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STRESS-FREE LIFE IN SEARCH OF BIGFOOT

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ON THE COVER Andy Samberg photographed for Men’s Journal by Peter Yang on January 7, 2020, in Los Angeles.

Styling by Sam Spector. Hair by Jeff Verbeck. Makeup by Kim Verbeck.

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Samberg wears jacket by Carhartt.

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14 NOTEBOOK

18 Four-Day Weekend

24 Essay It was unlovely and emasculating, but the demise of the author’s crappy van triggered a weird midlife crisis that was long overdue.

37 Autos A head-to-head comparison of the two best seven-seater luxury SUVs.

88 What Works for Me Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian on routines that keep him up to speed.

90 Fitness 38 Books A new memoir turns a sensationalized disappearance into something much more: a father’s search for solace.

Exercises to supercharge your hold strength for better everyday functioning and gym performance.

94 Health News 42 In Defense Of A case for the dreaded hangover.

THE BLUEPRINT

The microbes in beer do wonders for your gut; running at any speed (or age) may extend your life; and air pollution is terrible for your eyes.

26 Food Spicing up, literally, a dinner party staple gone bland, the short rib.

81 Workout of the Month The lowly barbell is the key to unlocking a slew of strength moves.

30 Fashion Spring looks that will work for any occasion, whether it’s a lavish dinner date or just reveling at a dive bar.

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86 Nutrition Aged Parmesan just might be the one delicacy athletes can get behind.

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L AST WORD

96 Bob Odenkirk The comedian and actor talks big families, helpless parents, and why the anchors on Fox News will never, ever be funny.

FROM LEFT: COURTESY OF IMPOSSIBLE PROJECT; DAVID PITTMAN; JUSTIN STEELE

Once sleepy Sacramento has reinvented itself as a culinary hot spot rivaling even California’s other foodie capital, Napa.

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Š 2018 Tyson Foods, Inc. Copyright Philippe Halsman/Magnum Photos.

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I recently subscribed to MJ, after having not purchased a men’s magazine in years. I made a good call: The December 2019 issue was full of vivid photos, and the stories transported me to far-flung places I hope to visit one day.

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but Purja opened the route in 2019 by f ixing the ropes to the top himself. Starting in late September, he completed a sweep of the last three mountains, summiting them over 37 days, a stretch that would have been quicker had it not taken special permission from China to climb the final peak, Shishapangma.

Purja’s near hang-up on Shishapangma hints at the massive logistical challenges of the undertaking. Each summit required permits, gear, support teams, transportation, and luck with weather and timing.

And there was a large budget to manage, too: Purja said the third phase alone cost $100,000. Though the Bremont watch company came on board as a sponsor following the first phase, Project Possible

COURTESY OF PROJECT POSSIBLE/NIMS PURJA

,

“Climbing one 8,000-meter peak isn’t a big deal,” says Conrad Anker, one of America’s best-known alpinists. “Climbing them all in such rapid succession is truly incredible.” Anker says that few people could withstand the physical toll of so much climbing at altitude. “After a six- to eight-week season on Everest, for just one summit, I’d be drained for months,” he says.

Purja climbed in three phases. During the first one, in spring 2019, he climbed six of the 14 peaks in a single month, including Mount Everest. During phase two, in July, he ticked off five more mountains, including what is widely considered the most difficult, Pakistan’s K2, in just over three weeks. Brutal weather on that mountain had stymied all attempts the season before,

was largely run on a shoestring, with the majority of the costs crowdsourced and Purja squeezing his climbs between jobs as a mountain guide. He sandwiched the ascent of 26,864-foot Cho Oyu into a three-day window in the middle of guiding clients up Manaslu, the eighth-highest peak in the world. And rather than celebrate after Shishapangma, he returned to Ama Dablam within days to guide more clients to the 22,349-foot summit.

“To get this off the ground, I had to take a second mortgage against my house,” says Purja. “More than the climbing, the money was always the biggest challenge.”

Unlike most Nepalese climbers, Purja is from the country’s lowlands, not the high mountains, and he started climbing only in 2012, summiting his first 8,000-meter peak, Dhaulagiri, in 2014. Instead of spending a lifetime burnishing his climbing skills and credentials, Purja spent six years in the Brigade of Gurkhas, a band of Nepalese soldiers within the British Army, before moving up to the British special forces, where he served for a decade, until 2018.

“Building a public persona, telling your story, and developing sponsor relationships all take time. And obviously, patience isn’t Nims’ strong suit,” says Freddie Wilkinson, an American alpinist who

has written extensively about climbing.

“Take his three-week linkup of Annapurna, Dhaulagiri, and Kanchenjunga. Most professional mountaineers would dine out on that with a book, a documentary, and a couple of years of slideshows.” Purja instead completed three more peaks, including Everest, in nine days.

The truth is that the importance of Purja’s accomplishments—and its attention in the media—often hinge on the audience, including the sport’s old guard.

While climbing an 8,000-meter peak is still considered a triumph by most people, it’s unremarkable in climbing circles. The cutting edge of the sport lies in exploration and f irst ascents without oxygen. Mountaineers also place a high value on self-supported expeditions, whereas the majority of people who climb 8,000-meter peaks, including Purja, use Sherpas to carry gear, f ixed ropes, and supplemental oxygen. “What he has done is quite extraordinary, but it isn’t mountaineering,” Chris Bonington, the British alpinist, told The Times. “Real mountaineering is exploratory.... I don’t see this as a major event.”

Despite those purist attitudes, Purja has plenty of supporters in the mountain world. The Italian climber Simone Moro,

BY THE NUMBERS

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Days it took to the complete the feat (2,674 days faster than the previous record).

Number of freezedried meals Purja tried and disliked.

He fueled himself entirely on dal bhat, the Nepali national dish of rice, lentils, fried meat, vegetables, and naan.

42 Climbers other than Purja who have summited all 14 8,000meter peaks.

380,469

PROJECT POSSIBLE

Total cumulative feet of elevation that Purja climbed.

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Before climbing, Purja was a special forces soldier in the British military.

who has previously decried the industry around 8,000-meter peaks as “high-altitude tourism,” commended Purja. Reinhold Messner, the first person to climb all 8,000meter peaks without supplemental oxygen, also saluted the Gurkha climber, writing that Purja demonstrated “a great capacity for economic management, leadership, logistics organization. And obviously, exceptional physical resistance.”

There’s also an important cultural component to Purja’s accomplishment.

While Himalayan alpinism has been dominated by Westerners and Sherpas, a mountain people, the fact that Purja is a soldier from the f latlands made many underestimate him—and then overlook his accomplishment. “Western mountaineers stereotype local guides as strong, silent, simple people. But Nims is brash, outspoken, and complicated,” says Wilkinson.

“I think he has the opportunity to be a transformative figure for the mountain people of Nepal.”

Purja is certainly working hard at such a legacy. Even as he manages speaking engagements and a documentary f ilm about Project Possible that he hopes will help pay off the debt he racked up, he already has his eyes on the next prize.

Nepal has kicked off a tourism campaign for 2020 aimed at boosting visits. As part of that effort, Purja hopes to put up a new route this year on the Nepal side of Cho Oyu and bring more climbers to his country, inspiring even bigger ambitions than his.

“I’m just a poor guy from a small village in Nepal. I barely had money for sandals before all of this,” he says. “I hope my story will help everyone to remember that you should never stop dreaming big.” Q MARCH 2020

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FOUR-DAY WEEKEND

Cali’s New Foodie Capital Once sleepy Sacramento is now a hub of creative energy, thanks to new investments and a rich history. And it just may be America’s most exciting new dining destination. by BLANE BACHELOR

F YOU LOOK up while jog-

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ing its longtime reputation as a stodgy political hub into a bona f ide culinary destination and outdoor-recreation hotbed.

In June, the Kitchen, a spacious restaurant serving $135 prix fixe meals—with delicacies like roasted quail over portbraised red cabbage—was awarded the city’s first Michelin star. The chef-owner behind the menu, Randall Selland, has long been an institutional figure in Sacramento’s foodie scene, having taken full advantage of the region’s abundance of farms and ranches. The Sacramento Valley produces much of the country’s fruits, vegetables, and nuts, and it’s that rich agricultural heritage that inspired the moniker “America’s Farm-to-Fork Capital.”

COURTESY OF SACRAMENTO TOURISM

ging around Sacramento these days, as I discovered last fall, you may find yourself face-to-face with a fourstory-tall orangutan. Or a menagerie of jungle birds in flight. Or even Johnny Cash.

Over the past several years, some of the best muralists in the world—including heavyweight artists Axel Void and Shepard Fairey—have transformed the state capital’s buildings into a giant plein air gallery, with more than 120 pieces of art. It’s all part of Sacramento’s Wide Open Walls, a two-week festival promoting the arts.

During my running tour of the murals, my jogging buddy/guide was Jenn Kistler-

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McCoy, founder of Sac Tour Company, which specializes in tours via foot or bike.

At the time, Kistler-McCoy was training for the Boston Marathon; I was just hoping to detox a bit after too many culinary indulgences the night before. Along our six-mile route, Kistler-McCoy pointed out a dozen or so murals, explaining the artists and story behind each one.

