Itâs like the world has been rubbing our noses in it. Broken government. Police brutality. A global pandemic. Climate change. Awash in harrowing realities, Joshua Ferris discovers the sustaining power of everyday fictions. [View in Browser]( [Esquire Sunday Reads]( [The Beauty in Lying to Yourself]( The Beauty in Lying to Yourself I hugged my father goodbye for the last time in a hospital room in March 2014. He was a seven-year survivor of pancreatic cancer. No one thought heâd make it much longer. He was laboring to breathe, and I was due on book tour. It was, he said to me, now or never, kid. Pride insisted he climb from the bed on his own. He had to negotiate around half a dozen tubes. But then he opened his arms to me and I fell into them as I had been doing for forty years. He whispered that he loved me and we wept and shook in each otherâs embrace, the profoundest love and the profoundest loss expressed in one gesture. Over our grief, neither of us could hear the cosmic laughter For it is never two sad jerks in a hospital room who decide the when and where of a last goodbye. He hung on for four more months, by which time the book tour was over and I was back at his bedside in the fresh hell of enlightenment: Final embraces do not get scheduled. Death toyed with him until he could no longer stand, or open his eyes, or speak. Our final final goodbye was a one-sided affair, uttered into the void. That I had any control over death was the first illusion to crumble. [Read the Full Story]( [MORE FROM ESQUIRE]( [Inside Daniel: The Most Influential Kitchen in NYC]( Inside Daniel: The Most Influential Kitchen in NYC Daniel, chef Daniel Bouludâs flagship restaurant on the Upper East Side, is turning thirty years old this month and I wanted to write something nice about it. Thirty is a big number, especially for a restaurant. After three decades, a restaurant is definitely not newâhell, a two year old restaurant is quasi-geriatricâbut itâs not old enough, like Peter Luger (1887) or Russ & Daughters (1914), that its age has an enduring momentum of its own. Most restaurants are like lowland tapirs: they begin to peter out at around thirty. This is not the case for Daniel, either the restaurant or the man. Both are in fine fettle. One sporting a year-round tan; the other a newly refreshed dining room. There are many ways to quantify the importance of a restaurant. Age seems like a good one because itâs straightforward and we like that. Longevity, in a market economy, seems at least loosely correlated with quality. Then there are other accolades like Michelin stars, of which Daniel has two at the moment, or stars from the New York Times, of which it has three. Thereâs the number of diners who have moved through the lushly carpeted dining room, peering at Danielâs notoriously intricate cuisine like it's a Faberge egg cracked open. Those measures are useful, kinda, but only up to a point. Most importantly, what makes Daniel so extraordinary isnât so much the people who have moved through the dining room but those who have moved through the kitchen. âThe joke is,â says Lior Lev Sercaz, the spice impresario who worked with Daniel from 2002 to 2007, âis that everyone has worked for Daniel, even if you think youâve never worked for Daniel.â [Read the Full Story]( [Are We Ready for AI to Raise the Dead?]( Are We Ready for AI to Raise the Dead? Eleven years ago, Tupac came back to life. So did Michael Jackson two years later. Okay, they still werenât breathing. But there they were, gracing the stage, digitally reincarnated as âholograms.â They caused a commotion the moment they materialized. Some people who saw them thought they were pretty sweetâa nice tribute. Others got queasy. Did the showsâ producers have the familiesâ approval? Would the King of Pop even want to be resurrected as a collection of light beams? Could we really make that choice for him? It was one thing for the hologrammers to go to a famous artistâs estate and ask for permission to create a projection of him for a four-minute performance. It was primitively lifelike, but it was essentially a movie in three dimensions. Here in the present, thereâs already chatter that people might want to begin saving voice recordings and videos of their loved ones, compiling their writings and texts, so that after they pass on, these data points can be put into a machine-learning model to create a digital facsimile of the person who has died. An MIT project on âAugmented Eternity and Swappable Identitiesâ is already working on it. At minimum, it could be what Michael Sandel, the influential ethicist and political philosopher at Harvard University, calls a âvirtual-immortality chatbot,â with whichâwith whom?