YOUR COMPLETE

SPECIAL REPORT
AN EXTINCT
POSSIBILITY
The truth
behind the
shocking
drop in sperm
counts

BADASS,
FEMINIST HERO,
SUPER DAD ANTONIO BROWN
JOHN C. REILLY
GUCCI MANE
TOM FORD
PETE DAVIDSON
JADEN SMITH
calvinklein.com/205
 NEW MUSEUM ® CLASSIC
PERFECTION UPDATED.
AN ICON OF MODERN DESIGN.
MOVADO.COM
SAKS FIFTH AVENUE

DON’T LET

DE F I NE YO U
 Visit & shop Montblanc.com

AVAILABLE AT MACY’S & MACYS.COM

 ON THE COVER
Photograph by Alasdair
McLellan. Styled by
Jon Tietz. Jacket,
$5,400, by Louis Vuitton.
Sweater, $1,350, by
Saint Laurent. Ring,
his own. Grooming by
Larry King at Streeters.
Set design by Roxy
Walton. Produced by Ragi
Dholakia Productions.

The dog days of summer are

here. Embrace the heat! Or
stay cool, like young style icon
JADEN SMITH (P.51) . Or SNL’s
super-funny and (now) super-
famous PETE DAVIDSON (P.79) .
Style editor Mark Anthony
Green has advice on how to find
a CHAIN STORE (P.62) for fashion
emergencies. A non-stylish
staffer fell for a pair of CHELSEA
BOOTS (P.58) —are they his gateway
drug to fashion? The Elder
Statesman founder GREG CHAIT
(P.68) demonstrates how to live
big in a small home. Seven
chefs recommend their favorite Behold, a rare sight:
CONDIMENTS (P.64) . Marian Antonio Brown
captured outside the
Bull convenes a chefs’ table to end zone.
figure out HOW TO FIX TOXIC
Blazer, $1,140,
KITCHEN CULTURE (P.86) . And and pants, $600,
Christopher Hooks reports that by Paul Smith.
BETO O’ROURKE’S (P.98) Senate Turtleneck, $360,
by AMI Alexandre
showdown with TED CRUZ might Mattiussi.
be a crystal ball for 2020. Watch, his own.

3 8 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 P H O T O G R A P H B Y S T E V E N P A N
C A L E B E L I J A H WEARS RAF S IM ONS
S K Y L A R P E N N WEARS GUCCI
 Clay Skipper catches up with
ANTONIO BROWN (P.124) , who’s
having a blast being the NFL’s
best wide receiver. Alex
Pappademas manages to find
GUCCI MANE (P.150) in a rare
moment of peace. TOM FORD
(P.154) talks underwear with
Mark Anthony Green. Brett
Martin eats his way through
HOUSTON (P.132) , the South’s new
culinary mecca. Zach Baron
visits CARY FUKUNAGA (P.140) in
upstate New York. Tom Lamont
dissects a deadly attack on an
EX–RUSSIAN SPY (P.118) . JOHN C.
REILLY (P.158) clowns around with
Sam Schube. Are we cruising
for SPERM COUNT ZERO (P.146) ?
Daniel Noah Halpern investigates.
And Lauren Larson breaks
bread with CHRIS HEMSWORTH
(P.108) , sensible hunk.

Director Cary Fukunaga steps

out from behind the camera.
Coat (price upon request)
by Dior Men. Sweater,
$205, by Officine Générale.
T-shirt, $40 (for pack
of three), by Calvin Klein
Underwear. Pants, $550,
by Canali.

4 2 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 P H O T O G R A P H B Y T H O M A S W H I T E S I D E
 How We Feel About…
HEALING CRYSTALS Crystal-curious Skeptical Hyped

G Q
H Q Fall draws nigh,

quite left summer’s

chill styles behind.

→ ↓ ←
The Latest News from the Monthly, the Daily,
and the All-the-Time-ly World of GQ NOAH JOHNSON JAMES
SENIOR EDITOR
EDITOR “The black rope sole
PRODUCER
and suede upper
are an unexpected
combination for a on an island
typically summery
shoe. No matter
what you’re doing,
with these on your
feet, it’s beach time.”

PHOTOGRAPHS, FROM TOP: KRISTA SCHLUE TER (3); @SAINTHOA X . ILLUSTRATIONS, FROM LEF T: ALEX ANDRA COMPAIN-TIS SIER; JUSTIN ME T Z .
Meet…

MARK AN T HON Y
GREEN
As GQ’s resident style guru, Green is used to E A R D AT
fielding readers’ sartorial queries (page 62). ERH GQ
We had a few questions of our own. OV JULY 24, 2018
No context, no mercy
How many pairs of shoes do you have
in your office at this time? Let’s not talk
quantity. Let’s talk quality. I have some gems
in my o∞ce right now. “EVERYONE HAVE
How many rings is too many rings? Eleven.
Because a toe ring would be overkill.
A BEVERAGE READY
Describe an item you own that you’re
too scared to wear. A Gucci G-string
AT ALL TIMES.”
that Tom Ford designed. I don’t have any Zach Baron’s July essay about
sneakers to go with it. CASEY JABBOUR being “washed”—letting your
digital production associate (via Slack) ambition drain away in favor of
When you meet someone new, what is “getting into red wine”—spoke
your biggest style red flag? A maga hat. to people in various stages
Other than that: Come as you are! of washedness.
What’s the best outfit you wore in middle
school? I didn’t miss in middle school. Sweet Memes “I wish I’d known earlier that life
could have periods of dormancy
Probably a green Ralph Lauren blazer. Mere hours after we and activity, and that a dormant
What’s the longest you’ve waited in line released our August- stretch doesn’t mean the
for a purchase? I slept outside for a pair of issue cover, artist end.”—REBECCA ONION, SL ATE
Heineken Nike SB Dunks. The good old days! Saint Hoax shared a
“I love to wake up early, take
Describe your look at age 75. Black Gianni glorious mash-up,
walks, and tend a garden behind
Agnelli mixed with James Baldwin. replacing Travis Scott my house. I’m so washed and I
and Kylie Jenner didn’t even know it.”—SHANNON
What is the smallest thing that you’ve
spent the most money on? Probably that with…well, this. M C FARL AND, T WIT TER

Gucci G-string.
“I love yoga now. When I was
younger, I thought yoga was the
biggest waste of time. But the
REJECTED HEADLINES NO, NOT CHRIS PRATT
—MARIAN BULL
STOP—HAMMER TIME!
—C.G.
THIRSTY THORSDAY
—ASHLEE BOBB
older I get, and the sorer my
FOR OUR CHRIS muscles get, I’ve come around.”
—RYAN, CALLER ON THE ‘BRIAN
HEMSWORTH COVER STORY
WE’RE NOT HEMS-WORTHY! BIG NORDIC ENERGY CHRIS ME, YOU FOOL LEHRER SHOW’ SEGMENT
(See page 108.) —CHRIS GAYOMALI —TOM PHILIP —SAM SCHUBE “ ‘ WASHED’ AND HAPPY”

4 4 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
 LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
Up With
the System!
A STRANGE THOUGHT’S been brewing in the
political nether parts of my brain lately. Nothing
conspiratorial. Just the opposite. In the Trump
era of naked power grabs, anti-democratic impulses,
full-scale bullying, and open corruption, when even
“collusion is not a crime,” I find myself longing for
the System. It slipped away, and I wish it would come
back. Reborn and improved, for sure. But back.
¶ When I grew up, the last of the original hippies in
my town—crispy guys who hung out in the parks
or at the black bridge behind my school; guys who’d
seen the Grateful Dead back in ’72 (and ’73 and ’74);
people we no longer called hippies, actually, but
“burnouts”—they would smoke a lot of dope and then
mansplain, or I guess hippie-splain, to us kids what
was wrong with society, which always boiled down
somehow to the System. The System had it out for
us, and you could never beat the System. ¶ I believed
them because they were obviously incredibly wise.
They had reached a stage of nirvana that allowed them
to hang out all day at the bridge and smoke my weed.
4 6 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
Anyway, the System, man!
It’s a drag. The System was the
original Enemy of the People
before the press won that
pageant. It was the Crusher of
Dreams, the Foiler of Plans, the
Matrix-like force field that held
us all back from realizing our
ambitions, such as smoking a shit
ton of Thai stick this afternoon.
Over the years, the System
became the bogeyman for
a whole generation of anti-
establishment thinkers, hepcats,
and iconoclasts. (“The System,”
railed Noam Chomsky, led to
wide-scale submission and
indoctrination and was propped
up by the media.) Belief in the
pernicious intent of the System
grew systematically, until its
existence, ironically, became part
of establishment thinking.
Donald Trump played right
into that. During the past election
he famously declared, “This is
a rigged System!” (Turns out, not
quite true: Other forces were
rigged against the System.)
What remained unsaid,
throughout the years, was what
exactly the System was, or is.
Is the System the “swamp” that
Trump promised to drain?
Only to fill it with the biggest
swamp creatures since The
Shape of Water?
How about Trump’s other
favorite term, the Deep State?
What is the Deep State but a
hysterical version of the System?
It sounds a whole lot like
Chomsky. To Trump, the Deep
State is conspiring against him,
a sort of hidden state within
a state trying to undo all his best
and purest intentions.
But maybe the opposite
is true. Maybe the thing that’s
missing now is the actual
System. What if we spent years
vilifying an abstraction, gave
a name to it precisely because
we couldn’t identify its murky
outline, and it turned out
to be not the problem but the
only solution?
What if the System were a
mostly benign force that, when
it’s working well, supports and
defends the rule of law against
tyrants like Trump? What if the
things that make it run were
the banal and painfully practical
tenets of a legitimate
democracy—good governance,
accountability, fighting
corruption—you know, boring
shit like that? And what if
these were now the things
we needed most, and the only
forces that could save us?
Wait, hold on. Seeing the
System as the potential
hero? That’s a little weird.
Disorienting, even. It’s like
that moment when you realize
that the supervillains in
the comic book you’re reading
are actually superheroes.
There’s an epiphanic flash,
and then the entire narrative
shifts. What I’m saying is,
I think we can go with that.
What I’m saying is, the System
isn’t a dirty word anymore.
We need more, not less, of it.
And the clearest and freshest
proof is this: It is in the absence
of a System that conspiracy and
collusion thrive. The swamp?
That’s what happens when Scott
Pruitt comes to town.
And that’s what Trump’s
trying to do, to choke the System
right out of the state. To make
power a loyalty oath. To make
justice and the rule of law not
systematic but capricious, subject
to his idiosyncratic whims.
It’s why he makes such a big,
gratuitous deal out of pardoning
people. L’état, he’d be saying if
he spoke French, c’est moi!
I’m rooting hard for the
System now. If the System is
the civics class we all stopped
attending; if it’s the constitutional
right of checks and balances—
if it’s Congress finally finding
the balls to stand up to Trump’s
perverse power plays—I’m on
Team System. If Robert Mueller
is the System, sweet Jesus,
I am so into the System. Because
Robert Mueller, ex–FBI chief,
is straight out of that comic book.
He’s a Clark Kent superhero.
He’s the Systematizer!
I know it’s not exactly
a rousing folk song: “Give the
System a Chance.” But I’ll
sing it. And I say, let’s turn
the old hippie phrase around:
ERIC RAY DAVIDSON
Up with the System!
JIM NELSON
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
GQ
Style

The
Fall
2018
Issue
STARRING

Tyler
The
Creator

SUBSCRIBE
AT
GQSTYLE.COM

On
Newsstands
Now
 MAKE AN
ENTRANCE
EVEN WHEN
LEAVING.

PREMIUM FOOTWEAR & PROVISIONS FOR THE MODERN GENTLEMAN.

MORALCODE.COM
 The 20-year-old
wunderkind has a new
collection with G-Star
and a whole bunch of
BARBER: KAVION GRIFFITH. GROOMING: SUSSY CAMPOS USING EPICUREN.

thoughts on why
Batman is a style icon
By SAM SCHUBE

P H O T O G R A P H S B Y J U L I A N B E R M A N
S T Y L E D B Y M A T T H E W H E N S O N S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 5 1
 JADEN S M I T H H A S three style icons.
T h e S t y le There’s Tyler, the Creator, who taught
him about Supreme. There’s Batman,
F i x S t ar
whose suit Jaden wore to Kim and
Kanye’s wedding because, he explained
at the time, “I felt as though I needed to
protect everyone there and needed
to have the proper gear to do so.” And then
there’s Poseidon: “He always comes with
the next-level vibes.”
Maybe I’ve misheard him. Poseidon?
Like, the Greek god of the sea?
“Yeah,” he says. He’s smirking.
How does he dress?
“Really good,” Jaden says. “A lot of
drapes, you know what I’m saying?
Those are really next.”
Jaden soon makes it clear that he
means sculptures of Poseidon, wrapped
in marble robes, not the actual deity. And
you know what? On this count, Jaden
Smith, 20-year-old actor, musician, and
fashion plate, is not wrong. I do some
Googling, and I learn that Poseidon style
is really next.
There’s a connection here: Jaden, who
is an ambassador for Louis Vuitton and
a fan of its womenswear, has done more
than most humans to encourage guys
to wear skirts, including wearing one
to prom. But Poseidon did it first, and
Jaden has done his homework.

THE FUTURE IS FLUID

Jaden doesn’t think twice about
wearing women’s Vuitton: “There’s
no concern about that, ever.”

Sweatshirt (price upon

request) by Louis Vuitton.
Jeans, $360, by Jaden Smith
+ G-Star RAW Forces of
Nature. Necklace, his own.

PREVIOUS PAGE
Coat, $1,250, by Comme
des Garçons Homme Plus.
Hoodie, $60, by MSFTS.
Jeans, $360, and T-shirt,
$120, by Jaden Smith +
G-Star RAW Forces of Nature.

5 2 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
 T h e
F i x

S t y le
S t ar

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

Jeans with history: Jaden made his
own pants and showed them to
Pharrell, who sent him to G-Star.
Vest (price upon request)
by Louis Vuitton.
T-shirt, $35, by MSFTS.
Jeans, $360, by Jaden
Smith + G-Star RAW Forces
of Nature. Sneakers,
$1,090, by Louis Vuitton.
Jewelry, his own.

This quality—and ability to say some-
thing bananas and then to smile, teas-
ingly, as you realize that it was, in fact,
bizarrely, uncomfortably sage and true—
might help explain how, shy of drinking
age, Jaden has become a style icon.
Now he’s channeling his godly
influence with Forces of Nature, a collabo-
ration with G-Star. It’s all nature-themed,
including jeans designed to replicate the
patch-heavy denim Jaden cuts and sews
in his room at home in Calabasas. It fits
nicely in his sustainable-goods portfolio
next to JUST, his paper-water-bottle com-
pany. “Animals are the most important
thing,” he says. “And what G-Star is doing
with sustainable denim as well. It’s just all
bringing back nature and animals. Trying
to make people aware of, like, Go outside.”
Which brings us back to Batman. “He’s
just the shit,” Jaden says. “Everything
about that suit: the cape, the utilities, the
tactical equipment. It’s everything you
ever want. I just want be a superhero and
save lives and jump o≠ of buildings and
hide in the shadows.”
You’re a young, famous dude, I say. It’s
hard to hide in the shadows.
Jaden looks at me like I’m 5.
“Hence the Batman suit.”
sam schube is gq’s deputy style editor.

5 4 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
C r e a t i n g n ew h e i g h t s
The new Montblanc 1858 Geosphere.
Spirit of Mountain Exploration.

montblanc.com/1858
 (SOME) REST
FOR THE WEARY
T h e Even 20-year-old multi-hyphenate
F i x superheroes get tired sometimes.
Jacket, $410, by Jaden
Smith + G-Star RAW Forces
of Nature. T-shirt, $35,
by MSFTS. Jeans (price
S t y le
upon request) by Louis
S t ar Vuitton. Belt, stylist’s
own. Necklace, his own.

5 6 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
 EVENTS || PROMOTIONS || EXCLUSIVES

GENTLEMEN’S QUARTERLY || EST. 1957

Photo credit: Elizabeth Dooley

THE GENT—SOHO, NYC

GQ’s invitation-only penthouse serves as an exclusive hangout in the heart of trendy SoHo, surrounded by fashionable boutiques, art galleries,
and top restaurants. The luxurious apartment spans three floors and features architectural details such as exposed brick, slanted walls, skylights,
and glass staircases. A combination of two pre-war buildings, the curved window frames, high ceilings, and two private outdoor spaces make
The Gent the perfect combination of eclectic and cool. For more information, visit solyhalabi1.wixsite.com/springph.
@GQTHEGENT

@GQREPORT
 T h e S t y le
Where
F i x Tun e - up Do I Begin?
One Man’s
Staff writer
Clay Skipper’s
step-by-step makeover
Modest Quest
to Finally
Get Stylısh
CHAPTER 1:
The Chelsea Boot

PROP ST YLIST: LEIGH GILL. ILLUSTRATIONS: SIMON ABRANOWICZ.

The boot that

launched a
thousand fits.
New Republic
$99

5 8 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 P H O T O G R A P H S B Y M A T T M A R T I N

T h e S t y le
F i x Tun e - up
C L O T H E S H A V E N E V E R really been my
thing. I wore athletic shorts for basi-
cally my entire childhood, including in
pile-driving Connecticut snow, waiting
for the bus to take me to middle school.
So when I started at GQ , I quickly
learned that my closet was not up to
the task. No one here dressed alike, but
everyone dressed with purpose. The only
intention behind my outfits was “Don’t
be naked.” My boss gave it six months
before I figured things out. It happens to
everyone who comes to GQ, he said.
It has been three-plus years and I’m
still waiting. That’s not to say I haven’t
tried—a pair of A.P.C. jeans here, 18 pairs
of Stan Smiths there. But I never quite
turned “owning clothes” into “having
style.” I wasn’t trying to go crazy with
oversize Visvim ponchos or ugly-cool
Balenciaga sneakers. I just wanted to
give o≠ David Beckham on a Weekend
Co≠ee Run, but I couldn’t manage to get
past Ben A±eck on a Vape Break.
And then I discovered Chelsea boots.
I don’t remember where, only that once I
saw them, I couldn’t stop seeing them—
on red carpets, in magazines (like this
one), on seemingly every other dude
on the sidewalk. In a fashion universe
where trends moved quickly and barri-
ers to entry were high (“Baggy pants?
With pleats?”), they seemed timeless,
and democratic: Kanye looked great in
Chelseas, but so too did all the hot dads
in my neighborhood. I didn’t yet have the
vocabulary to describe what I was look-
ing at, but I knew they were sleek and
sexy, not clunky like all the other boots
I’d owned. (Plus they slipped on!)
Best of all? These boots—from New
Republic—were only $99 and came
in lots of di≠erent styles. I passed on
brown leather (trying too hard) and
6 0 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
THE CHELSEA-BOOT SPECTRUM, FROM SKIPPER TO SWERVE
Maybe foremost among the 7,648 reasons we love Chelsea boots? They’re perfect for your
very first foray into fashion—but also for every last step on your own style journey. Whether
you want harness hardware or cherry red designer soles, there’s a boot for you
NONE MORE BLACK
1 2
Ralph Lauren, master of all things
the rainbow. But before you grab a pair in aspirational, figured out how to turn upper-
desert camo, try slightly out-there maroon. class velvet slippers into badass boots.
Common Projects $529 Ralph Lauren $795
A BARGAIN BIT STAND TALL
3 4
One side effect of the Chelsea-boot Buy for the details you can see—that extra-
explosion? You don’t have to fork over a sleek silhouette, the cap toe—and the one
grand for that coveted strap-and-ring piece. you can’t: CL’s famous red lacquer sole.
Aldo $150 Christian Louboutin $1,195
camouflage (too teen hypebeast-y) and Walking to dinner one night, I felt like I’d
grabbed a pair in tan (“sand”) suede with finally slid into the slipstream, one more
a cushy crepe sole. They were elegant but figure in the nightly parade of fashion-
non-threatening. I could imagine wear- able New Yorkers. Even at dinner, my
ing them without a chorus of my long- boots hidden under the table, I got an
time bros calling me Devil Wears Prada. added dose of confidence just from know-
Which makes sense: The man behind the ing they were there. Also: They feel like
boots—Mark McNairy, a veteran shoe walking on memory-foam pillows.
designer—explained that this whole style And then one night, because it was
thing doesn’t have to be so hard. raining and my boots were suede, I took a
“You can put on a pair of Levi’s and a cab four blocks home. Had that moment
white T-shirt with a cool pair of shoes, of reckoning my old boss promised finally,
and that’s all you need to make your belatedly, come to pass? Was I someone
statement,” he told me. And what did who cared about getting dressed?
these particular boots say? “You’re timely. Yes and no. I still don’t know much
But you’re not an idiot who spends his about fashion or What to Wear, but I
money on unnecessary things.” don’t roll my eyes at the idea that caring
I was okay with putting that message about clothes might actually breed confi-
into the world. But even though these dence. When I asked McNairy what he’d
boots weren’t that out-there, their styl- say to the guy—me—who was skeptical
ishness quiet and personal, I was still whether style really mattered, he drove
nervous. So I wore them to dinner with it home: “You can not give a shit about
a low-stakes audience to try something clothes and still look super-fucking cool.”
new on: my family. No one noticed, and I But how? I’ll spend the next few
realized I could wear them without feel- months here, trying to figure that out—
ing like a complete poseur. how you go about finding the denim
So I kept wearing them. I wore them jacket you want to own for life, or how to
with the few “fashiony” items I owned— wear a necklace, or what a damn “grail”
those A.P.C. jeans; a dressed-down gray is. At the end, my style might not scream
suit with a black T-shirt—hoping they David Beckham Jr., but I’m hoping it’ll
would elevate my style. People at work be somewhere beyond “grew up wearing
started to notice. It was a small addition athletic shorts in the snow.” Low bar, sure.
with an outsize consequence, like a spritz But it’s a start.
of cologne providing an extra layer of
presence as I moved through the world. clay skipper is a gq sta≠ writer.
 a great brand. We’re too focused on pieces and not
Style editor
T h e A sk Mark Anthony Green
collections. Just because you like a jacket you saw on
has your answer Ryan Gosling doesn’t mean the whole line is strong.
F i x M. A .G .
at @AskMag The way I grade a brand is by something I call the
pass-to-grab ratio. If out of every ten items I would only
grab two, then that brand isn’t really my thing—even
if two of those items are the “must-have,” celebrity-
craze items of the season. It’s like our grandparents
complaining when pop stars pad out their albums

You Just Haven’t with filler songs. (Looking at you, Beebz.) And the
brand that has the highest ratio (I’ll put it at eight out

Found Your of ten) is the French go-to Sandro. It doesn’t just make
hit singles. Each collection is a balanced four-disc rock

Chain Store opera. Almost everything there is marked by a Parisian

It can’t be too cheap, or too pricey, or too…
everywhere. I just found mine
When I shop, it feels like the only good fashion
pieces nowadays have a 3-D frog sewn on them or
cost a thousand bucks. Am I doomed, or is there
an easily findable store I’m overlooking—a place
where I’ll want everything on the rack?
I went to a mall in L.A. a few weeks back to find a
simple white button-down for a party, and it turned
into some kind of fashion odyssey. Everything had
pick stitching or bejeweled buttons or embroidered
amphibians. I felt like I was shopping at the Rainforest
Cafe gift shop. So I agree: In this maximalist, put-an-
animal-on-it sartorial era that we’re currently shopping
in, it’s damn near impossible to find a foundational
anything. Which warps our perception of what makes
touch—a baked-in nonchalance that makes you look
like you know what you’re doing.
It’s easy for a brand—lazy, even—to make a great
sweater that costs 800 euros. But Sandro’s pricing
is a fraction of that. And they often have sales. And
the clothes don’t fall apart when you accidentally
wash ’em on “sanitize.” Plus you can find Sandro in
Bloomingdale’s or at an outlet center just past the
Ruby Tuesday. Which really comes in handy when
you’re traveling. I often find myself buying clothes
when I bounce from city to city. I’ll need a dark pair
of pants for an unexpected dinner, a lighter jacket
because, despite my much wiser girlfriend’s pleas, I
won’t look at the weather forecast before I board the
flight. And I can always find something at Sandro that
I can wear long after my specific style emergency—
and this style era—passes. Isn’t that the whole point of
shopping? To find things that, no matter what Gosling
is wearing, you’ll always come back to? Clothes with
value. And with as few frogs as possible.

6 2 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 I L L U S T R A T I O N B Y K I M J U N G Y O U N
 T h e
C o ok ing
F i x 2

1. CRUSHED CHILE PEPPERS 4

These salty, fermented, oil-packed
chiles “add deep notes of spice
not only to pizza and pasta but
to shellfish, chicken, and pork,”
says chef Anita Lo, author of
the upcoming SOLO: A Modern
Cookbook for a Party of One.

2. TOMATO VINEGAR
Never buy pre-made dressing!
Mix up your own. “I’m in love with
Mutti tomato vinegar,” says Ashley 1
Christensen of Poole’s Diner in
Raleigh, North Carolina. “It’s a great 3
base for a vinaigrette—especially
for dressing fresh tomatoes.”

3. MOUTARDE DE BOURGOGNE
Opt for real-deal French mustard
for your next sandwich, says Jess
Koslow of L.A.’s Sqirl: “Once I read
that true Dijon mustard is made
with verjuice—the juice of pressed
unripe grapes—I picked up a jar
of this and quickly realized what
I had been missing.”

4. BLACK SOY SAUCE

“Anyone who grills should have
black soy sauce in their pantry,”
says Kris Yenbamroong of L.A.’s
Night + Market restaurants. “It’s dark
and sugary, which is good for getting
a nice char on a piece of meat.”

5. MOLE SAUCE
Make your own special sauce with
a jar of mole. “I usually fry it up
with some onions to make quick
sauces,” says Fabian von Hauske,
chef at New York City’s Contra
and Wildair, “or to marinate meats.” 6

6. CHILI CRISP
Use this Chinese staple as a
crispy, spicy jack-of-all-trades.
“Whether you’re stirring it into
a vegetable stir-fry or bleeding
it into your instant ramen,”
says Trigg Brown of Win Son in
Brooklyn, “it really transforms
the final product. It’s also money
on scrambled eggs.”
5 7

7. NONG’S KHAO MAN GAI

Chef Joshua McFadden of
Ava Gene’s in Portland, Oregon,
is obsessed with this super- PROP ST YLIST: RACHEL STICKLEY AT BERNSTEIN & ANDRIULLI
versatile sauce: “It’s got spice
and lots of garlic. I love it
in stir-fries or brushed onto
grilled chicken. It’s one of
those things that make you say,
Holy shit, this is good.”

Yes, There Is a Secret Sauce

We asked some pros to help us assemble the
ultimate condiment lineup for way less boring
meals at home B y M A R I A N B U L L

6 4 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 P H O T O G R A P H B Y M A T T M A R T I N
 PROMOTION

Hey
Handsome!
We know that
caring for your
hair, skin, and
beard isn’t
easy, but you
always look
and smell your
best. If you’re
a grooming
junkie, and want
to sample the
product first,
then sign up
for our Try It
Program. Just fill
out a grooming
profile to qualify.*

Sign up now > GQ.com/tryit

*Spaces and samples are limited. Products are targeted to skin and hair types and preferences where applicable.
 T h e
F i x

In terior s

This retrofitted
Malibu trailer isn’t
the only residence
of Greg Chait,
founder of The
Elder Statesman.
But it is the only
place he calls home
B y NOAH J OHNS ON

GROOMING: HEE SOO KWON USING DAVINES

The
↑
This custom
Coolest Way
reading nook
Voltrons into a
queen-size bed
for guests. to Live Small
6 8 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 P H O T O G R A P H S B Y D U S T I N A K S L A N D
toyota.com/camry
 “ TO DAY, W H AT W E E X P E C T

F R O M A H O U S E I S A LOT

M O R E , I N T E R M S O F L U X U R Y.

W I T H A N O P E N K I TC H E N ,

L I K E T H E O N E AT T H E

GARCIA HOUSE, EVERY

SINGLE THING BECOMES

T H AT M U C H M O R E I M P O R TA N T

A N D H A S TO B E T H AT M U C H

MORE BEAUTIFUL.”

The Designer’s Mind

DA R R E N B R O W N

Designer
 T h e
In terior s
F i x

“ T H E G O A L I S to be happy, right?” Greg million-dollar homes is an idyllic escape

Chait asks. He’s trying to convince me
that his surf shack in the elite Malibu
trailer park known as Paradise Cove is
all he needs. “Keep it simple,” he says.
“That’s what I want.”
The home is indeed simple: a one-
story rectangular abode with low-slung
ceilings, a wooden deck out back, an out-
door shower, and two small bedrooms.
But the Elder Statesman founder isn’t
the average American trailer-park resi-
dent, and this isn’t the average American
trailer park. Matthew McConaughey
has reportedly lived here, for start-
ers. And it’s been called the “hippest
neighborhood in Malibu.” But all that
aside, this little community of million-
dollar homes tucked between multi-
from the fuss of nearby Los Angeles.
“It’s supposed to be like this,” he says,
meaning: slightly tacky. He steps o≠ the
front porch into the kitchen that’s been
partially renovated to update the origi-
nal design, which dates from 1968, when
the place was built. He left the original
wood floors and chose not to raise the
ceilings, as many of his neighbors have
over the years.
So yeah, it’s humble and modestly
appointed, but it’s also draped in
insanely luxurious hand-dyed cashmere.
The stu≠ is everywhere. A blanket tossed
haphazardly across the bed. Psychedelic
couch cushions on the custom-built
wood furniture. A floor-length robe 2
hanging casually on a door.