“The mural movement started in the 1960s,” she said. “This isn’t a new phenomenon—it’s just f inally getting the attention it deserves.”

The same can be said for Sacramento itself. Once described by now governor Gavin Newsom as “just so dull,” California’s capital is on a tear these days, transform-

FOUR DAYS IN SACRAMENTO Clockwise from above: The Golden 1 Center arena; Kru Japanese restaurant;

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: NICK OTTO FOR THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY IMAGES; SHUTTERSTOCK; COURTESY OF KRU

WHERE TO S TAY The boutique Citizen Hotel is a fitting nod to the city’s stately roots, decorated with framed political cartoons from The Sacramento Bee. For a more see-and-be-seen spot, head to the Kimpton Sawyer, home to Sac’s first rooftop pool.

WHERE TO E AT AND DRINK It’s hard to go wrong with the Italian-influenced seafood dishes at Allora. Or get your brisket-andbeer fix at Urban Roots Brewing & Smokehouse. The Canon has amazing al fresco dining, with designed-for-sharing plates like bulgogi butternut squash.

CATCH A BUZ Z The Beer Vault, housed in a 1912 bank building, has 68 self-pour taps to sample from. Or revel in the old-school vibe at B Side, a Midtown bar where DJs spin vinyl on the weekend. Want vino? You can choose from 24 sparkling wines served by the glass at Fizz Champagne & Bubbles Bar. DON’ T LE AVE WITHOUT ...strolling around Old Sac, which offers a glimpse into the city’s Gold Rush–era riverfront district... savoring Milk Money’s absurdly delicious doughnuts with cheeky names like Bananas & Pajamas.

one of the city’s many murals. Opposite page: The annual Tower Bridge Dinner.

“In the dead of winter, we’re still being supplied from local farms,” says Oliver Ridgeway, who, while executive chef at Grange, helped put Sacramento on the culinary map. In 2018, Ridgeway left Grange to open his brasserie-style eatery, Camden Spit & Larder, and many of the city’s culinary talents have similarly opened their own restaurants.

The city is growing on other fronts, too. In 2016, the $557 million Golden 1 Center opened as the new home of the NBA’s Sacramento Kings—and as the world’s f irst 100 percent solar-powered arena. The public-private venture has transformed a formerly blighted swath of the city into Downtown Commons, or DoCo, which includes a luxury hotel; Punch Bowl Social, a hybrid bowling alley/ arcade; and two dozen restaurants and retail shops. In two years, a professional soccer team is scheduled to play in a new $300 million stadium in the booming Railyards district, a mega-development just north of downtown that’s roughly eight times larger than New York’s Hudson Yards.

“We didn’t just want to be that place between Tahoe and San Francisco anyMEN’S JOURNAL

more, so we decided to invest in ourselves,” says Raymond James Irwin, a Sacramento native and president of Fizz Champagne & Bubbles Bar, located in DoCo. “The city is changing because the leaders in our community decided, let’s do it instead of just talking about it.”

Sac’s year-round mild weather makes it easy to burn off calories by exploring the city’s leafy neighborhoods via foot or two wheels. For longer rides, cyclists have the 32-mile American River Bike Trail, which runs to the Sierra Nevada foothills.

Closer to downtown, the Sacramento River Parkway Trail is popular among runners, with views of the river and its iconic, mustard-yellow Tower Bridge.

Standup paddleboarders and kayakers are a common sight, and farther af ield, there are several national forests rich in both hiking and Gold Country history.

Not unlike modern-day Californians, Sacramento’s Gold Rush–era residents faced fires and severe flooding of the river; many left and never returned when the boom fizzled. But the city’s infrastructure and economy have come a long way since then, and locals these days are finding plenty of reasons to stay for the long haul.

“You could have asked me 10 years ago if I’d be back in Sacramento, and I would have told you no way,” says Dane Blom, a native of the city who was named executive chef at Grange in 2018 following stints in New York and Napa. “But now I have zero plans to go anywhere. I love it here.” Q MARCH 2020

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Believers

S AS NONEXISTENT CREATURES go, Big-

warm October Saturday. “Like, a physical sensation. Then this thing steps out from behind a tree, 30 feet away.”

Carpenter, now 45, is standing in a field turned overflow parking lot, in rural southeast Oklahoma. The creature was upright, bipedal, and covered in black hair, he continues. For a 10-second eternity, the two gazed at each other. “There was a human quality behind its eyes,” 020

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tival and Conference, a two-day Sasquatch salon of sorts, held annually at a campground about 200 miles east of Oklahoma City. He’s mindful that Bigfoot believers fall along a spectrum. He wants to keep his distance from the true whackjobs—the folks who say that Bigfoot can turn invisible and has mastered space and time travel. Carpenter just wants the truth.

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foot has had a helluva run. A thousand years ago, indigenous people were painting his likeness onto rocks, and he remains a fixture on television and in movies to this day. A contingent of kooks has long maintained that the creature exists. But in recent years, as QAnon, f lat-earthers, Area 51 raiders, and other conspiracy theorists have gained traction, Bigfoot has captured the interest of a burgeoning number of regular people, like Carpenter.

At least 10 states now have annual festivals, with two having started since 2017.

photographs by JOHN DAVID PITTMAN

The Bigfoot festival here in rural Oklahoma is among the longest running. It began in 2005 and now draws a few thousand people to Honobia (population: about 70).

Festivalgoers gather to share encounter stories, attend seminars, and camp in Sasquatch country. “We’re in the middle of nowhere,” says Jolly Winsor, one of the festival organizers. “You’re lucky if your phone works. No gas stations, ATMs, or stores.” What the town does have are churches, deer, and Bigfoot sightings.

There have been dozens over the years.

It would be easier to dismiss Bigfoot believers if they all wore tinfoil hats. But that’s not the case when you walk around the festival. Most people have jobs, kids, and minivans, and are exceptionally kind.

They wander among the vendor booths scoping out the T-shirts, Bigfoot research kits, tomahawks, and turquoise earrings.

Throughout the day, crowds file into a conference center for seminars led by Bigfoot experts. They include Igor Burtsev, a Russian “hominologist” who’s been researching Bigfoot since 1965. He spends months at a time in the field, investigating supposed encounters. During his talk, he explains how in Mongolia he found ponies whose manes were tangled in a peculiar way that, in his view, clearly pointed to Bigfoot.

(His logic is, unfortunately, impossible to track.) Later, a cryptolinguist plays field recordings that sound like chimpanzees trying to shake down a grocer for bananas.

A cryptozoologist then drones on about Bigfoots’ pillar-like legs. (Crypto sounds high-tech, but in this world, it just means that you’re trying to substantiate something no one else has.) All of the speakers, as it happens, have books for sale.

The degree to which the attendees buy into these talks, and into Bigfoot in general, varies. “I’m not a Bigfoot believer,” I overhear a guy in mirrored sunglasses say. “I’m a Bigfoot knower.” Later, when I ask Larry Harkey, a retired truck driver, whether he believes, he says, “Don’t tell anybody, but not really.” He comes to the festival just for the fun of it.

The skeptics and the zealots do share a sense of humor about the whole thing.

Popular T-shirt phrases include “World’s Hide-N-Seek Champion” and “Bigfoot Has Pictures of Me But Nobody Believes Him, Either.” There’s even a guy in a Bigfoot Lebowski shirt, bearing a cartoon

of a furry creature in a bathrobe and shades, hoisting a White Russian. “I’m the Squatch, Man,” it reads.

THERE’S BEEN A LOT of hand-wringing

recently about how we live in a post-truth era, in which facts are meaningless and

misinformation threatens to topple Western civilization as we know it. The Bigfoot crowd doesn’t dwell on such concerns.

After lunch, among a circle of trucks and campers, I f ind Kurt Stanley, the founder of a Bigfoot group called the North Canadian River Project. He’s sitting in the shade of an RV. He used to play bass in a hair-metal band and now works as a real-estate property manager.

He says that his first sighting was in 1988, while he was bass f ishing with a buddy in an Oklahoma reservoir. “We rounded a little bend,” he says, “and there it was by a tree, 13 feet away.” The creature may have been a juvenile: It stood six and a half feet tall, compared with the normal seven to nine feet. It had reddish hair, Stanley adds, and a “dangly little penis.”

That ain’t no suit, he recalls thinking. He was too amazed to be afraid.

He kept fishing nonchalantly, to avoid spooking it. When he finally alerted his friend, the guy turned and screamed. The

From top: MMA fighter turned Bigfoot chaser Shane Carpenter; a crowd gathers for a Sasquatch-centric weekend.

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF BIGFOOT 1000:

1929:

A traffic sign near Honobia, Oklahoma,

1967:

where Bigfoot has been sighted dozens of times. Bottom: Troy Hudson leads a Sasquatch-encounter sharing session.

2019:

the fact that, though there’s no evidence that Bigfoot is real, there’s no evidence that he isn’t, either. The believers don’t sweat this lack of proof. Besides, gathering with friends in the woods to chase Bigfoot is a lot more fun than having to reckon with legitimate conspiracies, like regulatory rollbacks or systemic inequality. And, ultimately, the true believers are so firm in their convictions that they don’t care whether you believe them.

