He’s new to it too, he says. He tried it for the first time just a few weeks ago. He had finished filming Jumanji in Hawaii, and he was off his fitness routine. One night he downloaded ChatGPT, signed up, and asked it what he should do. He framed his query in detail—Johnson likes detail. He told it what he’d eaten that day, how much he’d slept the night before, and what he wanted to accomplish. He said he wanted an intense workout with drop sets and a rest/pause on the final three. (He’s telling me all this, using weight-room vernacular, as I’m slurping tequila, no idea what he’s talking about.)
“And Ryan, within three seconds it comes back with a training program that’s lights-out, pencils-down spectacular. Like it came from ten of the greatest coaches I’ve ever worked with,” he says. His eyes pivot to me, the whites bigger than any whites of any eyes I’ve ever seen. DJ, amazed. Now we’re just two buzzed guys who don’t realize we’re buzzed. (“I feel fine.” “Me too. Totally.”) And we’re playing with this new toy like it’s a Magic 8 Ball.
“Let’s ask it something,” I say.
“What comes to your mind?”
“Is Dwayne Johnson running for president?”
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To some, the American flag is a symbol of freedom. To others, of oppression. You know precisely how you feel when you see it in flames.
The Federal Flag Code, published in 1923 and adopted by Congress in 1942, states that when a flag is “no longer a fitting emblem for display”—tattered, unraveling, or otherwise damaged—burning is the preferred method of disposal. In 1937, the country’s largest veterans’ association, the American Legion, codified a retirement ceremony. The flag, the Legion’s resolution reads, must be treated with respect, and our citizens must be taught how to pay it “proper courtesies.”
In the decades since, government officials across state and nation have tried to outlaw any other instance of flag burning, arguing that desecrating America’s national symbol should be illegal. They have never been successful.
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They didn’t have Instagram and Substack back in 1776, so how did that whole revolution thing get rolling? Where did the rebels of the American colonies manage to meet up and murmur to each other about their radical strategies for, well, overthrowing a king and kick-starting a new country? Kiddos, we have bars to thank for all that. The very concept of the United States of America had its genesis some 250 years ago in the taverns of the Atlantic seaboard. You’ve heard about Thomas Paine and Common Sense, his revolutionary pamphlet, but did you know that Common Sense gathered momentum as it was passed around in pubs and recited aloud by drinkers swept up in the froth of pints and the spirit of the moment?
We’d like to think that here at Esquire we’re carrying on that tradition with our annual tribute to the Best Bars in America. This year we’ve gathered some of our favorite writers to proclaim their loyalty to bars—in Alabama and Arizona, in Tennessee and Louisiana, in California and Texas—where that deep sense of American comradeship is alive and well. Another round for our friends? That’s just common sense.
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Looking back, I have to be completely honest about how we started. I was a successful business owner in my 40s. She was a 23-year-old hostess. That kind of age and power gap creates an inherent instability, a skewed foundation that I didn’t fully acknowledge at the time. I wanted to protect her, but I see now how overwhelming that dynamic must have been for a young woman trying to find her footing while dating her boss.
At first, I never looked at her as dating material. But one slow night, I gave her a ride home and suddenly felt a profound impulse to kiss her. We ended up dating on and off for 11 years. I tried to break it off a few times because she was struggling deeply with her mental health—eventually diagnosed as a form of bipolar disorder—and had left college. But she never wanted to part ways, so for long stretches, we simply lived together almost like roommates.
Then, I noticed Margot.
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There’s no other place on earth that holds cultural, plutocratic, and motorsport influence quite like the French Riviera. For a century, this strip of Mediterranean coast has been the epicenter of exquisite design and unadulterated hedonism. It’s where Christian Dior, Elsa Schiaparelli, Jeanne Lanvin, and Hubert de Givenchy came to escape; where Slim Aarons snapped poolside photos of high society; and where drivers like Ayrton Senna, Graham Hill, and Michael Schumacher dominated the streets of Monaco.
It was precisely here, days ahead of this year’s Monaco Grand Prix and Audi’s first official European race on the Formula 1 grid, that the German manufacturer chose to stage a top-secret unveiling of their newest supercar.
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The rival Columbian drug lords Pablo Escobar and Carlos Molina Yepes had one thing in common besides their enthusiasm for the marketing possibilities of cocaine: a love for the game of soccer. Before he went underground, Escobar was known in Medellín merely as a local politician, a member of parliament who was more at home on the terraces of the city’s stadiums, appraising the talents of players who had grown up in the roughneck neighborhoods nearby. So notorious was his passion for fútbol that even after he vanished, there were Elvis-like sightings of Escobar in the stadiums of Medellín. His investment in the club Atlético Nacional de Medellín, through his testaferros, his front men, was said to be vast. For the local soccer team was one of his toys, like his imported giraffes and rhino, and it was said that many star players were enriched by his favors.
Molina, like Escobar, haunted the terraces. He, too, operated behind testaferros as an investor in Nacional. As such, he knew the players intimately—what their moves were on the field and who their associates were off it. This was knowledge that would prove invaluable when Molina’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Claudia, was kidnapped while out walking in Medellín one afternoon last spring. Within days, the suspicion grew that Molina’s fellow soccer fan and former business partner, Escobar himself, had engineered the abduction.
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