Esquire Classic Podcast

It’s hard to find 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, Stalkerazi.” Two years later, Richardson found out what it was like to be the hunted when he profiled a then still-rising and very vulnerable Angelina Jolie for “Angelina Jolie and the Torture of Fame." Richardson joins the Esquire Classic Podcast this week to discuss our cultural infatuation with celebrity and the humanity that lurks on both sides of the camera lens.

In March 2013, the man who shot and killed Osama bin Laden came forward to tell his story for the first time in “The Shooter,” by Phil Bronstein. It is a report of the celebrated mission by turns captivating, astonishing, and visceral, but also heart-breaking: The shooter decided to break his silence because, now a civilian, he feared for the safety of his family, was concerned about a life without a safety net, and he wanted to shine a light on a little-known and worrisome aspect of Special Forces service. Bronstein, the executive chair of the Center for Investigative Reporting, joins host David Brancaccio to discuss why the shooter decided to finally emerge and what he’s doing now.

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 search crew and the massive amounts of technology, money, and human capital being spent trying to find this airplane, McMahon tells a story of our time—of a world completely dependent on nets of redundant technology, yet completely lost and broken when those nets suddenly break. McMahon joins host David Brancaccio to discuss his October 2015 story, "The Plane at the Bottom of the Ocean."

Richard Ben Cramer’s masterful profile of Ted Williams from 1986 is often cited as one of the greatest magazine stories of all time. It’s about a sports idol who wanted fame but hated celebrity, who shouted louder than anyone but demanded privacy, who wanted to be the best at everything, always, and thus wanted to be immortal. Former Esquire editor David Hirshey joins host David Brancaccio to discuss the enigmatic and bigger-than-life Teddy Ballgame and the journalist who finally uncovered his essence.

We will all get old one day. Mike Sager’s astonishingly intimate portrait of Glenn Sandberg, age ninety-two, is about what it actually feels like to be close to the end. It’s a story about mortality and love and companionship and the things in life that are most important—and how those things we once held as so important fall away. Longtime Esquire writer at large Mike Sager joins host David Brancaccio to discuss how and why he wrote “Old,” which was published in 1998, and how the story continues to ripple and shape his own views on work, death, and what matters most.

What It Takes is the most unvarnished account ever written about the personal price of running for president.

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 Noyce,” remains one of the most revealing and entertaining portraits of early Silicon Valley and the personalities, imagination, and free wheeling gall that triggered and continue to power the computer revolution. Kara Swisher, who spent two decades covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal before cofounding the influential technology site Re/Code, joins host David Brancaccio to discuss what both Noyce and Wolfe wrought, and how the influence of each—in computers and nonfiction writing, respectively—remains as powerful and mesmerizing as ever.

In 1968, just hours after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, the legendary historian and 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, then later traveled twelve hours by bus with mourners to King’s funeral in Atlanta. Nearly fifty years later, Wills’s “Martin Luther King Jr Is Still on the Case!” remains one of the most revealing and lasting portraits of King and his turbulent era ever written. Writer and director John Ridley—who won an Oscar for his screenplay for 12 Years a Slave—joins host David Brancaccio to discuss why Wills’s wrenching portrait of King continues to resonate today, what has changed in America since it was written, and, most important, what still needs to change.

“Oh my God—we hit a little girl.” This was the single, shocking cover line of the October 1966 issue of Esquire. Inside was John Sack’s 33,000-word New Journalism masterpiece, M, in which he followed a single company of American infantrymen from Fort Dix, New Jersey, to the war in South Vietnam. With that story—the longest to ever appear in Esquire—Sack single-handedly invented what it meant to be an embedded reporter and reset the bar for what journalism could be: trenchant, moving, and at times funny and even rollicking, yet dead set on revealing in personal terms the most troubling and urgent issues of our time. Esquire executive editor Mark Warren, who was Sack’s last editor at the magazine, joins host David Brancaccio to discuss Sack’s legacy and why he remains the least known but arguably most important New Journalist of his generation.

Back in 1986, Joe Nocera spent a week shadowing Steve Jobs, who was then leading his start-up, NeXT, and attempting to build a new kind of computer. What resulted is one of the most intimate and honest appraisals of the computer visionary ever written. The Steve Jobs we recognize now—obsessed by design and unwilling to bend to anyone or anything—is in Nocera’s profile, but so is a more human Jobs, one rarely seen after he returned to lead Apple a year later. Nocera, a longtime New York Times reporter and op-ed writer, joins host David Brancaccio to discuss Jobs's legacy, and how the man he wrote about twenty years ago is far different from the one portrayed today.