AT THE END of the day, I run into Shane

Carpenter, the former MMA fighter. Turns out, he started investigating Bigfoot well before this weekend. In 2013, while hiking with his wife and three sons in Missouri, he was overcome with the same sickening 022

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feeling of being watched as when he was 10. Please don’t let this be what I think it is, he thought. He spotted three heads looking at him from behind a brush pile.

The Carpenter family quickly skedaddled.

This time, though, Shane was determined not to be afraid. He went back to the spot the next day, then kept going back. He says he took a “Jane Goodall approach”— nonconfrontational, walking the same trails at the same time of day, leaving food, showing that he wasn’t a threat.

He had more encounters and got hooked.

He closed his MMA gym, took a f lexible construction job, and devoted as much time as he could to recording his encounters. He even has a documentary in the works, titled In the 400. He explains this all to me matter-of-factly, as if it were a completely normal thing to do. But he knows the futility of trying to convince guys like me and doesn’t try. He believes in what he’s seen. Q

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Elegy for a Minivan It was ancient, unlovely, emasculating. Anyone would have been happy to see it go. Instead, the demise of the van triggered a weird D kind of midlife crisis.

HE LAST TIME I saw my

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photograph by FIRSTNAME LASTNAME

ITANI/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

minivan was at a wrecking yard in Richmond, California. Just a few yards up the road loomed one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s largest active landfills, the final resting place for everything plastic and unrecyclable. It seemed like an appropriate place for a car to die.

My ex-wife and I signed our names and transferred the title. I posed for one last

picture next to the van and then hitched a ride home with my ex.

I had scoffed several months earlier when an obscure regional government agency sent me a letter offering a thousand bucks if I agreed to take my 1996 Nissan Quest off the road. I was no reckless polluter! My minivan had never failed a California smog inspection. The odometer broke a few years back, so I can’t say exactly how many miles were on the car,

but the total was surely under 200,000. It seemed greedy and disrespectful to put the old warrior down at the first whiff of a state handout.

But then, a few months later, the engine overheated. My mechanic told me that the cooling fan was busted, which would be a $500 job. He also noted signs of long-term engine wear. Without rebuilding the entire engine, he said, there was a chance the minivan could seize up randomly on the freeway. When your mechanic tells you to stop giving him money, it’s time to listen.

So I called the government agency and made a date for the minivan’s dismantling.

Then I started moping around as if my dog had died.

Tears welled up on the minivan’s last trip to Costco. The sight of the spot on

AS I CHECKED UNDER THE HOOD OF MY OWN LIFE, I HAD TO CONCEDE THAT MY SUSPENSION WAS ALSO MORE THAN A LITTLE SUSPECT. I, TOO, HAVE RUST SPOTS. tackling brutal bike rides in the Sierras and on the Lost Coast. I remembered transporting a group of grown men tripping balls on mushrooms to a basketball court, and thinking how their deranged chatter wasn’t that much different from a pack of 7-year-olds singing a song about farts.

And I remembered, when my best friend and I were hanging on to each other for dear life while both our marriages collapsed, driving around the block repeatedly just so we could listen to the dreamlike end of a Sonic Youth song before we were forced to park and return to our wearisome lives.

The minivan was part of the custody deal. My ex and I lived five blocks apart, and when the kids changed houses, so did the Quest. There were some obvious emotional costs to sharing a car with your ex—it’s hard to let go and move on when you cohabit a vehicle—but it also

The author bids farewell to his beloved 1996 Nissan Quest.

COURTESY OF ANDREW LEONARD

the driver-side windowsill where 20 years of my cocked elbow had worn away a soft patch, like marble steps in a church scalloped away by centuries of worshippers, filled me with gloomy awe. I considered the pile of Maxell UD XLII tapes on the f loor and lamented: I’ll never own another car with a cassette player.

Good grief. I was in mourning for a fucking minivan—the least glamorous of all vehicles, the favorite ride of soccer moms, a veritable monument to testosterone deficiency. It was ridiculous. My Quest was no classic and I’d never treated it as one. No car wash crew could ever fully eradicate the patina of crushed Goldfish crackers and spilled milkshakes that insinuated itself into every crevice.

The suspension was shot, the paint job was freckled with rust spots, and the electronic door locks had a bad habit of randomly misf iring. My children were convinced that it was haunted, and my daughter was afraid to drive it. I felt stupid for being so sad and mad about being so stupid.

And yet.

Sure, the minivan was a no-doubtabout-it clunker that only the nanny state of California would pay good money for, but the memories it contained gleamed like fresh chrome. I drove my daughter to preschool and to college in that car.

From San Diego to Eureka, Lake Tahoe to Pismo Beach, the minivan was a sublime road trip machine. I remembered the kids sleeping in their car seats, curled up with their favorite stuffed animals, as I roared down Interstate 5 to visit their great-grandmother in Los Angeles.

I remember so many children transported en masse to so many birthday parties and Pixar movies and karate classes and fencing and piano lessons. I remembered fitting a kid-size mattress in the back and sleeping in the van before

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felt like a grown-up way to approach the messiness of divorce. Mature, efficient, safe—kind of like a minivan.

Seven years ago, I finally cut the cord and bought out my ex’s stake in the car.

But I never got around to recording the change of title with the state, and when I made my appointment for the van’s dismantling, I learned a funny thing: To get my check, all registered owners of the van had to be present at the wrecking yard. Call it the circle of minivan life. We had bought the car together in 1996 at a dealership in Long Beach. Now we’d be together again, a quarter century later, at Carlos Auto Wreckers.

It’s a lot harder to end something than begin it. I gradually realized that my mopery wasn’t just nostalgia for road trips gone by and the f leeting adorability of toddlers. It was about coming to grips with the narrative arc of my own life.

When we bought the car, my career as a writer was taking off. I was making real money chronicling this new phenomenon called the internet. That same year, we bought a house. We already had an amazing 2-year-old daughter, and an equally incredible son was just a year away. I was feeling pretty goddamn good about things, and if there was one thing I knew for sure, it was that I needed a car with a lot of cupholders.

By the time of the minivan’s final ride, all of the cupholders within reach of the driver were broken. And as I checked under the hood of my own life, I had to concede that my suspension was also more than a little suspect. I, too, have rust spots. I realized that the longer I held on to the car, the longer I was pretending that I was still that person who bought it, that person with healthy knees and a great marriage and a future beckoning as wide open as California’s Central Valley. But the wrecking yard comes for everyone.

I felt a lot better once I realized I was sad about my minivan because I was afraid to die. So I threw a wake. I gathered a community of people whose lives intersected that of the minivan around a fire in my backyard, and told them to tell stories about crushed Goldfish and Tahoe blizzards and that time everyone in the car got a stomach virus after a trip to Big Sur. I handed out shot glasses full of tequila. And I made a toast: “You were uncool, minivan, but you performed your duties with stodgy grace.

You raised my family. You took us all where we needed to go.” Q MARCH 2020

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Buck Mason Felted Chore Coat ($225, buckmason .com); Joseph Abboud Linen Scarf ($125, josephabboud .com); Brunello Cucinelli Cotton Sweater ($975, Brunello Cucinelli, NYC); BLDWN Modern Slim Trouser ($178, bldwn.com); UGG Beach Moc Slip-On ($125, ugg.com); TAG Heuer Monaco Calibre 11 Watch ($5,900, tagheuer.com); Dooney & Bourke Florentine Medium Duffle ($558, dooney.com).

Todd Snyder Italian Dylan Suede Jacket ($998, todd snyder.com); Perry Ellis Long Sleeve Untucked Chambray Shirt (price upon request, perryellis.com); Onia Miles Waffle Knit Henley ($75, onia .com); Tod’s 5 Pocket Jeans ($545, tods.com); Fratelli Rossetti Shoes ($700, fratellirossetti.com).

Planning an adventure in New York City? You can’t beat a stay at the brand-new 286-room Moxy East Village (showcased on these pages). Like the neighborhood it’s in, the Moxy has plenty of downtown style with lots of retro rock & roll flourishes. Our favorite touch? You can request a turntable—and selection of vinyl curated for any mood—delivered right to your room. Rock on!

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Brunello Cucinelli Denim Jacket ($1,595, Brunello Cucinelli, NYC); Buck Mason Pima Curved Hem Tee ($35, buckmason.com); Brunello Cucinelli Trouser ($795, Brunello Cucinelli, NYC); Tod’s White Competition Sneakers ($625, tods.com); Leatherology Kessler Large Signature Duffle ($365, leatherology.com).

MARCH 2020

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GROOMING

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photograph by JARREN VINK

4/ Tiege Hanely

AUTOS

Notebook

7-Seater Slugfest Which upscale, American three-row SUV is worthy of your royal family? by JESSE WILL

OU, THERE, looking for a new ride. You’ve got a patriotic streak: All six Rocky films are in your Netf lix queue, even the questionable V. You have a family, and stuff, and enough coin to haul both in style.

Turn your attention, then, to two brand-new, U.S.-made midsize luxury SUVs: Lincoln’s Aviator and Cadillac’s XT6. Both feature V6 engines, three rows, a laundry list of tech, and stickers that start around $50,000. But which deserves a spot in your garage?

