How a Freak Accident Happens

Over two years after 10-year-old Caleb Schwab lost his life on the tallest waterslide in the world, the amusement park industry has yet to fully reckon with the tragedy. [View in Browser]( [Esquire Sunday Reads]( [It's Aaron Taylor-Johnson Season!]( How a Freak Accident Happens Standing on a platform more than 168 feet high and overlooking the flat entirety of the Kansas plains, Jess Sanford was scared. On vacation from Lincoln, Nebraska, with her friend Melanie Gocke and her friend’s family in August 2016, Sanford, then a rising high school junior, didn’t know anything about Schlitterbahn Kansas City. The park, which had been open since 2009, was the first effort outside of Texas for Schlitterbahn, the family-run water-park dynasty that’s become the world’s preeminent aquatic amusement giant, with its original park winning “Best Waterpark in the World” by Amusement Today for two consecutive decades. The only thing Sanford, a self-proclaimed adrenaline junkie, did know on this summer road trip was that Schlitterbahn Kansas City had an attraction no other water park could claim: the Verrückt, the tallest waterslide in the world. And after waiting about thirty minutes and walking 264 steps with Gocke and Gocke’s little sister, it was Sanford’s turn to go down the slide named “insane” in German. She wondered to herself if the Velcro straps that held riders in place were safe enough on a waterslide deemed by the Guinness Book of World Records two years earlier to be the tallest in existence. In times of fear, Sanford says she resorts to humor, which is exactly what she did with the twenty-something lifeguard who helped strap her into the raft at the top of Verrückt around noon that summer Sunday. “I feel really bad about this now,” the nineteen-year-old told Esquire about that day, “but I was joking with the lifeguard, asking her if anyone had ever died on this thing. When she said no, I said, ‘There’s a first for everything.’” [Read the Full Story]( [MORE FROM ESQUIRE]( [One of Their Own]( One of Their Own My choice to align myself with Spurs was mostly arbitrary. Most people inherit their sports fandoms through geography, family, or a combination of the two. Though my DC native father tried his best, I've always been a Philadelphia sports fan, and I wanted a squad that felt like a Philadelphia team. One upon which I would gamble my emotional energy on a regular basis with incredibly mixed results. A team that could soar high one moment, then come crashing back down to earth the next. That life influenced my decision to pick Spurs. They hailed from a big city—London, but a part of London that was historically a little gritty. They had the capability of greatness, but never really got there. High ceiling, low-ish floor, but not low enough to be relegation fodder. 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We're sweating through record temperatures, scraping for Twitter alternatives, and of course, anticipating the looming actor's strike. SAG-AFTRA wouldn't hit the picket lines until a couple weeks after we spoke, but it was still top of mind for Richardson. "We need art to be written and created," he tells me. "This isn't about the top actors. It's not about millionaires paying millionaires. It's about billionaires paying people a living wage. It's about the people who gig, need health insurance, and the residuals to support themselves." Today, in mid-August, the studios still feel no closer to reaching a deal. [Read the Full Story]( [The OG Lacoste Polo Is As Cool As It's Ever Been]( The OG Lacoste Polo Is As Cool As It's Ever Been How often is the first iteration of something the undisputed best? I truly can't think of any examples besides this one, the Lacoste polo. 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Even now I have all eleven hundred episodes of Soul Train, and I keep it on a twenty-four-hour loop on all televisions in my house. [Read the Full Story]( [The Audacity of Making Your Own Playlist]( It's Aaron Taylor-Johnson Season! A summer afternoon in New York's West Village, a warm day fast turning hotter, and inside Buvette Gastrothèque—a tiny bistro so perfectly Parisian that there’s another one in the Quartier Pigalle, a few blocks from the Moulin Rouge—Aaron Taylor-Johnson is scooping up ruddy- pink globs of steak tartare and packing them like wet sand onto little ellipses of toasted bread, one bite at a time. The size of the space means we’re out in the open, visible. His eyes dart to the front door every time it opens. His body language says he’s ready to be recognized, to be spotted—not waiting for it but scanning, steeling for it. It doesn’t happen. Either everyone’s being chill about his presence or nobody associates the guy at the table with the things he’s been in. 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