1 3

1. The fridge
is period-
accurate but
was chosen
for the color.
2. Beach-life
knickknacks.
3. Chait keeps
his ’64 Impala
parked a
hundred yards
from his
bungalow.
4. Stacked
petrified-wood
slabs make for 4
an improvised
bedside table.

7 2 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
 ©2018 Timex Group USA, Inc. TIMEX, INDIGLO and SUPERNOVA are trademarks of Timex Group B.V. and its subsidiaries.

FAIRFIELD CHRONOGRAPH SUPERNOVA™

Cut from metal. Shaped by light. From the laser-cut INDIGLO® backlight dial to the
complementing perforated leather strap, the appeal of this watch is all in the details.

#TIMEX | timex.com
 T h e
In terior s
F i x

5. The wood Chait started The Elder Statesman in
paneling 2007 with a line of cashmere blankets.
and built-in
closet in the
Today he has a factory in Culver City and
bedroom are around 50 employees who design and
both original. knit everything from vibrantly colored
6. Paradise socks and ponchos and hoodies to trippy
Cove residents
get to the
stu≠ed animals and sculptural furniture.
beach and The outpost in West Hollywood acts as a
restaurant via retail shrine for cashmere lovers.
golf cart. When Chait bought the place, four
years ago, he wanted a safe haven for
himself and his 8-year-old daughter,
Dorothy. “Everybody around here just
THE HOME OF FLY KNITS looks out for each other,” he says. (One
At The Elder Statesman’s West Hollywood neighbor, an ophthalmologist, will
outpost, clients can buy high-grade cashmere off soon perform eye surgery on Chait so
the rack or dream up no-limits custom creations
for their closet or home.
he can see where he’s going when he
surfs—“I’m totally blind out there!”) It’s
not exactly an undiscovered beachside
utopia, but Dorothy can roam freely and
he can beat the crowd to the best surf
breaks in the morning. “Small spaces
create close relationships,” he says.
They also force a certain aesthetically
pleasing kind of minimalism. One lamp
or vase too many in a place this small
and you step onto the precarious path
toward hoarderdom.
“I’m super fucking happy,” Chait says.
“I don’t even know what I want—I have
what I want.” A few hundred square feet,
a golf cart, and a dozen or so surfboards,
it seems, is plenty.
noah johnson is a gq senior style
editor.

7 4 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
 T h e
F i x

BDE

Pete Davidson is one

of SNL’s youngest cast
members ever—

and his DGAF comedy has

turned him into a star
we can’t look away from
GROOMING: JESSICA ORTIZ USING JACK BLACK

Shirt, $650, by Lanvin. Tank top,

$360, by Hermès. Pants, $228,
by Michael Kors. Sneakers, $160,
by Nike. Watch, $195, by Seiko.

P H O T O G R A P H S B Y K A T I E M C C U R D Y
S T Y L E D B Y J O N T I E T Z S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 7 9
 T h e
BDE
F i x

PETE D A V I D S O N S A Y S fame hasn’t

changed his style. The 24-year-old
Saturday Night Live comedian is wear-
ing pastel purple parachute pants—
swishy $280 Acne Studios warm-ups
with a drawstring waist and zippers at
the ankles. They are the easiest decision
Davidson will make all day. For one,
they fit his lanky six-foot-three frame
perfectly. (“I look like a praying man-
tis,” he says.) And, two, they look cool.
“I dress how I dressed when I was, like,
10,” he explains. “I’m like, ‘What would
be cool? Purple pants.’ ”
Since making his SNL debut in 2014, as
one of the youngest cast members ever at
age 20, Davidson has charmed audiences
with this direct, shoulder-shrugging
brand of comedy. He often appears as
himself on “Weekend Update,” where
he jokes about his personal life. As the
“Resident Young Person,” he talks about
weed, obviously, and sex. (“If you don’t go
down on a guy for a million dollars, you
obviously don’t care about your family,”
he said, straight-faced, during a bit on
his very first episode.) But he also mines
the darker elements of his life in his
stand-up. His dad, a New York City fire-
fighter, died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks,
and Davidson often references the trag-
edy in blunt terms. On Comedy Central’s
roast of Justin Bieber in 2015, he turned
to the troubled pop star and said, “I lost
my dad on 9/11, and I always regretted
growing up without a dad. Until I met
your dad, Justin. Now I’m glad mine’s
dead.” Despite how beloved Davidson
has become on SNL and in the stand-up
community, he still doesn’t see himself
as a star. It’s “mortifying” for him to do a of these?’ She was like, ‘Those are my him about Grande on his show in June, ↑
Shirt, $90,
photo shoot like this, all the posing and favorite ones,’ and I was like, ‘Sick.’ ” Davidson confirmed the engagement by Wu Wear
talking about himself. “It’s all bullshit. Suddenly, Davidson became one half and replied, “It’s fuckin’ LIT, Jimmy!” at Barneys
GQ wouldn’t hit me up if I didn’t recently of the most talked-about millennial His easy, unbothered confidence New York.
Pants,
get engaged to a super-famous person,” couple in America. Paparazzi trail him inspired Twitter users to give it a very flat- $1,500, by
he says, settling into an oversize black and Grande everywhere they go in tering name: Big Dick Energy. But still he Gucci.
leather couch at the studio with a plate New York City, and the tabloids report insists that when the paparazzi camp out- Sunglasses,
$665, by
of catered pasta salad. “Nobody gives a breathlessly on each moment they’re side his door, “they’re not waiting for me.” Mr. Leight.
shit, you know what I mean?” spotted together. Davidson seems to Davidson and Grande recently moved Watch,
He’s referring to his new fiancée, think this is happening just because into a Manhattan apartment that report- his own.
the intergalactically famous pop star Grande is a “super-famous person.” edly cost $16 million. She bought the
Ariana Grande. According to the tab- He’s correct in that she introduced him place, Davidson says, and he stocks the
loids, Davidson presented Grande, 25, to a wider audience, but we’d argue fridge. “She’s really sweet. She’s like, ‘This
with a $93,000 pear-shaped diamond that his lovably bizarre antics are what is our house,’ and I’m like, ‘You’re very
in June, after just a few weeks of dating. have propelled the couple to public- nice for saying that. Thank you for let-
According to Davidson, it happened even obsession territory. Instead of hiding ting me stay here,’ ” he deadpans. “She’s
quicker than that. “The day I met her, I from the press, Davidson waltzes down like, ‘We’re getting married!’ And I’m like,
was like, ‘Hey, I’ll marry you tomorrow,’ ” the street wearing neo-goth surgical ‘I know, thank you for letting me stay
he says, grinning. “She was calling my masks, flipping the bird. (“My friends here.’ ” They’re still working on decorat-
bluff. I sent her a picture [of engage- think I’ve gone crazy,” he says of the ing it. “It’s like, we have six beanbags,
ment rings]. I was like, ‘Do you like any masks.) When Jimmy Fallon asked but we have (text continued on page 84)

8 0 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
 1 2
T h e
BDE
F i x

3 4

1. Necklace, his own. 2. Coat, $2,900, by Salvatore Ferragamo. Jersey, $165, by Rapha. Pants, $258, by Palace Skateboards. Sneakers,
from left, $190 (for pair) and $170 (for pair), both by Nike at KITH. 3. Vest, $360, by Polo Ralph Lauren. Turtleneck, $170,
by Jil Sander. Sweatpants, $140, by Wu Wear at Barneys New York. Sneakers, $190, by Nike at KITH. 4. Cardigan, $795, by Simon Miller.
Sweater, $300, by Acne Studios. Watch, $315, by Seiko.

8 2 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8

T h e
BDE
F i x
no forks—you know what I mean?” he
says, taking a massive bite of pasta salad.
“We’re learning how to be adults. We’re
having a really fun time.”
The only impediment to their domes-
tic bliss is the level to which the tabloids
have focused on it. It used to be that
Davidson could keep up with what was
written about him. “I gotta tell you, up
until about two months ago, if some-
one wrote about me, I saw it,” he says.
“Nobody gave a shit two months ago, so
anytime there was an article, I would
obviously see it, because my mom would
send it to me and be like, ‘Yaaay!’ ”
Soon, Davidson will get to escape the
city altogether: He’s filming a new movie,
Big Time Adolescence, in the decidedly
8 4 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
less paparazzi-heavy Syracuse, New
York. But he won’t exactly evade tabloid
speculation. There are rumors that he
and Grande will get married very soon,
on August 4, to honor his dad’s badge
number, 8418. (He recently posted
a photo of her wearing the badge on
Instagram, but it’s since been deleted.)
Davidson says that they haven’t really
started wedding planning, but “it’s defi-
nitely going to happen, for sure.”
As if on cue, Grande appears at the
studio to pick him up. Looking like a
fairy-tale woodland creature, with two
pigtail buns on top of her head and cat-
eye makeup, she skips around in a cloud
of sweet perfume, offering hugs to every-
one on set. Then she greets Davidson by
burying her head inside his Balenciaga
T-shirt. “The universe works in weird
ways,” he says. “All I know is that I’m the
luckiest guy in the world.” He wears the
purple pants right out of the studio.
allie jones is a writer based in
Brooklyn. This is her first story for GQ.
As with all GQ fashion shoots, we started this one
with a plan: a half-dozen looks, styled out on a
rack, that we wanted Pete Davidson to try on and,
hopefully, wear. But Davidson dresses with the
swagger of a Staten Island dice roller. He’s not the
kind of guy who lays his outfits out the night before.
So we ditched the rack and embarked on a sartorial
Choose Your Own Adventure with the SNL comic
that took us to all corners of a modern man’s
wardrobe—even the corner where he keeps his bright
pink cycling jersey. Next time you don’t know what to
wear, borrow a few of these moves and a fraction of
Davidson’s boundless confidence and you’ll be all set.
Coat, $1,990, by Burberry. Tank top,
$40 (for pack of three), by Calvin Klein
Underwear. Pants, $1,295, by Giorgio
Armani. Sneakers, $450, by Adidas by
Raf Simons at KITH. Hat, $100, Wu Wear
at Barneys New York. Sunglasses, $665,
by Mr. Leight. Necklace, his own.
©2018 IMPORTED BY BIRRA PERONI INTERNAZIONALE, WASHINGTON, DC
 T h e
F i x

Kitch en
Cultur e

PHOTOGRAPH: ALESSANDRO SALVADOR /EYEEM/GE T T Y IMAGES. PHOTO ILLUSTRATION FOR EDITORIAL PURPOSES.

When accusations of sexual harassment

and abusive behavior took down big
names like Mario Batali and John Besh,
few people in the business were
surprised. Is kitchen culture inherently
How Do We toxic? And what to do about it? We asked
six chefs from different backgrounds
Fix Restaurants? to sit down and figure out what it takes
to change an industry B y M A R I A N B U L L

8 6 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
S I G N AT U R E S TA C Y A D A M S C L O T H I N G

NAVY CAMEL VESTED SUIT

BURGUNDY FLORAL PRINT DRESS SHIRT
BURGUNDY/BLACK POLKA DOT TIE & HANKY
S TA C Y A D A M S
BALEN MONK STRAP SUEDE GROUP

C A R G O / / I N D I G O / / TA N
S TA C YA D A M S . C O M
The GQ Best Stuff Box is a quarterly subscription box
featuring our favorite gadgets, grooming products,
style accessories, and beyond—all rigorously tested and
endorsed by the magazine’s editors.

The latest box includes brands like:

a BKR
a HARRY’S
a ORIBE
a POCKET SQUARE CLOTHING

Every box guaranteed to have

$200+ VALUE FOR ONLY $49

LEARN MORE AT
BESTSTUFFBOX.GQ.COM
 T h e
F i x

1 2 3
Kitchen
Culture

4 5 6

CAST OF CHARACTERS
1.
AMANDA COHEN
CHEF-OWNER
Known for: Dirt Candy,
a gratuity-free fine-
dining restaurant serving
vegetarian food in
downtown Manhattan.
2.
JEN AGG
RESTAURATEUR
Known for: Three bars—
Grey Gardens, Rhum Corner,
and Cocktail Bar—and a
nose-to-tail restaurant, The
Black Hoof, all in Toronto.
3. 4.
GERARDO GONZALEZ MICHAEL SOLOMONOV
CHEF CHEF-RESTAURATEUR
Known for: The casual, Known for: Modern Israeli
cool, smart California- at his Philly flagship, Zahav.
Latino food at Lalito in Also Federal Donuts in
Manhattan’s Chinatown. Philly and Dizengoff in
N.Y.C.’s Chelsea Market.
5.
PREETI MISTRY
CHEF
Known for: Semi-casual
California-Indian cuisine
served in Oakland at Navi
Kitchen and Juhu Beach
Club, both now closed.
HAIR: FRANCIS CATANESE FOR R+CO HAIRCARE. MAKEUP: SARAH APPLEBY USING NARS COSME TICS.
6.
TOM COLICCHIO
CHEF-RESTAURATEUR
Known for: Co-founding
New York’s iconic Gramercy
Tavern and his flagship
restaurant, Craft; judging on
Top Chef.

WE’VE LONG KNOWN that restaurants can be intense, some-
times hostile places to work—screaming chefs, creepy
diners, personal and professional boundaries blurred by long
hours and alcohol. But in the past year, it’s become clear:
The need for change, in the way the restaurant industry treats
its employees and prosecutes abusers, is dire.
As the #MeToo movement gathered steam, restaurants had
their own reckoning. We learned about Mario Batali’s his-
tory of groping female employees; Ken Friedman, the mega-
successful New York restaurateur, had a similar M.O. plus
a third floor reportedly nicknamed “the rape room” in his
West Village landmark, The Spotted Pig. New Orleans celeb-
rity chef John Besh stepped down from his restaurants amid
reports of the sexual harassment that allegedly ran rampant
in his company. The list continues to grow.
Here at GQ, we love restaurants and desperately want them
to be better to the people who make them such a joy to dine
in. So we put six chefs in a room—a mix of old guard and new
guard, restaurateurs with empires and chefs who are still in
the kitchen every night—and got them talking about the state
of America’s restaurants and the work that needs to be done
to fix them.

8 8 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 P H O T O G R A P H S B Y E R I C T . W H I T E
 T h e Ki t c h en
F i x Cultur e

G Q : So we’re in a place where

predatory behavior on the behalf
“You get to a point where you realize that
of male chefs and restaurateurs you don’t have to yell. You don’t have to
has been exposed. I’m curious what
you guys think needs to happen threaten to get your point across. It’s much
now. Do the offending chefs need
to divest from those restaurants?
easier to be quiet about it.”
J EN AG G : Of course they should divest.
P R E E T I M I S T RY: They should just go
the fuck away. pizza.—Ed.], I didn’t personally
AG G : They’re gonna try to come back, know how fucked-up it was. But
as we’ve seen. Ken Friedman is on I knew he was a fucking creep.
the way to redemption and hasn’t done I’ve told him to his face to fuck o≠,
anything to get there. with a smile.
A M A N DA C O H E N : I don’t understand
In June news broke that Gabrielle why people aren’t picketing outside
Hamilton—chef-owner of the much of The Spotted Pig.
beloved Manhattan restaurant Prune— MISTRY: I don’t think people care. They
would be taking over operations at care more about where the fucking
The Spotted Pig with her wife, Ashley meat in the burger came from than
Merriman. Controversy erupted they do about the people cooking it.
over their decision to work with Ken C O L IC C H I O : They don’t care about that.
Friedman after his abusive behavior MISTRY: In California they do!
was reported in ‘The New York Times.’ C O H E N : So many people who are eating
there don’t know what’s happening.
TO M C O L I C C H I O : I think it’s too easy to MISTRY: When I think about The
say, “They should just go away.” They’re Spotted Pig and Charlie’s restaurants
not gonna go away—they wanna try to in Oakland, those are fucking really
make a living. busy restaurants. As a front-of-the- THE ORIGIN OF THE SCREAMING CHEF
MISTRY: Why should they have the right house person, that is a really good
to still earn a living? job. Those people are walking out of ERIC RIPERT CHEF, LE BERNARDIN
C O L I C C H I O : Even if you come out of there every night with anywhere
prison, you— from $500 to $800 in their pocket.
My first restaurant job kicked in the butt.
MISTRY: But they’re not going to go to C O L IC C H I O : Do you think that
was at a fine-dining Not in a mean way, but
prison! They’re not going to be held restaurant should close? restaurant in Paris it was not a joke.
accountable. MISTRY: Yes! called La Tour d’Argent. There was no terrible
C O L I C C H I O : They are being held C O L IC C H I O : Then [the employees are] The kitchen had an abuse, though, because
accountable, okay? But the question is— not getting that money. extremely disciplined, it was so structured.
AG G : How are they being held MISTRY: But someone [in that military mentality: The It was not like the chef
accountable? environment] being able to say, “I’m chef or the sous-chef was going crazy and
is directing the chef throwing pots and pans.
C O L I C C H I O : Look at the tally. Three being treated this way. I’m gonna
saucier, for instance, There were no
[of Batali’s] restaurants were closed in go get another job”—it’s not easy
who is going to give women. I saw one
Las Vegas. That’s about $40 million when you’re working in a place that orders to his commis. American woman who
worth of revenue gone. is phenomenally busy. Going to It’s very dogmatic came in for training,
AG G : A drop in the bucket. get another serving job somewhere in a sense—you do not and we were like, wow—
C O L I C C H I O : It’s not a drop in the bucket! else is not necessarily gonna pay question authority. we had never seen a
You have no idea! the same bills. There was a lot of woman in the kitchen.
AG G : [laughs] I’m not trying to rile AGG: And you might be blacklisted! pressure from the top. Her name was Jane.
you. I’m saying that I don’t think C O L IC C H I O : You know what I think
Sometimes there was One smart-ass guy
yelling in the kitchen, went to her and said,
they’re being held accountable in the really sucks: There’s some big people
sometimes even some “Hi, Jane, I’m Tarzan.”
ILLUSTRATIONS: SIMON ABRANOWICZ

right way. that got taken down, but there’s

C O L I C C H I O : No, no, I agree.
MISTRY: When all of those cases came
out last fall—it’s not like anyone in
this room was surprised by the people
who were being accused. With Charlie
[Hallowell, whose abusive behavior
was the subject of a ‘San Francisco
Chronicle’ report in late 2017; his most
popular restaurant, Pizzaiolo, was
an Oakland staple for California-style
physical contact— And she said, “You’re
some fucking asshole chef somewhere being punched in the more like Cheeta”—the
in Nebraska that just cornered shoulder or being monkey—“than Tarzan.”
someone in the walk-in and is gonna
get away with it because he’s not
known. Even if they fire him, he’s just
gonna walk over to the next place
and get a job there.
AGG: This is my big thing right now:
You’re not rapey enough to be brought
down, but you’re still a terrible person.

S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 9 3
 T h e Kitchen
F i x Cultur e

It might not be sexual harassment. C O H E N : I had the worst boss. So I’ve

It might be, like, emotional abuse. learned so much of what not to do.
There’s all of these other categories. G O NZ AL E Z : It’s amazing once you
MISTRY: I had a line cook for a stop to think about how easy it is to
while who had worked in some top be respectful and run a kitchen that
places—I was super excited about promotes acceptance. It doesn’t have
his skill level. But he honestly to be a violent kitchen. That’s what
believed that being a dick was cool. I really appreciate about the restaurant
I’d sit down and I’d reason with that we’ve created as a team.
him: “Hey, we’re a nice kitchen. We Everybody is just accepting—there’s
respect each other.” And he was not even a second thought about it.
like, “Oh, I didn’t take the Rosetta WHY KITCHEN CULTURE STAYS TOXIC C O L IC C H I O : You get to a point where
Stone on nice.” [laughter] you realize that you don’t have to
AGG : It’s funny when you say it.
PREETI MISTRY CHEF yell. You don’t have to threaten to get
MISTRY: He thought that was really your point across. It’s much easier
fucking hilarious. And then I was There’s an idea that room talk? To me, to be quiet about it.
like, “We have an open kitchen. child care and maternity that’s why women don’t AG G : I was just talking with this guy
Be fucking nice to the servers. Don’t leave are this issue want to be in kitchens on my sta≠, and he’s like, “You actually
that’s keeping women anymore. And most
treat them like dumb girls. See it do things in a way that is terrifying—
out of the upper of the ones who stay
as a business decision: Customers are echelons of the industry,
but not because there’s yelling. You’re
decide to continue to
gonna have a bad experience.” And and I just find it to be put up with it. very stern. You make it clear this can’t
he still wouldn’t get it—he believed really myopic. What To really change happen again.” That is unfortunately
that being an asshole was what it it really comes down to things, it requires how you lead a restaurant. You can’t
meant to be a chef. is the environment. people at the top to just say, “Hey, could you please not do
C O L I C C H I O : I’ve had kids say, “I can’t There was an article fucking listen. How that again?” That is not e≠ective.
work here. You’re just not yelling a couple of years ago many times do women, C O L IC C H I O : But that’s such an honest
enough.” from René Redzepi queer people, people conversation to have. It’s much easier
about his fantasy for of color have to voice
AGG : Nobody said that! Nobody said to yell at someone.
a kinder kitchen. He our issues and have
that! said something about
AG G : Sometimes it has to be during
people roll their eyes at
C O L I C C H I O : Absolutely. “You’re not service, so that the impact lands.
instructing his chefs us or say, “She can’t
yelling and screaming enough. not to use such vulgar take a joke. They didn’t Unfortunately, restaurants are
You don’t seem to care enough.” language or make mean anything by it”? dictatorships, not democracies.
C O H E N : I have a kid right now who’s inappropriate jokes, The kitchen should be Otherwise they’d fall apart.
like, “I need to go to a Michelin-starred and I’m like, This is a place for all different G O NZ AL E Z : Right, I mean it’s tricky.
restaurant, Amanda. I need a lot a restaurant that types of people to I would say from my experience
more motivation. I need to be yelled at.” people say is the best work in, not a domain running places, you can get very
restaurant in the that is ruled by
AGG : Why are we all such fucking kumbaya, and the problem is, at
world. You’re still at straight white men
masochists? the end of the day, [your employees]
the phase of lowering where everyone is
GER ARD O G O NZ A L E Z : ’Cause that’s what actually want some kind of structure.
the amount of locker- secondary to that.
success is in this industry. I think They thrive o≠ of it. When they don’t
sometimes you have to refine your idea have the structure, they feel like you
of success to just being a decent don’t have the tools to actually achieve
person. You see these people who can’t something or succeed.
even look at their sta≠ in the eyeballs go visit her in California. And my AG G : [Cooks] need to learn how to be
or acknowledge them as human beings. co-worker’s like, Why would you even leaders, not angry parents.
AGG : Oh, my God. do that kind of thing—you’re G O NZ AL E Z : They need to learn how to
GO N Z AL EZ: I saw the direction that jeopardizing the week after a review. communicate, honestly. As a cook,
I could’ve gone, in the [traditional MISTRY: Good for you. Because I’ve been I learned to repress things. Personally,
sense] of what it means to be that asshole. I don’t believe that my cooks have
successful in this industry. I got a to leave their baggage at the door.
review in The New York Times, GQ:I’m curious as to how your early If you’re carrying something with you,
and that week my grandmother was jobs in cooking have shaped the way we can talk about it. Giving somebody
in the hospital. I was like, I’m gonna you run your kitchens now. a fucking hug is enough to get them

“I have an employee right now who’s like,

‘I need to go to a Michelin-starred restaurant,
Amanda. I need a lot more motivation.
I need to be yelled at.’ ”
9 4 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8

through the day so they’re not, like,
eating their own stress. “We go forward by owning our shit, by having
C O H E N : You hug your sta≠ ?
AG G : I hug all my sta≠.
these conversations, by understanding where
MISTRY: There are times when I’ve we’ve erred.”
been too nice. Yes, I also hug my
sta≠. But at a certain point you have
to decide how much do you care
about a person versus how much do a lot of restaurants are canceling sta≠
you also need to be really clear. parties, and I think that’s bullshit.
Especially being a person who looks C O L IC C H I O : Oh, I did that years ago.
a lot younger than they actually are. AGG: Why?!
They forget that I’m actually the C O L IC C H I O : I mean, we had three
owner of this restaurant. restaurants [in New York]. It was a
AG G : Which is how so much of this large party. And there was always
shit happens in the first place, too. someone—sometimes several people—
Not with you, but this is how we who I had to fire after parties.
get down that road with these blurred AGG: That’s a good way to find out!
lines. And, like, it’s booze! I know C O H E N : I’ve had people show up drunk.
M I C H A E L S O LO M O N OV: For the first
couple of years, everybody [at our
parties] was partying, and there were
inevitably fights, and people hooked
up, but they do that anyways.
C O L IC C H I O : It’s gonna happen.
S O LO M O N OV: But it’s weird when you’re
liable for that. Like, “Come to this
party. We’re gonna buy all your alcohol.
Now get home safe!”
C O L IC C H I O : Right, good luck.
G Q : Have any of you revised your
H.R. guidelines in the past year?
S O LO M O N OV: We have almost
300 employees, and so we take it
very seriously when there’s
anything happening that requires
us to address it. It always starts
with an updated [H.R.] manual. And
then we address problems as they
come. What I’ve realized is now
HOW TO STOP THE ABUSE my job as a chef-owner is basically
ONCE AND FOR ALL an H.R. director.
AGG: And a psychiatrist.
AMANDA COHEN CHEF-OWNER, DIRT CANDY C O H E N : And a plumber.
C O L IC C H I O : Does anybody do sexual-
Sexual-harassment be able to practice. harassment training?
training is expensive. You would also have an AGG: We have conversations about it,
If we had a governing actual punishment. I don’t know if I explicitly follow that.
body where we could Ideally, you would We talk with everyone about it.
get resources, I would also have places C O L IC C H I O : We bring an outside firm
totally use them. But for employees to get to do it.
there’s nobody who’s lawyers and health S O LO M O N OV: Yeah, we have somebody
watching over what insurance—everything
come in and do it. It’s the Wild
we do. that would make it
In any other harder for people who
West when you decide to open your
profession, if you were have done really own small business. There’s nobody
abusing your staff, shitty things. They that teaches you what is right or
you would get disbarred. would know there are wrong, and the H.R. things that we
You would lose your real repercussions go through are just liability stu≠.
license. You wouldn’t out there. There’s nobody to teach you how to
behave properly, you know?
S E P T E M B E R
T h e Ki t c h en
F i x Cultur e
GQ: So what is the next step in the
conversation? Once we’ve figured
out what to do with all the bad men,
what happens next?
AG G : I think we go forward by
looking back properly. We go forward
by owning our shit, by having these
conversations, by understanding where
we’ve erred.
C O L IC C H I O : I’ve never done the rapey
thing.
MISTRY: Okay, yeah, but every single
freaking chef has rubbed someone
the wrong way. Do you just go, Oh,
well, they’re fucking overly sensitive?
Or do you actually look and think,
Oh shit, that was not my intention,
and try to grow from it and learn
from it?
COHEN: I think all of us can only do
so much. I can tweet a lot. I can
write things. But we each can only
do what we can in our restaurants.
I place the burden on the media,
because you guys are the ones who are
gonna continue telling the stories.
And at some point these stories aren’t
gonna be sexy anymore. You know
people are gonna be like, “Ugh, I read
that. I read that.”
AG G : They’re already so over it. My
frustration is that nobody gave a shit
until, like, this year. And then when
you watch white men get the cookies
for the bare fucking minimum—and
you happen to maybe know that
they’re monsters—that sucks, too. I
mean, obviously I want male allies.
It’s such a hyper-male industry. And
they listen to dudes—they don’t listen
to women. So it’s really nice when
there are men amplifying your voice.
Which is something Tony [Bourdain]
was really good about.
C O H E N : The next thing is, really: How
do we make this industry sustainable?
Because it’s not sustainable right now.
Financially, we need to raise prices.
We need health care. There’s a million
little things that go into it.
marian bull is gq’s Travel & Eats
editor.
2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 9 7
 T h e
F i x
This Fight Is Bigger
Than Texas
Politic s

Down in deep-red Texas,

a fresh-faced liberal named
Beto O’Rourke has a shot
at beating Ted Cruz . But huge
as that would be, the race
has grander implications:
It helps explain all the giddy
hopes and secret fears
of Democrats everywhere
By CHRISTOPHER HOOKS
SEE ADDITIONAL CREDITS.