We’ll save you t he suspense: It ’s the Lincoln. Whatever your opinion of Matthew McConaughey’s fanciful ad spots, it isn’t diff icult to discern the differences once your foot hits the pedals. Lincoln went with a more advanced powertrain, and it pays off. The Aviator’s three-liter V6 engine is turbocharged, and most of its power is available as soon as you tip-in.

On the other hand, the Caddy’s naturally aspirated V6 puts out 90 fewer horses and far less torque (271 versus 415 lb-ft), peaking at high RPMs. It’s not anemic, but it’s by no means as satisfying, especially when you consider its fuel economy is only one gallon better on the highway.

The Aviator’s edge is evident on the inside, too, where you’ll find more metal and leather, and fewer plastic touchpoints.

Not to say that the Aviator is perfect. Some choices seem almost arbitrary rather than driven by functional improvements— such as the dash-mounted “piano key” gear selector. The XT6 does have bright spots like excellent suspension tuning, a hushed and comfy cabin, and a solid crash rating—but it still falls just short.

So in this fight, it’s Lincoln. But like Rocky, we look forward to a rematch. Q

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BOOKS

A Father’s Story The disappearance of a young man in Costa Rica becomes something much more than a simple mystery in a moving new memoir: a father’s search for solace after losing his adventurous son.

by RYAN KROGH

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Dial, above in 2015, searched for his son, Cody Roman, for two years before a miner found his body in Costa Rica.

When I spoke to Dial last fall, he told me, despite so much media coverage of his son’s story, that he knew he’d want the final word. “I wanted to make sure that the right story was out there because the TV show just seemed wrong to me,” he said. “I thought it was going to be a documentary, but it ended up being a reality TV show.”

In the series, filmed with Dial in Costa Rica, there are “re-created” scenes, including one with a local walking with what looks like a blood-stained machete. Dial was f lown to Los Angeles to read narration that the show’s producers had written

photograph by FIRSTNAME LASTNAME

FROM LEFT: JARREN VINK; PETER BOHLER; COURTESY OF ROMAN DIAL.

N J U LY 1 0, 2014, Cody Roman Dial, a 27-yearold graduate student from Alaska, set out into Costa Rica’s imposing Corcovado National Park, a 164-square-mile jungle on the country’s western f lank.

He never returned.

His disappearance spurred his mother, Peggy, and his father, Roman Dial—a National Geographic Explorer and wellknown figure in Alaska’s outdoor circles— into a relentless two-year quest to find their son. It was a tortuous search, with contradicting clues, a dubious murder confession, and the ever-diminishing hope

that Cody, who went by his middle name, Roman, might be found alive. Dial’s search was first chronicled in this magazine in 2016. It also became the subject of a sixepisode National Geographic “true-crime series,” Missing Dial, which traced Dial’s repeated efforts to discover what happened to his intrepid son. Now, nearly four years after Cody Roman’s remains were discovered in the jungle, Dial has carefully, agonizingly written down his version of events for the book The Adventurer’s Son. It’s a moving portrait of an inspired young man and a firsthand account of a father’s desperate hunt for his missing son. But the heart of the book is Dial’s detailed accounts of his and Cody Roman’s exploits around the globe—and a father’s close bond with his only son, a friendship forged through shared adventures.

for him. Two investigators hired to assist in the search become fixated on a local drug dealer who people had seen traveling with “the gringo”—this despite Dial’s insistence that his son didn’t fit the mold of a 20-something backpacker looking to get high. This tension generated good TV, but it also made Dial seem unwilling to accept the true nature of his son’s disappearance.

“I was totally willing to trade my story for their help,” says Dial. “But once we got down there, it just became another story that I didn’t feel was going in the right direction.”

In the wake of the show’s airing, Dial received letters criticizing him for his reluctance to believe the investigators helping him and his impatience with them. A few people even skewered him as a father. How could you let your son take off on such a risky adventure like that, they asked.

It’s a question that Dial grapples with in his book. In one section, Cody Roman emails his father about a planned trek through Guatemala’s El Petén region, a vast jungle full of Mayan ruins. It’s a notoriously diff icult area to negotiate, with a reputation as a stopover for Colombian narcos transporting cocaine to the U.S. Dial pored over maps of his son’s planned route and crafted multiple emails essentially telling him, “No, don’t do it.” With each email he typed out, he thought better and deleted it. At this point in his travels, Cody Roman was far better equipped to make these decisions.

He spoke Spanish f luently, thrived in the backcountry, and was probably in the best shape of his life. In the end, Dial simply warned him of hazards he might encounter and hit send on a short email, hoping to himself that the trip would go well. It did and conf irmed to Dial that his son had grown into a strong, capable, and conscientious young man.

It’s not giving anything away to say that Cody Roman’s death a few months later in Costa Rica was not the result of a murderous local but a freak wilderness accident. His remains were discovered in May 2016 by a miner in Corcovado, in a creek bed. Dial immediately f lew down.

“I felt like I’d been held underwater, literally, for years,” Dial says. “I was 99.9 percent sure that he was dead, but I just didn’t know how it happened or where.”

When Dial sat down to write The Adventurer’s Son in 2018, his hometown of Anchorage had just been hit by a magnitude 7.0 earthquake. He wrote as the aftershocks rumbled through his house,

I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN IS, BUT I FELT LIKE I WAS ON THE VERGE OF ONE. where he was working. “I don’t even know what a nervous breakdown is, but I felt like I was on the verge of one,” he says.

“There was a lot of pent-up emotion that I was able to let out as I wrote.”

To complete the book, Dial reread Cody Roman’s journals from when he was a kid.

As a researcher sometimes working in remote areas around the globe, Dial had the opportunity to introduce his son to far-f lung adventures from a young age.

When Cody Roman was only 6, the duo bushwhacked for 60 miles across the tundra on a remote Aleutian island. They explored the jungles of Puerto Rico and Borneo. The family road-tripped together through the Australian outback. Dial and

Dial also wanted to demonstrate just how essential those experiences were to his close relationship with his son. “It’s really useful to go outdoors with your kids,” Dial says. “It’s fundamental to being human, and it helps build really strong bonds.

My strongest relationships are ones that developed doing outdoor adventures.”

For the book, Dial also pored over all Cody Roman’s email correspondence during his travels through Mexico and Central America. People who had met Cody Roman reached out to send Dial notes about what a caring young man he was. “To read those things and then see the whole arc of his life, to see who he’d become, it was beautiful,” says Dial, “but it was very painful, too.”

In the end, what Cody Roman’s saga became is not a wilderness mystery or parable of a dramatic adventure gone wrong. With Dial’s words, it was transformed into an almost real-time memoir of a father’s struggle to deal with the grief of losing his son through revisiting the adventures they once shared. It’s a story about a mourning father and his quest to f ind some sort of peace—and in the process discovering what a remarkable, confident young man his son had become, not unlike his old man. “I wanted him to be his own person,” Dial told me, “but it’s very satisfying to see yourself in your children. I just wished that he’d lived long enough to have his own son.” Q

In 2008, Dial and his son floated the Grand Canyon in pack rafts, one of the first teams to do so.

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WE’RE WITH HER

Danai Gurira The Tony-nominated playwright and star of Black Panther and The Walking Dead talks sword fighting, culture shock, and the secrets of the creative process. by SAR AH Z . WEXLER

This is your final season on The Walking Dead. Other than being super prepared for a zombie attack, what will you take away from the experience?

A greater level of physical endurance.

A nd a deep understanding of the amount of work and collaboration and camaraderie and goodwill and family that goes into creating a show that has this level of staying power.

What about your character Michonne’s sword? That would be nice to hang in the living room.

They didn’t give me the sword. I tried.

Why wouldn’t they give it to you? I mean, what else are they going to do with it?

We’ll see. I consider it an ongoing negotiation.

JAMES MACARI/AUGUST IMAGE

Did you like playing such a tough character, riding a horse and swinging a sword?

Over the years, I got more and more connected with my sword and made it my own. It was a really cool journey to find my character through her weapon.

The coolest part is when it just starts to be instinctual, not something you’re mindful of. Riding a horse definitely was something I had to get familiar with. They don’t care when they’re going to relieve themselves, if you’re shooting or not, so they kind of own the set. How your day goes is really up to them.

You also portrayed Okoye in Black Panther. What is it with you and badass women?

I’ve also played a housewife in Brooklyn, to be fair.

But I want to see things I’ve never seen, be a part of things I’ve never seen. And that definitely appealed to me about both Michonne and Okoye. I’d never seen the story of a woman who’s the head of an army of a nation, with deep connections to the throne and to the traditions of her African nation. That’s just something I had never seen, and I was desperate to be a part of.

THE BASICS Age

Hometown

nitely understanding the novel, but also all the aspects that it brings to life around the immigrant experience. There’s no end to how I relate to it.

How so?

I’m t he same a s t he main 4 Favorite charac ter, Ifemelu. I wa s b o r n h e r e , i n Io w a , a n d Plays my family moved back to Zimbabwe when I was 5. So I have very little recollection of America as a child. Then I moved back to the U.S. for college. There are so many similarities in terms of my navigation of America and hers. Like the culture shock I experienced.

