Esquire articles from October 2008

Esquire archives from October 2008

The 21st century begins now: an explanatory note.(Editorial)
October 1, 2008... Welcome to the twenty-first century. This is Esquire's 75th Anniversary issue, but this special edition of the magazine is not like most tributes to longevity. It's not about Esquire's past, or even about the past of our amazingly fertile...

The 75 most influential people of the 21st century.
October 1, 2008... WE SET OUT TO FIND THEM ACROSS EVERY FIELD OF ENDEAVOR, THE PEOPLE WHO ARE BENDING HISTORY RIGHT NOW. IT WAS AN IMPOSSIBLE TASK, WEIGHING THE RELATIVE INFLUENCE OF ENTERTAINERS, ENTREPRENEURS, INDUSTRIALISTS, POLICY MAKERS, SCIENTISTS, AND...

What Bush meant: the lasting influence of the last eight years.(No. 76)(George W. Bush)(Essay)
October 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heckuva lot easier. Just so long as I'm the dictator." GEORGE W. Bush, DECEMBER 18, 2000 One morning in 2001, one of President Bush's most senior economic advisors walked...

Rupert Murdoch has potential: the oldest man on our list is in many ways the most vital--and least predictable--man on the planet.(75 PROFILE)
October 1, 2008... HE WORKS. AT THE AGE OF SEVENTY-SEVEN, that's all Rupert Murdoch really does. He works. That's what brings meaning to his life. That's what gives him pleasure. When you get in to see him, it's always in his office. He spoke to us twice for...

LeBron James's magnum-sized, ultrashiny, Nike-powered lawn mover to the next century.(75 PROFILE)
October 1, 2008... Rising from his throne like an urban fairy tale, the great black king stands in his glass house. Looming erect, at six feet eight inches and 250 pounds, he is a pythonic force of length and clout, and all he has to do is crane his neck just so...

The performance matrix: a scientific guide to greatness.
October 1, 2008... IS STEVE JOBS as good as Tiger Woods? Is Philip Roth better than Warren Buffett? Are any of them as great as Michael Jordan was? And how will their relative greatness be viewed in the future, say, fifty years from now? Are any questions so dumb...

Steve Jobs and the portal to the invisible: in his controlling hands, technology became both the engine and the emblem of transcendence. But as the iPhone slips from his grasp, Jobs is making his final bid for immortality.(75 PROFILE)
October 1, 2008... One day, Steve Jobs is going to die. First, he is mortal. Second, the odds against him are not only actuarial--the inevitable odds we all face--they are clinical. Four years ago, he announced in a memo to his employees that he had undergone...

Power. The Vladimir Putin story.(75 PROFILE)
October 1, 2008... VLADIMIR V. PUTIN stood on the landing of a staircase outside the Grand Kremlin Palace. Ceremonial troops paraded before him. Behind him was the presidency, which he had left a few minutes before. It was May 7, 2008, a milestone in a season...

What the 21st century will taste like: a quick preview (and a delicious example).(ARGUMENT NO. 1: A Case for What Comes Next)
October 1, 2008... RECENTLY I WAS CHATTING with one of my purveyors about meat, prices, and the food chain. Michael raises Tamworth pigs in upstate New York and rocks his John Deere cap without a trace of irony. He's an honest, upright citizen, a real person, not...

The unspeakable Odyssey of the motionless boy.(Erik Ramsey)
October 1, 2008... How much of our humanity are we prepared to cede to machines? This is a dilemma of the future, but it's not much of a concern for Erik Ramsey. Erik can't move. He can't blink his eyes. And he hasn't said a word since 1999. But now, thanks to an...

The Indian diaspora: the worldwide rise of Bollystan.(Essay)
October 1, 2008... IN CASE YOU'RE WONDERING who the beautiful new woman on CNN who knows so much about gastrointestinal viruses is, her name is Roshini Rajapaksa. It's difficult to pronounce but, like that of her ubiquitous colleague Sanjay Gupta, unmistakably of...