9 8 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
 AU TO
cyc l e
home
RENTERS
b oat
rv

But you can choose to

switch to GEICO.
U M B R E L LA

GEICO.COM 1 - 8 0 0 - 9 4 7 - AU TO L O CA L O FFI C E

Some discounts, coverages, payment plans and features are not available in all states, in all GEICO companies, or in all situations. Boat and PWC coverages are underwritten by GEICO Marine Insurance Company. Homeowners, renters and condo coverages are written through non-affiliated insurance
companies and are secured through the GEICO Insurance Agency, Inc. Motorcycle and ATV coverages are underwritten by GEICO Indemnity Company. The GEICO Personal Umbrella Policy is provided by Government Employees Insurance Company and is available to qualified Government
Employees Insurance Company and GEICO General Insurance Company policyholders and other eligible persons. GEICO is a registered service mark of Government Employees Insurance Company, Washington, D.C. 20076; a Berkshire Hathaway Inc. subsidiary. © 2018 GEICO
 T h e
Politic s
F i x

Ted Cruz tells me.

T E D C RU Z I S M I S U N D E RSTO O D , basketball game he’d played against
Jimmy Kimmel. But his constituents
Out behind Mama Jack’s Road House Cafe, the most had more pressing concerns.
prominent eatery in Kountze, Texas, the senator is hunkered When it came time for questions, one
down in the passenger seat of a Texas-size pickup truck, of the first, from an older woman, was
about a recent viral video showing a man
watching through Ray-Bans as his staffers re-arrange wearing a MAGA hat getting a drink
vehicles in his traveling caravan. It’s the last stop on lobbed in his face. It upset her.
“All of us are horrified at how divided
a five-day campaign tour—Cruz’s tepid counterpoint to our society is. How much anger there
the marathon barnstorming that his Democratic opponent, is. It’s really sad to see,” Cruz told her.
Beto O’Rourke, has become famous for. The senator, who for years was the most
well-known plotter in the reactionary
At hundreds of town halls, in the most far-flung corners of rebellion against President Barack
the state, the size of O’Rourke’s worshipful crowds has Obama, seemed pained by the rancor of
our times.
been growing month after month. Not even well-wishers in Liberals had forgotten that “we live
his own party know quite what to make of it. This is, after all, in a society where we can disagree with
each other with civility. We can have fun;
Texas, a place where no Democrat has said, ‘Mike, I am your father.’ During the we can laugh! You don’t have to take
won a statewide election since 1994 and presidential campaign, I did Simpsons yourself that seriously.”
where no Democrat has won a Senate impressions and re-enacted scenes from But this crowd was in a pretty serious ↓
seat since 1988. The psychological impact The Princess Bride.” Politics these days mood. A man rose and began railing A little-known
congressman
of such a drought is di∞cult to overstate: has gotten so serious, he complains. against the Deep State in alarming terms, from El Paso,
For liberals in Texas, the institutional This pivot toward congeniality makes mumbling something about Ruby Ridge. Beto O’Rourke
memory of their old party, or even what some sense for Cruz, who’s re-emerging As Cruz listened, the man reasoned that has trailed
it feels like to win, has long ago slipped from the humiliation of his 2016 loss the FBI was a greater threat to Americans Senator Ted
Cruz by only
through the hourglass. And yet this has to Trump—and no doubt looking to than ISIS, because terrorists could be a single-digit
been the summer of Beto—a giddy cam- improve some dismal favorability num- dispatched with violence, whereas “it’s margin for
paign season during which descriptive bers. No surprise then that this amiable against the law to shoot the FBI.” much of
clichés like “Kennedy-esque” and “punk- side of Cruz was on display earlier in the Cruz ditched his kumbaya act. “I share the race—
inspiring
rock Democrat” have abounded. day, inside Mama Jack’s, where he spent your frustration. And it is a frustration newfound hope
O’Rourke’s strengths—his charisma nearly a third of his 12-minute speech that millions across this country share,” among Texas
and optimism—are Cruz’s weaknesses, discussing a well-publicized charity he said. He pointed out that the FBI was Democrats.
and the hype that surrounds his oppo-
nent is not lost on the senator. You might
think Cruz would be sweating things.
But he isn’t. According to him, the media
has this race all wrong—just as it has
long gotten him all wrong.
In Cruz’s view, he’s been maligned
and unfairly portrayed for years as a
surly right-winger. That’s a press concoc-
tion, he says. “The nature of the modern
media world,” he tells me in his method-
ical style, “is that in di≠erent periods
of time, di≠erent narratives take hold.
Typically those narratives are overstated
or caricatures.” The storyline on Cruz,
BILL CLARK/CQ ROLL CALL/GETTY IMAGES

when he first came to power, was that

“I was this wild-eyed bomb thrower,” he
says. “That was never accurate.”
The truth, Cruz wants me to know,
is that he’s always been a more light-
hearted fellow than he’s been given
credit for being. “I like to have fun. I
enjoy life. I like to make jokes,” he tells
me. “In 2013, during the Obamacare
filibuster, I read Green Eggs and Ham
on the Senate floor. I did a Darth Vader
impression. Turned to Mike Lee and

1 0 0 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
8 kids a day are accidentally killed
or injured by FAMILY FIRE.
FAMILY FIRE is a shooting involving an
improperly stored gun, often found in the home.

ENDFAMILYFIRE.org
 T h e
Politic s
F i x
awash in partisan shenanigans that
required urgent attention: “I’m trying to
do everything I can” to expose the lies of
“[former FBI director] James Comey and
[former FBI deputy director] Andrew
McCabe.” The answer, Cruz said, was
“to get rid of partisan players who are
abusing their position and to restore the
rule of law.” In other words, more purges.
He’d help lead the way.
For all the talk of image soften-
ing, here was Cruz being Cruz. And if
there’s one thing that unites those who
aren’t fond of him—whether on the right
or on the left—it’s the feeling that he’s
playing a character, that he’s an insin-
cere opportunist.
O’Rourke’s message su≠ers no such
authenticity trouble. His approach,
while sometimes light on specifics,
“There are two Americas,” Cruz
tells me: “GQ America” and what
he calls “Field & Stream America.”
favors what feels good and right in the
moment—an uplifting, improvisational
DIY crusade. Cruz, in response, is doing
what he has always done, and perhaps
what he can only do: reaching out, once
again, to the agitated conservative base.
His voters have pulled even further right,
and Cruz—despite the lighthearted
demeanor—is sprinting after them.
Polls, though scattered, often report
that O’Rourke and Cruz are separated by
only a single-digit margin in what is now
the most watched Senate race in the coun-
try. Should Cruz win big, he’ll likely van-
quish some of the humiliation su≠ered
two years ago at the hands of President
Donald Trump and re-invigorate plans to
succeed his old nemesis.
If O’Rourke prevails or even does
well, such an upset—likely to hinge on
suburban and women voters—has the
potential to reorder Texas politics and
the nation’s, too.
T H E D A Y A F T E R Cruz’s rally, O’Rourke
is in Hutchins, a small town in Dallas
County. Though he and Cruz are roughly
1 0 2 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
the same age—45 and 47, respectively—
O’Rourke looks and talks like a much
newer model. The fervor that greets him
verges on the messianic. (A state repre-
sentative speaking at the event invoked
Nelson Mandela.) He feels like a candi-
date tailored for the moment.
His campaign’s product—what Beto
o≠ers—is an opportunity for dispirited
Democrats to take part in something
hopeful. But as Election Day has drawn
closer, the tone has slowly shifted. It’s
gotten more urgent and a bit darker. Our
country is in peril, he tells the crowd in
Hutchins, and if there isn’t a change in
2018, things could get worse: The “slip
that we took in 2016, if unchecked in 2018,
could become a slide,” he says, and “we
could lose the things that have made us
who we are for 242 years and counting.”
The GQ Best Stuff Box is a
quarterly subscription box
featuring our favorite gadgets,
grooming products, style
accessories, and beyond—all
rigorously tested and endorsed
by the magazine’s editors. Our
latest box includes brands
like Areaware, Boie, Breda,
Time is running out. “No pressure, folks.
Goodr, and Image Skincare.
The entire fortune and future and fate of
this country rests on our shoulders,” he
says. O’Rourke calls the 2018 election the
“moment of truth.” There is not the slight-
est bit of ironic distance here, and the
crowd loves it. Somehow, it’s cathartic.
$200+ VALUE
Later that day, in the well-o≠ suburb
of Farmers Branch, over a thousand peo- FOR ONLY $49
ple pack a college gymnasium to hear
O’Rourke speak, shutting out hundreds
more. Even those unable to get into the
rally are excited about the attendance.
“Wonderful. Awesome,” one turned-away
Get yours now at
latecomer says. “It’s so good that people BESTSTUFFBOX.GQ.COM
are coming out.”
Standing in the shade with me near
his campaign minivan after the event,
O’Rourke acknowledges the tough road
ahead—while noting that much good
has already been done. His rallies, he
says, are about something bigger than
the current Senate race. “There’s so
many things going on right now that lit-
erally can’t wait until the next election,”
he says, still fired up just after having
taken selfies with a line of hundreds.
Breda Visser Watch

Win or lose, the fervor brought about
by the campaign could be leveraged on
other issues, he says. “I feel that judg-
ment of my kids and of history if we fail
to do this. I mean, it is going to be on us.
They won’t say that Trump [alone is to
blame], because they’ll know that this is
a democracy that all of us had a chance
to participate in. They’ll say, ‘Those
pendejos in 2018, they were the ones who
screwed this up.’ We can’t screw this up.”
C R U Z , F O R H I S P A R T , o≠ers none of
that flower-power stu≠; it’s not in his
nature. His campaign is keenly aware of
the divisions that exist between people,
and he says this race features the stark-
est di≠erence between two candidates of
any campaign in the country. He’s proba-
bly right, and not just on policy grounds.
The two men seem custom-built to
oppose each other.
Just a few points of distinction: The
DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES
half-Cuban Ted Cruz—born Rafael
Edward—took an Anglo nickname
as a kid, while his opponent, Robert
O’Rourke, of Irish extraction, took a
Spanish one. When O’Rourke was grow-
ing up in El Paso, immersing himself in
the local punk scene, Cruz was touring
with the Constitutional Corroborators,
a youth group that discussed the text of
America’s founding documents in front
of rotary clubs. When Cruz was securing
a clerkship with Chief Justice William
Rehnquist, O’Rourke was living in a loft
with his bandmates in Brooklyn.
Whereas Cruz, as Texas solicitor gen-
eral, was tasked with upholding a dildo
ban, O’Rourke, as a city-council member
in El Paso, was pressing to legalize weed.
Earlier this year, as O’Rourke was baking
in the sun along the Mexican border in
the town of Tornillo, assailing Trump’s
family-separation policy to a crowd
over a megaphone while border-patrol
agents eyeballed him through binocu-
lars, Cruz was in Houston, playing bas-
ketball with Kimmel.
Even the campaign vehicles that
the two use are opposites. O’Rourke
has been roaming the state in a Dodge
minivan, straight out of a youth-soccer
pickup line. Cruz prowls it in his mus-
cular pickup. Like the cowboy boots he
wears, it seems both genuine and inau-
thentic at the same time, a part of his
persona more than a part of his person.
In Kountze, while he slouched in the
passenger seat, Cruz again bemoans the
somber turn of contemporary politics.
“Now no one can take a joke, no one can
laugh,” he says. People want to take part
in something “joyful.”
T h e
Politic s
F i x
I ask: Didn’t O’Rourke appear to be
running a joyful campaign? “He seems
to be having fun,” Cruz tells me. “I
will give him that.” Cruz rarely talks
about O’Rourke directly, but he grants
that O’Rourke appears “genuine,”
which Cruz says he appreciates. He
likens O’Rourke to Bernie Sanders,
whom he calls an “honest socialist.” (In
truth, O’Rourke’s political history since
his time on the El Paso city council has
been pragmatic and generally pro-busi-
ness.) “That’s refreshing, because it
means we can have a real contest of
ideas,” Cruz says. Their race, he says,
provides a good opportunity for debate,
a stage upon which to fight for the
“American free-enterprise system.”
As for actual debating, Cruz only
recently consented to squaring o≠—on
five Friday evenings, up against high
school football (an old scheduling
trick in Texas to minimize the events).
What he wants most to do is turn out
his voters, not help O’Rourke reach a
big audience.
The real story of the race, Cruz
posits, as with so much else in the
past few years, is the vast di≠erence in
↑ the semi-sealed-o≠ worlds that the two
Two years after candidates’ most passionate supporters
his crushing
loss to Donald inhabit. “The Democratic Party, more
Trump, Cruz and more, has become the party of
has tried to coastal elites,” Cruz tells me matter-of-
position factly. “No o≠ense, but the party
himself as
a friendlier that reads GQ—your target demo-
and more graphic—are successful, urban profes-
conciliatory sionals with a fair amount of disposable
politician—with income. That’s the heart of today’s
mixed results.
Democratic Party. That’s the heart,
by all appearances, of Congressman
O’Rourke’s campaign. But that’s not the
bulk of Americans.”
There are two Americas, Cruz
declares: “GQ America” and what he
calls “Field & Stream America.”
“The bulk of Texans are working hard
to put food on the table,” he says, “and
they don’t appreciate being looked down
on by people richer than they, in more
privileged positions.”
There’s something o≠ about this
analogy—for one thing, it misstates
the demographic coalition O’Rourke
wants to assemble across an economic
spectrum—but it fits with the blunt-
force logic of Cruz’s political project.
Though Cruz’s team would love to start
repairing his weak favorability num-
bers across the state, they know that the
surer bet is to energize the conservative
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 0 5
 T h e
Politic s
F i x
base. Cruz may be a one-trick politi-
cian, but in Texas, for the foreseeable
future, that’s still the most useful trick
a Republican can employ.
For all the attention O’Rourke’s cam-
paign has gotten, the most impactful
question for Americans might be the
one least asked in the race. Assuming
Cruz wins re-election, what does his
political future look like? Few observ-
ers expect him to limit himself to the
Senate forever. Cruz has been a loyal
soldier for Trump since the 2016 elec-
tion, but he became one after some
pointed out that not doing so could cost
him his re-election. What will he do
once he’s secured it?
No doubt he envisions another run
for the presidency—this is a guy who
dreamed about high o∞ce as a kid; a
political animal who, as a child, sent
cash to Jesse Helms. He seems initially
reluctant to dwell on 2016. I ask him
about Trump’s penchant for starting
meetings with Cruz by rehashing the
fractious GOP-nomination battle—a war,
you’ll recall, in which Trump e≠ectively
called Cruz’s wife ugly and implicated his
beloved father in the Kennedy assassina-
tion. Is it true that he loves to chat about
the race, I ask Cruz in his pickup truck.
“Yeah,” he says, gazing straight ahead at
the parking lot. It is his tersest answer.
But then he, like Trump does, returns
to the campaign. “We went head-to-
head, and I beat him in a significant
number of states,” he says. “In virtually
every state in the primary, either Trump
was one and I was two, or I was one and
he was two.” He emphasizes that he had
run especially strong in the Republican
youth vote—college campuses, he
reminds me, had been split between his
and Sanders’s campaign.
Cruz had to dismantle his presidential
machine after Trump won, but he still
very clearly hopes to contest the par-
ty’s future. And in case things go south
for the president, Cruz is one of just a
few Republicans with the credibility to
attack Trump from the right.
ALREADY O’ROURKE HAS surpassed the
low expectations that Texas Democrats
had for him when he first took aim at
Cruz. Whatever the result in November,
this is the first statewide campaign in
some two decades that the party can feel
genuinely good about, and that’s a win
of its own. Even if he loses, the questions
that O’Rourke has raised in this race
1 0 6 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R
aren’t going anywhere. Chief among
them: Can Texas “turn blue”?
The debate over whether the state
can swing Democratic often revolves
around immigration figures and the
state’s changing demographics, since,
traditionally, Hispanics tend to vote
Democratic. But there’s more to the
story. Hispanic voters in Texas are some
of the most conservative in the country,
and the Republican Party needs only a
sizable minority of them to stay in power,
provided the GOP continues to dominate
the share of the white vote.
The conversation among Texas
Democrats focuses now on the extraor-
dinarily shabby party infrastructure. In
much of the state, the party barely exists
and organization remains surprisingly
wobbly. O’Rourke’s simple though
At every event, O’Rourke says,
he thinks: “Holy shit, there are so
many amazing people.”
important decision to tour the state—
visiting all 254 counties—has already
done a lot to spread the seeds of the party
in distant corners.
O’Rourke entered the race with
significant shortcomings, name recog-
nition chief among them, and is being
asked to overcome all of his own prob-
lems and then the party’s, too. That’s
a tall ask, to say nothing of the fact
that the electorate in midterm-election
years skews whiter, more conservative,
older, and more a±uent than the elec-
torate in presidential-election years.
Those are just a few of the reasons
why local observers are less optimis-
tic about O’Rourke’s chances than his
national supporters are.
There’s a chicken-and-egg problem
here, though, that O’Rourke can help
them solve. The party needs a “good loss”
in order to really start building its infra-
structure—that is, in order to start luring
good candidates and donors and volun-
teers who see winning as feasible. But
even earning that first “good loss” takes
some organizational and operational
2 0 1 8
help from the party, and nobody in years
has been able to jump-start it. The hope
among many Texas Democrats is simply
that O’Rourke closes the gap and loses by
less than ten points, which many would
take as an encouraging result, something
to build on. It would spur other prom-
inent candidates to jump into more
races. It might even help O’Rourke lay
the foundations for a future run.
Of course, this is the sort of pragma-
tism that a candidate doesn’t express in
the middle of a race. And O’Rourke, for
his part, seems completely unfazed by
the pessimism that hangs over the party.
“I will very often get disappointed at
myself or disappointed with our team if
I feel like we didn’t reach what we were
supposed to reach or achieve,” he tells
me in Farmers Branch. “What I never do
is leave [a rally] like this with anything
other than the feeling that, ‘Holy shit,
there are so many amazing people.’ ”
In the line to meet O’Rourke that day
is a woman who had lost part of her foot
to diabetes. “She wheeled over to [me],”
O’Rourke recalls, “and she said, ‘I have
no reason to feel this way, but I am so
hopeful right now.’ You meet that person
and you’re like, ‘How can I not also be
hopeful and make sure that we deliver
on the hope that we’re all raising among
each other?’ ” He would keep pushing.
“I’m very lucky to be a part of that.”
He seemed to mean it—O’Rourke is a
man without guile. Back into the minivan
he went, o≠ to the next event. He is not a
guy who agonizes over the construction
and deconstruction of narratives and
calculates subdivisions of the electorate.
History most often belongs to the ana-
lysts, but from time to time what’s needed
is a person to step up and do the thing.
Maybe—just maybe—he will.
christopher hooks is a writer based
in Austin. This is his first story for gq.
 HOW, IN
TIMES LIK
GOLDEN E THESE,
-HAIRED, IS A
ACTION CHISELED
STAR SUP -BODIED
RELEVAN POSED T
T? L O BE...
HOW C H AUREN LARSON D
RIS HEM ISCOVER
OUT THE SWORT S
OLD MAC H THREW
BECAME H O PLAYBO
A NEW K OK AND
IND OF L
EADING
MAN

ALASDA
I
McLELLA R
N

JON
TIETZ

THE PRIVATE LIVES of action stars tend to disappoint,
action-wise. The superhero costume is replaced by swim
trunks and flip-flops. The mighty hammer is abandoned
for the beer. But when the stakes get truly high, Chris
Hemsworth can unleash the Thor within.
Such was the scenario on field day recently at his
daughter’s school, as Hemsworth and a slew of other
fathers prepared for the “dads race.” They assembled like
young maidens ready to catch the bouquet at a wedding—
all feigning disinterest, all ready to kill for victory.
The other dads had dressed to move, but Hemsworth
was wearing jeans and boots. There was a big crowd.
Hours before, having watched his daughter’s events—the
egg-and-spoon race, the 100-meter and the 200-meter
dash—he o≠ered his 6-year-old some fatherly wisdom:
“I was like, ‘It’s great, honey. It’s not about winning.’ ”
But that advice was trash, he realized. Life is about
winning, and he must. For his daughter’s sake. At the
line, Hemsworth’s heart was pounding. He got a bad
start, pulled it together—his Thor muscles snapping to
attention. The finish drew nearer until, suddenly, he
was the champion.
“There was just this wave of nirvana,” Hemsworth
recalls. “I turn around, and I go, ‘Where’s my daughter?
Where is she?’ And she’s like, ‘Dad, did you win?’ And
I’m like, ‘Did I win? You didn’t see it?!’ They gave me a
sticker. A first-place sticker.”
About These
Clothes
Hemsworth called his wife, the actress Elsa Pataky.
Like her daughter, Pataky missed the race. She had been
shooting that day, but she heard all about the Running
of the Dads—repeatedly. “I’ve never seen him so excited,
not even about getting a big job,” Pataky says with a
laugh. “It was probably one of the best things that has
happened to him in his life, which is funny, right? All
the things he has achieved.”
The next day, Hemsworth had to hop a plane and fly
to London to shoot his next film. He’d been home in
Byron Bay, Australia, for a few months, and his daugh-
ter was distraught that he was leaving. “She’s normally
like, ‘Yeah, see you, Daddy. Cool.’ She was like, ‘Papa!
←←
Papa! Papa!’ She doesn’t always call me Papa, either.”
OPENING PAGES Hemsworth found the shirt he had been wearing the
sweater $1,150 day before, with the first-place sticker still stuck on it,
Gucci and o≠ered it to her. “I wasn’t, like, sobbing, but…” But
eyeglasses $280 it shattered him.
Moscot
An actor treasuring his family isn’t especially unusual.
watch
(throughout)
But a globally famous star who is as earnest about those
$8,700 feelings in public as he is in private, well, that’s not the
TAG Heuer sort of action star that Hollywood has traditionally pro-
ring duced. Hemsworth’s openness and warmth when he talks
(throughout),
his own about his family is not lost on fans—particularly female
fans, who don’t often hear famous men speaking candidly
→
about the di∞culties of juggling a demanding career with
THIS PAGE
child-rearing. “Obviously women are asked all the time,
coat $1,495
Boss ‘How do you balance it?’ Men are never asked that,” Tessa
sweater $698 Thompson, his co-star in the most recent Thor movie,
Michael Kors Thor: Ragnarok, and in the forthcoming Men in Black
pants $1,520 film, tells me. Hemsworth’s frankness about his fatherly
Tom Ford priorities is endearing, she says, because it’s e≠ortless.
“It’s so lovable, because it’s really honest.”
Back when Hemsworth was first starting out in
Hollywood, it was better to be a rebel than a dad. He had
appeared for a few years in the Australian soap opera Home
and Away—the launchpad that also produced Naomi Watts
and Heath Ledger—and arrived in America in 2007, during
what might be described as a golden age of the Hollywood
bad boy. It was an era when a sex tape or a drug problem
was easily excused with a wink, or even rewarded. Back
then, the path to stardom seemed clear enough.
jeans and boots, hoodies and
big ol’ aviators. He’s an expert
practitioner of low-key, fuck-off-
paparazzi celebrity style. So we
Luckily for mega-famous dudes swapped out his understated off-
like Chris Hemsworth, there’s duty kit with sumptuous sweaters,
a subtle side to our favorite fall elegant tees, and oversize
designer gear. While Thor spends outerwear. It’s a clean, sharp
most of his time at Byron Bay look that’ll work for you, too—but
in board shorts, he’s gotta put unless you’ve got the physique
on clothes like the rest of us on of a sledgehammer-wielding Norse
occasion, and when he does god, we recommend wearing a
he opts for covert over cool—slim shirt underneath your camel coat.
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 1 1
1 1 2 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
 “I remember trying to be Colin Farrell. Thinking,
‘People love the bad boy.’ Going out and being sort of
reckless. But no one cared,” Hemsworth recalls. “There
wasn’t the presence of paparazzi, nor the presence of
social media, nor the immediacy of all these platforms.”
He’s quick to clarify that he wasn’t doing anything bad
bad in his salad days—“just, like, being drunk.”
Mild as they were, those days were fleeting. Hemsworth
and Pataky met in Los Angeles in 2010. “He was a very
mature person for his age,” recalls Pataky. “I could totally
feel that he loved kids. And it’s something that just melts
you, as a woman.” They married fairly quickly. It was a
potentially radical move at the time: There was a sense
then that a rising star should be single, a line of thinking
that may have doomed Leonardo DiCaprio to a lifetime
trapped in a Pussy Posse vortex. Once, a publicist—not
his—advised Hemsworth not to let people know too much
about his personal life. “ ‘The more they know about you,
the harder it is for people to believe your character,’ ”
he remembers the publicist telling him. “They want to
believe the fantasy that that could be them on the screen
in that situation, doing whatever.”
Then, as now, Hemsworth looked like the archetypal
leading man—he had the blue eyes, the eternal tan, the
smirk, and muscles nobody had ever seen before. And he
got the archetypal leading-man roles. His breakthrough
big-screen job was his 2011 turn as a hammer-wielding
Norse god: the self-serious,
unflappably macho Thor. From
← which followed a string of simi-
shirt $1,695 larly one-dimensional roles. His
turtleneck
$1,095 trajectory seemed ordained.
Ralph Lauren But to those who knew him
pants $1,000 well, this all seemed a little
Dior Men odd. “It was quite jarring for
belt $248 my family and friends when I
John Varvatos
was on-screen doing a straight,
heroic, sort of overly masculine
kind of thing,” Hemsworth says.
More recently, filmgoers have finally gotten to see
what he is. Having done his time in hunk purgatory,
Hemsworth has lately re-emerged as an actor eager to
skewer the old stereotypes. He tested those waters as a
bimbo secretary in 2016’s female-led Ghostbusters. And
last year, in the third installment of the Thor franchise,
he played a re-invented version of his old macho char-
acter—a hero suddenly less sure of himself, gleefully
emasculated at the hands of co-star Tessa Thompson.
Hemsworth and director Taika Waititi wanted to create a
Thor who could show more vulnerability—they had more
Kurt Russell in mind than Clint Eastwood. “Not to say that
Kurt Russell has ever been ‘less masculine’ than contem-
porary heroes,” Waititi explains. “[His characters were]
just more flawed than contemporary heroes.”
This fall Hemsworth stars in the artsy crime thriller
Bad Times at the El Royale—a film that excited him for
the same reasons the last Thor movie did: It didn’t feel
safe or entirely conventional. As thrillers go, Bad Times
is quite fun, like a demented Clue board. “It’s got a kind
of Tarantino energy to it,” Hemsworth says. “It’s a thriller
and a drama, but there’s some humorous moments—in
an insane way. I just want to be surprised. I have a real
fear of being bored.”
It’s convenient for Hemsworth that audiences have
grown bored of flawless, archetypal masculinity at the

