NY Observer > Esquire

Esquire Believes in Paper Too! September Issue to Have Battery-Operated Cover

John Koblin — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 07:51:55 -0400

Back in April, Esquire editor David Granger told the Observer he had no worries that the Internet would make magazines unnecessary, as, arguably, it has done with newspapers. But if magazines want to flourish in the Internet age they have to capitalize on the direct, textural experience they provide that the Internet can't.

“Magazines have to become more magaziney rather than less magaziney,” said Mr. Granger back then. “There are things you can do with your cover where the paper will actually fold into different shapes—this cool experience that will let you do novel editorial things, but it’s all very expensive.”

But he likely already had in mind something far more elaborate than an origami cover—like, a flashing, battery-operated cover!

The Times' Tim Arango writes today that Esquire will have an electronic cover for its September issue that will flash the words, “the 21st Century Begins Now."

Comedy... So Hot Right Now... Comedy

Matt Haber — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:48:47 -0400

To judge from the current crop of men's magazines on the newsstand, comic actors are hot right now—like, Ben Affleck hot!

First out of the gate is Esquire, which features Stephen Colbert on its August cover in a re-creation of the magazine's iconic April 1968 image of Muhammad Ali as St. Sebastian. Inside, Mr. Colbert—or his writing staff—offers a humorous take on America's most beleaguered minority: white men.

Then there's GQ's Comedy Issue, which places endomorphic comic phenom Seth Rogen on the cover and teases a package including Jack Black, Sarah Silverman, Kal Penn, Flight of the Conchords, Tina Fey, David Sedaris, Ricky Gervais, Seth Meyers, Chris Rock and Don Rickles. read more »

Mayor: Despite Esquire Claim, Newark Free of Zombies

Matt Haber — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 13:20:54 -0400

In July, Esquire writer-at-large Scott Raab wrote a story called The Battle of Newark, Starring Cory Booker, which begins in latter-day New Journalism style:

Nearly 275,000 souls live in Newark, New Jersey—twelve miles from New York City—served by a grand total of one movie theater, where Cory Booker, Newark's mayor, sits on a Sunday night, hand-holding with a leggy Jersey City beauty and surrounded by various City Hall colleagues watching Will Smith in I Am Legend trying to save Manhattan from zombie hordes by devising a cure for the plague that has zombified them and wiped out most of the human race. Goddamn zombies. read more »

Move Over Chuck Klosterman: For Esquire Skulls Are the New... Something

Joe Pompeo — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 16:32:15 -0400

The July issue of Esquire debuts a new culture column by Stephen Marche—a Ph.D.-possessing smart guy, former college professor, and Toronto-based novelist who apparently loves The Hills as much as he loves early modern drama. In zany Esquire fashion, the column’s laid out as if it were thought up on a typewriter and pasted into the mag 'zine-style, with little clippings of relevant pictures interspersed with the text. (The column is not online yet.)

The subject of this inaugural column? Skulls. read more »

David Granger on Clinton Remarks: It Wasn't Me

John Koblin — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 09:51:41 -0400

During Bill Clinton's spectacular meltdown yesterday--calling Vanity Fair's Todd Purdum a scumbag, sleazy and slimy--he also decided to drag just about everyone into the melee. He said:

"The editor of Esquire-- he sent us an email yesterday and said it was the single sleaziest piece of journalism he'd seen in decades. He said it made him want to go take a shower and he was embarrassed to be a journalist when he read it." read more »

Gore Vidal Doesn't Need Your Stinkin' Esquire Assignment

Matt Haber — Fri, 30 May 2008 17:38:06 -0400

This week, Esquire.com posted the magazine's most recent "What I've Learned" interview with Gore Vidal.