As a Broadway playwright, you’ve been nominated for a Tony. How do you get What was disorienting about being back inside your characters’ heads? in America?

I use my degree in psychology—I’m I don’t know if I can put my f inger on always digging into why people do what it. Like the food. There’s an abundance they do and what makes them who they of everything, but it just tasted and are. Also, I’m the child of academics, so felt different from what I was used to.

I’m a big researcher. I believe in deeply Everything was different. delving into something, becoming almost an expert until it stimulates your Does your childhood in Zimbabwe influimagination and the story clicks. ence your advocacy work about gender equality?

What are you researching now?

I grew up in a house where there was I’m working as a showrunner to adapt a lot of equality, and my father was an the Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie novel advocate for his daughters having an Americanah into a miniseries. It’s defiassertive voice. Yet every time I stepped out of my house, I could see a disparity in terms of how women were expected to behave versus men. That’s something I’ve always desired to challenge.

OVER THE YEARS, I GOT MORE AND MORE CONNECTED TO MY SWORD AND MADE IT MY OWN. IT WAS A REALLY COOL JOURNEY.

MEN’S JOURNAL

I heard that you pray or meditate every day. How are those similar or different?

They’re very similar. I try to do it every day. It’s centering, focusing—a sense of purpose and calling. Q MARCH 2020

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IN DEFENSE OF

Hangovers The head-throbbing, nauseous effects of overdrinking are an evolutionary miracle—and a prime excuse to veg. by MIA MERCADO

HE CORRECT NUMBER of Malört shots one should consume is zero. I discovered this on a recent trip to Chicago, where I chose to get absolutely blasted on the stuff the night before a full day of driving. I spent the entire eight-hour ride back home trying not to puke and shit my pants in the car. Though successful on both fronts, there’s a Wendy’s in southern Illinois to which I can never return.

Hangovers, with all their gastro fireworks, are easy to hate. But, reader, I’m here to say that we should revere these woozy day-ruiners for the biological wonders that they are.

At the very least, hangovers warrant respect for basically being unbeatable.

We’ve rid the world of polio, smallpox, and cargo shorts. And yet the hangover, in all its nauseous glory, endures. It is resistant to any combination of vitamin C and Vitamin water and to any supposed hangover cure, which are all, to put it scientifically, bullshit. I once blew $35 on a hangoverprevention pill, in hopes that it would counteract the Fireball I was about to ruin

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myself with. But as any sane adult knows, and as I soon discovered, the only surefire way to avoid a hangover tomorrow is not to overdo it tonight. (Admittedly, this is a near-impossible feat when it’s two-forone margaritas and, suddenly, your body is mostly tequila.)

Hangovers also have a practical benefit, in that they afford otherwise upright adults a voucher good for one (1) self-imposed, only mildly guilt-ridden sick day. We’ll all power through a head cold on a workday while DayQuiled out of our minds. But a hangover is a sorry-can’t-I’m—gag—sick, plan-canceling ailment in which even the noblest among us can indulge. A hangover is like a friend who shows up at your house, extremely uninvited. Your initial reaction is “Why are you here?” Then they’re like, “You know what would be great right now?

Garbage food and not moving.” And you’re like, “Maybe you’re not so bad.” You can then wrap yourself in a blanket and plop down on the couch for an entire day like the gross human burrito that you very much are deep down.

And should you, against all odds, muster the strength to leave the couch, MEN’S JOURNAL

hangovers are a perfect excuse to buy super-sugary sports drinks, even though you’re not playing sports, and to chug Pedialyte, for nostalgia’s sake, even though you’re not a baby. (Though, in fairness to babies, if you admitted that you spent a day eating, sleeping, pooping, and crying, a baby would be like, “Who gave you my day planner?”) Plus, when it comes to food, the only thing that tastes better than an egg-and-cheese sandwich when you’re drunk is an egg-and-cheese sandwich when you’re hungover. It’s magic.

Perhaps the hangover’s greatest asset is its sheer, immediate pain. Humans treat their bodies terribly. But if you blow off a trip or seven to the gym, your body doesn’t immediately turn to mush. If you skip fruits and veggies for three meals, your body doesn’t break out in hives that spell “Please Stop Subsisting on Chipotle.”

At least when you assault your body with alcohol, hangovers remind you that you’re an idiot and warn you please, please, please not to overdo it again. Will you listen?

Maybe one day. In the meantime, the hangover, terrible yet entirely deserved, will be there to tuck you in to your blanket burrito and to give you sports drinks and egg-and-cheese sandwiches.

It could be worse. With booze, you’re basically ingesting poison. Hangovers are arguably the best worst way your body could react. I’ll drink to that—provided it’s not Malört. Q illustration by IAN KELTIE

SEAL OF APPROVAL

Notebook PUNCH LIST

FRONTIER LOADED Three truly wild new releases all about the (arguably) best state—Alaska.

BOOK The Wonderful

WHEELS I recently

Story of Henry Sugar and Six More, by Roald Dahl, changed my life. The title story is about a wealthy gambler who masters clairvoyance to cheat at cards. In doing so, he discovers that there’s more to life than chasing wealth and empty pleasures.

bought a VanMoof Electrified X2, a Dutch electric bike. It’s sleek and beautiful, and though it’s electric, it doesn’t do all the work for you. It’s great for getting around New York. I’ve started riding out to Brooklyn and exploring spots I don’t normally go.

BOOK This Is Chance!

by Jon Mooallem In 1964, the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in North America rocked Anchorage, Alaska, splitting streets apart, triggering tsunamis, and killing 139 people. Mooallem’s vivid, read-in-one-sitting book of reportage centers on Genie Chance, a part-time radio journalist. For 59 hours, the Texas native manned the radio mic, helping to guide the city through chaos and becoming a state legend in the process.

PODCAST

VERETT COLLECTION; UNIVERSAL/ 2WEST

ACCORDING TO

Trevor Noah The Daily Show host—currently on his Loud & Clear comedy tour— discusses a life-changing children’s book, Caribbean cuisine, his NYC ride, and his other recent obsessions.

TELEVISION I’ve been

DINING In New York, I

watching Kengan Ashura on Netflix. It’s about an underground Japanese fighting ring, in which the fighters represent corporations, as a way to help them settle disputes without lawyers. It’s a hilarious premise and an easy, fun watch.

seldom eat at the same place twice, but I do frequent Pearl’s in Brooklyn. They serve really authentic Caribbean food. I’ve fallen in love with a dish called bake and shark. (Yes, shark!)

—AS TOLD TO J.R. SULLIVAN

FILM

THE GREAT THRILLER REVIVAL A brief history of recent suspense gems, including The Invisible Man (2/28).

Midnight Son This true-crime Audible series dives into the case of Teddy Kyle Smith, an actor turned fugitive who claimed he had a supernatural encounter on the tundra as he fled police.

Things get weirder from there.

MOVIE The Call of the Wild Fair warning: There’s a CGI dog in this rehash of Jack London’s famous novel. But, hey, your kids will dig it, and Harrison Ford is always solid. (2/21) MUSIC

CHANGING TUNE A fuzzy-guitar god goes acoustic, and sort of country.

Don’t Breathe (’16)

Get Out (’17)

Bird Box (’18)

The Invisible Man (’20)

Slacker-rock OG Stephen Malkmus returns with Traditional Techniques. It’s his third album in three years and the best of the bunch, with acoustic ballads tinged with autoharp and slide.

MARCH 2020

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man on fire, the set of a magazine photo shoot can be a pretty tedious place. A photographer stares into a monitor, a pack of bearded bros in Carhartt pants rig lights and f iddle with those photo umbrellas, which surely have a purpose (though I couldn’t tell you what that is).

Somewhere there’s a table of Trader Joe’s snacks. Mostly it’s just a lot of standing around and waiting.

But Andy Samberg—a 41-year-old man dressed in a pink cashmere sweater, pretending to shoot down toy drones with a wooden bow and arrow—is pretty psyched to be here.

For Samberg, a few hours alone is a luxury. In 2019, he hosted the Golden Globes, shot a bunch of episodes of his Emmywinning sitcom, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, went on an eight-city tour with his comedy-rap troupe the Lonely Island (performing after Post Malone at Bonnaroo!), shot more Brooklyn Nine-Nine, co-wrote and starred in an unlikely musical parody about Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire, fronted a twisted romantic comedy that debuted at Sundance in January, and changed a whole mess of diapers. Samberg and his wife, the musician Joanna Newsom—the only harpist cool enough to have Paul Thomas Anderson direct her music videos—have a 2-year-old daughter at home.

“I’ve been working so much,” he says.

“Parenting is a fuck ton of energy and focus.” But here, on set, it’s different.

“They gave me a haircut!” Samberg says.

“And no one asked me to feed them!”

By any account, it’s been a remarkable run. And Samberg hardly seems the worse for wear. He remains professionally adorable; his curly hair has been tamed for prime time, but his class-clown spirit remains unchecked—an infectious, come-

on-get-happy vibe that’s a tonic for these otherwise turbulent times. Still, it’s a little surprising to see him here. After all, a goofball’s post–Saturday Night Live career tends to follow a pattern. You take a beloved character from the show and stretch it to an 81-minute sporadically funny movie that critics dismiss as “bloated.” Then you show up at a Comedy Central roast.

