My Role Model, the Monster

Sometimes, role models do bad things. Very bad things. [View in Browser]( [Esquire Sunday Reads]( [I Think You're Fat]( My Favorite Teacher One night twenty years ago, my biology teacher picked up a seventeen-year-old hitchhiker named Jefferson Wesley. Hitchhikers were rare on Chicago's exclusive North Shore, where kids owned Camaros and carried plenty of taxi cash. Even rarer were high school teachers who picked them up. It was midnight. Mr. Lindwall pulled over his yellow Toyota Land Cruiser and told Wesley to hop in. Down the road, Mr. Lindwall stopped the Land Cruiser and asked Wesley to wait a second, the spare tire was rattling in back. Wesley said cool. Mr. Lindwall shut off the headlights, exited the vehicle, and popped open the back hatch. Among a pile of tools, he found his hunting knife, which he unsheathed and poked at Wesley's back. He ordered the boy to bend over and locate the hangman's noose by his feet. Wesley found it and tightened it around his neck in the way Mr. Lindwall instructed. My teacher climbed back into the driver's seat and explained: The seat belts in this jeep don't unfasten. Put your head between your legs. I'm going to tape your hands behind your back. This noose is attached to a series of pulleys. If you struggle, I can pull tight from here and control you. Wesley now had good reason to believe he'd be killed. The son of a Chicago cop, he'd heard his share of stories, and in those stories kids wearing nooses didn't live. [Read the Full Story]( [MORE FROM ESQUIRE]( [The Movies You Shouldn't Watch With Your Kids]( Yo, Ye: You Are a Racist By Proxy Yo, Ye. Yeah, yeah, yeah: You’re a trolling provocateur par excellence. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Ye: You’re a freethinker and iconoclast even. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Ye: You’ve released hella great music over the years, tsunami’d many a fashion wave. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, Ye: Kudos to the activist bent of “Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Yeah, yeah, yeah, Ye: Big facts—Beyonce should’ve won. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Ye: Points for the benevolence of the Donda Academy. Yeah, yeah—you reached that billi realm with the big homie. Yeah, yeah—we should consider the mania of your mental health struggles. Yeah, yeah—the trauma of a near-death crash. Yes, oh yes, deep compassion for the eternal hurt of you losing your mother. All that context and then some ran as subtext when I saw a picture from Kanye West’s YZY Season 9 show during Paris Fashion Week. A flick where he and Candace “I-Cape-for-the-far-right-and-call-it-conservatism” Owens hold hands and cheese while dressed in t-shirts emblazoned with white lives matter. Be clear: white lives matter, like Blue Lives Matter, is a motto meant to negate the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement, to imperil the humanity of Black people writ large. There ain’t no gainsaying the truth that white lives matter fomented the tiki-torch racists in Charlottesville and the insurgents storming the halls of the Capitol Building, or that it inspired Dylan Roof, even Kyle Rittenhouse. The phrase is so damn incendiary that the Anti-Defamation League deemed it hate speech. (The Klux Klux Klan began using it in 2015 at as a response to BLM.) [Read the Full Story]( [The Rise and Fall of Planet Hollywood]( How I Fixed My Sleep For most of my adult life my sleep has been, scientifically speaking, completely f***ed. I stayed up late and woke up early. I slammed caffeine in the afternoon and cocktails late into the evening. Fourth meals and midnight snacks were always on the menu. My preferred method of conking out: mindlessly scrolling through my phone until I couldn't any longer. After a bad night's rest, I’d promise myself I’d make it up tomorrow, or next weekend. Sometimes I'd be able to sleep in a little on Saturday or Sunday; sometimes I wouldn’t. Then, come Monday, I'd repeat the process. I was never sure how much sleep I was getting—or not getting—but I accepted that feeling groggy and run down all the time was a part of living. Sound familiar? [Read the Full Story]( [Whither Jon Stewart?]( Five Fits With: Actor, Musician, and All Around Creative Adam Goldberg This week, we met up with Adam Goldberg, who has appeared in films like Dazed and Confused, Saving Private Ryan, and 2 Days in Paris. What you might not know is Adam is also a filmmaker, photographer, and musician. He is constantly creating, on or off the clock. He posts hilarious Reels to his Instagram profile that feel more like short films than tossed-off content, and he also uses it as a way to showcase his unique style and recent fashion acquisitions. Adam discussed his love of art and photography, the power of shooting film instead of digital, and dressing his character in The Equalizer, the hacker Harry, in Kapital and Visvim. [Read the Full Story]( [What's With All These Shirtless Celebs in Suits?]( Mike Conner v. The Pain Mike Conner sits in his truck atop a hill in Boring, Oregon, where he can feel the summer breeze through the window and see the sun at its meridian over the fields and the snowcapped tip of a distant Mount Hood poking into a cloud-dotted sky. He sits here and thinks about cutting off his feet. His legs are barely his anymore—just fused cadaver bone and metal. Nearly half of six-foot-four, 225-pound Mike is steel and titanium: the majority of his legs from his knees down, his shoulder, his elbow, his wrist, his back, and his spine. [Read the Full Story]( [Peter Bogdanovich on the Long, Slow Decline of a Teenage Star]( Meet Mike Krzyzewski, Retiree Exactly 142 days after Coach K became Mr. K for the first time in nearly 50 years, Mike Krzyzewski is telling me about his MasterClass. John Legend did one! So did Robin Roberts. The next day, he’ll jet off to Vegas, speak at a convention, play video poker, and take his wife, Mickie, out to eat. When Krzyzewski returns to Durham, you’ll find the man in his yard, pruning trees and handing out kibbles to his puppy—named . . . wait for it . . . Coach—who, of f***ing course, “is actually a really good athlete.” Retirement! It happens. Even for a guy who won 1,202 college basketball games. “In retirement, although I’m not retired,” Krzyzewski, 75, clarifies, “I’m doing all the things I want to do.” [Read the Full Story]( Follow Us [Unsubscribe]( | [Privacy Notice/Notice at Collection]( esquire.com ©2022 Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 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