Esquire Classic Podcast

Dec 22 2016 10.7k

Esquire Classic Podcast artwork

Hosted by acclaimed journalist David Brancaccio (Marketplace and PBS' NOW), this podcast dissects classic Esquire stories and reveals the cultural currents that make them as urgent and timely today as when they were first published. Guests include Esquire writers, along with noted authors, comedians, and actors who offer unique and personal perspective on some of the most lasting stories ever published. Presented by PRX and Esquire Magazine.

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Don’t Mess With Roy Cohn, by Ken Auletta

Dec 22 2016 26 mins

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 McCarthy during the communist witch-hunts of the fifties, and later as a pugnacious attorney for whom the only bad publicity was no publicity. With hooded eyes and a scar running along his

The Plane at the Bottom of the Ocean, by Bucky McMahon

Dec 13 2016 26 mins

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, writer Bucky McMahon boarded one of the vessels searching for Malaysia Air 370 in one of the most isolated and treacherous stretches of ocean on the planet. In telling the story of the sea

The Price of Being President, by Richard Ben Cramer

Dec 06 2016 23 mins

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 pointed out to C-SPAN shortly after the book came out, is that to become president a candidate must sacrifice the entire life that had prepared him or her for office in the first pla

The Old Man and the River, by Pete Dexter

Nov 28 2016 22 mins

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 that he’d told them for years. The resulting novella is a classic of economy and clarity. A few years later, Pete Dexter visited Maclean in Montana and profiled him for Esquire in �

The Days of Wine and Pig Hocks, by Jim Harrison

Nov 21 2016 24 mins

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—about eating, really— in a woolly, baroque style for Esquire’s “The Raw and the Cooked” column. He began one piece with this Hors d’oeuvre: “Distraught, I fled north with

Martin Luther King Jr Is Still on the Case! by Garry Wills

Nov 14 2016 30 mins

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 as King’s body was embalmed at the mortuary; later, Wills traveled twelve hours by bus with mourners to King’s funeral in Atlanta. Nearly fifty years after its publication, Wi

Love in the Time of Magic, by E. Jean Carroll

Nov 07 2016 29 mins

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 shockwaves through popular culture, as well as the more narrow subculture of millionaire athletes and the woman who pursue them. Magic Johnson was not only one of the most famous men in Ame

The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce, by Tom Wolfe

Oct 31 2016 25 mins

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 glass over the social and class currents that shape America, rewrote the laws of what it meant to be a journalist. Their resulting Esquire story from 1983, “The Tinkerings of Robert

The House That Thurman Munson Built, by Michael Paterniti

Oct 24 2016 26 mins

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 Michael Paterniti, consistently one of the most inventive and entertaining magazine writers going—Munson, the gruff All-Star catcher, was the perfect childhood hero. In his 1999 p

The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Oct 17 2016 33 mins

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 and memoirist Nick Flynn discusses with host David Brancaccio Fitzgerald’s mindset at the time, the ridicule he faced from friends like Ernest Hemingway, and how his essays set of