F R O M K U R T S U T T E R, T H E C R E A T O R O F S O N S O F A N A R C H Y

®
p. 47
Style + Design
Sleek, sexy, and innovative—
42 items that will
change the way you live,
work, drive, and play.

p. 64
Life of Crime
Not only is George Pelecanos
a master of hard-boiled
fiction—he helped create
the toughest, grittiest
show in TV history.
By J.R. Sullivan

p. 72
NFL Preview 2018
Fifteen reasons to stop worrying
and learn to love football again.

80
TOM SCHIERLITZ/TRUNKARCHIVE.COM

KAREN MCDOUGAL ON THE

p. COVER: Karen McDougal
photographed by Dustin Snipes.
Hair and Makeup by Kimberly

Flight Risk Carlson. Top by Lino Fitness.

Bottom by Elisabetta Rogiani.
The most dangerous part of
search-and-rescue operations may MERCEDES ON THE COVER:
Mercedes AMG Project One
be the choppers themselves. photographed by Jonathan
By Devon O’Neil Glynn-Smith.

SEPTEMBER 2018 MEN’S JOURNAL

 NOTEBOOK
14 Dispatch
Squid fishing is a big business in New
England. But netting the creatures can
push a crew to the limit.
18 Travel
One of North America’s most rugged
national parks—and toughest desert
climbs—is just across the border in Baja.
23 Drinks
Put away the gin: A new breed of bespoke
tonic waters go great with almost any kind
of booze.
24 Food
Salads and salsa are fine, but here are 15
ways to make tomatoes new again.
006 SEPTEMBER 2018
28 Cars 104 Fitness
The Subaru Ascent is a tough-luxe hauler Supercharge your abs routine with
for families that need versatility. four moves that work the entire body.
29 Grooming 108 What Works for Me
FROM LEFT: COURTESY OF RIDE THE KEWEENAW ENDURO; BLEND
New, all-natural deodorants that actually How MSNBC’s Ari Melber finds the energy
keep you dry and smelling good. to chase stories in a 24-hour news cycle.
31 Fashion 109 Wellness
Our guide to everything you need to look Hangover cures: Do they really work?
great this fall.
IMAGES/GALLERY STOCK; IAN MADDOX
110 Health News
THE BLUEPRINT The anti–air pollution diet, America’s
fittest cities, and more.
94 Move of the Month
An alternative to the risky back squat. THE L AST WORD
98 Advice 112 Rob Lowe
The ultimate guide to a strong, injury- The veteran actor on being a dad, handling
proof back—for life. regret, and the virtues of partying too hard.
MEN’S JOURNAL
 CL E R MON T
K . Y. U. S .

THIS IS NOT YOUR

PARTICIPATION TROPHY.

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 Letters
Thanks for introducing
us to the wild, almost
unbelievable life of John
Arthur [July 2018]. His gripping
story was a reminder that
truth is almost always stranger
than fiction, and that we don’t
need movies to create heroes
with amazing stories. They’re
everywhere—maybe even
running your local gym.
NAT GUILDSTEIN
BOCA RATON, FL

GOOD HEAD JOSH BY GOSH

The fish-collar story [“Hot I was impressed by the Josh
Around the Collar,” by Adam Brolin story [“The Antihero,” by appearing in major roles in summertime beverage raises
Erace, July 2018] got me hungry Mickey Rapkin, June 2018]. We movies like American Gangster the question: What more can
for grilled seafood for sure. finally managed to learn and Wall Street: Money Never you ask of a summertime brew?
While you’re talking about something about the disposi- Sleeps. And, of course, in No My answer: How about
collars, why not heads? Salmon tion of one of the most Country for Old Men, which is American owned? It’s
heads can be deboned easily, intriguing male actors in a modern classic. important to me, and I’m sure
and there’s good meat in there. Hollywood. The stabbing BRUCE G. CLOSWAY it’s important to a lot of your
If you’re adventurous, you can incident was interesting ROCHESTER, MN readers. Don’t let that
do heads Asian style in broth reading, as was the difficult “America” branding fool you—
with noodles, and pick around start to Brolin’s career and the CLAMTASTIC Bud is owned by a foreign
the bones. Not as gross as it “near normal” lifestyle he I enjoyed your “Summer conglomerate. I enjoy beers
sounds, and the price is right. enjoys. Like many other film School” guide, in the July issue, from Sam Adams, Full Sail,
ANDY TURNER lovers, I became a big fan of tremendously, with the Yuengling, and other American
IRVINE , CA Brolin’s as soon as he started exception of “All Hail the brewers.
Quahog,” by Marjorie Korn. BRUCE RUTKOSKI
She missed the boat on clams. NAPLES, FL
Now, littlenecks are fine for
linguine in clam sauce or RIDE ON
seafood fra diavolo. And top Your article “Riding the
necks are good for clams Americas,” by Clint Carter [July
oreganata or casino. But 2018], was one of the best I’ve
cherrystones are the king of the read concerning veterans
half shell. They cannot be fulfilling a dream. The story is
slurped, as you do with an correct: The wilderness can
oyster, but must be bitten and help former soldiers cope with
chewed. When cherrystones are life after war. As a Vietnam
really fresh, that first bite “pops” veteran, I have been section-
and floods your mouth with a hiking the Appalachian Trail for
briny deliciousness that just the past five years; I recently
cannot be duplicated. completed 378 miles in 32 days.
LAWRENCE UYDESS For three years, I have been
WESTPORT, CT begging men from my Marine
CONTACT US: TWITTER @mensjournal FACEBOOK facebook.com/
MensJournal INSTAGRAM @mensjournal EMAIL letters@mensjournal.com Corps Vietnam unit (we meet at
SEND LETTERS to Men’s Journal, 4 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004. CHUG AMERICAN a reunion every two years) to
Letters become the property of Men’s Journal and may be edited for publication. Your endorsement in “Summer join me—but so far no takers.
SUBSCRIBER SERVICES Go to mensjournal.com/customerservice School” of the “King of Beers,” DELFINO CANDELARIA JR.
Subscribe • Renew • Report Missing Issues • Pay Your Bill • Change Your Address Budweiser, as the go-to ALBUQUERQUE , NM

008 SEPTEMBER 2018 MEN’S JOURNAL

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 Letter From
the Editor
S P I R AT I O N A L . It ’s a
word that gets bandied
A about in this off ice a
lot. I mean, we love the
adventure, travel, fash-
ion, and gear we feature
each month. But realistically, some of
it’s, well, a bit out of reach. As much as
I want to jet to Sri Lanka for a coastal
safari (page 22) or pair a Rolex Oyster
Perpetual Cosmograph Daytona (page
34) with my J.Crew button-down, let’s
just stop for a moment and acknowledge
how raref ied and hard to obtain those
experiences are.
This does not bother me a bit. There’s
an escapist quality to all entertainment,
and as much as I love our advice—for the
record, I’m drinking a tonic-based cock-
tail right now inspired by this month’s
drinks column (page 23)—I also love
looking at and reading about things I’ll
probably never get to experience, wear,
or play with. For me, always topping this
vicarious lust list will be ridiculously
expensive bikes and digital cameras that
cost as much as new Hyundais.
Nothing embodies that feeling of “If
only...” more than paging through our
annual Style & Design feature. For most
of the year, we feature gear you might
actually buy. In Style & Design, we give
010 SEPTEMBER 2018
you some stuff to dream about. That Mer-
cedes-AMG Project One on page 49 is a
drop-dead sexy, street-legal race car. It
also costs $2.7 million. (And if you’re still
interested, apologies—all 275 are spoken
for.) No, I’m not going to run out to nab a
$30,000 Sony LSPX-A1 projector (page
62), but how freaking cool would it be
to have a device that leans against your
living room wall and projects a stunning
4K, movie screen–size image to watch the
latest Marvel installment? And as much
as I love coffee, am I really going to add
a $5,800 home roaster (page 55) to my
kitchen arsenal?
Truth is, if I had the means, I’d buy
all this stuff today. But in the meantime,
reading about these innovations—fea-
tures that you know are going to pop up
in more affordable items soon—is almost
as rewarding. And don’t be too alarmed,
there’s plenty of more modest gear, as
well. That new Rabbit Axis Lever cork-
screw (page 53) will make popping the
cork elegant and easy—no second mort-
gage required.
While aspiration generally refers to
material wants, there’s one other thing I
consistently aspire to, and I bet many of
you do, too: getting fitter. To that end, this
month’s Blueprint section is our biggest
ever. In an effort to help you kick-start
things this fall, there’s everything from
a complex cable pulley workout (page 90)
to a comprehensive guide to your back
and how to keep it strong (page 98). I’m
especially fond of our fall adventure race
calendar (page 96), which will help you—
whether your thing is paddling, running,
or cycling—f ind a challenge to crush in
the upcoming months. And when the
training gets tough, let your mind wan-
der. Maybe even imagine yourself behind
the wheel of a $2.7 million Mercedes.
Happy daydreaming.
GREG EMMANUEL
Chief Content Officer
MEN’S JOURNAL
The Best
View in Town
ORGET HIGH-RISES. The greatest place to take in Hong
Kong’s skyline is not at the top of one of its 1,300 sky-
F scrapers but in the hills north of town, at Lion Rock
mountain. Located five miles from the city’s downtown
center, the mountain, at 1,624 feet, is far shorter than
Hong Kong’s 3,140-foot Tai Mo Shan or the 3,064-foot Lantau Peak.
But Lion Rock’s proximity to and sweeping views of town have made
it a favorite climbing spot, as photographer Kwong Man Chak can at-
test. He has scaled the mountain at least a dozen times, but one ascent
last January was unlike the rest. Kwong, who specializes in cityscape
photography, usually gets to the mountaintop at nightfall, to snap pho-
tos after dark. But after a two-hour climb that
day, he reached the top earlier than usual, and
KOWLOON,
there happened to be a climber right in front of
HONG KONG
him on the rock. Though he seldom includes
people in his work, “I just thought it was very
beautiful, and I liked the background, so I just
Kowloon
went for it.” The image would go on to win Kwong
acclaim in the international photo community.
He attributes the shot to luck; nonetheless, “it’s
an honor to show the world how beautiful Hong
Kong can be,” he says. — CAMRYN LASALA

SEPTEMBER 2018 MEN’S JOURNAL photograph by KWONG MAN CHAK

MEN’S JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 2018

Squid fishing has become big business in New England—
but netting the creatures can push a crew to its limits.
by MICHAEL R . SHEA
OREY HARRIS wasn’t con-
cerned about the storm. The
C captain of Rhonda Denise, a
77-foot commercial trawler,
he’d been stuck in port all
week, as two nor’easters, in
early March, slammed the New England coast
back-to-back. Now a third brewed offshore.
But Harris saw an opportunity. “We’ll thread
the needle between the storms,” he told me
over the phone. We’d catch as much squid as
possible, then haul ass back to port before the
next system hit. Bring seasickness medicine,
he added. “It’ll be rough—but worth it.”
SEPTEMBER 2018
On the Thursday of our departure, the Port
of Galilee, in Point Judith, Rhode Island, was
full of boats but empty of people. If you’ve
eaten calamari at a seafood shack or a little
red-sauce joint, odds are it crossed the dock
here in Point Judith. In 2016, the village’s 119
vessels landed 22.6 million pounds of squid,
valued at $28.6 million—its best haul to date.
It’s the 15th-highest-earning seaport in the
country and f irst in squid on the Atlantic
seaboard. By all measures, it’s the calamari
capital of the East Coast. And with ongoing
downturns in cod, f lounder, and haddock,
scores of commercial fishermen, not only here
MEN’S JOURNAL
but also up and down the New England shore,
now depend on squid to stay afloat in a notori-
ously unpredictable industry.
Harris met me in the parking lot. Among
the local f ishermen, he’s one of “the few
young guys worth a shit,” a longtime captain
told me. He’s also something of an anomaly.
The salutatorian of his high school, in Baby-
lon, New York, he dropped out of his univer-
sity’s predental program, in 2007, to work on
trawlers, drawn to fishing for reasons that he
can’t quite explain. Soft-spoken and ambi-
tious, with a tight red beard, he started as a
deckhand on Rhonda Denise, made captain
by age 22, and became a co-owner a few years
later. Now, at 31, he’s still 20 years younger
than the majority of guys on the dock.
“The storms have kept most boats in,” he
told me. “There’s no fish on the market. Prices
will be high.” There was no need to worry
about the weather, he added—as long as we
made it back by Monday.
WIND AND FLECKS of snow ripped through
More than 100 miles offshore,
brothers Dave Smith (left) and Ryan Smith
clean monkfish on Rhonda Denise.
MICHAEL R. SHEA (6)
 PACK LITE
Great Taste. Only 96 Calories.

MILLER LITE. HOLD TRUE.

 Atlantic longfin squid lay eggs by the millions
in the warm waters off Rhode Island. But in
winter, they amass on the edge of the continen-
tal shelf, more than a hundred miles offshore.
So that was where we were going.
By sundown, the four of us aboard were
alone, with nothing but ocean for miles
around. These long hauls are worth it for
Harris. Ninety percent of the seafood that
Americans consume is imported. But Atlantic
longfin squid are so superior in taste, texture,
and resilience when cooked that demand out-
strips supply, giving local captains an uncom-
016 SEPTEMBER 2018
mon edge in the industry. The price of squid
seldom dips, staying at $1.50 a pound or bet-
ter, and that’s no small change when you haul
in 10,000 pounds a drag.
Morning came quickly; Harris f lipped on
the bunkroom light at 5. Once dressed and
topside, the crew—brothers Ryan Smith,
24, and Dave Smith, 26, both bearded and
stocky—began stacking plastic totes on the
deck, unfazed by the 10-foot seas that had me
stumbling. Ryan is the shorter and quieter of
the two. He started working with Harris in
2017, when a DUI charge left him needing a job
that didn’t require driving. He’d hardly missed
a trip since and was on track to make $80,000
by the end of 2018. Dave, a recovering alcoholic,
was a more recent hire, after he’d bounced from
ship to ship for several years. Still, he expected
to make $70,000 in 2018, a good living for a
26-year-old, much less one 16 months sober.
“This is the best boat I’ve ever been on,” he told
me. “I’m not going to screw it up.” Working
with Ryan is certainly an appeal; on his chest
Dave has a tattoo of the two of them as teen-
agers. “He’s my brother,” he explained. “I love
him.”
The pair soon took its place behind a giant
winch and let a spool of net and cable as large
as a tractor tire play out into the sea. Once
submerged, the net would open to 15 feet tall,
135 feet wide, and 120 feet long; drag along
the ocean f loor; and—the crew hoped—find
squid, fluke, and other keepers. The technique
is called bottom trawling, and Harris is fortu-
nate to have the permits to do it. For decades,
environmental groups have criticized the prac-
tice, claiming that it bulldozes the ocean floor.
Though the long-term sustainability of the
method remains up for debate, the government
A longfin squid (top); the squid crew
(from left): the author, Dave Smith,
captain Corey Harris, and Ryan Smith.
MEN’S JOURNAL
THE STORM WAS
ROLLING SOUTH FROM
NOVA SCOTIA. ANY
BREAKDOWN, DELAY,
OR TROUBLE, AND
WE’D BE IN SEAS AS
TALL AS THE SHIP WAS
LONG.
and haddock. The price of federal permits has
also skyrocketed, which has prevented many
young guys from breaking into the business;
lucky for Harris, Rhonda Denise already had
permits when he became a co-owner.
An hour and a half later, 5,000 pounds of
fish, a pile the size of a Camry, dropped into
a squared-off pen midship. Dave rolled his
eyes and groaned; Ryan said nothing. It was a
mixed bag that fishermen call swill—butter-
fish, fluke, dogfish, lingcod, sea robin, weak-
fish. Squid, to the crew’s disappointment,
weren’t here in large number. Turning this
pile into dollars would take work.
Harris and Dave climbed onto the mound
and started tossing dogfish and sea robins
overboard. Nearby, at a waist-high conveyor
belt, Ryan sorted the keepers—squid, whiting,
monkfish—into large red laundry baskets.
They worked quickly; fish zipped by. Har-
ris pushed the pile onto the conveyor with a
broom, then I took a turn. We filled 54 bas-
kets, 60 pounds apiece, then switched to totes
until the remainder disappeared. Below deck,
Dave shoveled some of the boat’s 20 tons of ice
into cardboard boxes to store the catch.
By the time we finished packing the first
haul, the net was full again and ready to be
brought up. This kind of mixed-bag fishing
can wreck a crew, Harris told me. “It takes an
hour and a half to sort a pile like that, and our
net fills up every 50 minutes.” A lot of boats
don’t bother with this type of f ishing, he
explained, since they end up throwing back
more than they catch and the prices for the
keepers can swing widely. “That’s why guys
like squid,” he said. “It’s big, clean bags, and
the price is set.”
It was well past midnight before we broke
for dinner. Everyone was exhausted, but
Harris remained upbeat. On his phone he
played a video of his 4-year-old son, Brody,
who has cerebral palsy, trying to rock climb
at a gym. His grandparents had wanted to
take him, Harris explained. But he hadn’t
liked the harness. “We can get a different
one, but they’re expensive,” Harris added.
“Everything for special-needs kids is so
damn expensive.” The cost of raising a son
with disabilities is, in no small part, why he
Clockwise from above: With squid in
short supply, Dave Smith watches as a
12,000-pound bag of scup—worth as
much as $20,000—hits the deck; the crew
chows down after a hard day at sea;
Rhonda Denise cruises close to shore.
pushes himself as hard as he does. In fish-
ing, pay is directly tied to effort, and effort is
measured in pounds.
BY SUNUP MONDAY, after two days of mixed-
bag fishing, the forecast had changed. The
nor’easter wouldn’t make landfall until Tues-
day, buying us more time. But not much. The
sea was flat—the quiet before the storm.
Dave and Ryan killed time on the deck while
Harris positioned the boat for another drag.
Dave leaped into the air and attempted a jump
kick. “See that?” he said to Ryan, as he threw
karate chops to the left and right of his head.
“Too fast. Too fast. What, what?—sucka.”
Comedy is necessary to endure the grind of
these trips. The crew stays in rubber boots and
bibs for 10, 12, even 16 hours at a time, as they
push and sort fish, haul nets, toss bycatch, box
keepers, and make counts. They sleep in two-
hour shifts, once or twice every 24 hours, until
they’re needed again.
“One more drag, then we’re scupping,” Har-
ris said. “Everyone loves scupping. It means
we’re going home.”
“I freaking hate scupping,” Dave said once
Harris was out of earshot. “It’s a shit-ton of
work, and they might be 25 cents a pound.”
For decades, scup, or porgy, were as reliable
and profitable as squid are today. Then after a
few bad years, the government limited catch
quotas, leading to a boom in farm-raised tila-
pia. The scup came back, and the harvest limits
remain high today. But the commercial market
has never fully recovered. Should the same fate
befall squid, captains like Harris would surely
go under—a looming concern, compounded by
worries about bottom-trawling bans, like one
passed in April on the West Coast.
We made three tows, each bigger than the
last—6,000 pounds, 8,000 pounds, 12,000
pounds. Scup the size of dinner plates filled
the net. “If these things are two bucks,” Harris
said, “this is a $20,000 bag.” Or it might just as
easily be worth $3,000. Either way, we raced
to get through the pile, all hands pushing or
sorting fish. The storm was rolling south from
Nova Scotia. Any breakdown, delay, or trouble,
and we’d be in seas as tall as the ship was long.
Harris set the pace—hustling about, throwing
dogfish, hosing baskets, moving totes—as the
crew tried to keep up.
By 2 a.m., the last basket was dumped below
deck, and we sat around the galley for a custom-
ary final night’s steak dinner. The guys were
excited, for a hard job well done, a potential
payday, home. But, mostly, they were just beat. caught 625 boxes of fish, or 41,520 pounds.
The ship motored through the night. When That meant, in five days, and only three of fish-
we reached the Point Judith at 7 the next ing, the crew had netted $80,000 in seafood.
morning, the dock hummed with activity. The After expenses and the boat’s cut, the broth-
nor’easter had been upgraded to a major winter ers each made $9,000, and Harris pulled in
storm; we’d beat it in by six hours. $13,000. “We killed it,” he said, standing in
Dockside, Harris worked a small crane, Seafreeze, attaching little tags to the cartons,
while Ryan and Dave attached cartons of fish bound for the Fulton Fish Market, in the Bronx,
to a conveyor that ran 90 yards from the ship to New York.
the heart of Seafreeze, one of the largest com- I asked what was next.
mercial processors on the coast. All told, we’d “Home,” he said. “Sleep.” Q
MEN’S JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 2018 017
 Baja Beyond
the Beach
There’s more to the Mexican peninsula than tequila shots
and white sand. It’s also home to a vast forested park—and
one of the toughest desert climbs in North America.
by HAL HERRING
H E R E WA S N O WAY we
were on the right route. The
T climb to the top of Picacho
del Diablo, t he highe st
mountain on the Baja Cali-
fornia peninsula, wasn’t
supposed to be technical. But steep pink-white
granite, featureless and hundreds of feet high,
surrounded us. One of my climbing partners,
Austin Waisanen, was heeding none of my
warnings. “The route to the summit is off to
the left!” he called down. “Up across those—
slabs!” The wind drowned out whatever he
said after that. “No!” I yelled. But the hyperfit
24-year-old hurled himself upward, leaping
from a house-size boulder.
We were lost somewhere in the 170,000-acre
Sierra de San Pedro Mártir National Park, in
northern Baja, three days into a five-day back-
pack. We’d been climbing since morning, and
the white noon sun glared at us, flyspecks on
the face of the mountain. Dave deRoulhac,
Waisanen’s friend and a forestry contractor, and
I continued our ascent, fighting through thick-
ets of spiky oak and manzanita. Our objective:
Reach Picacho del Diablo’s northern summit.
At 10,154 feet, it’s the highest point between the
Sea of Cortez to the east and the Pacific Ocean
to the west. The explorer Donald McLain made
the first known ascent in 1911, and today the
climb is considered one of the toughest on the
Sierra Club’s Desert Peaks Section list.
I’d wanted to scale the mountain ever since
I first caught a glimpse of it, in 2002. But now
I was here again, and our expedition had run
amok. Even so, we’d come to experience true