S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 1 3
same time he has. And lucky for him, he’s had more incline, a punishing slant that goes up and up over the
to o≠er, anyway. Filmgoers now want characters who next ten minutes. For his current role in Men in Black, he
feel human and fallible on-screen. They want to con- doesn’t need to be Thor-fit, just normal Hemsworth-fit,
nect with what’s real and relatable o≠screen, too. a specification that’s still very daunting. Nearby, the
The golden age of the bad boy, you might say, has given weights look on nervously. The room fills with manly
way to something else—a new epoch of the hot dad, a grunting. The women, on the ellipticals now, glance over
species of cultural figure that Hemsworth embodies every so often, more annoyed than anything else.
genuinely and e≠ortlessly. Hemsworth barely slept the night before. He tells me
this while incongruously punching the air a few times,
then whipping around to walk backward. Soon he’s on
↓
NO MATTER HOW ENLIGHTENED your attitude toward to bear crawls—pawing across the floor and looking, in
jacket $2,495
leading man–dom, Hollywood is Hollywood: It helps still Emporio Armani this tiny space, even more massive than usual. He can
to look the part of the stereotypical star. And contrary to sweater $1,350
traverse the entire room in two bear crawls and one frog
my assumptions about Hemsworth and about those hail- Saint Laurent jump, and he’s surprisingly light-footed. “You have to
ing from Australia—where, move like a kid moves!” he
it seems, everyone looks says instructively.
like they just crawled out of For Hemsworth, a 30-min-
an Abercrombie catalog—it ute circuit in his hotel is not
takes a lot of hard work to ideal. He’d rather be on a
look like Chris Hemsworth. surfboard. He favors fitness
Today that hard work for function versus for aes-
must take place in a hotel thetics. “That’s the way
gym in London’s Southwark we grew up,” he explains.
neighborhood. Though this Recently, Hemsworth’s
one can barely call itself brother Liam Instagrammed
a gym. It’s a single room, a photo of their parents,
small and poorly appointed. Leonie and Craig. His father,
The only other people here Craig, shirtless in the photo,
are a pair of women doing became an instant Internet
gentle cardio by the win- sensation. He is the patron
dows. And then Hemsworth saint of hot dads. There is
and his trainer arrive, dis- no evidence that Craig is
turbing any peace that a not Chris, aged 10 years—
claustrophobic little hotel 15, max—with some light
gym can contain. makeup. But his dad’s phy-
Hemsworth has brought sique, Hemsworth tells me,
to London a mini entourage is naturally Aussie-built,
of friends turned employ- not gym-groomed. “He’s
ees—vital links, it seems, to always been really ath-
home. There’s his trainer, letic, but I don’t think he’s
Luke Zocchi, who projects ever lifted weights in his
overwhelming goodwill even life. It’s a functional sort of
when he’s screaming about strength,” Hemsworth says.
squats. And there’s Aaron “We had maybe a few acres
Grist, Hemsworth’s assistant. of property, and we lived in
Zocchi used to be an electri- a national forest, and he was
cian, and Grist once worked always trimming trees and
as a glazier, but now they roll cutting paths in case there
with Hemsworth full-time. was a bushfire.”
Zocchi and Grist seem to Hemsworth and his broth-
tether him to his proto-self. ers, Luke and Liam, grew up
They do this by merrily mock- between Melbourne and an
ing him. When Hemsworth wonders aloud who is staying Aboriginal community in the bush. Craig worked as a social
in the hotel’s penthouse, Zocchi quickly jumps in: “Guess worker, Leonie as an English teacher. Hemsworth started
you aren’t as famous as you thought, heh?” acting after high school, in 2002, and scored a role on
They’ve all known one another since they were “this Home and Away two years later. In his mind, he had grad-
big,” and when they walk together—a sun-kissed, chiseled uated from one idyllic life to another. “I look back at that
trio—they look like a boy band without the angst. Even if time, and I go, ‘Man, you were 19 years old, you were living
Hemsworth weren’t extremely famous, they would stand on the northern beaches of Sydney,’ ” Hemsworth recalls.
out among Londoners, who see the sun three times a year → “I was getting paid 3,000 bucks a week, which was a lot
and default to an expression of tight-lipped despair. coat $2,705 of money where I’d come from. I was surfing in the mid-
Dries Van Noten
When he talks to non-Australians, Hemsworth reins in dle of the day on set if I had a break, I was experiencing
swim shorts $305
his accent, but when he and Zocchi get going, it’s in a loud Stella McCartney fame, I was a young single guy.” He wonders now why he
patois of “innits” and “mates.” Zocchi starts him o≠ on the socks $29
spent that time panicking about his career. “Why didn’t
treadmill, where Hemsworth begins at an eye-widening Pantherella you enjoy that? We can wish years by saying, ‘Ah, when I

1 1 4 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
get here it’ll be okay. When I get here it’ll be okay.’ We just Hemsworth grunting and straining and putting in way
keep moving that bar until we get to that place.” more e≠ort than they had mustered. Working out in the
Hemsworth saw life as a series of ladder rungs leading same room as Thor for too long is bad for morale.
to stardom, and he couldn’t stop climbing. Even if the
climb felt stressful. Hemsworth still remembers an early
television appearance on an episode of The Saddle Club, FOR A MAN OF Thor-like proportions—he’s six feet four—
a Canadian-Australian co-production, in 2003: “I came Hemsworth can contort himself into some pretty
in as the young vet, and I remember I was so nervous. childlike positions. Even in a fancy restaurant. ←
And you can see, if you look it up on the Internet, my Slumped across the table from me, he’s currently got necklace, his own
voice is so high, so tight. I’m, like, pink, red, flushed face, his right leg folded up almost to his chest, knee level
↓
having a proper panic attack on-screen.” Hemsworth was with his chin, his giant desert boot planted firmly tank top $40
certain that the flop had doomed his career, what with on the leather seat. At one point, the server, intent on (for pack
of three)
the huge reach of the show and all. “I remember being placing a napkin in Hemsworth’s lap, can discern no obvi- Calvin Klein
close to tears, talking to my mum about it and being like, ous lap. Flummoxed, he drapes the linen on the closest Underwear
‘The show gets shown in Canada, so they’re gonna see it, thigh and hurries o≠. (continued on page 165) necklace, his own
and Canada is close to America, so
Hollywood is gonna see it, and I’m
never gonna work again.’ That was
my second job—no one gives a shit.”
That newfound recognition—
that mistakes aren’t always fatal
and first impressions aren’t always
final—was useful as Hemsworth
helped push the Thor trilogy for-
ward in Thor: Ragnarok. “The first
one is good, the second one is meh,”
Hemsworth says. “What masculin-
ity was, the classic archetype—it just
all starts to feel very familiar. I was
so aware that we were right on the
edge.” Where in the first two films he
played his hero character straight,
in the third iteration he injected
more humanity and created a char-
acter truer to his own spirit.
Confident though he may have
become on set, Hemsworth is, right
now, very apprehensive in the hotel
gym. See, he needs a mat. The women
have a mat, but he really doesn’t
want to go over and ask them where
they found it. For a hard-to-mistake
movie star, he’s a master at politely
managing civilian attention, but it
goes against his better judgment to
seek it out. So he stalks the gym, look-
ing for a secret mat stash. He tugs on
a mirror that looks like it might be
a cabinet. Nothing. He resigns him-
self and approaches the women, now
splayed out on the floor.
As Hemsworth appears above
them, they freeze. One of the women,
on her back on the mat, chooses to
play dead. She stares up as he asks
about the mat situation, and she
does not move until her friend
reports that there are no more mats.
Hemsworth mutters a defeated “ah”
and quickly marches away to dis-
courage further discussion.
The women linger for a few
minutes more and then abandon
their mat and quit the room—but
not before one last long look at

S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 1 7
1 1 8 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
 THE INSIDE STORY
OF HOW THE POISONING
OF A RUSSIAN DOUBLE
AGENT BECAME THE
LATEST—AND MOST
TERRIFYING—FRONT
IN VLADIMIR PUTIN’S
WAR WITH THE WEST

TOM LAMONT
 1:
FORTHWITH
AS A RUSSIAN DOUBLE AGENT working
for the British, he’d been code-named
“Forthwith”—quickly—but this afternoon the
poison in Sergei Skripal’s system went unhur-
ried, making its way around his body over a
period of hours. Skripal was 66, comfortably
heavy in retirement, an ex-colonel who’d
been cast out of the intelligence services in
Russia and now lived in exile in the English
city of Salisbury. Neighbors knew the place
as “Smalls-bury” and said that nothing too
dramatic ever happened here, which would
stay true for another couple of hours yet.
This was March 4, 2018, a Sunday of sun-
backed clouds, the air crisp and glad the way
it gets in southwest England after the lifting
of snow. A day earlier Yulia Skripal, Sergei’s
33-year-old daughter, who visited Salisbury
regularly, had flown in from Moscow. The
poison had gotten into Yulia that morning,
too, but father and daughter were still unwit-
ting and felt well enough early on Sunday
afternoon to plan an outing. Sergei owned
a cherry red BMW and they drove into town
for a drink in a riverside pub. Maybe they
would have a meal together. An ancient
cathedral, south of the city center, chimed
the half hour: 1:30 p.m. This poison wanted
two hours more.
Salisbury is a city of spires and rusted
weather vanes, a place that is particular
about time, the dates of things stamped on
buildings and everywhere clocks, clocks, on
belfries and over bookshops. Across the water
from where the Skripals parked their car, a
sundial had been engraved with the adage:
Time speeds up until it is nothing, therefore
use it before it is gone. At the pub, Sergei and
Yulia had a quick drink. When father and
daughter were together, they sometimes
posed for pictures, raising toasts. The pub
was a converted mill that had a display of
photographs on the wall, one of these a
close-up of a pocket watch, its crystal broken,
hands frozen at what appeared to be 1:35 p.m.
Next they went to an Italian restaurant to
eat. An hour passed. Finally, walking back to
their car at around 3:30 p.m., the Skripals
began to feel truly unwell and had to put them-
selves down on a bench, where they drifted in
1 2 0 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
and out of consciousness, slumped over and
gesturing strangely. Passersby assumed they
were high. At a quarter to four, the cathedral
clock sounded again. The Skripals’ pupils had
shrunk, and they were sweating. They were
foaming at the mouth. An o≠-duty nurse was
the first to attend them, and a small crowd
gathered. At 4:15 p.m., an ambulance was
called, come quickly, forthwith.
2: THE NEW KID
DOCTORS AT SALISBURY District Hospital
guessed that this was opioids, that the
Skripals had overdosed. They were taken to
the intensive-care ward and put on breath-
ing support. Shortly before sunrise on
March 5, doctors received new information
from London: that Sergei Skripal was not
just any patient; he was an old, blown spy.
Police arrived at the hospital to watch over
the critical pair.
Even in those early hours of what would
become a worldwide crisis, “the gravity of
this,” in the words of a senior source in the
British government I spoke with, had dawned
quickly. By March 6, national counter-
terrorism police formally took over the
investigation, an initial guardedness about
what exactly might have overwhelmed the
Skripals (“an unknown substance”) quickly
giving way to a blunter charge: “attempted
murder by the administration of a nerve
agent.” Speaking in Parliament two days
later, the home secretary said that any such
attack would be “a brazen and reckless act
[and] people are right to want to know who
to hold to account.” But she asked that her
peers restrain themselves from speculating
about the culprits—restraint that lasted a few
minutes before a backbench minister stood
up and said that this was surely an act by the
Russian state: “Who else?”
INVESTIGATORS IN HAZMAT SUITS TRY TO CONTAIN ANY POISON
LINGERING ON THE BENCH WHERE THE SKRIPALS WERE DISCOVERED.
According to a report released by the
Russian embassy, foreign secretary Boris
Johnson summoned Alexander Yakovenko,
the Russian ambassador to the UK, on March
12. Sta≠ at the Russian Embassy later revealed
what Johnson had told Yakovenko, “that
according to the UK assessment, it was highly
likely that Russia was responsible for the
attack.” (The Kremlin has denied involvement
in the “tragic situation.”) A senior source in the
British government outlined for me the think-
ing in London that first week: “When you look
around the world, there are very few countries
that could technically do this. Iran. China.
North Korea, conceivably? But they don’t nec-
essarily have the means or the motives, and
we’ve never had the intel they’ve even tried.”
In figuring out where to cast blame, many
found the who-else rationale attractive.
Sergei Skripal had once been a member of the
GRU, the Russian military-intelligence unit
now best known for hacking into the serv-
ers of the Democratic National Committee,
before he was caught selling secrets to the
British, in 2004, and imprisoned. But two
obvious points argued against Russia’s
involvement: First, Skripal had been par-
doned by Moscow for his crimes, part of the
swap deal that got him out of a wintry prison
and over to Salisbury to begin with. And, sec-
ond, there was an internationally adhered-to
rule of espionage that forbade the murder
of re-settled spies. Kill them, after all, and it
risked future swaps.
After assembling intelligence reports they
believed put culpability for the Skripal hit
beyond reasonable doubt, the British went
busily around Europe and America, persuad-
ing allies to join them in sanctioning Russia.
President Trump was so convinced by what he
learned that he somehow overcame his curi-
ous reluctance to find fault in the Kremlin’s
 actions—even the most senior members
of the British government were surprised
by this, I was told. The president signed o≠
on the expulsion of 60 Russian diplomats,
after which Russia expelled 60 Americans
in reply. London and Moscow swap-expelled
46 of their people. Diplomatic sta≠s thinned
everywhere: at NATO headquarters, around
Scandinavia, in Australia.
Blood samples from the Skripals were
sent to the UK’s main chemical-weapons
research facility, a campus not far from
Salisbury known as Porton Down. Chemists
detected the presence of one of a family of
Soviet-born nerve agents, first developed in
the 1980s and known informally in Russian
as novichoks—“the new kids on the block.”
These novichoks, which could be deployed
in liquid form and absorbed through the
skin, work their ruin on a body by stop-
ping the normal transmission of messages
between the nerves and the muscles. Light-
headedness turns to grogginess, to strained
breathing and collapse.
Up until March, there’d been few docu-
mented human exposures to novichoks, but
back in the 1980s, Andrei Zheleznyakov, a
lab engineer in Moscow whose job it was to
test the toxicity of this nascent weapon for
the Soviet military, inadvertently breathed
some in. He later said that straight away he
felt his brain had emptied. Colors swam.
Before Zheleznyakov lost consciousness, he
was taken for a walk out in Moscow, where
he experienced a hallucination in which a
nearby cathedral began to glow and crumble
apart. The military-research program that
Zheleznyakov was a part of was so secretive
that when he was eventually taken to the hos-
pital, doctors were told nothing of the novi-
chok, only that he’d had a bad meal.
The firm conclusion of Porton Down’s
scientists, that it was a novichok deployed
in Salisbury, was later ratified by the
Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical
Weapons (OPCW), a 193-state group run out
of The Hague, after it sent out samples of its
own to be checked in the labs of neutral coun-
tries. The evidence was there in its chemical
structure: This was a novichok—the new kid
in middle age.
On March 14, the U.N. Security Council
held a special meeting to discuss the attack,
THESE PAGES: SEE ADDITIONAL CREDITS.
and it was there that the Russian ambassa-
dor asked the lingering question: But why?
What motive should the Russian state have
to eliminate a retired, redundant spy, “who
after his prosecution, sentencing, prison
term, pardon, and handover to the British
authorities no longer posed any kind of
threat to my country?” Everybody in the
West seemed to have a theory. That the
Skripal hit was meant to sow confusion and
panic abroad or, no, at home in Russia. That
this was really about geopolitics, some sort
of coded message about the use of chemical
weapons in Syria. That it was about domestic
politics, closely timed and meant to rouse
support for the incumbent regime ahead of
Russia’s elections that month.
Andrew Wood, a former British ambas-
sador to Russia, told me that “guessing, I
would say they would have expected this to
be a relatively swift assassination, quickly
forgotten, but that the method used would
stick in the mind of people back home....
Persuading other Russians, in other sys-
tems, to be careful? That’s a valuable aim.”
A well-informed source a∞liated with the
OPCW, not British or Russian, told me they
felt the incident must be about the novichok
itself—a lid-lifting on this still mysterious
weapon, something like a product unveiling
after its 30-some years in development.
What connected these theories was the
idea that Sergei Skripal was secondary—
collateral damage in his own attempted mur-
der. After all, the reasoning went, he was a
spy out to pasture, living obscurely in old
England. What could he have done to bring
assassins to Salisbury?
THEY COLLAPSED ON A BENCH AND
BEGAN GESTURING STRANGELY. THEIR PUPILS
HAD SHRUNK, AND THEY WERE SWEATING.
THEY WERE FOAMING AT THE MOUTH.
PASSERSBY ASSUMED THEY WERE HIGH.
3: TOWER AND FURNACE
T H E Y C A L L E D I T P R Y Z H K I S V Y S H K I —the
tower jump—and when Sergei Skripal was a
recruit into the airborne division of the Soviet
army, it was the most dreaded part of basic
training. He was in his early 20s, an engineer-
ing graduate who’d grown up on the western
tip of the Soviet Union, near the Baltic Sea. He
was squarely handsome, boxer-nosed, neces-
sarily gutsy. When it was your turn to tower-
jump, you strapped on an open parachute
and went to the edge of a platform, 80 feet
up. You were taught to ignore every last
nerve-ending warning, that this was insane,
like readying to step o≠ the roof of a building.
Then you stepped o≠. One airborne recruit
told me that no subsequent leap from a plane,
no later reckless life risk, ever felt as chancy
as that first fucking tower jump.
THE FIRST TWO VICTIMS:
SERGEI AND YULIA SKRIPAL.
It emboldened you. And they liked you to
be bold if you were to ultimately graduate, as
Skripal did, into the GRU. Vladimir Rezun,
a defector from this secretive agency, later
described in a book of memoirs what initi-
ates were told on arrival at boot camp: that it
was not compulsory to join; it was only com-
pulsory to stay, the one way out “through the
chimney of the crematorium.” After which,
for good measure, Rezun was shown a film of
a bound and writhing GRU traitor being fed
feetfirst into a furnace.
In 1985, after five years of GRU training,
Skripal was posted to the island of Malta.
He had with him his wife, Liudmila, and
their two young children, Alexander and
Yulia. Notionally, Skripal had a role to play
at the embassy in Malta, “cultural and sports
attaché,” which many years later made
another former GRU trainee chuckle appre-
ciatively. “That would be the cover,” said Boris
Volodarsky, a Russian-intelligence historian
who many years ago relocated to the West
after completing his own GRU training. He
had since become a leading expert on promi-
nent exiled Russians and their habit of dying
in unusual ways on foreign soil.
Upon graduation, Volodarsky explained to
me, trained-up GRU agents were often given
an international posting under diplomatic
cover, or they became “illegals,” not o∞cially
recognized by the Russian government, who
could do murkier work abroad. Skripal had
diplomatic cover, and he rose in this capacity
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 2 1
to become the director of the department of
personnel. “Skripal was an H.R. guy within
the GRU. And knowing the names of oper-
atives? That’s seen as the crown jewels,” a
senior source in the British government told
me. Skripal was posted in Spain when, in
1995, he started working with British intel-
ligence. He was o≠ered cash in return for
state secrets, later testifying to a Moscow
court that “every time I met with members of
British intelligence, they paid me a fee in hard
currency,” about $100,000 in total. Skripal
stayed in contact with his British handlers
for nine years, through his return to Moscow
and his elevation to colonel, before he was
exposed and arrested.
His name had allegedly been passed
on by another spy in the system. Tried in
2006, at age 55, Skripal was stripped of his
rank and sentenced to 13 years, a relatively
short term that, the judge said, took into
account Skripal’s cooperation with investi-
gators. Most of his term would be served in
Mordovia, in a miserable network of barbed-
wire compounds in the flatlands southeast of
Moscow. Thirty-below temperatures. Guards
with Alsatians. Even so, this wasn’t a furnace,
and to Skripal’s old colleagues in the GRU,
those 13 years might have looked light.
He was out early, too, in 2010—a fluky
beneficiary of the discovery of the so-called
Illegals Program, an operation that had
placed several Russians undercover on the
East Coast of the United States. A spy swap
was arranged between Russia and the West,
mostly managed by the CIA. I was told by
Robert Hannigan, who until last year was
head of the UK intelligence hub GCHQ, that
the British decided to pluck out Skripal not for
intel (after several years in prison, he didn’t
have much to o≠er) but instead out of a sense
of obligation: “A duty of care to people who’ve
risked an awful lot and paid a high price.”
When, in the summer of 2010, Skripal
was flown to Vienna for the exchange, Boris
Volodarsky, the intelligence historian, was
there at the airport to watch a stage-managed
swap for the media. “Quite a crowd,”
Volodarsky recalled, “to watch a group of
poorly dressed people switch planes.” Skripal
was put on the same Boeing that the East
Coast illegals had just left, which then took
o≠ and flew west. Quickly he was out of the
“FRANKLY,” A FORMER BRITISH-INTELLIGENCE
CHIEF SAID, “YOU’RE NOT GOING TO HIDE
MUCH FROM RUSSIAN INTELLIGENCE IF THEY’RE
KEEN TO FIND SOMEONE.”
public eye, living in Salisbury with Liudmila.
The British government managed their secu-
rity and gave Skripal a pension. In 2011 he
bought a semidetached home—No. 47—on
a drowsy cul-de-sac called Christie Miller
Road. A real estate agent who oversaw the
deal showed me the sales brochure: power
shower, heated towel rail, all of it a long way
from Mordovia and the weekly wash in a
communal hut.
The Skripals hung a lucky horseshoe on
their front door, though if this was a time
of good fortune for them, it did not last.
Liudmila died of cancer in 2012. Their son,
Alexander, who’d grown to be a bearish and
amiable man like his father, died young in
2017. Both were interred at a cemetery in
Salisbury. Now in his 60s, Skripal cared for
his cat, which he told people took instruction
in Russian, and joined a social club where
by unbendable house rule the rear-room TV
always showed the horse races. Yulia spent
most of her time in Moscow but traveled
frequently to England to visit her father.
No great care was taken to hide the location
of the Skripal family home, and obviously
MI5’s assessment of the threat to Sergei in
his retirement was low, because for $4 the
website of the Land Registry would reveal
his name and address. “Frankly,” Robert
Hannigan told me, “you’re not going to hide
much from Russian intelligence if they’re
keen to find someone, particularly if that
person’s still in touch with family back home.”
Security-camera footage of Yulia Skripal’s
movements through the Moscow airport on
March 3, a day before the poisoning, showed
a slender woman with an erect bearing,
shu±ing through check-in with other trav-
elers. A fold of auburn hair fell over her pale
face. That morning Yulia shared a video
on social media, a gyrating dog alongside
the caption: Dance like no one is watching.
According to discoveries by British intel-
ligence, later made public in a submission
to NATO, “cyber specialists” working for the
GRU had been snooping in Yulia’s e-mails as
far back as 2013. Furthermore, according to a
person with knowledge of the investigation,
Sergei’s e-mails were also under surveillance
during that period. “They would have known
Yulia was coming,” a senior government
source told me.
4 : A CITY ON LOCKDOWN
L I K E I N K , liquid novichok can transfer
by contact from surface to surface, fainter
each time; it is colorless, odorless, and dete-
riorates slowly. Shortly after the Skripals
arrived at the hospital, a local cop, Nick
Bailey, came into contact with the poison
and had to be admitted for treatment as
well. Later I would learn that this particular
novichok had most likely never been tested
on humans. It all meant that in Salisbury,
authorities were now trying to cope with
an invisible, spreadable, untraceable poi-
son that might be smeared anywhere the
Skripals had been on March 4.
When I first arrived in the city, I visited
the riverside pub where the Skripals had
had a drink before their collapse, press-
ing my face to its plate-glass door as inves-
tigators slow-motioned around inside
wearing hazmat suits. Three hours later, a
public-health bulletin went out, advising any-
one who’d been to the pub to disinfect their
phones, wash their clothes, and so on.
The bench where the Skripals had been
overcome was enclosed by ribbons of don’t-
cross tape. Brightly colored forensic tents
popped up like spring flowers. Reporters
skulked, and the spook-watchers among them
noticed the movements of unmarked cars
known to be favored by British intelligence.
Over on Christie Miller Road, Skripal’s
property had been cordoned o≠, so that
neighbors had to wave a special pass at police
to come and go. I walked a perimeter around
No. 47, as close as possible, in the company of
Boris Volodarsky, the intelligence historian
and former GRU man, who was spending the
day with me in Salisbury. A suited and cardi-
ganed 63-year-old, his face partially obscured
by a brushy mustache and aviator sunglasses,
Volodarsky was about the most conspicuous
man in town that afternoon. But he had no
reason to steal around in the shadows, not
anymore, and instead he turned an opera-
tional eye on the scene, trying to identify the
shadows that might’ve been useful to others.
This operation would’ve called for a large
team, Volodarsky said—Russian illegals, he
thought, arriving in the country over the
course of weeks to study the local minutiae:
“When lights were switched on and o≠, did
neighbors look out their windows?” Crucial
to any such plan, Volodarsky said, would be
settling on a where—someplace they could
be certain Sergei Skripal would be—and a
when. The application of this poison would
have been skilled work, technically complex.
“[The nerve agent] will burn through nor-
mal hazmat suits,” a senior source from the
UK government told me. “You need time and
you need cover.”
From Christie Miller Road, we drove two
miles to a cemetery in Salisbury, a wooded
place home to wild ring-necked pheasant,

POLICE SHUT DOWN SALISBURY CITY CENTER AFTER THE NERVE
AGENT POISONED TWO NEW VICTIMS.
deer that liked to eat the graveside roses,
and for the time being several police cars.
Investigators believed that on the morning of
their poisoning, Sergei and Yulia had come to
this cemetery to visit the graves of Liudmila
and Alexander. Police, still guarding the site,
took our names and let us through, and when
Volodarsky was close enough to Alexander
Skripal’s headstone, he read the inscribed
dates. He pointed out that March 1 would
have been Alexander’s 44th birthday.
It felt a fair assumption that this was why
Yulia had arranged to visit that particular
weekend. (A when.) And if Yulia was due,
Sergei would surely be in Salisbury to bring
her back to his home. (A where.) According to
the UK’s national-security adviser, the highest
concentration of novichok was detected on
the handle of No. 47’s front door. A senior gov-
ernment source later confirmed for me that
it was the outward-facing handle, and that
Sergei and Yulia had each taken in the poison
through the palms of their hands. Alistair Hay,
a chemical-weapons expert, explained that
because of the thickness of the epidermis layer
here, “uptake through the palm is some 20 to
25 times less e∞cient [i.e., slower] than, say,
application on the cheek.” Time—hours, poten-
tially—for any assassins to flee or melt away.
At the cemetery, Volodarsky was looming
over Alexander’s headstone when a young
policeman approached and said uncer-
tainly, “Obviously you know not to touch it?”
Volodarsky thanked him—but yeah, he knew
not to touch.
Volodarsky had left the Soviet Union in
the late 1980s, after which he re-settled in
Austria and began writing spy exposés for
Western publications. Alex Goldfarb, a well-
known Russian dissident, once described
Volodarsky as the only ex–agency man “with
whom it is certainly safe to drink tea”—a
macabre reference to their mutual acquain-
tance, Alexander Litvinenko, a journalist and
sometime consultant for British intelligence
who was murdered in London after drinking
from a teacup laced with radioactive poison.
Volodarsky attended Litvinenko’s funeral
in the winter of 2006.
Many well-connected people I spoke
with about Skripal mentioned, unbidden,
Litvinenko’s ghost—a lingering guilt, inside
and outside the British establishment, that
his murder had not been properly faced up to.
Few in power doubted that Litvinenko’s was
a state-sponsored killing, but the diplomatic
response from the British government was
insubstantial. Oligarch money was splashing
through London at the time. Surface relations
with the Kremlin were okay. Shrug.
And no wonder, people said, that the
strange deaths continued. Since 2006, at
least a dozen UK residents with strong links
to Russia had died abruptly (heart attack,
fall, inexplicable collapse), after which
their deaths were unimaginatively written
o≠ by coroners as unsuspicious (suicide,
weak heart). Volodarsky knew many of the
deceased, including Boris Berezovsky, found
hanged in 2013; and Badri Patarkatsishvili,
discovered collapsed in 2008. In the weeks
following March 4, another acquaintance,
Nikolai Glushkov, had been found dead at his
home in South London, the cause of death
given as compression to the neck.
On the road out of Salisbury, there were
more wild pheasant, like in the cemetery,
only these had roamed in front of powerful
cars and been flattened. Volodarsky and I
drove back to London, talking all the way of
the men he had known and the means of their
sudden ends. “Russia is orientated to elimi-
nate enemies,” he said. “And not foreigners,
primarily, by the way. It’s Russians who’ve
left.” He said he believed he’d once been tar-
geted himself—a contact he didn’t fully trust,
some substance slipped into his co≠ee. His
wife told me he was “white as paper” when
he came home that day, and had curled up on
her lap like an animal.
Volodarsky said there was a part of him,
the GRU-trained part, that felt disgust at his
carelessness in drinking that co≠ee. Then
a sort of fatalism came down. “You think
to yourself, it’s either a well-done job or a
badly done job. If it’s one, you’ll die. If it’s the
other, you’ll survive.”
5: THE POISON SPREADS
A T T H E H O S P I T A L , Sergei and Yulia were fed
drugs intended to help their systems re-create
the enzymes disrupted by novichok. At first
the doctors treating them had little sincere
hope for their survival. Then, after seeing
signs of slow improvement, they began to
scale the Skripals’ sedation back.
After 20 days, Yulia awoke. It was a di≠er-
ent world, “disorientating,” she would call
it. During the weeks she was unconscious,
the Kremlin had continued its efforts to sow
doubts about the investigation. At the U.N.,
a Russian envoy speculated that doctors in
Salisbury were manipulating the health of
the Skripals, and may even have injected
this rare poison themselves. For one 24-hour
cycle, attention was deflected toward Sergei
Skripal’s pets, a house cat and two guinea
pigs, unaccounted for since March 4. A
Russian statement was typical in its strange,
sidelong emphases: “To learn the fate of
the animals is important not only from the
point of view of Mr Skripal’s property rights,
but also as a matter of animal welfare....”
In fact the pets had been left uncared for
inside the quarantined No. 47. The guinea
pigs were eventually found dead, and the cat
had to be put down, distressed beyond rescue.
It was an extraordinary oversight by author-
ities at the scene.
Even so, the British pushed and con-
demned, demanding state-size confessions
of guilt that were never likely to come.
Anybody who recalled the shrinking reaction
to Litvinenko’s murder might have identified
overcompensation. Certainly there was an
irony in Teresa May, the prime minister, and
Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, leading
this Kremlin censure. In their previous jobs
as home secretary and mayor of London,
respectively, they’d done as much as anyone
to create a sense that powerful Russians had
a high threshold for misbehavior; that scores
might be settled and fortunes laundered in
the UK without too close a scrutiny, as long
as the rubles kept filtering through domestic
banks and the property market.
But this time a policeman had been struck
down. The target’s daughter, too. Cost to the
local police was heading toward $10 million,
and great chunks of an ancient English city
were behind quarantine lines. As nobody
could be certain where the poison had spread,
the people of Salisbury kept on playing a fright-
ening game of touch-and-see. That lamppost?
That trash can? (continued on page 166)
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 2 3
 FAIR QUESTION:
IS THE STEELERS’
ANTONIO
BROWN
THE BEST PLAYER
IN THE NFL?
UNFAIR QUESTION:
IS HE THE
FUNNEST?
LET’S ASK HIM

