Your Fox News Family, Explained

Does mom or dad suffer from early Fox News dementia? There's hope (for you). [View in Browser]( [Esquire Sunday Reads]( [How to Love Your Parents Even If You Hate Their Politics]( How to Love Your Parents Even If You Hate Their Politics Many people I know have parents who are suffering from Early Fox News Dementia, ranting about the perfidy of Anthony Fauci and the possibility of catching critical race theory from an open jar of mayonnaise. But at the same time, they want to give their children parental advice and guidance, though now through the prism of their separate bespoke realities. They want to remain parents, but only on their own racist and hurtful terms. My counsel to these children—stemming from what my closest friends and I experienced, all of us immigrants in our forties from different parts of the world—is to orphan yourself. A few years after graduating from college, I decided to do just that. Not to become an orphan per se, because my mother and father remained thankfully alive, but to leave their vast, roiling emotional spheres of influence. I realized that they could not provide me with what parents are supposed to provide twenty-somethings, which is not necessarily a trust fund but rather a map of what early adulthood could look like based on their own experiences. My post-Soviet parents’ map of adulthood ended at the Baltic Sea; none of their advice made any sense, but all of it was rendered with supreme parental self-confidence, because they were, after all, my parents. As a sickly adolescent, I remember them taking me to a Russian energy healer who was supposed to cure my asthma by rubbing my chest with his alcohol-soaked hands. On the career front, my mother wanted me to pursue a CPA license. (I can barely add two small figures.) When I meet fellow post-Soviet immigrants at readings, the stories they tell me in the signing line are full of similar quack cures and ridiculous career advice. How many unfortunate women of my generation were parentally goaded into pharmacy school for no discernible reason? I’ll never know. And, of course, this does not only apply to Russian-speaking parents. As one friend of Indian heritage was told by his father when he was a teenager: “No one will marry you; you have no muscle tone.” Or another Indian American friend, who was given this mixture of romantic and career advice: “Become an engineer or a doctor, because no one will ever love you, and this way you can at least be useful.” When I was a teenage immigrant (I arrived in the States in 1979, at the age of seven), all of this started to make me angry, and the anger only grew through early adulthood. Now I approach my parents with unbounded love, and also with sadness. You are who you are. You know what you know. You do what was done to you. My parents won’t get vaccinated against Covid, in part because, in addition to Fox News, they watch Russian state television, which tells them Pfizer and Moderna may kill them or cause lethal allergies or blood clots or who knows what. How can I be angry at anything they’ve done to me, including the time spent with that asthma energy healer, when they are now using the same misconceived advice to rob themselves of their golden years? [Read the Full Story]( [MORE FROM ESQUIRE]( [The Winston Duke Era Begins Now]( The Winston Duke Era Begins Now Winston Duke's mother wanted him to be a pastor. In one of our first conversations, he told me she was still holding out hope, imitating her thick Tobagonian accent: “‘Maybe you’ll still become a preacha!’” He playacts his loving but firm rebuff: “Lady,” he laughs, “give it up!” For a certain kind of mother, and a certain kind of upbringing, a job in the church is the highest calling. That Duke’s older sister graduated from high school early and eventually became an accomplished doctor didn’t really ease the pressure, either. Duke, thirty-six, is no man of the cloth. But he has a creation myth to share when I arrive at the Shulamit Nazarian gallery in Los Angeles on a hot, sunny Tuesday afternoon. On display are fifteen works from the artist Trenton Doyle Hancock, who dreams up alter egos, villains, cartoonish Klansmen, and Technicolor creatures, conjuring a world from inspiration that’s part autobiography and part fantasy. [Read the Full Story]( [The Best Nonfiction Books of 2022 (So Far)]( The Best Nonfiction Books of 2022 (So Far) It seems a cruel paradox that in this age of information overload, the world can feel harder to understand than ever before. Amid a dissonance of news