Samberg, somehow, has rejected that narrative and traveled a different trajectory.

He’s the star and producer of a long-running network sitcom (rare) that’s beloved by legit comedians (extremely rare) and professionally smart tastemakers like LinManuel Miranda (unheard of). But he’s also quietly—and impressively—sent the elevator back down for the next generation of comics, executive producing two of the funniest (and oddest) streaming hits of the last year—Netf lix’s I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson and Hulu’s PEN15.

How did we get here? Seriously, we’re looking around: How did we get here?

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THE PHOTO SHOOT IS TAKING PLACE AT

a secluded house on a massive piece of untamed property that appears to have crash-landed in the Hollywood Hills.

There are orange and lemon trees and a Moroccan-style cabana alongside a sleek pool. Somewhere in the woods behind us, an animal—unseen but making itself known—seems to be stalking its prey.

Samberg does seem at ease, sitting on dirty outdoor furniture and talking about the obvious: the speed with which life moves.

No matter what else Samberg accomplishes, his obituary will surely begin with “Lazy Sunday,” the first SNL Digital Short to go viral and a true data point in comedy history. The 2005 rap—about gorging on cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery and going to see The Chronicles of Narnia, which featured Samberg and Chris Parnell—has been credited with reenergizing SNL. But more importantly, it introduced YouTube

as a place to watch and (even more importantly) share comedy. It’s hard to believe, considering we live in a world in which a Hannibal Burress bit about Bill Cosby, captured by a cell phone in a small club and shared online, can spark a revolution. But in 2005, that kind of thing was unheard-of.

“We were not aware of YouTube until ‘Lazy Sunday,’” Samberg says, now dressed in his street clothes—a black T-shirt and a navy hoodie that’s been washed too many times. The morning after the short aired, Samberg got a call telling him it was all over the internet. “We’d had our own website with streaming capabilities. After ‘Lazy Sunday,’ we were like, ‘Why are we paying for bandwidth and shit?’”

All of us woke up in a slightly altered world. But Samberg more than most. He was maybe the internet’s first boyfriend.

He was also SNL’s next breakout star. It was literally everything he’d ever wanted.

Samberg grew up in Berkeley, the son of hippies who kept the door to the bathroom open and smoked pot liberally. Young Andy would stay up late to watch SNL— obsessing about it, really—in the Phil Hartman, Church Lady, Wayne’s World era. That, in turn, led to him to seek out the comedy-nerd canon: Monty Python, The Jerk, and Mr. Show.

Later, as a student at New York University, he started doing stand-up in the Village—mostly absurdist “The Far Side”–style bits. His first big laugh was a riff on Janet Jackson’s 1997 album, The Velvet Rope. In one interlude between songs, Jackson is caught memorably masturbating while on the phone with a girlfriend. Samberg

Below left: On the set of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Right: Taking a dip with his co-star Cristin Milioti in the new romantic comedy Palm Springs.

could not resist. “I was like, ‘That’s one thing that girls could get away with that a dude couldn’t,’ ” he says. “And then I’d act out what it would be like if a dude called up his friend jacking off. It was pretty base.”

After college he moved to Los Angeles and reunited with his high school buddies and eventual comedy life partners, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone, to form the Lonely Island—a comedy troupe whose collective, comedic voice grew out of a shared passion for The Simpsons, hip-hop, Python, video games, and skateboarding.

Says Schaffer: “We are all into the same things now. Literally, we haven’t grown out of any of our interests.”

Schaffer remembers the absurdity of that time. “Our first month, me and Andy were kind of intimidated by L.A., Like, what are we going to do here? Jorma had a teeny little studio apartment near UCLA. We had very little money and no jobs. We had an original Nintendo, and we would get full packs of Budweiser.” They survived on burritos and canned chili and spent their days making silly videos and a few failed pilots. Those led to a stint writing jokes for the MTV Movie Awards and then, miraculously, an audition for SNL. In the fall of 2005, Samberg was hired as a performer; Schaffer and Taccone came on as writers. “Lazy Sunday” aired three months later, introducing the Lonely Island as one of the most exciting upstart brands in comedy. While most new cast members have to fight for screen time, celebrities actually sought out Samberg (who always appeared in sketches but made his mark in Digital Shorts) and the “Lazy Sunday” guys. They shot with Natalie Portman (“Natalie Raps”), Justin Timberlake (the Christmas classic “Dick in a Box”), Rhianna (“Shy Ronnie”), Peyton Manning (“United Way”), Seth Rogen (“Like a Boss”), and T-Pain (the Grammynominated “I’m on a Boat”). Samberg recalls selling Lady Gaga on “3-Way (The

Posing with his spouse, the indie rocker Joanna Newsom, at the 2019 Vanity Fair Oscar Party.

woman on the force. “I kind of riffed in rehearsal,” Beatriz says. “I was like, ‘I don’t understand—you’ve never been this hung up on a chick before.’” Before shooting the scene, Samberg pulled her aside and said: “Calling her a chick sounds really dismissive to me. I don’t want to set it up that way.

That this is how we talk about women.’”

Beatriz is still moved by the memory.

“It was important to him, as executive producer of the show and as lead of the show, that the audience understands Rosa and Jake talk about people they’re attracted to with respect. It was such a small thing, he probably doesn’t even remember it. But it had a huge effect on me.”

She’s right: Samberg doesn’t remember. When I bring it up, he shifts awkwardly in his seat, saying he doesn’t want to “get credit” for being human. But the moment dovetails nicely with his theory about why the show has been on the air for 135 episodes and counting. “There are a lot of people who are like, ‘I like watching The Great British Bake-Off and Brooklyn Nine-Nine.’ You know what? I get that. I can totally see it. That’s kind of the big sell of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. It’s similar to Parks and Rec in that way. In many ways, it’s a utopia that doesn’t exist but that a lot of us would really wish to exist. It’s nice to live in that space.”

SO MUCH OF SAMBERG’S LIFE SOUNDS

like the setup to a sketch. The lovable goof from SNL marries the world’s most

famous harpist and—according to rumor, at least—they live in a historic Hollywood estate? Come on. On paper, he and Joanna Newsom seem like an unlikely match. Her lyrics are famously cerebral and complex; one song on her last album, Divers, managed to reference a painting by Titian, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet “Ozymandias,” and the so-called Boy Mayor of New York City, John Purroy Mitchel, who served from 1914 to 1917. Samberg, meanwhile, co-wrote “Jizz in My Pants.”

But their meet-cute story shows how perfectly matched they are. When they encountered each other for the first time— backstage at one of her concerts in New York—she shouted in Samberg’s face: “You’re Steve the Cunt!” It was a reference to a Lonely Island song she loved. Though she was dating someone else at the time, a seed was planted. The two stayed in touch, married in 2013 in Big Sur, and had a daughter four years later. They’ve never disclosed her name to the press, though they will reveal that the girl is currently obsessed with, of all things, Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. “Someone gave us a book of The Nutcracker—you push the buttons and it plays snippets of the music,” Samberg says. “It’s all she wants to hear. We joke a lot about that. Like, I wonder which side of the family she gets that from?”

Samberg can be guarded about his personal life. If you want to hear one of the world’s most awkward pauses, check out his appearance on the Pete Holmes podcast, You Made It Weird, when Holmes asks Samberg how he lost his virginity. After taking a swig of water and a long pause, Samberg gives up the goods—age 16, at summer camp, to a 24-year-old counselor!—but when Holmes follows up, asking if he wore a “bag,” Samberg mutters, “No.” And then recoils: “How many people listen to this?”

I’m more interested in Samberg’s other long-term relationship, with his partners in the Lonely Island, Schaffer and Taccone.

If you haven’t seen the troupe’s underrated movie Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping—a mockumentary about a boy band’s spoiled front man’s attempt to go solo—it’s a mustwatch. Popstar is full of eminently quotable, throwaway lines, like how the star employs someone to punch him in the nuts regularly, just to remind him where he comes from. But the movie has a sly, emotional hook running underneath, and it says more about male friendship and toxic masculinity than just about anything in a long time.

Samberg insists the movie’s sensitive beating heart was “all Judd.” (Judd Apatow was a producer on the film.) But whatever’s happening onscreen works because of the

TOP: IMAGESPACE/SHUTTERSTOCK. SAMBERG WEARS JACKET BY CARHARTT. T-SHIRT BY PAIGE. JEANS BY J BRAND

Golden Rule).” Sample lyric: “I know most guys won’t freak together.… It’s OK when it’s in a three-way.”

“She was definitely aware of ‘Dick in a Box’ and ‘Motherlover,’ ” Samberg says. “It was really fun getting to pitch her. Like, ‘You’ll be in the Fly Girls outfits from In Living Color and the joke is, [Timberlake and I] clearly want to fuck each other and you’re just there.’ When we asked her, she was like, ‘I’m so honored.’ ” When SNL leaned further into politics, Samberg was quick to adapt while playing to his strengths, memorably enlisting Maroon 5’s Adam Levine to serenade Iran’s then president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (who’d just declared there were no homosexual people in his country) with the gay anthem “Iran So Far.” When he left SNL in 2012 after seven years, Samberg didn’t have a vision for the rest of his life. “The only thing I ever wanted in terms of my career was SNL— since I was 8,” he says. He wasn’t necessarily even thinking about a sitcom. But rather than overthink his next step or worry about his star power or his ego, he did what he’d always done: He followed the funny.

