On Friday the thirteenth, a cool night in March, Johnny Ringo meets me at my hotel in downtown Wilmington. He walks me to an alleyway and rings a doorbell next to an unmarked entrance. We’re let into a speakeasy. The room is brick walled and shadowy, the air thick with the smell of whiskey and lemon peels. I’m impressed. It’s not the dive bar stocked with PBRs that I expected. This is the kind of place I would show off to my friends if I lived here.
He drinks Vieux Carrés, a boozy New Orleans concoction. I drink Old Cubans, a fancy twist on a mojito. We sit by ourselves in a back patio area and get to talking about violent hobbies, partly because they are on the agenda for my visit, partly because that’s how our conversations seem to lead if I let them.
“Men need a violent hobby,” Johnny Ringo says. “A man should be peaceful, but peaceful doesn’t imply harmless. You still have the capacity for violence, and an outlet for that is healthy.”
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So what is America? Do you know? Do any of us know anymore? We’re hermetically sealed in our information bubbles, sorted by our social-media feeds, feverishly working alone in our home offices, picking up essentials with a swipe and a tap rather than a trip to the store. You’ve heard a million times that we’re polarized, but this is something else: We’re atomized. Absent from one another. Us, here in this place that puts a lot of stock in a very important idea about collectivism: “Out of many, one.” (Perhaps you know the Latin: E pluribus unum.)
If you haven’t heard, America’s got kind of a big birthday coming up. The lady turns 250 this year, and that means it’s high time to consider how she’s doing. To consider what she is. To consider who we are.
If you want to know what America is, well—listen to Americans. Not so easy, of course; there are almost 350 million of us. And we’re pretty much all loud. But Esquire decided to get as close as a magazine can. On a single Friday in April, we carried pen and camera from sea to shining sea, visiting with Americans as far apart as a Hollywood scion and the diner waitress in the small town in Maine where the sun first hits the country. We covered thirty-three cities, both states outside the lower forty-eight, D.C., and Puerto Rico. We went fishing, we went farming, we flew, we partied, we ate Italian beef. So what is America? Many things. But it’s 2026, so let’s start here: It’s a gamble.
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Around A.D. 1210, Gervase of Tillbury, an English cleric and scholar who had traveled widely throughout Europe, wrote down everything he had learned in his years of study and exploration. The work became a handmade encyclopedia known as Otia Imperialia, and in those Dark Ages any such compendium of science, history, politics, and geography was both rare and extremely valuable. However, some entries in the catalog are more unusual than others. The third volume, for instance, includes section CXX (120 in Roman numerals), which is titled, in Latin: De hominibus, qui fuerunt lupi—which translates to “Of Men Who Were Wolves.”
There were many other written accounts of shape-shifting beasts from this era, and these archaic texts were all writer-director Robert Eggers needed as inspiration for his latest film: Werwulf. The filmmaker behind Nosferatu, The Northman, The Lighthouse, and The VVitch is renowned for his immersive and authentic style, crafting stories that feel less like movies and more like time travel to dark, distant, and uncertain eras.
As part of Esquire’s exclusive first look at Werwulf, featuring star Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a 13th-century man haunted by his bestial metamorphosis, Eggers speaks about what he drew from the various ancient lores for his original story and what he discarded from modern-day pop-culture werewolf tales.
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When an advance copy of Taylor Sheridan's new book, How to Not Die in Prison, landed on my cell bars in Sing Sing, I was shocked it didn’t get denied because of the censorship rules. On the back cover is an illustration of a sharpened toothbrush and in its pages a tutorial on how to make it: “A sharpened toothbrush can make a decent knife on its own, or you can heat up the brush and insert an old razor blade into the handle,” writes Sheridan’s coauthor, an ex-con named Tom Nelson. (I wouldn’t bring one of those to a knife fight in Sing Sing—the boys in here have real knives.)
This book, I quickly realized, is not Taylor Sheridan breaking into the literary world—it’s really him looking out for Tom Nelson, who did 17 years on an installment plan, mostly in California joints. Nelson got out and became a personal trainer. In the introduction, Sheridan explains how he used to work out at Muscle Mechanics, a gym Nelson owned in Los Angeles. The two became cool. During Covid, Nelson lost his business. Sheridan bought the gym’s weights and machines for the Yellowstone crew in Wyoming. Nelson still struggled. Instead of giving him a loan, Sheridan offered Nelson an opportunity. Having read a script Nelson wrote about his own life (ah, yes, the ex-con autobiographical screenplay), he knew the “dude could write.” It hit Sheridan: “What the world needs is a travel guide to the penitentiary.”
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I own three sex dolls. And unlike the stereotype, I’m not a creepy single guy. I’ve spent virtually my entire adult life in some form of relationship, so I have had a great deal of sex but not a lot of partners.
When I first got married, I was very young, only 18 years old. We stayed together until I was 29. We had a very physical relationship, but I went through a lot during the marriage and came out with sexual baggage. Immediately after our separation, I began to experience erectile-dysfunction symptoms. I took testosterone replacement therapy, but it didn’t solve the problem. The real problem was that I had a bad relationship with sex.
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Scotch isn’t just about big wafts of smoke that assault your senses, though the style is well represented by distilleries like Laphroaig, Lagavulin, and Ardbeg. There are also spicy, sherry-forward classics like the Macallan, the Glendronach, and the Dalmore. However, there is a rarefied, lesser-known group of distilleries that expertly balance acridity and sweetness. And the very best of these comes from a region many whisky drinkers don’t even know exists.
Established in 1798, Highland Park Distillery is located on Orkney, an archipelago that’s about as far north as you can go in Scotland. Sheep outnumber residents by about seven to one, and the weather is generally cold and rainy. The islands are dotted with Stonehenge-like rock formations and subterranean villages that have emerged from the ground over the years, clues as to what the Vikings were up to centuries ago aside from pillaging. Also below the ground is peat. The ancient organic matter is excavated in large blocks that look like chocolate layer cake but taste nothing like it—trust me. Highland Park, like many distilleries, burns peat to dry its malted barley, the main ingredient in single malt Scotch, thereby imparting smokiness.
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