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AND

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An Action Plan For 2020

HOW TO

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BIG FITS FOR THE GYM RELEARN THE ANCIENT ART OF RUNNING

Climb Like Alex Honnold Eat Like Jean‑ Georges Globe‑Trot Like Diplo

y r r La id v a D COMEDY LEGEND, ST YLE GOD & SELF-ACTUALIZATION WIZARD

CONTENTS

GQ February The Fix

Behind the Scenes With the People Who Make GQ

Fashion Drops. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 RYAN G ARCIA ,

Boxing’s Instagram Champ. . . . . . . 14

Contributor

Hall of Fame: Celebrities Working Out.............. 24 on the Philippe Dufour Simplicity Watch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 W E S L AN G

Level Up: The Radical Wellness of AL EX O L S ON ... . ...... .. .. .. . .. . . .. .. . . . . . . .. ... . .. .. .. 28 Labels We Love: DIS TRICT VISION ................... 32 on Running Your Way Into Better Shape.............................................. 34

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Features

GABRIELLA PAIELLA Staff writer While profiling the high-flying DJ known as Diplo, Gabriella Paiella had one big fear: falling asleep at the club, only to be left behind by Diplo’s posse. Thanks to her first 5-hour Energy in 10 years, she was able to avoid that cruel fate. Afterward, she says, “it took a couple of days to recover, but then I was ready to return to the Diplo lifestyle.”

Office Grails

Cover Story: L A RRY DAVID . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 ←

Up All Night With DIPLO ................................ 50 How We Eat Now. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 At the Climbing Gym With AL EX H ONNOL D . . . . . . . 66 This Season’s Most Lavish Weekend Wear. . . . . . . . 74 The Bittersweet Bounty of Greenland’s First Spring................................................ 78

← CORINNE FERMAN

designer

Desert Sessions..................... 84

On the Cover Photograph by Jason Nocito. Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu. Shirt by Salvatore Ferragamo. T-shirt by Cotton Citizen. Pants by James Perse. Shoes by Ecco. Glasses by Oliver Peoples. All his own. Grooming by Johnny Hernandez using Dior Backstage Face & Body Foundation. Tailoring by Yelena Travkina. Produced by Connect the Dots.

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J OSH HO MME’ S

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CONTENTS

STYLIST: MOBOLAJI DAWODU

GQ February

For our cover story on comedy king Larry David, see page 40. Jacket by Armani. Shirt by Theory. T-shirt by Cotton Citizen. Pants by Ralph Lauren. Shoes by Ecco. Glasses by Oliver Peoples. All his own.

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THE REAL ACTION IS OFF THE FIELD. WAT C H AT

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GROOMING: GEORGE KYRIAKOS AT HONEY ARTISTS

ADVANTAGE SAINT LAURENT The French fashion house collaborated with Wilson on a racket befitting the world’s most elegant sport ($770).

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THE BIKE OF THE FUTURE The ST3 bicycle by Stromer looks like a sleek but standard two-wheeler—till you hop on and its pedal-assist technology hurtles you toward work at 28 mph ($7,499).

MULTIUSE LAYERING JACKET Aether’s trim, lightly insulated jacket is also sneakily water- and wind-resistant ($395).

PYER MOSS REMIXES REEBOK When is a pair of track pants more than just a pair of track pants? Kerby Jean-Raymond of Pyer Moss is now artistic director of Reebok; he plans to use the platform to incubate young talent ($90).

A DIVER YOU CAN DIVE WITH Very few fancy watches making water-resistant claims can actually be taken diving. Omega’s flagship Seamaster Diver 300M is one of them ($8,100).

RECOVERY IN A JAR Treat yourself postworkout (or post-work) with these CBD bath salts by Lord Jones, the La Mer of cannabis beauty ($65).

SUMMIT SHADES These bug-eyed Oakley frames are built for epic excursions, whether that’s to the summit of K2 or to your local bodega ($196).

A CORK YOGA MAT Grippy, eco-friendly, and antimicrobial, 42 Birds’ all-cork yoga mats are like a down payment on your mindfulness ($110).

PHIPPS’S ECO OUTDOOR GEAR Designer Spencer Phipps dug deep into the archive of the French alpinist brand Millet for fabrics to upcycle for this collaboration ($110).

FAST HIKERS These Hoka One One hiking sneakers are the peak of “ugly” fashion, thanks to their massively cushioned lightweight soles ($160).

THE WHOOP WORKOUT PLAN Now that you have a list of New Year’s resolutions, strap on a Whoop— which monitors your sleep and measures workout recovery—to stay on track ($30 per month).

FASHION SOCKS PART I Prada has revived the spirit of the sporty ’90s with its relaunched Linea Rossa line ($210).

A BRILLIANT BAG For his Moncler Genius collab, Alyx’s Matthew Williams lent his signature rollercoaster buckles to this tactical tote bag ($940).

ITALIAN HIKING BOOTS Fashion’s favorite hiking boots are made by Roa,

OUTERWEAR THE A-COLD-WALL* WAY The future of streetwear looks like Samuel Ross’s A-Cold-Wall*, where advanced silhouettes meet functional details ($2,800). A SMARTER JUMP ROPE Smart home, smart mirror…add a Tangram Smart Rope to optimize your life, Rocky-style ($80).

BEATS BUDS You probably can’t work out like LeBron, but Beats’ gym-ready wireless earbuds will help you pump yourself up like the King himself ($250).

FASHION SOCKS PART II The name Thom Browne is synonymous with shrunken tailoring, but the designer’s long fascination with athletic American prep puts sportswear firmly in his wheelhouse ($98).

MAXIMAL SNEAKERS The Japanese outdoorstyle gurus at White Mountaineering put a futuristic spin on an Adidas classic ($220).

PREMIUM SWEATSUIT The ultimate après-ski sweatsuit involves a little brand called The Row and a bundle of grade-A cashmere (hoodie and pants, $1,490 each).

CRUNCHY RUNNING CAP KAVU’s nylon-andmesh-brimmed cap is the pinnacle in stylish running headwear ($30).

A SMARTER BOTTLE The Larq has a UV-C LED light in the cap, which purifies water and eliminates that dank smell all your other reusable bottles have ($95).

ADVANCED COMPRESSION Fashion phenom Kiko Kostadinov’s partnership with Asics produces sneaker hit after sneaker hit— but you can’t sleep on the sportswear, which Kostadinov designs in tandem with his highconcept clothing line (price upon request).

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Undefeated boxing phenom Ryan Garcia has 19 wins, 16 knockouts, zero losses—and 4 million Instagram followers. Some say he’s the next great thing; others say he’s all hype. Now it’s on the young lightweight to show the world which one is true. By KEVIN LINCOLN

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The Instagram Champ

second nature now.” And when it started happening for him—when the videos went viral and the hundreds of thousands of eyes started watching this teenage prospect who was still proving himself—the decision was easy: You don’t hide from this kind of thing anymore. You embrace it. “It was crazy,” he says. “I believed it was happening, but I didn’t at the same time. I was like, Oh, wow, this is happening to me. But then, I knew it was an opportunity, and I wasn’t going to let it slip.” About his rise to fame, Garcia says, “It was hard, looking at the comments, reading what people had to say: doubters, people saying that I’m not a real ﬁghter, that I was simply a social media kid. It was hard, because I was never that. I’ve only boxed my whole life. To see that, I was kind of hurt, but I knew I would have a chance to get my respect, and I’m slowly doing that now.” The questions follow him today, which is why every bout matters and why, here at Canelo’s gym in San Diego, ahead of the biggest ﬁght of Garcia’s life—against Duno in Las Vegas, on a Canelo undercard—it’s kind of a shock that Garcia seems so loose, so relaxed, so ready to dance. “Whenever you get nervous about anything,” Garcia says, “start dancing. You’ll feel better.”

got a surprise shot at Duno last September. At the time, Garcia had been scheduled to fight Avery Sparrow, but a day before the bout, at weigh-ins, Sparrow was nowhere to be seen. “Somebody call him,” Garcia said at the time. Turns out, Sparrow had been arrested some 24 hours before the bell. The GarciaSparrow fight was canceled, but Golden Boy Promotions, the management company arranging the bout, attempted to salvage the event by replacing Sparrow with Duno, who was in the same weight class and ready to fight that weekend. Garcia’s team bristled, having trained specifically for Sparrow. Words were exchanged, with Golden Boy president Eric Gomez claiming in a tweet that Team Garcia said Duno was “a tough opponent to take on 24 hour notice without proper preparation” and Garcia punching back. “We never said no,” Garcia said at the time. “We said, ‘Let’s talk numbers.’ ” Meanwhile, Duno donned a shirt that bore the message “Stop Running.” The relationship between Garcia and Golden Boy, which dates back to late 2016, seemed at a breaking point—but only days later, the Duno GARCIA VERY NEARLY

in San Diego, Ryan Garcia is dancing. The 21-year-old phenom has been training here for six months now, preparing in an anonymous industrial park to face Romero Duno. The gym belongs to the Mexican ﬁghter Saul “Canelo” Alvarez; posters of Canelo cover the walls, and occasionally the familiar sight of Muhammad Ali’s cocky grin appears among them. Canelo is the three-time world champion, boxing’s biggest star—Garcia calls him “the head honcho, my guy”—so the message is clear: In the eyes of Canelo, at least, Garcia is next. But is he? Part of the excitement of watching Garcia right now is the tension that surrounds him. Yes, his 19-0 record and 16 knockouts are promising, but then there’s the other, somehow more remarkable stat: 4 million. That’s the number of followers he has on Instagram, bringing with it the pluses and minuses of modern fame—is he a social media N

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star or a boxing star? Can he be both? Plenty of critics have used his online persona to cast doubt on his talent: He’s a pretty boy. He’s an Instagram boxer. Forget that he’s been in the ring since he was seven years old, forget the 215-15 amateur record, and deﬁnitely forget those professional knockouts. They say he hasn’t fought a worthy opponent, that he’s still unproven. Either way, with movie-star looks and cultural cachet that extends beyond the ring, Garcia is already the rare modern boxer who has become a star outside of the sport—and not just with ﬁght fans. The comments on his Instagram posts are endless streams of heart eyes and kitten emojis. And in a sport hungry for the kind of characters who have skyrocketed the UFC to its current heights, he’s a crossover star. “I think it’s just part of my generation,” Garcia says of his digital life. “It would be weird if I didn’t do social media, because it’s been part of the life when you’re growing up. It’s just

o p e n i n g pa g e

Tank top (throughout), $695, by DSquared2. Sweatpants, $146, by Les Tien. Shoes, $335, by Kenzo. Socks (throughout), $20, by Tabio. Necklace (throughout), stylist’s own. Bracelet (throughout), $2,200, by David Yurman. t h i s pa g e

Jacket, $920, by Hermès.

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Jacket, $2,480, and shoes (price upon request) by Prada. Shorts, $145, from Stock Vintage.

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fight was set for November and a new deal had been struck. Garcia describes the verbal sparring as a “miscommunication.” When—after all the anticipation— Garcia and Duno finally met, the fight ended in a flash. Garcia obliterated Duno 98 seconds into the first round, laying quiet the speculation that resulted from the bizarre circumstances leading up to the fight. In the eyes of his toughest critics and boxing’s die-hard fans, the knockout inched Garcia closer to proving himself as the real thing. the Duno fight, I meet Garcia and his parents in the lobby of the Westin Bonaventure, a sprawling brutalist structure that looks like it belongs more in a former Soviet republic than in downtown Los Angeles. The night before, Garcia served as a commentator at the second bout between the YouTube stars KSI and Logan Paul, which aired on DAZN. Days before the fight, Justin Bieber posted on Instagram in support of Paul. “It was a social media influencer [event],” says Garcia’s mother, Lisa, who serves as both the director of his corporation and his personal administrative assistant. “A lot of social media influencers were there, and anytime a popular influencer stood up, the whole crowd would try to run down the aisle at them.” While that might sound like an internet sideshow, a weird by-product of the same phenomenon that’s given us millionaire video gamers and TikTok stars, the event highlights how the social media generation is helping to boost boxing, a sport that, more than others, has risen and fallen with the whims of the culture. Garcia says boxing “is at an all-time high, because the fighter can promote the fight himself,” but for his part, he would rather be in the ring than in the commentator’s booth. “Everybody said I did a great job, but I hated every second of it,” Garcia says, laughing. He’s wearing a patterned silk shirt unbuttoned to his navel, eating sausage and a grapefruit; Lisa and his father, Henry, who now serves as his assistant trainer after Canelo’s coach, Eddie Reynoso, took over, sit next to us. The ring is where Garcia feels comfortable, where the noise of social media and the hype die down—where, finally, he has control. “It’s crazy,” Garcia says. “Before going in the ring, I’m scared shitless, and I say that as in not scared to fight the guy but scared because all eyes are on me—that feeling of like, A

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damn, it’s big-time. But when the bell rings, I’m an animal. All I see is red. Let’s have at it.” “That’s weird,” Lisa adds. “That must be a mother-son-bond thing, because I feel the same way. It’s not fear of the opponent so much as the pressure, and once the bell rings, it’s like a release. All of my anxiety is gone, my stomach stops hurting.” Now, in the Westin lobby, everyone is back in good spirits due to Garcia’s virtuoso performance in the ring. He’s been learning from Canelo and Reynoso, modeling his training on the mantra of “work smarter, not harder,” and he hopes to ﬁght three or four times next year, steadily cementing his credentials. He’ll continue to build his clout as

well: He’s recently signed to the talent agency WME and IMG Models, and the Hollywood Reporter wrote that there is a docuseries about his family in the works. Family is at the heart of Garcia’s life, and not only because boxing has become the family business. “I don’t have friends outside of my family,” Garcia says, though he does mention close friends who he now considers members of his family. Having grown up in boxing, “I don’t know anything about normal. I just want to be myself.” And in a sport littered with the careers of ﬁghters who were exploited by those around them, Garcia puts his trust in his family; in fact, his younger brother, Sean, is currently following in his footsteps,

t h i s pa g e

Hoodie, $168, and sweatpants, $88, from Front General Store. Shirt, $245, from Stock Vintage. o p p o s i t e pa g e

Top, $1,295, by Emporio Armani. Shorts, $445, by Bode. His own shoes, $180, by Nike.

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with a 5-0 record and nearly 200,000 Instagram followers of his own. “My mom is the Kris Jenner of boxing,” Garcia jokes, at which point Lisa weighs in: “I had my hair short before Kris Jenner.” The TV series isn’t hard to picture, and there’s more in store. Garcia is at that unique point in an athlete’s career when there seems to be nothing but potential. But it’s a ﬁne balance, one that he’s aware

of, and one that means even more in a sport where a single loss changes the narrative completely. For now, all eyes are on the kid—and the expectations are sky-high, in boxing and beyond, with none higher than his own. “I’m looking to expand my brand everywhere,” he says. “I want to be worldwide, I want to reach the world. If it’s opportunities in acting, if it’s opportunities in things like this [story

and photo shoot], I’ll take them if I have time. But the main focus is boxing, because without boxing I got none of this. Boxing gave me my life.” If boxing gave Garcia his life, then Garcia has the chance to give something back to boxing: a hypermodern superstar, born on Instagram but made in the ring.

kevin lincoln is a writer who lives in Los Angeles.

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New York City, 1997 John-John loved to throw the Fris in Central Park almost as much as he loved to be shirtless when the paps were around.

Hall of Fame

m o r F d Rippe the Tabloids We dug through 40-plus years of celebrity workout photos to find the 10 most awesomely stylish moments, from John-John to Jonah.

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A M E , A T L E A S T the good kind, is a great sacrifice—one that demands hard work. Part of the hard work is making it all appear e≠ortless: When we see celebrities, they’re almost always immaculately groomed, with implied Adonis bodies lurking beneath expensive clothing someone else chose for them to wear. Celebrities embody that tired old mantra “Never let them see you sweat.” Indeed, you might say that celebrities, whose work takes place in closed studios, private gyms, and gated homes, live by those words. The less they look like they’re exerting themselves, the more superhuman they appear, and the further we fall under the spell of their fame. The magnificent exception to this rule is the occasional, glorious moment when a photographer catches a celebrity in-medias-workout. This is especially true in the vintagecelebrity sphere: When Madonna is caught running in a purple Asics tracksuit, she radiates star power. But it can also be seen today: Check out Jonah Hill with his fists plunged into two bulbous yellow boxing gloves—a man who burst out of his horny, pubescent cage and became a sinewy director with an admirable wardrobe. It isn’t that they’re putting in more e≠ort than we are: Is Adam Sandler leaving it all on the court? Probably not. But his looks aren’t merely about exertion—it’s about style. Like Keanu lacing up his skates, his face a red-carpet-worthy expression of calm elegance. Their love of performance is tempered with a self-consciousness that only the truly famous possess, like a rare jewel or a member’s card to the San Vicente Bungalows. The internet has changed how we think a person should look while working out. Consider influencers who appear to be glowing during yoga the way celebrities glow on the red carpet. With a light sheen of sweat, they are sculpted, styled in all the right brands—aspirational but somehow impossible, just like the bod of our dreams. Celebrities don’t have to try so hard—not even John F. Kennedy Jr., shirtless and chasing something (as he so often was) in Central Park. And that indelible X factor is what ultimately distinguishes the truly famous from the influencers. There’s Sean Combs, crossing the finish line of the New York City Marathon, arms raised in victory. He’s just like all the runners around him, with one key di≠erence: He’s Pu≠ Daddy, baby.

— R A C H E L TA S H J I A N

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JFK JR.

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New York City, 2003

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Apologies to the 34,000 other NYC Marathon runners, but who really wins when Puff Daddy is in the race?

Fun fact: Neo played goalie for his Canadian high school’s hockey team.

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Don’t sleep on the combination of ’70s hair flow, retro tennis fit, and overdeveloped pecs.

The Duke of Sussex’s kickabout kit is very cool, but the look on his face burns with the intensity of an athlete.

The Stones frontman looks as good rocking the stage today at 76 as he did on a country jog nearly 40 years ago.

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He’s no Clark Kent, but his sweat-soaked Superman tee is a heroic pickup-game fit.

Before Peloton and Goop, A-plus-list celebs got their wellness on in the streets.

Boxing is the workout du jour for aspiring fashion models and, apparently, stylish film directors.

MICK JAGGER

FLEA Los Angeles, 1997 Flea is a courtside fixture now, but the RHCP bassist was an MTV Rock n’ Jock MVP back in the day.

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Universal Perfection

H E G R E A T E S T W A T C H M A K E R working today isn’t in a lab putting together Rolexes or Pateks. He’s a 71-year-old artisan named Philippe Dufour who works in a converted schoolhouse in the Swiss countryside, painstakingly creating a minuscule number of timepieces. Dufour turns out so few watches that it’s more likely you’ll be struck by lightning than encounter one in person. In a good year, he produces just over a dozen. His influence, however, far exceeds his output, because each watch bearing his name represents a singular technical and aesthetic achievement. Take the Philippe Dufour Simplicity. Using traditional Swiss watchmaking techniques, Dufour has harnessed the unfathomable concept of time in one of the most beautiful objects I have ever seen. With a creamy white lacquer dial, blued Breguet hands, and an elegantly recessed sub-seconds dial, the Simplicity approaches sacred geometry, so perfectly proportioned that it boggles the mind. It’s only 34 mm and it has the presence of Big Ben. Dufour became a watchmaker in 1967, launched his brand in 1978, and introduced his masterpiece in 2000. In the years that followed, he made only 205 Simplicity watches, in a range of precious metals. Each one was ordered via direct commission, meaning that before he made it, he knew exactly whose wrist it would end up on. (Some 120 were sold in Japan, where Dufour has developed a cult following.) He discontinued the Simplicity in 2012 and, save for a handful specially created for big clients, has not made any more.

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If you were lucky enough to get your name on Dufour’s list early, you could have scored a Simplicity for around $34,000. In 2016, a similar Simplicity sold at auction for just over $225,000. “Simplicity” is actually a funny name for this watch, considering that Dufour has managed to squeeze an insanely complicated movement into such a small case. When it comes to designing movements, Dufour is nothing short of a genius—he was the first watchmaker to put a grande sonnerie (it chimes every 15 minutes) in a wristwatch. And when it comes to the finishing and detailing on the Simplicity’s movement, viewed through the crystal case back, the big brands are all playing catch-up. One of the most interesting parts of the Simplicity is that little “Metalem” stamp on the dial. Dufour outsources his dial making to a Swiss shop called Metalem, which supplies all the major watch brands. While others keep the supplier a secret, Dufour, in a grand gesture of humility and transparency, leaves Metalem’s name right there for all to see. Like any true artist, Dufour has disciples and devotees. Many of them—including Rexhep Rexhepi, a 32-year-old Swiss watchmaker who also produces neoclassical time only watches in extremely small quantities—are establishing themselves as the future of horology. But there’s reason to think that Dufour is yet to make his most profound mark. He has reportedly been working on a new design, perfecting the expression of time.