While Mr. Vidal's interview was as erudite and prickly as the great man himself (samples: "'You got to meet everyone—Jackie Kennedy, William Burroughs.' People always put that sentence the wrong way around. I mean, why not put it the true way, that these people got to meet me, and wanted to?"; "Everything’s wrong on Wikipedia"), the most interesting part was the behind-the-scenes story in the form of an email from interviewer Mike Sager. read more »

Beloved Esquire Franchise, 'Dubious Achievements,' Becomes One

Leon Neyfakh — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 18:39:58 -0500

“It would be like instead of re-imagining Eustace Tilley, David Remnick decided to behead him,” David Hirshey said. He was talking about Esquire’s decision to discontinue Dubious Achievements, the beloved, mischievous year-end roundup of folly that has been running in the magazine since 1962. Like a blooper reel but real, Dubious was an annual assessment of all the awful things that had happened in the world during the preceding 12 months. read more »

Johnny Depp Really Likes His Privacy

David Foxley — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 16:54:48 -0500

Johnny Depp will likely never drive around L.A. bumping into people and things in a convertible Mercedes. Instead, the Sweeny Todd star, 44, looks forward to the time when he can achieve some semblance of anonymity. In Esquire’s January issue, on newsstands Friday, the actor imagines what that freedom will be like, saying, “I'm sure it will be a possibility someday again. Maybe when I get old. They get tired of you,” he told the highbrow lad mag. “‘Didn't you used to be Johnny Depp?' That will be the clincher." Apparently, he leaned the value of privacy from his friend and mentor, the late Marlon Brando, recalling how the screen legend told him: ‘“That's your world and it's nobody else's business. It's not anybody's entertainment.”’ (He does, in the end, throw the paparazzi a bone by revealing that he likes to enter restaurants and hotels through the back door.)

"It'll definitely make you a little weird if you're constantly being stared at," Mr. Depp went on. "I don't want to be a product. Of course you want the movies to do well. But I don't want to know ... who's hot now and who's not and who's making this much dough and who's boffing this woman or that one. I want to remain ignorant of all this. I want to be totally outside and far away from all of it." [AP via HuffPo]

The Editor Who Loved To Paint

Gillian Reagan — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 16:47:59 -0500

Byron Dobell, one of the most respected and accomplished editors in New York magazine publishing history, is also a painter, and his seventh solo show, “Recent Works,” is currently on view at Chelsea’s First Street Gallery (526 West 26th Street). Mr. Dobell, who’s 80 (but doesn’t look a day over 65!), worked as an editor at many important magazines in the city, including Time, Esquire, New York and American Heritage, and edited writers like Tom Wolfe and David Halberstam before they were household names. But 17 years ago, Mr. Dobell left the media world to pursue a lifelong passion: portraiture painting. Over the years he’s painted many friends and colleagues, including New York magazine founder Clay Felker; Tim Forbes, chief operating officer of Forbes, Dominique Browning, editor in chief of late House & Garden, and feminist icon Betty Friedan (the Friedan piece now hangs in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery).

At his Recent Works’ opening last week, Mr. Dobell dressed in a sharp navy jacket, an eye-catching tie and round, thin-framed spectacles. The room was noisy and bustling with his friends, mostly graying folks from the magazine business, who braved the biting cold to make it to the party. They held their hands behind their backs and considered Mr. Dobell’s small, sketchy “Life Study” chalk drawings of his less famous models lounging, seemingly in mid-air. There are also serene landscapes inspired by his travels to Scotland, Rome and New Hampshire. In some paintings, little trees sway in front of fuzzy bushes swirled with strands of India ink. read more »

Brooklyn Book-Nerds Still Love Lethem

Gillian Reagan — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 13:43:17 -0400

While John Grisham's Playing for Pizza and Alice Sebold's The Almost Moon top the New York Times' best sellers list, we're poking our heads into BookCourt in Cobble Hill to see what Brooklynites are tucking into their totes.

Out in the Manhattan suburb (sorry, it's true!), where baby strollers, daddy-actor types and yoga-obsessed writers run rampant, it's not surprising that Tom Perrotta's new book The Abstinence Teacher tops the hardcover fiction list. After all, the guy wrote Little Children, the most angsty-cool anti-parenting guide ever written. In his new book, Mr. Perrotta abandons the kiddie playground for school to examine how a single sex education teacher will battle a herd of evangelical Christians trying to get her to ditch the old banana/condom demo and take on an abstinence curriculum. In The Abstinence Teacher, Mr. Perrotta continues "writing books for people who don't much like books—satires for nice people, fuck books for prudes," according to Benjamin Alsup at Esquire. Fun! But you could also follow Mr. Alsup's advice and just wait for the movie. read more »