The Cult Leader of Staten Island

When he was 19, Jeff Gross fell under the sway of the charismatic, fifty-one-year-old Mildred Gordon and spent more than half his life in an "intentional community" they built together. It turned out to be much, much more than that. [View in Browser]( [Esquire Sunday Reads]( [The Follower]( The Follower On the night of May 29, 2006, after seeing the documentary An Inconvenient Truth in Manhattan, Jeff Gross drove home from the Staten Island ferry to Ganas, a communal-living experiment he’d spent decades building. He climbed the steep steps up to the group’s cluster of houses scattered among leafy walkways and squinted his way through uncut shrubs and poor lighting. As Jeff approached his porch, a figure stepped from the shadows and raised a handgun. “What do you want?” Jeff shouted, and then, “No, no, don’t do it!” Shots pop-pop-popped as the shooter unloaded six rounds into his hip, stomach, arm, and neck. Jeff fell to the ground, blood pumping from his wounds. His assailant stepped over him and fled. A neighbor who heard the shooting knelt beside Jeff and shouted for towels to stanch the bleeding. Many moments had delivered Jeff to this one. Since 1980, Ganas had been a community that embraced all manner of new-agey life. But his relationship with the group—particularly with its charismatic and often abusive leader, Mildred Gordon—had become unrecognizable since their early days. He’d signed over a small fortune, endured thousands of hours of “feedback” sessions, and entered a four-way marriage. And now he was bleeding out in the back of an ambulance. How had Jeff gotten into this mess? And why had he stayed? [Read the Full Story]( [MORE FROM ESQUIRE]( [Harrison Ford Has Stories to Tell]( Harrison Ford Has Stories to Tell Most people know a good deal about Harrison Ford. His path to becoming an actor was methodical and uneventful: going out for parts, landing small roles. 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At turns funny and sexy, thirsty for intellectual engagement (and men too), his new book, The Male Gazed: On Hunks, Heartthrobs, and What Pop Culture Taught Me About (Desiring) Men, untangles the simultaneous threads of desire to be a beautiful man, or to be with beautiful men, then unravels the implications of all of it to understand how those threads form the self. Betancourt is a preeminent thinker, a “movie-made gay” man. Given that sexuality in media has become so high stakes, there’s no better time to hear from someone who brings true intellectual rigor to his analysis of contemporary media. Betancourt spoke with Esquire about hunks, men’s body image, queerbaiting, and the realities of American soft power overseas. [Read the Full Story]( [The Best Bars in America, 2023]( The Best Bars in America, 2023 Birds were on every page. Pretty ones. Ugly ones. Downright strange-looking ones. I was perusing the avian-themed cocktail menu at Meadowlark, an old library-like spot in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood. Each drink was meant to resemble a specific feathered friend. You looked at the glass in front of you, sipped, looked at the bird picture again—and all of a sudden, it clicked. This joyfully odd drink menu was the brainchild of Abe Vucekovich, Meadowlark’s beverage director, who used to work in one of the country’s most serious temples to the cocktail, just a few L stops away, the Violet Hour. What, I asked Vucekovich, had sparked the idea to try something so delightfully trippy? And why were we seeing such a right turn away from cocktail classicism here and in so many other bars we’ve been visiting lately? “People were ready for something more fun after the pandemic,” he explained simply. “We felt that people deserved novelty.” He knows his customers: Every seat at the bar was full by 6:30. That same spirit of custom creativity is what drinkers sought out in an even bigger way at Mothership in San Diego. From the drinks to the bathroom to the music, Mothership commits hard to the idea that you’re in a spaceship that made an emergency landing on a tropical planet. I think it was the first time I’ve ever seen a line to get into a bar at noon. Over the past year, we criss-crossed the country to report on America’s finest drinking establishments. This is our eighteenth edition of the list, and in all my years of bar crawls, I don’t think I’ve ever seen as much spirited originality—as many bars that make you say, “So strange, yet so awesome.” The pages that follow reflect that, with a slew of new bars to know. There are familiar spaces, too, some of which have been reinvented. So use this as a guide. Then get out there, find your niche, and embrace the weird and wonderful. 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The “SH” is highly common, though, and also wrong, and wrong in such a way that it does betray what you do not know. Now, somebody once advised against mocking someone for mispronouncing a word because they likely learned it reading. And maybe you don’t give a flying focaccia how the Italianos say it. But just in case you do possess the thin skin of an effete cosmopolitan always out to impress, here’s a little procedure to show you’re an American of culture without doing too much. After all, nobody wants to be the guy shouting “bruSKEHHHtta!” at a waitress, either. You want the ‘SK’ without the ostentatious accento (and, we can only assume, pinching your fingers in upward triangles). You’ve got to find exactly the right balance to show you know how the word is pronounced without showing that you’re an asshole. [Read the Full Story]( Follow Us [Unsubscribe]( | [Privacy Notice/Notice at Collection]( esquire.com ©2023 Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 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