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PROP STYLIST: MONIKA BUKOWSKA. BACKGROUND: GET TY IMAGES.

You could fit every single timepiece made by Philippe Dufour on a small table, but the master craftsman has fan clubs and acolytes the world over. One need only look at his Simplicity watch, says L.A. artist Wes Lang, to understand why.

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GROOMING: RACHEL LEIDIG

Health

The mind behind coveted fashion label Bianca Chandôn spends two hours in the morning practicing yoga and meditation—and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. B y N O A H J O H N S O N P H O T O G R A P H S 2 8

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comes out of nowhere. I’m waiting on the sidewalk in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where we agreed to meet for breakfast, expecting to see him roll up on a bike or behind the wheel of his Mitsubishi Delica minivan. Instead he appears silently on a mini skateboard with big, soft cruiser wheels, as a blur of hair and limbs ﬂying o≠ the street. The scion of legendary skate punk Steve Olson, Alex is one of a few second-generation professional skateboarders. He skates for Nike and his own successful board company, Nine One Seven, but these days you’re just as likely to see him surﬁng on Long Island or DJ’ing a club on Avenue C—or, maybe, shopping for medicinal herbs at an Indian grocery store called Dual Spices—as you are to see him in Thrasher. Olson’s various curiosities have led him down quite a few di≠erent paths, with LEX OLSON

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and without his skateboard. He also runs a small but highly sought-after fashion label called Bianca Chandôn, which makes limited runs of graphic tees, hoodies, and sportswear that sell out quickly. He’s an insatiable dabbler, approaching every new project with the intensity and focus of a ﬁrst-year med student. He’s been skateboarding since he was 12, and now Olson has become a voracious consumer of all things related to mindfulness and spiritual betterment—a self-taught guru on his quest to feel better and make the world a better place. But he would never put it that way. He’s just curious…and deep in the wellness rabbit holes of YouTube and Instagram. You’d think that would be enough to keep Olson occupied most days and grounded in some kind of corporeality. But not so much. “I’m just like a bag blowing in the wind,” he tells me. A chiseled Jesus with an aggro edge, today he’s wearing a vintage army jacket, faded jeans, and black woven-leather shoes that resemble Mexican huaraches. It’s fall in New York, but he’s got a Florida tan. I picked the one easy place in the neighborhood where I thought we’d be able to chat in peace, but I soon realize that I’d made a crucial

mistake. Olson is vegan. Anyone who follows him on Instagram, where he obsessively reposts extremely crunchy natural food and medicine memes, knows that. Nothing at this bistro is made without butter. But Olson perks up when the server tells us that the place has oat milk, which is enough to hold us over in the form of a couple of Americanos. “Whenever I post any of that stu≠,” he says of the Instagram stories he often shares, which are like Russian propaganda for the Erewhon set, “it’s more just for awareness. This may be true, this may be false. It’s bringing attention. You can decide.” You can decide about the beneﬁts of cupping, fasting, and colon cleansing, but Olson has made his decision. “I want to try to squeeze out as much whatever—as many years of skateboarding as I can,” he tells me. “I just want to feel good.” Olson is 33 now, but, he says, a culmination of events that occurred around the time he turned 30 led him to a few major lifestyle changes. He lost his grandmother and his close friend, fellow pro skater Dylan Rieder, in the same year. “Seeing Dylan going through cancer and stu≠, you’re just like, Okay, we need to be healthier,” says Olson. So he watched

o p e n i n g pa g e a n d t h i s pa g e

His own T-shirt (throughout) by International Farmer. Pants (price upon request) by Louis Vuitton Men’s. Bracelet, his own.

the documentaries Cowspiracy and What the Health. He read Meat Is for Pussies, by Cro-Mags singer John Joseph. “I read that and I was like, Fuck. I need to do this.” Olson is the kind of person who isn’t satisfied by conventional answers. I ask, for example, if he ever takes Advil or other over-the-counter medicine. “Fuck no!” he says. (His cure for a headache: Eat 10 almonds.) He drinks only distilled tap water, to which he adds his own minerals. “It’s crazy how much better it tastes,” he says. Lately he’s been trying to get into an Ayurvedic diet, eating whole foods at set times according to doshas—di≠erent kinds of energies circulating in your body. Around the same time he was starting to tweak his diet, Olson hurt his ankle badly on a trip with the Nike skate team. He tried physical therapy and personal trainers but didn’t feel like he was making much progress. So he signed up for a onemonth trial at the Woom Center on Bowery in New York City. Woom is a lot like your typical neighborhood yoga spot but with “a futuristic flavor for technology,” according to its website, that includes 3D sound baths and projected visual installations. “It’s very New Agey,” Olson says. “I was just like, All right, I’m going to immerse myself in this yoga and see what happens if I apply myself for a month.” After five days a week for a month, Olson says, his ankle felt strong and, perhaps more important, his mind felt clear. For all its New Agey–ness, he liked that Woom put an emphasis on meditation and encouraged chanting om. Then one day a friend told him about Wim Hof—“I think everyone knows who Wim Hof is at this point,” Olson tells me. For those, like me, who didn’t: Wim Hof, a.k.a. the Iceman, is a Dutch guy who hangs out while mostly nude on icebergs, plays guitar, runs marathons barefoot in the snow, and swims in frigid waters. Hof believes that you can train yourself to control your body through breathing in order to suppress pain, strengthen your immune system, and elevate your mood. The Wim Hof method combines breathing exercises with exposure to cold, often in the form of icy showers. “It’s all about controlling your heart rate with your breath and having them sync,” Olson says. “It’s so cold that you have nothing to focus on but that one thing. There’s no other thought. Which I think is really the hardest thing with meditation.” Olson completed two Wim Hof courses online but skipped

a ﬁnal lesson: “Like, go walk in the snow in the mountains. I’m like, Who the fuck has that? I mean, yeah, we have snow, but I don’t have a fucking cold spring that I can jump into.” Wim Hof added new dimensions to Olson’s yoga practice—which he had been only doing on and o≠—and it was also a starting point on a journey through di≠erent realms of Eastern spirituality and meditation. He did nauli kriya, a stomach-contorting breathing practice that is meant to squeeze your organs to “rinse them out.” He practiced kundalini yoga, an intense style that incorporates seated meditation with long, melodic chanted mantras and dynamic movements. That got him into Holotropic Breathwork, a 60-minute series of forced exhalations without pause. “I’ve fully hallucinated doing Holotropic,” Olson says. “I know when you hear that you’re like, Okay, bullshit. But you hyperventilate for 15 minutes, basically. I was seeing

colors and I was definitely like, I’m not where I’m supposed to be.” Where Olson is headed with all of this—beyond a longer, more productive skate career and surfing faster waves—is anyone’s guess. There is no end to this journey for him. He describes it like moving out of your parents’ house: You find a home. You start to fill it with your own furniture—your own ideas about how to be in the world. “It’s just where you put your intentions,” he says. These days his morning practice is devoted to yoga, breathing, and meditation, which takes about two hours. What strikes me most about Olson’s always evolving regimen is his capacity for learning and trusting new things. “I think it’s just being kind of open,” he tells me. “Like Bruce Lee says, ‘Be like water.’ You know what I mean? You can take any form if you pour yourself into it.”

Pants, $1,155, by Gucci. Hat, $71, by Chamula.

noah johnson is gq’s style editor.

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were a newfound commitment to running, for Daly, and meditation, for Vallot. They were also both really into Japanese-made eyewear and felt the market lacked the styles they wanted to wear. “It seemed no other interesting runner was excited about any sports eyewear,” Vallot says. “We felt sports eyewear could use some love.” Love they could provide. For their first pair—squarish frames that look fast but not Tour de France fast—they hit on a few key features: an adjustable hypoallergenic nose pad, titanium-core temples, oil-and-water-resistant lenses. They applied those to the shapes that came next—high-fashion blades built for speed, ’70s-inspired aviators, and raver-meets-alpinist ovals. Now all are stocked at high-fashion emporiums like

Dover Street Market and SSENSE rather than traditional sporting-goods stores. The duo didn’t plan to get back into clothing, but eventually they couldn’t help themselves. They developed Air-Wear, a mesh that appears solid but reveals thousands of holes when stretched (see the T-shirt above). A midlayer program, along with a grip of fashion and sports collaborations, is on deck. It’s all meant to fit seamlessly into the District Vision world—“somewhere at this intersection of sports and mindfulness,” as Vallot puts it. So when I found myself training for a marathon last summer, DV was my first stop. The race was back in October, and my mileage has since dropped considerably—but I don’t wear my sunglasses any less. —SAM SCHUBE

PHOTOGRAPH BY MAT T MARTIN. SHIRT, $80, SHORTS, $89, SUNGL ASSES, $249, AND TOWEL, $70, BY DISTRICT VISION. FOR SOURCE PHOTOGRAPHS, SEE ADDITIONAL CREDITS, PAGE 95.

I S T R I C T V I S I O N does not traffic in the hybridized world of athleisure. No, cofounders Max Vallot and Tom Daly are into performance: They launched the brand in 2015 with precisionengineered sunglasses and have since released a range of technical apparel for runners. DV is for athletes, not athleisurers. But don’t blame Vallot and Daly if you buy a pair of their frames to wear while training for a triathlon and can’t stop wearing them once you’re done with your workout. This might be expected. Before starting District Vision, both men had careers in fashion marketing: Daly was working at Acne Studios, Vallot at Saint Laurent. But when hard work and a heavy nightlife regimen caught up with them, Daly explains, it prompted some reassessment. The results

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The F i x

Fitness

If the New Year has you scrambling for a new workout regimen, let our fitness and wellness columnist make the case for runningâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and why you should (finally) sign up for that 5K. By JOE HOLDER

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Fitness

F Y O U ’ R E A N ablebodied human being, you are a runner. I can see some of you clutching your pearls already. Me? A runner? Heavens, no. But humans evolved to move. Running is one of the most natural integrated motions we can do. Ipso facto: You—yes, you!—are a runner. That doesn’t mean you need to run a marathon. Or a 10K. You don’t even have to run a 5K. (As you’ll see, though, you should probably sign up for something.) But you do need to be able to jog down the block without pain. Which is where I come in. I’ve taken plenty of running-haters and turned them into runners. And I had to transform myself too. I grew up doing track but fell out of love with running while still a kid. This isn’t uncommon, especially if you play sports. (Coaches use running as a punishment, right?) Then I got injured playing football in college— broke my leg, among other things— and when I graduated, I could barely go for a mile without pain. So I had to reteach my body how to run. Now I’ve managed to complete three marathons in two years, and I ran my latest in just under three hours with only eight weeks of training. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. In the beginning, the key to running is patience. It’s going to take some time. That time is going to pass anyway, and if you do the things that you should do, the results are going to come. And that’s the beauty of running: So many things in life are outside your control, and there are so many things in life where you can’t tell if you’re improving. With running, if you put in the work, you can (literally) see how far your own feet can take you. Mine have taken me pretty far—and along the way I’ve learned some lessons that I hope can get you moving too.

1. TREAT RUNNING LIKE SCHOOL.

Success comes through structure. That’s why school works. You show up every day. Next thing you know, a few months later, you know geometry. And geometry is

mind-boggling! The only reason you know it is because you sat down every day. So take the structure of school—which is just consistent practice—and make yourself a student of something you love. It could be meditating, or cooking, or learning to be more emotionally open—or, in this case, running. 2. FORCE YOURSELF INTO A FRAMEWORK.

Parkinson’s Law says that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” So if your timeline for getting into running is some vague, yet-to-be-determined time in the future, then you’ll just… never get very far. But if you sign up for a race that takes place on a specific date—be it a mile sprint or an ultramarathon—well, now you’ve

got a forced framework in which to work. You know that race is coming, and that “Oh, shit, I should probably get off the couch and run” feeling gets a little more urgent. 3. DESIGN A SYLLABUS...

You need to figure out your coursework. Maybe you’ve never run before. No worries. Start slow. Three years ago I had a client sign up for a half marathon. She was not a runner (yet). The first week, I told her to walk for one minute and then run for 30 seconds. I had her repeat it 10 times, two to three times that week. The next week, I upped it to one minute of walking and one minute of running. The third week, it was one minute of walking and two minutes of running. Before long she was running for 10 minutes straight, three times a

↑ Running is important to a running regimen, but so is how you rest and recover.

week, then 30 minutes without a break. And that’s how you get from the couch to a race. (Tellingly, that client is a voracious runner now.) Even with clients who have some experience but are just getting back into running, I tell them not to even think about miles at the beginning. Instead I tell them to go for time, to get used to increased volume. Do 30 minutes of running three times a week. The next week, up it to 40. Ten minutes doesn’t seem that much, but that’s a 30 percent increase from what you did last week. Nice work! Life is all about increasing your tolerance. My first training run for the marathon was 40 minutes, and I thought I was going to die. I felt like trash. My lungs hurt. My legs hurt. I was like, There’s no way I’m going to get this marathon done.

have to do that, but here is an easy rule of thumb: Eat minimally processed food with no added sugar and get as close to a Mediterranean diet as you can. Also, chew your food. It sounds crazy, but when healthy bacteria in your saliva mixes with food, it has been shown to help produce nitric oxide, which can aid digestion. The most useful lesson I’ve learned over the years? The runs aren’t the hard part of running. It’s: Am I sleeping enough? Am I eating enough? Am I mindful enough? If you optimize everything around the work, the work becomes easy. Because your body is like, “I’ve been sleeping, eating good, taking care of my mind, and cutting out all the bullshit? Running’s easy, man!” 7. STACK YOUR HABITS.

4. ...AND STICK TO IT...

I divide my schedule between “hard time” and “soft time”—hard time is for obligations that cannot move. So when I signed up for the Chicago Marathon, I knew that every week I’d have to do certain runs or workouts. That was hard time. The great thing about building your schedule around hard time is that it makes you more effective. With finite time to get things done, you don’t have time to waste. Those limits can be clarifying. Training for the marathon helped me cut out the things that I didn’t need in my life during that period. 5. ...FOR THE MOST PART.

Maybe you’re thinking: Starting one habit (running) is hard enough, let alone worrying about eating, sleeping, and being mindful. This is where habit stacking can be helpful. If you’re having trouble starting a new practice, pair it with something that’s already established. Since my running is hard time in my schedule, and I know I have to do it, I try to pair it with meditation. For 10 minutes after the run is over, I breathe, calm down, digest the run, and assess how I’m feeling. Now, if I left my mindfulness practice to another part of the day, I may not do it. But this way my running rolls right into my meditation.

9. APPLY WHAT YOU LEARN.

Running has helped me realize that my body can handle more than I ever expected. And it has helped me find joy in being meticulous and consistent. You can apply that to life. When you’re up at 3 a.m. working on some dumb shit because you know you have to get it done, you can power through it the same way you would a five-mile training run. I’ve trained clients to run a faster mile or to complete a marathon, and there’s nothing more liberating than those moments when they realize they can do it. There’s a weightlessness associated with it. You can find joy in having your body do what it was meant to do— there’s a real symbiosis of body and mind. Getting in shape is a nice by-product, but running a race can literally change the way you look at yourself forever! I ran a 5K the other day, and I thought no way I was going to make it. But I’m like, “You ran 26 miles— and you did that by methodically setting yourself up for success.” That changes how you think about what you can do. Once you push yourself over the edge, you fully understand what your body is capable of doing. This is why people get addicted to running. I think it’s the closest we get to nirvana.

↓ The human body was designed to move. So try to move it!

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8. GRADE YOURSELF—EVERY DAY.

Do you get kicked out of school for playing hooky a few times? No. So maybe you didn’t feel like running and stayed in bed on a training day. That’s fine. But you’ve got to understand that just because you miss one day doesn’t mean you have to miss them all. Consider the first two weeks of running—when you’re still trying to establish a habit—your orientation. If you don’t get a 75 percent, you can’t graduate. Hit at least three out of four of your workouts in those first two weeks. You don’t have to be perfect. But you have to be okay. After all, C’s get degrees. I got a few C’s at Penn, but I still got that Ivy League diploma. 6. THINK HOLISTICALLY.

What are all the things apart from running that can help you with running? There’s what you eat. I gave up booze for 60 days. You don’t

Take five minutes at the end of your day to reflect. Did you get your run done? How did it feel? Pay attention to what you ate, what you drank, how well you slept—all the non-running parts of running I just mentioned. Write it down if you want. It’ll help you see patterns so you can re-create good days, and it’ll also hold you accountable. Know that certain things matter more than others. If you slipped up on a meal, that matters less than missing a run. But if you slipped up on a meal and didn’t run? Notice that and try to do better the next day. You don’t want to do that several days in a row. I always say your day can be given one of three grades: a big win, a small win, or a small loss. But you can never have a big loss. A big loss is when you have multiple consecutive days of not eating right, not sleeping, and not running. Avoid big losses.

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The Incredibly HAPPY Life of TV’s Favorite GROUCH

We venture into the peculiar alternate reality of Larry David and begin to wonder: Is the world’s most infamously neurotic man actually its most self-actualized?

BY BRETT MARTIN PHOTOGRAPHS BY JASON NOCITO STYLED BY MOBOLAJI DAWODU

a T-shirt reading “EAT MORE AVOCADO,” one of the designs for sale at this Venice Beach café at which he’s a server, along with “WE SELL DESIGNER KALE” and “BEET IT.” He’s waiting on me and Larry David, who is of course dressed precisely like Larry David—gray knit hoodie, dark long-sleeve T-shirt with a white shirt beneath that, beige jeans, and sneakers. David chooses or approves all the wardrobe for Curb Your Enthusiasm, and then he keeps all the clothes, from blazers to socks, creating a seamless visual loop between Larry and the character he calls TV Larry. So Larry David is sitting there, using his very Larry David voice to discuss very Larry David things: breakfast preferences (today, scrambled egg whites, grilled onions, and sliced avocado), the relative pleasures of killing flies and ants (flies are more satisfying), and yes, clothes, about which, unsurprisingly, David has Thoughts. The son of a garment-district salesman, David has always approached clothing with something of a tailor’s eye. The very first Seinfeld gag was about shirt-button placement; the first Curb Your Enthusiasm centered on a crotch cut too big, thus simulating an erection. He has a code: One should wear only one “nice” piece of clothing at a time. “Otherwise it’s too much,” he says. “Too dressed. You have to be halfdressed. That’s my fashion theory, since you asked: Half Is More.” In nearly two decades of interviewing people for this fashion magazine, I have rarely spent even this much time discussing fashion. But then I’ve seldom profiled a Fashion Icon. Is there a more recognizable, self-assured, incredibly specific wardrobe to be found anywhere in pop culture? The tear-shaped Oliver Peoples glasses alone have now approached a Groucho Marx or John Lennon level of personal identification. David has worn them since the early 1990s. He used to own only two pairs, until a suitably paranoid producer recently went on a worldwide hunt and came up with a few backups. They were the first thing he grabbed last October, when the Getty Fire forced him to evacuate his Pacific Palisades home. “Jerry said I dressed like an Upper West Side communist,” David says, referring to the Jerry with whom he created Seinfeld, back in 1989. I think of the look as Alpha TV Writer: In a profession where status is measured by how casually and comfortably one can arrive at work, David’s wardrobe qualifies as a kind of normcore bling. In the course of all this pleasant kibitzing, David’s decaf Americano has gone tragically tepid. He beckons to the Avocado Kid, who has hovered nearby. “Let me ask you,” David says. “To make this a little hotter, you have to make a whole new thing, right?” “Or dilute it,” says the server. “But we’ll probably just make a whole new thing.” THE KID IS WEARING

