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 profile, “The House That Thurman Munson Built,” Paterniti recalls the devastation he felt when Munson was killed in a plane crash in August of 1979—echoes of which were felt around the game when Jose Fernandez died in a boating accident last month. Paterniti joins host David Brancaccio to discuss Munson’s relationship with an unforgiving, brutal father, a tender reversal with his own children, his combative grit on the field, and why he was adored by teammates and fans alike.

In 1953, a twenty-seven-year old factory worker named Henry Molaison, cursed with severe epilepsy, underwent a radical new version of the lobotomy that targeted the most unexplored structures of the brain. The operation was performed by Dr. William Scoville whose brilliance as a surgeon was only tempered by an adventurousness that bordered on recklessness. It did not cure Molaison’s seizures but left him profoundly amnesiac. This tragic, if revelatory, accident opened the door to our understanding of how memory works and Molaison—better known as Patient H.M—was studied for over sixty years, becoming the most important research subject the field of neurology has ever seen. In 2003, Esquire contributor Luke Dittrich—Scoville’s grandson—set out to learn more about this seminal case in his feature, “The Brain that Changed Everything.” He joins host David Brancaccio to discuss the story and how it led to his seven-year journey to write a full-length book, Patient H.M.—published this summer—a fascinating journey about the history of neuroscience, his grandfather’s methods, and buried family secrets.

It’s hard to think of a profession more maligned than the paparazzi, but in 1998 Esquire writer at large John H. Richardson decided to find out for himself what it feels like to hunt celebrities for money in “I, Stalkerazzi.” Two years later, he learned what it was like to be the hunted when he profiled a still-rising and very vulnerable Angelina Jolie for “Angelina Jolie and the Torture of Fame.” Richardson joins the Esquire Classic Podcast to discuss our cultural infatuation with celebrity and the humanity that can be found on both sides of the camera lens.

Rudolf Nureyev was one of the most dynamic performers of the twentieth century. “He was Mick Jagger before Mick Jagger,” remembers Elizabeth Kaye, who specialized in writing in-depth profiles of men in power for Esquire in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. Kaye spent a full year with the famously volatile dancer, who unbeknownst to the public was dying of AIDS. She joins host David Brancacchio to discuss the defiance he still showed, even at the end of a glorious career, and the sadness she found behind unceasing charm and bravado.

When journalist Philip Caputo set out to profile William Styron in 1985, it was something of a dream assignment: Styron, then at work on the novel The Way of the Warrior, was one of the towering figures in American letters. The two men’s shared experience as Marines—Styron himself praised Caputo’s 1977 Vietnam memoir, A Rumor of War—formed a connection far stronger than their common bond as writers. But when Styron fell into a clinical depression during the reporting of the story, the nature of Caputo’s profile changed radically. Styron never completed the novel, although his 1990 meditation on depression, Darkness Visible, remains one of the most lucid and illuminating accounts of the illness. Caputo joins host David Brancaccio to discuss Styron’s greatness as a writer and how his struggle against depression—and his ability to articulate it in print—stands, in some regards, as his ultimate literary achievement.

In 1992, writer Susan Orlean was sick of celebrity profiles. Instead, she wanted to do something bigger and much harder: She wanted to profile the inner life of an average American boy. After convincing her editor, Orlean spent more than a week going to fifth grade and hanging out with Colin Duffy, a ten-year-old from Glen Ridge, New Jersey. The resulting article—“The American Man at Age Ten”—stands as one of the most surprising and engaging portraits of what it’s like to be a boy in America. Orlean joins host David Brancaccio to discuss how the story came about, what it was like to shadow Colin, and how the piece continues to reverberate almost twenty-five years after it was first published.

Martha Sherrill’s father, Peter, rakish and handsome, was an irrepressible charmer and natural raconteur; when he died, she was flooded with calls from his ex-girlfriends who wanted to pay their respects and share their stories about this man who adored women. This week Sherrill joins host David Brancaccio to discuss her intimate 1999 Esquire essay, “My Father the Bachelor,” one of the most unusual and endearing tributes to fatherhood ever published.

“A Few Words About Breasts,” from May 1972, is Nora Ephron’s comic lament about how her late onset of puberty and earliest sexual experiences gave her a lifelong obsession with her breasts. Jessi Klein, head writer for “Inside Amy Schumer,” joins David Brancaccio to discuss Ephron’s famous Esquire story and its lasting influence on the way women perceive and voice themselves in writing and comedy.

Published in 1991, Richard Ben Cramer’s book What It Takes remains the richest and most detailed account of the personal price of running for president. The irony, as Cramer pointed out to C-SPANN when the book was first published, is that to become president a candidate must sacrifice the entire life that prepared him or her for office in the first place. Longtime Esquire political correspondent Charles P. Pierce joins host David Brancaccio to discuss how Cramer’s book—which was excerpted in three parts in Esquire in the 1990s—continues to shape how we understand presidential politics today and the psyches of those with the hubris to seek the highest office.

In Raymond Carver’s masterful short stories, what goes unspoken between characters—what can’t or won’t be articulated—carries more weight than what they say. In the 1984 essay “My Father’s Life,” Carver turns his unforgiving eye on his own life, and with heartbreaking frankness he examines the seemingly unbridgeable gap between him and his own father. The novelist Jay McInerney, who studied under Carver at Syracuse in the early eighties, joins host David Brancaccio to talk about his mentor’s approach to writing and teaching, and how there were things left unsaid between Carver and his father that would haunt both men all their lives.