It’s hard to imagine Brooklyn Nine-Nine working without Samberg. The show— from Parks and Recreation alums Michael Schur and Dan Goor—is about a hapless crew of detectives working at a Brooklyn police precinct. The ensemble, including Andre Braugher, Terry Crews, and Melissa Fumero, is top-notch. But Samberg’s Jake Peralta is the show’s North Star: a popculture obsessed optimist who wants his life to be a movie where he’s the hero taking down bad guys.

It’s a slapstick half-hour, stuffed with jokes, that has also somehow managed to tackle hot-button issues including racial profiling and gun control in a way that feels organic. Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s “He Said, She Said” episode last year perhaps walked the world’s thinnest tightrope: One male character defends himself from charges of sexism or worse, saying: “I’m the kind of guy who thinks Kathryn Bigelow should direct the next Star Wars— and I’ve said that to other men.”

“When people talk about Brooklyn NineNine, I think they talk about how—to use an overused word—woke it is,” says Stephanie Beatriz, who co-stars as Detective Rosa Diaz. “Much of that is due to Andy. He’s very aware and sensitive to the world we’re living in. And frankly, the world I think he wishes we were living in.”

Beatriz recalls rehearsing a scene, very early on in the show’s run, in which Diaz and Peralta are talking about another

“I CONSTANTLY THINK A PIANO IS GOING TO FALL ON ME. I CONSIDER MYSELF VERY LUCKY.”

Lonely Island’s very real 20-year history.

Schaffer refers to their relationship almost like a marriage. “We were on the phone yesterday debating if we could ever do more tour dates like we did last summer,” he says.

“It’s a balancing act. I might get offered a movie and go, ‘Oh, that sounds fun.’ But in the same way, I have to go to my wife and go, ‘Hey, would I be able to do this movie?’

I also need to call those guys—even if it has nothing to do with them—and go, ‘In six months, are we thinking that we would do something together?’”

Schaffer thinks about this for a second, adding: “I think I speak for all three of us—the things that we’re the proudest of, and that seem to be the things that people

bring up to us over the years, are always the things we’ve made together.”

I ask Samberg what drove them to make a 30-minute “visual poem” about Canseco, McGwire, and steroids, which contains the lyric “She said she wanna fuck me with my uniform on. She grabbed me by the bat, now it’s going, going, gone. I never finish sex ’cause I’m so juiced out.

But she nutted three times then we bashed then I bounced.” Samberg grins. “Working together is how we stay friends,” he says.

“Because once you’re married and you get a little older—you’re tired.”

It’s an odd time in show business.

Nobody knows what works anymore. So if you’ve got any power, why not just make

things you love with the people who make you laugh the most? Sometimes it’s a TV competition about people who cook tiny meals in impossibly tiny kitchens. (Samberg will host Biggest Little Cook-Offs on Quibi, a new streaming platform, later this year.) Sometimes it’s Palm Springs, an off beat romantic comedy. It’s producing PEN15, a risky comedy about puberty and middle school, in which the two 13-yearold leads are played by the two 30-something women who created the show. And no one ever acknowledges the joke. The show shouldn’t work, but it absolutely destroys.

As we wrap up, Samberg and I get to talking about those early Lonely Island days. Samberg smiles wide. He’s thinking about a bit they wrote for Vin Diesel and Thandie Newton to perform on the MTV Movie Awards in 2004. “I’m going to butcher it,” Samberg says, “but the bit was basically Vin Diesel going, ‘You know, Thandie, I didn’t realize until today that your name was pronounced Tandy, not Th-andie.’ Then she said something about his name. And he said...‘Tanks.’ Instead of ‘Thanks.’” At first Diesel didn’t want to do it. “But we were like, ‘No, no! It’s funny!

Trust us, it’s funny!’ And then it didn’t work. Right after, he was like, ‘I knew it wasn’t going to work.’ ” Samberg laughs. Maybe it’s at the absurdity of the bit. Or maybe it’s about something more—that a bunch of Vin Diesel jokes and bits he wrote with his best friends could somehow lead to SNL, and then Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and then somehow to Joanna Newsom, fatherhood, and to this bench on a stranger’s property with fruit trees and a Moroccan cabana and an animal loudly stalking its prey.

“I constantly think a piano is going to fall on me,” Samberg says. “I consider myself very lucky. It’s like, If you’re going to be a human being on earth, I couldn’t ask for more.” MJ

2020

THE RIGHT GEAR CAN MAKE OR BREAK AN ADVENTURE. WITH THAT IN MIND, WE’VE COMBED THROUGH THIS SEASON’S BEST NEW BIKES, BOARDS, AND BOTS, SINGLING OUT THE KEY STUFF TO TAKE ANYONE TO THE NEXT LEVEL—WHETHER YOU’RE A TOTAL NEWBIE, AN INTERMEDIATE PLAYER AIMING TO IMPROVE, OR A HARDCORE EXPERT EN ROUTE TO TRUE GLORY.

Hit the Trails

Tackle any off-road route with these killer climbers.

BEST FOR: NEWBIES

Specialized Fuse 27.5

BEST FOR: WEEKEND WARRIORS

Ibis Ripmo AF GX

Those new to riding trails will appreciate the Fuse’s build, which puts your center of gravity farther back for better uphill traction. A SunRace and Shimano drivetrain, instead of a generic one, and hydraulic disc brakes, rather than mechanical ones, help you ride with confidence, and the 2.8-inch-wide tires create grip for laying into corners. $1,250; specialized.com

The Ripmo’s wider gear range lets you tackle steeper climbs than the Fuse can. The standard air shock (shown) absorbs the impact on jumps, without sacrificing pedaling efficiency uphill.

But for maximum bounce and bigger air over rougher terrain, upgrade to the coil shock. Either way, beefier than normal brake rotors control the momentum. $4,295; ibiscycles.com

BEST FOR: EXPERTS

Pivot Switchblade Team XTR For seasoned riders who want one bike for the whole mountain, the Switchblade lets you roll on 27.5-inch-diameter tires, up to 2.8 inches wide, or 29ers up to 2.6 inches, so you can crush any trail. Fox’s electronic suspension (optional) reacts within 3 milliseconds, smoothing out the ride. $8,999; pivotcycles.com

2020 SPRING GEAR

THE SMOKER THAT SEARS Sure, the Camp Chef Woodwind WiFi 24 pellet grill syncs with your home’s network, letting you check a brisket’s temp and make adjustments from your smartphone while on the sofa—we’ve seen that. But add that to the gas-powered side burner that gives you the 900-degree heat to grill steaks, griddle smash burgers, or crisp a pizza crust—and this smoker becomes an all-in-one outdoor kitchen. From $1,000; campchef.com

The Ultimate Trail Layer has a novel dual-front-zip design for quick access to energy bars and hydration. Yank a zipper down to chest height, then pull what you need from the vest underneath without breaking stride. The zippers also act as a fast heat dump when you get cranking. The light (seven ounces) three-layer, 100 percent recycled-nylon waterproof hooded jacket tucks away in its own stuff sack, making it the perfect emergency shell to pack just in case. $250; patagonia.com

BEST FOR: EXPERTS

2020

A PACK WITH POTENTIAL When a day can take you from morning emails in a coffee shop to photographing the setting sun to dinner in the city, you need a versatile bag like the Boundary Arris. It’s a modular, 34-liter main pack that you add to with any of seven accessories, from a tech pouch to sling bag, depending on the mission. From $290; boundarysupply.com

BEST FOR: WEEKEND WARRIORS

A Clever Cutter Stop defiling your catches with dull, rusty fillet knives. The Bubba Multi-Flex Full Tang Interchangeable Blade Set has four swappable titanium nitride–coated carbon stainless steel blades that can withstand the harshest salty conditions. Each of the cutters, from ultra-flexible to serrated, are solid metal and lock into a chunky, nonslip handle that’s easy to grip, even with wet hands. $130; bubbablade.com

1

3 BEST FOR: WEEKEND WARRIORS

1. To ride most inflatable SUPs you need to pump them to about 20 PSI, but the rigid skin on the Air-Glide is rideable at 15, saving time and arm power. It’s shorter, narrower, and quicker than newbie builds, with three fins that track straight through water. $880; sicmaui.com

2

BEST FOR: EXPERTS

2. For experienced paddlers, this inflatable touring board is designed to go faster and farther, with a long nose that cuts through the water with more glide per stroke.

A deck mount up front accepts a GoPro to catch the ride, and in the tail, the texture of the grip changes, so you’ll feel where your rear foot is when nailing step-back turns. $1,499; redpaddleco.com

BEST FOR: NEWBIES

Roll With the Tides The best crop of boards to get you paddling this summer.