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“I’m going to tell you in advance, I’m only going to drink about this much of it,” says David, fingers measuring a tiny pinch. “It is what it is,” the kid says agreeably. “You know what? Put it in the microwave.” “We don’t have a microwave.” “Okay,” says David. “Let’s forget it.” The kid shrugs, apologizes, and withdraws as David and I return to our discussion, which has now moved on to his disdain for the supposed innovation of UNTUCKit shirts: “Like nobody ever wore their shirt out and noticed that it was too long? We all noticed.…” But lo! Just as he gets rolling, the server returns, having seized the initiative and bearing a fresh hot carafe of Americano. “I just had him make another one,” he says proudly as he tops o≠ our cups. “Great, thank you,” says David. And then he pauses a long moment. “But…just for the sake of discussion…” He purses his lips, raises his eyebrows. “Shouldn’t you have brought a new cup?” “What?” says the server. “So you don’t put it in the old, cold co≠ee. Here, let me see.” He takes a delicate sip. “Is it hotter?” asks the server uncertainly. “It’s a little hotter,” concedes David. “But don’t you see how you defeated the purpose?” The kid has a small grin frozen on his face. On the one hand, there is a real customer-service situation to be reckoned with. On the other, he must feel, as I do, deeply disoriented, as though he has passed through the looking glass and into an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. It’s like getting a living room concert from the Rolling Stones. A few more seconds and the server snaps out of it, finding his line. “Well…live and learn,” he says, smiling. “Every day I’m working on my craft.” David grins too, gratified by the repartee. “I know, I know,” he calls after the server as he moves away. “I know you’re going to be a great waiter someday!” I have, in the line of duty, met actors who seem like they are continuing to play their most famous roles in real life—Pierce Brosnan, say, who ordered a martini in the opulent hotel where we met without so much as a knowing Bondian wink. Never before David, though, have I been around a celebrity whose actual persona so immaculately and surreally matched their onscreen one. The simplest explanation is that they are the same person. Or close enough that it would be hard to fit the page of a script between them. David bestows his own travails and kvetches on TV Larry, of course. But also his existence is so circumscribed—“My whole life is spent in three places: home, the o∞ce, and the golf club,” he says—that some things that happen to TV Larry because they happened to Real Larry wind up happening to Real Larry again. When we leave the restaurant to retrieve David’s Tesla Model S from a lot, he initially attempts to give the valet ticket to a dark-skinned guy in a reflective vest who just happens to be standing near the entrance—a mistake exactly like one made by TV Larry way back in season four. For all these circles within circles, the Case of the Diluted Americano is cut-and-dried: “Am I supposed to not say something?” he says. “Yes, you’re supposed to not say something,” I say, feeling like a Pollyanna. “So most people would not say something.” “Of course not.” “Even if he didn’t know me, I would have said something,” he insists. “After all, what did I do? I pointed something out. I didn’t insult him or anything.” It is almost reflexive—for reasons of temperament and ethnicity— to describe David as “neurotic.” Sitting there with him in what I had already begun to think of as Larry World, I start to believe maybe this is exactly wrong. It occurs to me that Larry David may be the most self-actualized person I have ever met. (text continued on page 46)

ALL CLOTHES LARRY’S OWN. ←← OPENING PAGES

shirt Salvatore Ferragamo pants James Perse → THIS PAGE

jacket Giorgio Armani shirt Theory t-shirt Cotton Citizen pants Polo Ralph Lauren shoes (throughout) Ecco glasses (throughout) Oliver Peoples

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←← OPPOSITE PAGE

jacket Giorgio Armani sweater Billy Reid ← THIS PAGE

hoodie Theory shirt Rag & Bone pants Ermenegildo Zegna

An elaborate set of rules used to govern when David donned sneakers. These days they’re about all he ever wears.

in Larry World begins several weeks before we meet in Venice. For one thing, we’ve talked on the phone, during which call David has assured me that this whole thing—story, photo shoot, magazine cover—is going to be a disaster. “I’m trying to figure out who to pay to get out of it!” he said. This is something he’s done before, with other writers about to attempt profiles, but there’s no reason to believe it’s not heartfelt. He’s talked to my editor, too, warning that if the plan is to get under his surface, I might as well give up now: “Believe me, there’s nothing there!” Also, for several weeks, I’ve been immersed in watching or rewatching the 90 episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm that precede the 10th season, about to begin on HBO. It is not uncommon, in the midst of such binges, for the fictional universe of the binged show to bleed into the tenor of real life, but this is an especially hard case. My world suddenly seems filled with egregious slights and social transgressions, a vast parking lot of carelessly parked cars. An editor emails to o≠er me an assignment. I write back with the sign-o≠ “Nice to meet you,” though I realize, as I click Send, we met years before. “No worries,” he writes back, after pointing this out, but it’s the last I hear of that assignment. I can’t help but notice a friend’s habit of letting me pay for the Uber when we go out to dinner but then arranging for another friend to drive us home for free. I decide, after a year of thinkDavid has worn ing about it, to ask the woman who cuts my his signature hair about the protocol of tipping her, since Oliver Peoples she also owns the salon. It goes really terribly. frames since the early ’90s. Larry World, I start to see, consists less of a IN TRUTH, MY TIME

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series of imaginative events than a perpetual state of combat, righteous or otherwise, with the universe. It is exhausting. To some extent we all live in Larry World; it’s why Curb’s theme song, “Frolic,” works laid over nearly any video on YouTube. I should admit, though, that I may be especially susceptible. David and I grew up in adjacent Brooklyn neighborhoods and attended rival high schools, albeit 25 years apart. He is such a kaleidoscopic amalgam of men I grew up surrounded by—grandfathers, uncles, great-uncles, teachers, Jackie Mason, Alan King, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, men in black socks trudging across the sands of Coney Island selling knishes: all the alter kockers of my Brooklyn Jewish youth—that I can’t always be sure I haven’t known him my entire life. So deep is the ancestral chord he strikes in me that whenever I hear the opening tuba of “Frolic,” I practically taste whitefish. It’s something of a mystery to me that the sensibility seems to resonate as vividly everywhere else in America. Twenty-two years after it went o≠ the air, Seinfeld remains omnipresent, a staple of local TV in places across the country where people don’t know their Boca from a babka. Netflix recently secured the streaming rights to the series for a reported excess of $500 million. “I want someone to explain it to me,” David says, when I ask about the enduring appeal. “I really don’t get it, other than—and it’s not very profound—it’s funny. And when something’s funny, people like it.” Meanwhile, Curb has been with us since shortly after the last presidential impeachment. It was the comedy component of HBO’s invention of prestige TV, arriving hot on the heels of The Sopranos, whose creator, David Chase, once told me, in what I took as at least 75 percent seriousness, that he thought he and David could have switched places, with Chase writing the comedy and David the drama. Now Tony Soprano is long gone, along with Don Draper, Walter White, Vic Mackey, and the rest of his cohort. Only Larry persists: The Last Difficult Man. Unrepentant white-male bad behavior may be slightly less fashionable these days, but Larry’s crimes and misdemeanors are so well established that they feel grandfathered in. (This may be tested by a #MeToo plotline in season 10, about which I am permitted to say no more, given the modern fetish for TV secrecy. “Larry wants every show to be like a pimple,” says executive producer Je≠ Scha≠er. “You

have no idea it’s coming; just wake up in the morning and it’s there.”) For the most part, Curb has sailed into the third decade of the 21st century unmolested by events and changes outside—or, really, even inside—its bubble. Wars may rage, despots may rise, divorces may be endured, both onscreen and o≠, TV Larry will still find time to obsess over the intricacies of party invites and thank-you calls. “Everybody’s worried about the big things, like climate change and corruption,” Scha≠er says. “Somebody’s got to focus on the little things.” Curb Your Enthusiasm, at the beginning, had the distinctly casual feel of a victory lap, its title poking fun at the notion of expectations. “In the early days, we’d get the call from Larry himself: ‘Can you come down tomorrow?’ ” says Ted Danson, who began appearing in season one. “You know, bring whatever clothes you want. There were no trailers. You kind of sat in your car until they were ready for you. It was really sort of guerrilla TV making.” (David can lay at least partial claim to the Dansonaissance that transformed the fading beefcake of late Becker into the white-haired sexy praying mantis we get to enjoy today.) Ten seasons in, the production may be more professionalized, and the budgets bigger, but the show is made more or less as it always has been: David and Scha≠er—a former Seinfeld sta≠er and creator of the Curb-influenced The League who has been on board since season five—labor over outlines for each episode. The scenes themselves are improvised. Though Curb has been a Grand Central Terminal for famous cameos, David knows the process is not for everybody. Some actors you did not like come in trying too hard to be funny. Others the Seinfeld have trouble negotiating the tricky landfinale. When Curb ends, he’s scape of exactly how to insult Larry. On the resolved, it will one hand, he loves abuse and is notorious do so without for bursting into laughter whenever someceremony. body lays into him. (“Do me a favor, just quote me in the article as saying, ‘I adore Larry David,’ ” Danson told me, dissolving into giggles. “He’ll hate that!”) On the other hand, it is not exactly open season. “There’s a few things you should never do in an audition with Larry,” says Scha≠er. “One is that unless the scene absolutely calls for it, don’t start to cry, because then the scene is just over. Two, try not to touch his face. Just don’t. And three: There’s a di≠erence between insults for comedy and just being plain insulting. Larry is sensitive.” “I’ve been called terrible names,” David says. “ ‘Old’ used to really bother me, cut me to the quick.” He says he only expects that others abide by the same code he follows himself: “I never cross a

line where I’m commenting on somebody’s looks. Never would I say anything that could personally hurt or insult somebody.” I have always understood Curb Your Enthusiasm to be about the existential horrors of being rich. The show makes the most sense to me as the continuation, on some transdimensional plane, of the last moments of the Seinfeld ﬁnale, in which the four characters are revealed to be in an ever repeating hell of their own petty narcissistic making. The Larry of Curb, as I imagine him, is George Costanza set horribly free, untethered now to civil society by even the ﬂimsy bounds of the need for employment: The Stranger in Brentwood. LD’s belt, This, David wastes no time in letting me customized on know, is all nonsense. To his mind, TV Larry the set of Curb is no antihero. He is a real hero. with his initials. “When I was told that there were moments in the show that made people cringe, I was shocked. It never occurred to me,” he says. “What do you think is the animating emotion of the show, then?” I ask. “I just thought people were going to enjoy it. I’ll tell you this: If something made me cringe, I don’t think I’d put it in the show.” “So Larry is just a truth teller?” “Yes.” “He doesn’t cross the line at all?” “He’s expressing himself.” “And it’s admirable.”

“I was playing shortstop on the improv softball team,” David says of the discovery that he was going bald. “I went to scratch my head, and I felt a bead of sweat. What in God’s name is that? Oh, my God.”

begun as an avatar for all the things Real Larry wished he could say but couldn’t, but the longer the former exists, the more the latter can get away with. This pays dividends for those around him too. “We get a social pass,” says Ashley Underwood, his girlfriend of two years. “We’ll be at a dinner party, and Larry will take his last bit of food and just stand up for us to go. I just shrug. He gets the laugh, and I get to ride his coattails.” as well come to my house,” David says, with what can be described as enthusiasm well curbed. So I find myself winding my way up the hills of Pacific Palisades, streets lined with the hodgepodge architecture of Westside wealth—Tudors, Colonials, Mission Revivals—sidewalks empty except for gardeners and the occasional power walker with tiny dogs in tow. This, too, is indisputably Larry World: It is as easy to imagine David on Mars as it is in Silver Lake. Looking clear through the entryway when David throws open the door, out the large picture windows at the back of the house, I get the illusion that we are suspended over a void. David walks us to the patio, which reveals itself to be perched on the wall of a canyon overlooking the dewy green paradise of Riviera Country Club. Soft-glowing viridescent fairways roll out toward distant hills, shrouded in mist and pocked with moon-white bunkers. A single golf cart crawls silently across the landscape as a flock of emerald parrots swoops by. It’s like White Wakanda. “How long before you started to take this view for granted?” David asks. “For me, it’s two days. I’m a two-day take-for-granted guy.” That’s why you have people over, I suggest. To experience it through them. David considers this trade-o≠. “Nah,” he concludes. He is, nevertheless, a very a≠able host— engaging, curious, and as many have noted, an easy laugh. David, at 72, is one of those screen people who actually look healthier and heartier in real life— more country-club dad than knish man. There is still, of course, his Diary of a Wimpy Kid body, like two pipe cleaners twisted together; the long hands, gesticulating like startled doves; the gleaming teeth. He walks with a kind of jaunty, dead-armed lope that sometimes threatens to tip to one side, as though he were on the deck of a listing ship. For someone whose comedy is so verbal, he would have made a tremendous silent-film star. We go on a tour of the house. “For it is Mary, Maaary,” he sings grandly, an old George M. Cohan tune, as he leads the way upstairs with what seems perilously near to a bound in his step. At the top of the carpeted stairs is, actually, Mary, his housekeeper. “Mary, tell him what a tremendous boss I am,” he says. “El mejor, right?” “Oh, yeah. Right,” says Mary. We pass through bedrooms and sitting areas, back downstairs to a home gym outfitted with workout machines and a massage table. On the walls are framed photos of David with his two daughters as babies, others of him with the Obamas. (continued on page 91) “I

“Come up with one example where I’ve done something bad. I don’t think you’ll find it.”

“Totally. When you think of the way we conduct ourselves in life, how much bullshit we have to endure, how much bullshit we have to listen to and how much bullshit comes out of us just to avoid hurting someone’s feelings. All these rules we set up for ourselves.… I don’t think I’m a bad guy. I’m honest. I’m not mean. I’m never cruel. Come up with one example where I’ve done something bad. I don’t think you’ll ﬁnd it.” I mention a scene, from season seven, in which TV Larry stops a little girl, Je≠ and Susie’s daughter, from singing at a party. He smiles. “To me that’s too funny to be mean. When it’s funny, it’s not mean. It’s just funny.” Are there things TV Larry does that he wouldn’t do? “I wouldn’t do anything,” he says. “Would I ever stop a girl from singing in my life? No. Would I stand there thinking, ‘Boy, I wish I could stop her?’ Yes! That’s why there’s a show.” Of course, as the Case of the Diluted Americano made clear, the line is hardly absolute—and less so all the time. TV Larry may have

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He survived the EDM boom, has courted countless controversies, and against long odds, somehow reinvented himself as a perfect (and hilarious) celebrity for the Instagram age. Gabriella Paiella goes deep inside the relentless, globetrotting, and often shirtless world of the one and only Diplo.

Photographs by Charlotte Rutherford Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu

Charlotte, North Carolina. The personal photographer is in the trunk. Diplo is riding shotgun. I’m squeezed into the back seat next to the rest of his crew, about to begin the longest night of my life, which is just a regular night for Diplo: three shows in two di≠erent states, the Saturday before Halloween, a holiday that’s grown

from an evening when children beg for free miniature candy bars into a weeklong bacchanalia for adults dressed in Chihuahuasize polyester costumes. Halloween for Diplo is like tax season for accountants, if accountants had groupies and chartered private jets and were constantly shirtless in

jacket and pants (prices upon request) Lanvin shirt $395 Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello hat $125 Stetson watch $9,100 Cartier ring $2,300 Tiffany & Co.

public. The plan tonight is to start here in Charlotte with a 9:30 p.m. set and end sometime around 6 a.m. after a performance at a Miami strip club. “Holy shit, that’s insane,” our driver, Je≠, says when he hears about the schedule. He slams the gas pedal unexpectedly and his luxury SUV careens forward at roughly the speed of sound. Je≠, I should mention, is Je≠ Gordon. As in Nascar legend Je≠ Gordon. And, as it turns out, big Diplo fan Je≠ Gordon. When he heard Diplo was coming to town, he invited Diplo over for a personal tour of the Hendrick Motorsports team headquarters, a sprawling operation where they develop top-secret engine technology and sell souvenir Hooters race car T-shirts. The two met at Madonna’s Oscar party a few years back. Then Je≠ Gordon was at Burning Man, waiting to watch the sunrise over the playa in his fuzzy Burning Man hat, when he looked over and, what do you know? There was Diplo, getting ready to DJ. Diplo flew here from an all-nighter in Saint Louis, though you’d be forgiven for thinking he arrived on horseback from the 1970s. He’s wearing a denim Wrangler shirt, flared black jeans that give way to beige snakeskin cowboy boots, and sleazy orange-tinted glasses. His dirty-blond hair hangs to his shoulders, and a single gold front tooth twinkles away, demanding a blade of grass to chew. The tooth follows you around the room like the Mona Lisa’s eyes. The original got knocked loose in a fight when Diplo was younger and eventually turned gray, and then, by the time he had to get veneers, he figured, what the hell, why not go for gold? “I don’t have a job, so it didn’t really matter,” he says, before amending his statement slightly. “I’m doing a country album, so I think having a gold tooth is fine.” That project would be Thomas Wesley—Diplo was born Thomas Wesley Pentz but goes by Wes— an alter ego that has him making EDM-laced country ballads with Cam, Morgan Wallen, and the Jonas Brothers. If his outfits are any indication, he’s approached it with the intense focus of Daniel Day-Lewis preparing to play Abraham Lincoln. We walk through an unassuming door to find ourselves inside a Narnia of a private car collection, with dozens of gleaming classic Corvettes and Optimus Prime from the Transformers movies. At the center is a bronze statue, about the size of a small toddler, of the late inventor of some kind of engine proudly displaying his legacy in his outstretched arms. “When I die, guys, I want one of those,” Diplo jokes, pointing at the statue. This kicks o≠ a debate about what a miniature bronze Diplo would be holding. A Grammy? He has one…but definitely not. The SD card on which he stores all his playlists for DJ’ing?

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“No, man,” he responds, his gru≠ voice taking on an ironic Valley Boy lilt. “I don’t want to be defined by that.” How exactly to define Diplo is di∞cult, because there’s no figure in pop culture quite like him. He’s a superstar DJ and a sought-after producer and a songwriter and a record executive and even a model. But what Diplo is best at is being Diplo. His public life is so ridiculously over-the-top—filled with nonstop intercontinental travel and hordes of twerking women—that it inspired an entire mockumentary TV series where Dawson from Dawson’s Creek plays a hapless version of him. He’s more brand than man at this point, but if other brands worry about oversaturation, the Diplo strategy is to do everything, everywhere, all the time. At one point when I’m with him, his publicist receives an email asking if Diplo wants to appear on The Price Is Right, and he answers with the same immediate no-brainer yes that most people would reserve for a free trip to the moon. As a DJ he rode the EDM boom to the top and held on after the bubble burst, touring about 300 days a year and racking up a reported $25 million net worth as of 2018. When he’s not producing hits with Beyoncé or Justin Bieber or Usher or Madonna, he’s scouting the globe for the next big Nigerian rapper or Syrian wedding singer. (Even if, as he admits, “I can’t play very good music. Put me on a piano and I can’t hold a note.”) He’s worked in so many genres—electronic, house, hip-hop, dancehall, Brazilian baile funk, Angolan kuduro, and now country— that he’s practically his own genre. Try to keep track of his current projects and you’ll end up like a TV detective uncovering a vast conspiracy on a bulletin board tangled with pushpins and string. If you ask some people, what Diplo is also the worst at is being Diplo. His critics will say he’s an obnoxious EDM bro who hijacks other cultures’ music and has been known to pettily hit back when called out for it. Either way, Diplo has had singular staying power in an industry where careers are notoriously short, where cool and cachet are instantly mutable. At 41, he’s still playing to audiences half his age and is more inescapable than ever. He insists he’s still having fun, but besides, Diplo’s selling something more enticing than fun: brazenly doing whatever the hell you want. And if anyone can’t quite understand how he’s outlasted himself, it’s Diplo. “I’m on borrowed time,” he tells me. “I can’t believe it’s still going on.” Je≠ Gordon drops us o≠ at the hotel, where Diplo is planning to use a sliver of downtime to work out. But when his outdoor set is pushed up an hour because of impending rain, everyone jumps into motion again. Diplo changes into a BlackCraft Cult T-shirt and denim coat and grabs a cowboy hat. Je≠ Gordon rushes back, in a Rolls-Royce this

time, to personally shuttle him through downtown Charlotte, now teeming with a zombie invasion of costumed young people drunk on $12 bottles of raspberry-ﬂavored vodka. I’m in a black SUV behind them, and when we idle at a stoplight, I see a woman, dressed as a medieval wench, recognize Diplo and bum-rush the passenger-side window of the Rolls-Royce to yell something at him before sprinting o≠, scream-giggling. When we get to the show, a Halloween party sponsored by the local Kiss station, I ask Je≠ Gordon what she said. He laughs and turns red but is too much of a gentleman to repeat it. When I ask Diplo the same thing later, he mumbles that it was “very sexual, kind of weird” before softening his stance and calling it “cute.” The average age of this crowd is about 22, and even at 8:30 p.m. they’re raring for a good shirt $750 Brioni pants $625 Emporio Armani hat $125 Stetson ring (on ring finger) $229 LMJ ring (on index finger) $780 Othongthai necklaces $77,700 (top) and $67,200 Shay

time. I spot a Mister Rogers who appears to be on every drug in the neighborhood, a wasted Bob Ross with a prop paint palette, two Day of the Dead skeletons ecstatically grinding, and a gaggle of women whose group costume concept is “The Purge but sexy.” Je≠ Gordon and I park ourselves backstage. He hands me a pair of earplugs, and I need them: Diplo peels o≠ his coat and saunters to the turntable, where he takes in the bedlam before pressing a button that kicks o≠ a body-reverberating beat and then the sound of 7,000 people screaming all at once. it’s not the club where Diplo ascends to his truest form. I’d argue that would be on Instagram, where he compulsively broadcasts his whirlwind life for his 5.7 million followers. (He does

