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Skip to main content Esquire Classic Issues Topics Contributors Login Subscribe Weekly Newsletter -- Latest Issue Latest Issue April 2020 Preview FEATURES The Escape By MIKE SAGER FEATURES THE SPECTACLE FACTORY By ERIC LLIVAN FEATURES MY OVERSUBSCRIBED LIFE By KELLY STOUT View Issue Now The Big Bite Our weekly selection of stories from our archives that reflect what’s going on now. Features September 1995 The Black Badge of Courage In full gear, the soldiers waded into a dark swamp, the water high and rising, the night approaching. They were all dying to be U.S. Army Rangers, but by the next day, some of them would just be dead By Philip Caputo PROFILES January 1991 Sinéad O'Connor, Uncensored After a childhood spent dodging blows, how can she be silenced by the likes of Frank Sinatra? By MARCELLE CLEMENTS ARTICLE June 1998 What Is a Brother? Bringer of chaos, protector, cute little bugger. A hedge against slipping off the world. By JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN The Classic Themes: New Stories October 2015 A Zuckerberg Kind of Love The famous and the powerful have new, more effective means of walling themselves off from us. Where, say, Sinatra had goons, today’s titans hide behind transparency and full disclosure. By TOM JUNOD PROFILES February 1966 Mr. Bad News Death, as it must to all men, comes to Alden Whitman every day. It's a living By Gay Talese Esky Essential FEATURES August 1970 What is the Difference Between This Photograph and a Real Frozen TV Dinner? A real frozen TV dinner comes with green peas in the upper-right-hand corner. Everybody knows that By M.F.K. Fisher Summer Fiction Features April 1998 Marry the One Who Gets There First Outtakes from the Sheidegger-Krupnik wedding album By Heidi Julavits FICTION March 2001 Memento Mori 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. By JONATHAN NOLAN FICTION February 2000 The Wish This is his time. His time is up. By JOANNA SCOTT SUMMER FICTION July 1996 Under the Pitons If he survived, he would never again smoke hash, do coke, drink rum, sail, or go where there were too many palm trees By ROBERT STONE SUMMER FICTION July 1993 Comet Love and debts By JAMES SALTER The Things They Carried FICTION October 1987 How to Tell a True War Story The really true ones are hard to believe and impossible to forget By TIM O’BRIEN Fiction March 1981 The Ghost Soldiers A bullet could transform you. You'd wake up solitary and restless, charge of the at home in darkness, in night By TIM O’BRIEN SUMMER READING August 1986 The Things They Carried Jimmy Cross’s platoon shouldered M-16s against the Cong, but the weight of fear and memory proved almost unbearable By TIM O'BRIEN Hollywood, Babylon HOLLYWOOD January 1984 Brian De Palma's Death Wish PARAMOUNT IS BURNING AND BRIAN DE PALMA IS CALLING FOR BLOOD. "THE NEW YORK STREET SET’S ON FIRE,” SOMEONE SAYS. “STAR TREK’S IN FLAMES.” DE PALMA NODS, UNCONCERNED. HE’S AT UNIVERSAL STUDIOS DIRECTING SCARFACE, AND THERE ARE IMMEDIATE WORRIES HERE: AN ACTOR HANGING FROM a rope looks, somehow, wrong. By Lynn Hirschberg December 1973 The Meditations of Jane Russell God must love her, because He made so much of her By Dotson Rader No Justice, No Peace ESSAY September 1992 Dead Black Men and Other Fallout from the American Dream After the looting and the killing and the hurting of Los Angeles, it may at long last have come down to a simple choice: equality or anarchy By John Edgar Wideman AMERICANS OF THE YEAR December 2012 Trayvon Before he became another flash point in America’s painful and never-ending racial drama, he was a seventeen-year-old boy. By JOHN H. RICHARDSON Art and Politics January 1991 The Sharpton Strategy He's got Martin Luther King's dream, James Brown's hairdo, and a plan to make white people nervous By MIKE SAGER FEATURES April 1999 Driving While Black You may have noticed that many of the motorists pulled over on the side of the highway are black or Hispanic. You may have attributed this to some kind of unspoken law-enforcement racism. You may be surprised to learn that it's the result of a federal program. Called Operation Pipeline. Your tax dollars at work. By Gary Webb Features December 1997 The Last Cop Story The top city-side columnist in New York was tired of the dirty-cop beat, until the dirtiest story he’d ever heard hit him hard in his own gut By Mike McAlary Put the Needle to the Groove PROFILES July 1981 Listen to Rosanne Cash! The firstborn of the House of Cash is some piece of work. She’s got flashy black eyes and a smile that could melt the paint off a signpost. Her shaggy hair is sometimes the color of grape Popsicles, and her feet are the size of ham hocks. But this lady also has rock in her socks and a voice that’s pure, deep-fried country. By Carol Caldwell FEATURES July 1992 The Second Act of Annie Lennox WITH EURYTHMICS FAR BEHIND HER, THE SISTERS DOIN’ IT FOR HERSELF By DAVID GATES PROFILES April 1980 Dee Dee Ramone Didn't Wanna Be a Pinhead No More So the New York rocker who practically invented punk—with three chords, sheer energy, and a rotten attitude—kicked heroin, bought a dinette set, and married Vera, who was, you know...normal By Frank Rose PROFILES March 1961 Ornette Coleman: Biggest Noise in Jazz He's not in a cutting contest By NAT HENTOFF ARTICLE December 1939 Blues Are the Negroes’ Lament Slaves found release singing songs of sorrow, mixed with humor, and all of the songs had a spiritual power By E. SIMMS CAMPBELL The Literary Life Articles November 1977 Can a Complete S.O.B. Be a Good Writer? Whose words these are I think I know. His character is rotten, though... By Malcolm Cowley PROFILES April 1989 The Light in August Playwright August Wilson wanted to be Dylan Thomas—but he couldn’t shake the blues By Chip Brown FEATURES Summer 2019 THE SECRET ORAL HISTORY Bennington College, Vermont. Fall of 1982. A new freshman class. Among its heirs and heiresses, artists and rebels, druggies and poseurs: the future Gen X literary stars Donna Tartt, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jonathan Lethem. What happened over the next four years—and beyond—would spark not just gossip and myth (and possible Ph.D. theses) but also some of the authors’ greatest novels. Return to a hothouse campus like no other . . . By Lili Anolik Enter a Search 3 Free Articles Left Unlock every article Esquire ever published Subscribe Login Every Article. Every Page. Every issue of Esquire ever published. 1933 to today. 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