Esquire Classic Podcast
1) Don’t Mess With Roy Cohn, by Ken Auletta
If president-elect Donald Trump learned anything from his mentor Roy Cohn, it was this: punch first and never apologize. Cohn was notorious for going on the attack—as counsel for Senator Joseph McCart...Show More
2) The Plane at the Bottom of the Ocean, by Bucky McMahon
The question is astonishingly simple: In the year 2015, with GPS and satellites and global surveillance everywhere all the time, how does a massive airplane simply go missing? To find the answer, writ...Show More
3) The Price of Being President, by Richard Ben Cramer
Published in 1992, Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes: The Way to the White House remains the richest and most unvarnished account of the personal price of running for president. The irony, as Cramer ...Show More
4) The Old Man and the River, by Pete Dexter
Norman Maclean published A River Runs Through It when he was seventy-three, and only after his children implored him to write down the stories about fly-fishing, brotherhood, and the wilds of Montana ...Show More
5) The Days of Wine and Pig Hocks, by Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison, the novelist and poet who died earlier this year at the age of 78, had a gargantuan, fearless appetite that would make both A.J. Liebling and Anthony Bourdain proud. He wrote about food—...Show More
6) Martin Luther King Jr Is Still on the Case! by Garry Wills
In 1968, just hours after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, the future Pulitzer Prize–winning author Garry Wills—then a young writer for Esquire—rushed to Memphis, Tennessee, where he watched a...Show More
7) Love in the Time of Magic, by E. Jean Carroll
On November 7, 1991, Magic Johnson held a press conference announcing that he had contracted the HIV virus, effectively ending his Hall of Fame career with the Los Angeles Lakers. The news sent shockw...Show More
8) The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce, by Tom Wolfe
It was a meeting of two American masters: Robert Noyce, who, in inventing the integrated computer chip and founding Intel, willed Silicon Valley into being, and Tom Wolfe, who, in holding a magnifying...Show More
9) The House That Thurman Munson Built, by Michael Paterniti
Reggie Jackson once called himself “the straw that stirs the drink” but there was no question that Thurman Munson was the pride of the Yankees—like Lou Gehrig before him and Derek Jeter after. For Mic...Show More
10) The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
In 1936, F. Scott Fitzgerald, then a struggling writer battling depression and alcoholism, published “The Crack-Up,” a radical series of essays in Esquire about his mental breakdown. Celebrated poet a...Show More