How To Deal With Fox News Parents

Does mom or dad suffer from early Fox News dementia? There's hope (for you).

View in Browser How to Love Your Parents Even If You Hate Their Politics Many people I know have parents who are suffering from Early Fox News Dementia, ranting about the perfidy of Anthony Fauci and the possibility of catching critical race theory from an open jar of mayonnaise. But at the same time, they want to give their children parental advice and guidance, though now through the prism of their separate bespoke realities. They want to remain parents, but only on their own racist and hurtful terms. My counsel to these children—stemming from what my closest friends and I experienced, all of us immigrants in our forties from different parts of the world—is to orphan yourself.   A few years after graduating from college, I decided to do just that. Not to become an orphan per se, because my mother and father remained thankfully alive, but to leave their vast, roiling emotional spheres of influence. I realized that they could not provide me with what parents are supposed to provide twenty-somethings, which is not necessarily a trust fund but rather a map of what early adulthood could look like based on their own experiences. My post-Soviet parents' map of adulthood ended at the Baltic Sea; none of their advice made any sense, but all of it was rendered with supreme parental self-confidence, because they were, after all, my parents.  Read the Full Story I Celebrated the 20th Anniversary of Sideways. It Did Not Go As Expected. Movies come and go, but every now and then a film—The Graduate, Do the Right Thing, Barbie—takes root in American culture. People remember scenes from it, they freely quote lines from its screenplay, they adopt the characters' characteristics. In an ever-expanding world of content, they find themselves returning to it again and again.   Sideways is one of those movies. The indie comedy came out in autumn of 2004. It quickly changed the trajectory of its four stars, its director and screenwriter Alexander Payne, and the entire economy of Santa Barbara's wine country. The story of Miles and Jack, two old friends on a wine-tasting bachelor vacation in the days before the latter's wedding, made around $110 million on a $16 million budget. It earned five Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Adapted Screenplay (which it won) and one for Best Picture (which it lost, to Million Dollar Baby). Sideways is a sweet film—and also a deeply sad one. It's a story of tender and tentative attempts at love in midlife, and also a story of untreated depression. It's a story of friendship between two guys, at least one of whom behaves like a sociopath. It's a look directly into the darkness of artistic failure, and at one point its protagonist is so desperate for a drink that he chugs out of a goddamn spit bucket. Read the Full Story Big Black Book: A Winter Style Guide For this fall's edition of Esquire's guide to lasting style and luxury, we're celebrating the art of escape. Or at least, getting out of town. Because one of the best things about the city is leaving it. The Brits recognized this early on, decamping from smoke-choked London for the countryside and trading their business suits for hearty tweeds. Americans adopted the look as part of their off-duty uniform. Then we lost our way. Old standbys gave way to stretch polyester and logo mania, a vibe that was rushing toward an expiration date. But classics are, as the saying goes, classics for a reason. Proper shoes gain even more character—and become even more comfortable—once you've worn and loved them for a while. Same goes for a herringbone jacket, a woolly sweater, or a leather bag.   These are the pieces that justify the investment because they feel as good as they look—and only get better when you put them through their paces. The items that, now that we're no longer bound by Edwardian social norms, look even better dashing across an avenue to catch a cab than they would tromping through a peat bog. No brown in town? Forget that. Pile it on and throw some tan and tweed—and maybe even a vintage hunting jacket—in the mix as well. Then get out of Dodge. Or don't. Either way, it works. Read the Full Story Inside the Improbable Rise of Say Nothing, One of the Year's Best Shows Every author dreams about getting a call from Hollywood. For Patrick Radden Keefe, a staff writer at The New Yorker in his late forties who investigates hidden histories, that call came almost twenty years ago. Now FX's stunning new series about the Irish Troubles, Say Nothing—which is based on Keefe's book—is one of the greatest TV shows of 2024.   Yet according to the creators of the show, it's a miracle that the series even came to life during our current streaming era of risk-averse television. "It's about two Catholic sisters in Belfast who join the IRA, and then you follow them on a thirty-year journey. That pitch doesn't exactly make a studio executive see dollar signs," says Josh Zetumer, Say Nothing's first-time showrunner. But executive producers Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson knew they had a thrilling story on their hands. Read the Full Story The Cult of Haruki Murakami On March 20, 1995, members of a religious cult released toxic gas in three Tokyo subways, killing thirteen people. Some months later, the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami happened to be reading the letters page of a banal Ladies' Home Journal–type magazine in which a reader described her husband's psychological inability to return to his job at the transit authority after surviving the terrorist attack. Murakami decided to interview survivors to examine the many traumatic effects of such a horrific event.   The resulting book, Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, is an oral history in the vein of Studs Terkel. In one of the few moments that come from Murakami and not the victims, he inadvertently summarizes one of the core themes of his fiction. Without the ego, he explains, we lose the "narrative" of our identities, which, for him, is vital for our ability to connect with others. Read the Full Story The Book of Denzel He has lived a big life. Tough streets, close calls, a wife of forty-one years, four kids, fifty movies, two Oscars, three Equalizers. For the first time—on the occasion of Gladiator II, and his approaching seventieth birthday—the man himself breaks it all down, in his own words, to the moments that mattered and the experiences that made him. He has lived a big life, but Denzel Washington ain't done yet. Read the Full Story Follow Us Unsubscribe | Privacy Notice | CA Notice at Collection Esquire is a publication of Hearst Magazines. ©2024 Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This email was sent by Hearst Magazines, 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019-3779