After we opened our relationship, Jenny was like a kid in a candy shop. She slept with any guy she found attractive: classmates, men who hit on her at the gym or the bar where she worked, or even friends of friends. She mostly hooked up with guys on her own, but sometimes I would watch. We would have threesomes with another guy or another girl or even couple-swap with friends. I never really wanted to play solo. I didn’t want to chase other women. I loved having sex with Jenny, and I enjoyed the vicarious thrill of her being with others and telling me about it.
One of her best college friends, who knew we’d opened our relationship, was a sugar baby and urged Jenny to become one too. We were both against it. Jenny thought the transactional nature would cheapen the experience. But the seed was planted, and her opposition slowly slipped away. She told me, “What if I only do it once as a fun little experiment?”
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Is Matt Damon a bona fide A-list movie star or merely a very successful character actor? The answer, of course, is both. Which, in a way, makes him a rare kind of celluloid unicorn. It wasn’t always this way. In the early ’90s, Damon was a Harvard dropout hustling to get his big break on the big screen until enough rejections piled up that he was forced to create his own luck. With his runs-on-Dunkin’ Beantown buddy Ben Affleck, Damon cowrote and costarred in 1996’s blue-collar male-weepie Good Will Hunting. And just like that, he was off to the races armed with a Best Screenplay Oscar and the sort of chameleonic range few would have suspected.
Since then, the now 55-year-old has appeared in more than four dozen films—a smart and seemingly uncalculated crazy quilt of leading-man action blockbusters (the Bourne movies), stylishly giddy ensemble bro-fests (the Ocean’s trilogy), without-a-net one-man showcases (The Martian), hard-hitting historical pictures (Saving Private Ryan), and inspirational dramas (Air). With his latest movie now in theaters, Christopher Nolan’s epic adaptation of The Odyssey, it seemed as good a time as any to rank the quintessential professional’s top 25 performances. So on to the rankings … in ascending order of greatness.
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Good sleep is hard work. If everyone could just flop down and immediately drift off, the world would be a different, more agreeable place. Instead, we all live life under-rested and over-caffeinated. The market’s response has turned sleep into a multibillion-dollar industry. You need the right pillow, the right mattress, silky sheets, and a few cozy pieces of loungewear. But it doesn’t stop there. There’s the alarm clock engineered to improve your habits, the lamp that wakes you up like a sunrise, not to mention the bed frame and rug that make your space feel like a true oasis. These are consumer choices, sure, but they are choices that have a real effect on your day-to-day life.
With every new direct-to-consumer furniture brand and tech company promising you percentage points of improvement on sleep, the hard part is figuring out which products are actually worth a damn. The days of grabbing a pillow off a department-store shelf are long gone. That’s where our testers come in. Our editors have spent the past year working hard at sleeping and constantly visiting showrooms, swapping out bed frames, and testing the most outlandish tech you’ve ever heard of.
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If you dread the thought of having the same thing on your wrist as someone else in the room, you’ve come to the right place. Not that there’s anything wrong with yearning for a Submariner or a Seamaster—we’re just as guilty as any watch fan—but sometimes it pays to do things a little differently. And though the juggernauts of the watch world tend to dominate the conversation, there are so, so many other players out there that are well deserving of your attention.
We’re talking about watchmakers with penchants for vintage good looks but price tags that don’t require a bank loan. Brands with unexpected sources of inspiration. (Coffee, anyone?) And companies that take the “Just have fun with it” ethos more seriously than you might expect. They tend to be grouped under the somewhat generic “microbrand” label. While that’s not exactly wrong when you compare them with the big guys, there’s a ton of variety and nuance to explore within that space.
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When was the last time you took buying flip-flops seriously? Well, maybe not “seriously” in the way you take a job interview, but when was the last time you went looking for the best flip-flop you could find? You’re forgiven if the answer is never. Normally, thonged sandals are an impulse buy off the drugstore or surf-shop racks 30 minutes before you hit the beach because you forgot to pack the pair you already own (from last year, when you did this exact thing). What’s a few bucks for sandals you’re wearing for the short distance between your car and the shore or while barhopping boardwalks in 90 degree heat?
But Reef, one of Esquire’s recommended waterside brands, makes a convincing argument that even the most casual footwear should be as carefully considered as bench-made footwear. In fact, beach footwear might be the most important footwear in your rotation: You’ve had a few too many margs and now you’re struggling to stay upright on what feels like the dunes of Arrakis. It’s times like these when we’re really glad we sprung for quality.
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A lot can be said about the technical achievements of Nolan’s The Odyssey, but this clash between staying true to course and falling off the rails is the theme that gives their work its soul. This film represents a team of masters, all working at the peak of their powers to breathe impressive new life into this 2,800-year-old tale.
First, there’s the majesty of its IMAX scale, as immersive, mesmerizing, and overpowering as it’s possible to get without being someone in real life. The earthy environments of this apocalyptic version of ancient Greece have been exquisitely manifested by production designer Ruth De Jong. Consider the eerie ambience of Hoyte van Hoytema’s cinematography, which pushes you up close with the characters without ever losing the scale of the menace that surrounds them. Ludwig Göransson’s concussive score is either perfectly mimicking your racing heart or pushing down the throttle to make it beat faster. Expert editing by Jennifer Lame ensures the audience is never sent astray, even as the story hopscotches in nonlinear fashion through time and space. The greatest compliment for the VFX created by Andrew Jackson and Scott R. Fisher is that, apart from otherworldly elements like the Cyclops, the Sirens, and the witch Circe’s transforming spells, it’s hard to tell where reality ends and their work begins.
Most of The Odyssey’s behind-the-scenes artists won Oscars or were at least nominated for their work with Nolan on Oppenheimer, and it’s clear that the filmmaker and his team are among the few people alive who could take a story like this and, well … bring it home.
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