All the surgeons needed was a volunteer. [View in Browser]( [Esquire Sunday Reads]( [This Is the Story of America's First Penis Transplant]( This Is the Story of America's First Penis Transplant On a cold morning in January 2012, sixty-year-old bank courier Tom Manning was easing a hand truck loaded with heavy boxes down a slushy ramp behind his company's office in downtown Boston. His legs slipped out from under him and Manning went down hard. The cart, loaded with a hundred pounds of paperwork, toppled onto him, forcing a portion of his colon through his lower intestinal wall and steamrolling his genitals. The impact felt like an explosion, but shock muffled the initial pain. A water deliveryman who had heard the crash and Manning's howl rushed over to help him back on his feet. He thanked the guy, told him he was fine, and trudged up to the employee restroom to assess the damage, grabbing clean clothes from his locker on the way. Once he was behind a locked door, Manning carefully peeled off his military-style cargo pants, long johns, and underwear, each layer soaked through with Boston slush. The impact had caused the button fly of his pants to rake across his genitals, and as the shock wore off, his entire groin began to throb in time with his heartbeat. There was blood, but Manning couldn't tell where it was coming from because his penis had swollen to more than twice its usual size. Everything looked wrong. [Read the Full Story]( [MORE FROM ESQUIRE]( [The Holdovers Is Tender, Triumphant, and Incorrigibly Corny]( The Holdovers Is Tender, Triumphant, and Incorrigibly Corny Veteran director Alexander Payneâs latest film, The Holdovers, takes place in a circa-1970 world weâve seen on screen countless times before: bell bottoms, brown corduroy, Vietnam. But its trailer evokes a more recent, if equally gone eraâthe '80s and '90s when CG, IP, and other soul-killing acronyms were but a gleam in some studio executiveâs eye, and character-driven mid-budget storytelling still reigned supreme. (Franchises have always been in the mix, itâs true. But try pitting your Star Wars or Indiana Joneses against 33 increasingly enervating MCU installments, 12 Fast & Furious skid marks, and threeâthree!âTrolls.) That three-minute preview, with its shaggy, toodling soundtrack, freeze frames, and old-timey Trailer Man voiceover, seemed to tap into a deeper vein of nostalgia than perhaps its distributor, Focus Features, could have guessed. In three months, it has racked up more than 15 million views on YouTube. The movie itself comes steeped in boldfaced vintage signifiers from the jump, literally; Payne renders the copyright notice and various production credits in bygone fonts of long ago, shot on crackling film stock. The effect is immediate and startlingly immersive. [Read the Full Story]( [REI Sells Incredible Adventure Packages]( REI Sells Incredible Adventure Packages The co-op has a new(ish) wing of its operation that plays full-on travel agency and guide service. The trips are U.S. only, but instead of calling guides in middle-of-fucking-nowhere Tennessee and comparing rates, REI does it all for you. Buy a package, and your entire adventure is set upâall you have to do is get to the meeting point. The prices are also incredibly reasonable, given how much easier it is to book this way. And if you're a member (which only involves a one-time $30 payment ) there's even further discounts. Experience shopping is the way to go. Get one for yourself instead of Black Friday shopping, or hey, these obviously make great holiday gifts. [Read the Full Story]( [You Can Now Buy a Grateful Dead Bong, and Life Is Complete]( You Can Now Buy a Grateful Dead Bong, and Life Is Complete Thereâs always a moment of electric bonding when, decades after the fact, two people realize they were at the same show. This happened recently when I was speaking with Mark Pinkus, the affable president of Rhino Records whoâs also in charge of the entire US catalog for the Warner Music Group as well as Grateful Dead Properties. âJuly 13, 1984,â he told me within three minutes of meeting him. âAt the Greek. That was my first show. The encore was âDark Star.â I saw 73 shows and I never got another one.â Iâd been there, too, and it turns out that, nearly 40 years later, weâd also both seen the same Boulder shows this summer. I was talking to Pinkus because he oversees, among many other things, the Deadâs brand extensions and thereâs a new extension dropping in November that I found intriguing. The Dead have popped their logo on a wide range of products over the years; on their site, Dead.net, a Head can find everything from dancing bear PJs to a branded âIgloo Steal Your Face Playmate Pal 7 Qt. Coolerâ to tarot cards to a âcosmic mushroom foraging tool.â But the newest brand extension was unique and a first of its kind: a bong. Or, as Pinkus refers to it, âa cannabis accessory.â [Read the Full Story](
[Has It Ever Been Harder to Make a Living As An Author?]( Has It Ever Been Harder to Make a Living As An Author? In early August, after Andrew Lipstein published The Vegan, his sophomore novel, a handful of loved ones asked if he planned to quit his day job in product design at a large financial technology company. Despite having published two books with the prestigious literary imprint Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Lipstein didnât have any plans to quit; he considers product design to be his âcareer,â and he wouldnât be able to support his growing family exclusively on the income from writing novels. âI feel disappointed having to tell people that because it sort of seems like a mark of success,â he said. âIf Iâm not just supporting myself by writing, to those who don't know the reality of it, it seems like it's a failure in some way.â The myth of The Writer looms large in our cultural consciousness. When most readers picture an author, they imagine an astigmatic, scholarly type who wakes at the crack of dawn in a monastic, book-filled, shockingly affordable house surrounded by nature. The Writer makes coffee and sits down at their special writing desk for their ritualized morning pages. They break for lunchâor perhaps a morning constitutionâduring which they have an aha! moment about a troublesome plot point. Such a lifestyle aesthetic is âsomething weâve long wanted to believe,â said Paul Bogaards, the veteran book publicist who has worked with the likes of Joan Didion, Donna Tartt, and Robert Caro. âFor a very small subset of writers, this has been true. And itâs getting harder and harder to do.â [Read the Full Story]( [Wouldn't It Be Nice If We Could Predict the Political Future?]( Wouldn't It Be Nice If We Could Predict the Political Future? My editor is a very nice person. My editor is also unfathomably cruel. A while back, she told me that this magazine would be celebrating its ninetieth birthday this autumn and, as part of the celebration, she would like me to write about what things might be like ninety years from now. Hello there, 2113. Whatâs up? She had to be kidding. I couldnât write with any authority about what I think will happen next week, let alone 4,680 weeks from now. By Christmas, we might be watching Florida drown. By Easter, Vivek Ramaswamy might be rolling to victory on a platform drawn from old episodes of Drunk History. By this time next year, we might be preparing to reelect a vulgar talking yam, back this time with a vengeance. Hell, I told her, just buy a Ouija board. Cut up a goat on a sacred rock. Rent a crystal ball from some Deadhead. All I know for certain about the year 2113 is that I wonât be around to see whatever happens. Iâm not entirely sure Iâm disappointed about that. [Read the Full Story]( [LiveIntent Logo]( [AdChoices Logo]( Follow Us [Unsubscribe]( | [Privacy Notice]( | [CA Notice at Collection]( Esquire is a publication of Hearst Magazines.
©2023 Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
This email was sent by Hearst Magazines, 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019-3779