018 SEPTEMBER 2018 MEN’S JOURNAL photograph by DAVE DEROULHAC


wilderness, and we’d found it. It was some of
the most impossible country any of us had
seen: cliffs and spiked ridges, expanses of
stones and thickets, all falling away in great
distances to desert and then sea. If only we
could get to the top of the damned mountain.
WHATEVER BEACHY, tequila-shooting men-
tal image you have of Baja, the Sierra de San
Pedro Mártir National Park isn’t it. Located
halfway between the Pacific Ocean and the
TOP RIGHT: REYNALDO CASTRO.
Gulf of California, the park sits along the
peninsula’s ragged spine and is a world away
from either coast. It snows in the winter, so
the park is greener than most of Baja, and the
Jeffrey pines, Douglas firs, and aspen grow
huge. Moreover, the nights are cold until
at least midsummer; at about 8,800 feet of
San Felipe
Sierra de San Pedro
Mártir National Park
elevation, our water bottles froze. In terms
of terrain, the park is dominated by a rugged
9,000-foot plateau, and also comprises rolling
chaparral foothills and, of course, the Picacho
del Diablo, which I’d recruited Waisanen and
deRoulhac to summit with me.
The drive to the park had been an adven-
ture unto itself. We crossed from Arizona into
San Luis Río Colorado, Mexico, spent a couple
of days in the tourist town of San Felipe, and
continued down Baja’s coastal plain, winding
through endless foothills. The region is beau-
tiful, with countless strawberry and tomato
fields, but it has gained an unsavory reputation
for crime. In January, the State Department
issued a travel advisory for the area, following
an uptick in homicides, and tourism tapered
off as a result. I’d wanted to climb Picacho
MEN’S JOURNAL
From left: A view of Pyramid Peak while
en route to Picacho del Diablo; a park
reception area, one of the few struc-
tures in the 170,000-acre wilderness.
del Diablo but also to see whether Baja was
as dangerous as the reports made it seem. We
passed no shortage of shantytowns but saw
no violence and felt no threat. The worst of the
crime is farther south, in Baja California Sur,
a different state from where we were traveling.
That said, when we accidentally rear-
ended a van, no one—not us, not the people we
hit—wanted anything to do with the corrupt
police. We paid them $300, and they seemed
more than fine with that. We also learned that
you shouldn’t drive at night; besides the threat
of robbers, cows are all over the roads and a
legitimate hazard.
When we reached Sierra de San Pedro
Mártir, an hour and a half ’s drive from the
town of San Telmo, we camped among the
huge pines and f ir trees. The evening was
quiet and starlit, in part because there’s no
electrical service for about 50 miles. With the
exception of a ranger station, a few A-frame
cabins and shops, and an observatory, the
park is free of development, and scantly vis-
ited, which has helped to keep it pristine. The
campsites are big and clean to boot, and cost
only about $4 a night per person.
Picacho del Diablo is undoubtedly one of
the park’s biggest draws. Cautionary accounts
of summiting the peak abound on the inter-
net. But Waisanen was sure that they were
written by “chowderheads” (his term) who
lacked our experience. But climbing the
mountain, though only a 15½-mile round-
trip, requires gaining and losing 16,450 feet
SEPTEMBER 2018 019

in elevation—a formidable figure we hadn’t
fully taken into account. First, to reach the
mountain, you have to hike across the 9,000-
foot plateau, which is made difficult by granite
outcroppings 100 to 200 feet high; you can’t
walk for more than a few hundred yards before
coming to another jumble of rocks. People get
lost every year, some of them permanently;
condors are helpful in finding the corpses.
I wish I could say we didn’t get lost, but
on our first morning, we took a wrong route,
misreading our maps, and got turned around
020 SEPTEMBER 2018
Clockwise from top: Mexico’s National
Astronomical Observatory, located in the
Sierra de San Pedro Mártir National Park;
the author and Austin Waisanen (right);
the San Quintín beach, a short drive from
the park, on the Pacific Coast.
among the aspen thickets and rocks. The next
day, we tried again and found the trail up to
Blue Bottle Saddle, an overlook with views of
the mountain and the San Felipe Desert and
the Sierra to the north.
From there, to begin the climb, you have to
descend 3,000 feet into a canyon to the base of
Picacho del Diablo. It was tough going, but the
bottom of the canyon ranks among the most
exotic places I’ve ever seen. We passed water-
falls and shadowed grottoes, and followed a
creek shaded by cypresses and pines. Whereas
MEN’S JOURNAL
move. We were looking for a gully that led to
long slabs and then the peak. Well, the gully
eluded us. We didn’t know it, but we’d taken
the wrong route up the mountain, having
thought we were somewhere we were not.
The day grew hotter, and by 3 o’clock, we
ran out of mountain. We were on a shoulder
in technical terrain, the true summit still hun-
dreds of feet above us, unattainable across
near-vertical stone. We sat down, beaten in
body and spirit, with no time or supplies for
another try. There was a bronze plaque drilled
into the rock that read: “Picacho del Diablo,
Punta Sur [South Point].” Sixteen years after
pledging to summit Picacho del Diablo, I’d
come up short. We took in the views of the
country beyond, and they were staggering,
never mind our foibles. This was real wilder-
FROM TOP: GUILLERMO ARIAS; DAVE DEROULHAC (2)
ness, and I’d underestimated it.
That night, we slept again at false Campo
Noche and the next morning tackled the
3,000-foot climb out of the canyon, moving
upward in silence. By noon, we reached Blue
Bottle. We stood there for a while, maps in
hand, studying the peak, trying to figure out
how we’d blundered upward to the wrong
summit. What was certain, though, was that
we’d entered the wilderness as a trio of hard-
bitten mountaineers, seasoned on rocks and
snows, and were leaving it as chowderheads. Q
FREE
CLEAR
 THE GETAWAY

The Coastal Safari

One of South Asia’s most luxe wildlife lodges is in Sri Lanka, where
leopards and beach breaks are only a short walk away. by RYAN KROGH

L
Wild Coast
Tented Lodge

COURTESY OF WILD COAST TENTED LODGE

SEPTEMBER 2018 MEN’S JOURNAL

 017

3/ LIQUORS & TONIC

Avoid anything woody or smoky, like
scotch or mezcal. But spirits that have
a touch of natural sweetness, like pisco
and rum, work beautifully. At the bistro
Frenchette, in New York City, bartender
Sarah Morrissey uses tonic to kick up

Anything
the juicy flavors of apple brandy.

and Tonic

023
 Tomatoes,
Reconsidered
They’re ripe and ready and perfect for more than salads and salsas.
Here are 15 ways to make tomatoes new again.

1 / CAPRESE 2.0

2/ A BETTER
BLOODY MARY MIX

3/ STUFFED TOMATOES

024

4
Steamed Mussels
Ripe tomatoes bring brightness and sweetness to this classic dish. Saute
½ chopped onion, 2 minced garlic cloves, and ½ head chopped fennel in 2 tbsp
olive oil and 1 tsp butter until soft, about 7 minutes. Add ½ cup white wine and
1 cup quartered heirloom tomatoes (or halved cherry tomatoes) and bring to a
simmer. Add 1 lb mussels, cover, and steam until opened, about 8 minutes. Finish
with torn fresh basil leaves.
5/ SUCCOTASH
Here’s how to sweeten up this
late-summer barbecue staple: Char
2 ears corn on the grill. Cool, cut off
the kernels, and toss with 1 lb
cooked lima beans, 2 pints halved
multicolored cherry tomatoes, ½
cup chopped parsley, salt, and
pepper. Whisk a dressing with 2 tbsp
each roasted pumpkin seed oil and
champagne vinegar, 1 tbsp each
honey and Dijon mustards, and
1 minced shallot. Pour the dressing
over the succotash and toss.
6
Tomato Tart
Arrange thin slices of red, yellow,
FROM TOP: GETTY IMAGES; WILLIAMS-SONOMA
and green tomatoes on store-bought
frozen puff pastry, overlapping
them like roof shingles and leaving
a ½-inch border. Sprinkle with salt
and pepper and drizzle with extra-
virgin olive oil. Bake according
to package directions, topping with
4 oz each chevre and chopped
hazelnuts halfway through. Garnish
with a drizzle of honey and fresh
tarragon or basil.
7/ 10-MINUTE PASTA
Toss 2 pints cherry tomatoes with
1 tbsp olive oil, 1 tsp dried oregano,
salt, and pepper. Load into a grill pan
and cook over direct heat on the grill
until tomatoes are blistered, 7 to 10
minutes. Meanwhile, heat ⅓ cup
extra-virgin olive oil on the stove
with a pinch of red pepper and a
dozen anchovies. Slowly cook until
anchovies melt, then toss with the
grilled tomatoes, 1 lb cooked
spaghetti, grated pecorino, fresh
oregano, and lemon zest.
8/ FRUITY GAZPACHO
Peak tomato season intersects with
peak melon season. Bring them
together in this cold soup. In a
blender combine 2 cups each
chopped tomatoes and chopped
watermelon, ½ cup cashews, the
juice of 1 lime, ½ red onion, 1 seeded
red chili, 2 tbsp each red wine
vinegar and olive oil, salt, and
pepper. Puree until smooth, chill for
30 minutes, and garnish with fresh
cilantro.
9/ SMOKY SALSA
Slice 2 large tomatoes in half and
grill cut side down over direct heat
until well charred. Cool, dice, and
mix with 2 chopped avocados,
½ diced white onion, 1 seeded
chopped jalapeño, a handful
chopped cilantro, the juice of 1 lime,
1 tsp each ground cumin and
coriander, and salt.
10/ FATTOUSH
For an easy Middle Eastern bread
salad, chop 3 heirloom tomatoes
and toss with ½ sliced red onion,
1 sliced cucumber, 2 cups pita chips,
⅓ cup pomegranate seeds, 1 cup
each chopped parsley and cilantro,
1 tsp sumac, salt, pepper, and 3 tbsp
extra-virgin olive oil.
1 1/ PICKLED GREEN
TOMATOES
Fill a pot with 2 cups water, 2 cups
cider vinegar, 1 cup sugar, and ¼ cup
salt, and simmer until the sugar and
salt dissolve. Put 1 tbsp yellow
mustard seeds, 2 tsp fennel seeds,
and 3 sprigs dill in the bottom of a
32-oz jar. Fill the jar with thick slices
of green (unripe) tomatoes, pour in
the hot brine, seal the jar, and
refrigerate for at least a week. Layer
on burgers.
MEN’S JOURNAL
12/ CEVICHE
In a blender, puree 1 cup each
coconut milk and lime juice, 1 tsp
sugar, and ½ tsp fish sauce.
Pour over 12 quartered scallops,
1 pint halved grape tomatoes, and
1 minced Thai bird chili. Cover and
chill for an hour, until the scallops
are “cooked” through by the acidity.
13/ TOMATO BUTTER
Toss 3 halved plum tomatoes with
extra-virgin olive oil and roast cut
side down in a 450°F oven until
caramelized, about 45 minutes.
Puree the tomatoes, cool, then
whip in 2 sticks salted room-
temperature butter, 1 tsp minced
rosemary, ½ tsp thyme, and ½ tsp
crushed juniper berries. Use as a dip
for raw vegetables or finisher for
grilled steaks, poultry, and seafood.
1 4/ TANGY
TOMATO SOUP
Roast 5 lbs chopped tomatoes
in a 450°F oven until caramelized,
about 45 minutes. As they’re
roasting, sweat onion, garlic,
shallots, 1 sprig each rosemary and
thyme, salt, and pepper in 2 tbsp
butter. Add 2 tbsp tomato paste and
saute. Add the roasted tomatoes
and 1 quart buttermilk, and simmer
gently for 30 minutes. (Don’t worry
if the buttermilk breaks.) Cool and
puree until smooth; garnish with
minced chives.
15/ SMØRREBRØD
This open-faced sandwich is go-to
comfort food in Denmark. To make
it, smear 1 slice of dark rye bread
with creme fraiche or cream cheese
and top with halved cherry
tomatoes, flakes of smoked trout, a
drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil,
minced chives, salt, and pepper.
SEPTEMBER 2018 025
 SECRET SAUCE
FIRE

OFF DUTY
WORKOUT ROUTINE
BOXING

Midwestern Chill
Chicago chef (and California native) Erling Wu-Bower brings a
West Coast sensibility to his new restaurant, Pacific Standard Time.
Here’s how the James Beard Award nominee keeps it cool at home.

ESSENTIAL FAMILY FAVORITE

INGREDIENT PAD THAI
OLIVE OIL

GO-TO DRINK
SAZERAC

026
© 2018 Tyson Foods, Inc.
Supersized With the new three-row Ascent, Subaru loses
some shagginess but wins with a tough-luxe hauler
for families who need versatility. by JESSE WILL
Subaru
HORSEPOWER ZERO TO 60 MSRP (FROM)

260 7.4 sec $32,970

the Honda Pilot. No longer: The Ascent
seats seven (eight in a pinch) in a big-
ger silhouette that mimics our favorite
soft-roader, the Outback. The rear doors
open wider than those in most SUVs,
revealing an interior that’s spacious (up
to 86.5 cubic feet of cargo space with
second- and third-row seats down) and
packed with whine-reducing amenities
like up to eight USB ports.
four-cylinder engine and continuously
variable transmission, there’s more
midrange power to follow up that ini-
tial spurt of torque. On steep, wet, and
winding roads in Texas Hill Country,
our tester proved sure-footed and
composed. The Ascent’s 8.7 inches
of ground clearance carried us over
some rutty gravel approaches without
an issue—like a Subaru should.
control, lane-keeping, and more—are
offered standard on the Ascent. (Get
this option if you are shopping any of
the brand’s other models.) One of its
most helpful features: A beeping alerts
you immediately when a car stopped in Choose between a bench or two
front of you starts moving, nudging you optional captain’s chairs
to put the iPhone down. For safety’s in the second row. Stash the
sake, toss that device into one of the last row down for up to 47.5
19 cupholders spread about the cabin. cubic feet of cargo space.

028 SEPTEMBER 2018 MEN’S JOURNAL

 Clean and Dry
Your deodorant may claim to be all-natural, but it’s probably fibbing.
Here’s how to avoid the pitfalls.
STYLING BY MEGUMI EMOTO FOR ANDERSON HOPKINS
Deodorants and antiperspirants that simply nix
aluminum will often call themselves all-natural.
Sure, it’s a good start. The metal can clog pores,
irritate skin, and cause those unappealing shirt
stains. But sweat sticks and sprays can sneak in
lab-made ingredients such as stabilizers,
synthetics, and petrochemicals like those in
windshield washer fluid. To be truly all-natural, the
main components should be baking soda or
by SAM KAPLAN
arrowroot, lotion or oil, an antiseptic, and maybe a
natural scent. If your new deodorant isn’t as
effective, give your body a few days to adjust and
you’ll smell just fine. (1) If you’re prone to breaking
out, try Soapwalla Deodorant Cream, $16. It gets
the job done with just charcoal, moss, shea butter,
and natural oils. (2) Spit & Polish Field Shower, $13,
smells plenty outdoorsy, with hints of rosemary and
tea tree oil. (3) No need to reapply Native Eucalyptus
N’S JOURNAL
4
& Mint, $12. It contains coconut and jojoba oils to
mask smell, and probiotics to help balance bacteria.
(4) Dab on a pea-size amount of Primal Pit Paste
Royal & Rogue, $9, using a cotton swab. Its earthy
blend of rosewood, frankincense, and sandalwood
oils combat the sweatiest workouts. (5) Schmidt’s
Charcoal + Magnesium, $10, uses everyone’s new
favorite ingredient (charcoal) to sop up moisture
and leave you with the scent of freshly fallen rain.
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Technical fabrics, bulletproof durability, and supercharged style—

perfect for the boardroom or the bouldering wall. by JUSTIN FENNER

photographs by JAMIE CHUNG MEN’S JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 2018

SEPTEMBER 2018 MEN’S JOURNAL
 FASHIO
N

MEN’S JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 2018

 There are more than a few ways to
ease yourself into technical style.
Belstaff’s Roxburgh denim jacket
($660; belstaff.com) and Ben
Sherman’s Honeycomb-knit
cardigan ($139; bensherman.com)
both replace clumsy buttons with
fast zippers. Tommy Hilfiger’s
workwear-inspired utility pant
($90; tommy.com) is extra durable;
Hugo Boss’ Piñatex sneakers ($348;
hugoboss.com) are cut from a
sustainable leather alternative; and
the coated canvas in Ermenegildo
Zegna’s gray Chevron backpack
($1,295; zegna.us) might have a
longer lifespan than you do.

These classic watch brands have a

long pedigree of looking sharp—and
working hard. From left: Breitling’s
Navitimer ($8,590; breitling.com)
was built to survive the ocean
depths. Omega’s Speedmaster
Apollo 8 ($9,750; omega.com) is
the first watch NASA sent to the
moon. Rolex’s Cosmograph
Daytona ($12,400; rolex.com) was
created to help race-car drivers
time laps at white-knuckle speeds.
And Panerai’s Luminor 1950
Carbotech Submersible ($17,100;
panerei.com) is made from nearly
indestructible titanium.

034 SEPTEMBER 2018 MEN’S JOURNAL

 FASHIO
N

MEN’S JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 2018 035

 The
Facebook
Detective
For Billy Jensen, using targeted social media
posts is not a way to influence your political
beliefs—he’s trying to solve murders. Meet a
gumshoe for the digital age.

H E WO M E N ’S bodies were
found a month apart in dif-
T ferent fields near Columbus,
Ohio. One was basically a
skeleton. The killer or kill-
ers remain at large.
Unsolved crimes like these 2016 murders are
the kind that Billy Jensen is drawn to. When I
met him last year in the Toluca Lake neighbor-
hood of Los Angeles, he had just returned from
covering this particularly gut-wrenching story.
The head of digital operations and an occa-
sional on-air reporter for the syndicated true-
crime show Crime Watch Daily, Jensen was in
Columbus to shoot a segment on the murders.
As we settled in for dinner at a busy Irish pub
not far from his apartment, he recounted the
gory details. “Nobody deserves to be thrown
away like a piece of trash,” he says.
Jensen, 46, has spent the better part of his
journalism career focusing on unsolved cases.
Meaning, as he likes to put it, most of his stories
have no endings. “I would constantly get, ‘Great
story! I hope they catch the guy,’” Jensen says.
He dealt with it, but then something changed:
In April 2016, his friend Michelle McNamara
died unexpectedly in her sleep at the age of 46.
The founder of the True Crime Diary blog and
the wife of comedian Patton Oswalt, she had
been writing a book about her all-consuming
search for the Golden State Killer, who had
committed at least a dozen murders and some
50 rapes in California between 1976 and 1986.
McNamara was smart and dogged, and
Jensen was sure that had she lived she would
have cracked the case. Angry that McNamara
died before she could identify the killer, Jensen
was spurred to action: “Fuck it,” he thought.
“I’m going to try and solve some cases myself.”
But how? He certainly had the reporting
bona fides, having written for outlets like The
New York Times, Los Angeles magazine, and
Rolling Stone online. And he was experienced
in digital media from his time at publishing Jensen discovers unsolved murders with
companies Village Voice Media and Buzz- another digital tool: Google alerts.

036 SEPTEMBER 2018 MEN’S JOURNAL photographs by JOHN FRANCIS PETERS

media (now SpinMedia), where, he says, “I
would live and die by how many eyeballs I
would get.” Then he hit upon it: Why not com-
bine those skill sets?
Jensen’s big idea was to use targeted
Facebook ad campaigns—like the kind that
Russian bots and the political-data miners
Cambridge Analytica used in nefarious ways
during the 2016 election season—to catch
killers. This isn’t the citizen sleuthing we’ve
come to expect; it’s definitely nothing like
that bungled internet investigation of the
Boston Marathon bombing, in which Red-
dit users fingered a missing—and, it was later
revealed, deceased—university student as one
of the bombers. Rather, Jensen is pioneering a
distinct new brand of detective work: a com-
bination of algorithm-optimized marketing,
crowdsourcing, and shoe-leather reporting.
Jensen looks for cases with good-quality,
compelling video—typically surveillance foot-
age—that will grab readers’ attention as they’re
scrolling through their Facebook feed. He’ll
start by setting up a Facebook page and creat-
ing a post featuring that video; then he pays
to boost the post, targeting it to users in the
vicinity of the crime scene—by either radius
or zip code—who may recognize the suspect.
He can control the reach based on gender, age,
and even the interests of his intended audience.
After that, Jensen will go back and forth pri-
vately with Facebook posters who might know
something, scour the evidence, and, if possible,
keep in touch with the victim’s family and law
enforcement. He’s not trying to get in anyone’s
way; he’s just trying to help the police do their
job better. Most of all, he wants to see some of
these stories get the endings they deserve.

