96 Hours in an American Ghost Town

The perfect domestic road trip exists on a stretch of road between Denver, Colorado and Cisco, Utah. [View in Browser]( [Esquire Sunday Reads]( [96 Hours in an American Ghost Town]( 96 Hours in an American Ghost Town The town consisted of just a few blocks. Since its founding in the 1880s, Cisco has been a stop for the railroad, a ranching town, an oil town, a uranium town—it burned through industries like a middle schooler burns through identities. At its most booming, around 250 people lived in Cisco. It had a hotel, a saloon, a gas station, restaurants. But eventually the train no longer needed to stop there, and then the interstate was built, bypassing the road that cut through town. Without the traffic, the town began to die. The last permanent resident moved out decades before Eileen drove through. By then the boomtown wasn’t recognizable. The buildings were collapsed or collapsing or no longer there at all. Only one looked remotely habitable. It was covered in trash or, depending on how you look at it, “interesting historical artifacts.” Eileen did some math: If they bought the land and sublet their apartment for the winter, they would actually be saving money. So they did. [Read the Full Story]( [MORE FROM ESQUIRE]( [The PGA Tour Should Be Ashamed of Itself]( The PGA Tour Should Be Ashamed of Itself Last summer, the PGA Tour did the Right Thing. As news emerged of LIV Golf, an upstart global golf tour funded by the Saudi Arabian government's Public Investment Fund, Commissioner Jay Monahan made it clear his Tour wouldn't associate itself with the Saudis' ongoing mission to sportswash. Plus, he wouldn't allow any pro who furthered that mission by joining LIV to play on the PGA Tour again. It was a firm stance, and even if it was mostly motivated by ego, the Tour was always going to have the easiest route to coming out as the "good guy" in all of it. The latest announcement of a PGA Tour and LIV Golf merger changed that—and exposed a good deal of hypocrisy along with it. All that you need to know about the Saudi Public Investment Fund is that the money is infinite, and the people in charge of it are alleged to have killed Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. That's all, it seemed, Monahan needed to know—or at least that's what made for an excellent opportunity to grandstand. It wasn't something that stopped Phil Mickelson from joining LIV. Before signing on, he told journalist Alan Shipnuck that his potential new bosses were "scary motherfuckers." He added, "We know they killed Khashoggi." [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. [Read the Full Story]( [Surreal Photos of Smoke-Clogged Cities After Canadian Wildfires]( Surreal Photos of Smoke-Clogged Cities After Canadian Wildfires The fallout from Canadian wildfires burning in Quebec began to hit the northeastern United States on Tuesday, filling the skies of cities like New York and Washington D.C. with smoke and all the colors of the apocalypse. Meteorologists say the smoky skies should dissipate by the end of the week, but in the meantime, according to The New York Times health alerts were issued from New York to the Carolinas, and as far west as Minnesota. Here in the States, the environmental disaster is making for skies that mirror those of end-of-days movies. Images show the White House, the New York City Skyline, and Toronto's CN Tower surrounded by hues of grey and orange. Fiery orange sunrises became the backdrop for outgoing flights and high-rise buildings. Here's what the northeast looked like well into Wednesday. [Read the Full Story]( [The Samsung Frame Really Is a Work of Art]( The Samsung Frame Really Is a Work of Art For too many years, I lived in a Brooklyn apartment that felt like something out of Alice in Wonderland. The staircase up from the entrance was so off-kilter that it induced something approaching vertigo. Ditto that for the wildly uneven floors in the apartment itself, which made me—and everyone who visited—wonder if we'd accidentally dosed on something mildly psychedelic as we made our way from the kitchen to the bathroom. What I'm saying is: When I moved into my current spot, I was mostly looking for something level. The unrelenting sunlight pouring onto the only reasonable spot to put a television was the last of my concerns. Until, that is, the weekend after move-in, when I realized that watching Saturday morning cartoons with your kid is a lot harder when there's a blinding glare bouncing off the TV screen. Instead of turning my living room into a crypt with blackout curtains, I got a 65" Samsung Frame. It was absolutely the right call. [Read the Full Story]( [Without Pat Robertson, American Politics Would Have Been Infinitely Better]( Without Pat Robertson, American Politics Would Have Been Infinitely Better The best I can say about Pat Robertson, the Christopolitical television star and onetime presidential candidate who, on Thursday, went off to glory (and to what probably will be one of the livelier final judgments that the heavenly peanut gallery has seen in a while), is that he eventually faded into irrelevance and that he was easily surpassed for pure craziness and reckless damage by succeeding generations of clerical errors who took up politics as a career. That's the best I can say about him. The worst I can say about him is that American politics would have been infinitely better off had Pat chosen a career in waste management. He was the beginning of a blight that is still causing untold damage among our fellow citizens. He was one of the original vectors for the prion disease that is presently eating away at the higher functions of the Republican mind. And, not to put too fine a point on it, he was a bottomless abyssal of completely batshit crazy ideas. [Read the Full Story]( Follow Us [Unsubscribe]( | [Privacy Notice/Notice at Collection]( esquire.com ©2023 Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Hearst Magazines, 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019