Inside WWE’s COVID-19 Dilemma

As wrestling events continue in empty arenas, performers are worried about their future. [Image] [Image]( WWE Is Considered ‘Essential’ During COVID-19. Why Aren't Its Wrestlers? It’s a balmy April afternoon in the midst of a plague year, and the self-proclaimed “Bernie Sanders of Professional Wrestling” is on the phone explaining to me the similarities between wrestling’s WWE and hard rock’s most maligned punchline. “Everybody knows Nickelback; there are people that love Nickelback, there's people that hate Nickelback, but at the end of the day, we all know the lyrics to ‘How You Remind Me,’” David Starr tells me, a trace of his native Philly ‘burbs creeping back into his voice as he commits to the example. “That's how it is. Everyone groans when Nickelback comes on, but we all just wanna be big rockstars.” It’s that very desire to win that fuels so many people to don the tights, hit the ring, and reach for stardom, even if the world is burning around them and, as independent contractors, their benefits package is nonexistent. To become a WWE Superstar is to achieve immortality, and some are willing to sacrifice everything to get there. Others, like Starr, hope to build their legacy elsewhere. Our man is no ordinary professional wrestler, and these are no ordinary times. Several days before our interview, the WWE unexpectedly furloughed or laid off 100s of its employees—from big-name superstars to backstage production staffers—in the midst of a global pandemic. Some wrestlers cut from their contracts say they were given only 30 days of full pay. Meanwhile their now-former coworkers are still performing as the WWE is classified as an "essential service." [Read the Full Story]( [Image] [Image]( Andrew Zimmern Says COVID-19 Raised a Mirror to the Ugliest Parts of Our Food Systems If you've caught any episodes of Andrew Zimmern's new MSNBC show, What's Eating America, you know that the chef, producer, James Beard award winner, and longtime Bizarre Foods frontman has a lot on his mind. The show covers a great deal of ground, delving into issues of hunger, health, labor, immigration, education, climate change, declining fish stocks, and factory farming, to name a few, with a determined seriousness and intellectual vigor that you might not expect if you only know him as that dude on TV who eats coconut grubs and dung beetles. [Read the Full Story](  [Image]( Behind the Scenes of a Nude Photography Project in Quarantine Until COVID-19 struck, the hallmark of Spencer Tunick's artwork was lots and lots of naked people packed together. He's perhaps known best for his shoot of 100 nude women gathered at sunrise in Cleveland in 2016 to make a statement outside of the Republican National Convention. They met in a secret location to evade any cops who might try to stop them—Tunick has been arrested a handful of times while creating his art. [Read the Full Story]( [Image]( Your Definitive Guide to At-Home Self-Care The thing is, self-care is exactly what we all need right now. So much of our typical stress management tools lie outside our homes. Now we can’t head to the gym to work off aggression or visit the ice cream shop down the street to stress-eat a sundae (just me?). Instead, we need to rethink how we manage stress with what is available to us right now. And there’s no better way to do that than at-home self-care. [Read the Full Story](  [Image]( The Slippers You Need Now, Because Everyone Needs Slippers Now Slippers are one of life's great joys. Kicking off your real shoes and sliding into something soft and inviting to pad around in? It's like a shot of serotonin straight to your brain. That feeling used to hit after a long day for a lot of us, but now that "staying at home" is the new "going anywhere at all," it can happen all the time. Call it a silver lining? Or don't call it anything, but at least recognize that slippers are more necessary than ever. I've long been an advocate. Now I'm an evangelist. [Read the Full Story]( [Image]( Mark O'Connell Is Terrified Of the End of the World. That's Why He's Obsessed With It. “The world would end neither with a bang nor a whimper, but with a push notification,” Mark O’Connell writes in Notes From An Apocalypse. It’s in this irreverent collision of twenty-first century life and ancient armageddon that O’Connell locates fertile material for his latest book, a gonzo travelogue meets philosophical meditation on the impermanence of human life in the age of climate decline. If that sounds like too much doom and gloom, think again; Notes From An Apocalypse is deeply funny and life-affirming, with a warm, generous outlook even on the most challenging of subjects. [Read the Full Story](  Follow Us       [Unsubscribe](  [Privacy Notice](  esquire.com ©2020 Hearst Communications Inc. All Rights Reserved. Hearst Email Privacy, 300 W 57th St., Fl. 19 (sta 1-1), New York, NY 10019   Â