STEVEN
PAN

JIM
MOORE
ACCORDING TO ANTONIO BROWN, superstar wide receiver for the Pittsburgh is boomin’!” But a boomin’
Steelers, there are three crucial, incontrovertible ways to “drip.” ¶ “You business comes with all sorts of
added responsibilities. A Nike-
got to have the smile,” he tells me, launching into an extemporaneous free backed “Destroy Doubt” tour
lesson on personal swag. “The first time someone sees you smile, they gotta this summer. The cover of the
new Madden (and a 99 rating).
know you mean business.” Second, “you gotta have the right smell for the A cameo in the music video
drip. When the person first meets you, they’re going to get that fragrance.” for Drake’s “God’s Plan.” Those
(And what, pray tell, does Antonio Brown smell like? “Like Chanel!”) are great, sure, but so, too, is
the pressure that comes with it.
¶ “You have the fragrance drip and you got the smile drip. That’s two ways “Antonio Brown now gets
to drip. Then you gotta get the fit. You can’t have no basic fit. You gotta have a lot of notoriety, a lot of people
watching him,” says Antonio
that di≠erent fit. When you got that di≠erent fit, you ’bout to DRIP.” ¶ And Brown. “A lot of news. A lot of
does Antonio Brown have that drip, you ask? expectation.”
And though AB
“I got all the drip,” he assures thrives in the high-
me. The divine-drip trinity. stakes environment
Whatever the 30-year-old of big games, the
Brown has, it’s working. In 2010 expansive social-
he was the 195th pick in the media empire he’s
NFL draft, an undersized five- built—2.5 million
foot-ten receiver who could Instagram followers
maybe scrape out a career as and an additional
a punt returner. He was selected 1.2 million on
for the Pro Bowl in his second Twitter—ensures that
season, and he’s made five more the bright lights
since, hauling in impossible never really turn o≠.
sideline catches that have “I just feel that
earned him the nickname “Tony sometimes it can be
Toe Tap” for his ability to keep hard as a player—a
his feet in bounds. His hands targeted player in
have the gravitational pull the NFL—to really
of small black holes—of the 174 express yourself the
passes fired his way last season, right way. Anybody
he dropped three. He’s football’s could say anything,
best current player not named and that’s what the
Tom Brady, its most electric public perception will
playmaker since Terrell Owens, be. If ESPN said I was
and the most drippy since a bad guy, or I was a
Deion Sanders wore a white killer, then that’s what
bowler in a bubble bath people are gonna
for “Must Be the Money.” believe.… I’m a real
“Maaan, I’m having a hell person. You just can’t
of a good time. It’s a great time say anything about
to be alive,” he says. “It’s like, my name and then
if you’re not having fun, what show up thinking it’s
are you doing it for?” In a league cool. You gotta put
that is often hostile to outsize some respect on it.”
displays of personality, he plays Of course, there’s
with a rarely seen brio. You already plenty of
could reasonably argue that he’s respect for his name.
single-handedly brought the So much, in fact, that
touchdown celebration back you might wonder
from whatever dark place NFL’s what he could
tightly clenched executives possibly want next.
buried it—and for his troubles, “Being my best self
Brown has racked up tens ←← ↑ hit some explicit dance moves. every day, being a good leader.
of thousands of dollars in fines, sweater $598 turtleneck I told them that’s for Dad only.” Being a good father figure. Being
including some $35,000 for Michael Kors $2,160 Wrist slaps from the no-fun consistent with the kids, the
pants (part Louis
“sexually suggestive” twerking/ Vuitton league aside, ask Antonio family. Working on being a better
of suit)
hip-thrusting. This last fact $5,190 Brown how business is and his boyfriend...but it’s kind of hard
has caused some domestic Tom Ford smile will explode—that smile to keep it in my pants.”
distress: “Whatever [my kids] watch, his drip—and he’ll o≠er up his Such is the burden of all that
own
see me do, they do. They try to signature phrase: “Business drip.— C L AY S K I P P E R

1 2 6 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
FALL
COLORS
Humble earth tones?
Not really AB’s
thing. Here he shows
you how to embrace
the electric side
of autumn fashion,
starting with bold-
and-vibrant yellow.
→
coat $3,900
Calvin Klein
205W39NYC
pants $950
Bottega Veneta
boots $1,550
Calvin Klein
205W39NYC
underwear $28
Calvin Klein
Underwear
sunglasses $405
Tom Ford
necklace, his own
SNAP TO IT
Meet our new favorite
casual-sportswear
staple: the leather
western shirt. (Eight-
pack not included.)
←
shirt $1,780
Isabel Marant
pants $860
Salvatore
Ferragamo

DRESS
BLUES
Every guy’s 2018
tailoring playbook
should include a
brighter shade
of blue—and a fine-
gauge turtleneck
to wear with it.
→
blazer $1,140
Paul Smith
turtleneck $360
AMI Alexandre
Mattiussi
pants $600
Paul Smith
watch, his own
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 2 9
FLASH
SOME
GREEN
The season’s ultimate
statement coat comes,
unsurprisingly, in the
ultimate statement
color: money green.
←
coat $4,810
pants $810
Prada
jewelry, his own

TOTALLY
TONAL
Sticking with one color
can make you look like
a Power Ranger—
unless you do it with
fresh sneakers and an
oversize shearling-
collared coat.
←
all clothing
(prices upon
request)
Alexander
McQueen
grooming by
barry white for
barrywhitemens
grooming.com.
produced by
jeff at broder
productions

S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 3 1
1 3 2 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
 we’ve been hearing the buzz for a few years now: Houston may, sneakily,
be america’s best food city. but when we sent gq food critic brett martin to dive
into the scene, we realized that was selling the city way short

PAO L A + M U R R AY
FEW YEARS AGO, Matthew Odam was driving
from Austin, Texas, where he’s the restaurant
critic at the Austin American-Statesman,
to Houston, where he was raised. He had
a passenger: a friend of a friend who was
moving back to Houston after spending some
time kicking around the capital, working
music festivals, picking up shifts at a juice bar,
and so on. He was a young African-American
kid, maybe 21 but probably even younger, and
kind of a beautiful art freak. He wore a black
T-shirt with some kind of disembodied anime
head on it and a spacey expression. He told
Odam that he “dabbled in the occult.”
“At the time, having grown up in Houston
in kind of a bubble, I was pretty skeptical
about the city,” Odam says. So Odam asked
the kid in the black T-shirt why he’d be mov-
ing there from someplace as verifiably and
undeniably hip as Austin. The kid shrugged.
Austin, he said, was a white monoculture of
hipsters, yuppies, and techies. (Odam was
telling me this story in a Japanese-fusion spot
in East Austin, which made it easy to visualize
said culture.) In Houston, the kid said, things
were happening.
They were already driving through the city’s The Orange
periphery, which hardly meant they were near Show
their destination. Harris County, made up of be pimping their Instagram bemoaning how much less cool it
The temple of outsider
Houston and its suburbs, is 1,777 square miles, accounts; the whole scene would art was built over is now than at some point in the
which is bigger than Rhode Island. “Where do be born, oversubscribed, and several decades and past, usually, by coincidence, the
you want to get dropped o≠ ?” Odam asked. spent before it even happened. remains a must-visit. point at which they arrived.
The kid directed him to a spot nearby the He gripped the wheel and Houston, on the other hand,
park outside the main building of the Menil considered the unspeakable: “Was Houston has remained for many—including plenty
Collection, the art museum tucked into the cooler than Austin? Really?” of people who were raised there—a kind
Montrose neighborhood. “He told me all these of empty image. There’s NASA. There’s oil.
kids were down there, hanging out in the P E R H A P S I T ’ S U N S E E M L Y to begin with such There’s the Galleria—the 2.4-million-square-
park, dropping acid and making art,” Odam a comparison. Houston is America’s fourth- foot shopping mall that is practically its
recalls. “Later, he was heading downtown to largest city, an international metropolis of own city-state. Beyond that, not much: a
a club that was something out of Stefon. Like, great institutions and great wealth. It has sterile, sun-blasted, multi-laned landscape
‘a midget working professional sports teams; it has operas and of concrete, strip malls, and glass, the very
the door, transients ballets. Why compare it to a city that is half vision of air-conditioned American ano-
as bartenders...’ ” the size and a fraction as diverse? mie. When the cry went out, on T-shirts and
Watching the kid But Austin, as Lawrence Wright points out bumper stickers, to keep austin weird,
A Taste of
Houston Cool walk o≠ across the in his book God Save Texas, is the Texas city part of the implicit message was to keep
lawn, Odam con- that is permissible for those who live outside Austin not like Houston.
Opening pages,
sidered: In Austin, Texas: urbane, hip, progressive, and Texan Then, sometime over the past five or six
from left: a smoky
barbecue platter everybody he knew in all the romantic, right ways (swaggering, years, things started to change. As somebody
at The Pit Room; would be fighting to wild, western) without so many of the wrong who writes about food, I could hardly miss it.
the casual outdoor
get on the guest list ones (conservative, provincial, big-haired). With its mix of exploding immigrant commu-
vibes at the Axelrad
Beer Garden. for that club; the kids Also, Austin is unimpeachably cool—even if nities and ambitious, sophisticated variations
in the park would Austinites will spend half of any conversation on upscale dining, Houston had decisively

1 3 4 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
 in its youthfulness,
diversity, and explosive
growth, houston looks
like the american city of
the future.
shrugged o≠ its reputation as a city of steak
houses and chains to become increasingly
mentioned as one of the nation’s great restau-
rant cities. In these pages, David Chang called
Houston the next food capital of America. This
year, it earned two spots on my annual list of
Best New Restaurants, a distinction shared
only with New York City and Los Angeles.
And as stories like Odam’s showed, there
were signs of more afoot. Not only of a
cool city but of a city that was cool in a way
that wasn’t just another replication of
Brooklyn built in some reclaimed industrial
downtown (for one thing, Houston doesn’t
really have one).
Last summer I made plans to head to
into Texas from the Gulf of Mexico. As though
tired from its Caribbean journey, the storm
circled lazily above southwest Texas for a cata-
strophic four days. The images, on the ground
and TV, were otherworldly: water, pushed by
swollen bayous and overwhelmed pumps,
running uphill; highway signs hovering
mere feet above the waterline, the roadways
beneath them filled up like giant bathtubs. By “Shade Tree”
the time it was over, the numbers, too, were Barbecue
surreal: Harvey had disgorged as much as want to hear from a The Bookity Bookity
48 inches of rain—a trillion gallons—on the state climatologist. Boudain Man is the
Houston metro area. Some 154,000 homes had I firmly believe king of Houston’s
pirate barbecuers,
flooded and tens of thousands of people had that there’s no such who set up shop
needed rescue. “The takeaway from Harvey thing as a city that anywhere—in his case,
is that it expands our understanding of what has more “grit” or a Walmart parking lot.

Houston, to explore further. Then, on
August 25, Hurricane Harvey came churning
is possible,” a state climatologist later said,
which is precisely the kind of thing you do not
“resilience” than any
other; some are just unlucky enough to get
the chance to show it. Still, the cracked-open
metropolis that the rest of the country gazed
upon in the immediate aftermath of Harvey
was clearly one of deep communal ties, fierce
civic pride, and wells of creative energy. There
were the four employees of El Bolillo Bakery
who, trapped by rising water, spent two days
of the storm baking 4,400 pounds of flour’s
worth of bread and pan dulce to distribute to
flood victims. There was the Houston Ballet,
whose home theater was inundated but who
pressed on with its season in makeshift digs
all over the city. Something special, it became
clear to those who might not have been paying
attention, was going on here. In its youthful-
ness, its diversity (by some measures, the most
diverse large city in America), and its explo-
sive growth (an astonishing two decades of 25
percent in the greater metro area), Houston
was looking more and more like the American
city of the future.
Part of the change has been intentional.
In recent years, a series of public-private
partnerships has worked to develop the
kind of amenities and public spaces that
cool cities tend to have: bike lanes; down-
town attractions;
ambitious and beau-
tiful green spaces
like Bu≠alo Bayou
Full-Spectrum
Houston Grub Park, with its criss-
crossing pathways
Chef Chris Shepherd
across the bayou
turned his James
Beard Award–winning and astonishing
restaurant Underbelly Cistern—a massive
into UB Preserv, a
underground reser-
shrine to Houston’s
multicultural cuisine. voir now used for art
installations—and

S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 3 5

downtown’s Discovery Green, a park and
gathering place for Houstonians of all eth-
nicities that longtime Houston Chronicle
food critic Alison Cook calls “our new town
square.” After years of development that
involved automatically tearing down any-
thing old in favor of building anew, a pres-
ervationist movement has finally begun to
take hold, too, leading to victories like the
renovated Heights Theater, reopened as a
beautiful and intimate music venue.
But a good deal of what’s happening in
Houston feels more organic and idiosyncratic
than what an urban-studies expert might
devise in a PowerPoint presentation—an
energy that feels born of two major factors:
one, the growth that has turned the city’s
diverse but discrete bubbles into a series of
unavoidable Venn overlaps, allowing cul-
tures to clash, cohabitate, and collaborate;
the other, a pervading sense of independent
frontier wildness.
That trait may not ride in wearing the
cowboy costume it does farther west, but it
nevertheless feels distinctly Texan. “There
are no zoning laws here” is the sentence you
will hear more than any other in Houston.
This is a key point of identity: the theoretical
ability for anyone to build anything anywhere
(never mind that it is in part responsible for
the kind of development that makes the
city so susceptible to damage from natural
disaster). People chatter about commercial
real estate in Houston with the same mix
of envy, romance, and fascination that they
do residential real estate in New York or San
Francisco: who’s developing what project and
where; which buildings are sitting empty,
waiting for the price
of oil to rise; who’s
erecting what glass
tower as revenge for
Texas-Style
Brisket
Get some at Ray’s. And
don’t forget to order
the oxtails, too.
this is a key point of
identity: the theoretical
ability for anyone to
build anything anywhere.
which other guy’s glass tower. “No zoning”
turns out to be the urban equivalent of the
great western myth of “no fences.”
Larry McMurtry once argued that Texas’s
cities inevitably sit uneasily alongside its
rural, pioneer history: “Imagine yourself as
a small hopeful immigrant family, alone on
the Staked Plains, with the Comanche and
the Kiowa still on the loose.… Elements of
that primal venturing will surely inform sev-
eral generations.” To which I would add only
that you can equally imagine yourself as a
small hopeful immigrant family o≠ a plane
from Saigon, or Michoacán, or Tegucigalpa,
or o≠ a bus from flooded New Orleans, in
order to understand the feeling of primal
venturing that Houston still exudes. And
that you can look east, as well as west, for
its source, to the special properties of places
that line the Gulf of Mexico: Cajun self-re-
liance, New Orleanian devil-may-care, that
sense of extraterritoriality that exists up
and down America’s third and wildest coast,
wherever the water regularly threatens to
rise. The Houston band the Su≠ers, which
have been gaining a national profile, have a
name for their smoothly powerful mishmash
of ska, R&B, country, and more, borrowed
from the great Beaumont-raised blues gui-
tarist Barbara Lynn. It works equally as a
description of the city a whole. They call it
Gulf Coast Soul.
As for Houston’s place in the Texas firma-
ment, one businessman with shops in all three
of the state’s most famous cities broke them
down for me thusly: “Austin is like your young,
hip millennial brother who always knows the
latest cool thing. Dallas is the metrosexual
middle brother that nobody really wants to
spend time with. But Houston is the older,
cooler sibling—he’s got some miles on him,
he’s been through some stu≠, but he totally
knows what’s cool and what’s not.
“You love all your siblings, but you know
which one you want to hang out with.”
There’s a T-shirt for sale in Houston these
days that was designed by James Glassman,
who runs a website about the city’s his-
tory and is the author of The Houstorian
Dictionary. It is in the same font as keep
austin weird but one significant word
shorter. It reads keep austin.
AND ANYWAY, YOU WANT WEIRD? Houston has
it by the square mile. Not Weird™, either. Like,
genuinely strange.
The only hotel in Houston’s Montrose
neighborhood is La Colombe d’Or, a five-room
outfit located in a mansion originally built for
an oil magnate. Seemingly preserved some-
time in 1979, it is filled with art and sta≠ed by
a rotating assemblage of men in suits, all of
whom seem to have worked there for decades.
I was the sole guest for much of my time there,
in a suite that inexplicably included a full din-
ing room set, and I was never 100 percent sure
they weren’t ghosts.
Montrose is the part of Houston that looks
the most like a cool city is supposed to look—
dense; green; filled with museums, co≠ee
shops, cocktail bars, and other hip indepen-
dent businesses; at least plausibly walkable
(though few seem to do so). Montrose has
also been the center of Houston’s food scene,
which, as is customary these days, has led the
city’s charge into the national conversation
in a way that a music or art scene might have
done for an emerging city 20 years ago.
Nobody has worked harder toward that
end than Chris Shepherd, who has three
restaurants in Montrose. His empire begins
along Westheimer Road, Montrose’s main
drag, in the building that was once his flag-
ship, Underbelly, and reopens this month
as a cast-iron steak house, Georgia James.
That menu (you may want to take notes)
began as a one-year experiment at One Fifth,
down the street, which Shepherd has given
a conceptual overhaul for each year of his
five-year lease. (This fall’s iteration, the third,
is “Mediterranean.”) Meanwhile, the much
loved Underbelly, at which Shepherd won a
James Beard Award, has been rebranded as
UB Preserv, located in a strip mall that also
houses a laundromat, a vape shop, and a
clothing store called Guyz ’N’ Style (“Where
endless fashion meets”).
Shepherd is a large man, partial to shorts,
bespoke dress shirts from the venerable
Houston tailor Hamilton Shirts, and New
Balance sneakers. These conceal the results
of monthly pedicures finished with nail pol-
ish in the shade Deep Steel Blue, which hap-
pens to be the Houston Texans’ color. Born
in Nebraska, raised
in Tulsa, he came to
Houston for culinary
school when he was
22 and has never left.
“I fell in love with
the city,” he says.
“Everything I could
ever want was here.”
On days o≠, he would
drive aimlessly and
explore, reasoning
 in Vietnamese, Chinese, English, A scene was being born—one that, its par-
A Perfect Spanish, Korean, and more, begin ticipants quickly realized, had the potential to
Night Out
to look like slabs of Rosetta stone. invent a culinary identity where there hadn’t
The light-filled— You pass buildings of exquisite been one before.
and extra-delicious— strangeness. Cars mounted on That generation has continued to work
environs of Justin
Yu’s Theodore Rex, poles as 3-D signs. A three-storied together, in various combinations, ever since.
a GQ Best New Italianate villa—complete with And all seem to have reached a natural point
Restaurant of 2018. arches, columns, fountains, and of change: Yu recently transformed Oxheart
statuary lining its circular drive- into the less rigid Theodore Rex (another
way—turns out not to be a casino or banquet 2018 GQ Best New Restaurant); Revival
hall but in fact a dentist’s office. Market has transitioned into a fast-service
Shepherd and I started at Saigon Pagolac,
one of the first Vietnamese restaurants
to open as the city’s Asian-immigrant
community spread out along Bellaire in the
late 1980s. Within a few minutes, the table
H OW T O E AT
was overwhelmed by platters of food: the
crispy egg pancake banh xeo; tight pouches HOUSTON
of beef wrapped in betel leaf; spongy squares IN 8 DISHES
of banh hoi, the intricately woven pads of
vermicelli noodles. Shepherd had recently 1. “ALL-IN” CRAWFISH
found a nearby supplier of fresh banh hoi CASIAN CRAWFISH
The emblematic Viet-Cajun dish of the
that however lost he got, he could always for his own restaurant, a discovery he talked new Houston: spicy, citrusy, garlicky, and
drive straight in any direction to eventually about as though each weekly delivery arrived utterly addictive.
reach the I-610 Loop that would get him via reindeer-pulled sleigh.
home. When he found something he thought We were joined by Alba Huerta, who came 2. BARBACOA
HUGO’S
was delicious, he was unabashed about ask- to Houston from Mexico with her family Rich, flavorful slow-roasted lamb at the
ing how it was made, ultimately transferring when she was 6 and has long been one of the flagship of Hugo Ortega and Tracy Vaught’s
that knowledge to the menu at Underbelly, to city’s pre-eminent bartenders. In addition to modern-Mexican empire.
which Shepherd gave the tagline “The Story co-owning downtown’s mezcalería The Pastry 3. PASTRAMI BEEF RIB
of Houston Food.” War, she owns Julep Bar, which is devoted to TEJAS CHOCOLATE CRAFTORY
“I wanted to introduce Houstonians to southern cocktails and features a Jacuzzi-size Thursday is Pastrami Day at Tejas, but
their city,” he says. tub of crushed ice behind the bar, a copper any day is a good day for elite craft
barbecue alongside high-end homemade
One hot morning, he was doing the same fairy rising from its center. chocolate bonbons.
for me. Despite having made this trip hun- We talked, as we ate, about the emergence
dreds of times, he grew palpably excited as of the city’s food scene. The turning point, 4. SMOKED OXTAILS
RAY’S REAL PIT BBQ SHACK
we approached Bellaire Boulevard, the main they agreed, was the annus mirabilis of 2012. Ray’s serves classic East Texas barbecue,
drag of Houston’s Chinatown. Each strip Shepherd opened Underbelly that year. porkier and saucier than its Central
mall o≠ered another suddenly mandatory Huerta was bartending at Bobby Huegel’s Texan cousin: fat spare ribs, ricey links of
boudin, and, as a weekly special, these
stop: hand-pulled noodles here, Szechuan Anvil Bar & Refuge, which had opened a gamy, gelatinous beauties.
dumplings there. few years earlier and was riding the new
The most obvious urban counterpart to craft-cocktail wave. One of its founders, 5. PARIS-BREST
Houston is Los Angeles, with its diversity, Morgan Weber, had just opened the gour- THEODORE REX
Everything on Justin Yu’s ever changing
its car-centrism, its sprawl. Houston is not met Revival Market. A branch of the high- menu is precise and soulful, but this simple
beautiful like L.A., but it is ugly like it: We end sushi restaurant Uchi arrived from dessert, funkified by Swiss-cheese cream
drove mile after flat mile filled with parking Austin. A few years earlier, Justin Yu and and honey, is what I’ve craved since I tried it.
lots and strip malls, fast-food restaurants Seth Siegel-Gardner, both Houston-born
6. BRISKET TACO
and box stores, new undistinguished con- chefs who had been working in fine dining THE PIT ROOM
struction cheek by jowl with older undis- in California and Europe, returned to town The Pit Room’s brisket shines brightest
tinguished construction. It is empirically and, along with Terrence Gallivan, opened (and smokiest) topped with cheese,
sour cream, and salsa roja on a chewy
ugly and totally intoxicating. The point a one-month summer pop-up. It was such homemade tortilla made with beef fat.
isn’t that there are beautiful places hidden a resounding success that they were now
amid the ugliness; it’s that the ugliness opening ambitious projects in town: Siegel- 7. SMOTHERED TURKEY WINGS
itself becomes imbued with a kind of beauty, Gardner and Gallivan opened The Pass ALFREDA’S SOUL FOOD
There’s nearly as much meat in the
thanks to the thrum of human energy that and Provisions; Yu created a tasting-menu vegetables as there is in the meat dishes
takes root there. The tall multi-paneled restaurant named Oxheart where he, too, at this venerable cafeteria—which is
signs standing outside each mall, written won a James Beard Award. how you know it’s legit.

8. CLAM RAPINI PIZZA

COLTIVARE
A touch of sorghum in the dough

“houston is cool because complements the brine of clams at

Morgan Weber and Ryan Pera’s

houston doesn’t give a f*ck regional-Italian spot. — B . M .

about being cool.”

1 3 8 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8

restaurant; Huerta is at work on a smaller,
fancier bar inside Julep; and Shepherd turned
Underbelly into UB Preserv.
Stu≠ed already, Shepherd and I headed
onward for a few pounds of Vietnamese
crawfish from Mike’s Seafood, a place that
one of his cooks had given him a tip about.
Vietnam-
Town
The bounty at Saigon
It was late in the season, mak- Pagolac, one of Shepherd wrote down his
ing the crawfish shells hard to the first Vietnamese number, inviting Nora to come to
restaurants to take
peel, but the citrus, garlic, and root along Bellaire UB Preserv. He left with a heavy
butter in which they bathed Boulevard in the bag of supplies and a promise to
made it worth the struggle. As late 1980s. bring some of his cooks back to
we left, Shepherd noticed a sign ask more questions.
a few doors down for a Nigerian grocery To many, this scene might as well be the
store named DD Vantage. There are more Zapruder film of cultural appropriation.
Nigerians in Houston than almost any- Shepherd has heard the critique, but it seems
where else in the country, and Shepherd had to genuinely ba±e him. His mission, he says,
been anxious to learn more about their has always been to introduce diners to cui-
cuisine, with an eye toward adding it to the sines they might start out too intimidated by
mix at UB Preserv. We walked in, surprising or unaware of to explore on their own and
a woman named Nora, who was working then send them to experience the real thing.
the cash register. Shepherd walked up and “I want to be the gateway drug,” he says. At
down the aisles, asking questions: Which Underbelly, and now at UB Preserv, the check
bottle of blood-red palm oil was best? What comes with a pamphlet listing Shepherd’s
were the fermented favorite restaurants, suppliers, and other
beans for? businesses, including those that inspired
“Are you with the his menu. “We’d love to have you back at UB
FBI?” Nora asked. Preserv,” it reads, “but we politely request you
The Mayor of
Houston “ I ’ m a c h e f ,” visit at least one of these folks first.”
Shepherd said. The menu, overseen by chef de cuisine
Rapper Bun B—one
“Oh Lord,” Nora Nick Wong, an alumnus of Momofuku
of Houston’s best
ambassadors—gets said, shaking her Ssäm Bar in New York, ranges liberally and
his hair cut by head. “When you’re lustily among the city’s influences. Many
Nicholas Howard,
a chef, you get to just of the dishes wear their inspiration on
self-styled Barber to
the Stars. play around and call their sleeve: Beef carpaccio dabbed with
it food.” an aioli made with (continued on page 162)
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 3 9
FROM ‘TRUE DETECTIVE’ TO HIS
MIND-BENDING NEW NETFLIX SERIES, ‘MANIAC,’

CARY FUKUNAGA
HAS PROVED HIMSELF A MASTER OF CREATING THE
PERFECT TONE ON-SCREEN. NOW THE VISIONARY
DIRECTOR HELPS US HIGHLIGHT SOME OF THE SEASON’S
KEY STYLE MOVES—CLOTHES WITH A LIVED-IN VIBE,
ALL SHOT AT HIS HOME IN UPSTATE NEW YORK

1 4 0 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
Z ACH
B ARO N

T H O M AS
WH IT E S ID E

TO NY
IRV INE
 ←←
OPENING PAGES, LEFT
coat (price upon
request)
Alexander McQueen
sweater $595
immediately, people called. By the time True Detective
Joseph made him a household name (in households that pay
necklace $4,900 attention to directors), he was in Ghana shooting his third
David Yurman film, Beasts of No Nation, which Netflix ended up buying
RIGHT
for $12 million. As Fukunaga looked around for his next
jacket $16,400 project, he was doing so as one of the most sought-after
Hermès directors in Hollywood. That was nearly four years ago.
sweater $895 Then It fell apart, and another project kept getting
pants $355 delayed and he had to walk away from that, too, and all
Joseph
the while he was working to compromise, working to
↓ just get something made. He was supposed to be, maybe
sweater $1,075 already was, our next great director. And then: “Between
Giorgio Armani
directing Beasts of No Nation and directing Maniac, it was
t-shirt $40 (for
pack of three) three and a half years of no production,” Fukunaga says,
Calvin Klein shaking his head. “I was in the prime of my directing life!”
CARY FUKUNAGA ISN’T ENTIRELY SURE if he has a rep- Underwear Maniac, the series that will finally bring him back to
utation for being di∞cult. But it’s something he’s heard pants $348 audiences, is loosely based on a Norwegian TV show of
Boss
from time to time. He heard it in the wake of shooting the same name. The original is a black comedy that fol-
HBO’s True Detective—a series that became a phenom- → lows the absurd delusions of a man locked in a psych
enon following the fourth episode, which included a turtleneck $345 ward. That was Fukunaga’s starting point: He wanted
Z Zegna
virtuosic six-minute-long tracking shot of Matthew to do something lighter—bright-colored candy, starring
pants $265
McConaughey stalking his way through a robbery that Sandro a pair of two-time Oscar nominees.
turns into a bloodbath. The show’s creator, Nic Pizzolatto, belt $690 But it turns out “lighter” is not exactly something
thought Fukunaga was being willfully idiosyncratic just Tom Ford Fukunaga is capable of: “I realized that I have a
for insisting on a shot like that. “Nic
wanted to cut it up in post-production,”
Fukunaga says over lunch in New York,
where he’s currently finishing Maniac, a
surrealist Netflix series starring Jonah
Hill and Emma Stone as two patients in
a pharmaceutical drug trial. “He did not
like that I was pushing for that one at
all.” But the show had been a lot of talk,
and a lot of philosophizing, before that.
Fukunaga wasn’t trying to showboat. He
just thought, “Let’s do something fun.”
And then there was It, the 2017 adap-
tation of the Stephen King novel, which
Fukunaga wrote and was prepared to
direct. He ultimately decided to leave
the project two weeks before it started
shooting, after the studio started treat-
ing Fukunaga like he might go rogue. “I
think it was fear on their part, that they
couldn’t control me,” he says.
And…were they right?
“No, they thought they couldn’t
control me. I would have been totally
collaborative.”
The irony, to Fukunaga’s mind, was
that he’d actually worked hard to appren-
tice himself. In 2009, he signed on to
direct an adaptation of Jane Eyre. At
the time, he was 32 and coming o≠ his
first film, Sin Nombre, which had won a
directing prize at Sundance. Fukunaga is
a romantic, and Jane Eyre appealed to
that part of him; it was also a relatively
conventional studio film, with movie stars
and well-known source material. “There
was nothing experimental about it,” he
says. “But for me, it was an exercise.”
The exercise worked. Fukunaga’s Jane
Eyre was taut, glossy, a bit haunted—a
success, and a calling card, and almost

1 4 2 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
 hair by silvia
cincotta.
grooming by kumi
craig using
la mer. produced
by donna belej
at allswell
productions.