WILD AS HIS SHOWS ARE,

not run his own Twitter anymore after such ill-advised tweets as “Someone should make a kickstarter to get taylor swift a booty.”) On Instagram, we see him DJ’ing at his Vegas residency and at the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Meeting Elton John and meeting Dr. Phil. Hanging out with his children, Lockett, 9, and Lazer, 5. Hanging out with his chickens, names unknown. Mostly we see shirtlessness. There’s Diplo, shirtless on a mountain. Diplo, shirtless in an airplane bathroom. Diplo, shirtless in his Calvin Klein underwear ad. Diplo, shirtless, gazing into a body of water, possibly with an erection. (That one made headlines.) Diplo, shirtless in an unidentifiable location, his body adorned with a collection of tattoos that could fill an illegal aquarium run out of an aboveground pool in the Florida Keys—a crawfish, a shark, a manatee holding a machine gun, a turtle with a yin-yang shell smoking a blunt. The updates are tempered with captions that are genuinely funny. “I was having a great time until I remembered that bees are dying at an alarming rate,” on a shot of him lounging on a boat next to an anonymous woman in a thong bikini. “I hope the fbi guy tracking my search history has learned as much about tractors this week as I have,” on a portrait in which he’s wearing a Wynonna and Naomi Judd T-shirt and a cowboy hat. “If he didn’t have such a razor-sharp wit,” DJ and producer Mark Ronson told me, “I don’t think he’d get away with some of the handsome-boy posts that he does.” Observing Diplo through this lens feels like watching someone do an extended bit about being a world-famous DJ. His life is as absurd as it is aspirational, and he leads with the absurdity. The result is a 41-yearold man with the self-deprecating tone of a millennial woman reared on 30 Rock and the meme literacy of a Gen Z’er. If everyone on social media is performing constantly, he lets you in on that fact. There is an authenticity to his inauthenticity. Another core tenet of the Diplo brand. I first met Diplo in Los Angeles earlier that week, at a smoothie-bowl place next door to a private celebrity gym. I had no idea what was happening inside the private celebrity gym because its frosted-glass windows concealed the horrors within, but I knew the place meant business because the signage included a mysterious anvil logo. Diplo was there preparing for a Tough Mudder. The day of the race, he told Instagram he was “heading straight from the night club to a 14 mile obstacle course with zero training” with the hashtag #prayfordiplo. “It sucks that it does matter so much, because if I didn’t have all those peripheral things about me on social media, people wouldn’t pay attention to my music,” he said, admitting that he (continued on page 93)

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Having a highly specific diet has gone from dinnerparty faux pas to fully common sense.

So we talked to some of our favorite wellnessminded people about how they feed themselvesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; and how it makes them feel.

No w

Brunello Cucinelli or asking a server whether a dish was, say, gluten- or dairy-free. Now, finally, the culture has changed. We are all free to let our freaky food flag fly. You have celiac? Tell us more! You’re vegan? How long and how do you feel? Dietary restrictions and food philosophies that used to garner eye rolls are now conversation starters. Today, more than ever, if you have the means, a vast array of choices—healthy ones—are on offer. You can pick from shelves of adaptogens, fermented foods, and probiotics at your local grocery store. Eat a diet specified according to your dominant dosha. Or chow down on a vegan Beyond Meat patty at any number of fast-food chains. We all have different needs. So we all eat different—and there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just a matter of figuring out what’s right for you now. In the spirit of today’s eat-my-way ethos, we asked a spectrum of conscientious eaters how they feed themselves, and others, now.

The Fashion Designer Who Believes Simple, Communal Meals Feed the Soul Today, if you visit Brunello Cucinelli’s company headquarters in the medieval Italian village of Solomeo, you won’t see any of his employees hunched over salads or fast-casual bowls on their desks at lunchtime. At 1 p.m., everyone takes a 90-minute lunch break at the brand’s cafeteria, where they commune over wine and a three-course meal typically of pasta, grilled meat, ﬁsh, or eggs, and fruit prepared by local cooks with ingredients grown on his land. Cucinelli didn’t have much growing up. On his family’s farm in Umbria, breakfast consisted of bread and milk straight from the cow, lunch was tomato sauce with homemade pasta (they couldn’t a≠ord to buy spaghetti), and for dinner, game that they had hunted. In his family of 13, food and company held equal importance. “There was a great respect for eating,” he recalls. “It was a rite. We would all sit around the same table, and everybody would tell a story.” Now the founder and CEO is a billionaire, thanks to his namesake company built on ultra-luxurious cashmere sweaters and sprezzy Italian suits, yet he still has an almost

religious reverence for the Umbrian way of eating from his youth: humble meals with family. “It was really very, very simple food, but still, I have it in my heart, in my mind, in my soul,” he says. Cucinelli follows the advice of the Benedictines, some of whom lived in Umbria centuries ago. “In the Benedictine culture of this Umbrian region, the recommendation is not to eat too much in the evening,” he says. It’s a piece of wisdom modern eaters are just starting to catch up to. Cucinelli’s meals, while uncomplicated, are made with premium fresh produce from local gardens around Solomeo. “It has always been said that in Italian cuisine, every dish must contain not more than three ingredients or ﬂavors,” he says of his devotion to simplicity. “Today we grow our fruits, our vegetables, the way we did 50 years ago. We do it according to nature. We don’t add anything chemical. Everything happens with respect and harmony with creation.” Even on workweek days, he takes a short nap after lunch and encourages his employees to do the same. To Cucinelli, meals aren’t just fuel but sacred rituals, places where great questions are debated and stories are shared. “Our soul needs to be fed on a daily basis too,” he says, “as much as the body and the mind.” — S A M U E L H I N E

David Zilber

The New York City–based, Alsatian-born Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who operates more than 30 restaurants around the world, has long been a sovereign of fine dining. Now he’s pivoting toward a new role—as a

Noma’s Director of Fermentation Wants You to Ferment Everything Along with chef René Redzepi, Zilber cowrote The Noma Guide to Fermentation, bringing cutting-edge R&D lessons from the worldrenowned Denmark restaurant to the masses.

though, more people were asking for a vegetarian menu, so we would create one à la minute using what we had in the kitchen. The availability at the Union Square farmers market was [also] improving—six different colors of carrots, five colors of beets. People wanted to eat more vegetables for their health and also for the sake of preserving nature. It takes two weeks to grow a radish but two years to grow a steak. I opened ABC Kitchen, in 2010, and abcV, in 2017, because people were saying, “You are doing such a good job with cooking vegetables, why don’t you open a vegetable restaurant?” And in September, I added a vegetable tasting menu to Jean-Georges. When you consider the array of vegetables and herbs and spices, there is no limit. You can be more creative. They make you think outside of the box, be more experimental, and feel better about the future of the planet. It is more gratifying. And nobody needs to eat a three-pound steak. We are going back to what we are supposed to eat. I want to be a part of that future.

People get really fucking fired up by the fact that there’s that holy-shit moment: “Wow, it’s not just sauerkraut, it’s not just kimchi, it’s not just pickles. It’s everything. I can make meat taste different if I want to. I can make fruit taste different if I want to. I can enter this pact with nature and interact with the food that I produce and eat.”

— A S TO L D TO P R I YA K R I S H N A

FITNESS & PROTEIN MORNING SHAKE At Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s extremely fashionable plant-based restaurant, abcV, the old bodybuilding protein shake gets a chef-y update. It uses a luxe mixture of six nut and seed butters (pecan, hemp, chia, poppy, almond, and macadamia). But almond butter is a great substitute.

1 medium frozen banana ¼ cup plus 2 Tbsp. unsweetened almond milk ½ cup frozen blueberries 1 Tbsp. nut butter 1 Tbsp. brown rice protein 1 Tbsp. hemp protein ½ tsp. vanilla extract 1½ small dates Purée all ingredients in a blender until smooth.

It seems like more and more people are getting into fermenting at home. What’s going on there?

You say fermented foods not only taste good but also feel good to eat. Why is that?

You end up tasting the molecules responsible for satiety in a higher quantity than you would in a traditional meal. By outsourcing that act of digestion, your body assimilates them at a much higher rate. Meals at Noma always leave you feeling full but never bloated. [At] Noma, vegetables, because of fermentation, can be as delicious as any steak.

Fermentation has been around forever, but it seems like Westerners started talking about it more recently.

The reason why it’s exciting is because things go wrong on occasion—the splendor of the natural world is the diversity and uncontrollability of fermentation writ large. When you understand that, it lets you ferment better and lets you move through the world more at peace, with more understanding, with more appreciation for the natural world, and that is a really fucking powerful thought. —CAM WOLF

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Jason Widener

The Erewhon VP Who Knows All the NextLevel Groceries for “Radiant Living” 4. Flora Pumpkin Seed Oil “When I get off my oils, I can feel it. Pumpkin seed oil is great for your prostate because it’s so high in minerals. There’s a consensus [that] there are parasites in your body. This oil is antiparasitic—it’s going to help get rid of that.”

L.A.’s cult health-food mini chain Erewhon has been the bleeding edge of wellness, drawing ﬁt celebrities like Jake Gyllenhaal and the Goop queen herself, Gwyneth Paltrow. So we asked VP Jason Widener, who started out as a tonic-bar barista, about what we should be stu∞ng into our eco-friendly totes. — A S T O L D T O M A R I U Y E H A R A

5. E3Live Blue-Green Algae “Your body detoxes naturally, but because of pollution and food today, our livers are overtaxed, our kidneys are overtaxed, our blood needs cleansing. That’s why you want blue-green algae.”

3. Pitaya (Dragon Fruit) “It’s a prebiotic. People use it in smoothies, and it feeds good bacteria and the body’s microbiome.”

6. QuintEssential Quinton “Phytoplankton bloom is a pure source of food for whales. It’s highly nutritious and detoxifying.”

7. Maui Nui Venison “This is invasive deer—wild Hawaiian venison. It’s sustainable. It’s clean meat. Anything wild that’s foraging on Hawaiian foliage is going to be really good.”

2. Jing Herbs Cordyceps “It’s amazing for energy. It helps you absorb more oxygen. Athletes use it. It’s great for the immune system. With different types of mushrooms, you [get] a compounding effect.”

8. HealthForce Spirulina “Almost a complete food that’s alkalizing, liver detoxifying, and blood building. It has chlorophyll, the blood of the plant, which gives you energy— micronutrient energy.”

1. Jing Herbs Reishi “A medicinal mushroom that’s been used for thousands of years, it’s revered. It’s very calming but [also] raises consciousness and cognitive functioning.”

9. Medicinal Foods Chocolate-Covered Sprouted Almonds With Maca, Chlorella, and Ashwagandha “A raw nut is much harder for your body to digest. After sprouting, it becomes more enzyme-rich and bioavailable.”

A$AP Ferg

The Touring Rapper on a No-Carb Diet

We caught up with rapper A$AP Ferg while on the road touring for his latest album, ‘Floor Seats,’ where his daily routine revolves around performing high-energy shows and trying to kick his carb habit. I’ve been on a no-carb diet since I started my tour in early November. When you’ve got two months on a bus, you can kind of contain everything. Your schedule is the same every day. So I like doing challenges when I’m on the road. This tour, I’m trying to reach a weight goal that I’m going to keep to myself. It’s been about a month, and I’ve already lost 13 pounds. I’m 31 now. As you get older, you take more notice of the changes that are happening in your body and how it breaks down food differently. I’m into fashion, so I want to be able to fit into certain things. You can’t be jiggy in your clothes if you’re not looking and feeling right. Also, I want to be light on my feet when I’m performing. I’m onstage for four hours every night—for two months. I want more energy. My father died of kidney failure, so I’ve always been conscious of working out and what I put in my body to live longer and feel good. And everyone who’s a little stocky

Cassidee Dabney

The Gluten-Intolerant Chef Who Welcomes Wellness Retreaters to the Great Smoky Mountains As the executive chef of renowned restaurant the Barn at Blackberry Farm, a 4,200-acre estate in the Great Smoky Mountains, Cassidee Dabney put the tiny Tennessee town of Walland on the culinary map with her elevated Appalachian tasting menus. But when she recently developed a gluten intolerance, she started to rethink how to manage the growing list of guests’ dietary restrictions without compromising the dining experience.

When did you start hearing about food sensitivities as a chef?

Is that particular to Blackberry Farm?

We are a resort, and we have lots of people coming in for different reasons. We normally have a vegetarian, a vegan, and a regular menu. And we always call guests to ask if there are dietary preferences or allergies. If we have a kosher guest, we will get kosher proteins. If there is a latex allergy, we buy things that have never seen latex.

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I started working at Blackberry Farm in 2005, and very rarely did you hear about gluten intolerance. The change happened very slowly, but it felt like the next thing you know, you wake up and are like, “Oh, my God—no one can eat anything.”

and naturally built like me has to watch what they eat. Sugar sticks to all the people in my family. I love candy. I love cookies. I love potato chips. I love all the bullshit food. But a lot of those carbs don’t do anything for your body, so it makes no sense to eat them. I have a chef that’s with me on tour, so I don’t have to think about where I’m going to get my next meal from. I usually do breakfast of an egg-white omelet with turkey bacon. Then I’ll have a protein shake after my workout. I will try to do fish or chicken with vegetables or a salad before my performance. And then after I perform, I’ll have dinner, which is another plate of protein and vegetables. I’ve also learned you gotta take your vitamins every day: fish oil, C-1000 antioxidant protection, vitamin D3, and omega 3-6-9 [a blend of the healthy omega-3, -6, and -9 fatty acids]. If I cheat, then the next day my trainer makes my workout that much more gruesome. You have to work it out. But I haven’t cheated yet. This is the best I’ve ever felt in my life. — A S TO L D TO C L AY S K I P P E R

In the past, chefs have had the reputation of not accommodating dietary restrictions. But now chefs themselves seem to be more conscious about their diets.

Last August, I was trying to lose weight for a television thing, so I went on a low-calorie diet, and I kept not eating gluten. When I tried to reintroduce it, my body was like, “No, you cannot have that.” Also, every January, the cooks pick a dietary restriction and live that way for a month. It is eye-opening. Two years ago, I went vegan. I was craving a burger, and I realized that most veggie burgers have gluten in them. It sucks to go to a restaurant and have only four things on the menu that you can eat. I know how good it feels to be taken care of.

That seems like a lot of work.

Accommodating all these restrictions usually adds about two hours to our work each night. But it’s good that people are more aware of what they are putting into their bodies and their reactions to it. And chefs are finally feeling empathy toward them. — P. K .

HOW A SOCIAL MEDIA MOM HYPED THE DROP OF A NEW APPLE BREED Bred at Washington State University, the Cosmic Crisp apple dropped with the magnitude of a new Supreme collection last December. It combines the sweet-tart flavor of the Honeycrisp with the hardiness of the Enterprise (it can reportedly last up to a year chilled), and Washington State growers, who paid for the research, bet big on the apple by planting some 12 million trees. When produce-industry players like the Watermelon Board or Dole want to move product, they call “the Produce Mom,” Lori Taylor. “This is the largest fruit and vegetable launch of all time,” she says. She was tapped as part of the “Influencer Team” for the Cosmic Crisp’s mammoth-for-an-apple $10 million marketing campaign, assembled by Proprietary Variety Management. Before the Cosmic Crisp’s launch, Taylor ginned up the Produce Moms website with recipes for a no-bake apple tart and apple dog treats. “To try the Cosmic Crisp is to love the Cosmic Crisp,” she coos. — C .W.

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J.B. Smoove

The Grill-Master Actor Who Became a Hard-Core Vegan Stand-up comedian and ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ star J.B. Smoove used to joke that he was a “part-time vegan, full-time carnivore.” Two years ago, he went all in and hasn’t looked back since. My wife and I have been together for 18 years, married 15. She hasn’t had meat in over 27 years, I think. I’d be on that grill all day making food. People would come to my house for Thanksgiving dinner just

because I made deep-fried turkey. I called myself part-time vegan, full-time carnivore: Whenever she cooked, or if she wanted to go to a vegan restaurant, that’s what I ate. But when I was traveling on the road, I was on my normal country-boy diet. New Year’s of 2018, I went full-time vegan. I knew it would make my wife so happy, because she’s been trying to convert me for years. For me it was like, “You know, I’m going to give it a try. Let me see how long I can go before my country boy kicks back in.” Then I realized how long I had actually been vegan, and I said, “You know what? I don’t think I got to go back.” I do it for diet. I do it for health reasons. I do it for animals, for the planet. For me, it’s a wide spectrum. I’ve always been tall and lanky. But I was at 205 when I went vegan, and my body immediately dropped down to like 175 out of nowhere. I’ve

evened out, so right now I carry my body weight at 185. I’m comfortable at 185. That’s my body weight that I love, because I don’t get the little mu∞n top, you know? I look good in my damn suit. My buddies ride me. They’ll tease me while I’m on the road. We’ll go to a restaurant after-hours, and so they’ll say, “Come on, man, just one Bu≠alo wing, man. We won’t tell Shah”—my wife’s name—“we won’t tell her, man. Just take a nice bite, man. You can order the chicken and wa±es, man. We won’t say anything.” But I will say this: They all are saying they’ve been going to the doctor or they want to lose some weight and want to get healthy. They all say, “You know what, man? I’m thinking about doing it for three days a week or trying it for a month or two and seeing how it works out.” — A S T O L D T O G A B R I E L L A PA I E L L A

What are the benefits of time-restricted eating?

Satchidananda Panda

Every organ has its own clock: There’s a time of peak performance, and there’s a time when they repair and rejuvenate. For example, every day we damage up to one tenth of our gut lining. (The pH of our gut is 1.5, so it’s very acidic. If you put that on paper, that paper will disappear in a couple of days.) So each night, our gut replaces somewhere between 7 to 10 percent of its lining. And just as you cannot repair a highway when traffic is flowing, you cannot repair gut lining very well if there is food in the system.

The Scientist Researching Time-Restricted Eating (a.k.a. Intermittent Fasting)

These days, it seems like almost every other person—Jimmy Kimmel! Chris Hemsworth! Jack Dorsey!—is singing the gospel of intermittent fasting. But Satchidananda Panda, a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and one of the world’s leading researchers in the field of circadian rhythms, actually studies it on a scientific level, shaping how the public approaches intermittent fasting now and in years to come.

Has your own diet changed over the course of your research?

Two things have changed for me since I started time-restricted eating myself. My food-and-drink preferences have changed. I used to love gin and tonics and rum and Cokes. Now I can’t drink hard liquor. And my salt threshold has changed, so I can’t eat pizza from certain shops I won’t name. Also, since I’m going through 14 hours of fasting, my breakfasts are bigger. And because of that, I almost never snack between breakfast and lunch. We see that in all of our studies on time-restricted eating: Many people eat fewer snacks. — C . S .

What are some of the misconceptions?

You usually see people eating for 8 hours and fasting for 16. But our studies on mice have shown that eating within a 10-hour window is very similar to an 8-hour window. In fact, 11- and 12-hour windows will also give you a benefit—but not as much. Every nutritionist will come up with his or her own modification: “Skip breakfast.” “Skip dinner.” “Eight hours is the magic number.” But no long-term studies have been done on humans. We think 10 hours is a sweet spot. Your last calorie of the day should be at least two to three hours before going to bed. When we eat, blood circulation goes to our stomach to absorb all the nutrients. That raises our core body temperature, which makes it difficult to fall asleep. And two to three hours before going to bed, our melatonin levels rise. That makes our brain sleep, but it also makes our pancreas [which produces insulin to help the body process carbohydrates into energy] go to sleep. There’s not enough insulin to absorb glucose when we eat late at night.

Alexis Ohanian

The Steak-Eating Entrepreneur Who Switched to a Plant-Based Diet Before his daughter, Olympia, was born, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian took a hard look at his health and began investing figuratively and literally in the plant-based movement while taking notes from his wife, Serena Williams (also known as the greatest tennis player ever).

What about the birth of your daughter motivated you to reexamine your diet?