sources, podcasts, commentators, and armchair experts, where should you turn to make sense of the world? More than movies, TV, or just other reading material, we stand behind nonfiction books as some of the best windows on the world, and luckily for you, we’ve curated some of the year’s standout releases. Our favorite nonfiction books of the year, several of them just the very best books of the year, touch on some of the most pressing topics of our time, from autocracy to conspiracy to healthcare reform. They vary in form, from reported nonfiction to memoir to a comic guidebook to supervillainy. Whether you’re looking to learn, laugh, or lose yourself in a great story, there’s something here for every kind of reader. [Read the Full Story]( [The U.S. Men’s National Team Must Have No Fear at the World Cup]( The U.S. Men’s National Team Must Have No Fear at the World Cup The Americans have arrived, but they’re locked out. In the lobby of the St. David’s Performance Center in Austin, Texas, there’s a bright-green couch and a coffee table and a front desk where an employee sits, back straight and typing. Through the sweeping glass front wall, the desk assistant and I watch a bus pull up outside. After a moment, the players come striding out in that athlete’s walk, the glide in slide sandals both nonchalant and studied. They coast toward the building only to be stiffed at the entrance. A few faces peer sheepishly through the glass, outside looking in. There’s a tug or two on the handle, a push—nothing. The door won’t open. The staffer scrambles up from behind the desk and hurries over to unlock it. And now here they come, streaming in one after another in a steady line: Aaronson, Adams, Tillman, Wright, Ferreira, Pulisic, Turner, Musah, de la Torre, Robinson, Zimmerman, Arriola, Johnson. As they file past, each offers a quiet “Good morning” almost without fail. Then, from the back of the bus, Tim Weah waltzes in with a boombox bumping some hip-hop. And Weston McKennie, back in his home state, bursts through the glass doors. [Read the Full Story]( [The Hands-Down Best Rye Whiskey to Drink in 2022]( The Hands-Down Best Rye Whiskey to Drink in 2022 Once upon a time, rye whiskey was extremely popular in America, particularly before the buzzkill that was Prohibition. But in the years that followed the dry spell, rye got a reputation as an inferior spirit, if it was even considered at all. Those days are long gone, and over the last decade the rye has become the whiskey du jour with both craft and longstanding distilleries releasing their own versions of bourbon’s spicier sister. The rules for American rye whiskey are simple: the mash bill must be at least 51 percent rye (whiskeys released at this percentage are sometimes referred to as “barely legal”), it must be distilled to no more than 160 proof, and it must be aged in new charred oak containers (virtually always barrels). Unlike bourbon, flavor and coloring actually can be added to rye whiskey, unless it is designated as "straight" rye whiskey (which also means that it’s at least two years old), so stick to that just to be safe. [Read the Full Story]( [A Girl's-Eye View of What's Happening in Iran]( A Girl's-Eye View of What's Happening in Iran Iran never seemed to get much consideration from Americans of my generation. It was more of a Boomer thing. Our parents watched the events of the 1970s and 1980s—the Revolution, the hostage crisis, the spiral into repressive theocracy—and so for them, Iran has loomed as a very real, potentially hostile presence. But for millennials who missed all of that, Iran was old news; instead, the Taliban and ISIS were our generational Islamabaddies. Iran’s Supreme Leader would pop up in the news now and again—arrested journalists here, yellow cake there, the will-they-won’t-they of the nuclear deal—but we didn’t pay much attention to anything that resembled a war MacGuffin, having seen the fallout from the Great Aluminum Tube Scare of 2002. We had a bad case of Middle East burnout, in other words. But if you’ve seen the news, you know that there’s something happening in Iran. What it is isn’t exactly clear—not yet, at least. But it very well could become one of the great advancements in human rights of our time. The world should pay attention—perhaps particularly Americans, who presently find themselves faced with wide-ranging attempts to wrest away hard-won liberties at the hands of a religious zealotry. It’s important to understand what happens when your country falls into the grip of a theocracy. 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