ABOUT
THESE
CLOTHES
Fall fashion has a
tendency to get a little
too woodsy when it
comes to relaxing
weekend wear. So we
took Cary Fukunaga
upstate and left the
buffalo plaids and high-
vis orange behind to
discover a more elegant
side of rugged style,
where subtle texture,
muted tones, and just-
so slouchy fits ensure
you are seasonally
correct without looking
like you got lost on an
Outward Bound trip.

tendency to make things harder than they need to be. ↑ discuss this and maybe I’m gonna win. The algorithm’s
Because the idea of having fun and not worrying too suit $4,545 argument is gonna win at the end of the day.” Fukunaga
polo shirt $1,495
much about production value went out the door the Brunello treated the process as one more thing to learn from, he
moment I started conceiving ideas.” The show he ulti- Cucinelli says: “I have no doubt the algorithm will be right.”
mately made takes place in a grimy, melancholy New t-shirt $40 (for But it also made him want to do what, contrary to
York and focuses on two broken people, in Stone and pack of three) popular belief, he hadn’t done yet. “I just kind of want
Calvin Klein
Hill, trying to connect with their pasts and with each Underwear
to make something that’s idiosyncratically all mine,”
other—when they’re not hallucinating. (And sometimes watch $5,950
Fukunaga says. He’s been working on a project with
even when they are.) It’s one of the more delightfully Omega HBO, based on Stanley Kubrick’s unproduced film about
strange projects you’ll ever see executed by a director Napoleon, and another thing about Hiroshima, and yet
→
this talented; the show feels like a John Lennon solo another thing about Alexandre Dumas. Will any of it
sports jacket
album, or a guided meditation by Terry Gilliam, or both $8,995 actually happen? There is no way to know. But the pro-
at the same time. Kiton cess, so far, has been amicable.
Like Beasts, Maniac will stream on Netflix, which has shirt $690 “I’ve only walked out of one project where a producer
its own surreal development process. “Because Netflix is Salvatore was like, ‘You’re never gonna work in this town again!’ ”
Ferragamo
a data company,” Fukunaga says, “they can look at some- Fukunaga says. “When he said that, I was like, Did he say
pants $348
thing you’re writing and say, ‘We know based on our Boss that? I want to record this!”
data that if you do this, we will lose this many viewers.’ boots $1,890
So it’s a di≠erent kind of note giving. It’s not like, Let’s Tom Ford zach baron is gq’s sta≠ writer.

1 4 4 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
 N
L PER
HA
H
OA
N
L
IE
N
A
D

A STRANGE THING HAS HAPPENED TO MEN OVER THE PAST FEW DECADES: WE’VE

WE MAY LOSE THE ABILITY TO REPRODUCE ENTIRELY. WHAT’S CAUSING THIS MYSTERIOUS
 SI
MO
NA
BRA
N OW I CZ

BECOME INCREASINGLY INFERTILE, SO MUCH SO THAT WITHIN A GENERATION

DROP IN SPERM COUNTS—AND IS THERE ANY WAY TO REVERSE IT BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE?

S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 4 7
 MEN ARE DOOMED.
Everybody knows this.
We’re obviously all doomed,
the women too, everybody
in general, just a waiting
game until one or another of the stupid
things our stupid species is up to finally
gets us. But as it turns out, no surprise: men
first. Second instance of no surprise: We’re
going to take the women down with us.
There has always been evidence that
men, throughout life, are at higher risk of
early death—from the beginning, a higher
male incidence of Death by Mastodon
Stomping, a higher incidence of Spiked
Club to the Brainpan, a statistically signifi-
cant disparity between how many men
and how many women die of Accidentally
Shooting Themselves in the Face or Getting
Really Fat and Having a Heart Attack. The
male of the species dies younger than the
female—about five years on average. Divide
a population into groups by birth year, and
by the time each cohort reaches 85, there
are two women left for every man alive. In
fact, the male wins every age class: Baby
boys die more often than baby girls; little
boys die more often than little girls; teenage
boys; young men; middle-aged men. Death
champions across the board.
Now it seems that early death isn’t
enough for us—we’re on track instead
to void the species entirely. Last sum-
mer a group of researchers from Hebrew
University and Mount Sinai medical school
published a study showing that sperm
counts in the U.S., Europe, Australia, and
New Zealand have fallen by more than 50
WE SHOULD HOPE FOR THE BEST AND PREPARE FOR THE WORST,” SAID HAGAI LEVINE, A LEAD
AUTHOR OF THE STUDY. “AND THAT IS THE POSSIBILITY THAT WE WILL BECOME EXTINCT.
percent over the past four decades. (They
judged data from the rest of the world to be
insu∞cient to draw conclusions from, but
there are studies suggesting that the trend
could be worldwide.) That is to say: We are
producing half the sperm our grandfathers
did. We are half as fertile.
The Hebrew University/Mount Sinai paper
was a meta-analysis by a team of epidemiol-
ogists, clinicians, and researchers that culled
data from 185 studies, which examined semen
from almost 43,000 men. It showed that the
human race is apparently on a trend line
toward becoming unable to reproduce itself.
Sperm counts went from 99 million sperm
per milliliter of semen in 1973 to 47 million
per milliliter in 2011, and the decline has
been accelerating. Would 40 more years—or
fewer—bring us all the way to zero?
I called Shanna H. Swan, a reproductive
epidemiologist at Mount Sinai and one of the
1 4 8 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
lead authors of the study, to ask if there was
any good news hiding behind those brutal
numbers. Were we really at risk of extinc-
tion? She failed to comfort me. “The What
Does It Mean question means extrapolat-
ing beyond your data,” Swan said, “which
is always a tricky thing. But you can ask,
‘What does it take? When is a species in
danger? When is a species threatened?’ And
we are definitely on that path.” That path,
in its darkest reaches, leads to no more nat-
urally conceived babies and potentially to
no babies at all—and the final generation of
Homo sapiens will roam the earth knowing
they will be the last of their kind.
I F W E A R E H A L F A S fertile as the genera-
tion before us, why haven’t we noticed? One
answer is that there is a lot of redundancy
built into reproduction: You don’t need 200
million sperm to fertilize an egg, but that’s
how many the average man might devote to
the job. Most men can still conceive a child
naturally with a depressed sperm count, and
those who can’t have a booming fertility-
treatment industry ready to help them. And
though lower sperm counts probably have
led to a small decrease in the number of
children being conceived, that decline has
been masked by sociological changes driving
birth rates down even faster: People in the
developed world are choosing to have fewer
children, and they are having them later.
The problem has been debated among
fertility scientists for decades now—studies
suggesting that sperm counts are declin-
ing have been appearing since the ’70s—
but until Swan and her colleagues’ meta-
analysis, the results have always been
judged incomplete or preliminary. Swan
herself had conducted smaller studies on
declining sperm counts, but in 2015 she
decided it was time for a definitive answer.
She teamed up with Hagai Levine, an Israeli
epidemiologist, and Niels Jørgensen, a
Danish endocrinologist, and along with five
others, they set about performing a system-
atic review and meta-regression analysis—
that is, a kind of statistical synthesis of the
data. “Hagai is a very good scientist, and he
also used to be the head of epidemiology for
the Israeli armed forces,” Swan told me. “So
he’s very good at organizing.” They spent a
year working with the data.
The results, when they came in, were clear.
Not only were sperm counts per milliliter of
semen down by more than 50 percent since
1973, but total sperm counts were down by
almost 60 percent: We are producing less
semen, and that semen has fewer sperm
cells in it. This time around, even scientists
who had been skeptical of past analyses had
to admit that the study was all but unassail-
able. Jørgensen, in Copenhagen, told me that
when he saw the results, he’d said aloud, “No,
it cannot be true.” He had expected to see a
past decline and then a leveling o≠. But he
couldn’t argue when the team ran the num-
bers again and again. The downward slope
was unwavering.
Almost all the scientists I talked to
stressed that not only were low sperm
counts alarming for what they said about
the reproductive future of the species—they
were also a warning of a much larger set of
health problems facing men. In this view,
sperm production is a canary in the coal
mine of male bodies: We know, for instance,
that men with poor semen quality have a
higher mortality rate and are more likely to
have diabetes, cancer, and cardiovascular
disease than fertile men.
Testosterone levels have also dropped
precipitously, with e≠ects beginning in utero
and extending into adulthood. One of the
most significant markers of an organism’s
sex is something called anogenital distance
(AGD)—the measurement between the anus
and the genitals. Male AGD is typically twice
the length of female, a much more dramatic
di≠erence than height or weight or muscu-
lature. Lower testosterone leads to a shorter
AGD, and a measurement lower than the
median correlates to a man being seven
times as likely to be subfertile and gives
him a greater likelihood of having unde-
scended testicles, testicular tumors, and
a smaller penis. “What you are seeing in a
number of systems, other developmental sys-
tems, is that the sex di≠erences are shrink-
ing,” Swan told me. Men are producing
less sperm. They’re also becoming less male.
I assumed that the next thing Swan was
going to tell me was that these changes
were all a mystery to scientists. If only we
could figure out what was causing the drop
in sperm counts, I imagined, we could solve
all the attendant health problems at once.
But it turns out that it’s not a mystery: We
know what the culprit is. And it’s hiding in
plain sight.
T H E S I X T H F LO O R of the Rigshospitalet,
a hospital and research institution in
Copenhagen, houses the Department of
Growth and Reproduction. The babies are

all a few floors downstairs—on six, the unit
is populated not with new parents but with
MEAN TOTAL SPERM COUNT (MILLIONS)
doctors and researchers hunched over mass
spectrometers and gel imagers and the like.
I was there to meet Niels E. Skakkebæk, an
82-year-old pediatric endocrinologist, who
founded the department in 1990. After walk-
ing me through the lab, he showed me to his
o∞ce, a cramped, closet-like space—mod-
est for someone who is a giant in his field.
Male fertility and male reproductive health,
Skakkebæk told me, are in full-blown crisis.
“Here in Denmark, there is an epidemic of
infertility,” he said. “More than 20 percent of
Danish men do not father children.”
Skakkebæk first suspected something
was going wrong in the late ’70s, when he
treated an infertile patient with an abnor-
mality in the cells of the testes that he had
never seen before. When he treated a second
man with the same abnormality a few years
later, he began to investigate a connection.
What he found was a new form of precursor
cells for testicular cancer, a once rare disease
whose incidence had doubled. Moreover,
these precursor cells had begun developing
before the patient was even born. “He had
the insight that testicular cancer, which is
a cancer of young men, is something that
is actually originated in utero,” Swan told
me. And if these testes had somehow been
misdeveloping in utero, Skakkebæk asked
himself, what else was happening to these
babies before they were born?
Eventually, Skakkebæk linked several
other previously rare symptoms for a
condition he called testicular dysgenesis
syndrome (TDS), a collection of male repro-
ductive problems that include hypospadias
(an abnormal location for the end of the
urethra), cryptorchidism (an undescended
testicle), poor semen quality, and testicular
cancer. What Skakkebæk proposed with TDS
is that these disorders can have a common
fetal origin, a disruption in the development
of the male fetus in the womb.
So what was causing this disruption? To
say there is only a single answer might be
an overstatement—stress, smoking, and obe-
sity, for example, all depress sperm counts—
but there are fewer and fewer critics of the
following theory: The industrial revolution
happened. And the oil industry happened.
And 20th-century chemistry happened. In
short, humans started ingesting a whole
host of compounds that a≠ected our hor-
mones—including, most crucially, estrogen
and testosterone.
The scientists I talked to were less cau-
tious about embracing this explanation than
I expected. Down the hall from Skakkebæk’s
o∞ce, I met Anna-Maria Andersson, a biolo-
gist whose research has focused on declining
testosterone levels. “There has been a chem-
ical revolution going on starting from the
GLOBAL PLASTICS PRODUCTION SINCE 1970
350 v 338
275
200
125
50
1970
beginning of the 19th century, maybe even
a bit before,” she told me, “and upwards
and exploding after the Second World War,
when hundreds of new chemicals came
onto the market within a very short time
frame.” Suddenly a vast array of chemicals
were entering our bloodstream, ones that no
human body had ever had to deal with. The
chemical revolution gave us some wonder-
ful things: new medicines, new food sources,
faster and cheaper mass production of all
sorts of necessary products. It also gave us,
Andersson pointed out, a living experiment
on the human body with absolutely no fore-
thought to the result.
When a chemical a≠ects your hormones,
it’s called an endocrine disruptor. And it
turns out that many of the compounds
used to make plastic soft and flexible (like
phthalates) or to make them harder and
stronger (like Bisphenol A, or BPA) are con-
summate endocrine disruptors. Phthalates
and BPA, for example, mimic estrogen in the
bloodstream. If you’re a man with a lot of
phthalates in his system, you’ll produce less
testosterone and fewer sperm. If exposed
to phthalates in utero, a male fetus’s repro-
ductive system itself will be altered: He will
develop to be less male.
Women with raised levels of phthalates in
their urine during pregnancy were signifi-
cantly more likely to have sons with shorter
anogenital distance as well as shorter
penis length and smaller testes. “When the
[fetus’s] testicles start making testosterone,
which is about week eight of pregnancy, they
make a little less,” Swan said. “That’s the nub
of this whole story. So phthalates decrease
testosterone. The testicles then do not pro-
duce proper testosterone, and the anogenital
distance is shorter.”
The problem is that these chemicals are
everywhere. BPA can be found in water
MEAN SPERM COUNT AND
350
GLOBAL PLASTICS PRODUCTION
(MILLIONS OF METRIC TONS)
275
200
138 125
50
1980 1990 2000 2010
bottles and food containers and sales
receipts. Phthalates are even more com-
mon: They are in the coatings of pills and
nutritional supplements; they’re used in
gelling agents, lubricants, binders, emulsi-
fying agents, and suspending agents. Not to
mention medical devices, detergents and
packaging, paint and modeling clay, phar-
maceuticals and textiles and sex toys and
nail polish and liquid soap and hair spray.
They are used in tubing that processes food,
so you’ll find them in milk, yogurt, sauces,
soups, and even, in small amounts, in eggs,
fruits, vegetables, pasta, noodles, rice, and
water. The CDC determined that just about
everyone in the United States has measur-
able levels of phthalates in his or her body—
they’re unavoidable.
What’s more, there is evidence that
the e≠ect of these endocrine disruptors
increases over generations, due to something
called epigenetic inheritance. Normally,
acquired traits—like, say, a sperm count
lowered by obesity—aren’t passed down
from father to son. But some chemicals,
including phthalates and BPA, can change
the way genes are expressed without altering
the underlying genetic code, and that change
is inheritable. Your father passes along his
low sperm count to you, and your sperm
count goes even lower after you’re exposed
to endocrine disruptors. That’s part of the
reason there’s been no leveling o≠ even after
40 years of declining sperm counts—the
baseline keeps dropping.
W I T H A L L D U E R E S P E C T to Dr. Swan
and the problems of extrapolating beyond
one’s data, I wanted to get back to What It
All Means. The answer, I thought, might be
found at the 13th International Symposium
on Spermatology, (continued on page 164)
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 4 9
BEFORE HE WENT to prison for probation
violations, and after years of opioid addiction
and spiraling legal trouble, the Atlanta-bred
rapper Gucci Mane became hyper-prolific
even by his standards, cranking out mixtapes
in the time it takes most artists to consider
dropping a single. A lot of it was amazing; as
the work of a troubled man unsure when he’d
next see the inside of a recording studio, a lot
of it was also pretty dark.
“It’s like, ‘Damn, man—that guy was going
through some shit,’ ” Gucci tells me. “I was
just manic in the studio. I had shit that I opuses into the mixtape marketplace long ←←
OPENING PAGES beanie $16
wanted to get off my chest. I don’t think it before chart-gaming three-hour albums Neff
overcoat $5,770
was so much that I wanted to give it to the became the standard. And he’s at least part of Maison Martin jewelry, his own
world—I just wanted to get it out my head.” the reason your favorite Soundcloud rapper Margiela
When he was released two years later, has a prominent face tattoo. coat $600
OPPOSITE PAGE

Gucci was a Mane reborn—skinny, sober, and You get the sense he always expected to be Pyer Moss coat (price upon
request)
ready to dominate a hip-hop landscape he’d a legend, but not necessarily a living legend. shorts $13 Dolce & Gabbana
helped redefine. He has become an improba- His two-year plan involves tripling his per- Starter
tank top $40
bly inspiring public figure, a beacon of seren- sonal fortune and using his passport—his sunglasses $185 (for pack of
ity and gratitude for positivity-starved times. first ever—to see the world. (Already checked Retrosuperfuture three)
He’s in a more stable, focused place on his off the bucket list: Iceland, where Gucci jewelry, his own Calvin Klein
Underwear
fifth post-prison album, out soon; it’s called documented his first dip in a hot spring on
THIS PAGE shorts $250
Evil Genius, a perfect title for a victory- Instagram. The video of his journey—“Ya boy jacket $1,650 Daniel Patrick
lap album by a once derided Trap God who Guwop in a lagoon!”—went instantly viral.) Prada
jewelry, his own
may have shaped 2018 hip-hop more than any “I want to go to Australia,” he says. “I want tank top,
other artist. His endorsement helped break to go to Africa. I want to see the animals. I grooming by
stylist’s own
heather blaine
Migos, Nicki Minaj, Young Thug, and Mike want to just ride on out. Take a safari. Just pants $2,315 at creative
WiLL Made-It. He was dumping triple-disc show me everything.” Philipp Plein management

1 5 2 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
MARK ANTHONY GREEN M AT T M A RT I N
Leave it to the king of sex to re-invent the first thing
you put on every day—and the last thing you take o≠

Tom Ford’s new underwear line comes

in a range of nude hues—so you can look
naked before you get naked.

S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 5 5
Tom Ford for your underwear supply is a bit like
going to a vegan’s house for a barbecue. Underwear
is a new frontier for Tom—completely. He doesn’t
even wear boxers or briefs. In fact, he’s notori-
ous for going commando. (In the fashion world,
his wardrobe malfunctions and more, um, voluntary exposures are
well known.) But his new “fully developed” underwear line is every
bit the Tom Ford we know and love. The underwear is damn soft,
but the real draw here is the look. You can pick a pair of flesh-toned
skivvies or something more exotic. “Let’s say you’re going on a date,”
he says. “When you take o≠ your pants, you want it to be kind of a
great moment—which of course it will be when you take o≠ your
underwear. But before you get to that point, why wouldn’t you want
silver metallic underwear? Or zebra? Or leopard? Or something
a little crazier?” ¶ That’s kind of the entire guiding ethos of Tom
Ford. It’s how the sex-appeal shaman made Gucci a temple of
swank and his own namesake fashion brand a powerhouse for
every leading man and woman in Hollywood. Tom Ford makes
the tux for the big premiere, the suit for the big meeting, etc. Sure,
there are designers who make pricier clothes than Tom Ford. (Not
many, though there are some!) But there’s no world as luxurious,
mahogany-wood-filled, and plush to the touch T H E S E P A G E S
as Tom Ford’s. His name alone is synonymous with underwear (from
$60 to $350)
the good life. And yet even with Ford being one of Tom Ford
the most consistent fashion hitmakers for over hair by thom
priano for
30 years, he’s still surprising us. Take as a start his r+co haircare.
makeup by
not-so-luxurious snacking. fulvia farolfi.

GQ : Do you eat junk food? There’s absolutely no elegant way to

TOM FO R D: I love junk food. Well, first of
all, I have an incredibly meticulous diet.
A plant-based diet. I mean, I eat really,
really, really well, but I supplement that
eat those. Or have you found a way?
Oh yeah. I mean, I like to think I can do
most things and look elegant.
OPENING PAGES, ST YLIST: LUCY ARMSTRONG

with at least three doughnuts a day.
Really?
Absolutely. I was just eating some Cheetos
before this interview. But my lunch is going
to be totally vegan, absolute protein. I’m
very conscious of my main source of food.
But you know the thing that’s like cocaine
to me? Those little mini doughnuts covered
in the white powder. I cannot see them
without having to eat the pack immediately.
It’s like, if we have them in the o∞ce, I eat
every single one.
How big is your closet?
I have no clothes! I wear the same suits
over and over and over to the point they
literally wear out, because when that’s all
you do all day long—dress other people
and design clothes—the last thing you want
to do when you have five or three minutes
is to order new clothes for yourself. So I
don’t. I went to a restaurant the other day,
and I was having lunch. I felt a little bit of
cold on my butt. I reached around, and my
pants had ripped all the way from my waist
completely to the bottom of my butt.
Yikes! And I assume that wasn’t a rare
day that you wore underwear, correct?
I was sitting there with my butt hanging
out at a restaurant. So anyways, I need to
order myself some clothes.
It’s di∞cult to celebrate any Tom Ford
creation with the man himself. For starters,
he’s not much of a smell-the-roses kind
of guy. Moreover, by the time we get the
new product in our hands, he’s o≠ working
on the next big thing. When we spoke
in July, he was preparing his women’s

P H O T O G R A P H B Y T O M F O R D A N D J E F F B U R T O N

collection, which was due in two weeks.
He’s coy about film projects he may have
in the works—Ford directed ‘A Single Man’
in 2009 and ‘Nocturnal Animals’ in
2016—but it’s not because he thinks the
public isn’t ready to hear about them.
It’s to keep the sta≠ of the Tom Ford fashion
house from flipping their shit when they
hear he’s o≠ in Tinseltown again getting
all noir and sexy. His life is mania—
powered by ego, purpose, and doughnuts,
apparently. But how long can Tom Ford
keep on Tom Ford–in’?
Are you worried that all of these
collections and films will eventually
put you in a creative slump?
I never actually stop. It’s a sort of constant
thing. So I don’t have time to be in a slump.
In fact, that’s a word I think you have to have
the luxury to sit around and say, “I can’t
think of anything.” I never have that luxury.
I’m constantly producing. So if I’m in a
slump right now, I don’t know until later.
Do you worry about “balance”?
My biggest fear is that I work too hard,
What better way to
celebrate the newest,
sexiest part of Tom Ford’s
world than with his friends,
supermodels Shanina
Shaik and Sean O’Pry?
and when Jack [Tom’s son] grows up, I’ll
think, Why was I doing all that? And that
I should’ve spent more time with him. But
I think a lot of people who work hard have
that same fear if you have kids. Richard
[Ford’s partner] is going to be almost 70, and
I’ll be 57 this summer, and I’m becoming
very aware of time and how much time we
have. My biggest fear is looking back and
thinking, Did I spend that time well? ’Cause
you don’t get it back. That’s it.
mark anthony green is gq’s style editor.
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 5 7
 HE’S BEEN THE SIDEKICK-IN-CHIEF
FOR LONGTIME COLLABORATORS LIKE
WILL FERRELL AND PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON,
MOVING SEAMLESSLY FROM ONE
END OF THE DRAMA-COMEDY SPECTRUM
TO THE OTHER.

BUT WITH HIS OSCAR-

WORTHY PERFORMANCE IN
THIS MONTH’S WESTERN
‘THE SISTERS BROTHERS,’

IS STEPPING ONTO
CENTER STAGE

LUCY ARMSTRONG
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 5 9
 LOOKED LIKE
53 -year-old man
since I was 18. In
my face, anyway. My
body has caught up now. This suits me.”
Drinking tea and mauling a tomato-
and-mozzarella tartine on the patio outside
a Los Angeles photo studio, John C. Reilly
was explaining how, growing up alongside
what looks to be America’s final generation
of true open-a-movie-solo stars, he’d crafted
a career as Hollywood’s ultimate sidekick.
And how he’d managed to find roles in films
this fall and winter that let him share center
stage: The Sisters Brothers, a Western; Ralph
Breaks the Internet: Wreck-It Ralph 2, his
first sequel; Holmes and Watson, another
Will Ferrell team-up; and Stan and Ollie,
about the comedy duo Laurel and Hardy.
“In every one, I have a strong partnership,”
he said. He’d been wondering: “Why is that?
Why aren’t you just a stand-alone movie star?
Why don’t you just do that? I know a lot of
actors, that’s their thing. They don’t do buddy
movies, or they don’t do partnerships. Why
aren’t you like that?”
By the time Reilly and I sat down together,
he had the answers. “Number one,” he said,
“things like that don’t generally come
my way.” Reilly—rock-solid, mop of curly
hair, brow like a bridge strut—has always
understood what Hollywood will and will
not give to a guy like him, but he’s also spent
30 years figuring out ways to turn looking
like a 53-year-old into a basically unparal-
leled filmography.
“I’ve finally come to embrace that: This is
the way I look,” he said in his French horn of a
voice. “I know I don’t look like Brad Pitt. I love
Brad Pitt. I really do—he’s one of my favor-
ites—but I’m never going to be like that guy.
I’m never going to walk in that guy’s shoes.
This is what I’m like, so I’m here. Some people
like what I do, and there’s something freeing
about that.”
Reilly is given to understatement.
“As you get older, this business can kind of
typecast you or decide what your limits are
for you. So as you get into it, and you’re not
some new, fresh commodity that everyone’s
RE I L LY
C T I N G," E V I NG
A L I
WHEN OOD AT BE
. " I ' M G
SA I D
1 6 0 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
A excited to re-interpret for their movie, you
start to realize, Well, if I’m going to get more
interesting opportunities that challenge me,
I’m going to have to start generating them.”
He laughed. “It’s an obvious thing that just
took me a long time to figure out.”
Conveniently, his figuring out the industry
coincided with the industry figuring out him.
“It’s like suddenly chocolate ice cream becom-
ing wildly popular,” he said. “I’ve been here all
along. I’m a standard flavor that’s been avail-
able. I’m not a new flavor. Not the flavor of
the month. I’m just chocolate. And goddamn!
People like me right now.”
IN THE ’90S, AFTER a childhood among six
siblings on Chicago’s South Side and a spell in
that city’s hard-driving, ego-denying theater
scene, Reilly jumped to movies—catching
small parts, his facility often leading direc-
tors to rewrite and expand roles for him. A
few pictures in, the Sundance Director’s Lab
paired him with a young filmmaker named
Paul Thomas Anderson. Reilly played the lead
in Anderson’s star-crossed debut, Hard Eight,
and made supporting roles iconic in Boogie
Nights and Magnolia. “I was as big a fan as
you can be of somebody who’d made five
movies,” Anderson told me. “He didn’t look
like anybody, he didn’t sound like anybody
else. And that was really exciting.” They grew
close, each letting the other into his career.
Anderson credits Reilly with figuring out the
ending to There Will Be Blood.
One summer, waiting for the financing
for Boogie Nights to get settled, they were
bored and frustrated. Cops was relatively
new back then, and they were obsessed.
They’d call each another from their respec-
tive living rooms and stay on the phone
while they watched. Reilly had a goatee at
the time, and Anderson gave him holy hell
for it, but when Reilly caved and shaved it
o≠, he realized he looked like a cop. The next
step was obvious: “If you’ve got nothing else
to do, take a video camera and drive around,”
Anderson said. Reilly explained: “He got me
in an L.A.P.D. uniform from a costume friend,
and we would drive around” in Anderson’s
Oldsmobile. “We’d call up,
like, Phil Ho≠man and say,
‘Phil, we’re coming over.
Someone called the police
because your music was too
loud. Just go with it. You’ll
see when we get there.’ ”
They had fun. “On the
way to Phil’s house,” Reilly
said, dropping into his dim,
thick cop voice, “I would be
like, ‘Apparently’—and I
had the Oakleys on—‘this
individual thinks they can
play their music however
loud they want. Well, I got news for them.
There’s a thing called the law.’ ” They’d impro-
vise, Anderson catching it all on tape. The
footage would eventually yield Reilly’s lonely
o∞cer in Magnolia, but at the time, the exer-
cise scratched a new itch. He was improvising
seriously, but it was also deeply, stupidly, pee-
your-pants hilarious, Ho≠man faking a heart
attack before sprinting away cursing. “It was
really, really, really, really, really, really fun,”
Anderson recalled.
And then they made Boogie Nights, and
Magnolia, Reilly quietly becoming America’s
most reliable character actor. In 2002 he had
parts in three of the year’s five Best Picture
nominees: Gangs of New York, The Hours,
and Chicago, for which he earned a best-
supporting-actor nomination. (Maybe the
best measure of Reilly’s enduring legacy of
versatility is that the Internet has started
uno∞cially giving the “John C. Reilly Award”
to the actor who appears in the most best-pic-
ture nominees in a given year.)
Once he’d firmly established himself in the
serious acting world of critical acclaim, some-
thing funny happened. Reilly had met Will
Ferrell a few times, and then, around 2000, did
a table read for Anchorman that has become
the stu≠ of legend. “We were like, ‘God, that
guy is so good,’ ” Ferrell told me. Reilly wanted
to do the movie, but a prior commitment got
in the way. “I think I was doing Gangs of New
York at the time,” he said with seemingly real
disappointment. (Director Adam McKay: “I
said, ‘Dude, you have a Martin Scorsese movie.
You don’t need to apologize to us.’ ”)
So when the opportunity arose to do
Talladega Nights, he jumped. And from
there, the follow-up was, Reilly says, a no-
brainer. Step Brothers, the tale of two 40-ish
men-children living at home, cracked
$100 million in the U.S. and had the added
honor of prompting Roger Ebert to write, in
his review of the film: “Sometimes I think I am
living in a nightmare. All about me, standards
are collapsing, manners are evaporating,
people show no respect for themselves.”
As far as Reilly is concerned, the two poles
OPENING PAGES, T YPE ILLUSTRATION: SIMON ABRANOWICZ.
G RO O M I N G : CAT H E R I N E F U R N I S S F O R TAC K A RT I ST G RO U P.
of his career—the nervy pathos of Magnolia
at one end and the Talladega Nights scene
where Reilly’s character imagines Jesus
as wearing “a tuxedo T-shirt, ’cause it says,
‘I wanna be formal, but I’m here to party, too’ ”
on the other—aren’t terribly far apart.
“I’m good at being sincere when acting.
I’m good at believing what I’m saying,” he
explained, reducing a career of remark-
able breadth to a general folksiness. “But I
can’t take something and make it funny. If
it’s circumstantially funny, or if in relation-
ship to the other people around me it’s funny,
I can do that.” But “that” is truly rare—it’s
far easier to give a comic actor a six-pack
than to find a “serious” actor with Olympic-
grade improv chops.