My first come-to-Jesus moment was when we found out that Serena was pregnant. That’s when it really hit me. I don’t want to be an unhealthy, lethargic dad when Olympia wants to practice soccer in the backyard. I spent all of my 20s focused single-mindedly on my work—I made sacrifices to myself physically and mentally in the pursuit of that. Previously, there were weeks where I’d order a ton of steaks on Instacart and put some spinach leaves on the side as my “side salad.” I’d eat that three, four, five times a week. Easy.

How did your diet change?

Sue Bird

The WNBA Star Who Powered a Comeback Through a Rebooted Diet

Things really changed when I watched this early cut of The Game Changers to see if I wanted to get involved [as an executive producer]. In the film, a bunch of guys who look like me—big dudes—made a great scientific and athletic case for eating plants. Around the same

Point guard for the Seattle Storm for the past 17 years, 11-time All-Star Sue Bird has played more games than any other athlete in WNBA history. At 39, she’s the oldest player in the league—with no eye on retirement—thanks in part to a diet-and-nutrition plan she rejiggered four years ago. My career was plateauing. I’d had three surgeries over two years. I looked in the mirror, and I wanted to make sure I was going to do everything I could to turn things around. One of those parts was my nutrition. I used to pound pasta. I would smash grilled cheeses. I used to eat pizza before games. That’s not hindering your performance per se, but you’re not getting the fuel you need. My diet [now] totally revolves around basketball: I’m constantly in a cycle of fueling for my workout and refueling after my workout—and then repeat. A typical day starts with an egg sandwich with spinach, onions, two eggs, on a gluten-free bagel or English muffin— some sort of carb. Then I’ll go work out. The minute I’m done, I’ll have a protein shake: almond milk, orange juice, frozen strawberries, and protein powder. Then, within an hour of working out, I’ll have lunch. It’s [about] four ounces of protein, two servings of vegetables, and two servings of a carb. A burrito is a great bang for your buck if you choose the right toppings (no sour cream, no cheese), but get your protein, your veggies, maybe some guac, because avocados are good for recovery, wrap it up in the tortilla—boom. Then for dinner: four ounces of protein, some veggies, and a starch. I don’t eat “white carbs” at night, so no bread. But I’ll have sweet potato or spaghetti squash. I totally prescribe to an 80/20 lifestyle. So 80 percent of the time, I’m dairy-free, I’m gluten-free. But then 20 percent of the time, I go enjoy something that I really like: pizza, burgers and fries, ice cream. That keeps me sane. It would have been fascinating to know what might’ve happened if I was eating the way I am now at 25. But right now I feel good for being 39. I feel great for being 39. — A S TO L D TO C . S .

Have you been able to take any pointers from how Serena eats?

She’s on a whole different level when it comes to what she eats and how she exercises. But I’m always bugging her to drink more water, actually. For years, going back to when we were dating, I’d watch her go work out in the morning without eating food. It didn’t really hit me until I fell down some rabbit hole on YouTube and saw this video saying it’s actually better to run on empty. I looked over at Serena like, “Goddamn, you’ve been doing this the entire time and I’ve totally missed it. Do you ever eat before practice?” She was like, “No, never.” From that moment on, when I do show up in the gym, it’s on an empty stomach. For her, that’s business as usual. For me, it was an epiphany. — A L E X S H U LT Z

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eople do all kinds of wild things these days in an attempt to feel better and restore themselves to

the primal. Lately we seem to be finding it in rock climbing. ¶ “There’s an innateness to it,” says Alex Honnold, the most famous climber on the planet. “We are primates. We’re great apes. We are hardwired to move in this way.” ¶ If you are a member of

recreational climbing’s still dominant demographic—à la Honnold, a white male between

18 and 35, though the sport is approaching gender parity and racial diversity is also on

the rise—it’s probable that you or someone you know has recently caught the fever. Instagram is lousy with glamour shots of attractive millennials sending boulder problems, and celebrity fans include Frank Ocean, Jason Momoa, Brie Larson, and Jared Leto. In the lead-up to the sport’s Olympic debut this year in Tokyo, there are more competitions and gyms dedicated to climbing than ever before. The primitive impulse might partly explain the frenzy, since along with running and swimming, climbing has been a basic way the human animal has negotiated its environment for millennia. But the sport’s core values—rugged individualism, self-actualization, performance e∞ciency, crowdsourced problem-solving—also position it as a uniquely attractive recreation for our tech-optimized, permalancing, late-capitalist moment. The arrival of modern gyms tricked out with coworking spaces, REI outposts, conference rooms, cafés, and craft beer (not to mention a built-in like-minded community) has turned climbing into a full-on lifestyle choice: You never have to leave. Fans of Honnold are already familiar with his most legendary accomplishment: On June 3, 2017, he became the ﬁrst person to scale El Capitan, Yosemite’s vertical granite slab, without a rope or safeguards of any kind, as captured in the Oscar-winning documentary Free Solo. Nobody knew whether the ascent was even possible, and it certainly wasn’t advisable, and the crew working on the movie—many experienced climbers themselves—had to consider the horrifying prospect that they might actually be making a snu≠ ﬁlm. Honnold set out before dawn and summited while the breakfast bu≠ets were still open. His (characteristically moderate) reaction upon making history after 3 hours 56 minutes: “So delighted.” The word inspiring has been degraded through overuse, but there’s no other way to put it: Alex Honnold’s El Cap climb was truly, excruciatingly inspiring—a feat that transcended sports and probably even art. In it he

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articulated the direct confrontation between humanity and eternity that most people dedicate their lives to avoiding. Jimmy Chin, the climber and filmmaker who, with his wife, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, codirected Free Solo, helps put the singularity of the achievement into context: “It would be the Hail Mary from half-court at the NBA Finals, except that if you didn’t make it, you die.” Then he revises the metaphor: “You have to make every single shot you take in that game or you die.” A few nights ago, Honnold was bivouacking o≠ the side of El Cap, sleeping under the full November moon. With his friend Tommy Caldwell, a fellow elite pro, he’d spent the season laying a new route up the wall and had returned to strip rope and clean up. Today, Honnold, an in-demand speaker on the corporate/TED/VC circuit, participated in a discussion on risk management for a group of venture capitalists (the partner who moderated is a big ice climber). Now, well after dark, he is at a soon-toopen franchise of Planet Granite, part of the country’s largest group of climbing gyms (for which he is a board member), near an industrial park o≠ the freeway in Fountain Valley, California, modeling fashion pants. “It’s all a life experience,” Honnold says, sitting in a modified lotus position, barefoot, having swapped out the Prada in favor of shorts and a tank top. “At this point, there are a lot of things I do in my life where I’m like, My body is a piece of meat that’s being used by others. That’s fine, that’s interesting, whatever.” Even late at night, in a fluorescent-lit warehouse, Honnold is alert, thoughtful, e∞cient, emitting the low-frequency zen of someone who spends much of his time in the wilderness. He speaks neatly, in complete sentences. Though friendly and game, he isn’t inclined toward hyperbole or the ingratiating tricks of conversational mirroring. The closest he comes to swearing is the occasional “freakin’ ” or “jeez.” It turns out that achieving the sublime doesn’t comprise one grand, dramatic gesture so much

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as a series of small, rational preparations. As Honnold describes in his main-stage TED Talk, the grand achievement comes from meticulously breaking down big goals into small chunks and then grinding each one till you’ve cracked it open. Ultimately, this collection of small, solved problems can become, in the zoom out, a giant mosaic: sweeping, dramatic, profound. Scaling El Cap without ropes is the mosaic. “That was freakin’ heinous for me,” says Honnold of the TED Talk. “The irony is that I found it really hard to prepare for that. Because if I spent an hour trying to memorize and practice, it felt like pulling teeth. Whereas I can spend hours and hours at the gym. It’s easy to spend six hours training for something that you love doing.” Honnold formalized his interest in the sport at age 11, when his parents took him to the Granite Arch Climbing Center near Sacramento after reading about it in the paper. He was hooked from the start, consuming classic manuals like How to Climb 5.12 and trying to incorporate the lessons on his own. “I was really shy, I didn’t like team sports,” he remembers. “I didn’t hang out with other kids that much.” After dropping out of Berkeley after freshman year, he committed himself to the life of a climbing dirtbag—the die-hard band of peripatetic, van-dwelling, subsistence-living climbers—that’s anti-materialist by definition. “When I first started climbing, it was still pretty fringe,” recalls Chin, now 46. “It was usually the misfits that didn’t belong, either in mainstream sports or society. Now it’s a thing. The dirtbag lifestyle is now something people aspire to in their $100,000 Sprinters.” Recent data attests to a surging, lucrative industry: Per the Outdoor Industry Association, approximately 7.7 million Americans went climbing in 2018, more than ever before, and two years ago, climbers injected nearly $12.5 billion into the economy—mainly through travel but also on gear and gym memberships. According to Climbing

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Business Journal, 2018 was also the industry’s most successful year on record, with 50 commercial facilities opening domestically, bringing the total number of commercial climbing gyms in the U.S. to 517. “At this very moment, there is way more demand than there is supply,” says Jeremy Balboni, CEO of Brooklyn Boulders, part of the new generation of climbing facilities whose ﬁrst location opened in 2009. Even 15 years ago, Balboni says, there were few appealing options for indoor climbers. The sport had been relegated to lone rooms of regular gyms, inviteonly private walls, and badly lit, uninspired climbing facilities in outlying neighborhoods. “We

City who has been climbing for ﬁve years. Bored with the regular gym, she was introduced to climbing after her then boyfriend (now husband) caught the bug. “Once you start reaching the top of things, doing a little bit better, you fall in love with it. It was really rewarding having this activity where you’re literally holding your own weight.” Ruben climbs primarily for the workout and acknowledges that the social engagement and community spirit of the climbing gym required a bit of an adjustment. “Normally you’re in a regular gym and you don’t even make eye contact. Everyone’s doing their own thing. That was the big di≠erence for me,” she says. Ultimately she

tar ted climbing s t rs fringe. It was u , it i f I tty s n e that didn’ t belon ually e r h s p its g. W f “ wa is m t he

TO R C H I N C E R CODI IMMY — F R E E S O LO J looked at [climbing] and we said, ‘This is an amazing sport that should be put on a pedestal and brought to a bigger audience.’ ” Brooklyn Boulders’ flagship gym, in the Gowanus section of the borough, opened with gra∞tied walls and live music. “The response was immediate,” says Balboni. The company currently has five locations, with five more on the way, o≠ering everything from yoga classes and summer camps to comedy nights and drum circles. “People will come on their o≠ day to work, or to hang out with their friends, because of the environment itself,” says Balboni. “It feels really good in there.” “I actually kind of hated it at first—it’s kind of scary. You have to get used to the heights, obviously,” says Jolie Ruben, 32, a photo editor in New York

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converted to climbing’s distinct style of camaraderie. “It’s one of those things you don’t realize until you go through it yourself. When I’m up on the wall and a stranger’s cheering me on, I’m not like, ‘That’s weird; she doesn’t know me.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s awesome—that’s pushing me to do better.’ ” Ruben now climbs about twice a week, usually with her husband but also with friends and colleagues, and credits the sport with toughening her mental game: “It’s deﬁnitely [about] overcoming thinking that I can’t do something, that I can’t get from one hold to the other.” Marie Buckingham, a 15-year recreational-climbing vet who has climbed all over the world, extols the sport’s physical and mental rigor, the way it insists you get comfortable with your

own vulnerability: You can’t bullshit your way up a wall. “It requires you to be present, to really challenge yourself,” she says. “There’s not much cheating you can do to get better at rock climbing. You have to build your discipline and your strength and your conditioning over time. When you’re climbing, you’re not thinking about your task list from work or whatever your best friend said to you last week that you feel weird about.” Buckingham, 31, estimates she’s met at least half of her closest friends through climbing. But she points out that the sport’s etiquette, including its vast insidery lexicon, is potentially alienating to beginners. “There’s so many ways to describe movement, shapes of holds, friction, weather patterns—people call this beta, like information. Part of the barrier to entry is understanding what the fuck people are talking about.” Unlike its dirtbag forebears or the auras surrounding other sporty subcultures—skating’s legacy of punk defiance, the existential poetry of surfing—climbing’s new wave isn’t especially a∞liated with cool. If cool is about casual detachment, climbing is about literal and figurative attachment, a concerted state of mental and physical engagement that requires nerd levels of exactitude. In climbing, you try and you care. With its work ethic and goal setting and math-y language (beta, problem, projecting, redpoint) and unembarrassed communal enthusiasm, the modern climbing gym is almost ruthlessly wholesome, more like a church than a bar. You might do it wearing funny slippers, but the sport itself is not known for its silliness or frivolity or biting wit. As Honnold puts it, “To a certain extent, climbing is kind of serious. You don’t joke around too much. No sudden movements, nothing weird. Because the thing is, a lot of time in climbing, if something goes sideways, you could actually die.” As in a church, there’s a certain amount of proselytizing. When he learns I’ve never climbed in a gym, Honnold o≠ers some advice. (continued on page 95)

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A NEXTLEVEL LEISURE SUIT Gucci’s Alessandro Michele has shifted the paradigm of men’s suiting with pussy bows, flared trousers, and lots of jewels. His fluid interpretation of streetwear staples is just as significant. Blown up to massive proportions, this supremely comfortable washed-out denim tracksuit (jacket, $2,500, and pants, $1,200) has both Big Boi and Billie Eilish written all over it.

HOUSEPARTY SHOES Clogs are now a staple on par with sneakers and loafers in the fashionable-footwear spectrum. They’re also ridiculously comfortable and, crucially, easy to put on. JW Anderson’s are made in Italy with vibey landscape-printed felt uppers and cork soles ($590). Meaning, they’re perfect house slippers but can hold up when you inevitably use them to upgrade your Friday-night fit.

OUR FOUR FAVORITE PIECES OF THE SEASON’S MOST LAVISH WEEKEND WEAR.

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THE CARDI G A N K IL L E R

PROP ST YLIST: DUSTIN HUBBS AT MARK EDWARD INC.

One of designer Virgil Abloh’s go-to style moves is to throw on a worn-in denim jacket. For his third Louis Vuitton collection, Abloh’s adventures in highly advanced knitwear reached their apotheosis with this ultra-chunky wool version of his trusty trucker ($3,350). Your shawl-collar cardigan could never.

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ESOTERIC LOUNGE SHORTS Emily Adams Bode is one of the brightest rising stars in American fashion for a reasonâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;she can take a humble silhouette, like boxy rugby shorts, and create a soulful garment worth treasuring. These loose, cropped shorts ($435) are made out of vintage African country cloth, a Bode staple that only gets better with age.

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candy, of chewy narwhal skin with blubber. controls the territory—in particular its external policies and secuThis was harpoon-to-table, and hatchet-to-table, and rusted-riﬂe- rity—Greenland was granted home rule in 1979. Today the Danish to-table. And in the case of caribou, which by Greenlandic tradition government pumps more than $500 million in annual subsidies into must be carried out of the wilderness by the hunter’s own hands, it was Greenland, a fact that most Greenlanders acknowledge as key to their shoulder-and-back-to-table. This was extreme food served in a highly survival. The history between the island and Denmark is complicated dramatic, weirdly bountiful environment. It made the American move- and blurry, and the social scars run deep. For years, too, the Danes ment feel quaint and prissy. Like people in Wellington boots playacting have stocked Greenlandic markets with Danish food, changing the for some sort of reality-television series. But it was more than that too: eating habits of Greenlanders, separating them—sometimes alienatWith global warming, the whole fundamental idea of Greenlandic cui- ing them, as Inu said—from their local cornucopia. Where other national cuisines had taken centuries to form, sine was in the throes of reconsideration and change, at the same rapid pace that the island itself seemed to be shifting politically and socially. Greenland’s, it seemed, was open to sudden evolution—and perhaps, If food is identity, one of the urgent questions in Greenland these days too, debate about how a place goes from subsisting on meat and fat seemed to be, how, exactly, are you supposed to approach and create in order to survive the long, cold winters to the higher levels of yearround gastronomy. What fused in my imagination, then, was a lone and ingest that identity as it melts into some new form? I’m guessing history may one day show that no Viking expe- whale and a table set with linen cloth on its back, a melting iceberg dition—or whaling voyage—took as long as my attempt to get to with a cherry on top. Greenland, sparked three years ago by a chance encounter with an If global warming was set to reshape the planet in profound, irreenigmatic Greenlandic chef in my hometown of Portland, Maine. His versible ways, Greenland seemed to be one of the most obvious places name was Inunnguaq Hegelund. Inu, as he asked to be called, spoke on earth already a≠ected. And one could read some of the tea leaves— with the whispery rolling r’s and th’s of someone operating their the weird, sometimes counterintuitive harbingers of our future writ third language. He came trailing his island behind, or embodied large—if one were to look closely for a moment at Greenland’s food it—vowels of rock, ocean, and ice on his tongue. He’d made his reputation back home by reimagining traditional dishes in surprising, sometimes bombastic ways, prompting some For many s c i e nti s t s, to glimpse in him the future of Greenlandic restaurant cuiGre enland is grou nd ze ro fo r glo b al war mi ng; sine. As part of the festivities surrounding a meeting of the proj e ct i ons su g ges t that a s the Arctic Council—the eight-member forum of countries with sovereignty claims within the Arctic Circle—he was cooking at a local Portland restaurant, Vinland, named for the windswept spot where Leif Eriksson landed in North America. My hometown newspaper had billed Inu as Greenland’s top chef, and culinary scene. Inu said I should come, as if inviting me to a poker but Portland has a larger population than all of Greenland (67,000 game around the corner. Or a rave with northern-lights lasers. He said versus 58,000 people) and probably has more restaurants too the easiest way to understand Greenland was to eat her food. It seemed (according to TripAdvisor at the time of this writing, almost seven a polite and, with later hindsight, feckless toss-o≠—the thing you say times more, in fact: 384 to 57). One had to be honest: It wasn’t quite to placate the overeager guy with the tweaky quasar gleam in his eye, like José Andrés or Massimo Bottura swooping in, but still, to me it the one who’s asking one too many questions. The problem was, I took seemed exotic, in part because I didn’t know there were exportable the invite seriously. As if it had been issued by Greenland herself. I kept Greenlandic chefs, as I’d never thought of Greenlandic food as being thinking: Seal steak and seaweed? What am I missing? particularly exportable. What was Greenlandic cuisine, anyway? As Inu was excited to point out, the answer to that question was in the I A R R I V E D I N J U N E , in cool rain, in what would be among the midst of revision. As the ice sheet that covers 80 percent of the island warmer summers in Greenland’s history, including one 70-plus-degree had begun to melt, tubers had begun to appear again from the dirt July day (the 31st, to be exact) during which 11 billion tons of ice of old Norse farms. There were more potatoes and a celery-like herb melted from the ice sheet. There was no ticker-tape parade. Inu did