Bobby Jindal, all-American: being the youngest governor in the country, the first Indian-American governor in history, and the first nonwhite governor in Louisiana since reconstruction are the least of the things that make Piyush Jindal different.(75 PROFILE)
October 1, 2008... The thirty-seven-year-old Republican governor of Louisiana walked across the set of The Tonight Show with the bashful aplomb of a spelling-bee champion. The longish, spidery fingers of his right hand, often employed to tick off the points of a...

The secret history of Paul Thomas Anderson: how our most distinctive director got that way.(75 PROFILE)
October 1, 2008... DEEP IN THE HEART of the San Fernando Valley, in a little cinder-block office that used to be a motel room, Carole Stevens is surrounded by memorabilia from her former students. There's a publicity shot from Robin Thicke's last record, a...

Fun couple of the 21st century: for years, Samantha Power and Cass Sunstein were their own rolling intellectual earthquakes. Then they met.
October 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] IF THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION had paparazzi, a few of them would be camped outside this office right now. The office is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and inside are two Harvard professors. The first--a tall...

The Google diaspora: the next big idea to come out of Google may not come out of Google.
October 1, 2008... IT'S NOTHING. It's so marginal." Salman Ullah spits the words from his black Aeron in the corner office that serves as the headquarters of Merus Capital. Scan Dempsey, who cofounded Merus last November with Ullah and another man, Peter...

The end of the war on terror: Al Qaeda will lose--in its own way, on its own time. Then what?(ARGUMENT NO. 2: A Case for What Comes Next)(Essay)
October 1, 2008... THE UNBELIEVABLE LUCK that the terrorists enjoyed on the morning of September 11 would be enough to make anyone doubt the existence of a just God--unless, of course, that person was Osama bin Laden. * It wasn't just the terrorists' amazing...

Of time and the tower: the Freedom Tower will always be a symbolic nexus of the horrific past and what the future might become. The question is: what's taking so damn long, and what will it mean when we're all dead and gone?(Essay)
October 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, I was bickering with the wife over an article in the "Health" section of The New York Times about babies choking on food, going back and forth about grapes. Judah, our son, was...

A brief history of the twenty-first century.(Essay)
October 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] NOV. 4, 2008: John McCain takes the U. S. presidency with 277 electoral votes, winning Ohio and Florida by less than 1 percent of the vote. American policy on Iraq does not change. JULY 14, 2009: While the price...

The Esquire 10 for the 21st century.(STYLE)
October 1, 2008... No one knows precisely how men will dress in fifty years, but we will almost certainly be wearing some version of these classics that embody men's style at its best. Here, their designers describe how they are evolving and point to what's next....

The new American: young entrepreneurial Americans are doing something they have not done much before. They are leaving. And even more than our government, our military, or our movies, they are expanding American influence in the world. Even in a crazy place like Shanghai.(Essay)
October 1, 2008... TODAY, THE PROBLEM is lead. Barrett Comiskey sits on a couch in a factory behind a brick wall and a sign that reads SHANGHAI HONG HUI PLASTICS COMPANY. He's a thirty-two-year-old New Yorker with an open, friendly face and his shirtsleeves...

The Esquire Museum of Contemporary Art: we asked one of America's top museum directors to name some of the art and artists that will matter most in the coming decades, and to tell us why. He filled the next eight pages with his answer.(ARGUMENT NO. 3: A Case for What Comes Next)
October 1, 2008... NEW ART MAKES US RECONSIDER the art of the past. It reshapes our image of the past. And I think the history of twentieth-century art will continually be reconsidered in terms of film, video, photography, and technology. If you look at the...

75 years of Esquire corrections: before proceeding with the twenty-first century, we've decided to clear up some unfinished business.(For the Record)(Correction notice)
October 1, 2008... An article in the December 1983 Golden Anniversary Collector's Issue--"50 Who Made the Difference: A Celebration of Fifty American Originals"--imprecisely described Dr. Benjamin Spock. Further reporting revealed that Dr. Spock had no idea what...