In 2017, I noticed that there was an explosion of money in the porn business, thanks in part to OnlyFans lifting its ban on adult content. I was curious about how I could get a piece of it in Atlanta, because the industry seemed to be centralized in California. I started following adult performers on Twitter and DM’d one from the South named Mrs. Feedme, telling her I wanted to work in the industry. She was trying to make a name in porn, too, but couldn’t figure out how to break into it. She was dabbling with OnlyFans and did some shoots in Atlanta.
She told me she was filming at a hotel and invited me to go with her. One of the people she was filming with was a guy who calls himself Mr. Nuttz. He and two other guys run a business called Team VP that organizes content-creator houses in Atlanta. We traded numbers, and a month or so later, the guys invited me to see their content house in action. I asked if I could bring Mrs. Feedme, and they said she could come and film, but she had to be tested for STIs first.
We got to the house, and there were performers everywhere, filming according to a strict schedule set by the producers. I’m like, Oh my god, how did they pull it off? The Team VP guys said that if you keep a tight schedule, supply food, and make sure everyone's tested for STIs, you’d be surprised how many people will show, no matter how far they have to travel.
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Ayad Akhtar first came to wide attention with the publication of his novel American Dervish, in 2012, and a play, Disgraced, the same year. With those two works, and with subsequent plays The Invisible Hand and The Who & the What, Ayad established himself as an artist who, as the searchlight of the country’s attention became trained on the Muslim community, was uniquely able to discern and illuminate essential through lines of post-9/11 American life. His 2020 novel, Homeland Elegies, is a culmination of his investigation of themes of identity, country, religion, family, assimilation, and belonging in America. Two additional plays, Junk and McNeal, addressed particular urgent concerns—money and finance, and AI, respectively.
The Radiance, out September 29 from Simon & Schuster, is Ayad’s third novel, and it is altogether different. It cracks the aperture open wide—about as wide as can be—to take on nothing less than the most timeless and fundamental questions of existence, of how to be in the world. It’s similar to what Ms. Doerfler was getting at, but its expansive ideas are bundled into an engrossing campus novel, braided with a tight plot—a whodunit—and set in a world riven by contemporary cultural, political, and social forces that are familiar to all of us. The book is briskly plotted and deeply absorbing, and at the same time thought-provoking and suffused with ideas of the oldest and deepest order.
Is it possible that even now, with our relentlessly atomized attention spans, our focus fragmented and trained on a dozen existential crises, reading a novel, of all things, can help us live richer and fuller lives, be better people?
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As Esquire delved into the making of Nocturne for this exclusive first look, it became clear that what sets it apart from other serial-killer stories is also what makes it psychologically unsettling. Villain Jurek Walter’s weapon of choice is not a knife, an ax, or a gun. It’s hopelessness. “For him, the best way to be able to [attack] is to make somebody take their own life,” says Stephen Graham, who plays Jurek. “He gets into your head and manipulates the situation until you can’t take it no more.”
Graham is familiar with harrowing darkness, especially after his acting and writing Emmy wins for Netflix’s Adolescence, about a young boy accused of a baffling violent crime. That series was about a vulnerable and disturbed child who becomes warped by toxic influences, with Graham as his heartsick father grappling with the fallout. In Nocturne, Graham is the toxic influence.
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Here at Esquire, we’re not shy about our love of a good, stiff drink. Perhaps that’s why we’ve been so distressed by the data that has been published over the past few years claiming young people don’t imbibe like they used to. Mercifully, that myth has been busted. A recent report from the IWSR has shown that 74 percent of Gen Z adults are enjoying alcohol, up from 66 percent just a few years back. (Did anyone even consider that maybe most of them weren’t 21 yet?)
When they’re not drinking canned cocktails—and they shouldn’t be, in our opinion—they’re reaching for spirits over beer and wine. That’s something we can get behind. So let’s celebrate with a drink, shall we?
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The two men are separated by nearly a decade. Harrelson is 65, and McConaughey is 56, and they were both Texas born but didn’t grow up together. Harrelson and his two actual brothers were raised by his mother in Ohio, and McConaughey was born in south Texas before moving to the eastern part of the state. The two first met in the late ’90s and worked together on the 1999 Ron Howard–directed reality-TV comedy EdTV.
They’ve been friends ever since, vacationing together with their families and forming a kind of found brotherhood. At some point, they began to wonder if they might share some genetic connection. The Apple TV comedy show Brothers, which speculates that the two Hollywood actors might actually be long-lost siblings, evolved from there.
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The bigger the star, the nicer the person. In early ’81, my little band and I are getting out of a cab. I see flashbulb, flashbulb, paparazzi. The Rolling Stones had just pulled up to go into the studio, and the photographers jumped out of the garbage can yelling, “Mick! Mick!” as they do. Mick grabs me and my mates and says, “Here’s my new band, the Frogs.” I’d pay anything for that fucking photograph.
Eighties style? Guilty as charged. Big shoulder pads, jeans tight as can be. And people talk about the big hair, but it’s just that my dad was a hairdresser, so, you know, mine looked good.
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