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At the home of not meet me at the airport, nor did he return my texts. meteorological fact. Greenland, it seems, is one of the Vittus Henson If I was befuddled by his absence, it added an air of few spots on earth that might one day provide refuge (center), an Inuit mystery. I was being ghosted by a guy I barely knew, from the new ravages. family shares a That first night, at the hotel restaurant sans Inu, I’d who may or may not have been serious about hanging traditional meal of out, in a country where I knew zilch other humans. had a mouthwatering fillet of musk ox steak, unexpected, dried cod and for in my mind’s eye I had equated the musk ox, sporting Meanwhile, Greenland went about her business. minke whale. Projections suggest that as the island’s ice sheet melts its distinctive heavy coat and long, curved horns, with to nothing, seas will rise up to 24 feet, swamping New one of God’s ugliest beasts, one named for its own stink, York City, among other metropoles. But planet Earth is, by many esti- no less. But the grilled steak had been so tender and buttery, so lean mates, already on the verge of large-scale migrations, virulent disease and sweet. It was more closely related to goat and sheep than to cow. outbreaks, and border stresses that will rearrange the chess pieces And, as I soon found, better—and more juicy—than all three. The other of our world. The New York Times figures that 800 million people in thing about it was that it had been hunted just up the fjord. South Asia alone will be a≠ected. On the second night, by a serendipitous turn of events (well, the If we’re all living under the big guillotine, that first morning pity and connections of a Stateside friend), I had been invited to eat the capital of Nuuk—like all capitals of the world, one must imag- at the home of Aleqa Hammond, the first female prime minister of ine—still bustled with oblivious, whistling people heading to work, Greenland. When I’d mentioned that fact to another Greenlander, I was met with a raised eyebrow. “Oh, that’ll be interesting,” she said. Aleqa was as well known for her cooking as for her outspokenness, she said, and predicted we’d be eating whale. Sure enough, steak number two was minke whale, taken from the nearby waters of the Arctic Ocean. At Aleqa’s cozy, i slan d’s ic e she et me lt s to n oth in g, thoroughly modern three-story house with a killer view of the mountains, a sweet scent wafted past me at the front s e as wi ll ris e u p to 24 fe et , s wamping N ew Yor k Cit y. door. Pans sat simmering on the stove, and upstairs, where we were to dine, there were lit candles and narwhal tusks grocery shopping, visiting friends. In a study from the University of that hung from the ceiling. With her hair sheared short, at 55, Aleqa Copenhagen, most Greenlanders who were sampled acknowledged was warm and charismatic, with a quick intelligence and unapologlobal warming was real and impacting their land and their lives, getic steeliness. She had been raised above the Arctic Circle, in a place but a majority also saw global warming as a boon to farming, tour- called Uummannaq, having lost her father, a hunter, at age seven, ism, mining, and shipping. To commerce, that is. And with the loss when he’d fallen through the ice. of Greenland’s heavy coat of ice—the ice sheet reaches two miles Greenland had its own complicated history, she said, defined deep in some spots—the oddest e≠ect of all was that the island was by the collision of Inuit culture with that of, at first, the Danes actually rising due to a phenomenon called “post-glacial rebound” and then, during the 1940s, the Americans. Her political renown whereby, with the melting of the ice cap atop the earth’s solid crust, came partly from the stridency of her desire to see Greenland septhe surface would spring upward, elevator-like. The more swamped arate from Denmark—in her lifetime, she hoped—and partly from and submerged that water-level cities become in the future, the the 2014 allegations of misused funds that drove her from o∞ce. higher and higher a place like Nuuk might rise, in increasingly Regardless, the accusations hadn’t exactly derailed her political more temperate weather. It’s not a metaphor but a geological and career, as she still held a seat in the Greenlandic legislature and

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had recently run, without success, for one of two seats Greenland holds in the Danish Parliament. Aleqa could be counted as one of the leaders of a vanguard in Greenland, a new generation more than willing to strike back at what she saw as Greenland’s colonial oppressors. When our U.S. president made noise about purchasing Greenland from the Danes this past summer, she appeared on the BBC, calling him “very arrogant,” reminding the world that Greenland belonged to the Inuits, not to the Danes or to anyone else, for that matter. Apparently she didn’t mince her words about local politicians, either. Wandering Nuuk earlier that day, I’d found an election poster with her face on it by the side of the road, a hole punched through the middle. It was hard not to notice a certain amount of this strife in the air, to be honest. From the radio in a cab, I was introduced to the Greenlandic rapper Tarrak, whose protest song “Tupilak” touches on the tension between the Danes and the Greenlanders, and on the fate of Greenlanders who are shut out of their own society for not speaking Danish. “They’ll label us as drunks and nobodies. Are we still a colonized people?” rapped Tarrak. “We come home broken. See ourselves as nothing. And feel like nobodies.” The driver, an exuberant young West Greenlander, cranked it for me, bobbing his head, and said, with a huge smile, “I need to contact this guy and give him a big shoulder clap.” This vociferation aimed again and again at Denmark caught me by surprise, particularly because we tend to idealize the Danes as being somewhat enlightened and progressive. As one Dane in Greenland told me, yes, if you had to be colonized by anyone, the Danes certainly weren’t the worst. And yet the country had been a domineering, schismatic presence in Greenland: For instance, Greenlandic hadn’t even been instituted as the o∞cial language of Greenland until 2009, while for many years islanders had been sent to Denmark for “proper” secondary schooling. “We’ve fucked up a lot of shit here,” said my Danish friend. Another woman I met, Maya Sialuk Jacobsen, born of a Danish father and a Greenlandic mother, said she’d grown up disconnected from some of the rituals of her Inuit past, more fully reconnecting only in adulthood, partly by allowing herself to get traditional face tattoos, five straight lines drawn from her bottom lip down her chin and a V on her forehead, similar to designs found on 500-year-old Inuit female mummies. (The Danes had banned the tattoos 300 years ago, but now there is a small but passionate movement of women getting these face tattoos, thanks in large part to Jacobsen herself, who had learned the art of application.) On the plate before me sat Aleqa’s whale: panfried in butter, then dished up with a sauce of shallots and angelica, an old staple with a new jus. I had eaten whale once before, in the most northerly part of Norway, where it was served as a peppered steak, panseared and rare—almost like sushi—feeling a little like forbidden fruit. But on this evening at Aleqa’s house, the whale was just…dinner. Simple, on the well-done side: dense, tasty, and rich (more meaty than fishy, with a faint aftertaste of the sea). There was hardly any ado about it. The whale, in this setting, was absolutely normal. But normal had a di≠erent connotation here. Savoring the meat, I was made to understand that the whale before me now was multiple, that one could, in their imagination, hold the whale up and rotate it 360 degrees to gain a sense of Greenland itself. It represented Aleqa’s own past: her father, the hunter, and the ancestors too. It represented part of the reason the Danes had come in the first place, how they’d arrived in the 1700s to this Inuit homeland obsessed with their religion and their need for whale blubber to light Europe. And the whale was a symbol, too, of Greenland’s

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formerly pristine biome—which held, within its DNA, its future, both its purity and the heavy metals contaminating its marine life. Worse, as the ice disappeared—and with it ice algae, which is eaten by plankton, which in turn is eaten by whales—the chain e≠ect eventually spelled disaster for much of the whale population. Finally, too, it represented a sort of political errancy in the eyes of Western activists, for to eat whale was to commit an almost criminal act. This idea, that there’s a rightness and wrongness to food, and that someone acts as arbiter—and usually that someone is a conqueror, in one guise or another—seemed particularly dangerous, if depressing. The supply ships came here each year from Denmark when the ice melted, packed with Danish products to restock the settlements of Greenland. The supermarkets carried something that sort of translated as “the One-Week Food Packet.” It was food for a week, but as one Greenlander described it to me, it was also a dependency, just “pork, pork, pork. Pork from Denmark. And people buy it because it’s cheap.” If the food of Greenland had indeed been criminalized to some extent by outsiders, the residents of Greenland had been partially infantilized by outside food, too. For people like Aleqa and Inu, there was a battle for the hearts and minds—and stomachs—of their compatriots. There was the Danish language and then there was the Greenlandic language; there was Danish food and then Greenlandic food. Though the early European trading companies frowned upon miscegenation with the Inuit, Greenlanders today are a mix, some bearing Danish-Inuit names. But still the two cultures remained separate, signifying very di≠erent things—the island self-identiﬁes as 80 percent Inuit and 11 percent Danish—and the line between them remains fraught and supercharged. For Aleqa, though, it wasn’t just the Danes. She seemed equally vexed by the Americans. The U.S. had come to Greenland during the Second World War and built military bases—sharing everything from the latest dances to American food with the Greenlanders. We’d also devised a covert underground Cold War missile launch site. Known as Project Iceworm, it was meant to house medium-range missiles aimed at Soviet targets. The program was kept secret at the time, even from the Traditional Danish government, and was decommisGreenlandic foods, sioned in 1967, leaving behind radioactive left, and the hunters waste and PCBs, as well as over 50,000 galwho harvest them, lons of diesel embedded in the ice sheet working north of the Arctic Circle. that was now melting. While the Pentagon

I nu jum p e d ou t of the c ar, hud dle d him s e lf, and lit a ci garet te. He s t ar te d t alking t he n, a b out G re e nlandic c ui sine an d the urgency h e felt to rele a s e it from t he ch ains of t h e i sla n d’s D a ni sh over lo rds, p a r tly as an im p or t ant p oli t ic a l act. has acknowledged discussing the matter with the Danish government, I later met an American contractor in Greenland who hinted at cleanup work being done sooner rather than later—their security clearance prohibited them from saying more—but who knew? “Our nature—the environment—is everything to us,” Aleqa said. It was Greenland’s dowry; no wonder polluters were the enemy. The Inuits believed the ancestors would come back to feed their brethren if that environment was protected. And there was that $500 million in annual subsidies from the Danish government, which to Aleqa’s mind spelled the di≠erence between home rule and complete independence. The island possesses some 10 percent of the world’s rareearth elements, while the government has already leased blocks of land to mining and oil companies for exploration of untapped but one day potentially lucrative reserves, ones that have proven too di∞cult to access as yet. As I sliced, swabbed, and ate that juicy whale meat, my ﬁrst epiphany was this: The past and the present were compressed here—maybe more closely than in other places—and as much as it was renowned for ice and glacier, Greenland was equally about its meat and blood. that I am, I’d planned my Greenland trip around Inu, who had kindly o≠ered to help me navigate the island’s enormity while leading me on a bit of a culinary tour. But there was a catch: Greenland’s top chef didn’t have a restaurant of his own; instead he did freelance gigs and pop-ups, ones that took him all over the island—and the world—and his schedule seemed to change so often I’d hesitated before buying plane tickets. He had parried my needy emails with breezy ones that read “I’m excited” (was he? No exclamation point) and “Should we do some great things for some magazines?” When at last I bought tickets for hard-chiseled dates, his plans changed again. At least between his various gigs, we would overlap for two nights in Nuuk. Or would we? I’d sent more texts from the hotel—to no avail. It dawned on me that Inu might SO YES, OPTIMIST

be one of the few chefs in the world who genuinely didn’t seem to give a damn about being profiled in a glossy magazine. That, or he was an epic flake. I started to think of him as part of the fauna here, evanescent. Like the threatened narwhal and polar bear. Everything in Greenland seemed on the move as well, new patterns asserting themselves: The minke whales had drifted farther o≠shore, scores of halibut had pushed farther north for colder water, the polar bears kept searching for the ice that kept disappearing (sometimes now they floated south on icebergs, completely dislocating themselves from their habitat). I learned that traveling by sled dog was becoming less practical and more dangerous, because even when frozen the ice was increasingly untrustworthy and therefore deadly. There are roughly half the number of Greenlandic sled dogs as there were in 2000. (Increased snowmobile use and disease have contributed to the decline as well.) Meanwhile the most famous glacier in Greenland, Sermeq Kujalleq, a World Heritage site at Ilulissat, lost more ice than any other glacier in the country from 2000 to 2010. Sometime around 4 p.m. on one of those days in Nuuk, my phone rang. The White Rabbit. Inu. He was very sorry, something about having fallen asleep for a while, packing his bags, sick kid, very busy blah blah, then sleeping again. Though he was leaving Nuuk the next morning in the wee hours, he said he would pick me up so we could go for a little ride. He said he wanted to show me something, a surprise. I waited on the allotted curb, losing confidence as the minutes ticked by. A wind picked up, the clouds bruised overhead. All of a sudden came a tin-can car barreling down into the old harbor, a rented beater of unknown make with Inu behind the wheel. He smiled sheepishly through the windshield. And apologized again when I got in. Dissipation of bad blood, I felt a sudden surge of gratitude. He possessed the skittish, impulsive energy of a teenager, though he was 32, his thin face and ovoid eyes topped with black hair. We started driving, past the cranes and new construction of Nuuk, a city that was smack in the middle of a growth spurt, with plans to add 2,500 new houses, three new schools, an art gallery, an indoor stadium, and a new airport with an expanded runway that would contribute to forecasts of a rapidly increasing population, some coming from the hinterlands, some coming for the business opportunities. We passed an o∞ce for Deloitte, the multinational financial-services network. Inu wanted to take me out to where the road ended, so we looped up and down the mountains of the fjord as the pavement turned to dirt, where more of the new Nuuk was to be built in the near future, a neighborhood that would one day house 5,000 new residents. We came to a stop on a promontory looking back on the rising city itself, at the cranes and bright-colored buildings. It was moody out there, windy and gray, and Inu jumped out, huddled himself, and lit a cigarette. He started talking then, about Greenlandic cuisine and the urgency he felt to release it from the chains of the island’s Danish overlords, partly as an important political act. It wasn’t a country that ate out much, really; it was more the tourists that sustained the restaurant industry. Which was one challenge. He himself had recently run a pop-up restaurant, one that lasted seven (continued on page 90) months, o≠ering lunch and

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EVERY BLUE MOON, JOSH HOMME AND A FEW OF PLANET EARTHâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S REMAINING ROCK & ROLLERS DESCEND UPON JOSHUA TREE AND

EMERGE WITH AN ALBUM A WEEK LATER. INTRODUCING THE LATEST ITERATION OF ONE OF THE COOLEST ENDURING PROJECTS IN MUSIC.

Josh Homme (left) and Billy Gibbons in Joshua Tree.

the Rancho de la Luna studio in Joshua Tree, Josh Homme identifies the creature glaring at us from a nearby tree and explains that, pretty as he may be, the roadrunner is a tough old bird, able to subsist on a Mojave bu≠et of snakes and scorpions. “That’s a gutsy meal,” notes Homme with admiration. Southern California’s high desert is famously inhospitable to soft forms of life, but the hardy and the resourceful can thrive here. It makes sense, in a way, that this refuge for outliers and margin dwellers would also become the hideout for a certain endangered strain of rock-and-roll swagger, whose presence and influence on the coasts has lately been outshone by other genres of expression. “We come out here and nobody knows we’re out here—it don’t matter,” says Homme. Since the late ’90s, Homme, himself a native of the region, has been returning to Rancho de la Luna to convene the Desert Sessions, an ongoing project initially conceived as a makeshift laboratory for creative collaboration when he was between bands. Each installment attracts a fresh cast of players—veterans include PJ Harvey and Dean Ween as well as several of Homme’s Queens of the Stone Age bandmates—for a week or so of communal living in the desert, with the objective of writing and recording an album on the fly. After a 16-year hiatus, the Desert Sessions are back for Vols. 11 & 12 (which came out in October), and true to his stated ambition of putting together a group that “looks odd on paper,” this go-round Homme enlisted a compellingly daft lineup of friends: ZZ Top frontman and living guitar legend Billy Gibbons, along with Carla Azar of Autolux, British actor and musician Matt Berry, bass god and producer Les Claypool, singer-songwriter Libby Grace, Royal Blood’s Mike Kerr, Warpaint drummer Stella Mozgawa, Jake Shears from Scissor Sisters, and notorious guitar polygamist Matt Sweeney (Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Iggy Pop, Adele, et al.). “If you play music, you’re interested in the inner workings of these other THE PATIO OUTSIDE

gangs of people,” Homme says of the project’s origins. “I was looking for a way to keep playing without having a band and have it be kind of genre-less.” By design (ambitious goal, limited time, close quarters), the encounter encourages participants to quickly shed their self-protective habits and make themselves available—and valuable—to the collaborative process, and if this all sounds a bit therapeutic, sure, that can be part of it too. Depending on what an artist is looking for, the Sessions o≠er a varied menu of possible services: spiritual rehab for the creatively burned out, an under-the-hood look at how other people work, a chance to see old friends and make new acquaintances, an à la carte opportunity to generate something together in one brief energetic blast and then leave it all on the ﬁeld. Homme points out that the stakes are low—if the record is terrible, it’s not your

Above, the latest incarnation of the Desert Sessions (from left): Matt Sweeney (guitar), Libby Grace (guitar, vocals), Stella Mozgawa (drums), Billy Gibbons (guitar), Carla Azar (drums), and Josh Homme (guitar, vocals).

fault, and if it works, you were a part of it—and maintains that the result is almost secondary to the Sessions themselves: “Releasing it is a great word. That’s what you do: Frisbee it into the darkness.” “Josh was pretty clear and detailed about the spirit and philosophy behind the Desert Sessions when he invited me,” says Mozgawa. “[He said] basically, every musician we know is at a di≠erent caliber of success, whether it’s personal or monetary or whatever, but the thing that binds everyone is we all want to get back to that place of playing in the garage with our friends for the sake of making music.” Rancho de la Luna, part of a sprawling compound of outbuildings at the end of a dirt road, is a place you’ll ﬁnd only if you’re looking for it. On the property, studio owner (and Desert Sessions vet) Dave Catching has established

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an enchanted zone of digressive, maximalist entropy: cacti and bleached cinder blocks, Christmas lights strewn haphazardly in the chinaberry trees, sculptures fashioned from metal and tin cans rusting in the courtyard. Inside the studio is a blitz of gear, art, ashtrays, stained glass, and books (sample title: Beyond Reason: Art and Psychosis). While in residence, musicians sleep on-site and eat meals communally. “Ideas come in the walk for meals, when you’re not playing—I think the French call it staircase logic, where you’re leaving and you think of the answer when you’re going down the stairs,” says Homme. “And [at] most studios, you don’t take a break to watch the sunset. Or if it rains, go outside and quietly smell the air for a while. I think what it does is it declutters your mind, so all that’s left is a little emptiness, which is where all of a sudden ideas pop out—when they have the room.” Outside on the patio, Billy Gibbons emerges from a dark doorway, squinting against the sun’s glare—a groovy, cosmically charming Texas Gandalf in a black suit and beanie, ﬁngers laden with hardware. “Yo, Rev, how are you?” calls Homme. “Doing okay,” Gibbons replies. “Went to sleep at 6 a.m. I opened up the computer, and this page led to this one.… I looked at the clock, I was like, Damn, I better…” He places an order for a Starbucks latte with 10 stevias and takes a seat. “May I tell you you’re a handsome devil, though?” says Homme. Gibbons laughs. “Sleepless but handsome.” He summons something on his phone. “I took a nice desert shot early this morning out the back window. It looks all red.” He displays the landscape: hills in the background, a can of Modelo in the foreground. “There’s really great comfort when you’re surrounded by those that you trust,” Gibbons says of the creative energy here. “What you don’t trust is where you’ve never gone before.”

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So it goes in the desert, where synergy provides when the muse refuses. Generally, though, session days follow a loose structure. “Maybe someone would be here ﬁrst, making sound, and people would just naturally come in. Some people had a song idea already started, we would all contribute ideas. It was very free,” says Carla Azar. “Josh welcomed everybody’s input on any instrument.… Even though he is in control because it’s his thing, he got musicians he wanted to play with and just let everybody ﬁgure things out.” You can assemble all the talented people you want and still not guarantee chemistry, but according to Azar, the group struck an easy rhythm. “It didn’t feel foreign at all— that was the strangest thing,” she says. “I stopped at one point and said, ‘God, I can’t believe we’ve never played together. It feels like we have always played together.’ ” The high-vibrational tug of the desert—Gibbons has been visiting since he was a kid, and Mozgawa likes it so much she recently bought a house here—has long attracted artists. The space and quiet allow the tightly coiled urban mind to soften and unfurl. But maybe don’t get too comfortable out here: As frequent visitors know, the lunar loveliness of this place is not without menace. “I’ve come out here enough that I know what it feels like,” says Matt Sweeney, lounging on a deck chair with a guitar in the far reaches of the courtyard, “and it’s nice to have that inside your brain, a sense of space and a sense of utter meaninglessness. That you ain’t shit, that you could just go out there”—he indicates the hills beyond with a wave—“and be completely screwed, ants eating you.” For every installment, Homme likes to invite someone from outside the orbit of what Mozgawa calls “the hamster wheel” of recording and touring and promoting as a professional musician. This time he encouraged Libby Grace, a family friend, to take a break from full-time mom duties and give it a shot. Grace has been playing guitar and writing songs since she was a kid but has always been put o≠ by the idea of public performance. The laid-back

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process of the Sessions, and working with people she already knew socially, made it a gentle baptism. “What it did for me, ’cause it’s so di≠erent from what my life is, is that it showed me another version of myself that exists that I need to feed,” says Grace. “That it can exist, and so can mom and so can wife.” Homme, whose plans for the Sessions are ongoing and open-ended going into the future, points out that the beneﬁt is mutual: “The Les Claypools and Carlas and Billys and mes get to see that wonder, which is, ‘Do you remember why you started playing? She does.’ ” “If you are lucky enough to do this for a living, you have to be careful so you don’t turn into a bitter old crank,” adds Homme. “Somehow that happens as time goes on. But this is a great reminder of what it should be, what it could be.”

caroline m c closkey is a writer living in Los Angeles.

