From GQ

  • I Emptied My Retirement Account to Buy Basketball Cards. It Was Thrilling. It Nearly Ruined My Life

    Card collectors refer to an unopened sealed box or pack of cards as “wax.” For many collectors, myself included, much of the thrill of the hobby is in opening wax, in the statistically improbable opportunity of finding a card worth more than the pack it’s in. I dwell in possibility, wrote Emily Dickinson. When I buy wax I’m not paying for the cards, I’m paying for the fantasy of what might be inside the pack. In this way the obsession (even now I’m consciously avoiding using the word...

  • Rolling With Travis Scott, a Big Man on Many Campuses

    Travis Scott has stopped answering the first question of this interview to sign a sneaker that’s been shoved through the rear passenger window of his Range Rover. Dozens of USC students have piled around the car, hoping to catch even a glimpse of one of the biggest stars their generation has seen. The lucky ones get close enough to push phones, sneakers, or hands through the cracked window, angling for a photo, an autograph, or a quick fist-bump. Scott obliges as he’s able, and the car’s driver...

  • Shogun's Lord Yabushige, Tadanobu Asano, Talks About the Emotional Series Finale

    This story contains major spoilers for the series finale of Shogun. Lord Kashigi Yabushige (Tadanobu Asano) has always had a unique relationship with death. At the start of FX’s Shogun, the Japanese warlord orders one of the Englishmen who sailed with John Blackthorne (Cosmo Jarvis) to be boiled alive so he can glean insight from the man’s screaming and suffering. Later, during a rescue mission to save a Spanish pilot, he nearly commits suicide for the shame of almost drowning. Throughout the...

  • Nick Offerman Addresses a Divided Nation

    Recently, I fell in love with Nick Offerman’s scotch. The raw product, a Scotch whisky with a distinctly American bourbon presence, aged 11 years in oak red-wine casks that have been shaved down and charred, is certainly drinkable—but the pro move is pouring two fingers into a rocks glass, then adding a splash of filtered room-temperature water. This draws out the perfume, the floral romance, the latent sweetness lying beneath its unctuous, musky angularity. I open with this because the taste of...

  • Donald Glover Claims He’s “GQ Best Dressed” on Upcoming Ye Track

    In the recent throes of this year’s biggest rap beef, the internet started pitting rappers against each other. The ammo? Their GQ photoshoots from the 2010s. On X, fans started unearthing photos from dated fashion spreads of yore, and no rap legend was safe: Kendrick Lamar in 2013, air drumming in a skinny suit. Drake in 2010, disparaging the collar gap. Donald Glover in 2011, traipsing around UCLA’s campus dressed like a nerdy-hot freshman in a CW teen drama. Now, Glover—or, at least, his rap...

  • What Do Tom Brady, Jay-Z, and Timothée Chalamet Have in Common? This Rare Cartier Watch

    Given his extensive collection of some of the world’s finest watches, it was only a matter of time before we spotted Tom Brady in a Cartier Crash. Effortlessly cool, outrageously valuable, and rarer than a biblical artifact from an Indiana Jones screenplay, the Crash is the It watch of 2024—and arguably 2023 and 2022, while we’re at it. And while some of Brady’s watches may be more objectively special given their configurations and limited availability, none has quite the cachet of this most...

  • A Night With the Undisputed Champ of Bare-Knuckle Boxing

    Bobby Gunn is pacing the concrete floor of an auto-body shop somewhere in the industrial badlands of a large northeastern city. “I’m worried,” he says, wringing his mallet-size hands. “I’ve heard this guy today is a head-butter.” More pacing, more hand-wringing, as Gunn sinks deeper into a momentary funk amid the garage’s taxidermy heads and faded American flags. Today’s opponent, a former marine, has a reputation for dropping his head during matches—an old trick among gloveless fighters who can...

  • Can't Decide What to Wear? Just Follow Jeremy Allen White's Easy, Breezy Lead

    Jeremy Allen White should be in the middle of your menswear moodboard right now. Yes, because he plays a hot chef on TV's hottest show, and yes, because he bared almost all in the year's hottest Calvin Klein campaign. But also because every guy on the planet can pull off his latest fit and fly with it. Spotted on the streets of Los Angeles (not at a farmer's market this time), White had this whole baggy fit thing on lock. Up top, he wore a white cotton shirt with the top two buttons undone and...

  • Randy Johnson Steps Behind the Camera

    Picture Randy Johnson. What do you see? The mullet, the mustache, the electric arm. A snarling oak tree planted atop a mound. Lefthanded batters would sooner take the day off than risk a 100-mph gust of wind behind the ear. Even righties never dug in too deep. He was an icon at the last moment baseball players could be icons. But here comes Randy Johnson, 15 minutes early, striding towards the double doors of the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts. He wears a short-sleeved button down,...

  • Will Deadpool 3 Save the MCU?

    Deadpool 3—officially titled Deadpool & Wolverine—is coming this year. And there's a ball-busting (no, literally) trailer to prove it. The last instalment, in which Ryan Reynolds' titular “merc with a mouth” squared off with Josh Brolin's Cable, arrived almost six years ago. To up the stakes this time, Reynolds has enlisted the help of his longtime frenemy Hugh Jackman, whose blade-fisted superhero has been canonically dead since 2017's Logan. A lot has changed in the intervening years: Deadpool...

  • Fallout's Creators Discuss Their (Big) Plans For Season 2, and Break Down That Finale

    The following article contains major spoilers for season one of Fallout. At 9.30 a.m. Los Angeles time, the day after Fallout has been renewed for a second season by Prime Video, co-showrunners Graham Wagner and Geneva Robertson-Dworet log on to Zoom to chat through the finale with GQ. They're obviously pumped about the renewal, signed and confirmed at this point as of something like 18 hours ago. But it's the zeitgeistiest video game adaptation this side of The Last of Us, and one of the most...

  • The Real-Life Diet of Orlando Bloom, Who Purged Himself With Frog Poison

    In his new Peacock series Orlando Bloom: To the Edge, the actor Orlando Bloom scales a 400-foot crag, freedives 100 feet on one breath, and jumps out of a plane at 13,000 feet to try wingsuiting for the first time. His wellness practices, as he tells GQ, have involved a similar amount of gutsiness: getting dosed with frog poison, embarking on a fast that involves eating bentonite clay. More than 20 years after Bloom was first introduced to audiences worldwide as the platinum blond elf Legolas in...