J E N S E N H I M S E L F would be easy to pick

out of a lineup: He’s 6'4" and lean, with dark
chestnut-brown hair and pale-blue eyes, and
his left forearm bears a woodcut-style tattoo of
an old-timey magnifying glass. He grew up on
Long Island, where his father, who ran a house-
painting business, instilled in Billy a deep
hatred of bullies and the value of persistence.
“That was the biggest thing that he drilled into
me,” Jensen says. “Just keep going.”
When I met Jensen in L.A., he was begin-
ning to focus was on a new case: the week-old
shooting death of a 31-year-old mentally dis-
abled man at a liquor store in Inkster, Michi-
gan, a suburb of Detroit. According to state
police, an unidentified man repeatedly shot
Hassan Ibrahim Tanana following an argu-
ment, killing him.
Jensen created a Facebook page called Ink-
ster Shooter at Fast Franks Party Shoppe and
targeted it to anyone within a one-mile radius
of the crime scene. He paid $105 to guaran-
tee that it would reach 6,000 people. Almost
immediately, Jensen began getting tips—one
person posted what he said was the shooter’s
street name and where he liked to hang out—
and some great numbers. By the time Jen-
sen showed me the post, it had been shared
more than 650 times, with an organic (that
is, unpaid) reach of 25,000 people. That’s a
At his home office in Los Angeles, Jensen
uses a foam board to track suspects and
a laptop to check the latest tips coming
in on Facebook.
number equivalent to the population of the
entire city.
The police don’t have the manpower to
reach nearly as many people as his ad did.
And even if they could knock on every door,
how many people are going to talk to the cops?
“That’s confrontational,” Jensen explains. “But
when you’re on Facebook, you’re looking at
pictures of your sister’s kids, you’re in a relaxed
atmosphere.” With defenses down, people are
more likely to volunteer what they know.
According to documentation provided by
Jensen, he has correctly identified or had a
hand in identifying suspects in at least a half
dozen homicide cases. Since police depart-
ments tend to be less than transparent about
their investigations, it can be difficult to dis-
cern which information Jensen brought them
was fresh and which of it the cops had already
found out on their own.
Take, for instance, the case of Timothy
felony. (Officially, the police say the suspect s
name and address came from a phone tip line.)
Jensen’s work did get singled out in one
case—the October 2016 slaying of 25-year-
old fast-food worker Juan Vidal, during an
attempted robbery at an El Monte, California,
Jack in the Box—though just how big a role
he played is a matter of dispute. Speaking at
a January 2017 press conference announcing
the apprehension of the alleged shooter, L.A.
County Sheriff’s Department homicide detec-
tive Adan Torres cited Jensen and his El Monte
Jack in the Box Killer page: “Tips started com-
ing in, as more information was put on this
Facebook page, and eventually we were able
to solve the case...” Jensen says Torres told him
that a call from a person who saw the Facebook

MEN’S JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 2018 037


page led cops to the killer, though the detec-
tive tells Men’s Journal that the tip came from
someone who’d seen local news coverage of an
earlier police press conference.
All told, Jensen estimates that he’s shelled
out about $16,000 of his money on targeted
ads for more than three dozen cases, which
he tracks on a pair of five-foot-tall foam-core
boards in his home office. He can’t imagine
sustaining this sort of spending for much lon-
ger. He’s considered crowd funding, and he’d
be thrilled if the police would kick in some
financial support. But he also fantasizes about
an even bigger benefactor.
“Zuckerberg holds the key!” Jensen tells me
at his apartment, spreading his arms wide. “If
he gave me a credit for $100,000, I could solve
20 murders this weekend.”
IN THE WAKE OF McNamara’s death, Jensen
volunteered to help finish her book, gratis,
an offer Oswalt immediately took him up
on. “He has the same encyclopedic mind
for all the details that Michelle had,” Oswalt
says of Jensen. And the same stubborn per-
sistence: “He just keeps hammering away.”
Jensen put the chapters McNamara had
written in an order that made sense, adding
connective tissue—drawn from
some 3,500 digital files and her
email correspondence—where
necessary.
I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One
Woman’s Obsessive Search for the
Golden State Killer was published
in late February and debuted as
a No. 1 New York Times best-
seller. But that was hardly the
end of the story. As Jensen and
P a u l Hay ne s , McNa m a r a’s
038 SEPTEMBER 2018
DO YOU
RECOGNIZE
Jensen and the late author Michelle
McNamara, seen here at the South
by Southwest conference, in 2014.
THIS GUY?
Her bestselling book, below.
Two months later, police had a name:
Joseph James DeAngelo. The authorities,
1
it was later revealed, had tracked down the
now-72-year-old suspect—who hadn’t been
on McNamara’s radar—by comparing genetic
profiles from genealogy websites with DNA
taken from crime scenes. When news of
DeAngelo’s arrest leaked, and Jensen became
convinced the police had their man, “I gave
myself maybe like 30 seconds to be happy
about it,” he says. “And then it was like, ‘What
2
else has this guy done?’”
Since then, Jensen has focused his ener-
gies on creating a detailed timeline of where
DeAngelo was throughout his life, then cross-
checking for any cold cases that may have
3
taken place in those areas. And, of course,
he’s using Facebook to help. In May, Jensen
started a page called Folsom High School:
Do You Remember Joe DeAngelo?, which he
targeted to the suspect’s former classmates.
Next, Jensen plans to create an ad aimed at
4
anyone who may have known DeAngelo dur-
ing his time in the Navy.
Jensen’s thirst for justice has only grown
since the DeAngelo arrest. “See-
ing that happen on this grand
scale just makes me wanna solve
5
more [of my own] stuff,” Jensen
says. He’ll always be chasing those
30 seconds of euphoria he felt
when he knew for sure that DeAn-
gelo was the guy. “It’s never gonna
6
be like, ‘Wow, it’s over. We’re
good,’ ” he says. “It’s like, ‘Wow,
this is great, and imagine if we
could get this feeling every day.’” Q
MEN’S JOURNAL
 ION OF STA
IAT TE
OC
SS

FO
NATIONAL A

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FO 0
U N D E D 192
SEPTEMBER 2018 MEN’S JOURNAL

Joy Bryant
The Ballers star, who dropped out of Yale to become a Victoria’s Secret model, talks
long-distance marriage and the upside of smoking weed. by SAR AH Z . WEXLER
You’re starring with the Rock on HBO’s
Ballers. Are you a sports fan in real life?
I know how football works, and basket-
ball, and hockey even, but I just watch the
playoffs. Tennis is the sport I really care
about. I’m all about Serena. My best friend
and I made a pact—it’s on our bucket list
as best friends—to go to all of the Grand
Slams. We want to f ly f irst class to the
Australian Open, the French Open, and
Wimbledon.
How did you get so into tennis?
Well, I played a little in high school, but
I was really, really crappy at it. I actu-
ally was better at squash. It’s weird that
I played squash at all—I grew up a poor,
poor kid in the South Bronx, but I got
a scholarship to this swanky boarding
school in Connecticut, where I learned
how to play both.
Would you describe yourself as athletic or
outdoorsy?
I was a city kid, so I didn’t know anything
about the outdoors. I loved looking at the
stars, and I rollerbladed through the city—
that’s about as outdoorsy as I was back in
the day. It’s fairly new for me, in terms of
the last 10 years.
THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO SPEND EVERY DAY
TOGETHER AND GET DIVORCED. MAYBE A LITTLE
BIT OF TIME AWAY ISN’T A BAD THING.
And now?
I hike all the time, and about 10 years ago
I learned how to surf when I dated this hot
surfer. My husband is very outdoorsy—
he’s a stuntman who grew up in Wash-
ington state and was an Eagle Scout. One
of the things we first connected over was
snowboarding, which I didn’t start until I
moved to California. He grew up that way,
but I just sort of discovered these things
later on in life.
photograph by CHRIS SINGER
WE’RE WITH HER
Speaking of your husband THE BASICS
[Dave Pope] being a stunt-
Age
man, do you worry about him
getting injured when he goes
off to work? Hometown
Not really. On set it’s all cal-
culated risks that are very All-time Favorite
well thought out, planned, Tennis Players
and choreographed. Hon-
estly, I’m more worried for
him when he’s on his motor-
cycle, just going from point
A to point B in the city.
Do you ever ride with him?
Hell no! Not interested.
You’ve been married for a decade.
What keeps it fresh?
You’ve got to do your own thing. I mean,
two days after our wedding, he went to a
job in Morocco and I went to do a pilot in
Vancouver, and we were apart for three
months. Even now, I just got back from
being away for two weeks, and before that,
he was away for two months. There are
plenty of people who spend every single
day together and hate each other or get
divorced. Maybe a little bit of time away
isn’t a bad thing.
You’ve been open about not wanting to
have kids.
We’re hearing more about women who
are childless by choice. The expectations
that are put on women in this society are
that you’re supposed to look a certain way;
you’re supposed to get married; you’re
supposed to have a baby. Who determines
these things? Why do they even care? I
can decide my reproductive destiny. My
mother didn’t have a choice.
MEN’S JOURNAL
You left Yale to model for
Victoria’s Secret. That’s an
unusual career path.
I was a poor kid from the Bronx.
Going to an Ivy League school
was supposed to be my end-all.
But I was completely burned out
and emotionally spent. Looking
back on it now, it was the riskiest
decision I ever made.
Did you stand out in both
worlds?
There was definitely an impres-
sion of models back then that
you’re dumb, just a mannequin
with a prett y face and a nice body. I
remember being on shoots where people
were talking to me like I was an idiot. One
editor asked me whether I’d finished high
school, and once I told her I went to Yale,
the way she dealt with me for the rest of
the day was completely different. I always
got a kick out of that. I love when people
think I’m stupid.
You’ve Instagrammed a photo of your weed
jar. Are you a big smoker?
I’m in my major pot smoker phase. It’s
crazy how things have changed after it
became legal [in California]. But I’m damn
sure glad that I’m not in my 20s as it’s being
legalized. I smoked a lot of weed back in the
day, but I think that being an adult, I can
deal with it in a way that I definitely would
not have been able to when I was in my 20s.
How is it different at 43?
It’s not so much of a party thing for me.
It helps me enhance that creative state. I
smoke, and it unlocks a door—I want to
write, I want to create. I want to brain-
storm. And I want to play drums.
You play the drums?
Drums have always been my favorite
instrument, so taking lessons was on my
bucket list. It’s not like I’m trying to be in
a band—I’m just learning for myself. It’s
never too late to learn something new. To
sit down at a drum set now, three years
later, and actually play something that
doesn’t suck? That’s cool. Q
SEPTEMBER 2018 041
 New
Music
Math
There has to be a better way
to discover new tunes than a
streaming-service algorithm.
Here’s our formula for finding
this fall’s hottest new acts.

A TRIBE

KEEPING UP WITH music can be a major

CALLED
QUEST + TORO Y
MOI + KENDRICK
LAMAR =
chore. For one, most new albums and songs,
frankly, suck. What’s more, the recommen-
DEEM SPENCER
dation engines on services like Pandora and

Spotify generally feed you stuff you already
know and like—boring. So we enlisted some
living, breathing, real-life humans to round
up eight up-and-coming artists that are actu-
ally worth your time and attention. Then,
to make your life even easier, we devised a
surefire music-discovery formula for each.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: COURTESY OF SAIS FOR BOOOTLEG; COURTESY OF CONAN/MATT NEGUS; COURTESY OF ELISE DAVIS/ALYSSE GAFKJEN
If you wanted to make it big in hip-hop, you’d probably take the exact opposite route of Deem Spencer. The
Queens, New York, rapper relies on hyper-earnest lyrics, and his songs tend to have a dreamy, unhurried quality—
like the orchestral “There Was Plenty of Time Before Us”—without big beats or hooks. Still, Spencer has amassed
a devoted following and proved one the most interesting and affecting rappers in the game. His latest single, “boy
ain’t a bad boy,” is built on dusty samples and a steady backbeat, and suggests that the young rapper will continue
honing his sound on his forthcoming LP, without losing any of his outsider appeal. —J.R. Sullivan

LUCINDA
WILLIAMS + BIG STAR
+ THE
BREEDERS =

ELISE DAVIS

When Arkansas singer-songwriter Elise Davis

began releasing music, in 2013, she was firmly
rooted in twangy alt-country, with a gift for bitter
breakup gems, such as “Make the Kill.” Her 2016
QUEENS OF
full-length debut, The Token, however, changed
things up, by diverging into power pop and cranking
SLEEP
+ BLACK
SABBATH + THE STONE
AGE
=
up the fuzz. Davis’ latest album, Cactus, due in
September, captures both sides of her considerable
talent. “Don’t Bring Me Flowers” is a sugar-sprinkled
CONAN
anthem about trying, and failing, to keep casual
sex casual, whereas the delicate country number British metal crew Conan specialize in what it calls
“Married Young” maps the struggles of new love— “caveman battle doom,” with landscape-flattening
with lyrics about working at a fast-food joint, riffs, galloping tempo changes, and Jon Paul Davis’
smoking weed, a shitty apartment, and discovering monotonal cry. The trio unloads more sludgy tonnage
Tom Waits. —Steve Haruch with Existential Void Guardian in late August. —S.H.

042 SEPTEMBER 2018 MEN’S JOURNAL

 MF
DOOM + ODD
FUTURE + WU-TANG
CLAN =

CHESTER WATSON

North Miami, Florida, rapper Chester Watson was

still a teenager when he released his 2014 debut
record, Tin Wooki, a rich collection of free-association
rhymes, coupled with sleepy-eyed, woozy beats. On
Watson’s forthcoming LP, tentatively titled A Japa-
nese Horror Film, the hallmarks of his music remain
unchanged, but he sounds more focused—and,
frankly, a little less stoned. —S.H.

SAM
COOKE + TY
SEGALL + ROY
ORBISON =

NICK WATERHOUSE
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: FRANK HOENSCH/REDFERNS; COURTESY OF CHESTER WATSON; SCOTT LEGAT;

L.A.’s Nick Waterhouse just wants to make people dance. His 2016 LP Never Twice synthesized old-school R&B
and soul traditions and melded them in a way that was just, well, fun—thanks to a driving rhythm section and big,
memorable melodies. Waterhouse flirts with kitsch, no doubt. But his top-shelf songwriting has enough charm and
wit to avoid seeming trite. Look for new singles this autumn and a record toward the end of the year. —J.R.S.
IMAGES; COURTESY OF BRENT COBB; COURTESY OF SZUN WAVES/MIKE MASSARO

THE
STURGILL
SIMPSON + THE BAND
+ PAUL
SIMON =
THE
BYRDS + STEREOLAB
+ EVERLY
BROS. =

BRENT COBB SUN SEEKER

With 2016’s Shine on Rainy Day, Brent Cobb, of
Americus, Georgia, proved that he’s neither a bro-
country cliché nor an alt-country Drive-by Truckers
clone. Instead, the singer-songwriter—who spent a
decade writing and playing for other people before
taking center stage—strikes a middle ground be-
tween accessibility and authenticity. He’ll be playing
tunes from his latest, Providence Canyon, when he
hits the road with Chris Stapleton this fall. —J.R.S.
APHEX
TWIN
To date, country-tinged psychedelic outfit Sun Seeker
has released a grand total of eight songs. Nonethe-
less, the group has fast won over critics with its
woozy, tuneful pop, anchored by singer Alex Benick’s
wistful vocals. After releasing Biddeford, a well-
received EP on Jack White’s Third Man Records, in
2017, the Nashville troupe heads into the fall with a
+ JOHN
COLTRANE + BRIAN
ENO = number of tour dates and, finally, a proper, debut full-
length soon to follow. —S.H.

SZUN WAVES

Jazz hasn’t been at the center of culture since the

late 1960s. But groups like the U.K.’s Szun Waves
have continued to expand the limits of the genre by
incorporating contemporary sounds into its sonic
palette. The trio’s latest single, “Constellation,” from
New Hymn to Freedom, out in late August, blends
free-jazz and ambient and electronic textures for an
effect that’s both celestial yet unmistakably human.
It’s also some of the best headphone work or study
music around. —J.R.S.

MEN’S JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 2018 043


BOOKS Right now I’m
reading Lost Connections
by Johann Hari. It’s about
the environmental and
psychological reasons for
depression that have
nothing to do with brain
chemistry. Hari argues
that for some people,
depression is a response to
their surroundings and that
they can help treat it by
connecting with others and
living selflessly.
ACCORDING TO
Keegan-
Michael
FILM The best movie I’ve
ever seen is Midnight Run,
Key
with Robert De Niro and
Charles Grodin. De Niro
plays a bounty hunter who
has to drive a bookkeeper
nicknamed the Duke
(Grodin), who laundered
money from the mob,
across the country. It’s the
funniest thing De Niro has
done in his career; he never
plays a single moment for
the comedy. It’s delicious.
BOOKS
SPEED READS
Two intense new novels that you’re sure to tear through.
044
MUSIC “Victim of Love” by
soul singer Charles Bradley
is the perfect song for
dancing with your lady in
the living room. Bradley
started making music in
his 60s and proves that you
can discover a new part of
yourself at any time.
Sometimes I’ll think, “If
Bradley can achieve what
he did at his age, I can
certainly get where I want
to go at mine.”
TIMEPIECE I’m a Shinola
watch freak—I own nine of
them. The one I wear the
most is called the Lake
Erie Monster. It’s
automatic—it runs as long
as it’s on your person and
you stay active. So I feel
beholden to this small
piece of equipment in an
interesting way.
—AS TOLD TO
J.R. SULLIVAN
TELEVISION
MUST-BINGE
HIDDEN GEMS
Largely unpromoted, these new
Netflix originals could slip under the
radar. Don’t let them.
The Angel
This thriller recounts the true story of
Ashraf Marwan, the son-in-law of
former Egyptian president Gamal
Abdel Nasser and a close confidant of
his successor, Anwar Sadat. Marwan,
though a high-ranking Egyptian
official, worked for most of his life as
PORTRAIT: ERIK TANNER/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGES. MIDNIGHT RUN: MARY EVANS/RONALD GRANT/EVERETT COLLECTION. CARGO: MATT NETTHEIM/NETFLIX
an Israeli spy—becoming a crucial
intelligence operative leading up to the
Yom Kippur War. (Mid-September.)
Tramps
In this caper flick, Danny (Callum
Turner) agrees to help his brother pull
off a heist. When he shows up to a train
station to exchange one briefcase full
of valuables for another, Danny takes
the wrong bag—forcing him to venture
into the New York suburbs with his
partner, Ellie (Grace Van Patten), to
recover the goods. (Now streaming)
The Land of Steady Habits
When Anders Hill (Ben Mendelsohn)
retires and finishes paying off his
son’s college tuition, he decides to
begin a new chapter in life, away from
his affluent Connecticut suburb. But
after leaving his wife and buying a
condo, he realizes that his dream was
misplaced—and he desperately tries
to backtrack. (9/14)
Cargo
A pandemic has decimated rural
Australia, turning human beings into
vicious zombies. One infected dad
(Martin Freeman, above) decides to
trek across the country to find a home
for his infant daughter before his in-
evitable transformation is complete.
(Now streaming)—Ariana McGinn
 5.11 makes purpose-built gear for life’s most demanding
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 2018

S T Y L E + D E S I G N

SLEEK, SEXY, AND INNOVATIVE—

42 ITEMS THAT WILL CHANGE THE WAY
YOU LIVE, WORK, DRIVE, AND PLAY.
Photographs by JAMIE CHUNG

47
KINS
A
STYLISH
HELMET
In 1969, when AGV made hel-
mets for rakish Italian MotoGP
rider Giacomo Agostini, they
weren’t nearly as safe and
comfortable as modern lids.
The X3000 GLORIA bridges the
gap, with a nod to the Olympic
stripes from Agostini’s iconic
racing leathers. “We applied
the original design to a mod-
ern and functional structure
that’s a pleasure to ride in,”
says AGV’s Massimiliano Mi-
rabella. The dual-button visor
opens left- or right-handed
while a vent funnels air in over
your head. $450; agv.com

A FORMULA ONE STREET CAR

The MERCEDES-AMG PROJECT ONE delivers every gearhead’s fantasy: the bleeding-edge tech of the world’s most
competitive race cars in a street-legal build. The mid-engine two-seater derives its speed from a hybrid drive-
train that pairs a compact 1.6-liter V6 gas engine with four electric motors—combining for more than 1,000 horse-
MODEL power. You’ll (try to) control it through a squared-away F-1 style steering wheel. $2.7 million; mbusa.com

THE KILLER-VALUE
SPORT SEDAN
Hyundai’s luxe offshoot has
finally landed a punch. The lithe
GENESIS G70 not only looks the
part—it sits lower and wider than
the German competitors it’s gun-
ning for—but it also features a more
responsive chassis than most cars in
$12,000; husqvarna- this price range. Surprised? Don’t be:
motorcycles.com The dynamics were tuned up by
a former boss at BMW’s M group.
$32,000 (est.); genesis.com

49
 BEAUTY IN
THE BEAST
THE ROYAL-READY
SPORT UTE
The ROLLS-ROYCE CULLINAN may be
the brand’s first SUV, but it’s no less
ridiculously posh than its sedan
stablemates. While the all-wheel-drive
model floats above terrain on an
air suspension, even more impres-
sive is the bespoke interior’s mélange
of metal, hardwoods, glass, leather,
and heated front-door armrests.
$325,000; rolls-roycemotorcars.com

$21,195;
ducati.com

THE SILENT KILLER

Porsche tends to hew closely to its storied driving heritage, but with the MISSION E concept, the brand takes a
big swing toward the battery-powered future. The all-electric model, which will be called Taycan when it
debuts in late 2019, will boast far-out (but functional) curves along with devastating performance, via a four-wheel-
drive system that delivers 600 horses and hit 60 miles per hour in less than 3.5 seconds. $TBD; porsche.com

TRENDY TRAILER
Not a worshipper of the classic
aluminum Airstream? Then the NEST is
for you: The company’s first fiberglass
trailer is a boxy, modern two-tone take
on camping with an interior that looks
more like a Boeing first-class luxury
suite than an austere tow-behind. Opt
for a queen-size bed, with a well-
appointed kitchen and full bathroom in
a build that’s light enough for any SUV
to haul. From $45,900; airstream.com

THE INNOVATION

A FASTER
RECHARGE
 CAN YOU
BELIEVE
WHAT YOU
READ? With fake news leaving most
Sources: 2016 Survey, Pew Research Center; GfK MRI, Spring 2016.

Americans confused about even

the basic facts, magazine media
keeps it real. Whether in print,

MAGAZINE online, on mobile or video, people

trust it to be expertly researched,
written and fact-checked. No

MEDIA wonder magazine readers are

more engaged and more likely to
recommend advertised products.
Better. Believe It. Being real matters. That’s a fact.