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dinner with paper napkins in a pub—serving polar bear stew and fried reindeer and raw whale skin with seaweed—but the finances had become too complicated. Meanwhile the idea of eating local has always been tricky in Greenland, in part because of the harsh weather and extremity—by November the sun would set and not rise again until March—but in part, too, because the population has been acculturated to eat imported food, including those ubiquitous pork packs. Over the years, Inu’s feelings about this kind of transactional interference had taken the form of proselytizing. “When I come to restaurants in Nuuk—or anywhere in Greenland,” he said, “I go back in the kitchens and have a co≠ee, and I ask, ‘Why are you serving chicken instead of fish?’ Once, people ate local every day here. Then came pasta and pork, and the rest.” Inu said it got so bad that up until about 10 years ago restaurants used few local ingredients, bypassing everything in Greenland’s natural icebox, all the whale, seal, halibut, lumpfish, narwhal, cod, reindeer, musk ox, angelica, lamb, seaweed, and tubers, flowers, and veggies on o≠er. The other challenge was dispositional. Inu said he taught each year at a vocational culinary school, in a town called Narsaq, where a new crop of enthusiastic chefs-in-training were learning the most modern techniques; in one case, he’d even paid for a young chef to go to Italy, to cook in kitchens there. But according to Inu, the Inuit temperament wasn’t suited to hierarchical kitchens run by protean autocrats, the oft-mercurial kind who’d flipped the script on their own national cuisine. “You can’t be a king like that in Greenland. Maybe because we’re humbled by nature,” Inu said. “If I’m cooking in the U.S. or Europe or Canada, I can be more aggressive in the kitchen. But Greenlanders, no, they don’t yell like this. They cower when you get angry.” Innovation, then, was less a question of wildly concocted whale foams and iceberg soups than the intensification of traditional dishes, a baby-step progression toward the new. Remember, this was the very beginning of something, the birth of a more haute cuisine that could be considered uniquely Greenlandic. In fact, some of Inu’s greatest pleasures as a chef seemed to come from confounding social and generational expectations. “I made a traditional dish, a stew, a suaasat”—often made from seal or whale—“for an old hunter,” he said. “The elders say, ‘You’re young, you can’t cook like we cook.’ But the old hunter tried it and said, ‘This is freaking good!’ ” In Greenland it was the ultimate French kiss of satisfaction.

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Inu allowed that his own perfect meal was sea urchins and mussels served with seaweed on rocks by the ocean because, in a strange way, maybe it captured the ethos of Greenlandic cooking right now. “The perfect taste over performance,” he said. Now, as the wind picked up, he’d locked himself out of his running car. “Shit, shit, shit,” he said, tugging on the doors. Soon he jimmied his way back in, and we were driving again, up a dirt road, in an industrial quarter of town. We pulled up to a blank warehouse with a barking husky straining on a taut chain, and two men stepped out of a disco-lit doorway. They were wearing hairnets and introduced themselves as Rasmus and Nicklas—a tall blond Viking-like fellow and his opposite, a smaller, charming dark-haired motormouth. Leading us through the door, they o≠ered us hairnets and shoe cozies and then, passing through another entryway with plastic strips, we found ourselves bathed in warm ultraviolet light, as if in someone’s heaven. It turned out, I think, to have been Inu’s, for he instantly seemed to levitate. Unlike, say, the San Joaquin Valley, Greenland today still possesses an extremely short growing season, on very limited arable land, mostly in the south. Even if there were new abundances of an herb like angelica to be found, there was still much

In new Greenland, the latest trend, I was told, was to mix the traditional food with some foreign inflection, whether it be tapas or sushi, like seal nigiri or walrus curry. that couldn’t grow here, or hadn’t yet, herbs we might otherwise take for granted in our supermarkets and kitchens. For Inu, part of building a new creative cuisine—as well as food independence—meant growing herbs of all sorts on the island itself, either indoors or outside, most of them not necessarily indigenous to Greenland. The “vertical farm,” as Nicklas dubbed it, was Nuuk’s only industrial greenhouse, a computerized micro-environment with a hand-built irrigation system. In the large hangar-like space were rows of metal platform-like shelving, bearing non-native plants and herbs and vegetables of all kinds, and Nicklas repeated what Inu had been saying, in essence: The future was right here, within these four walls, a yearlong supply of veggies and herbs, if only the future could find clients to buy—and cook with—purple basil and turnips, celery and peppers. You’d have to retrain an entire populace how to augment their meat and fish, to make their sauces and stews, to use a cookbook, even. At the moment, Rasmus and Nicklas were building their client list, selling to high-end restaurants in town, as well as peopling a table outside the downtown supermarket, as a kind of street-vendor/info post. “We spend six hours out there at a clip,” said Nicklas. “They can’t tell the di≠erence between basil and thyme and parsley. We have

to tell every person we meet that dill would be good for the fish or reindeer; thyme is best for Greenlandic lamb; sage is great for seal soup. Turnips—they don’t know what those are good for.” Those who actually bought their produce were Danes living in Nuuk, the ones comprising a fifth of the population in the capital. It would take time, said Nicklas. It was an untapped market, but what Inu seemed to be seeing in all of the leaves and flowering vegetables were not dollars but the beginning of a movement. He kept pacing up and down the glowing aisles, beaming, checking the health of the oregano and chives. In that greenhouse moment, all Inu saw was possibility. “I’m so happy,” said Inu, smiling in the ultraviolet, gazing on the plants, just before he disappeared again to another country, or sleep, or wherever. What he saw was freedom, too. “We’re looking at a new world,” he said.

G R E E N L A N D W A S a test-tube baby for global warming, then what could one deduce? That there might be some net short-term positives balanced by some much darker future unknowns? Right now, you could say that molecules were shifting and reshaping. The ice sheet kept melting, the glaciers, mile-deep ecosystems unto themselves, kept calving, the water kept rising, the fish and animals kept reorienting in new patterns, chased by the hunters reorienting. Where this would end was anyone’s guess. If it felt like everything was in flux, the human beings themselves seemed to hearken back to some age-old hospitality. People invited me into their homes to eat their suaasat. They wanted to share their dried cod. Again and again, they o≠ered mattak, the narwhal blubber that was to be treated in one’s mouth like a tobacco chaw, to be suctioned and salivated over, then spit out or swallowed whole. And there was kiviak: little birds named auks stu≠ed and fermented in seal skin, consumed on the most special occasions like a smelly French cheese. In Inuit, it turns out the word for food is kalaalimineq, which means “a piece of a Greenlander.” Which suggests some sort of weird cannibalism, but isn’t that exactly—or kind of maybe it is. I’d been told this when I’d gone to visit Natuk Lund Olsen, who is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Greenland, completing her dissertation on Greenlandic food and Inuit culture. “When a hunter goes hunting in Greenland,” she said, “they go hunting for their ancestors, the ones who sacrificed themselves. So hunting is seen as digging into your self, digging into your soul. The Inuit believe your soul has been various kinds of animals and people and plants.” Natuk, in turn, invited me to attend her daughter’s confirmation party, what was called a ka≠emik, which would include anyone who wanted to come and a smorgasbord of food, from polar bear to ptarmigan to the tail of a whale. In new Greenland, the latest trend, she said, was to mix the traditional food with some foreign inflection, whether it be tapas or sushi, like seal nigiri or walrus curry. Natuk said her specialty was minced-reindeer IF

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spring rolls, and sure enough, by the time I arrived, they were long gone. But the spread was incredible, the old and new, in bowls and platters on a white linen table, with a polar bear skin including head a∞xed to the wall, watchful brown eyes still open and sharp yellow teeth ready to make amends. On Greenland’s National Day—June 21—I ate a communal meal with the 620 residents of Qaanaaq, among the most northerly permanently populated places in the world, a village with no restaurant. As July Fourth patriotism would require hamburgers, hot dogs, corn on the cob, and watermelon, theirs inspired, besides mattak and seal stew, walrus served out of huge metal vats. In fact, I’d been present on the ice when they killed that particular walrus with a bullet through the brain, and it tasted no better than it looked, frankly—but then how much did my experience of that taste matter when we shared the walrus communally and it connected us all in that one moment to a past that was theirs? And more to the point, it really didn’t matter at all what an American made of this food: It was given by their land and sea, imbued with their spirit system. Wherever I traveled, wherever I found actual restaurants, I met the newer chefs trying to assert themselves. One, Salik Parbst Frederiksen, cooked a lovely meal for me, in a house at the heights of the postcard town of Qaqortoq (scallops, musk ox, and a rhubarb pie, all with a view of candy-colored homes spiraling down to the harbor). He was collaborating now with Inu on a Declaration of Food Independence, with hopes of getting it signed by as many Greenlandic chefs as possible. Another chef in Nuuk, Jens Jørgen Schmidt, spent all of his free time hunting, to bring the freshest game back to his kitchen, where he spun it with New Nordic techniques. And another, Laasi Biilmann, who worked in a hotel restaurant in Ilulissat, told me he’d come from a family of ﬁve chefs (Biilmann, his parents, and two siblings), but now only he and his sister were left. His lesson? “You have to be cold if you want to be a real head chef,” he said. Was he the one who would reach that yet inchoate place where Greenland itself, and alone, left its original signature on cuisine? Was that even the point? “ ‘Taste the nature you are surrounded by,’ ” Natuk said her mother always told her. Eat it cooked or raw. Respect the ancestors who’ve done the same and bequeathed a clean world in which the cycle repeats. Way back when Hans Egede, the Danish-Norwegian missionary, arrived and began to convert the Inuits, in the 1700s, he had to retroﬁt the Lord’s Prayer to a culture that had never tasted bread, or seen it, changing the line to read “Give us this day our daily seal.” Food both as identity and spiritual sustenance. “If a culture’s intact,” another Greenlandic researcher told me, “food isn’t politicized. But if a culture’s been fully torn apart, it really is.” As it was, the culture here went hand in hand with the environment too. The locals in Qaanaaq pointed out that the ice in the fjord was now melting two to three weeks earlier than it had in the past. (A photo taken there just before I’d arrived showing a sleddog team seemingly running on water had gone viral around the world as a symbol of

our imperilment.) In the south there was less rain and sometimes more ferocious storms. And the heat kept rising. When all the ice melted, too, perhaps the whales would move on in search of plankton elsewhere—and the polar bears would become a figment of our imagination. What new animals would replace them, and what new forms of food? At the end, just before I left Greenland, he popped up on TV. The White Rabbit, Inu, one last time. He shared the screen with Jaime Lannister from Game of Thrones—or, rather, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, the Danish actor who plays him. Coster-Waldau is married to a Greenlander, an actress and artist named Nukâka, and the two have a second home in the south here. He was hosting a travel show, narrated in Danish, that seemed both a little fascinating and a little boring. Greenland itself, however—its ridiculous natural bombast, its kingdoms of ice and its glacial rivers rushing, heightened by swooping drone footage and awesome vistas—did not disappoint. There was Inu and Coster-Waldau on TV, a Greenlander and a Dane, in a brightly lit cafeteria of some sort, a room defined, I’d say, by anti-ambience, the pale light making pale people more pale. They were eating bu≠etstyle, moving down a line of prepared dishes, sitting at long unadorned tables, as if in a school cafeteria. The pièce de résistance, at least for Inu, was the whale heart. Back when we’d spent our time together in Nuuk, Inu had told me about it. “I grilled a whale heart because—why not?” he said. “I took out the muscle and filled it with mushrooms and herbs. Forty-five pounds. I thought I’d be the first in the world to grill one.” Traditionally the heart of an animal, as a source of rich protein, was either eaten immediately on the ice for survival or saved to be consumed later, when food caches had been depleted. But here Inu had made it the centerpiece, a provocation, and he’d added something to it as well, something that didn’t fit in the frame: mushrooms and his beloved herbs. Inu’s idea, or gesture, or vision, then, was this more subtle reframing, even as the food carried the bombast of the landscape or the volume of Aleqa’s political voice. There was almost a meta quality to the simplicity of it. Broadcast on TV as it was, the two of them eating whale heart seemed part of a public service announcement—a sort of fully updated This is how we roll now—for a dish served by a Greenlandic chef back to Denmark, rather than the other way around, was making its political point too. Here it was, then, the literal heart and the figurative soul sliced and tasted and savored, before the chef went his own stubborn, enigmatic way again, searching up the fjord for the next first, and the next one after that too. We eat our past, even as we find new forms for it in the present. But it was a di≠erent hunger now—Greenland’s—and it kept growing. It didn’t seem as if it would be satiated again until that day it was fed by its own hand alone, food that would adapt to the future but remain as old as that moment the first glacier calved and the first whale was drawn from the sea by the hunter’s harpoon. michael paterniti is a gq correspondent.

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There’s a large print of David’s family tree, produced for Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s ancestry show, Finding Your Roots, on which he discovered that he and Bernie Sanders are distant cousins. He takes another photo o≠ the wall, a class picture from the first grade at P.S. 253, 1953. It takes only a moment to spot David in the back row, with a toothy grin and elfin ears, and only a moment more to guess which of the paintings hanging over the blackboard, amidst happy animals and flowers, is Young Larry’s: It’s the one of the boat covered in swastikas. David has lived in this house for 10 years, since soon after his divorce. His daughters, now 25 and 23, spent their adolescence here. (The presence of kids is one of the major ways David’s life diverges from that of TV Larry, who is childless.) Underwood moved in last year, bringing a flu≠y black-and-white cat named Elwood, who now curls up next to David on the living room couch and accepts a good scratch. The couple recently adopted an Australian shepherd puppy whom, after much discussion, David says, eyes twinkling for the reveal, they named Bernie. All in all, it is a place that in every way radiates great success. None of which, it seems, has accrued to any sense of inevitability—a conviction that had Jerry Seinfeld not caught up with him backstage at the comedy club Catch a Rising Star one night in 1988 and asked him to work on a show for NBC, some other path would have emerged. “Let’s face it, if Seinfeld doesn’t come along, what happens to me, really?” he says. “Here’s what I think: I think I’m living in a studio apartment in New York. I think I’m miserable doing it. I think I hate everything and everybody, including myself most of all. I think I’m a guy walking down the street, screaming at people for slights like a bump-into without a sorry, things like that.” I say that I find it a little terrifying, the idea that one’s direction in life could be so tenuous. “I do too,” he says. Nevertheless, he’s committed to this worldview. “This whole ‘happiness from the inside’ thing…where’s it coming from? What am I feeling good about? You have to have some sense of accomplishment.” There was a dark period, as a failing stand-up in New York, when his parents paid for him to seek therapy. “I couldn’t have hated it more,” he says. “Because I knew that you need two things. You need money and you need a girlfriend. With no money, there’s no girlfriend. Of course, I hated myself deeply, but that’s because I didn’t have the money and the girlfriend. If I had the money and the girlfriend, I knew I would hate myself a little less.”

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David has consistently said that he had no sense of being funny until leaving home for college, at the University of Maryland, where all his Brooklyn mannerisms were suddenly exotic among his gentile classmates. His childhood, in general, seems to have been something of a cipher. He is at a loss to describe what pre-funny Larry David was like. “I don’t remember. I mean, I was kind of quiet,” he says. “I wish I could get hypnotized and go back to my 15-year-old body and experience that again. And then go to 10, and then six. That would be interesting.” Young Larry watched Phil Silvers and Abbott and Costello, read Mad magazine, summered in the Catskills—all the comedy-nerd touchstones of his generation—but without a premonition of a future calling. “I wasn’t brought up to think that I was going to be able to do anything. I don’t know whose fault that was, if it was my parents’ fault or it was just something in me, but it never occurred to me that I could go on and make something of myself,” he says. “Nobody ever said to me, ‘You can do something.’ ” It was performing stand-up comedy that gave David his first sense of purpose, even if his strange and somewhat antagonistic act didn’t exactly vault him to stardom. Stand-up looms as a benchmark of success in David’s mind, and something of a white whale. The one-hour special from which Curb sprang was ostensibly about his return to the art form, which, of course, the program’s own success derailed. “I suppose it’s always been somewhat unresolved in my head. That I didn’t do it the ‘right way,’ ” he says. “I used to think, when I was younger, that this was what I was meant to do. That this was my calling, stand-up. I guess it still kind of bothers me that I haven’t conquered the form the way I thought I would.” He could, of course, wake up tomorrow and have a special on the network or streaming service of his choice—with a significant sack of money, to boot—but that only adds to the pressure, and to his ambivalence. “I have such mixed feelings about it. The one aspect of it I don’t like is that they”—the audience—“are in control of how I feel. I have to do something to elicit a response, and if I don’t, I’m going to be in trouble. I have to please them, and there’s something about that I don’t like,” he says. “On the other hand, when I do please them, it gives me a great deal of pleasure.” Other setbacks bother him less. He knows you did not like the Seinfeld finale. It bugged him for a while, but now he just makes a preemptive joke when the subject arises. When Curb ends, he’s resolved, it will do so without ceremony. “I would never do that again,” he says. His feature-length e≠orts— Sour Grapes, in 1998, and Clear History, released in 2013, during Curb’s six-year layo≠ after season eight—have failed to capture the spark he’s brought to the half-hour form. “I don’t know; some people are better at short stories than novels,” he says with a shrug. As for David Chase’s fantasy of switching places, David says he has never had the urge to write a drama. “If it’s funny, I know it’s good. Otherwise I’m completely lost,” he says.

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O U R P L A N H A S B E E N to visit Riviera—the last of the places David spends his life—but there’s a hiccup. With Larry World up in my head, mindful of a plotline involving F. Murray Abraham as an “outﬁt tracker,” from the show’s most recent season, I have been extra careful not to wear the same pants today as yesterday. As a result, I’ve got on jeans, which are verboten at the club. “This is all because of your stupid show!” I complain. “I was not outﬁt tracking you!” David says. I say, “Are dress codes not among the social conventions we eschew?” “Of course.” “ ‘Bullshit,’ right?” “Ridiculous!” “Then why do you follow them?” David shrugs. “It’s golf. Allowances must be made.”

“I wasn’t brought up to think that I was going to be able to do anything,” David says. “It never occurred to me that I could go on and make something of myself.” Squeezed, then, into the largest pair of pants Larry David can find in his closet, I sit beside him on the two-minute ride down the hill to Riviera. He keeps his window up as we pass the booth at the club entrance, where a chatty attendant once inspired a Curb plot. TV Larry confronted that annoyance, with predictable results; Real Larry wrote something about it down on his phone, duly transcribed it into one of the large spiral notebooks of ideas he always has working, and lived out his revenge onscreen. Still, when that attendant left, the new one didn’t get window privileges. David parks the Tesla in the space closest to the clubhouse, and we stroll out through the men’s locker room and to the first tee. It’s an unusually quiet day in the club, and we jump in a cart to take a short spin around. “This is really the only thing I like to do outside,” David says. “What about swimming?” I ask. “Hate the water.” “Bike riding?” “Never.” “Hiking?” He makes a noise as though I’ve suggested a nice case of leprosy. “The beach?” “Could not hate the beach more.” We pass the driving range, where a lone figure, short and wiry, pauses between swings. “That’s Johnny Mathis,” says David. He calls, “Hey, John!” Johnny Mathis waves. “Can you begin to see the appeal?” David says, gesturing at the landscape as we circle back toward the clubhouse. From a nearby green, a fellow member calls out “LD! Living legend!” David raises his hand in a pope-like manner. I begin to see the appeal. We swing into the clubhouse dining room. David seats himself at the one spot

of a four-top not made up with silverware, near a huge TV showing coverage of the Trump impeachment hearings, and orders a salad—debating and then allowing himself the luxury of adding turkey. “Oh, yeah, yeah,” he shouts sarcastically at the screen when the president appears to make a statement. “Stop lying, you asshole!” He is aware that in the wealthy precincts of the club there are sometimes other members nearby who feel di≠erently about the administration. “I talk louder on purpose when they’re around,” he says. “To me, if somebody bought Fox News, I would feel the same as I felt when the Berlin Wall came down. That feeling of euphoria, like the world was going to change.” We head back up the hill to his house. For two days, I’ve continued to mull the “neurotic” question: Is he or isn’t he? To be sure, he is a creature of routine, verging on the compulsive; he must make the trip into his ofﬁce every day, even if only for a brief visit. He dislikes travel, with all its disruptions. He is an assiduously healthy eater and claims to be something of a hypochondriac, but then admits he doesn’t “rush o≠ to the doctor” at every provocation, which I’m pretty sure gets you kicked out of the hypochondriac club. And some of his social hang-ups clearly are not shtick. “I’ve lost all ability to talk to people at a social gathering,” he says at one point, shaking his head. “I don’t know what it is. I just can’t even face them. It gets worse all the time. I can’t go to parties anymore.” Still, I’m forced to conclude that Larry David, for all his demands on the world, su≠ers very little from its perpetual failures. “People are under the wrong impression when it comes to me being happy or not,” he says. “I think most people think that I’m miserable. Or that I’m a very disgruntled person. But I’m not. I have a very good disposition.” When it’s time for me to leave, David walks me toward the door but then stops. I see the pursed lips and raised eyebrows and brace myself. “Let me ask you a question: At the club, which urinal did you use?” “Say again?” “When you went to the bathroom at Riviera. Which urinal?” He pantomimes the layout of the club’s men’s room. “You walk in, and then there are three urinals—closest, middle, and farthest from the door. Which do you think is the right one to use?” “Which one do you think?” I ask warily. The ﬁrst or second, he explains, on the reverse-psychological theory that most people will choose the third, thinking it the least used, thus leaving the others cleaner. “Aha!” I pounce. “But you can’t use the middle one, because that then forces anybody who comes in to stand next to you, whichever one they choose.” I am sure now that I could stay here forever, discussing these pressing matters while the California sun rose and set a thousand and one times on Larry World. But we’ve already reached the door. “Okay, okay.” David nods as he opens it. “I hadn’t really considered the Neighboring Factor. Okay.” And then he sets me free.

brett martin is a gq correspondent.

