-legend Tinker Hatfield released the Air Max 1, a game-changer for the industry. Inspired by the design of the Centre Pompidou in Paris—which transformed traditionally internal components like pipes and escalators into an external facade—the shoe was made to sell consumers on Nike's "Air" technology and featured a big, visible Air bag in the midsole. The Air Max 1 was big; it created the Air Max line, and for that, it is a legend. But after a second iteration (dubbed the Air Max II), Nike unleashed a third Air Max that I believe outdid the original and everything else since. The Air Max 90 is an icon, and 35 years later, it looks as fresh as ever. It has to fight for attention against every other model of Air Max that's ever been released, but it's the one sneaker you'll catch me rocking every week. |
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Ever notice how art seems to grow more powerful the more people try to take it away from us? Take for example: the movies, TV shows, songs, and podcasts we watched and listened to this year. Paul Thomas Anderson and Leonardo DiCaprio made a movie in One Battle After Another about revolutionaries who fight back against an authoritarian government. The Pitt used a tried-and-true TV format the medical drama, to talk about our worsening health care system. Hell, even late-night TV took on the current presidential administration directly. But it wasn't all doom fighting against the gloom. Powerful music by Spanish-language and K-pop singers expanded our tastes and dominated the charts. Video games and novels helped us escape to new worlds, and the end of a certain podcast represented an all-important turning of the page as we enter 2026. So, as you read on below, I hope you enjoy our number-one picks of the year throughout film, TV, music, books, and more as much as we did. |
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