#BelieveMagMedia | BelieveMagMedia.com
THE CREATURE COMFORTS—REDEFINED.
fun. $1,300; stihlusa.com

FINER
WINE
TIME
The Rabbit corkscrew is the
easiest way to pop a cork, but
the brand’s update, the AXIS
LEVER, is a refined version
that you won’t have to hide in
the drawer. The clean lines,
articulating handle, and matte
finish are three more reasons
to open a bottle of vino.
$50; rabbitwine.com

LOOKING SHARP
You might be tempted never to chop with the MIYABI BLACK CHEF’S KNIFE and just mount it on your wall. But this handmade showpiece means business
with about 130 layers of carbide steel that give it a higher hardness rating than a typical chef’s knife, so it stays sharp longer. Unlike single-bevel Japanese
blades, which take some getting used to, the Miyabi has two bevels and feels like a regular chef’s knife. $350; zwillingonline.com

53
 POSH SPICE

$270; tastetro.com

PERFECT PRESS
Making great French-press coffee
means nailing finicky water tem-
perature and brew time. That’s where
the RITE PRESS comes in. Its built-in
tools include a thermometer and an
hourglass timer, so you know when
to plunge and pour. Cleanup is easy,
too, with a removable bottom cham-
ber that collects the wet grounds.
$80; rite.company

54
 A LOW SEAT WITH
HIGH STYLE
While we love a good leather-wrapped club chair, their look is decidedly bulky. The KELLY
WEARSTLER ARDENT has a lighter contemporary silhouette with a pewter finished steel frame,
softened with rounded edges. Though it looks like a chair to reserve for company, the comfy linen velvet
back and seat pair nicely with a Negroni, a novel, or NFL Sunday. Trust us. From $4,890; kellywearstler.com

THIS REALLY
SUCKS

$699; dyson.com

CLEAN
MACHINE

$300; myheatworks.com
RAISE THE COFFEE BAR
Attention coffee nerds: Now you can easily roast
your own at home. The ROEST hits around 600 de-
grees, cooking beans in about three minutes. Pick
from a built-in roast profile, or do it manually for
more control. About $5,800; roestcoffee.com
CUTTING LOOSE IN ULTRA-HIGH STYLE.
SMART SKIS
We’ve used skis built to go fast
on packed snow, and others
that float through powder, but
the RENOUN CITADEL set is the
first that adapts to conditions
on the fly. A soft polymer, layered
beneath the sleek carbon-fiber
skin, reacts differently based on
the stress applied: Hit compacted
snow hard and the skis stiffen to
go faster, but dive into fluffy
powder and they become supple.
Now, whatever the conditions,
you’ll be ready.
$1,499; renoun.com

SOARING
STYLE
Alpinists have trusted the
lenses and side shields on Vuar-
net Glacier sunglasses for better
contrast and glare protection
since the 1960s. The redesigned
ICE is now built for the modern
adventurer with nylon and rub-
ber instead of heavier metal and
leather. With removable shields,
these frames look good on Main
Street, too. $270; vuarnet.com

PURER WATER

ROUGH RIDER
The NICOLAI ION G16 GPI is built for the nastiest trails: There’s no derailleur for a branch or rock to shear off; instead it uses
an 18-speed Pinion transmission for torque uphill and control heading down. After an especially mucky ride, you can hose $79; livelarq.com
the bike off without worrying about rust—it uses a carbon-belt-drive instead of a chain. $8,160; nicolai-bicycles.com

57
PERFECT THEFT-PROOF E-BIKE
PACKER
$3,398; vanmoof.com

$290; peakdesign.com

SNUG RIDER
The thermo-moldable BONT HELIX
excels where it matters most—
power transfer and weight—but
it also earns points for style and
ergonomics. With a carbon-fiber
sole and ultralight synthetic upper,
it weighs just 9.1 ounces (size 12)
and a single-dial BOA lacing system
wraps around the foot for a perfect
fit. $399; bontcycling.com

CAMP CUTLERY
The OUTDOOR EDGE CHOWPAL cleverly
combines a knife, fork, and spoon
in a two-piece interlocking stainless
steel set. Unlike most utensils, the
knife here is legit: a steak-carving,
2½-inch-long locking blade. This
lightweight kit’s screwdriver and
wrench also help make minor repairs.
$27.50; outdooredge.com

SHARP SHOOTER
Pros Rory McIlroy and Dustin Johnson use the
TAYLORMADE MYSPIDER because its counter-
weights and precisely milled grooved face launch balls
across greens faster than traditional putters. But if you
don’t want to look like a fanboy, customize your own
TOUR edition by picking colors for the head and five
other putter parts. $360; taylormadegolf.com

58
GUITAR HERO
While music evolves, the tools of the
BORN TO RUN
trade are notoriously stagnant, with The INOV-8 TERRAULTRA is the first shoe to use graphene, a thin layer of bonded carbon that
most guitars falling into a handful gives the outsole longer life, better flexibility, and more grip compared to standard rubber.
of stock styles. That’s why we like It threads the needle between cushion and trail feel, with a 9mm midsole and zero drop that
the collaboration between Ernie Ball $150; inov-8.com
Music Man and singer-songwriter
Annie Clark (better known as St.
Vincent). She designed an axe that
takes the angles from the late ’50s,
then adds curves, a tight waist, and
a Strat-style five-way pickup selec-
tor. The ST. VINCENT SIGNATURE GUI-
TAR is slim in the middle, so you can
play comfortably sitting or standing.
This is a refresh that rocks.
From $2,199; music-man.com

THE INNOVATION

SNEAKERS
STRONGER
THAN STEEL

GLOBE-TROTTER
When backpacking off the grid, bring along the
SOMEWEAR GLOBAL HOTSPOT. Durable and water-
proof, this teardrop pod pairs with your smart-
phone, transforming it into a sat-com device
that sends and receives texts, weather reports,
and location sharing—anywhere on earth.
$450; somewearlabs.com

COOL AS ICE

$85; blackdiamond
equipment.com
THE TOYS THAT
ELEVATE
THE EVERYDAY.
THE SPACE-SAVING SPEAKER
The BENQ TREVOLO 2 changes the notion of how a bookshelf
speaker can look and sound. Instead of passable tunes
from bulky woofers and tweeters, the three-inch-wide metal
body uses flat, audiophile-grade electrostatic speakers that
fold out to deliver distortion-free sound, then flip back to save
space. $299; benq.com
IN LOUD AND CLEAR
Unlike the sea of “look at me” headphones on
the market, the SENNHEISER HD 820 uses an
illusion to nail its style. Most high-end headsets
have open ear cups so vibrations won’t ruin the
music, and they’re best worn in quiet rooms.
Sennheiser uses Gorilla Glass to cap your ears,
which directs reverb into absorber chambers
and blocks outside noises, plus
it looks cool. $2,400;
sennheiser.com

STAR SEARCH
Think of the STELLINA
telescope, developed by
French startup Vaonis, as a
robot astronomer. Fire up
the app, pick the constel-
lation you want to see, and
the motorized telescope
spins 360 degrees to find
it, as gazers view stars in
real time. “People have
said the Stellina looks like
EVE from Wall-E,” says
Nicolas Marquis, of Ova
Design, which helped build
the telescope. “We love
this comparison because
it means the object is
eliciting an emotional l
response, and that’s how m
we feel using it.” At just
25 pounds, the Stellina
packs up nicely, too.
$3,000; vaonis.com

PULL THE PLUG

$20; Ilovehandles.com

61
 DIY PARTY KIT

$TBD; ikea.com

A RETRO-LOOKING
INSTANT CAMERA
We’ve seen modern instant cameras
before, but none nail the retro styling
like the Rollei—a refresh of its twin-
lens design, which debuted in 1929.
Forget squinting through a tiny win-
dow: Using the ROLLEIFLEX INSTANT
KAMERA means holding it waist-
high and looking down through the
top-mounted viewfinder. Inside it
has the guts of a modern instant
camera, but the boxy build has
changed little since they were first
released. $400; rollei.com

OPTICAL ILLUSION SMALL DRONE,

Gone are the days when living with obtrusive tech was an
unavoidable part of having a projector. The slickest HD
BETTER SHOTS
version of the season is one that disappears when you’re done
Netflix bingeing. Turn it on, and the SONY LSPX-A1 beams stun-
ning 4K video onto 120 inches of wall space from about 10
inches away, and has built-in speakers. When off, the tech dis-
appears and you have a stylish side table with a marble top, mirror-
aluminum frame, and a wooden shelf that’s cocktail-party
ready. The U.S. release hasn’t been announced, so for now you’ll
have to get to Japan to find one. $30,000; sony.com

$700; parrot.com

62
 LIVE FRIDAY SEPT 7 8 | 7C STANDUPTOCANCER.ORG

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Cancer Stem Cell Consortium, Farrah Fawcett Foundation, Genome Canada, Laura Ziskin Family Trust, LUNGevity Foundation, National Ovarian Cancer Coalition,
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Crime writer turned
TV showrunner
George Pelecanos on
 L I FF EE
of
C R I M E
NOT ONLY IS GEORGE PELECANOS A MASTER
OF HARD-BOILED FICTION—HE ALSO HELPED WRITE
ARGUABLY THE GREATEST, GRITTIEST SHOW IN
TV HISTORY. NOW HE’S BACK WITH A NEW SERIES AND
STILL UP TO NO GOOD.

By Photographs by
J.R. JAKE
SUL L I VA N CHESSUM
 When The Wire completed its five-season run, Pelecanos again
worked with showrunner David Simon on Treme, set in post-Katrina
New Orleans. Now he’s back with The Deuce, also on HBO, starring
James Franco and Maggie Gyllenhaal, which will return for a sec-
ond season in September. Created by Pelecanos and Simon, the series
explores New York City’s Times Square and the hustlers, mobsters,
politicians, prostitutes, and pimps who helped to create the modern
pornography industry there in the 1970s. Like in The Wire, the charac-
ters are fictional but based, at least in part, on real people, and the show
relies on political and historical events to inform its plot.
“On The Wire, we had researchers, but we never used them,” Peleca-
nos tells me one spring afternoon. We’re in the back room of a police sta-
tion—or, rather, a Catholic community center that has been transformed
to look like one, circa 1978—in New York’s East Village: typewriters on
desks, an old Bunn coffee maker next to the door, a cigarette machine in

WHEN GEORGE PELECANOS WAS 17, HE SHOT HIS BEST FRIEND IN

the face. He and Frank Carchedi, buddies since the first grade, had
skipped school that day in November 1974, as they often did, to drink beer
and hang out at Pelecanos’ house, in Silver Spring, Maryland. Pelecanos,
a short, then-long-haired Greek-American, knew where his old man kept
his revolver, a police-issued .38 Special that he’d bought on the street.
Pelecanos wouldn’t have messed with the gun had his dad, a Marine
who ran a diner downtown, been home. But he was impulsive, so he took
out the revolver for no good or obvious reason, loaded a round into the
cylinder, and spun it shut. He and Carchedi continued bullshitting about
soccer or girls or whatever. They weren’t drunk, but they were enjoying
themselves, and soon Pelecanos forgot all about the cartridge. Then,
without thinking, he pulled the trigger—nothing. Mindlessly, he pulled
it again and again, cycling through the chambers. Next came the bang.
The bullet hit Carchedi’s cheek and grazed his neck on the way out,
taking a chunk of his face with it. Blood f lecked the living-room wall;
it would soon be all over the house. Carchedi looked at his friend. “You
shot me,” he said.
Had the gun been pointed half an inch differently, Pelecanos recalls,
“I would have just blown his head off.”
The guys managed to call an ambulance and get Carchedi to a hospi-
tal, where he survived the wound; looking at photographs of him now,
you’d never know that he’d taken a bullet. “I don’t even think about it
anymore,” he says.
But the incident was formative for Pelecanos, who, at 61, ranks
among Michael Connelly, James Ellroy, and Elmore Leonard as a mas-
ter of hard-boiled fiction. Stephen King has called Pelecanos “perhaps
the greatest living American crime writer,” and rightly so. Over the past
quarter-century, Pelecanos has helped to usher in a new era of bleak
urban noir with his tales of drug dealers, hood rats, lowlifes, rogue
P.I.’s, and other characters of the Washington, D.C., underworld. His
21st book, The Man Who Came Uptown, out in September, tells of a
former cop who makes a habit of robbing pimps and who hunts down
a white supremacist to recover a stash of stolen jewelry. “The violence
and the reality of the accident inf luenced his work,” Carchedi says.
“You can see it.”
Pelecanos is best known, however, not as a novelist but as a producer,
story editor, and writer for HBO’s The Wire, a sprawling cop drama
about the war on drugs in Baltimore. The show teetered on cancellation
throughout its run, from 2002 to 2008. But in the years since, it has
become a touchstone for what television can achieve. Pelecanos was one
of its key architects and, in effect, transformed television.

the hallway. Dressed in Levi’s 501s and a blue gingham shirt, he’s seated
in a low-slung chair, f lanked by three guys wearing headphones and
watching monitors of a live feed from the next room. For insight when
writing The Wire, Pelecanos continues, “we’d go out and do drug busts
with the police, and at night we’d partner up and go out on the streets.”
The Deuce is different; it required a deep dive into New York’s seedy past.
“This is all research,” he says.
In the scene being filmed, a city hall lackey is standing before a group
of officers, explaining that Ed Koch’s new mayoral administration will,
at last, erase vice from Times Square. In doing so, the lackey says, city
hall intends to ban massage parlors and “hot bedding” (renting hotel
rooms multiple times a night for prostitution). The cops, led by officer
Haddix, played by Ralph Macchio, aren’t buying it, though, and heckle
the guy throughout his presentation. Of course, as any longtime New
Yorker knows, Koch shuttered not only massage parlors but also after-
hours clubs, topless bars, XXX movie theaters and book-
stores, peep shows, and other seedy hangouts in Times
Square, leading to a boom in real-estate speculation that
would transform the district forever. The second season
of The Deuce will jump six years ahead of the first and
pick up as these redevelopment efforts get underway, in
the spring of 1978. “The biggest agent of change in a city
isn’t politicians or anything like that,” Pelecanos says.
“It’s Sheetrock and cranes.” In other words, the Deuce—
42nd Street—is going to get bulldozed.
THE PELECANOS
T V PRIMER
Clockwise from left: The Deuce follows barman Vincent
Martino (James Franco) and Candy (Maggie Gyllenhaal, far
right), a Times Square prostitute turned porn actress.
Treme centered on residents of New Orleans, including
Antoine Batiste (Wendell Pierce), after Hurricane Katrina.
The Wire, set at height of the war on drugs, made an un-
likely hero of stickup man Omar Little (Michael K. Williams).
067
Unlike other recent series set in the period, such as the now-
canceled Vinyl and The Get Down, The Deuce resists romanticizing
the past. The first season, set in 1971 and 1972, captured New York
teetering on oblivion, bankrupt and choked by crime. At the center of
this Gomorrah was Times Square, where—in the decades before the
Disney Store and Ripley’s Believe It or Not! moved in—some 1,200
prostitutes walked the streets on any given weekend night. “Right now
we’re in the era where everybody’s just having a lot of fun, doing a lot of
coke,” Pelecanos says. “It’s a walk up the mountaintop.” Soon, though,
everything will come tumbling down.
AFTER THE NEXT TAKE, PELECANOS LEADS ME TO A SMALL ROOM
that serves as Capt. Peter McDonagh’s office in the show. A ’78 Yankees
pennant hangs on the wall, and a bulky Sony TV with rabbit ears is
perched on a metal filing cabinet; the entire room has a faint yellow
tint. “My favorite movies are from the ’70s,” Pelecanos says. “All the New
York ones—French Connection, The Seven-Ups, The Taking of Pelham
One Two Three—so I wanted the show to look like one of those.”
He settles into a leather chair across from the captain’s desk. After
years of sitting on a director’s stool and riding in vans to scout scene
locations, he’s plagued by back problems. He knows that he’ll eventu-
ally age out of television, so he feels an urgency to produce as much of
it as he can while he’s able. “That’s why I get so much done,” he says.
“Every day I’m not working or writing is a wasted day to me.” Back
issues aside, he’s healthy for his age, trim and muscular from regular
exercise and years of playing basketball. He’s not a big guy but gives
the impression of a dude you’d regret trying to fight. The chain he
wears around his neck and his graying beard add to his tough-Greek
aesthetic. And though he’s affable and candid about his life and work,
he can seem stoic at first, to be sure.
Of The Deuce’s two co-showrunners, he is in the press less frequently
than his partner Simon, who’s considered one of the great auteurs of
modern television, along with Matthew Weiner (Mad Men), Vince
Gilligan (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul), and Jill Soloway (Transpar-
ent). Simon, a self-proclaimed “loquacious Jew,” is known for picking
fights—with Sean Hannity, the writer Roxane Gay, and Twitter’s Jack
Dorsey, for starters—and Pelecanos can seem taciturn in comparison.
He never yells at the junior writers. “Shit, he never yells,” Simon tells
me. And his low D.C. drawl can be hard to hear in a crowded room. But
Pelecanos, though more inconspicuous than Simon, is no less integral
to The Deuce. He’s splitting his time this week between reviewing edits
for the new season’s first near-completed episodes, attending writers’
meetings to hash out future scripts, and taking turns with Simon to
oversee the set, as he is this afternoon.
Simon explains that, during their early days of working on The Wire,
he was unsure whether Pelecanos, accustomed to the solitude of writing
novels, could run a show. “I know a lot of people who are pure writers,
and George is one of them,” he says. “Doing this job is a whole different
skill set.” Pelecanos mastered it, though, and became adept at leading a
writers’ room and corralling the 150 to 200 people necessary to produce
a television series. “George is at the point where we can send him to set
and we know he’s going to deliver, on his own terms, the best possible
hour of television,” Simon says.
Pelecanos is an effective showrunner in no small part because of
his novelist’s focus. “David is all about the overarching themes, and
the political aspect of everything, and what it all means,” he says,
adjusting in his chair. “I’m more scene by scene; I want to dig into
the details.” When filming city shots, for instance, he inspects every
vehicle, looking for anachronisms. “Some of these car guys will say,
‘That’s a ’71,’ ” he adds. “And I’m like, ‘No, it’s a ’73. I know because I
know the headlights changed in ’73’—that kind of shit.”
His eyes don’t glaze over in wardrobe meetings, either. “You start
telling me about fashion and I’m like, ‘You need to get me out of here,’”
Simon says. “But George will not leave it untended.” Because to Peleca-
nos, every facet of the show must ring true; fashion, literature, music,
and characters are sacrosanct. Franco, who plays barman Vincent
Martino on The Deuce, adds: “To make an artistic move that smells of
selling out is as likely as him playing golf at Mar-a-Lago.”
 068

THOUGH PELECANOS HAS EMERGED AS A TOP TELEVISION great affection for every character that he puts on the page.”
writer and producer, he first won acclaim as a crime novelist, and, at Pelecanos took an unlikely route to channel his curiosity into fiction,
his core, that’s what he remains. His books—all set in or around Wash- however. Raised in a Greek Orthodox home outside Washington, at age
ington—are swift and energetic, rooted not only in the tradition of 11 he started working at his dad’s downtown diner, the Jefferson Cof-
hard-boiled fiction but also in hip-hop, punk, and soul records and the fee Shop, taking two buses across town to get there. The route carried
language and rhythms of D.C., a city that he has never left. “He writes him through corridors burned down in the 1968 riots; later he would
about Washington without ever making wander neighborhoods to find pickup bas-
you feel like it’s the seat of the American ketball games and venture into gay bars
government,” says Richard Price, the and motorcycle clubs to check them out
author of the novel Clockers and a writer for himself. “I wasn’t afraid of anything,”
on The Wire and The Deuce. “You never see he says. “For a Greek kid growing up, this
the Capitol building.” is cool as shit—the music is coming from
Pelecanos’ characters share his inter- everywhere, the funk and soul, the cars.”
ests—B movies, basketball, family, muscle Working at his father’s diner shaped
cars, music—and they hold many of the Pelecanos the most, though. His imagi-
same jobs he once did, like washing dishes, nation roamed as he delivered orders and
tending bar, or working dead-end retail helped out in the kitchen. He also took
gigs. He researches and reports diligently, notice of the white businessmen coming
rather than plotting his books beforehand, in for cold cuts or coffee, and he internal-
and lets a story reveal itself to him as he ized the interactions between them and
writes. As a result, his books skirt predict- the all-black crew working behind the
ability and contain a tangle of plot threads counter with him and his father. “Intellec-
that ref lect the messiness of life more tually, I was too young to understand the
closely than most noir. dynamic, but on a gut level I knew where I
His novels also have no shortage of vio- stood,” he later wrote.
lence. Bullets are sprayed, children killed, Pelecanos His father, Pete, a Greek immigrant
bodies discovered in gardens and on river- in his wild and a World War II vet, was loving but
banks. In 2001’s Right as Rain, a P.I. buries years. tough—the kind of guy who never talked
a Buck knife into the neck of a cop, and a about the fighting he’d seen in the Pacific.
crimson fountain erupts from the artery. He instilled in Pelecanos not only the
Moreover, in 1997’s King Suckerman, importance of work but also a fondness for
Bobby Roy Clagget, a “white-boy-wanna- it. In Pelecanos’ favorite photo of his dad,
be-black-boy cracker,” blasts his boss with a shotgun. As the man flops he’s standing over a grill with his apron on, spatula in hand, smiling.
around like a fish, Clagget idly wonders where his head has gone, with “He was just really happy when he was working,” he says.
only a jagged piece of spine left between his shoulders. The pair’s relationship frayed during Pelecanos’ teenage years, when

PREVIOUS SPREAD FROM TOP LEFT: © HBO; © HBO/COURTESY OF EVERETT COLLECTION; NICOLE RIVELLI/ © HBO/COURTESY OF EVERETT
Yet, despite the bloodshed, Pelecanos writes with empathy, par- he grew out his hair and started causing trouble and partying. He wasn’t
ticularly for the disenfranchised. “What makes him a great writer is a charged for shooting Carchedi. Still, to the outside observer, little about
genuine curiosity about the world and how it works,” Simon says, “and his life suggested that he’d be the neighborhood kid to make good, or to

MURDER, HE WROTE

COLLECTION. THIS PAGE: COURTESY OF GEORGE PELECANOS

After an 8-year-old boy is

Pelecanos’ taut debut fol- In this ’70s thriller, two As the coke trade rips killed in a drug shooting,
lows hard-partying adman Stefanos, while on a friends end up on the run apart D.C., dirty cops and his peewee football coach,
Nick Stefanos as he inves- bender, discovers a dead with $20,000 and a drug drug dealers race to re- P.I. Derek Strange, goes
tigates the disappearance teen by the river and tries dealer’s girlfriend after a cover $25,000 stolen from after the murderers to
of a stock boy. to track down the killers. deal goes south. the scene of a car wreck. seek revenge.