So I’ll submit that Reilly was bullshitting
me, or at least being modest. Multiple col-
laborators described him as riotously funny.
“Only if somebody hadn’t been paying atten-
tion would they be surprised that he was
somehow a comedic actor,” Anderson said.
Joaquin Phoenix, Reilly’s Sisters Brothers
co-star, went further: “He does have a natural
ability to just make any moment very sensual.
You would find him oftentimes on set just
lying on the rocks in a very seductive pose, just
sunning. And it was a lot. It was beautiful.”
WHENEVER POSSIBLE, Reilly likes to align
some splinter of his own personality with his
character’s. But sometimes darker methods
are required. I asked him about a scene in
Step Brothers—the one where Reilly’s Dale
Doback, 40 and interviewing in a tux for a job
at a sporting-goods store, lets o≠ a 15-second
trumpet blast of a fart.
“I was really cutting real farts,” he said,
still a little astonished. But he wasn’t just
screwing around, he explained—he was pay-
ing homage to John Malkovich. Malkovich
was the king of the Chicago theater scene
right when Reilly was breaking in, and
during a production of Curse of the Starving
Class, Reilly explained, “the legend was
Malkovich peed on stage in front of the
audience every night. All of us in my friend
group were actors at the time. We’re like, Oh,
my God, how did he do it? Malkovich is so
Method, oh, my God.”
So when it came time to make Step
Brothers, Reilly channeled Malkovich. “Ask
Will—I did it a number of times and in a num-
ber of scenes,” Reilly said. “But in that one”—
the interview scene—“it was not that long,
of course. But I was like, Boom, there. I did
it. Put that on my SAG card.” Ferrell more or
less confirmed it: “I think that became a thing
where we would really try to, in the middle
of the scene, if you happened to have gas,
just let it go and try to mess with the other
guy and stay in the scene. John is an expert
at it. He was [farting] probably five times to
OPENING PAGES my one time.” Reilly
jacket laughed while he
Mister Freedom told the story; he’s an
other clothes, actor, not a Method
his own
farter. But while he
THIS PAGE made his bones with
jacket dramatic parts, the
David Saxby funny stu≠ opened
vest, new avenues artis-
his own
tically—and made
shirt him the kind of guy
Emporio Armani
at whom people bel-
hat low “Boats ‘N Hoes!”
in airports.
“I think it’s well
known that Step Brothers is one of my favorite
movies,” Phoenix said. “It’s a broad comedy
and he’s functioning in that space, and yet it
feels like there’s such truth to the character.
It doesn’t feel like it’s just played for laughs.
There’s a real history there for that character.”
There’s real history to Eli, Reilly’s Sisters
Brothers character, too. Reilly and Phoenix
play hit-man siblings pursuing a target down
the Pacific coast in the 1850s. While Phoenix’s
Charlie is the bu≠oon, Eli gets the romantic
scene. He wins a solo gunfight. He also makes
brushing his teeth an act of comic genius. The
lesson: John C. Reilly’s tongue is a world-class
character actor, because of course it is.
The film is based on a novel by Patrick
DeWitt, a friend and former collaborator of
Reilly’s; Reilly and his wife, producer Alison
Dickey, optioned the rights before the book
was published in 2011 and spent nearly a
decade shepherding it to the screen. Reilly
always saw himself playing Eli, but only if the
director he and Dickey chose—French film-
maker Jacques Audiard, making his English-
language debut—felt the same way. Audiard
did: “I knew some of John’s work, and I felt as
if I knew and loved him before truly knowing
him. John as Eli was a great idea, anyway.”
And Eli is perhaps the role of Reilly’s
career—the first that feels big enough to
contain everything Reilly does best, his over-
whelming earnestness pressed in new, satisfy-
ing directions. Imagine one of his characters
in an Anderson film, weary and good-hearted
but now extraordinarily talented with a pis-
tol. “He is one of the funniest people I know,”
Phoenix said. “But I think we know that. We’ve
seen that in films. What’s unexpected is this
other part of him that I think really shines in
this film, a real depth and a real sensitivity
that I don’t know that we’ve seen before.”
Reilly and Phoenix shared a house in
rural Spain before they started filming.
They’d take three-hour silent walks to build
their brotherly rapport, and ride horses and
shoot guns to look proficient on film. Reilly’s
horse was named Pollito—Little Chicken.
He and the horse grew close, too, Reilly
stopping by the stables on weekends to
feed Pollito apples. (continued on next page)
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 6 1
 J O H N C. R E I L LY
C O N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 1 6 1
All of it, Reilly explained, got him in a
ponderous mood. “There’s this beautiful
thing that happened where, somewhere in
ancient history, a horse decided, I’m going
to allow you to ride me,” he said. “I’m going
to allow you to tie me to this wagon so you
can move these things.” Reilly was struck by
the beauty of this sentiment. “Without that
decision, and without that cooperation from
that animal, we would have nothing that you
can see here. Nothing. We would be fucking
running around with bones and furs on our
back. Really! Think about it! That relation-
ship is the foundation of civilization. There’s
no other animal that’s that cooperative and
that’s strong enough to do the things we need
horses to do.”
Cooperative and strong, willing to submit
ego to the good of a greater project: You could
find hackier metaphors for Reilly and his own
career. A year after spending every day with
Pollito, Reilly was still marveling about his
friend: “Damn, I’m telling you, man. I don’t
know if you’ve ever spent much time with
horses. But they’re miraculous creatures!”
basically omnipresent at the
R E I L LY H A S B E E N
movies for almost 30 years, but thinks of him-
self as lazy. And when he’s not working—well,
he’d rather not talk about that. He says he
doesn’t want to give audiences any conflict-
ing signals. “They don’t know too much what
I really think, so they’re willing to accept what
I do,” he said. Sure, he likes to roller-skate
once a week, ripping o≠ the names of his
favorite rinks in the greater Los Angeles area.
But even that quirky hobby is connected to
preserving his privacy.
“One of the reasons I really love roller-
skating is because you can be a real social but-
terfly,” he explained the next day. We were sit-
ting by the pool at an unusually gilded hotel
far from Hollywood. The temperature hov-
ered in the high 70s; Reilly wore his preferred
Lonesome Dove Takes Hollywood outfit—three-
piece chambray denim suit, cherry red cowboy
boots, wide-brimmed tan felt hat, and pocket
watch on a chain—and lingered over a bowl of
New England clam chowder. Skating, he said,
was a way to be out in public without dropping
the curtain he likes to keep raised: “You can be
in contact with someone, and if you just decide
you don’t want to be anymore, you just skate a
little faster.”
It’s disappointing, almost: An actor respon-
sible for some of the strangest, funniest, most
crushing performances of the past 30 years is
a mellow, sensible, serious man, albeit with a
taste for roller-skating. An actor!
1 6 2 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
Lucky for us, then, that John C. Reilly also
collects clown paintings.
He knows it’s strange, but he thought he
might become one, once—his church group
trained kids in the art, sent them out to nurs-
ing homes and mall openings. And while
he traded in clowning for drama class, he
retained a love for the art. “It sounds absurd
to say,” he admitted, “but I really am a clown.
A lot of actors are. Tragicomic. We’re there as a
kind of vessel for you to feel something.”
And after his wife gave him an amateur
painting of a clown for a birthday in the ’90s,
something clicked. “I’m sure she rues the day
she gave me that,” he said. He started haunting
vintage shops. He’s since moved on to eBay,
and now he’s got more than a hundred.
Reilly has specific tastes in amateur clown
paintings—he likes ones made pre-1970,
before, he says, acrylic paints became pop-
ular and “colors started to get really ugly.”
And, anyway, there was a weird boom in
clown-painting instruction in the ’50s and
’60s, he said, so that’s the period all the good
ones come from.
Reilly is generally warm, but when we
started talking about clowns, he lit up:
“Here’s what you get from an amateur
clown painting, okay? You get, first of all, a
folk expression of art, which is from a non-
professional point of view. Someone who’s
just putting their heart into it. It might not
be the most technically proficient thing, but
they’re trying to paint. The second thing you
get is the graphic design of a clown.” Clowns,
Reilly explained, can spend years finding and
developing their characters, a sort of spiri-
tual quest. “Finding your character and what
your face is going to be is this deeply intimate
thing,” he said, “so there’s the expression
that this folk artist made—I want to paint
a clown—and then there’s the picture of the
actual clown.”
He wasn’t done. “And then there’s this other
thing behind that, which is if the painting is
done well enough, you see the person behind
that. So there’s these three levels of expression
that are really moving.
“They are not allowed to hang in the house,”
he explained, “so I have to keep all my clown
paintings in my o∞ce. All the walls are cov-
ered in clown paintings. I also use my o∞ce
as our guest room, so depending on how you
feel about clowns, you stay for a short stay, or…
“Clowns get such a bad rap now,” he said,
right before he wrapped up what had become
a graduate-level seminar on amateur clown
paintings. “At some point, someone decided
that clowns were scary, or could be scary.
They’ve been so abused in popular culture.”
He knew it was odd, going on about this, but
it was so much the thing he preferred to talk
about. “It sounds funny—and it is funny, to a
certain extent—to stick up for clowns.”
Ah. Yes. To a certain extent. As in: It’s not
that hilarious to stick up for clowns. For Reilly,
clowning is basically acting, only purer—it’s
about becoming a vehicle for joy, and for tears,
without having to worry about getting recog-
nized at the airport. Clowning is a sacred act,
and John C. Reilly is a clown. Nothing funny
about it.
sam schube is gq’s deputy style editor.
HO US TON
C O N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 1 3 9
cinnamon, star anise, and other spices and
covered in Vietnamese herbs is something
like a pho minus the broth. Turkey-neck yak-
amein is a direct hat tip to New Orleans’s own
Creole-Asian noodle soup. Is there something
slightly absurd about lumping all of these tra-
ditions together? There is. Though it should
be pointed out that Shepherd did the same
with western cuisines at One Fifth, with the
theme “Romance Languages,” presumed to
encompass French, Spanish, and Italian.
Does it always work? It does not. Is it usually
delicious? Very. I found myself wrapping bits
of Mexican al pastor in the lettuce leaf from
Thai pork larb and dragging it through the
dank, buttery garlic sauce from Shepherd’s
ri≠ on Vietnamese crawfish, which have
become synonymous with the delicious-
ness dividend of cross-cultural pollination.
I thought of it as my own edible version of
Gulf Coast Soul.
OF COURSE, CALLING a city cool is tricky
business. Cool how? Cool for who? Cool isn’t
the same as hipster, and it’s certainly not the
same as gentrified, though both seem to fix to
it like remoras to a shark. And Houston didn’t
suddenly become cool just because outsiders
started to take notice. It was cool way back
when Archie Bell and the Drells name-checked
it while teaching America the “Tighten Up,”
cool when Montrose was perhaps the most
bohemian and LGBT-friendly neighborhood
in the whole South.
“Everybody who got
famous here did it working
outside the system,”
Bun B said. “If they had
a buzz, they were the ones
who created that buzz.”
It was cool, certainly, when a brand of
slowed-down hip-hop emerged from the
streets in the early 1990s. Nobody is better
evidence of that enduring cool than Bun B.
As one half of UGK, he had helped trans-
late that sound, pioneered by the legendary
mixtape-maker DJ Screw in imitation of the
dreamy, slurry rhythms of codeine syrup,
into the sound of Houston rap. Since the
death of his partner, Pimp C, in 2007, Bun B,
has emerged as one of the city’s most visible
boosters, mingling equally with politicians,
millionaires, and younger hip-hop acts.
He also still performs and, with his wife,
 H O US TO N C O N T I N U E D
produces an exceptionally funny YouTube
series of cooking videos called “Trill Meals.”
“I think Bun could be elected mayor,” I was
told by Shepherd, who once had him collabo-
rate on a comic-book version of tasting notes
for the wine list at Underbelly.
I met Bun B at his barber, on the southwest
side of the city. It had been a typical Houston
arrival in that I was convinced, pulling up to
what seemed like an abandoned office complex,
that my GPS had failed. Eventually I noticed a
tiny barber-pole sign on one entrance. Inside,
the rapper, who was born Bernard Freeman,
was being tended to by Nicholas Howard, self-
styled Barber to the Stars, a title bolstered by
photos of athlete and rapper clients covering
the wall behind his shop’s single chair. Bun B
shrugged when I repeated Shepherd’s com-
ment, sending the faintest ripple of alarm
across the face of Howard, who happened to be
holding a razor millimeters from Bun B’s nose.
“That might be overstating it, but I’ll take it, I
guess,” Bun B said. “I try to represent the city
with pride.” Howard recovered and proceeded
cutting his client’s beard in a line as straight as
a West Texas road.
As Bun B told it, the rise of Houston rap was
another example of the city’s frontier ethos.
“Everybody who got famous here did it work-
ing outside the system,” he said. “It was a lot
of hand-to-hand: going out, meeting people,
making connections. If they had a buzz, they
were the ones who created that buzz.” The
success of UGK, Geto Boys, and others drove
the mainstream record business crazy, he said:
“New York likes to lay claim to everything, and
this was something they couldn’t lay claim to.”
Perhaps as a sign of middle age and new civic
responsibility, he now downplays the role of
syrup in creating the Houston sound: “It was
just a reflection of the vibe. Very laid-back.”
Another thing we tend to mean when we
say a place has gotten cool is “cool for white
people.” The sheer size and centerlessness of
Houston has spared it some of the gentrifi-
cation debates that roil other cities, but it is
hardly immune. Close to downtown, the Third
Ward, a traditionally African-American neigh-
borhood that’s recently seen a glut of high-
priced construction, has become a particular
battleground and inspired a pushback.
“White communities have their co≠ee
shops and their bars and that kind of thing.
Black communities are starting more and
more to invest in themselves,” Bun B said. “It’s
a conscious e≠ort to bring black businesses
into black neighborhoods. It’s just part of our
DIY nature.”
Black Restaurant Week started in Houston
in 2016 and has since spread to five other
cities. The restaurant Kitchen 713 has been
one participant in the promotion, serving
“Global Soul” food from its location near
Rice University. Another is Turkey Leg Hut, a
wildly successful late-night restaurant owned
by the couple Lynn and Kia Price. Music
was already pounding at noon, when I sat at
the bar. Behind it hangs a yellow neon sign:
when life gives you lemonade, add
hennessy. That apparently goes equally for
when life gives you turkey legs. The Hut’s sig-
nature item is a tomahawk-size leg, smoked
until ruby red and ready to fall apart at the
slightest touch; one version comes lacquered
with a sweet, slightly spicy Hennessy glaze.
(There is also a Cîroc Mango Habanero ver-
sion that I felt would be too performatively
woke to order.) The legs are also available
stu≠ed with shrimp Alfredo or crawfish mac
and cheese. If that sounds vulgar, consider
that it is reminiscent of nothing so much as
the signature dish of Montreal chef Martin
Picard, who stu≠s a slow-cooked pig’s trotter
with foie gras at his restaurant Au Pied de
Cochon and in return receives endless acco-
lades, not to mention 60 Canadian dollars.
THE FRONTIER COMES in di≠erent guises:
Sometimes it looks like a pickup truck bar-
reling up I-45 at night, bouncing behind it
the blackened tube of a smoker at full burn,
smoke billowing down the road like steam
from a locomotive. This is the Bookity Bookity
Boudain Man, king of Houston’s pirate barbe-
cuers, whose destination is a Walmart parking
lot somewhere north of the Loop, I-610, south
of the beltway, TX-8.
I am being vague because, as Bookity
tells me, he’s “down with the underground
economy,” a position that somehow doesn’t
preclude taking credit cards or having a
Facebook page but that has a well-established
history in Houston. “We have a long tradi-
tion of ‘shade tree’ barbecue,” said J. C. Reid,
who co-founded and runs the Houston BBQ
Festival and writes a barbecue column for the
Chronicle. “Somebody just sets up under a tree
and starts cooking. It’s old wildcatter culture.”
Bookity wears a chef ’s toque and a T-shirt
covered in hundred-dollar bills and the word
hustle. He lost his left foot to diabetes last
year, so he’s in a wheelchair, and while a
younger employee works the smoker, he works
the crowd. A steady stream of cars and SUVs,
driven by whites, African-Americans, Latinos,
and Asians, head o≠ into the night with fat,
ricey links of boudin sausage; slabs of ribs;
pork-shoulder steaks pulled, sizzling, o≠ of
the smoker’s burn box; and dripping, moist
links of deer sausage made from deer that a
couple of police-officer customers who are also
hunters bring him. “That’s wild meat,” he said.
“Not everybody can stand the wild.”
Sometimes the frontier looks like The
Orange Show, an extraordinary artifact of out-
sider art in the East End, built over the course
of several decades by an eccentric postal car-
rier named Je≠ McKissack. McKissack was
obsessed with the healthful properties of
oranges and constructed a riotous, colorful
shrine filled with twirling weather vanes,
welded birds, fluttering Texas flags, and cryptic
mosaic proclamations from Confucius, Aesop,
and others. McKissack reportedly felt a keen
sense of competition with another monument
to human insanity and hubris going up across
town: the Houston Astrodome. It pleases me
on his behalf to note that the Dome closed its
doors over a decade ago while The Orange
Show is still open for visitors, administered by
a foundation that also oversees a collection of
mosaics just down the street named Smither
Park, and the annual Houston Art Car Parade.
“There’s a wonderful quirkiness that has
a home in Houston,” said Rebecca Rabinow,
the director of the Menil Collection. Named
for John and Dominique de Menil, visionary
activists and collectors who moved to Houston
from France during World War II, the Menil
is one of the world’s great museum-going
experiences: Its campus of bungalows and
galleries seems to grow organically out of the
surrounding Montrose area. Its main lawn has
become a kind of public square for picnick-
ers, yoga groups, hippies doing circus tricks,
and those just napping under the live oaks. It
is also the anchor of a museum district rich
with the benefits of the kind of institutional
philanthropic art funding that comes with
periodic oil booms. The Houston Center for
Photography is nearby, as is the Contemporary
Arts Museum Houston, the Museum of Fine
Art, and, most indispensably, Rothko Chapel,
the artist’s last commission and a place (to
“There’s a sense of
percolation in the arts
that’s very palpable,”
Rabinow said. “You have
a creative class that can
a≠ord to be here and an
innate sense of confidence
that you can try anything.”
me, at least; part of its power is that it means
di≠erent things to di≠erent people) of simul-
taneous melancholy and soothing.
Rabinow took me on a tour of the museum’s
newest building, the Menil Drawing Institute,
proof that sometimes the frontier can come in
the guise of the old-fashioned institutional high
culture as well. The $40 million building, by
the firm Johnston Marklee, is stark white, with
overhangs that echo Renzo Piano’s main Menil
Building as they extend out into the surround-
ing area and crisp, folding angles that bring to
mind the works on paper it is built to celebrate.
We walked through bright, empty galleries,
archives, and research rooms as workmen
moved past us, attending to finishing touches.
Given the fragile nature of paper, the building
would be brought to optimal temperature
and humidity for six weeks before any art was
introduced. That was not the only consider-
ation being made for climate: At key doorways,
Rabinow pointed out, there were riveted cuts in
the floor, like those on the deck of a boat. These
were dams, programmed to automatically rise
if water ever breached the already formidable
network of pumps and bulwarks designed to
protect the collection against the intrusion of
weather. Harvey had been an unexpected test,
and the dams had not even been called into use.
Rabinow spent nearly 30 years as a cura-
tor of modern and contemporary art at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
before returning to Houston, where she’d
spent her high school years. “I came for the
Menil, but Houston has been the real sur-
prise,” she said. “There’s a sense of percola-
tion in the arts that’s very palpable. You have
a creative class that can a≠ord to be here and
an innate sense of confidence that you can try
anything. It might work, it might not, but peo-
ple are going to show up.”
These qualities—community and a≠ord-
ability—shouldn’t be underestimated. They’re
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 6 3
 H O US TO N C O N T I N U E D
part of what allowed someone like Chris Wise
to stay in the city. Wise, 31, is the talent booker
for the Day for Night music-and-arts festi-
val (which was headlined last year by Nine
Inch Nails and took place in a converted post
office), a part-time bartender, and the bass-
ist for the neo-Americana band Buxton. He
grew up in La Porte, a town 30 minutes east of
Houston dominated by petrochemical plants
that nearly every high schooler was expected
to go work for after graduation. As a kid more
interested in film, musical theater, and art,
Wise had other plans, but unlike those of pre-
If there’s anything left in the
exposed wreckage of tech
utopianism, this is it: The
damn phones really do help
people find one another.
vious generations, that didn’t automatically
mean heading east or west. “New York or L.A.
never really occurred to me,” he said. Instead,
he set up in Houston, where energy may rule
the roost (nearly every person I met could
quote the current price for a barrel of crude oil
o≠ the top of their head), but there’s still room
for a young man to pursue talent booking/bass
playing/bartending while living with two dogs
in a one-bedroom apartment near downtown
for $600 a month.
Handsome and slender, with a sweep of
hair in something approaching a pompadour,
Wise appears to know literally every person
in town, a condition that grew so comically
ostentatious during an evening bar crawl
that he felt the need to embarrassedly assure
me that he hadn’t set up any of our encoun-
ters. Echoing many others I’d met, he said
that technology has helped Houston’s scene
cohere. Until recently, it was simply hard to
navigate the far-flung corners of the city, much
less gather a crowd. “There was always great
food, but it was 30 miles away,” he said. “There
were people who wanted to come see shows,
but they didn’t want to drive.” Now social net-
works have brought people of similar interests
together; Google Maps help them find places
to meet; ride shares let them stay out later
getting drunk and then home safe. If there’s
anything left in the exposed wreckage of tech
utopianism, this is it: The damn phones really
do help people find one another.
the frontier looks like
A N D, Y ES, S O M E T I M ES
Hipster Brigadoon, as in the sprawling com-
pound of a bar in midtown called Axelrad Beer
Garden. In the center of the outdoor space
is a large tree covered in neon. Around that
totem, when Wise and I visited, was arrayed
an entire souk: There was an Airstream out-
fitted with beer taps. Massage tables. Shelves
filled with board games. Someone was selling
churros from a folding table. At another, a
South Asian man o≠ered biryanis. Couples
wound their way through, carrying steaming
boxes from the adjacent pizzeria. Along one
long side, there was a grove of hammocks
hanging from steel racks and swaying in the
summer breeze, each as heavy as a seed pod
1 6 4 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
with a young, beautiful body, sometimes two;
if you ever find yourself asking “Where did all
these hipsters come from?” look to the fertile
Hammock Fields of East Texas.
Axelrad’s owner, Adam Brackman, cut
his teeth helping out and providing a venue
for displaced New Orleans musicians after
Hurricane Katrina. The NOLA trumpeter
Kermit Ruffins is an Axelrad investor and
plays regular gigs there. (Some 250,000 New
Orleanians spent time in Houston after that
storm; an estimated 40,000 stayed for good—a
small population bump but one that can’t have
had anything but a happy e≠ect on Houston’s
taste for eating, drinking, and going out.)
It was open-mic night, and on a large
stage near the neon tree, a bearded guy with
a guitar sang “Ain’t No Sunshine” while surf
videos played on the wall behind him. He
was followed by a young black duo. He, with
dreads creeping out from under a bucket hat,
started rapping in a kind of mumble while
she crooned Fill me up / Fill me up / You’ve
got to fill me up in a way that made it clear
she didn’t mean with gratitude. The perfor-
mance threatened to wander o≠ course until
the “Ain’t No Sunshine” guy reappeared,
strumming, behind them, and suddenly it all
came together.
It was hard not to think of the Su≠ers’ “Gulf
Coast Soul” and of Kam Franklin, the band’s
mighty-voiced lead singer. Raised in Houston,
Franklin got her first gigs by inventing agents
and managers: fake old white guys with fake
e-mail accounts.
“I used ‘Mike’ a lot. Mike seems like a trusty
guy but also tough,” she said.
In those days, Franklin could easily have
borrowed the Bookity Bookity Boudain Man’s
hustle T-shirt: Wednesdays and Thursdays,
she sang at open mics at R&B clubs on Almeda
Road or Emancipation Avenue, joints where
you needed to crush covers of Erykah Badu
or Chaka Khan or Beyoncé 50 or 60 times
with the house band before anybody even
thought of asking about original material.
“Late Tuesdays, I’d go sing with a country
band I used to mess around with,” she said.
“Saturdays, I’d go hang with the punk and ska
kids. And the rest of the week it would be stu-
dio gigs with rappers, if I could get them.”
On the road, people still express disbelief
that the band is from Houston. “We get, ‘Are
y’all from Austin? Are y’all from New Orleans?’
I’m like, ‘No, we’re from H-Town, Texas. Where
we’re going to stay.’ ”
The Su≠ers’ new album, Everything Here,
leads o≠ with a song called “Intro (A Headnod
to Houston).” It features Paul Wall rapping
over a background of voices singing: It might
not be that pretty / But it looks real good to me
/ It might not be your favorite city / But it’s
really got a hold on me.
Maybe it’s that sense of defiance that ulti-
mately defines Houston’s cool—the sense that
a city where cool isn’t the primary commodity
can a≠ord to lie back and let the world come to
it, whenever the world catches on. As Matthew
Odam’s passenger put it, before closing the car
door and taking o≠ toward the Menil’s lawn
and into legend: “Houston is cool because
Houston doesn’t give a fuck about being cool.”
brett martin is a gq correspondent.
SPERM C O UNT ZERO
C O N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 1 4 9
which took place in May, on Lidingö, a small
island in the inner Stockholm archipelago. A
hundred spermatologists in one place: You’d
think (incorrectly) that the jokes would be
good. Skakkebæk had told me I’d be able to
find some dissenters to the conclusions of
Swan’s meta-analysis there, but what I wit-
nessed instead was the final vanquishing of
the few remaining doubters.
At the welcome dinner (reindeer
and rooster), I met Hagai Levine, the Israeli
co-author of the Hebrew University/Mount
Sinai meta-analysis. Levine, who is 40,
told me we had reasons to worry. “I’m saying
that we should hope for the best and pre-
pare for the worst,” he said. “And that is the
possibility that we will become extinct. That’s
a possibility we must seriously consider.
I’m not saying it’s going to happen. I’m not say-
ing it’s likely to happen. I’m not saying that’s
the prediction. I’m just saying we should be
prepared for such a possibility. That’s all. And
we are not.”
His session the next morning—“Are
Spermatozoa at the Verge of Extinction?”—
would be the defining event of the conference:
It cast a shadow over all the other talks. At
a panel discussion that followed his presen-
tation, Levine continued his argument for
addressing the causes of the crisis, saying,
“My default, if I don’t know, is that it is up
to the manufacturers of chemicals to prove
that their chemicals are safe. But I don’t feel
like I need any more evidence to take action
with chemicals already known to disrupt the
endocrine system.”
We can glimpse what our
low-sperm-count future
might look like. It will be
arduous to conceive, and
expensive—so expensive
that having children may
no longer be an option
available to all couples.
The organizer of the symposium, Lars
Björndahl, a Swedish spermatologist who
had presented earlier in the morning, urged
caution. “I have great respect for epidemi-
ological studies, but we should remember
that mathematical correlations don’t prove
that there is a causative relation,” he said.
Questions from the audience—often taking
the form of statements—were much along
the same lines: Be careful of a bias toward
 SP E R M C O U N T Z E R O C O N T I N U E D
the assumption that all these things are
connected. Levine nodded with only a hint
of chagrin, like a patient professor waiting
hopefully for his students to catch up.
David Mortimer, who runs a company that
designs and establishes assisted-conception
laboratories, was one of the only members
of the audience willing to question Levine’s
study itself. He pointed out that methods for
measuring sperm had changed dramatically
over the time period of the study and that the
old studies were profoundly unreliable.
Levine was ready with an answer. “So
that’s one of the reasons we also conducted a
sensitivity analysis,” he said from the stage,
“with studies with sample collection only
after 1995—and the slope was even steeper.
So that could not explain the decline we see
after 1995.”
“I’ve never said there was no decline
in sperm counts,” Mortimer said, a bit
defensively. Levine, who had been so gra-
cious and engaged with his critics, began
to look a little tired. He rallied, though,
when the group agreed to put out a joint
statement about the crisis. The chairs of the
symposium called on the world to acknowl-
edge that male reproductive health
was essential for the survival of the species,
that its decline was alarming and should
be studied, and that at present it was being
neglected in funding and attention.
Mortimer came around and ended up
signing the statement. When I caught up
with him later, he wasn’t nearly as dismis-
sive of the study’s conclusions as I expected.
He agreed there was little question that sperm
counts were dropping, and he even embraced
some of the direst predictions of scientists like
Levine. “The epigenetics are the scary bit,”
he told me, “because what we’re doing now
a≠ects the future of the human race.” When
even the skeptics are scared, it’s probably time
to pay attention.
CAN ANY THING BE DONE? Over the past
20 years, there have been occasional
attempts to limit the number of endocrine
disruptors in circulation, but inevitably the
fixes are insubstantial: one chemical removed
in favor of another, which eventually
turns out to have its own dangers. That
was the case with BPA, which was partly
replaced by Bisphenol S, which might be
even worse for you. The chemical industry,
unsurprisingly, has been resistant to the
notion that the billions of dollars of reve-
nue these products represent might also
represent terrible damage to the human
body, and have often followed the model
of Big Tobacco and Big Oil—fighting
regulation with lobbyists and funding
their own studies that suggest their products
are harmless. The website for the American
Chemistry Council, an industry trade asso-
ciation, has a page dedicated to phthalates
that mostly consists of calling Shanna Swan’s
research “controversial” and asserting that
her “use of methodologies that have not
been validated and unconventional data
analysis have been criticized by the sci-
entific community.” (Cited critics of Swan
include Elizabeth Whelan, now deceased,
an epidemiologist famous for fighting the
regulation of chemicals from her position as
president of the American Council on Science
and Health, which has received funding from
Chevron, DuPont, and other companies in the
plastic business.)
Assuming that we’re unable to wean
ourselves o≠ plastics and other marvels
of modern science, we may be stuck inno-
vating our way out of this mess. How long
we’re able to outrun the drop in sperm count
may depend, finally, on how good we get
at IVF and other fertility treatments. When
I spoke with Marc Goldstein, a urologist and
surgeon at Weill Cornell medical center
in New York City, he said that while there
was “no question I’ve seen a big increase
in men with male-factor infertility,” he
wasn’t worried for the future of the spe-
cies. Assisted reproduction would keep
the babies coming, no matter how sickly
men’s sperm become.
It’s true that fertility treatments have
already given men with extremely low sperm
counts the chance to be fathers. Indeed, by
looking at their cases, we can glimpse what
our low-sperm-count future might look like.
We know that it will be arduous to conceive,
and expensive—so expensive that having chil-
dren may no longer be an option available to
all couples. A fertility-treatment-dependent
future is also unlikely to produce a birth rate
anywhere near current levels.
Not long ago, I spoke with Chris Wohl,
a research materials/surface engineer
at the NASA Langley Research Center in
Virginia, who spent six years trying to
conceive a child. Both he and his wife had
fertility problems: Wohl’s sperm count
was under 2 million per milliliter—the aver-
age count we’d expect to reach, at the cur-
rent rate, by 2034. “We started in the normal
way of trying to have kids,” he said, “and after
a few years, we said, ‘Okay, let’s talk to some
folks.’ ” They went through several rounds
of intrauterine insemination. “And then
after that sixth time, we said, ‘This isn’t work-
ing. We need to kind of up our technology
game.’ So we went to a reproductive endo-
crinologist and went through several rounds
of IVF. And then when that failed, we
were going to look into adoption. That’s
when somebody came forward and said that
they would be a surrogate for us.” Finally,
with the surrogate, the process worked. He
and his wife now have a healthy, strong-
willed 4-year-old girl.
So perhaps that’s the solution: As long as
we hover somewhere above Sperm Count
Zero, and with an assist from modern medi-
cine, we have a shot. Men will continue to be
essential to the survival of the species. The
problem with innovation, though, is that
it never stops. A new technology known as
IVG—in vitro gametogenesis—is showing
early promise at turning embryonic stem
cells into sperm. In 2016, Japanese scien-
tists created baby mice by fertilizing normal
mouse eggs with sperm created via IVG. The
stem cells in question were taken from female
mice. There was no need for any males.
daniel noah halpern wrote about the
Singularity in the November 2014 issue.
CHRI S HEM SWORTH
C O N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 1 1 7
Hemsworth’s clinical contentment seems to
have started when he and his wife moved near
the easternmost edge of Australia—to Byron
Bay, a gorgeous beach town perched on steep
cli≠s that plunge straight into the ocean. In
2014, burned out from the increasing hassle of
paparazzi in Los Angeles, they went in search
of quiet. They visited Australia, and Pataky,
who is from Spain, wasn’t initially impressed,
Hemsworth says. “Both trips we did, it was like
pouring rain. And she was like, ‘I don’t know
what the big fuss is,’ ” he recalls. “Then I said,
“I really do feel a sense
of ease for the first time
in years,” Hemsworth
says. “I don’t mean that
as an assessment of
my achievements. I just
mean I’m content with
what’s going on.”
‘Let’s do a trip up to Byron Bay,’ and we get o≠
the plane and it’s raining. I’m like, ‘Oh, my God.
I’m not selling it.’ And she instantly went, ‘No,
there’s something di≠erent about this place. It
is a very special place.’ She went, ‘This could be
it. It could be the best decision we’ve made.’ ”
The charm of Hemsworth’s life by the sea
can be glimpsed on Instagram. That publicist
who once told him to be cryptic and withhold-
ing about his personal life might be surprised
by how the world has changed. “The social-
media side of it is just trying to work out: How
do you keep up with the times?” Hemsworth
explains. “You see that Sylvester Stallone has
an Instagram account, and you kind of go,
‘This is the world we’re in.’ ”
When Hemsworth shares shots of his kids,
his 20 million followers go especially crazy.
“In the few and rare times that he does, it’s
genuine,” Waititi observes. He’s not curating
anything; he’s just proud: “It’s ‘Here’s this
amazing moment when my daughter was
surfing!’ ” Waititi says with a laugh.
Still, Hemsworth and Pataky are both
careful not to show their children’s faces in
photos. He bristles at any suggestion that he
is somehow “selling” his life by sharing sweet
tidings from his family. “The exploitation is
something I’m very wary of,” Hemsworth says.
“We’ve been o≠ered things, like ‘Advertise
such-and-such and have dinner with your
family.’ There’s no way.”
Even on a relatively remote bay in
Australia, the threats of fame can crop up.
S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 6 5
 C H RI S H E M SWO RT H C O N T I N U E D
Recently, Hemsworth was out with his
son when he spotted some paparazzi. He tried
to ignore them, but then one of his sons took
o≠ his bathing suit. “He’s naked, and I look
over, and they’re still shooting,” Hemsworth
says. “I ran over, and they knew. I just very
pointedly and definitely said, ‘Don’t you dare.’
I was close to destroying the camera.”
A SOMMELIER STANDS before us, wonder-
ing whether Hemsworth would like a glass
of wine with his steak. Moments earlier we
had admitted to each other our mutual illit-
eracy on the topic of wine. That sort of shared
ignorance can feel comforting and egalitar-
ian—nobody wants to look like a fool in front
of the sommelier.
Before the guy arrived, I had joked that
the word I use when I’m trying to sound
knowledgeable about wine is “nostalgic”—a
seemingly vague descriptor for a red wine
with long legs and strong notes of bullshit.
Hemsworth volunteered that his enological
safe word is “jammy.” “We should go on a
wine tour!” he’d suggested, looking out the
window as though he might spot a vineyard
peeking from behind Parliament.
“Do you have a Cabernet?” Hemsworth
asks the sommelier.
“I do have some Cabs,” he says. “Something
oaky? Something perfumy?”
“Something”—Hemsworth pauses, and
I know what’s coming because he shoots
me the same challenging look a cat gives
you before batting your water glass o≠ the
table—“nostalgic.”
The sommelier nods once and zips away,
presumably to consult whatever tome allows
a sommelier to describe a wine as “reticent”
with confidence. Hemsworth cackles. The
sommelier quickly returns with a glass of the
Châteauneuf-du-Pape. “It smells of co≠ee.
Chocolate. Roast buns,” he tells Hemsworth,
who reaches for his glass and gives it a sip.
“That’s nostalgic for me,” he replies. “You
know what I’d describe it as? Jammy.”
He brings the glass to his lips again.
“Someone told me that you’ve got to just sip
it and say literally what comes to mind,” he
says. “I think it’s a smoky, musty…forest?”
“You do like your wines,” the sommelier says
with detectable snark. “If we’re going to hire,
I’ll let you know.”
For now, of course, Hemsworth’s all set
career-wise. He’s all set on plenty of fronts, to
be honest. “I really do feel a sense of ease for
the first time in years. I don’t mean that as an
assessment of my achievements. I just mean
I’m content with what’s going on and relaxed
and open about it,” he says.
Gone are those old uncertainties—the
occasional feeling that he was a passive
player in his own career. Gone, too, are the
old assumptions about what it might take
for him to thrive. “I came into Hollywood
thinking I had to be Russell Crowe. I loved his
performances, and because of my physical-
ity and my size, that was the obvious choice.
I think I was aware that it could kind of get
me in the door,” Hemsworth says. “But it
wasn’t me.”
lauren larson is a gq associate editor.
1 6 6 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
T H E P O I S O N WAR
C O N T I N U E D F R O M PAG E 1 2 3
Midsummer, a 45-year-old British man
named Charlie Rowley found what appeared
to be an unopened box of perfume and brought
it home. A few days later, he gave the perfume
to his partner, Dawn Sturgess, a 44-year-old
mother of three who was staying in a homeless
shelter in town. Sturgess sprayed her wrists
with some of the bottle’s contents, which
came out “oily,” Rowley recalled afterward,
and did not smell like perfume. He quickly
washed his hands. Sturgess had to lie down.
Rowley was later found frothing at the mouth,
and the couple were taken to the same hos-
pital as the Skripals. Samples sent to Porton
Down confirmed it was a novichok—the scav-
enged bottle, it seems, may have been a vessel
for the poison carried by attackers back in
March. Guards returned to the ward; more
cordons went up. After a week, Sturgess died
in the hospital. Rowley recovered and was dis-
charged back out into Salisbury, where locals
were being warned, firmly now, not to pick up
anything they hadn’t themselves put down.
As a backdrop to all this, a vigorous informa-
tion war had broken out between London and
Moscow, and their row was coming to repre-
sent something larger and more sinister, too—a
feud between the Russian Federation and the
NATO-anchored West. In April, when the Assad
regime bombed a rebel-held Syrian city with
what were widely accepted to be chemical
weapons, Russia stood by Assad. Afterward,
in speeches making the case for Western
retaliation, Teresa May directly and repeat-
edly invoked the Skripals—as if Yulia and her
father, who last they knew were out for pizza,
were now endorsing air strikes.
In the hospital, Yulia’s health improved,
delighting those who treated her and—they
would admit—perplexing them. “To see the
recovery happen and at such a pace,” one
of Yulia’s clinicians later told the BBC, “that
I can’t easily explain.” The details of the
Skripals’ medical treatment remain confiden-
tial, though one source told me there was a
member of sta≠ at Salisbury District Hospital
who also worked at Porton Down, which
helped doctors identify the symptoms of
nerve-agent exposure relatively quickly.
Anxious about overwhelming her, Yulia’s
doctors were not sure how much to tell her
about what was happening outside the hospi-
tal walls. Her recovery, her headlong progress
toward discharge, only made the diplomatic sit-
uation knottier. Here was a Russian citizen, in a
British hospital, under the protection of British
police. If there were plans afoot to secretly
re-settle the Skripals upon their release from
the hospital, the Russian embassy stated, this
would be seen “as an abduction.” Meanwhile
a relative of Yulia’s back home, a cousin, had
given interviews to the Russian and British
media, pointing out she’d been denied a UK
visa to visit her relatives and making a disarm-
ing suggestion that echoed right back through
the years. What if all that ailed Sergei and Yulia
was a bad meal—food poisoning?
From London the Russian embassy pushed
for consular access to the Skripals, a request
that would later be repeated by Vladimir Putin
himself. In a brief statement, Yulia politely,
very carefully, declined.
6. “Some Analytical Work”
FEW OUTSIDE MOSCOW knew the world of
Kremlin intrigue—and what happened when
you found yourself on the wrong side of it—as
well as Valery Morozov, a Russian business-
man in his 60s now living in the London com-
muter town of Guildford, where he keeps up a
colorful blog about Russian politics. Morozov
and his wife, Irina, were now in their sixth year
of restless exile in the UK, Valery having once
risen fast and high in construction back in
Moscow before he made “too many enemies”
and had to flee. It was from reading Morozov’s
blog posts after the attack that I’d learned of
a chance encounter he’d had a few months
before—with Sergei Skripal.
They had run into each other in December,
Morozov recalled when I met him at his home.
Both of them were waiting for trains out of
London, and they’d stopped in at a grocery
store, not far from Waterloo Station, that spe-
cializes in delicacies imported from Russia.
Shrink-wrapped sausages the width of biceps.
Colorful roe in jars. A certain kind of chocolate
made from “bird’s milk.” By which was meant
(the store owner snickered when recounting
this to me later) bird shit.
Morozov was stocking up on this chocolate
when he found Skripal in the shop, a pink-
faced deda, or grandfather, with a telltale
gait. “He looked like military intelligence,”
Morozov said. “You behave in a certain way,
your posture.” Irina was there in the shop that
day, too, and the three exiles fell into conver-
sation, discussing family, cats, the best jarred
herring on the surrounding shelves—and also
work. Valery had his blog, rich and gossipy and
stoked by old contacts back home who kept
him v teme—in-the-know—about Kremlin
intrigue. Irina took jobs as an interior designer.
Skripal (the couple recalled) said something
that day about his own line of employment that
would only later seem significant.
I spent hours in the company of Valery
Morozov this April, when the reverberations
from Skripal’s poisoning were wildest. I found
his bracing, fiercely un-Western way of looking
at the world a useful counterweight to all the
easy anti-Russian rhetoric in the daily press.
Despite his exile, he remained a Kremlin nos-
talgist to his core; he’d drunk vodka, once,
with Vladimir Putin. When I asked him the
same questions I asked everybody about the
Skripal hit—why? and why now?—Morozov
was withering about certain British assump-
tions. Whenever the poisoning was described
as being ordered by Putin, he said, it showed
an awful naivety. “Everyone thinks that Putin
controls everything. No! He’s controlling only
what he controls.” To the Russian mind, the
 T H E P O I S O N WA R C O N T I N U E D

