Our weekly selection of stories from our archives that reflect what’s going on now.
He spent a lifetime passing himself off as the genial Juice, an affable guy who went from sports hero to TV pitchman to smiling joke in a Leslie Nielsen movie. Then his wife said goodbye for the last time, and O. J. Simpson made the terrible discovery that his disguise no longer fit.
You may think O.J. Simpson killed his wife. But does that mean you can’t be friends?
Some of the elements are true. Others are not.
Actor, ass-kicker, widower, philosophizer, big man, funny man, capable drinker of pinot noir: may we introduce to you, the man you’ve known for all these years
An exploration of sporting clays from Virginia to California
Norman Mailer, the only World War II–generation writer left, staked it all on manhood and the novel. Fifty-eight years after his first book, eighty-three years old, what does his oversized life mean?
The best of the best
Should she redecorate the nation? Preside over the April-in-Paris Ball? Marry Adlai Stevenson? Advice comes from every quarter, as the lady recedes quietly from public view
His wife was just thirty-four. They had two little girls. The cancer was everywhere, and the parts of dying that nobody talks about were about to start. His best friend came to help out for a couple weeks. And he never left.
Two brothers had an idea for a story. One brother turned it into the most original movie of the spring, Memento. The other wrote this short story.
In these anxious days, some Americans have turned to God; others, to gurus. But more and more turn to the cowboy hat
Whenever Holly Golightly left a man—as she did often—she left him bewildered; for although she was a girl of small character she had a lot of personality.
The lady is pretty and nice and smart. Smarter than you are, probably. The pretty lady is smiling at you. What do you think she’s thinking. . . .
There’s not a club in New York that the maverick editor hasn’t crashed, including the most exclusive one of all—publishing
The writer slipped imperceptibly into the hereafter, leaving behind a life as oblique as any of his plays
... Unshaken through a lifetime of one-night stands, from Atlantic City to Xanadu
Manners and morals at Minton’s, 1941: the setting for a revolution
A cloudburst of blues at Randalls Island jazz festival (preceding page) symbolizes the message of these sixteen pages: photo studies of the jazz scene in general, textual inspection of one man in particular, Norman Granz, first man to make a fortune out of jazz
He's not in a cutting contest
Bucolic Chester County, Pennsylvania: Beneath the charm, there lurked a network of thievery that led to rape and to killing
A mystery starring Sarah Miles, Burt Reynolds and the legacy of F. Scott Fitzgerald, in which life imitates Monday Night at the Movies
Charles Stuart’s hunger for a new life meant doing something wicked to the one he had
Smokers don’t need our pity, as the legions of lawyers lining up to sue big tobacco assert. They don’t need the lawsuits, either. In fact, they deserve our praise. An argument in the form of a story.
Requiem for Ruben Salazar
She’s getting stronger and stronger and stronger
One evening, Matt Shaunfield overdosed on heroin and died. In the past two years, as many as ten more kids in Plano, Texas, have died for their love of the drug. This had never happened to Plano. It also had never happened to Austin or Orlando or Boulder or any of the other places in America designed to keep harm away.
Not long ago, the brilliant doctor had AIDS on the ropes, and the world tried to make him a celebrity. Now the virus counterattacks. A little peace and quiet, if you don't mind.
How much anger can a boy contain? An excerpt from Esquire's forthcoming book Brothers.
Panic rises in the hearts of the unchosen
At West Point, there are only four acceptable answers: yes, sir; no, sir; sir, I do not understand; and no excuse, sir. It is a place where it is not a matter of if you can
We asked nine men to comment
Ladies and germs, direct from Las Vegas ... Harry Ritz!