My Mother, the Poker Shark |
My mother had first started playing poker for the fun and for the intellectual challenge. Returning to competition twenty years later, she rediscovered old pleasures. She was playing not only to make money but also as an emotional escape. At the table, she wasn’t a single mother without a steady job mourning her husband’s death. It was the only place she felt comfortable playing the villain, cutthroat and cruel, lying to strangers’ faces and getting paid for it. “I love having a nemesis at the table,” she once told me. “It gives me purpose.” To this day, at every table, she picks a player and slowly, steadily, hand by hand, tries to destroy them.
To some people, poker is just a card game, a way to pass the time. For me and my mother, it’s a window into our identity, our way of understanding a world that at times can seem unforgiving. I began joining my mother in basement games around town in 2003, when I was sixteen. Ever since, poker has formed a bond between us, a mutual love, a prism through which I can see her not just as my mother but as a three-dimensional person who carries deep heartache and immense responsibility. Though it took me years to realize it, I now understand exactly how high the stakes were each time she sat down at a card table: It was the only way she knew how to keep living.
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An Honest Conversation With Doug Herzog on the Occasion of MTV News' Shutdown |
This week, as part of a massive round of layoffs at Paramount, the entire MTV News department got switched off for good. It’s difficult to remember in today’s world of infinite and narrowly-targeted news outlets, but for Generation X and millennials, MTV News was the place to get informed on music, fashion, sex, and even politics. It brought a youthful curiosity to the big subjects, and the analytical eye of the expert to the fluffier stuff. It was one of a kind, and like so much of what happened at MTV, it was made up as it went along.
Doug Herzog started the whole thing nearly forty years ago. Since his time as MTV’s first News Director, he’s gone on to run Comedy Central, Fox, and USA Network, among others, and he’s just wrapped a fascinating podcast called BASIC!, in which he charts the history of basic cable. I caught up with Doug just after the news of MTV’s demise broke.
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Do Great Actors Make Great Novelists? |
Great actors don't make great novelists. Apologies for sort of spoiling the premise right up front, but that’s the answer. Great acting talent does not necessarily translate to literary excellence. But the reason this is true has nothing to do with acting and everything to do with novel-making. Constructing a complex narrative with tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of words is really, really—really—difficult; merely completing a draft of a novel is a major accomplishment. Then the revision process demands not only complete overhauls, but also infinitesimal tweaks that can sometimes cause reverberations throughout the rest of the story. A novelist must keep all of this in their head, balance the bewildering intricacies of one’s own novel with the endless possibilities available for improving it. The writing, revising, copyediting, marketing, publishing, and promotion of a single novel can take many years. Debuts are rarely a novelist’s best work, and often this is because many of the “rules” of fiction are notoriously difficult to articulate, let alone learn in practice and eventually wield with grace.
The result of all this is pretty straightforward: novelists are the only great novelists (and even they are rarely great). So, no, actors don’t make great novelists, but that’s no slight on actors. Saying that great actors don’t make great novelists is basically like saying that great dancers don’t make great architects—yeah, but that’s only because dancers aren’t architects. To be great at something necessitates not being great at much else.
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Finally, a Perfect Set of Cocktail Glasses |
The glass matters. Never did I feel more strongly about this than when I realized how much I hated all my old highball options. The first batch I owned, years ago, was too tall and narrow, making mixing up a balanced cocktail that would actually stay balanced impossible. The top was all club soda, the bottom all booze. (Equally hard: Drinking out of the glass sans straw.) The second, which I received for my wedding, was far too big, in both circumference and volume. Fill those with liquor and I'd be on the floor; attempt a more moderate approach and your drink looks ludicrously undersized. (They have since found a second life as water glasses.) But I've finally arrived at my just-right option, the Barwell Cut Crystal highball glass set from Soho Home. Perfectly sized, remarkably attractive, and delightfully weighty, these glasses hit all the right marks. There's no looking back for my home bar.
Living in New York, I've been to Soho House, a members-only social club with multiple locations in Manhattan and Brooklyn, plenty of times. I knew I loved the glassware. That it felt good to drink out of while I was there. But even as other friends ordered their own sets for their own bar carts, I held off on purchasing due to the price tag. Four glasses for $200 deserves a little pause. Right? Actually, wrong. That was a mistake. Not only have I wasted more on other options I hate at this point, but these glasses instantly upgrade whatever you've chosen to pour into them (also, your night on the couch). When something looks beautiful—as every liquid does behind this etched glass—it tastes better. Amazing how that works. Certainly science agrees with me!
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Kendall Roy's 12 Best Outfits of All Time, Ranked |
There's a certain lowkey flex to the ultra-wealthy not needing to slap flashy prints and designs and monograms on their staple pieces: they may look like basics, but everyone knows they're not spending less than a few hundred on a single garment. Those who do enter the circle of the Roys with flashy designer branding are ridiculed for their tastes, ostentatious and tacky in the face of such understated luxury—RIP, Ludicrously Capacious Bag Girl.
The beauty of Kendall Roy is that, as far as Succession characters go, he has a definitive style. He's not Roman Roy, with an ever-present, barely-ironed button-down and trousers, nor is he Cousin Greg, bumbling around in awkwardly-fitting formalwear. Kendall's suits are always sharp and sleek. He loves a beige knit and a gold chain and some fresh kicks. His casual wear can best be described as hypebeast-adjacent, elevated streetwear that doesn't contain a single item under, oh, $400? And that's just for the T-shirts. Kendall has the wardrobe of a billionaire, sure, but one who still has personal style. He's not boring. He's a cool guy who wears cool clothes—but subtly.
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The Best Books of 2023 (So Far) |
As we approach the halfway point of the year, 2023 has yielded a massive bounty of extraordinary new reads—in fact, the stacks are towering over us here in the Esquire books department. If you're looking to read more as the days grow longer and brighter, then you’ve come to the right place. We’ve rounded up our favorite books of the year thus far, which range from debut works by emerging voices to new outings for canonical writers. Our favorite titles delve into everything from prisons to utopias, slashers to ghost stories, and American dreaming to American failures.
Whether you’re into novels, short stories, memoirs, or nonfiction, there’s something here for every type of reader. Not all of these books have hit shelves yet, but if you see something you like, pre-order it now and thank yourself later. When it arrives in your mailbox weeks from now, after you’ve long forgotten about it, it’ll be like a gift from Past You.
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