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spends way too much time on Instagram. “If people can identify with you as a human being, they’re going to like you more for what you do.” This approach is working: If Diplo used to be an aggressively in-your-face acquired taste, now he’s way more palatable to a wider audience, even—or maybe especially— when he’s gleefully pushing the boundaries of good taste. I was initially taken aback by how normal, and even slightly tired, he looked in jeans and a long-sleeve Vampire Weekend crewneck. (I would later see him walking around unnecessarily bare-chested and realize it was the shirt that was throwing me o≠.) He was not wearing underwear, which I know because about 30 minutes into our conversation he told me, “I don’t even have underwear on. I couldn’t ﬁnd any when I went to the gym.” As Diplo sipped his smoothie—spinach, banana, and almond butter plus two scoops of CBD powder—Patrick Schwarzenegger, son of Arnold, came over to our table to say hello. He and Diplo traded notes on recent workouts that sounded like they violate the Geneva Conventions. (Patrick: “You sit in this chair, and it’s like an electric-magnetic-pulse thing that shocks through your body over and over.” Diplo: “I’ve done that, because I do the workout where you tie the whole thing to your body and do like 20 minutes of that.”) Turning 40 didn’t clarify anything for Diplo, he says, except that he had to work out a lot harder to stay in shape, which is biologically true for everyone but an especially pressing concern for someone whose torso is exposed so frequently. Mainly, he was relieved. Relieved to no longer be “fake older,” a term he threw out as if it’s a standard demographic category on the U.S. Census before clarifying that he meant the ages of 35 to 40. “I was kind of the dorky middle-aged guy, and I’m now just the cool older guy,” he explained. Getting older hasn’t lessened his desire to stay on top of the new, music or otherwise. His current obsession is TikTok, a social media platform for posting short videos set to music that’s most popular with children born after George W. Bush’s ﬁrst term. When an assistant mentioned that ISIS has reportedly been posting videos on TikTok, Diplo sarcastically deadpanned: “Are they good ones, or no? I’ll follow them.” Talking to Diplo can feel like hanging out with that one friend who is always on, who is always performing a little bit, who couldn’t turn it o≠ even if they tried. This performance, in some ways, functions to obscure Diplo’s relentless ambition. “I for sure feel everything is a competition,” he told me. “You

can always say like, Only compete with yourself, but no—fuck everybody else. In my mind, I’m trying to take down everybody. Not in a malicious way, but just in a way where I want to be the best at everything.” Diplo’s refusal to rest, his nonstop pursuit of the next thing and the next thing and the next thing after that, has obviously served him well. It’s an itch he’ll never be able to scratch—and maybe doesn’t want to. “I think when you ﬁnd contentment, maybe that’s perfect harmony with the world. But I never do. I always feel like I could do more,” he says. “I’m not going to be content. Hopefully I never will be.” The pop star Sia, who has known and worked with Diplo for more than a decade, most recently in the supergroup LSD, called him “the sweetest thing in the world” and “one of the most insecure boys I’ve ever met.” Not when he’s making music, she explained— at that he’s conﬁdent and decisive—but in terms of personal relationships and how to pose in photos and the like. “He doesn’t think that he’s good enough at anything. He has crazy low self-esteem,” she said. “It’s so interesting, because he’s one of the most talented and attractive people in the world. But he doesn’t know it.”

11:30 p.m. A private jet, somewhere over South Carolina. The sparkling water that the flight attendant dispenses is as crisp as an autumn morning in heaven’s apple orchard. The aloe-infused socks that Joe, the personal photographer, hands me are as cozy as a space heater wrapped in a Patagonia fleece. The toilet seat, which is hidden inside what appears to be a padded leather armchair so that I am totally confused and slightly panicked when I first enter the bathroom, is both warmer and softer than any bed I’ve ever slept on. And Diplo, well… Diplo is furious. After his Charlotte show, a mob of fans swarmed him for photos. He barks at his tour manager, Luke, and tour assistant, Eli, for letting it happen, and it feels like when you’d be at a friend’s house for dinner and their dad would start yelling at them in front of you. The pair are brothers (Eli is younger by four years) who grew up in Idaho, and they possess an elusive mix of traits that make them perfect for the gig: the chill of Ultimate Frisbee players and the swift e∞ciency of the Secret Service. Even though Eli bears the brunt of most of the criticism tonight (among his transgressions: momentarily forgetting to carry Diplo’s bags, including a Dior tote embroidered with the word “DIPLO”), he shrugs it o≠. “It’s a very good, brotherly type of relationship, where we’ll be total bros and then just have a shitty day,” he tells me. “I probably spend more time with him than anyone else on tour.” Before this, Eli was a firefighter. When I ask him which job is more stressful, he says, “The firefighting, you know what you do in every situation. There are set guidelines. But this, it’s all playing on mood.” We’ve also been joined by a petite young woman, not older than 25, with platinumbleached hair, an oversize ’NSync shirt, and

pouty lips so mesmerizingly glossy I can see my reflection in them. Diplo can have such a specific e≠ect on women that the Kinsey Institute should award somebody a scientific grant to study it. It’s not that he’s good-looking, which is obvious. It’s that he inspires a sort of revelatory shamelessness. You can’t scroll through his Instagram comments for a millisecond without seeing someone calling him “daddy.” In 2013, a high school teacher was reportedly fired after tweeting at him a video of herself topless and twerking upside down. “Much of our relationship is just being spent trying not to have sex so that we wouldn’t ruin our business relationship, because he’s superduper hot,” Sia even told me during our phone call. “This year I wrote him a text, and I said, ‘Hey, listen, you’re like one of five people that I’m sexually attracted to, and now that I’ve decided to be single for the rest of my life and I just adopted a son, I don’t have time for a relationship.… If you’re interested in some no-strings sex, then hit me up.’ ” Diplo follows over 6,500 people on Instagram, about 6,000 of whom are women blessed with figures that look like they were dreamed up by a 13-year-old boy in the margins of his spiral notebooks. I wonder if that’s where he meets most women. The answer, according to Diplo, is both “no, just like in real life” and “yeah, I’ve been guilty of meeting girls on there.” While we’re suspended in the air thousands of miles above the earth, Diplo mauls a plate of Cajun chicken pasta (“I’m always trying to be

“He doesn’t think that he’s good enough at anything. He has crazy low self-esteem. It’s so interesting, because he’s one of the most talented and attractive people in the world. But he doesn’t know it.”—sia a vegan; I’m about to do another diet tomorrow”) and ruminates on the lack of intimacy in modern sexual relationships. “Kids are very sexual, with these weird apps, and they lose the accountability of their emotions because they don’t really connect with people. So sex becomes a little too mundane,” he says, suddenly sounding much older than his years. He takes a contemplative bite of garlic bread. “I’ve probably got the same problem. But I am very into the women I’m with, and sex, so it’s not just sex with them.” He doesn’t “really believe” in marriage but feels as good as settled down with Lockett and Lazer. They live with their mother, his ex-girlfriend Kathryn Lockhart, but he sees them whenever he’s in Los Angeles. “I think I found true love with my kids. I get lonely sometimes, I might have bouts of depression. But my kids, they love me. And they can’t escape me,” he says. “Any girlfriend would end up breaking up with me because I’m so busy, and I’m just a bad boyfriend. My kids, they literally can’t. My job is to be good to them.”

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Briefly: While in Los Angeles, I accompanied him to his Beachwood Canyon house, where he stopped for 20 minutes before taking o≠ again to attend a Morgan Wallen concert. He used his short interlude at home to cuddle both his sons, spin a basketball on his fingertip to impress Lockett, unpack a box of vegan ice cream (shirtless), put the dry ice from the ice cream delivery into bowls to entertain the boys (“There’s Harry Potter magic happening in the sink!”), and tenderly spoon-feed Lazer chocolate ice cream from the carton (“You only get a little bit, baby boy”). I ask Diplo if he always knew that he wanted to have children. “Not really,” he says. “Then my ex-girlfriend got pregnant with somebody else and I was like, ‘Damn,’ because we had almost had a baby together.” He’s referring to M.I.A., the British singer-rapper with whom he scored his first hit, 2007’s “Paper Planes.” They dated for five years but, after breaking up in 2008, went on to have acrimonious back-and-forths in the press for longer than they had been together. “She had a baby immediately, and I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ ” he recalls. “I kind of lost all hope in that relationship. And then I had a kid, probably like a year after that, because I was just like, ‘Fuck it, I want a kid.’ ”

both would take turns getting thrown out of class,” he conﬁrms conspiratorially. “And they would put us right back together! We’d just terrorize the fucking class.” Diplo eventually made his way up to Temple University, in Philadelphia, where he studied ﬁlm. He dropped out just shy of graduation and started working as an after-school teacher’s aide, but he remained obsessed with music. Mark Ronson recalled meeting him around that time through a mutual friend, Ben, at the Silk City diner, an establishment whose name they’d eventually lift for their Grammy-award-winning collaboration. “Wes was maybe the biggest record nerd of all of us. He sat, sort of one-upping me of knowledge,” Ronson told me. “I just remember being vaguely annoyed about the whole evening and just being like, ‘Yo, Ben, your friend is a little too much.’ ”

“I think I found true love with my kids. I get lonely sometimes, I might have bouts of depression. But my kids, they love me. And they can’t escape me.” —diplo

3 a.m. Miami, Florida. Inside a rooftop restaurant situated above a smoke-filled strip club, Diplo is dismantling a whole head of roasted cauliflower with the dexterity and precision of a professional chef. Walshy Fire, the a≠able Jamaican-American DJ who is part of Diplo’s dancehall-inflected trio, Major Lazer, is digging into a communal salad that is the size of an entire Sweetgreen’s worth of vegetables dumped into a bathtub. In this club, we care about reaching our recommended daily fiber intake. We’ve just come from Diplo’s second set of the night, a secret Major Lazer show at a venue called The Compound. This crowd was more intimate and the music all dancehall and reggaeton, in contrast to the more mainstream pop hits he was blasting over in Charlotte. Major Lazer’s next album is due out this spring; it may be their last, though Diplo can see the group continuing as a collective without him. Diplo has been revived. He’s in his element, and that element is Florida—a vibe he plays up with exaggerated dirtbagginess. Born in Mississippi, he grew up in the Daytona Beach area listening to everything from Miami bass to reggae to heavy metal. Mom worked as a supermarket clerk, while Dad, a Vietnam veteran who went to college when he was in his 30s, owned a bait shop. Diplo credits his father with giving him his sense of drive and determination. “I don’t think he knows that, ’cause I was such a bad kid,” he says. “But I remembered everything he taught me.” By “bad kid,” he means fighting, shoplifting, cursing out teachers, and just generally “being a shithead” at school. “I had really bad friends,” he explains. One of those friends is Sam Borkson, who cofounded the art collaborative FriendsWithYou and has joined us here. “We

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Soon enough, Diplo channeled that energy into Hollertronix, a legendary weekly dance party he started in 2002 with his friend DJ Lowbudget. They ground out experimental mash-ups at a Ukrainian social club in Philly, early predecessors to his signature style of dipping into multiple genres simultaneously. Though Hollertronix remained mostly an underground sensation, one of their mixtapes landed on the New York Times’ albums-of-the-year list in 2003. After “Paper Planes” went platinum, bigger and more mainstream names came calling, seeking out Diplo’s skill for creating cutting-edge beats and his fingerprints to lend their projects a patina of cool. By 2014, he was able to credibly release an album titled Random White Dude Be Everywhere, and he’s only been more everywhere since. When Diplo started Major Lazer, in 2008, critics began to accuse him of cultural appropriation. He has fielded questions about the topic numerous times over, usually without tact. “I don’t…really…fucking care,” he told The Guardian in 2018. “What kind of music am I supposed to make? Being a white American, you have zero cultural capital, unless you’re doing Appalachian fiddle music or something.” He is more careful when I bring the subject up. “I’m not sure where I’m supposed to go,” he says. “Anybody has the freedom and right to do anything creatively, as long as their heart’s in it.” Ironically enough, Diplo says, he’s faced the most di∞culty trying to expand into country music. “Country was hardest to break into, like people [were] not accepting me there,” he says. “I’ve only found a few artists that were like, ‘I’ll take a chance with you.’ ” After the cauliflower head is decimated into florets, a psychedelic Macho Man Randy

Savage costume materializes and Diplo strips out of his tie-dyed Haile Selassie T-shirt and black jeans down to his emerald green boxer briefs. “I’m definitely not getting laid tonight if I wear this,” he says, wriggling a leg into a multicolored jumpsuit. “But maybe it’s time I don’t get laid.” “Maybe you get laid by your truest love,” Sam o≠ers up helpfully. We pile into an elevator to descend into the depths of E11EVEN, where a security guard escorts our conga line out to the DJ booth. You know that Hieronymus Bosch painting of hell? Imagine that, but with bottle service. The most precarious stripper pole known to man juts out of the middle of the floor, a wobbly steel spike waiting for the one true dancer who can conquer it. She finally appears and climbs to the top to execute a gravity-defying upsidedown split, better at her job than anyone I’ve ever seen in my life. The DJ booth is guarded more intensely than the White House, but one woman, dressed as Princess Jasmine, is granted entry. She bounces her hips swiftly and e∞ciently to deep house for a while before she remembers that she has a question for Diplo. “Can I bring…,” she begins, turning her heart-shaped face up sweetly and batting her eyelashes. Diplo leans in to hear her. “…my fiancé in here?” She flashes a boulder of an engagement ring. “Who’s your fiancé?” he asks her. Princess Jasmine points to the left of the DJ booth, where a man in an Aladdin vest waits, puppy-like, on the other side of the glass. He smiles and waves eagerly. “That guy?” Diplo asks, and then, without waiting for an answer, “No.” Jasmine skulks away. Soon we’re joined by a brunette with a sky-high ponytail and a visible rhinestone thong whose Halloween costume is a Sexy Bratz doll. (So a Bratz doll.) I ask her how she knows Diplo. “I met him in Vegas. For my 21st birthday!” she explains. “I’m 23 now. I’ve known him for a while, actually.”

6:45 a.m. Eli tells me he has some bad news: The night’s not over. Diplo changes back into his civilian clothes; then we’re shuttled across the street to Club Space, where we mostly stand there watching him scroll through his phone amid the pulsating music until he decides he’s done. By the time we get back outside, it’s well past 7 a.m. I thought I’d be delirious by now, but instead I have that adrenaline rush people get that lets them lift cars o≠ children. Diplo’s weekend will continue later today—with a festival performance in San Antonio, followed by a set at a club in Las Vegas. But for now, he needs to get some sleep. “Diplo!” a woman in a skintight white halter yells out, her curls bouncing as she jumps up and down to get his attention. “You are! The muthafuckin’ man!” He strolls over and adjusts her top. “Your boob’s hanging out,” he says. Then, his work done for now, he ﬁxes his cowboy hat and walks o≠ into the Florida sunrise.

gabriella paiella is gq’s sta≠ writer.

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“Go to Boulders, prime time. It’ll be throngs of people, masses huddled around, all chitchatting, mostly people lying on the pads while one person climbs. They fall, you sit for a while, you chat. It’s incredibly social.” With bouldering, he explains, “you have eight people trying the same problem. One person tries it, they all talk about what they did, what they could have done di≠erently, what they did better. And then when you’re tired, you just lie there, ‘Oh, so how was your Friday?’ ” He describes another gym he visited in Seattle

“It’s the same way that CrossFit has a certain tribalism to it, except that climbing is way more chill and way more fun.” —alex honnold that epitomizes the new climbing lifestyle: “It’s all just people writing code upstairs and then bouldering for a couple of hours, then taking some meetings.” He adds, “I think a big part of the rise of gym climbing is the fact that it’s a really fun, community way to stay fit. It’s the same way that CrossFit has a certain tribalism to it, except that climbing is way more chill and way more fun.” But with popularity comes change. The rise of competition climbing means many new facilities are catering to those flashier leaps and dynamic swings instead of to the more classical movements one might make in nature. And whereas gym climbing was once mainly considered a training ground for outdoor goals, now there’s a membership of newbies who may have no intention of ever climbing outside at all. “You have a large community of people who just like climbing inside recreationally, and they’re totally content with just casually going in and having fun for the afternoon and calling it good,” says Cli≠ Simanski of GP81 in Brooklyn. An experienced climber and route setter, Simanski, along with his partners, sought to go in the other direction, minimizing distractions and returning to a more purist approach: no marketing, no youth teams, no menu of other fitness classes. “A lot of what we try to do is avoid some of that parkour-style stu≠ and use more simple moves and climbing techniques that you do encounter outside,” he says. Honnold also observes a sea change in the scene. “To me the biggest indicator is that if I do events, if I speak at a climbing gym, the majority of climbers now have been climbing

for fewer than three years,” he says. “I realize it’s a completely di≠erent climbing culture. They don’t know the same climbing gear I had growing up, they don’t know the same stories. It’s like, ‘Oh, wow, there’s a lot of climbing history that’s disappearing behind now.’ ” But, he adds, “I’m fully into it. I’m a sponsored rock climber. The more people rock climb, the better that all of us in the industry do. If others get even a tiny fraction of what I’ve gotten from rock climbing, that’s incredible.” Honnold, who uses gyms for training and recreation, points out that this new wave of gyms radically improves opportunities for climbers of all abilities. He gestures around us. “When I look across this wall—some of these routes are completely di≠erent styles, completely di≠erent techniques. Some of them, you’re all laid out sideways, doing crazy maneuvers; some of them are straightforward power, a pure test of finger strength. It might not be quite as varied [an experience] as the outdoors, but in terms of movement, you can probably get more varied movement indoors, because you can create anything you want in here. You’re limited only by your imagination.” Outdoor climbing, though, introduces an ethical and spiritual dimension that you can’t access in a gym. Beyond the principles of “leave no trace” environmental stewardship, climbing outside is a constant, humbling reminder of your small place in the grand scheme. “You just get worked by nature all the time,” says Honnold. “It’s cold, it’s windy, it starts to rain. No matter how big your ego is, no matter how many people have told you that you’re the man, as soon as it starts to rain, you’re getting cold and wet.” After Free Solo, Honnold could’ve gone for the crass cash grab—appearing on Dancing With the Stars (though that is extremely hard to picture) or slapping his name on a line of gear—but as Chin notes, “he doesn’t care about fame and money. The intent is very pure.” Still, Honnold fully appreciates the way the attention has changed his life, from how he makes a living (more sponsorships, more partnerships, more speaking gigs, more opportunities) to the impact that his eponymous foundation, dedicated to environmental work, can make. The push-pull between drive and domesticity, a major theme of the film, continues to reverberate for him: He’s still with his girlfriend, Sanni, and he seems curious about ways to reconcile the work-life balance moving forward. It’s a new problem to solve, another goal to set. Honnold hasn’t been a reluctant ambassador to climbing, but being its public face was never his dream. With climbing coming to the Tokyo Olympics this summer, there are new athletes and heroes waiting in the wings— he mentions Brooke Raboutou, a young American climber who recently qualified for 2020—and he’ll be happy to pass the baton when the time comes. “I can’t wait, I’m ready to hand it o≠,” he says. “I’m gonna pull down my hood, I’m gonna walk out the back, and I’m gonna go climbing.” caroline m c closkey is a writer living in Los Angeles. She wrote the June cover story on Seth Rogen and the October profile of DJ Harvey.

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To read our story about Alex Honnold and the explosion of rock climbing as a sport, see page 66.

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STYLIST: JON TIETZ

Pullover, $249, by The North Face. Pants, $515, by The Elder Statesman. Shoes, $190, by La Sportiva. Beanie, $213, by Begg & Co. Watch, $3,525, by Tudor.

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