Western impulse to have everything be dis-
tinctly this or that—if not the truth, a lie—read
as idiotically simplistic.
He flung up his hands in frustration when I
asked, the Skripal hit in mind, how one might
draw the Kremlin’s permission structure. A tri-
angle, I asked, with Putin at the top? Morozov
was appalled. “A triangle!” He searched for a
less facile description, something that would
properly conjure the mass of interconnecting
interests: the politicians, mafia, business-
people, generals, spies, all cross-assisting or
at cross-purposes. “It’s not a triangle. It’s the
Internet.” He told me he believed that Skripal
had been punished for interfering, maybe inad-
vertently, in the financial interests of a self-con-
tained criminal group. Morozov speculated
that Skripal had passed the wrong intel to the
wrong people, probably during the course of
“his analytical work for some intelligence com-
panies, if I understood what he was saying...”
I asked Morozov to repeat this. Yes, during
their December encounter in the shop,
Morozov said, Skripal claimed to be doing con-
sulting work in “cyber-security, intelligence,
some analytical work.”
This was a surprise. It made me recall a
conversation I’d had with a Salisbury taxi
driver, Mehmet Beykanoglu, who said that
over a period of about seven years, he’d taken
Skripal home from the train station to Christie
Miller Road “maybe 40, 50 times”—so often
that Beykanoglu knew his address by heart.
Beykanoglu’s cab queued with others at the
station, taking random fares, which sug-
gested a much larger number of such jour-
neys undertaken by Skripal over the same
period. Beykanoglu believed his fare, wearing
a suit on most occasions, was returning from
employment in London: “I asked, once, and he
said he worked for the government. I wish I’d
asked which government.”
Perhaps Skripal was a why in his own assas-
sination attempt after all. A well-informed
source told me that Skripal had given at least
one lecture at a British military institution,
in which he discussed his GRU background.
Had he been trading on his knowledge and
his past in other quarters, too? The owner
of the Waterloo shop, Mohsen Najim, said
Skripal would sometimes drop by after trav-
eling abroad. “He said, ‘Oh, I’m working for
a company; they send me everywhere. They
need my experience.’ ” In May, responding to
reports that Skripal had traveled to the Czech
Republic to help instruct intelligence agents
there, the Czech foreign minister, choosing
his words, said such a visit would certainly
have been useful—“logical.” When I consulted
Robert Hannigan about all this, he said it
didn’t sound so unusual. Once spies re-settle,
“they’re free individuals. They can do what
they want. And bear the risks, too.”
Boris Volodarsky told me if Skripal had
plugged himself into Western intelligence
networks, that would have made him a con-
spicuous point of contact for anybody waver-
ing within the Russian system. Volodarsky
recounted that when Alexander Litvinenko
first hoped to contact MI6, he sought an intro-
duction through Oleg Gordievsky, a KGB dou-
ble agent living in the UK. And once Litvinenko
was on MI6’s books, a later defector named
Vyacheslav Zharko reportedly came to him for
a similar intro. Volodarsky imagined an equiv-
alent conversation between Skripal and some
old colleague: “Sergei, could we meet?” If it was
di∞cult for Volodarsky to explain the targeting
of a pardoned, pensioned-o≠ spy, he had less
di∞culty in imagining why a roving defector
magnet might be worth snu∞ng out.
7. The End of the Cold War
and without fan-
I N S A L I S B U R Y, F U R T I V E LY
fare, Sergei Skripal left the hospital and disap-
peared into protected hiding with Yulia. It was
mid-May, 74 days after the initial exposure.
Later that month, Yulia filmed a short state-
ment from an undisclosed location: In it she
said her immediate focus was on caring for her
father, whose recovery had been slower than
her own. Yulia herself appeared outwardly
healthy, despite the breathing-tube scar on her
throat—smiling, contented even. But doctors
acknowledged that the future health of both
of them was more or less unknown. Without
giving details in her statement, Yulia spoke of
“devastating changes thrust upon me.”
After Andrei Zheleznyakov had been saved
from the initial ravages of a novichok, back
in ’87, he was a±icted by a miscellany of side
e≠ects, among them cirrhosis, hepatitis, and
epilepsy. He died in 1992, five years after his
exposure. The attack this March has killed
one bystander, Dawn Sturgess. Her compan-
ion, Charlie Rowley, has reported that the
novichok has a≠ected his ability to concen-
trate. Nick Bailey, the cop exposed during the
course of the investigation, was eventually
released from the hospital but said in a state-
ment that “normal life for me will probably
never be the same.” For the Skripals, the future
looks, at best, precarious. “I take one day at a
time,” Yulia said in her statement. She hoped
to go back to Russia eventually, she said, while
repeating with delicacy her refusal of assis-
tance from the embassy: “At the moment I do
not wish to avail myself of their services.”
The week of Sergei’s discharge, I sat with
a senior government source and asked what
was next for father and daughter. “They don’t
know,” the source said. “I think that’s the hon-
est truth. Of course there will be o≠ers of deep
levels of cover for both of them. But there’s a
balance. You’ve got to live.” As to whether this
living would finally be done in the UK, else-
where in Europe, or even somewhere in North
America, they hadn’t decided. The source told
me, “They’re scared.”
By early July, the investigators still hadn’t
announced any suspects. The head of counter-
terror policing, Neil Basu, sounded a note that
was very like despair. “I would love to be able
to say that we have identified and caught those
responsible and how we are certain there are
no traces of nerve agent left anywhere,” he
said. “The brutal reality, however, is that I can-
not.” (Later that month, the Press Association
reported that investigators, finally, after scour-
ing hundreds of hours of CCTV, had identified
“several” of those who were suspected to have
traveled to Salisbury to carry out the operation
on Christie Miller Road. The authorities, at the
time of writing, refused to confirm this.)
Around Salisbury—you couldn’t call it
Smalls-bury now—what choice did they have?
They continued to touch foreign objects, half in
mind of lethal risk while carrying out everyday
tasks. Investigators’ best guess was that it could
take 50 years for the last of any stray novichok
to deteriorate. Tourists didn’t want to visit, and
there were businesses behind the quarantine
lines that had to shutter. In the window of a
bookstore (the Skripals would have driven right
by it on March 4), a history book, The End of the
Cold War, was put on display. On closer inspec-
tion, you could see a new, handwritten note
protruding from its pages: “Or is it?”
On Christie Miller Road, Sergei’s home had
its front door removed. The garden was cov-
ered by wooden planks, and steel-fence bor-
ders lined the drive. Decontamination was
due to last for months; there was a rumor that
No. 47 could even be razed. For the time being,
the house assumed its position in the history
of international espionage, and in the lore of
assassinations ventured if not quite achieved.
It was a place that had once had its time,
its target, its horrible method. The Skripals
wouldn’t live here again.
tom lamont wrote about the Grenfell
Tower fire in the December 2017 issue.

gq is a registered trademark of advance magazine publishers inc. A DDI TI ONA L CREDI TS

copyright © 2018 condé nast. all rights reserved. printed in the u.s.a.
Page 98. O’Rourke: Cal Sport Media/Alamy. Cruz:
VOLUME 88, NO. 8. GQ (ISSN 0016-6979) is published monthly (except for combined issues in December/January) by Condé Nast, which is a division of
Advance Magazine Publishers Inc. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: Condé Nast, One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. Robert A. Sauerberg, Jr., President &
Cheriss May/NurPhoto/Getty Images. Capitol Building:
Chief Executive O∞cer; David E. Geithner, Chief Financial O∞cer; Pamela Drucker Mann, Chief Revenue & Marketing O∞cer. Periodicals postage paid at Getty Images. Cowboys, from left: Prisma by Dukas
New York, NY, and at additional mailing o∞ces. Canada Post Publications Mail Agreement No. 40644503. Canadian Goods and Services Tax Registration Presseagentur GmbH/Alamy; Hulton Archive/Getty
No. 123242885-RT0001. POSTMASTER: SEND ALL UAA TO CFS (SEE DMM 507.1.5.2); NON-POSTAL AND MILITARY FACILITIES: Send address corrections Images; O. A. Fitzgerald/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.
to GQ, P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0717. FOR SUBSCRIPTIONS, ADDRESS CHANGES, ADJUSTMENTS, OR BACK ISSUE INQUIRIES: Please write to GQ, Photo illustration for editorial purposes.
P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0717, call 800-289-9330, or e-mail subscriptions@gq.com. Please give both new and old addresses as printed on most recent
Pages 118–119. Clockwise from top left: Shutterstock/
label. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within eight weeks after receipt of order. Address all editorial, business, and production correspondence
to GQ Magazine, One World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007. For reprints, please e-mail reprints@condenast.com or call Wright’s Media, 877-652-5295.
Rex; TASS/Getty Images; Matt Dunham/AP Images;
For re-use permissions, please e-mail contentlicensing@condenast.com or call 800-897-8666. Visit us online at www.gq.com. To subscribe to other Condé VvoeVale/Getty Images; Jay Vallejera/EyeEm/Getty
Nast magazines on the World Wide Web, visit www.condenastdigital.com. Occasionally, we make our subscriber list available to carefully screened compa- Images; Ivan Sekretarev/Reuters. Photo illustration
nies that o≠er products and services that we believe would interest our readers. If you do not want to receive these o≠ers and/or information, please advise for editorial purposes.
us at P.O. Box 37617, Boone, IA 50037-0717 or call 800-289-9330. GQ IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE RETURN OR LOSS OF, OR FOR DAMAGE OR ANY Page 120. Peter MacDiarmid/Shutterstock/Rex
OTHER INJURY TO, UNSOLICITED MANUSCRIPTS, UNSOLICITED ARTWORK (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, DRAWINGS, PHOTOGRAPHS,
AND TRANSPARENCIES), OR ANY OTHER UNSOLICITED MATERIALS. THOSE SUBMITTING MANUSCRIPTS, PHOTOGRAPHS, ARTWORK, OR
Page 121. From left: Gavin Rodgers; Dylan Martinez/
OTHER MATERIALS FOR CONSIDERATION SHOULD NOT SEND ORIGINALS, UNLESS SPECIFICALLY REQUESTED TO DO SO BY GQ IN WRITING. AFP/Getty Images
MANUSCRIPTS, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND OTHER MATERIALS SUBMITTED MUST BE ACCOMPANIED BY A SELF-ADDRESSED STAMPED ENVELOPE. Page 123. Peter MacDiarmid/Shutterstock/Rex

S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 G Q . C O M 1 6 7
 BACKSTORY

Revenge Is
a Dish Best
Served...
at a Fashion
Shoot
So how did we get Pete
Davidson, a guy who
finds photo shoots totally
embarrassing, to pose for
this issue? He was motivated
by revenge, he says. Revenge
against…us. Because once
upon a time, in 2016, we made
fun of his shoes. It was right
after Comedy Central’s
roast of Rob Lowe: Davidson
appeared on the red carpet
wearing a slim navy suit
with self-lacing high-top
Nikes (a.k.a. “Marty McFlys”).
A couple of days later, he
wakes up to this shit: “It was
a picture of me on the carpet
with my McFlys, and the
person was like, ‘Those are
the coolest sneakers ever.
Here’s how to not wear them.’
I was like, ‘Eyy, that’s mean!’ ”
But now he gets the last laugh.
Two years later, GQ came
calling, asking the 24-year-old
to appear in a fashion story
(see page 79). “It’s just funny
how things turn out,” he says.
—ALLIE JONES

coat $1,990
Burberry
tank top
$40 (for pack
of three)
Calvin Klein
Underwear
pants $1,295
Giorgio Armani
sneakers $450
Adidas by Raf
Simons at KITH
necklace, his own

1 6 8 G Q . C O M S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 P H O T O G R A P H B Y K A T I E M C C U R D Y
www.grand-seiko.com