Moon Landing Conspiracy Theorists Raise These Questions. Here's Why They're Nonsense.

To be fair: it is hard to disprove that Stanley Kubrick didn't direct the lunar rendezvous. [Image] [Image]( Moon Landing Conspiracy Theorists Raise These Questions. Here's Why They're Nonsense. The moon actually is made of cheese. Really. Really! Not the stuff from which you saw off a wedge to spice up a cracker. Cheese. The bloomy-rinded pablum that people seem to mean, but can’t possibly be taken seriously. The fifty years since we sent three men there—and put two on its surface!—have seen giant leaps for mankind, and moon shots for conspiracy theorists. Once the credo of dingy basements and underground newsletters, conspiracy theories are everywhere. The moon hoax alone has emerged on The View, in the NBA, and, to its detriment, in the general vicinity of Buzz Aldrin’s fists. If America is at risk of becoming the theocracy long-feared, the state religion is conspiracy. In retrospect, it’s not surprising that the moon landing has proven so durable as a subject of paranoid speculation, second only, probably, to JFK’s assassination. Whereas the miasma of theories around Oswald are rooted in the utter unreality of an American president's life—at the peak of the American Century—brutally ended before his time, the haze of disbelief around the lunar rendezvous has more to do with the sheer incomprehensibility of the leaps in technology that pulled it off. The moon landing was the first great public achievement powered by computers, and even if they only had a tiny fraction of the processing power of an iPhone, they were still inscrutable. After all, the most complicated machine in most people’s homes in 1969 was the car in their garage, and if you popped the hood on a Trans Am and stared at it for a while, you could more or less make sense of how it worked. (Try that with a Tesla—oh, wait, there’s not even a motor under that hood.) With the moon landing, technology proved itself to be so advanced as to seem like, as they say, magic. So of course there are people insisting it’s all a sham. Here is a sampling of some of the most common questions conspiracy theorists pose around the moon landing—and how to disprove (most) of them. [Read the Full Story]( [Image] [Image]( Inside the Secretive World of High-End, Ultra-Luxe Art Bongs Bong makers used to be arrested for their work. Now, some of the most intense bongs you've ever seen are going up for public auction. It's the first public, fine art auction of bongs to ever take place in America, at the third-largest auction house in the world. Melding highbrow artistry with lowbrow culture, they’re part of a small family of astonishing glass bongs that sell for thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of dollars to anyone who wants to buy a piece they’d be proud to display on the mantle. They work, too. [Read the Full Story](  [Image]( The Real Hero of the New Corvette C8 Is Its Luxe, Cockpit Interior The first uncontrollable “wow” I uttered from my encounter with Chevrolet’s new Corvette C8—which was unveiled yesterday in Orange County— wasn’t when I saw the clever hidden door handles, or the detailed design of the engine. It was when I opened the driver’s side door. What I saw wasn’t an amalgamation of plasticy knobs and switches from the GM parts bin. There wasn’t a whiff of Camaro or Impala. The cabin felt downright luxurious, as if I was looking at an Audi or a Lexus or—if you squint harder—an Aston Martin’s. Practically bespoke. [Read the Full Story]( [Image]( Marlon Brando's 'Apocalypse Now' Rolex Is Going Up for Auction If there were any doubts that celebritydom does wonders for watch value, Paul Newman put that to rest. Well, Newman's own watch did, in 2017 when his own Rolex Paul Newman Daytona sold at auction in New York for just shy of $18 million. The auctioneer in that eventful night (at a Philips auction, which saw unparalleled prices for a slew of iconic vintage watches) was one Aurel Bacs. He's the unrivaled ringmaster in a vintage collectible watch circus that has seen prices skyrocket in the past five years. [Read the Full Story](  [Image]( Every U2 Album Ranked From Worst to Best More than four decades ago four high school kids from Dublin started a band that would become one of the biggest rock groups in the world. In 2019, U2 can still be listed alongside the likes of the Rolling Stones as one of the most influential legacy rock bands still touring. U2 just, like, won’t go away. Even now, they’re plotting another leg of their 30th-anniversary Joshua Tree tour — which started in 2017. They also spent a chunk of 2018 on the road for their latest album, Songs of Experience. In a lull between albums—presumably for Bono to get some sleep between music and saving the world—it's a good time to look back at U2's catalog and run down their best work. [Read the Full Story]( [Image]( These Are the Best Nordstrom Anniversary Sale Style Deals Nordstrom's anniversary sale is the best. It really is. A lot of times, brands, stores, or websites put stuff on sale that's...not that great. It's just stuff you don't really need, but it looks flashy because it's marked down. Nordstrom does not do that. Its very famous anniversary sale puts good stuff on sale, and on a major discount, at that. It includes new-season product—so, not just stuff the store is trying to get rid of—as well as flagship products from brands that don't often go on sale. [Read the Full Story](  Follow Us       [Unsubscribe](  [Privacy Notice](  esquire.com ©2019 Hearst Communications Inc. All Rights Reserved. Hearst Email Privacy, 300 W 57th St., Fl. 19 (sta 1-1), New York, NY 10019   Â