amount to much at all. He snatched wallets from a restaurant cloakroom;
he rode in stolen cars; he broke into a home. He once threw M-80s into
a karate dojo; he shoplifted from department stores. “I never needed
anything I took,” he says. “I want to be chased.” And he had been.
There were moments, in addition to the Carchedi accident, when Pele-
canos should’ve grown up and chilled out on the drinking and the drugs
and the petty crime. When he was 19, his dad suffered a heart attack,
and Pelecanos had to drop out of the University of Maryland to run the
diner for a year or so, until the old man recovered. Doing so afforded
Pelecanos a chance to prove himself to his father and, in a way, make
amends for shooting Carchedi. Nonetheless, “I was still getting fucked
up every night,” he says. And he hadn’t been enjoying college anyway.
His last major brush with trouble came one evening in 1985, when
he was 28, shortly before he married his then girlfriend and now wife,
Emily, whom he’d met one Christmas while working at the Gap. (He
soon quit the job to sell women’s shoes on commission at a store nearby.)
He’d spent that day drinking with friends, and some weed and cocaine
were probably involved, too. But the problems began later, when he was
headed to an afterparty with Emily. Still drunk and high, he stopped
for smokes at a gas station and in the parking lot hit a guy’s car with his
pickup. Words were exchanged, as were some shoves. When someone
called the cops, Pelecanos and Emily bolted.
A chase ensued, with several police cruisers in pursuit. Pelecanos
blew through a four-way stop and a red light, sending other cars skid-
ding. In a commercial district, he turned up some side streets and killed
the headlights. When he knew he’d lost the cops, he pulled over, and
he and Emily broke out laughing. “I was still an idiot,” he recalls. They
continued to the party, and in the morning Pelecanos surrendered to
“PEOPLE CHANGE, AND I JUST
BELIEVE IN THAT,” HE SAYS.
“NOBODY WAS PICKING ME OUT
IN HIGH SCHOOL TO BE THE MOST
LIKELY TO SUCCEED.”
police. “I look back at some of that stuff, and I feel like, ‘Oh, I guess that
was me,’ ” he says. “But it doesn’t feel like me.”
IN THE END, THE THING THAT INSPIRED PELECANOS TO CHANGE
was not the arrest or the shooting or a questionable decision but turning
30. By then he was a general manager of a local appliance and kitchen
retailer, overseeing 100 salespeople. Though good at the job, he was
discontented that his life was moving away from whatever it was he was
meant to do, that he was a business guy, not an artist. “It’s ridiculous
to say,” he says, “but I felt like I was getting older and that if I didn’t do
something then, I was never going do it.”
Though he’d never written fiction and had no idea how to make
any money at it, he decided to leave his job to try writing a novel. He
had pored over noirs and studied film in college, so he had a handle on
storytelling basics. Still, he knew the plan was ridiculous; he’d never
even written a short story. He remembers his wife tearing up when he
told her that he intended to write. “Most women would’ve said, ‘Stupid
motherfucker,’ ” he says. But she didn’t—and she didn’t tell him not to
go for it, either.
Alone in his attic, he began drafting what would become his debut,
1992’s A Firing Offense. It follows Nick Stefanos, an underachieving
alcoholic who works as an ad director for a D.C. electronics chain and
who’s based, in part, on the author. Stefanos, in his free time, spars with
a friend at a junior-high gym and, after a night of drinking, jumps rope
while blaring the Replacements to sweat out the alcohol—details taken
almost straight from Pelecanos’ life. Stefanos becomes an investigator
by happenstance, after one of the store’s stock boys goes missing. He
cruises around D.C. searching for the guy, while pumping Lou Reed
and Elvis Costello on the stereo.
After writing for a couple of months, Pelecanos ran out of money,
so he took a job slinging drinks at a cop bar. But he continued to work
on the novel for two hours each night, and his energy comes through
on the page. “The early stuff was very stripped down, very dark,” says
Dennis Lehane, a crime novelist who also worked on The Wire. “There
was never anything that felt like he was pandering or thinking about
some sort of target audience or trying to brand himself.”
Once Pelecanos completed A Firing Offense, he sent it blindly to St.
Martin’s Press, where, in a publishing-world miracle, it was picked off
the slush pile and bought for $2,500. He was paid about the same for
his next four novels. “I wasn’t making any money,” he says. “But I was
enjoying writing novels so much that I really didn’t care.”
Soon enough, Pelecanos’ trilogy of novels about Stefanos gained
him a cult following, and they remain favorites among his readers.
But in 2001’s Right as Rain, Pelecanos introduced one of his greatest
creations: Derek Strange, a middle-aged black P.I. who has a weakness
for massage-parlor women and booze, but who also coaches peewee
football and keeps a careful eye on his stock portfolio. With Strange
and other African-American characters, Pelecanos, who has two black
sons adopted from Brazil and an adopted daughter from Guatemala,

“I WANTED PEOPLE TO KNOW, AND
THEY DO KNOW, THAT THE WIRE
WAS THE BEST SHOW,” PELECANOS
SAYS. “IT DIDN’T MATTER THAT WE
DIDN’T WIN ANY EMMYS.”
has proved to be a sharp observer of race in America. “He understood
the world of working-class people in Washington, and a lot of those
people happened to be African-American,” Lehane says of Pelecanos. “It
didn’t feel like a white guy trying to write a black guy for fashion’s sake.”
As Pelecanos continued to publish novels, he held down a day job
until 1998, when Miramax bought the movie rights to King Suckerman,
his sixth novel, which allowed him to write full-time. (Record producer
Sean Combs was supposed to star as Marcus Clay, but the film was
never made.) Pelecanos’ biggest break came a few years later, however,
when he ran into a former Baltimore Sun reporter named David Simon
at a funeral for a mutual friend.
Simon had just sold the pilot for The Wire to HBO and approached
Pelecanos, of whom he was a fan, about writing for the series. “David’s
theory was: If television writers are so good, how come television
sucks?” Lehane recalls. So he recruited crime novelists, “and he chose
George as his guinea pig.”
Pelecanos didn’t disappoint. He wrote some of the series’ most
memorable episodes—including the penultimate episode of Season 1,
in which the young drug dealer Wallace (Michael B. Jordan) is assas-
sinated. He also played a role in shaping each season. In the writers’
room, Simon and Ed Burns, the show’s other co-creator, would try to
shift the focus away from the police to social and political issues. “But
George would say, ‘No, no, no—it is a cop show,’” Lehane recalls. “That
tension is what helped make The Wire as solid as it was.”
Pelecanos is Simon’s toughest critic, says Richard Price. “I think
David likes him because David can’t get away with anything that George
thinks is bullshit, not that David has a lot of bullshit in him.”
Determined for The Wire to be great, Pelecanos tried to put as much
effort and thought into the series as he did his novels. “I wanted people
to know, and they do know, that The Wire was the best show,” he says.
“It didn’t matter that we didn’t win any Emmys.” People will be watch-
ing the show for a long time anyway, he says. Because when you create
something worthwhile, people don’t forget.
A FEW WEEKS AFTER MY SET VISIT, PELECANOS AND I MEET AT
the Grand Central Oyster Bar, in Midtown Manhattan. Located just four
crosstown blocks from Times Square, the spot is more Mad Men than
The Deuce, with its old-school New York grandeur and vaulted white-tile
ceilings. It’s just after 5 p.m., and the 440-odd-seat dining hall is mostly
empty, save for five or six kitchen guys, in white aprons and white paper
hats, killing time at a nearby counter before the evening rush.
We sit at the far end of the bar. Pelecanos spent most of the day
in Red Hook, Brooklyn, to scout for piers resembling the ones that
once skirted Manhattan’s west side, for an upcoming scene involving
gay bartender Paul Hendrickson. In the 1970s and 1980s, the piers
© DC NOIR, LLC
were a hot spot for gay men cruising for sex, and gay and transgender
runaways often slept there, as immortalized in the 1990 documentary
Paris Is Burning. But the AIDS epidemic largely put an end to that,
and it did much the same to the Times Square scene, when hundreds
071
Pelecanos on
the set of
D.C. Noir.
of street kids, who often relied on turning $5 tricks to get by, started
dying. This is where The Deuce is headed in its third and final season;
the city will be in a tailspin.
After ordering drinks, we discuss Curtis Mayfield and Hüsker Dü
and then Pelecanos’ mother, Ruby. She taught Sunday school for 25
years and is “a true believer in the best sense of the word,” he says.
Despite all the trouble he caused, he never robbed or pulled a gun on
someone, because he didn’t want her or his dad to have to hear that he’d
caused someone genuine distress.
A quick-moving bartender soon returns with a Bulleit rye, neat, for
Pelecanos and a beer for me. “Cheers, man,” Pelecanos says, raising his
glass. He still drinks some but not in a real way. Not like before. You
can’t party hard and write well, so writing gave him a reason do less of
the former. Pelecanos and Emily’s decision to adopt their first son, Nick,
in 1991, played a part, too. (The couple’s other two children, Peter and
Rosa, are also now grown.) “Once you have kids, you look back behind
you like, ‘Yeah, we did all that. Now we’re doing this,’” Pelecanos says.
Family, in many ways, centers him. While filming The Wire in Bal-
timore, he never once stayed the night, preferring, no matter how late,
to drive the 40 miles home, to sleep under the same roof as his children.
Now that he’s in New York filming The Deuce, he has an apartment in
the city, but he calls his wife and his mom, who’s 94, every day, and both
his sons work with him on set.
Though now a father, he hasn’t forgotten what it’s like to be a teen-
ager overtaken by impulse and adrenaline. He knows that some young
guys “just have to do all this crazy shit because they can’t help them-
selves in a way,” he says.
He volunteers for two reading programs, Free Minds Book Club
and Writers in Schools, and visits detention centers and high schools to
discuss literature and writing with young people. Whenever he does, he
makes clear that he wasn’t unlike many of them growing up. “It’s a long
life. People change, and I just believe in that,” he says, setting down his
glass. “I know it’s corny, but nobody was picking me out in high school
to be the most likely to succeed.”
And with the success that Pelecanos has found, he has continued to
push himself, no matter the medium. He has a film coming out soon,
titled D.C. Noir, which his son Nick helped to direct; he publishes a
new novel every year or two; he’s still competitive about the episodes
he writes for The Deuce. Likewise, later this evening, after drinks and
oysters and a day of scouting, he’ll return to his apartment and work
on script revisions and field emails until the early morning; to care
or try less would be a disservice to the show. “On some level,” Simon
explains, “he’s still the kid whose father told him to mop the f loor at
the end of the working day. And he’s not going to miss a corner.” MJ
 15
REASONS
TO

STOP WORRYING
AND
LEARN
TO

LOVE THE NFL

BETWEEN POLITICAL PROTESTS, HEAD INJURIES, AND
GREEDY OWNERS, IT’S EASY TO HATE ON THE NFL.
BUT AMID THE DRAMA, THERE’S STILL PLENTY OF
ON-THE-FIELD ACTION TO ROOT FOR.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY KAGAN MCLOUD

 1
BY ANY STANDARD, THE PHILADELPHIA EAGLES
had a remarkable 2017 season. Coming off a
disappointing 7–9 record in 2016, they reeled
off six straight wins in 2017 to snag the NFC
East title. And after their second-year quarter-
back, Carson Wentz—who was likely en route to
becoming the league’s MVP—went down with
a torn ACL in week 14, backup Nick Foles led
the team through the playoffs and to an aston-
ishing Super Bowl victory, the franchise’s first.
Now, as the 2018 season dawns, the Eagles
remain among the league’s elite, but it’s not
just their on-field dominance that’s striking.
They’ve also established themselves as the most
socially conscious team in the NFL, a locker
room full of committed activists and philan-
thropists that are challenging the way fans and
critics perceive NFL players. Even if you’re not
from Philly, it’s hard not to cheer for them.
074
The Super Bowl champion
Philadelphia Eagles are as
ferocious off the field as on
The Eagles’ activist mentality has been
publicly evolving over the last few seasons, but
it became front-page news in June, after the
team was disinvited from the White House.
The cancellation was ascribed to Eagles
players having kneeled during the national
anthem last season. Except that wasn’t the
case: No player took a knee. The Eagles all
stood, though safety Malcolm Jenkins raised
his f ist during the anthem, and penned a
Washington Post op-ed explaining why. In the
piece, he discussed the work he and 40 other
players are doing in the Players Coalition to
reform the criminal justice system, “which
is crippling our nation and especially affects
people who are poor or of color.” Jenkins
called for police transparency and an end to
the money-bail system. This was hardly a new
stance for Jenkins; in addition to his namesake
foundation, which develops youth programs,
he founded the Let’s Listen Together initiative
to discuss police-community relations. After
the White House snub, when reporters sur-
rounded him looking for comments, Jenkins
instead silently held up signs bearing mes-
sages such as “More than 60 percent of people
in prison are people of color.”
When Jenkins raised his fist during the
anthem, defensive end Chris Long expressed
his solidarity by putting his arm around his
teammate’s shoulders, becoming the most
RICH SCHULTZ/GETTY IMAGES
visible white player to wade into the anthem
controversy. Long is no stranger to social
issues himself. He started a foundation that
builds wells in East Africa and endorsed Ber-
nie Sanders for president. Long also donated
his entire $1 million 2017 salary to charities,
primarily educational causes, and joined Jen-
 2018 NFL PREVIEW

2 THIS YEAR’S CLASS OF ROOKIE QBS

“WE’VE GOT A LOT OF GUYS
WHO ARE HOPING TO HAVE IS NEXT IN LINE FOR SUPERSTARDOM
A DIALOGUE ABOUT THINGS
THAT MOST PEOPLE DON’T In the 2018 NFL draft, four quarterbacks were selected in the first 10 spots. That hasn’t
happened since 1949. But with those high picks come huge expectations, and who
WANT TO TALK ABOUT.” succeeds and who flames out is a season-long drama. Hall of Fame coach and NBC
Football Night in America analyst Tony Dungy thinks this class has serious potential—
kins in lobbying lawmakers for criminal justice provided they’re given time. “Fans are going say, ‘We drafted a quarterback, and he’s
reform bills, along with Eagles players Rod- gonna come in and do what Deshaun Watson did,’ ” says Dungy. “That’s a rarity but, in a
ney McLeod and Torrey Smith (now with the year or two, you’re going to see some very good play.” Here’s how the top four stack up.
Panthers). Even quarterback Carson Wentz
has become a leader in the community: His
foundation works with underprivileged youth,
veterans, and the physically challenged, and
he donated $120,000 to an organization that
provides service dogs to people in need.
Further bolstering their bona fides on and
off the field, the Eagles traded this off-season
for Seahawks defensive end Michael Bennett,
a three-time Pro Bowler and one of the players
who joined Jenkins in sending a 10-page memo
to commissioner Roger Goodell that helped #1 PICK #3 PICK #7 PICK #10 PICK
secure a $90 million pledge from the league to
fund community programs. Bennett is also the BAKER MAYFIELD SAM DARNOLD JOSH ALLEN JOSH ROSEN
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: LIEBENBERG/AP; BEN LIEBENBERG/AP; BEN LIEBENBERG/AP; BEN LIEBENBERG/AP; CAPTAINANDREWLUCK/TWITTER

author of the new book Things That Make White Cleveland Browns New York Jets Buffalo Bills Arizona Cardinals
People Uncomfortable, which discusses his past Chances of playing in Chances of playing in Chances of playing in Chances of playing in
experiences with racism as well as his activism. 2018: Good 2018: Slim 2018: High 2018: Slim
Bennett was known for his community work Long-term outlook: Long-term outlook: Long-term outlook: Long-term outlook:
in Seattle, and he’s eager to find out about the Mayfield, one of the Darnold has a capable Allen will likely see time Rosen is probably the
issues facing Philly; the Eagles not only plan to most decorated players veteran in front of him, under center this year, best pure passer here,
defend their Super Bowl title but also to learn in college history, will so seeing time this which could be a roller- but the Cardinals’ line
how they can best use their growing platform have to beat out veteran year will be tough. But coaster experience for is weak and Rosen has
to fight for change. “We’ve got a lot of guys who Tyrod Taylor to play in if he does, he has great Bills fans, because he a penchant for hanging
are hoping to have dialogue about things that 2018, but with a strong accuracy and is cool in can make pressured on to the ball too long.
most people don’t want to talk about,” says Ben- arm and a roster that the clutch, which will throws that few oth- Though with help from
nett. “The thing for me is finding ways to have has some real weapons make him fascinating ers can—but he also veteran QB Sam Brad-
our voice and also be able to build bridges to on it, he could take over to watch at the end of a has a knack for poor ford, he could develop
the communities that don’t get represented.” a game easily. close game. decision-making. into an effective starter.

IT’S NOW LEGAL TO BET ON YOUR FAVORITE TEAM (AT LEAST IN A FEW STATES)
Thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision, Nevada’s monopoly on taking legal sports wagers is over. All states can now authorize betting on sports,
although there will be only a handful in which bets can be placed this NFL season. Here’s how it’s going to work.

STATES WHERE IT WILL BE LEGAL tion and should be ready for the be our biggest time of year in terms about to get a lot more exciting.
Anticipating that the Supreme opening kickoff. Pennsylvania and of the sportsbook side,” says New TYPES OF BETS BEING OFFERED
Court would strike down the Rhode Island could be allowing Jersey’s Monmouth Park Racetrack You’ll be able to bet on almost
Professional and Amateur Sports wagers come playoff time, and operator Dennis Drazin. “We an- anything: upcoming games, who’s
Protection Act (PASPA) as un-
constitutional in May, some states
moved early to be ready for the
NFL season. New Jersey and
Delaware became the first states
outside Nevada to take single-game
research firm Eilers & Krejcik

HOW YOU CAN PLACE WAGERS

wagers in June. West Virginia and
Mississippi also passed legisla-
The states that legalize sports
betting are authorizing existing
3
Gaming projects that 32 states will
have sports betting by 2023.
casinos and racetracks to offer wa-
gering. “Football season is going to
ticipate crowds to be substantially
higher.” In Atlantic City, Borgata
Hotel and Casino committed mil-
lions to constructing a top-notch
sportsbook, and owners of Ocean
Resort Casino made one a priority
going to win the Super Bowl and,
in some states, in-play action on
things like who will score the next
touchdown. New Jersey and West
Virginia are also gearing up for mo-
bile/online betting, which will even-
of its recent renovation. In other tually be a cornerstone for wagers
words, Sundays in Atlantic City are in most participating states.

4
CAPT. ANDREW LUCK IS THE FUNNIEST FEED ONLINE
There are more than a few great NFL parody accounts on Twitter—Tom Brady’s Ego, Faux NFL Network—
but our favorite is Capt. Andrew Luck, which reimagines the quarterback as a Civil War soldier: “Dearest
mother, I write with exuberance. Today, for the first time after many sunrises, I fired my sidearm in full
view of onlookers.... The unit has a grueling campaign that inches closer daily. I shall be ready. I love you.”

The Giants’ Odell Beckham Jr.
is primed to become comeback
player of the year
Last year was plagued with high-profile injuries—JJ Watt, Andrew Luck,
Aaron Rodgers. But the Giants’ wide receiver is healthy—and ready to
light up defenses again with his impossibly graceful catches.
MOST FANS HAVE A LOVE OR HATE relation-
ship with Odell Beckham Jr. Part arro-
gant asshat, part self-assured superstar,
the 25-year-old wide receiver has been
involved in no shortage of drama since
entering the league in 2014, including a
widely viewed video in March that showed
him in bed with a Parisian woman—while
smoking a blunt and eating pizza. What-
ever you think of OBJ’s antics, however,
there’s no question he’s electric on the
field, and there seems little reason to doubt
he’ll bounce back from an ankle break that
landed him on injured reserve last year.
F
076
5 TAKING COMMENTARY
rookie season, a hamstring injury forced
him to miss training camp, preseason,
and the first four regular-season games.
OBJ not only recovered but also went on
to log 91 receptions, 12 touchdowns, and
1,305 receiving yards—breaking all sorts of
records. And by all accounts, he looked as
good as new in minicamp this year, help-
ing to squash doubts about whether he’ll
make a full recovery. What’s more, with
Giants ace rookie running back Saquon
Barkley sure to demand extra coverage
in the box, Beckham will likely be left to
go one-on-one with defensive backs. The
NATE BURLESON IS
TO THE NEXT LEVEL
The former wide receiver is on TV as many as
six days a week, working for the NFL Network
and on CBS’s The NFL Today, and his insights
are more astute than anyone’s.
HOW HARD WAS THE TRANSITION
6 FROM PLAYER TO ANALYST?
When I first got out of the league,
I still felt like I was a part of the
fraternity, so I didn’t want to hurt anybody’s
feelings. Then I remember one of the guys in the
studio saying, “Nate, you’re clever and you’re
going to make people laugh, but you have to say
something. In the course of that, you might hurt
some people’s feelings.” It took me some time,
but I realized the more honest I was about the
game, the more the fans appreciated it.
DO THE PLAYERS LISTEN TO THE MEDIA HYPE?
No question. You have a rare group of guys who
really just don’t watch TV, but most guys watch
it. It used to be kind of taboo, because we’re
all taught, “Hey, don’t get distracted and don’t
let that stuff blow up your head.” Now I think
guys are just open to it. If they love soap operas
and reality TV, they might as well watch the
reality show that they’re in.
WHO ARE YOU MOST EXCITED ABOUT THIS YEAR?
I got my eyes on the Houston Texans and
Deshaun Watson. The games he played in last
year were unbelievable. He went blow-for-blow
with Tom Brady and Russell Wilson. He came
on our show, and we asked, “What are your
goals?” He said “I’m chasing the GOAT, Tom
Brady.” He hadn’t even been drafted yet.
ANYONE ELSE?
The Jaguars. That defense is sexy as hell, man.
They’re loud and they’re brash and they’re here
to stay. The Jags could be my favorite squad.
WILL THE NFL BE ABLE TO STAY OUT OF POLITICS?
I feel like Trump is still pushing the narrative
that the players are anti-American and anti-
military, which is not the case. One thing I do
hope is that the players stick to whatever it is
that they believe in and do it because they want
to see change, not because of the president’s
words or anybody else’s.
WHAT’S THE PRESEASON BUILDUP LIKE FOR YOU?
It’s like that week before Christmas, you know,
FROM TOP: PETER HAPAK/TRUNKARCHIVE.COM; COURTESY OF CBS
Santa’s almost here, the decorations are up, got
the milk and cookies. Kids opening up their
presents, that’s opening day for us, and it’s a
gift that keeps on giving the entire season.
 2018 NFL PREVIEW

ALEJANDRO ROGER GOODELL

VILLANUEVA NFL commissioner
Pittsburgh Steelers Misdeeds: Despite
defensive end being one of the most
Good Deeds: The former powerful men in sports,
U.S. Army captain served the commissioner just
three tours of duty in can’t stop stepping on
Afghanistan and earned PR rakes. This year’s
the Bronze Star for valor new national anthem
for rescuing wounded policy banning protests
soldiers under enemy on the field but allow-
fire. After an anthem flap ing teams to stay in
last season—he stood the locker room is the
alone for the anthem latest in a long line of
while his protesting blunders, from insuf-
teammates remained ficient punishment for
inside the locker room— domestic assault to
he donated his royalty egregiously slow action
check from jersey sales on brain injuries.
to charity.