âyou could text back and forth. Call it UndeadGPT. You can see wonderful possibilities here. Some might find comfort in hearing their momâs voice, particularly if she sounds like she really sounded and gives the kind of advice she really gave. But Sandel told me that when he presents the choice to students in his ethics classes, the reaction is split. [Read the Full Story]( [The Improbable Story of How the Savannah Bananas Changed Baseball]( The Improbable Story of How the Savannah Bananas Changed Baseball The Savannah Bananas are one of the greatestâand most improbableâstories in sports. They throw out a first banana rather than a ball. Their first-base coach does "Thriller" dance moves between innings. Players run into the crowd to hand out roses. The team sings "Stand by Me" after every game. They have two cheer squads: the âDancing Nanasâ (age 70-plus) and the Man-ananas (all Dad Bods). The team has a 600,000-plus waiting list for tickets. In every game, the Bananas put on their show with a cast of 110. (The Harlem Globetrotters use 30.) But the team's popularity exploded when the team's founder, Jesse Cole, decided to remix the rules of baseball. This is the story of how Banana Ball was born, told by the inventor himself. What are the best moments in baseball? Many say walk-offs, bat flips, triples, home runs, circus catches, and plays at home plate. We asked ourselves: how do we do more of those? What are the worst moments in baseball? Letâs say walks, guys constantly stepping out of the batterâs box, pitchers taking forever and the interminable games that stretch to four hours. How do we get rid of those? Then we thought about the fans. What would be the most fans-first rule to make people really feel like they were involved in the game? It was a ton of experimentation, innovation and evolutionâthe way weâve always lived, reallyâto invent the structure of our Banana Ball. [Read the Full Story](
[Is It Time to Quit Coffee for Good?]( Is It Time to Quit Coffee for Good? There is perhaps no mind-altering substance as tightly woven into the fabric of daily life than caffeine. Nearly 80 percent of adults in the U.S. consume caffeine, in some form, every day. Coffee is the primary caffeine-delivery mechanism for many peopleâtwo thirds of American adults drink it every dayâand many consider it an indispensable part of daily life. T-shirts and, naturally, coffee mugs exclaim, âNot before Iâve had my coffeeâ or âBut first, coffee,â as if the travails of everyday living are impossible without a morning cup of joe. For some, coffee even serves as a handy substitute for having a personality. Entire human interactionsâthe coffee date, the coffee break at work, the post-dinner mugârevolve around its ingestion. So ubiquitous is caffeine in our culture that it doesnât even register to people as a drug. Step out of the office for a midafternoon cigarette and people might look at you askance. Get caught doing a bump of coke in the office bathroom as a midday pick-me-up and itâs grounds for immediate termination. But slam a Monster or a quad-shot Americano at work and people will think youâre a go-getter. That perception is increasingly being challenged by a small but growing choir of laypeople and experts making a concerted effort to raise awareness about the potential downsides of caffeine dependence. [Read the Full Story]( [Every Fast and Furious Movie, Ranked]( Every Fast and Furious Movie, Ranked The horsepower behind the Fast and Furious franchise is undeniable: It ranks as the biggest movie franchise that doesnât involve wizards, superheroes, or space. At least not yet on the latter; there is much Internet chatter that subsequent features wonât take place on terra firma. Not implausible for a series where cars have the ability to jump over submarines, out of planes, and across city skylines. In the Fast and Furious universe, gravity is merely a suggestion. You may disagree with this ranking. And thatâs OK. If you are a fan of Fast and Furious movies, chances are you like them all. They contain this wonderful misfit energy thatâs hard to hate even when thereâs campy, meme-like lines like âI live my life a quarter mile at a time," or "I'll have the tuna. No crust,â or thereâs terrible CGIâas in the dirt tunnel race in Fast 6. To me, there are no bad Fast and Furious movies, just misunderstood ones whose true value may not be understood until years later. [Read the Full Story]( Follow Us [Unsubscribe]( | [Privacy Notice/Notice at Collection]( esquire.com
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