LARRY
FITZGERALD JR.
Arizona Cardinals
wide receiver
Good Deeds: Voted
the NFL’s most likable
player, Fitzgerald’s First
Down Fund dispenses
ROBERT BECK /SPORTS ILLUSTRATED/GETTY IMAGES
EZEKIEL ELLIOTT
Dallas Cowboys
running back
Misdeeds: He was sus-
VON MILLER JJ WATT BILL BELICHICK VONTAZE BURFICT pended for six games in
Denver Broncos Houston Texans New England Cincinnati Bengals 2017 after an investiga-
linebacker defensive end Patriots coach linebacker tion of several alleged
Good Deeds: The be- Good Deeds: He donated Misdeeds: He’s argu- Misdeeds: He’s earned a incidents of domestic
spectacled Bronco’s $100,000, then raised ably the greatest coach reputation as the NFL’s assault. He appealed

over $500,00 in grants
each year for causes like
promoting reading pro-
ficiency. He travels the
globe in the off-season
for charities, engaging
in acts like handing out
hearing aids in Uganda,
and supports nonprofits
that fight breast cancer
and HIV/AIDS.
foundation Von’s Vi- over $37 million more, in NFL history, but he dirtiest player, amassing the suspension with the
sion provides free eye for relief efforts after relentlessly flaunts the more than $4 million backing of owner Jerry
exams and glasses to the 2017 hurricane in rules and accrued the in fines and multiple Jones, but eventually
underprivileged youth, Houston. His foundation largest fine ever for a suspensions. Offenses withdrew it. Elliott was
and even throws a fit- also generated over coach, thanks to Spy- include: late hits, kicking also caught on video
ting party to help kids $1 million to provide kids’ gate. Game of Thrones a player, twisting Cam pulling down a woman’s
feel at ease in their with after-school op- author George R. R. Newton’s ankle, and giv- top at a 2017 St. Pat-
new eyewear. Miller portunities and he paid Martin has compared ing the finger to Buffalo rick’s Day parade.
also visited troops in for the funerals of the 10 the Pats to the Bills fans. He’ll begin
Afghanistan in 2013, victims of the Sante Fe, Lannisters and called this year with a four-
along with JJ Watt. Texas, school shooting. him “Evil Little Bill.” game PED suspension.

THE NFL’S MOST OUTSPOKEN COACH IS BACK

9 For nearly a decade, Super Bowl–winning coach Jon Gruden was the irrepressible voice of Monday
Night Football, offering such pearls of wisdom as: “Anything goes on any given Sunday, especially
Monday night.” Now that he’s returning as the Raiders coach, his verbal—and football—brilliance
promises to be even more entertaining as he tries to bring the men in black back to the Super Bowl.
 TWO UNDERDOGS ARE THE MOST THRILLING TO WATCH
The Patriots and Eagles are still the squads to beat in 2018, but these two
up-and-comers might be even more intriguing to follow.

AFC: HOUSTON TEXANS NFC: LOS ANGELES RAMS

The Texans will be bolstered by the
return of quarterback Deshaun
Watson, who electrified the league
in his rookie season, setting a
number of passing records.
The Texans also have some
of the best games on the
schedule, including matches
10
against the Super Bowl cham-
pion Eagles, the Patriots, and
two against the upstart Jaguars, so get
ready for some serious showdowns.
Quarterback Jared Goff led the Rams
to a surprising NFC West title last
season. What makes them even
more intriguing this year is
a trade for speedy wide re-
ceiver Brandin Cooks, who
will be a potent deep threat.
Combined with running back
Todd Gurley, the Rams can
score from anywhere on the field
at any time. So don’t turn away, lest
you miss a game-changing play.

The NFL is trying

(oh so slightly) to
make the game safer
This off-season, the league tweaked two rules
in an effort to limit concussions and make the
game’s most dangerous play less risky. But will
the new plans work? Here’s our take.
KICKOFFS
11 The Rule Players on the kicking team will no
longer be allowed a running start before the
ball is in the air, and players on the receiv-
ing team are prevented from engaging in “wedge blocks,”
wherein two players come together to block another player.
What It Means “The kickoff becomes a glorified punt,” says
legendary Steelers coach and analyst Bill Cowher. “I think
it may even make the return game more important rather
than eliminate the collisions. You may see more runbacks.”
Will It Make the Game Safer? Probably not, but it could
unintentionally make it a lot more exciting.

TACKLING
The Rule Defenders will no longer be able to tackle by lead-
ing with the crown of the helmet.
What It Means NBC analyst Tony Dungy says it will have
less of an impact than most players think. “Coaches have
been teaching different techniques for years now, and this
won’t affect that many plays,” he says. “But it depends on
how the refs call it.”
Will It Make the Game Safer? Yes, but only marginally.

078
 2018 NFL PREVIEW

13
Stadiums are
going even
more high-tech
These days, going to the game is just as
much about the stadium experience as it is
about the game, thanks to NFL teams that
are doing everything they can to draw fans to
the seats: A five-story-tall, 360-degree HD
video halo board (Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz
Stadium). A translucent roof and facades
that provide natural light and keep out the
elements (Minneapolis’ US Bank Stadium).
Free high-speed WiFi to stream video and
post photos online (too many to name). One
of the most intriguing new offerings is
VenueNext’s app, which is a sort of digital
concierge for game attendees. So far, it’s
available in only two stadiums, the Vikings’
and 49ers’ venues, but more are on the way.
Here are the app’s coolest features.

seats will be able to control the 3-D replays

themselves, pausing the play and zooming
around virtually on the f ield, just like in a
video game—except with a play you’ve just
witnessed in real life. Welcome to the brave
new NFL.

BYPASS THE BEER LINES: One of the most

popular uses last year was a simple feature
that allowed users to pay for beer through
the app, then swing by and pick up a few
cold bottles at coolers placed strategically
throughout the stadium (which are watched
by an attendant). No line, and no missing a
crucial play.
WATCHING AT HOME WILL BE MORE FUN, TOO
For those who want to truly experience the game at home, virtual reality is on its way—
14 eventually. The NFL has already installed cameras capable of capturing games in VR at
many of its stadiums, and now offers highlights as part of a postgame package, as well as
during some replays on Thursday night broadcasts. Actually providing a real-time game in VR is still
some time down the road, thanks to the massive amount of data required. But when it comes, likely in
the next two or three years, the resolution will be much higher on a headset, so you’ll truly be able to
feel what it’s like to be on the field—without actually getting hit.

THE DISASTROUS “CATCH RULE” HAS BEEN FIXED

15 At long last, the NFL is making a catch a catch by doing away with the “going to the ground” stipulation, which stated that a
player needed to maintain control while bouncing off the turf—and which created numerous controversies. Now receivers
simply need to control the ball, get two feet (or another body part) in bounds, and make a football move. “I think they’ve righted a
wrong here,” says former coach Tony Dungy. “I think the fans will be much happier.”

Contributors: MIKE RUBIN, J.R. SULLIVAN, RYAN KROGH

The aftermath of a July 2015 helicopter
crash in Colorado that killed the pilot
and badly injured two others.
 A
Mahany was considered a dean among
mountain rescue pilots. He’d been shot down
three times in Vietnam and earned a Bronze
Star and Purple Heart, for taking a bullet
through his armpit. He’d rescued climbers
from 14,000-foot peaks and plucked ava-
lanche victims from remote debris f ields.
When he lifted off in Frisco, under blue skies
and in relatively calm winds, he had more
than 13,200 hours of flight time.
Repsher immediately sensed that some-
thing wasn’t right. He looked at Bowe and
tightened his seat belt. Bowe asked Mahany
over the intercom if everything was OK. Mah-
any didn’t reply. The helicopter had begun to
yaw, or spin to the left, immediately after it
took off, likely due to a loss of tail-rotor power.
It spun out of control for about 30 seconds,
then plummeted from an altitude of 100 feet
and smashed into the hospital parking lot at
nearly 40 miles per hour.
Repsher was ejected and landed next to
the fuselage, under a door. He was brief ly
knocked unconscious. He does not remember
much, but he does recall feeling like someone
dumped a five-gallon bucket of water on his
shoulders—later determined to be fuel gush-
ing from the ruptured tank. Within 3.9 sec-
onds of impact, the helicopter was ablaze.
About 20 seconds later, Repsher can be seen
on surveillance footage lifting the door, then
running away from the helicopter while on
fire, still attached to his seat by his seat belt.
He remembers someone throwing dirt on him
next to a paved bicycle path.
Nearly two minutes after the crash—and
roughly 30 seconds after Bowe escaped,
unburned—a bystander pulled Mahany from
the cockpit and sprayed him with a fire extin-
guisher. The chopper continued to burn until
the wreckage was little more than knee high.
Mahany, who took the brunt of the impact,
suffered a crushed pelvis, fractures in both
lower legs and a wrist, and broke every rib.
He also suffered liver and spleen injuries
and inhalation burns from being trapped in
82
the helicopter. His primary cause of death
was classified as blunt force trauma, though
experts theorized he would have survived if
not for his internal burns.
Repsher, meanwhile, had been scorched.
By the time first responders carried him to
the emergency room, he was close to death.
Ninety percent of his body had been burned.
“I just remember being on that board, holding
my arms up, watching the skin slough off my
hands,” he says.
Inside the hospital, he thought of his wife.
“Tell Amanda I love her,” he whimpered. Then
a sedative knocked him out.
THE HELICOPTER THAT crashed
was not just any helicopter. It was
an Airbus AS350 B3e, a derivative of
the B3, the only helicopter to land
on the summit of Mount Everest (in 2015 Air-
bus rebranded it the H125). When Flight For
Life debuted it at the Frisco base, known as
Lifeguard 2, in August 2014, the B3e’s superior
efficiency cut the bread-and-butter flight to St.
Anthony Hospital in Lakewood, near Denver,
from 23 to 20 minutes. It was outfitted with a
$150,000 autopilot system and night-vision
goggles and could fly 160 mph. Any pilot who
has f lown it will tell you it is the world’s best
EMS helicopter, especially at altitude.
Not surprisingly, it is also one of the most
popular in an industry that has boomed in
recent years. In 2003, 545 helicopters f lew
EMS missions from 472 bases across the U.S.
Since then, due in part to a growing number
of rural hospitals closing their doors, those
numbers have nearly doubled, to 1,049 heli-
copters and 908 bases in 2016, creating a
multibillion-dollar industry within the much
larger civil helicopter field. EMS work now
employs 4,400 pilots and more than 11,000
medical crew members, who transport
350,000 patients each year. The choppers are
everywhere—rushing heart-attack, stroke,
and car-crash victims to the hospital and res-
cuing backcountry travelers from perilous
Flight nurse David Repsher suffered
burns over 90 percent of his body
after his chopper crashed and ignited.
situations, when minutes could mean the dif-
ference between life and death.
Flight For Life Colorado—known as
“Flights” to EMS and hospital workers—was
the first civilian helicopter ambulance service
in the country when it launched in Denver in
1972. It remains a standard-bearer, and Frisco
is still America’s highest medevac base, at
9,100 feet. When the B3e arrived, the ship was
so key to Frisco’s mission that Flights paid its
owner, Air Methods Corporation, $120,000 a
month to lease it.
Repsher checked every box that Flights
looks for in a nurse. He had grown up in Sil-
verthorne, a few miles from Frisco, and built
his credentials over two decades. He worked
as an avalanche technician on the Copper
Mountain Ski Patrol and as a whitewater raft
guide, then as an intensive-care nurse. He had
arms like bazookas from rowing his 22-foot
raft down the Grand Canyon, which he’d run
more than 30 times, and was the guy hunter
friends called when they needed someone to
help pack out big game from the wilderness.
He’d seen Flight For Life’s telltale orange
and yellow helicopters f lying between peaks
since his days at Copper Mountain. “They’re
such a big part of this whole region, really,”
he told me when we met in April. “It was
something I wanted to be part of.” Jobs at
Lifeguard 2 are hard to get and harder to
leave; Repsher was hired in 2012. Think-
ing back to that day made him smile. “I was
proud of myself,” he said. Amanda, sitting
next to him, still referred to him as a nurse
in the present tense.
But as experienced as he was, Repsher,
who was earning about $60,000 a year at the
time of the crash, knew little about the heli-
copter’s safety features, trusting his superiors
and Air Methods to manage that side. It was
only later, after the accident, that he learned
the truth: that despite cutting-edge equip-
ment on much of the helicopter, the B3e was
equipped with a plastic fuel tank and rigid
fuel lines that were prone to breaking upon
impact. While the components met Federal
Aviation Administration guidelines, the
standards themselves had been written four
decades earlier—when helicopters were used
almost exclusively by the military. With nei-
ther a new system nor a retrofit available on
the market, Flight For Life program director
Kathy Mayer wouldn’t have had a choice for
a safer option even if she knew how outdated
the current one was, which she says she didn’t.
Crashworthy safety features have existed
in helicopters since the mid-1970s, but they
are found primarily on military ships. The
Army, alarmed that so many of its soldiers
were burning to death after survivable crashes
in Vietnam, eliminated those fatalities when
it equipped its f leet with crash-resistant fuel
systems. The problem persisted in the civilian
sector, however, which is overseen by the FAA.
In 1985, studies commissioned by the agency
showed that people were dying in survivable
crashes due to post-crash fires. In 1994, the
FAA published a paper that stated, “...sig-
nificant benefits would be achieved by incor-
poration of crash-resistant features” in civil
rotorcraft—a category including everything
from metro news helicopters to Hawaiian
sightseeing choppers to heli-ski outfitters to
EMS ships. Yet the FAA also noted such ben-
efits would be bad for business: “The manu-
facturer who installs an enhanced fuel system
may be at a disadvantage in selling its aircraft.”
In 1989 and 1994, the FAA imposed rules
requiring all new helicopter designs certified
by the agency to include the latest safety tech-
nology in seating and fuel systems. But there
was a caveat: The rules didn’t apply to exist-
ing helicopter designs. This excluded the vast
majority of new builds. “It’d be like DOT not
making Ford put seat belts in their 2017 Mus-
tang because it was certified in 1964,” says
Newman Shufflebarger, president of Robert-
son Fuel Systems, which manufactures crash-
resistant tanks and equipment.
When asked why so many models were
grandfathered, FA A spokesperson Tony
Molinaro said the agency probably expected
more new helicopter designs to be intro-
duced after the rules were passed. The truth
is that almost every FAA safety regulation is
structured the same way, a result, numerous
sources said, of effective industry lobbying,
since it costs more to include crashworthy
safety features and it’s a common refrain that
“safety doesn’t sell.”
The fact that Repsher was burned after
a survivable crash did not make him all
that unique, he would learn. Yet two factors
placed him in a category of his own—and led
to a groundbreaking outcome in a legal battle
against Airbus Helicopters and Air Methods.
One, every moment of the crash and burn
was caught on video.
Two, he survived.
TH E NATIO NAL Transportation
Safety Board will tell you, as it has
told the FAA, that it investigated 135
crash-and-burn accidents between
1994 and 2013, which killed 221 people and
left 37 seriously injured. Only three of the 135
helicopters had crash-resistant fuel systems.
“It’s like collateral damage in war,” one pilot
told me. “It’s an accepted loss rate.”
The NTSB—which has no regulatory
power—will also tell you that due to the
FAA’s loophole, as of 2014 only 15 percent of
helicopters built since 1994 were equipped
with a crash-resistant fuel system. Opera-
tors don’t push to include them because they
weigh more and cost more, and most pilots
think they’re never going to crash anyway,
so what’s the point?
Those safer fuel systems are built with a
puncture-resistant rubber bladder inside the
tank and breakaway, self-sealing valves to
keep fuel from leaking after a violent impact.
84
do and can’t leak more than six ounces in the
first five minutes after impact. Grandfathered
helicopter tanks, however, can gush fuel by
the gallon and still be considered legal—as
was the case with Frisco’s B3e, which was
built in 2013.
Both Repsher and Bowe sued Airbus and
Air Methods after the crash, alleging that a
faulty design and noncrashworthy safety fea-
tures caused the accident and their injuries.
(Mahany’s widow, Karen, a former f light
nurse, opted not to litigate and instead worked
to change the law.) Bowe, whose back was bro-
ken, settled his suit for an undisclosed amount
in November 2017 and signed a confidentiality
agreement. Repsher, who was sedated for five-
and-a-half months and spent almost an entire
year in intensive care, refused confidentiality
and braced for a trial.
He would face a pair of industry Goliaths.
Air Methods, which is based in Greenwood
Village, Colorado, operates more than 300
helicopter bases serving 48 states—more
than any other company. Airbus, meanwhile,
reported $7.9 billion in global helicopter reve-
nue last year, including $800 million in North
America; the company spends about $4 mil-
lion a year on lobbyists in the U.S. Everyone
knew the suit could have enormous implica-
tions on the EMS industry.
In the days following the crash, doctors
told Amanda Repsher, a nurse and para-
medic, that her husband had a 10 percent
chance of survival. They couldn’t bear to tell
her the truth: that their formula had calcu-
lated his actual chance of survival at nega-
tive 140 percent. He developed compartment
syndrome, a severe swelling of tissue, and was
sliced open to relieve the pressure—down his
arms, legs, chest, and abdomen. His kidneys
failed, eventually requiring a transplant. He
endured 10 months of septic shock, which
forced him to be placed on life-threatening
medication. Five months in, he developed
massive internal bleeding in the middle of
the night. Doctors cracked open his chest—
a last-ditch lifesaving procedure. Repsher
laid there open-chested for two days as his
pneumonia-stricken lungs struggled to get
enough air from a ventilator.
To cover his burns, doctors harvested skin
from wherever the f ire didn’t maim. They
grafted from his scalp, which was spared by
om his
psher,
who’d been 5'8" and 180 pounds before the
crash, withered to 89 pounds. Once he got the
feeding tube out of his nose, it took him six
months to relearn how to swallow. His fingers
were immobile, and he could barely bend his
elbows and wrists. His therapist made him a
two-foot-long spoon, which, when attached to
his hand, he could use to scoop up food, then
try to steer it toward his mouth.
He was discharged August 2, 2016, the same
month that a high-level FAA manager named
Jim Viola told a Denver television reporter that
he would not fly a helicopter without a crash-
resistant fuel system, because he didn’t want
to “look like a fool” if it caught fire after a hard
landing. In the 9News report, part of a series
stemming from the Frisco crash, Viola said
instead of waiting for the FAA to change the
rules, manufacturers should stop producing
ships without crashworthy safety features.
“We try not to hamper growth,” Viola said.
To that end, any proposed regulation
changes have to pass through a gauntlet of
industry appointees who serve on what is
known as the Aviation Rulemaking Advi-
sory Committee, which has a huge inf lu-
ence on whether the FA A will consider a
change. “I call it regulation by permission
of the regulated, because you know how
the system works,” says Dennis Shanahan,
HUGH
a former Army colonel who helped develop
Top: Repsher rafting the Grand Canyon.
Below: An Airbus AS350 B3e takes off from
a helipad in Frisco, Colorado.
 safety. “You end up with a watered-down ver-
sion, or it doesn’t happen at all.”
“All I can say is I disagree,” said Molinaro,
the FAA spokesman. “The industry does have
safety as its number one priority.”
In March 2017, the NTSB held a meeting
to determine the probable cause of the Frisco
crash. Investigators cited pilot error, claiming
a high probability that Mahany had turned
off the chopper’s hydraulic switch during a
pref light check and forgotten to turn it back
on, leading to a loss of control at takeoff. The
badly burned switch was found in the on
position, but no one knows how or when it
got there. Investigators also cited as a con-
tributing factor that Mahany had failed to
conduct a required hover power check. His
son, Ryan, a Black Hawk pilot and instructor
in the Army, believes his father was trying to
save the aircraft and didn’t have time to per-
form the hover.
NTSB board member Robert Sumwalt
argued that Airbus and Air Methods had failed
COURTESY OF DAVE REPSHER
to protect the pilot and crew with the design
of the switch and the lack of a warning light
if one forgot to reset it. Ultimately, the board
sided with Sumwalt—a decision that seemed
to bolster Repsher’s and Bowe’s legal cases. “If
you design a system with traps,” Sumwalt said
at the probable-cause hearing, “sooner or later
you’re going to snare somebody.”
Repsher later learned that his crew seat was
required to withstand an impact of only five
feet per second, a rule written by the FAA in
1965. (He hit the asphalt at more than eight
times that speed.) The agency revised the rule
in 1989 to require that seats be made five times
stronger, but because of the loophole, it didn’t
apply to Frisco’s B3e. Meanwhile, the gas tank
Repsher would sit within inches of, separated
by an aluminum partition, was made of roto-
molded plastic, which can degrade over time.
“So basically,” Repsher told me, “you’re f ly-
ing around with a sun-rotted milk jug right
behind you, full of fuel.”
The most damning discovery that Repsher’s
legal team made may have been a fundamen-
tal FAA rule from 1964. It states, simply, “The
aircraft may have no design features or defects
that experience has shown to be unreliable or
hazardous.” In light of the statistics cited by
the NTSB, as well as the FAA’s own findings
from the ’80s and ’90s, I asked agency spokes-
man Molinaro why the FA A has allowed
noncrashworthy fuel systems to persist. “I’d
have to question your definition of hazardous
or unreliable,” Molinaro replied. “I mean, tail
rotor blades are hazardous.”
ONE OF THE REASONS the Frisco
crash became so inf luential is
because it occurred shortly after an
eerily similar accident in Wichita
Falls, Texas. At 1:55 a.m. on October 4, 2014, a
Bell 206L1+ transporting a gunshot victim
landed upside down in front of a hospital. The
flight nurse, 27-year-old Leslie Searle Stuart,
managed to evacuate the helicopter within
seconds and was six feet away when the ship
blew up. Stuart, like Repsher, had been doused
with fuel from an outdated tank. She caught
fire and sustained severe burns on 70 percent
of her body. She died four days later. The para-
medic and patient also perished, while the pilot
escaped by kicking out his windshield.
Stuart’s father, Richard Searle, spent 22
years as an active-duty helicopter pilot in the
Air Force. He was well aware of the crash-
resistant fuel systems on his helicopters, he
says, and equally shocked to learn that his
daughter’s ship did not have one. “I can’t tell
you how angry I got that this well-painted,
well-f lown, nice-avionics-package, good-
medical-package aircraft had a prehistoric
damned fuel system in it,” he said. “Your
damned coffeepot has more safety features
than the fuel system. You can pull the urn out
of the coffeepot without it dumping hot coffee
all over you.”
The Wichita Falls crash led to a recommen-
dation from the NTSB to FAA administrator
Michael Huerta that was delivered, coinci-
dentally, less than three weeks after the Frisco
crash. The NTSB had been recommending
that the FAA mandate crash-resistant fuel sys-
tems for 30 years, but the timing of this recom-
mendation added a level of urgency, and the
FAA formed a working group to look into it.
By then, word had spread through Colo-
rado’s Flight For Life crew that the B3e fuel
system was dangerous. “We were literally
dumbfounded that we didn’t have the safest
possible fuel tanks,” said Katherine Hillig, a
former f light nurse who was based at Chil-
dren’s Hospital and had flown with Flight For
Life for eight years. “You had this expectation
that you were going to be put in the best pos-
sible hands.”
Multiple sources said they didn’t discuss
the issue in public because they feared for their
jobs—which is not uncommon in the helicopter
industry. “It’s dirty laundry,” a former Flight
For Life employee said. He spoke on the con-
dition of anonymity because he still works in
the industry. “You don’t talk about anything
negative about Flight For Life at all. Nothing.
That was the culture.”
On February 1 this year, a month before
Repsher’s case was scheduled to go to trial,
Airbus and Air Methods settled for a combined
$100 million—$55 million from Airbus and $45
million from Air Methods. It was the largest
pretrial settlement in U.S. civil court history,
but aside from local news outlets and trade
publications, it received little media coverage.
Nine days later, a sightseeing helicopter
run by Papillon Airways, a Las Vegas–based
aerial-tourism outfit, spun out of control and
crashed in the Grand Canyon, igniting a fire
that would leave five British tourists dead. The
helicopter, a derivation of the Airbus AS350
series that was built in 2010, did not have a
crash-resistant fuel system. Because of the
loophole, it was not required to.
T WO W E E K S A F T E R the Grand
Canyon crash, I flew to Las Vegas to
attend the annual Heli-Expo staged
by Helicopter Association Interna-
tional, one of the largest and most powerful
trade organizations. Traditionally the conven-
tion serves as a time for the industry to pat itself
on the back, and in some ways that was true
this year too. Manufacturers announced hun-
dreds of millions of dollars’ worth of orders and
debuted new products on the sprawling floor
of the Las Vegas Convention Center.
The event took place not far from where
the doomed Grand Canyon f light had taken
off. Most by then had seen the post-crash
fire on video, captured by a bystander and
broadcast on television and online. The year
2018 was already on pace to be the deadliest
in civilian helicopter history—and that was
before another sightseeing helicopter crashed
in New York City and killed five tourists on
March 11, though that incident did not involve
a post-crash fire.
Nervous unease combined with big busi-
ness made for a strange atmosphere in the
convention center. At one exhibit, women
in high heels passed out popcorn to poten-
tial helicopter buyers. Next door, salesmen
hawked fire-retardant flight suits. I struck up
conversations with pilots and crew members
about the state of occupant safety, particularly
fuel tanks. One pilot, who f lies AS350 B3e’s
for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, told
85
me he would be heavily in favor of mandating
crash-resistant fuel systems. “Every time I get
into one of those egg cartons to fly, I’m think-
ing about that plastic gas tank behind me,” he
said, then declined to give his name.
An air-medical crew member from Ten-
nessee, who also declined to give his name,
said he thinks the FAA will eventually elimi-
nate the loophole and pass a stiffer rule, albeit
begrudgingly. “It will be written in blood,”
he said. “Every FAA rule is written in blood.”
The biggest presence in Vegas, as usual,
belonged to Airbus. Everyone’s convention
badge hung from an Airbus-sponsored lan-
yard. The daily Heli-Expo newsletter ran mul-
tiple stories per day about Airbus’ latest sales
and designs. The company initially offered an
interview with Airbus North America presi-
dent Chris Emerson, but ultimately granted
an hour with spokesman James Darcy, who
alternated between speaking on and off the
record. Darcy told me Airbus developed and
is now including crash-resistant fuel systems
on all of its new helicopters in the U.S.—even
though some operators still request them
without—“because it felt like the right thing
to do.” I asked Darcy why it wasn’t the right
thing to do 10 years ago. He said Airbus is con-
ditioned to listen to its customers and adhere
to FAA rules. The about-face “wasn’t driven
by customer demand, and it wasn’t driven by
a safety regulation,” he said. “It was simply a
business decision that we as a company made.”
After we spoke, I wandered over to the
showroom floor, where a crowd had gathered
around a shiny Los Angeles Police Depart-
ment AS350 B3e. I introduced myself to Stu-
art Lomax, the pilot, who has f lown for the
LAPD for eight years. He was wearing a green
jumpsuit with a sidearm and badge and had
his hair slicked back. He told me the B3e has
far more horsepower than the Bell Jet Ranger
he trained on. “That’s like a VW Bug,” he said
of the Jet Ranger. “This is like a Ferrari.”
I asked if its fuel system was crash-
resistant. “It would have to be,” Lomax replied.
“All that stuff is regulated by the FAA.” Lomax
went on to explain that the skids are designed
to absorb energy in a crash and split outward,
and the seats are made to withstand so many
g’s of force. “There are a lot of systems in
place,” he said.
Eventually I asked if anyone would know
for sure whether it had a crash-resistant fuel
system. “I guarantee…” Lomax began. He
spotted an Airbus technical rep and called
him over. I repeated my question. “No,” the
rep answered. It had an older system, just like
Flight For Life’s B3e.
Due to Repsher’s settlement and the run of
high-profile tragedies, the industry is seeing
substantive changes in occupant safety for the
first time in decades. Some manufacturers
have developed retrofit kits and are selling
them at or below cost. Kurt Robinson, presi-
dent of Robinson Helicopter Co., a Torrance,
California–based chopper manufacturer, said
his perspective intensified after meeting a
burn victim. He decided he would never f ly

Repsher, who has undergone 51
surgeries since the crash, with his
wife, Amanda, and dog, Turq.
without a crash-resistant fuel system again—
and is working to retrofit the company’s entire
fleet worldwide. “I get really mad at an owner
who tells me he still hasn’t complied, because
I know the difference,” he said.
Air Methods is in the process of installing
safer fuel systems on all 150 of its Airbus heli-
copters, at a cost of $15 million. Papillon Air-
ways, whose helicopter crashed in the Grand
Canyon, announced an order of 40 retrofit kits
in Las Vegas. Tempe, Arizona–based Robert-
son Fuel Systems, which sells the industry’s
most robust retrofit at a cost of up to $120,000
each, has had to hire more staff to keep up
with demand. “I’ve already been asked can I
triple production in the first year, and we’re
three months in,” the company’s president,
Newman Shufflebarger, told me.
Meanwhile, Karen Mahany got sick of
waiting for the industry, or the FAA, to act.
In 2016, she began meeting with members of
D are not touching his face. He is going to look
Congress, spurring them to introduce legisla-
tion that would close the FAA loophole and
require all newly manufactured helicopters
to install crash-resistant fuel systems. It was
passed by the House in April and was await-
ing Senate approval at press time. “I still am
angry that we didn’t correct this a long time
ago,” U.S. Representative Ed Perlmutter, the
Colorado Democrat who carried the legisla-
tion, told me. “It makes no sense.”
The accident is a sensitive subject at Flight
For Life, where Patrick Mahany remains a
constant, if slightly controversial, presence.
There is a saying among pilots: “One ‘oh, shit’
in a helicopter wipes out a lifetime of ‘atta-
boys.’ ” Pilots tend to be a self-confident, even
macho lot, and some of Mahany’s former col-
leagues maintain that the fuel system never
would have been an issue if Mahany hadn’t
crashed in the first place. “I’d rather have the
power than a safe fuel tank,” especially at alti-
tude, said Bud Wheeler, who flew for 32 years
in the Army before joining Flights in 2013.
(He has since retired.) “Because that means
I’m less likely to crash when I get up there and
need the power.”
Others say that’s exactly the point: Even
stellar pilots crash, but no one deserves to
burn for their mistake.
REPSHER, now 48, likely would
have walked away from the crash if
not for the fire. He had one broken
rib and four minor fractures in his
back. Instead, when I met him in April, he was
preparing for his 51st major surgery, an aver-
age of one every three weeks since July 2015.
Inside, he was still “D-Rep,” the rugged
mountain man and lifesaving rescuer. Out-
side, he looked frail yet resolute.
He is two inches shorter now. His life
expectancy was reduced from 79 to 64. His
body still has not fully sealed three years after
the crash, with open wounds on his right
Achilles and left shin, where the fire burned
his f lesh down to the tibia. His left nostril is
deformed, his lips sag, and he can’t sit still for
very long before his skin tightens. He lost the
tips of his thumbs and three fingers, so tying
his shoes takes a while.
Still, throughout the grafting process,
Amanda refused to let the doctors take any
skin from his forehead—one of the only places
where he can still sweat. “They were like, ‘We
need every inch of Dave’s skin.’ And I said, ‘We
in the mirror and say that he can see himself.’”
During his recovery, Amanda kept a sticky
note above her computer that read, “You don’t
know how strong you are until you have to be
that strong,” a mantra that rang true for both
of them.
Repsher’s greatest gift to his profession
may come later, when he plans to visit con-
ferences and implore air-medical crews to
demand better helicopter safety. “Because the
only way it’s going to change,” he told me, “is
if crews start saying, ‘No, I’m not getting in
there until it’s safe.’ ” He doesn’t obsess about
his plight or dwell on his fate. “My approach is
that there’s only one way to go, and that’s full
steam ahead,” he said. He ice-skated again in
June and is able to hike, although he can’t be
exposed to the sun. Someday he hopes to ski
and bike and camp on sandy riverbanks like
before. After living in a one-bedroom apart-
ment near University Hospital for two years,
he and Amanda were f inally expecting to
return home to Silverthorne in July.
Repsher has spent months poring over his
lawyers’ discovery, an exercise that confirmed
how important it was to reject a confidential-
ity agreement. “The stuff we learned in depo-
sitions and from the experts, it’s horrifying,”
he said. “The industry is so renegade, and
there’s no oversight from anyone.”
Will he ever get in a helicopter again?
Maybe, he said. He misses f lying. He always
felt safer working in the air than he did on the
ground. But a lot has to change first. “If these
companies can’t afford safety features,” he
said, “then they shouldn’t be in business.” MJ
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THE PLAYBOOK FOR A LONGER , STRONGER LIFE

Cable Pulley Workout

Simba Squat

Fall Race Calendar

Karen McDougal’s 4 Moves

for Stronger Abs

The Cherry on Top

Health News

089
 WORKOUT OF THE MONTH

Cable Pulley Circuits

by ANDREW GUTMAN

Y CHRISTINA GUERRA FOR CELESTINE;PRODUCTION BY

BY ADIDAS; SHORTS BY LULULEMON; SHOES BY NIKE

High cable fly
(see page 92).

SEPTEMBER 2018 MEN’S JOURNAL photographs by IAN MADDOX

 THE WORKOUT

LOW SETTING

1
Stand with pulley on
right, and hold the D-
A handle with both hands
at right hip. Extend
arms out and rotate
Cable Twist torso left, driving arms
up until the handle is at
head level, then slowly
lower for 1 rep. Com-
plete reps on right side,
then switch to left.

2
One-arm Front
Shoulder Raise

3
A

Lateral Cable
Adduction

Stand with pulley on

right, holding on to the
station with right hand,
left hand on hip, and
left ankle strapped into
the wrap attachment,
cable extended behind
right leg. Bracing core,
kick out left leg to the
side until muscles in
hips and glutes con-
tract. Lower leg slowly
for 1 rep. Do all reps on
B left side, then switch
to right.

MEN’S JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 2018 091

 1
Single-arm
Cable Row
MEDIUM SETTING

2
Attach a D-handle
to both cable pulley
attachments. Grab
one in each hand and
walk out a few feet
Medium so there’s tension in
Cable Fly the cables. Keeping
elbows up and slightly
bent, fists parallel to
shoulders, press hands
around and forward to
meet each other, like
you’re hugging a tree.
Reverse for 1 rep.

3
E XPERT TIP

UPS AND
Overhead
Pallof Press
DOWNS
Stand 3 feet away from
the pulley, the machine
on your right, holding D-
handle with both hands
at chest level, knees soft
(A). Brace core and press
handle straight overhead
until arms are extended
(B), then lower slowly for
1 rep. Complete all reps, A B
then switch sides.

092 SEPTEMBER 2018 MEN’S JOURNAL

 HIGH SETTING

3
Kneel facing the pulley,
about a foot away, and
grab rope attachment
with both hands. Pull it
down so that your head
Cable Crunch is in the middle of the
rope (A). Keeping arms
locked, crunch stom-
ach down and inward
until abs contract (B).
Release for 1 rep.

1
Biceps Curl

2
Face Pull
B
Stand facing the
pulley and grab both
ends of a rope at- E XPERT TIP
tachment with palms
facing each other.
Squeeze shoulder
blades together and LIFT LOW, GO SLOW
row the rope toward
your face, leading the
pull with your elbows.
Hold the contraction
for 1 second. Reverse
for 1 rep.

MEN’S JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 2018 093

 MOVE OF THE MONTH

Simba Squat
Replace the risky back squat with a movement that’s just as
effective—and taxes even more muscles. by ANDREW GUTMAN

HOW TO DO IT

094
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 Autumn Rush
Here’s the cure for the end-of-summer blues: A race in a destination worth traveling for.
These are some of our favorite upcoming events for every skill level and sport,
including trail runs, biking, stair climbs, kayaking, and more. by MICHAEL CHARBONEAU

08.25
Pursuit Games
BLAINE, MINNESOTA
5K obstacle race

Set in the largest amateur-

sports complex in the world,
just outside Minneapolis,
the Pursuit Games go beyond the usual
strength tests. The 15 obstacles in-
clude soccer dribbling, passing basket-
balls, a sled push, and tire flips. Believe
it or not, you can get the whole thing
done in an hour.

09.01–02
Copper Harbor Trails Fest
COPPER HARBOR, MICHIGAN
Enduro, downhill, short XC, long XC

COURTESY OF PARK CITY 13.1. GPS, BIKE, AND KAYAK ICONS BY MAXIM KULIKOV FROM THE NOUN PROJECT
Head to the northern tip of
Michigan’s Upper Peninsula
to ride a pristine network of
singletrack trails overlooking Lake Su-
perior. The race offers some seriously
gnarly terrain, and the cross-country
events are a fan favorite for their mas-
sive combined start, in which all the
competitors ride through town before
getting into the dirt.

09.08
Night Sweats Trail
Marathon & 15K
SAUSALITO, CALIFORNIA
Marathon & 15K trail run

Grab a headlamp and em-

bark after sunset to the hilly
Marin Headlands, across the
Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.
Racers climb several big ascents (five
for the marathon, two for the 15K) in a
time limit of seven hours. If you need
extra motivation on the last push,

096 SEPTEMBER 2018 MEN’S JOURNAL

 there’s an excellent post-race barbe-
cue, just before the sun comes up.
09.09
New Balance
5th Avenue Mile
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
1-mile run
You may not have raced
a mile since elementary
school P.E., but that’s all
the more reason to sign up for this
epic sprint down one of New York’s
most iconic streets. There are heats
for pros, kiddos, and disabled athletes.
Need more convincing? You earn post-
race beers in less time than it takes to
listen to “Stairway to Heaven.”
09.15
Park City 13.1
PARK CITY, UTAH
Half-marathon
Leave the pavement behind
on Park City’s scenic Round
Valley Trails. If you’re look-
ing to get comfortable with off-road
distance running, this is a great race to
start. The climbs are short and sweet,
FROM TOP: COURTESY OF ANOTHER DAM RACE; COPPER HARBOR TRAILS FEST. SWIMMING GOGGLES ICON BY DANIL POLSHIN FROM THE NOUN PROJECT.
and there are four aid stations along
the way. Maybe you want to podium
this one; last year’s winner finished the
course in just 1 hour, 34 minutes.
09.16
Buzzards Bay
Sprint Triathlon
WESTPORT, MASSACHUSETTS
⅓-mile swim, 14-mile bike, 3.1-mile run
Soak up prime ocean views
along the Massachusetts
shore known as the Farm
Coast, 60 miles south of Boston. It’s
a fast course that attracts zippy ath-
RUNNING SHOES ICON BY DENIS SHUMAYLOV FROM THE NOUN PROJECT
letes. At the beach, racers take off in
four to five heats into Buzzards Bay, to
dolphin kick through crashing waves,
for a heart-pumping start to the open-
water swim.
09.16
Clark Fork
Adventure Challenge
PLAINS, MONTANA
8-mile run, 8-mile kayak race, 15-mile
mountain bike ride
Think of this adventure
course as the flannel-
wearing cousin of a regular
triathlon: You’ll run, paddle, and moun-
tain bike your way through spectacular
Montana wilderness, encountering
incredible views and plenty of rugged
terrain along the route. Prepare to haul
your own kayak to the starting line,
since the supply of local rentals sells
out faster than race bibs.
09.16
Liberty to Freedom Swim
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
2.2-mile swim
This iconic swim takes place
in New York Harbor, from
the Statue of Liberty to the
Freedom Tower. The short race forces
swimmers to grapple with a stiff cur-
rent and choppy waters as they charge
across the Hudson River.
09.22–23
Finger Lakes Open
Water Swim Festival
WATKINS GLEN, NEW YORK
10- 2-, 1-, and half-mile swims
It’s a weekend of racing on
Seneca Lake in upstate New
York, with a distance suited
for every swimmer. Bonus:
It’s an in-water start, so you’ll
avoid the dreaded mad dash
from the beach.
10.06
Chucktown
Showdown
CHARLESTON,
SOUTH CAROLINA
9- and 4-mile paddle races
In a demonstration
of southern hospi-
tality, the Chuck-
town Showdown is open to all
kinds of paddling craft, from
MEN’S JOURNAL
SUPs and prones to outrigger canoes
and surf-ski kayaks, each competing in
a separate heat. The challenging 9-mile
loop has views of Fort Sumpter and
the Ravenel Bridge, while the 4-mile
out-and-back tends to be flat and less
choppy.
10.20
Bisbee 1000, the Great
Stair Climb
BISBEE, ARIZONA
4.5-mile stair race
Put your quads to the test
on the old mule trails of
Bisbee, which date to the
town’s copper mining days. Level up
the 1,000-plus step challenge with
the Ironman Ice Competition—partici-
pants grab a pair of “antique tongs”
and race while hauling a 10-pound ice
block, a nod to the days when the trails
were used for delivering ice before
refrigeration.
11.03
Another Dam Race
PARKER DAM, CALIFORNIA
11.2-mile paddle race
Sign up as an individual, or in
2- or 4-person teams, grab
your craft, and cruise past
hills, cliffs, and cottonwoods on this
point-to-point race along the Colorado
River, with California on your left and
Arizona to the right. Don’t miss the
post-race feast and open jam that’s
BYOI (bring your own instrument).
SEPTEMBER 2018 097
Your Back:
A User’s 3

Guide
The back is a masterful piece of
engineering. Here’s what you
2
need to know to keep it working
properly. by SARA ANGLE
1

F YO U ’ V E never experi-
enced back pain, con-
I sider yourself very lucky.
Because it sucks. For
4

one, it impacts ever y

part of your day. Going
for a run, working at your job, lifting your
kid—even getting out of bed can be a has-
sle. Plus, it’s not something you’re able to
overcome by sheer willpower. “Back pain
is unique because it tends not to be some-
thing you can get used to,” says Stuart
M. McGill, author of Back Mechanic.
But luckily, there are a lot of ways
to treat injuries, and—better yet—get
out ahead of the problem by build-
ing a back that’s strong, f lexible,
and able to withstand all that
you ask it to do. We spoke with 5
experts to learn about the basic
architecture of the bones and
muscles, what to do when
s ome t h i n g g o e s w ron g,
separating the good advice
from the bad, and map-
ping out the kinds of body
movements that’ll make 6
you strong and f lexible
for the long haul. What
we’re saying is: We’ve
got your back.

SEPTEMBER 2018 MEN’S JOURNAL illustrations by BRYAN CHRISTIE

 1 2

BACK-SAVING STRATEGIES,
BACK TO ALL DAY LONG
Don’t wait for pain to strike. Here’s how to protect your back, 24/7.

BASICS
The spine is a flexible rod that has the crucial job of
AT THE OFFICE AT THE GYM AT HOME
supporting the entire body. Here are the most basic You’ve probably heard Inadequate strength and Start your day with some
structures. that sitting is the new flexibility in your core exercise—a serious
smoking, and it doesn’t and back is the number workout, shooting hoops,
do your back any favors, one reason for back pain, a 15-minute walk—to
either. The position puts Marcus says. Healthy wake up your joints, says
1 . VER TEBR AE stress on the lower back, muscle isn’t just strong; Rami Said, D.P.T., of the
The spine is made up of 33 individual bones that run from the base but you can mitigate it’s also relaxed. “Focus- Columbia University De-
of your skull down to the tailbone. They protect the nerves that pass the damage by get- ing on strength without partment of Neurological
through the spinal canal. Muscles and ligaments also attach to your ting up every 20 to 45 respecting flexibility is a Surgery. Then stretch if it
vertebrae, which helps your spine bear weight. minutes, and changing big mistake,” he says. It feels good. And when you
positions, says Jeffrey goes without saying that get home from work, it’s
2. DISKS Goldstein, chief of spine aiming for weightlifting OK to flop on the couch
Gel-filled disks connect each vertebra, acting as both glue and shock surgery education at NYU PRs to the detriment of and rewatch a few epi-
absorber. A slipped or herniated disk means that the inner part of the Langone. technique is an express sodes of Stranger Things,
disk comes through the outer part. This can cause nerve root compres- If you’re a desk track to injury. so long as you get up
sion, which may result in pain as well as loss of sensation, strength, and jockey, nab an ergonomic And employ smart and move about every 20
reflex, says Norman Marcus, director of muscle pain research at the chair, which optimizes back practices during minutes.
New York University School of Medicine. Herniated disks may be caused your posture and pro- cardio, too. When you’re Just as your back
by a singular event, like a bad fall, but often the injury accumulates vides lumbar support for on a machine, especially needs to stay active dur-
over many years, with something otherwise innocuous—swinging a lower back aches. Set an elliptical or stair ing the day, it also needs
golf club—being the final straw. the height so that the climber, resist the urge to move during the night,
keyboard is below your to lean over the front Marcus says. That’s
3. CERVICAL SPINE elbow-height, meaning handlebar. You’re robbing where your mattress
This contains the vertebrae that make up your neck. Muscle strains your arm bend is greater yourself of full cardio comes in. If it’s too soft,
are common, and they usually resolve themselves in a few weeks, says than 90 degrees. Position potential and putting un- you sink in and usually
Andrew Hecht, chief of spine surgery at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New the monitor just below necessary stress on your stay in one position. Opt
York City. It could be whiplash from a car accident, a funny sleeping eye level and use a phone spine. Instead, stay tall, for one that’s slightly
position, or cradling a phone receiver on your shoulder. Constantly headset instead of cra- with shoulders back and firm, which encourages
looking down at your smartphone for hours at a time isn’t great, either, dling the receiver against arms at your sides, which your body to adjust posi-
as it pulls the cervical spine around. Try to maintain a neutral neck as your ear. works your core, too. tions during the night.
much as possible, with your chin slightly down.

4. THOR ACIC SPINE

This segment of spine, right behind your rib cage, is the longest but
least injury-prone. If you feel an ache in this area, it’s probably that
your muscles are tired, possibly from a workout.

5. LUMBAR SPINE 3
How to Fix It
This is your lower back, an area where pain is common, since Americans
spend a lot of the day sitting, Marcus says. Other reasons include
poor biomechanics—basically the way you move and lift—as well as
posture. Chronic low back pain in older adults, however, could mean
arthritis—degenerative wear and tear. And back pain as well as leg pain
probably means you’ve got a disk bulge that’s pressing on a nerve.

6. COCCY X
Also known as the tailbone. Normally, people don’t have pain in this
part of their spine unless they experience a fall or sit on a hard surface
for a prolonged time.

MEN’S JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 2018 099


1 lifting safely and efficiently, McGill says.
2
4 relieve back pain.”
4 Worse, if you have an injury, it may cause
MUSCLE UP
The best way to protect your spine is to make sure all your back muscles are robust.
But the strength training doesn’t stop there.
The human body uses the same approach to fortifica-
tion as an engineer who’s building a tower in an earth-
quake zone does. It employs a sophisticated array of
muscles and tendons to bolster the spine and relieve
the stresses placed on it by everyday life. So protect-
ing your spine really means strengthening your back,
among them the largest muscle, the latissimus dorsi
(1); the obliques and other muscles along the lateral
SEPTEMBER 2018
5
3 ankles—so-called gravity boots—or on
line (2), as well as your glutes (3), which are involved
in posture and stride. It’s also important to incorpo-
rate stretches to hit tissues that get tight, such as the
iliac crest (4) and lower back (5). But remember, the
torso is a 360-degree machine, meaning your core is
just as important, especially as you age, McGill says.
Turn the page for an expert-endorsed back and core
strength and stretching routine.
MEN’S JOURNAL
5
WHAT’S YOUR
BACK IQ?
You’ve gotten a lot of back
advice. Not all of it’s sound.
“Lift with your legs.”
FICTION
People hear this and think that bend-
ing their knees and incorporating their
legs will save them from straining their
lumbar spine when they’re picking up,
say, a 50-pound bag of dog food. But
that’s not the right way to think about
Here’s the true back-saving cue: Lift with
your core. Brace your torso during the
entire lift, and particularly when you set
down the load. “Stay stiff, sip a little bit
of air, move your hips back, and lower
the weight with the same tautness and
preparation you used to lift it, then
stand again,” McGill says.
“Hanging inversions
FICTION
The idea is that hanging upside down
from a bar from cuffs attached to your
an inversion table that tilts you back
relieves nerve pressure in the spine by
creating more space between the
vertebrae. “Any relief from traction on
its own is hardly ever permanent,” McGill
says. In a study he conducted, laying on
an inversion table for 15 minutes helped
the spine decompress and expand
between one and five centimeters.
However, the effects were short-lived.
The spine returned to its preinversion
length after 20 minutes of walking.
more pain by making the spine unstable
or making a herniated disk worse. How-
ever, if you don’t have back issues and
like the head rush, it probably won’t
hurt if you do it a few minutes at a time.
“Go see a chiropractor.”
FACT
Chiropractors are trained at manipulat-
ing joints, and they understand the
foundations of body movement, Said
says. Most people are looking for a
spinal readjustment, which helps with
vertebrae alignment and joint move-
ments. The neck and spine cracking can
also offer relief from aches and pains.
Unfortunately the improvement tends to
be temporary, so you’ll need to go back
on the regular. In addition, you may con-
sider visiting a physical therapist, who
can give you at-home exercises.
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 Kettlebell Windmill
6. BEST BACK CIRCUIT
This 6-move circuit incorporates flexibility and strength
WHY IT WORKS This hybrid strength and stretch hits the lower back, lats, glutes,
and lateral hamstrings. Dynamically stretching and strengthening the muscula-
ture of the lateral line lets you release tension in the lower back.
exercises to help ensure your back muscles are strong and HOW TO DO IT Stand with feet hip-width apart, toes pointed 45 degrees to the left,
kettlebell in right hand. Press the kettlebell overhead, resting it on your forearm,
supple, says Eric Leija, senior kettlebell coach with Onnit
biceps by ear (A). Keeping kettlebell overhead and spine straight, hinge into left hip
Academy in Austin, Texas. Do 6 to 10 reps of each move and reach left arm along inside of left leg until fingertips touch foot (B). Squeeze
using a 12-kg (26-lb) kettlebell, and do the whole circuit core and glutes to return to start. That’s 1 rep. Do 6 reps. Switch sides; repeat.
3 times. If your form falters, skip that move or drop down in
weight. Do this workout twice a week. Note: This workout’s
for prevention, not if you’re already injured.
A B
A

STYLING BY KEVIN BREEN; GROOMING BY ASIA GEIGER FOR ART DEPARTMENT. TOP BY LULULEMON; SHORTS BY LACOSTE SPORT; SHOES BY NIKE.
B
Mountain Climber Reach
WHY IT WORKS It helps mobility in the thoracic spine and hips to help you move
better and access full range of motion.
HOW TO DO IT Start in a high plank. Step right foot to outside right hand. Touch
right fingertips to ear and reach right elbow to the ceiling, twisting your torso and
opening your chest until it’s perpendicular to floor. Reverse the movement. That’s
1 rep. Alternate sides as you go.

Scorpion Reach
WHY IT WORKS Having tight hip flexors, lats, or hamstrings can all increase the
amount of tension in the tissues surrounding the lower back. This move opens up
the hips, netting you a full-body stretch.
HOW TO DO IT Start in a high plank. Maintaining a slight bend in left leg, bring
right knee to left elbow (A). Lift and bend right leg, press through shoulders, tuck
chin, rotate torso counterclockwise, and swing right leg behind you (B). Reverse
the motion and return to plank for one rep. Do all reps on right, then switch sides.

SEPTEMBER 2018 MEN’S JOURNAL photographs by JUSTIN STEELE

 Crab Reach
WHY IT WORKS This active stretch is great for mobilizing the thoracic spine
while lengthening the hip flexors and abdominal muscles, all while engaging the
posterior chain.
HOW TO DO IT Sit on floor, legs bent, hands on floor, wrists facing heels (A). Lift
hips off ground to start, then press up into tabletop, while rotating torso until
right shoulder is stacked on left. Squeeze glutes to keep hips from rotating (B).
Reverse the movement for 1 rep. Alternate sides with each rep.

Chest-loaded Good Morning

WHY IT WORKS This cues the body to engage the core and maintain a neutral
spine while hip hinging, which is useful for weightlifting but also for picking stuff
up off the floor. Adding a weight means it hits all the major core musculature,
like the pelvic floor muscles, transversus, rectus abdominis, and internal and
external obliques, plus the hamstrings, glutes, and lats. Do a couple of these
unweighted to wake up your hips, then add the kettlebell.
HOW TO DO IT Start standing with feet hip-width apart, holding a kettlebell
B
against your sternum. Maintaining a tall, neutral spine, shoulders back, and soft
knees, hinge at the hips, keeping shoulders above hips. Reverse the movement
by activating hamstrings and thrusting hips forward, fully extending the hips and
squeezing your glutes to end the rep. Do 8 to 12 reps.

E XPERT TIP

On a Roll

Needle Arm Thread

WHY IT WORKS You’ll open up the thoracic spine with this deep rotation,
stretching out the lats and releasing tension in the low back.
HOW TO DO IT Start on hands and knees, knees wider than shoulder-width apart
and hands in front of shoulders. Draw right elbow up straight up towards ceiling
as you inhale, then reach right arm under left elbow, stacking shoulders. Exhale
and twist deeper into the stretch. Return to hands and knees. That’s 1 rep.
Alternate sides, doing 5 reps on each side.

MEN’S JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 2018

 4 Moves for Stronger Abs
Sure, you could do 200 crunches a day. But fitness model Karen McDougal shares her go-to core moves that hit
other muscles as well. Add these to the end of your workout a few times a week.

1
Top Banana

WORKS: TRICEPS, CORE, GLUTES

Lie on your back, legs and arms ex-
tended and shoulders lifted to start
(A). Drop feet to floor and bend knees
to 90 degrees; meanwhile, place
palms on the floor, fingers pointed to
heels, and press hips up to a tabletop
position (B). Drop to back and return
to start. Do 3 sets of 20 reps, fast.
B
 A

3
Pushup with
Cross Reach

WORKS: SHOULDERS, CORE

B
Start in a high plank. Do a pushup (A),
then at the top, press hips up and
back into downward dog. Reach left
hand to right foot (B), replace left
hand; reach right hand to left foot,
replace right hand; and return to a
high plank. Do 2 sets of 12 pushups
and touches per side.

WORKS: CORE, HIPS

B
Start in a side plank, right forearm on
ground, feet stacked, hips high, left
elbow pointing to ceiling and left hand
against left ear (A). Twist torso toward
ground, left elbow touching right hand
(B), and reverse to start. Do 2 sets of
20 reps per side.

MEN’S JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 2018 105

 Cherries on Top
These smallest of stone fruit have some impressive nutritional bona fides.
And right now they’re ripe for the picking.
by SARA ANGLE

W E ’ V E A L W AY S B E E N s we e t tart cherry juice before weightlifting can help to remove the pits, then chop and toss with
on cherr ies—even before we prevent muscle damage. And research from quinoa or salads. Frozen, pitted cherries are
learned about their stellar health Northumbria University in the U.K. suggests just as healthful, so include them in smooth-
SAM KAPLAN/TRUNKARCHIVE.COM

prof ile. “Cherries are f ull of
inf lammation-reducing antioxidants, fiber,
and vitamin C,” says Eliza Savage, a nutri-
tionist in New York City.
While all varieties are good, tart cherries
stand out. A British Journal of Sports Medi-
cine study found that drinking 12 ounces of
marathoners who juice before and after 26.2
miles recover faster. Experts credit the phyto-
chemical anthocyanin—which gives the fruit
its rich color—with decreasing inflammation
and cell damage, as well as helping the heart.
Cherry season is short, so if you see some,
get some. Press a straw through the centers
ies or fruit compotes. Look for unsweetened
tart cherry juice—which often comes concen-
trated—and cut with water or mix with selt-
zer and a splash of lime. Steer clear of dried
cherries, as those tend to contain added sugar.
And sorry, that maraschino in your Manhat-
tan doesn’t really cut it. Q

106 SEPTEMBER 2018 MEN’S JOURNAL

 H E N EWS HAS never been
busier than it is these days.
T No matter how you feel
about our current adminis-
tration, everyone can agree
it has been untraditional,
chaotic, and dramatic. There are times I go
on the air without knowing what I’m about to
report, so it’s important to be able to focus—to
take in new information and respond on the
fly. I need to be healthy to make that happen.
I put a lot of work into keeping my head right.

Pose for the Camera

Yoga is one of my favorite ways to stay in
shape. It can change your mood more than
any other activity. Even if you’re not feeling it
at the beginning of class, by the end you know
you’ve done yourself a favor. I love the way
yoga instructors speak. They’ll say, “There
is no such thing as competition” or “You can
only measure against your own practice.”
They sound like lame Instagram quotes, but
it is actually helpful for me to hear.

Running Time
I grew up in Seattle, where there were incredi-
ble trails. I did a lot of hiking, mountaineering,
and running. These days, I run between three
and five evenings a week around my neighbor-
hood in Brooklyn, always with music. I lose
track of time easier and run farther if I have
the right album on. My playlist is rap and trap
songs. I imagine most people who watch me
report on the Supreme Court don’t immedi-
ately think “trap music,” but I’ve loved hip-hop
ever since I was a teen. I have been listening
to the new albums by J. Cole, Pusha-T, and
Kanye West. I study Jay-Z’s lyrics and bring
him up on my show.

Media Consumption
I take carbs very seriously. And by that I mean
I will often have a cinnamon roll from Au Bon
Pain before the show. It gives me that perfect
little kick I need. Sometimes I will have choco-
late right before we go on. A producer came up
to me once and saw that I was eating a choco-
late bar. He was like, “Are you really eating that
right now?” What can I say? It works for me.

Work-Life Balance
The rapper Kevin Gates has the anthem
“2 Phones,” where he says he has “one for
the plug and one for the load.” While I don’t

Action News
encourage people to have a separate phone
for contraband, I also have two phones: one
COURTESY OF MSNBC/NATHAN CONGLETON

for work and the other for real life, reserved

How does Ari Melber, host of The Beat, on MSNBC, find the energy to
chase down stories in a 24-hour news cycle? Long runs,
rap music, yoga classes, and a surprising number of pastries.
for friends and family—and no social media.
I try to have a total news holiday from Friday
night to Monday morning. I think it’s impor-
tant to decide what is worth our energy and
whether we need to be totally available, even
after clocking in 52 hours a week. I personally
enjoy spending my weekends tweeting less
and living more. —As told to Charles Thorpe

108 SEPTEMBER 2018 MEN’S JOURNAL

Q

109
 Health News
The month’s most important discoveries, updates, and advice.

Less
Lifting,
More
Muscles
Ever feel like your lifting routine
has too much downtime? It
does. A study from the American
Council on Exercise finds that a
20-minute high-intensity
interval-style strength workout
done three times a week builds
the same amount of muscle as a
slower, 45-minute session. If
you do multi-joint exercises,
which work several muscle
groups at once (like chest
presses and leg extensions)
you’ll see gains after three
weeks, says Cedric X. Bryant,
chief science officer at ACE.
That’s significant, since three
weeks out is often when
exercisers get discouraged and
quit a new routine. To judge
strength improvements,
researchers tracked partici-
pants’ one- and five-rep max for
eight exercises—something you
can do outside the lab. How do
you know when you’ve sur-
passed your one-rep max? If you
can do two reps at that weight in
two consecutive workouts, add
additional weight plates.
FROM TOP: PAUL KLINE/GETTY IMAGES; ALEX FARNUM/AUGUST

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON FRIENDS

Doing things with friends is more than just a good time. The Ohio State University
research finds that living with a group of people rather than solo might help with intel-
lectual growth and memory, especially as you age. “Getting along with a whole group
is a challenge that requires the mind to adapt and quickly learn new information in
order to survive,” says Elizabeth Kirby, a behavioral neuroscientist. The animal study
measured growth in the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for remem-
bering everyday details, like directions and where you left your wallet. “Social
interaction stimulates this area, so it makes sense the more people you socialize with,
the greater the benefits,” Kirby says. Not looking for roommates? Regular group
activities, like boot camp, book clubs, and running teams, can have similar effects.

110 SEPTEMBER 2018 MEN’S JOURNAL

 THE UNITED STATES OF FITNESS

A
In some places, keeping up with the Joneses is about who has the most tri bikes
and marathon medals. A survey from the American College of Sports Medicine
reveals how big cities across the U.S. rank in terms of fitness. After evaluating
33 health categories—such as access to gyms and doctors, rate of chronic diseases

DR . and smoking, and availability of bike and running paths—Arlington, Virginia, leads
the pack. Here are the top 10:

BER 1. Arlington, VA
2. Minneapolis, MN
6
5
2 8

3. Washington, D.C. 10
4
4. Madison, WI
5. Portland, OR 3
7
9
6. Seattle, WA 1
7. Denver, CO
8. St. Paul, MN
All those vitamin face serums 9. San Jose, CA
people use—do they work? 10. Boise, ID

THE KEY TO
RECOVERY IN
YOUR FRIDGE
If you pop ibuprofen for post-workout
soreness several times a week, there may
be a better way. Research from Augusta
University in Georgia shows that baking
soda may reverse dangerous inflammation
in the body linked to diseases like
rheumatoid arthritis, and could ease
muscular inflammation, too. In the study,
drinking baking soda stirred into water
Another reason to
raised the body’s pH to higher alkaline
dine Mediterranean-
levels, reducing inflammation. More
style: It may
research is needed, says study co-author
counteract harmful
Paul O’Connor, but since baking soda is
effects of air pollution. Re-
reasonably innocuous, try mixing ¼ tsp of
searchers at New York University
the kitchen staple into eight ounces of
School of Medicine analyzed two
water—and save the pills for when you’re
decades of data from 500,000
feeling really achy.
people and found those whose
diets are heavy on produce, fish,
and olive oil, while low in sugar
and saturated fat, register the

24%
least amount of long-term heart
damage due to dirty air. Pollution
causes oxidative stress and
inflammation, while antioxidants
in fruits, vegetables, nuts, and
FROM TOP: JENS MORTENSEN/GALLERY STOCK; GETTY IMAGES

fish help nullify it. And people

The drop in restorative sleep quality after just two who ate the most fruits and
shots of alcohol. A Finnish study, which used heart-rate vegetables showed an even
variability to determine restfulness, found that even lower mortality risk. So however
one drink can lower sleep quality by nearly 10 percent. big your Greek salad is, double it.

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MEN’S JOURNAL SEPTEMBER 2018 111

 Rob Lowe
The star of Lifetime’s remake of horror classic
The Bad Seed on bringing up boys, the virtues of
partying too hard, and the key to handling regret.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

I’ve been sober for 28 years, and a common
tenet of recovery is: “Never compare your
insides to someone else’s outsides.” You
never know what challenges someone else
may be dealing with. It’s always good to
remember that, because inevitably you look
at other people and think, “Well, gosh. If
they’re doing so well, why can’t I?”

What motivated you as a kid?

I always felt different. I was an 8-year-old
kid who knew 100 percent that I wanted to
be an actor or filmmaker. That unrelent-
ing drive at 8 years old was, I can imagine,
very hard for a lot of people to wrap their
head around.

How should a man handle getting older?

You go to 50 and stop counting. I mean,
women have been doing that forever—why
can’t men?

You’ve been married for almost 30 years.

What’s the secret to a successful marriage?
It’s exactly the same answer for the secret
to a successful movie: casting.

What is the one thing every man should

understand about women?
Above all else, they want to be heard.
What do you think every father should know
about raising boys?
Honestly, the number one thing is to keep
them healthy, alive, and not too dinged up
by impetuous and poor choices. They’re
boys, so you’ve got to let them screw up,
but you want to put the rails up on the
bowling lanes so they don’t ruin their lives
in the process.
You’ve raised two boys. What is the toughest
challenge you’ve faced as a father?
Navigating the temptation to be their
am in my life is I give no fucks anymore. I’m
not auditioning on any level, for anyone,
anywhere. There’s nothing more cringy
than a grown man worrying about what
others think.
Who is the biggest influence on your life?
It has to be my wife. We’ve known each
other for well over 30 years, and the num-
ber of times where she has helped me make
better decisions than I would’ve made on
my own is innumerable.
What advice would you choose to give to your
younger self?
So, basically, “party harder”?
Party harder, but you better know when the
party’s over.
What role should vanity play in a man’s life?
I certainly don’t think it’s anything to
be ashamed of. I think everybody has a
natural, God-given inclination to be the
best version of themselves. And I think to
deny that is to deny part of our essence.
Some of my heroes are among the most
vain people walking the planet. False mod-
esty is way worse.
How should a man handle regret?
PEGGY SIROTA/TRUNKARCHIVE.COM

friend as opposed to their father. You need
dad and mom to be dad and mom.
How should a man handle criticism?
I think you want to get to a place where you
actually enjoy a good criticism because it
gives you something to build on. But one
of my favorite things about being where I
I probably spent a little too much time
having fun when I could’ve dug in more
to building my career. But at the end of the
day, if I wasn’t out having fun and being a
lunatic, and gobbling up every single thing
that life put in front of me, I wouldn’t be
who I am today. And I wouldn’t have mate-
rial for my one-man show.
My biggest fear is that I will end up with a
life of regrets. And I think the way to avoid
that is to take advantage of every oppor-
tunity offered to you. And try to live an
authentic life, try to live according to some
sort of a code. If you can do that, you’re
going to be good to go.
—INTERVIEW BY LARRY KANTER

112 SEPTEMBER 2018 MEN’S JOURNAL