3. It’s the longest and widest board here, which makes the thick, inflatable Ray Air a stable ride for beginners or bigger paddlers—it can support you and a truckload of gear, up to 286 pounds. A mount underneath accepts a fin for more stability, and one above holds on to a windsurfing sail. $1,129; fanatic.com

1 BEST FOR: NEWBIES

2

1. Most beginner tents have a flimsy build. But this one’s smart, sturdy design will last, and the poles are interchangeable, making setup easy for rookies. Mesh walls preserve views while keeping bugs out, and a rain fly attaches quickly if the weather turns overnight. $300; mountainhardwear.com

BEST FOR: WEEKEND WARRIORS

2. The Salt Creek’s door converts into a vestibule by adding some trekking poles.

Open, this three-season shelter feels like a breezy cabana, but it hunkers down to protect in a storm, leaving enough room inside for campers and their gear. But even experienced campers should practice the setup at home first, to get it right. $350; bigagnes.com

BEST FOR: EXPERTS

3. When you’re ready to tackle extreme weather, this single-wall tent sheds snow and keeps you dry. The poles lock in with Velcro, and a roof vent expels built-up moisture. It’s not just for winter, with mesh doors that let the outside in and an awning that blocks rain. $440; black diamondequipment.com

Camping Headline

3

BEST FOR: EXPERTS

2020 SPRING GEAR

To lock in a 32-degree rating in a 14-ounce sleeping bag, Rab needed more than just top-notch insulation. It developed an industry first—a bag that not only prevents heat from escaping to the outside but also reflects your body’s warmth. So while the 900-fill, efficient mummy shape fights convective heat loss, a liner made of threads coated in titanium fires radiant heat back at you with negligible additional weight. The result is a minimalist’s dream: the Mythic Ultra 360—a three-season bed that’s as packable as a summer bag. $550; rab.equipment.com

A Breathable Shell The three-layer Outdoor Resarch MicroGravity Jacket is made with an electrospinning process that produces a better-breathing waterproof membrane, which means rain beads up and rolls off while water vapor is vented from skin for technical adventures, like climbing a mountain or biking to work, but its softshell feel is comfortable enough for in-town errands or dog walking, too. $249; outdoorresearch.com

Run the Road BEST FOR: EXPERTS

Saucony Endorphin Pro Saucony built the midsole of this marathon shoe with a carbon-fiber plate, which lessens the amount of energy required to run. At 7.5 ounces, the Endorphin Pro also has a foam ramp that, like a lever, converts your stride’s power into forward momentum. The shoe’s ride is efficient, especially at faster speeds. $200; saucony.com

BEST FOR: NEWBIES

Nike React Infinity Run

BEST FOR: WEEKEND WARRIORS

Asics EvoRide The 8.1-ounce EvoRide’s curvy platform helps your foot roll smoothly from heel to toe. That concave design gives you dramatic toe spring, popping the forefoot off the ground as you begin a new stride. Cushiony, it has a comfortable feel for fluid, quick-cadence running—perfect for faster workouts and shorter races. $120; asics.com

The key when you start training is logging pain-free miles. During testing, Nike’s version of a beginner’s stability shoe earned 52 percent fewer injury complaints compared with a traditional build. The 10.3-ounce React Infinity Run is designed to prevent overuse injuries, but unlike shoes that control your motion, this is a smooth-riding, softly cushioned runner with a secure feel, using a wide footprint and springy midsole foam.

Nike’s thin, stretchy tongue and a plastic heel-anchoring bar help lock in your foot. $160; nike.com

2020 SPRING GEAR

BEST FOR: WEEKEND WARRIORS

THE DO-ITALL RIDE The Party Crasher surfboard blends unique maneuverability and speed with just enough float to get you into waves early. The agility comes from a deep single- to doubleconcave bottom that provides lift and blazing, down-the-line speed. Plus, a diamond-shape tail lets you crank out vertical turns easier. From $790; lostsurfboards.net

A Realistic Rider Unlike the spin class standard, the StagesBike has the fit and feel of a real road bike. Built to stream Zwift workouts to your tablet, the adjustable crank missing is a breeze. Dial in the resistance through electronic shifters—up to 3,000 watts—and the power meter’s visual display shows your effort. $2,800; stagescycling.com

2020 SPRING GEAR

A FLASHY BASKETBALL BEST FOR: NEWBIES

The Best Seat Most zero-gravity chairs won’t let you sit upright, legs raised, but it won’t mimic zero-gravity’s weightless comfort. The GCI Freeform Zero Gravity Lounger does both. Sit up, and the chair lets you raise your legs like an ottoman, so you can take in views with the pull of a lever. To take a nap, or do some star gazing, release the locks, and recline fully as the chair converts into zero-gravity mode. $100; gcioutdoor.com

The channels between the panels of the Wilson Luminous Basketball have a reflective coating that’s baked into the composite leather skin. During the day, it looks like a bad-ass indoor-outdoor ball, but hit the iridescent lines with a smart phone’s camera flash and they light up with a rainbow effect, lending a new dimension to photos of your 3-pointer form, backyard tomahawk jams, or finger-spinning tricks. $30; wilson.com

Go Full Throttle

On a commute or a road trip, these bikes maximize saddle time.

BEST FOR: NEWBIES

BEST FOR: EXPERTS

BEST FOR: WEEKEND WARRIORS

Honda Rebel 500

Ducati Streetfighter V4

BMW F 900 R

The manageable 471cc engine in the overhauled Rebel is enough to be a fun commuter without holding you back anytime soon. An assist-slipper clutch makes it simpler for new riders to shift, but it’s the improved safety and comfort that comes from a new fork, shocks with stiffer springs, redesigned seats, and LED lights that make it easier to take on longer, confidenceboosting rides. Bonus: Its blacked-out frame makes the bike look meaner than ones twice its size. $6,500; powersports.honda.com

Designers used the Joker’s smile as inspiration for the V4’s LED fascia, and the rest of the bike is just as wicked.

With a 1,103cc engine creating 208 horsepower and 90.4 lb-ft of torque, this is Ducati’s most powerful naked bike. To control the chaos, aerofoils apply downforce at high speeds to increase stability. Behind the scenes, sensors provide feedback to the electronics suite, so you can flip on Wheelie Control prevention and manage the torque. $19,995; ducati.com

Longer weekend trips are better with a bigger, faster engine, but it’s the power and responsiveness to dive into corners and zip right out that makes a ride fun. There’s plenty of that with the BMW’s 895cc parallel-twin engine, delivering a punchy 99 horsepower and 67 lb-ft of torque—but with a twist: selectable riding modes, including one for rain, which tweak the handling based on road conditions. Feel like pushing it? Turn the traction control, and the oversight, off and test yourself. $8,995; bmwmotorcycles.com

2020 SPRING GEAR

AN OFF-THEGRID LIFELINE Going deep into the backcountry? Take some peace of mind: The Bivy Stick turns a smartphone into a satellite-based, two-way communicator that texts and sends SOS calls and location updates from anywhere. Credits start at $18, applied per text, location share, weather report, or hour of tracking (with no contract). The 3.35-ounce, weather-resistant Bivy Stick works as a GPS through an app that also

comes loaded more than 40,000 trails and climbing routes. Want to unplug, phone free? The bare-bones functions let you send either an SOS location signal or a preset OK message to contacts back home. $350 plus $18 for 20 credits; bivystick.com

A Rod That Flies Straight Since accuracy is something even seasoned vets can struggle with while casting, Orvis engineered it directly into this rod. The Orvis Recon dampens tip vibration, so you drop flies where you want them without affecting the rod’s power and flex. The secret is a round carbon-fiber shaft, which uses a military-grade resin with an unmatched strength-toweight ratio so it won’t deform under stress. The result: casts that track with near-perfect alignment to your motion, which rookies and pros alike can appreciate. $429; orvis.com

BEST FOR: EXPERTS

Skydio 2 Starring in your own action movies means using a drone smart enough to fly itself. The Skydio scans the terrain for obstacles at a million points per second, constructing a 3-D model of the world around it. Then it bobs and weaves its way through the environment—at up to 36 mph for 23 minutes—chasing you on a run, bombing downhill, or ripping waves all while filming at up to 45 megapixels from six cameras. $999; skydio.com

BEST FOR: WEEKEND WARRIORS

DJI Mavic Mini Small but capable, the Mini can fly up to 2.5 miles while beaming back HD video. With a 30-minute battery, you have enough time to orchestrate shots and even do some mulligans. DJI’s app has flying tutorials and helps construct killer videos, too. $400; dji.com

BEST FOR: NEWBIES

Extreme Flyers Micro Drone 4.0 Unlike the toys you find at the mall, the six-ounce Micro Drone is easy for beginners—and packs better tech.

Toss it in the air and it instantly starts hovering, and the controller’s joysticks are easier to learn on than a phone’s touchscreen. Its tiny, two-axis gimbal keeps the footage, up to 1080p, rock solid. $200; microdrone.co.uk

Catch All the Action

Shoot dazzling landscapes or star in action flicks with these drones.

Lance LeNoir crawls through the 36-inch-high tunnel near Otay Mesa, California.

USED TO SMUGGLE WEED, OPIOIDS—EVEN HUMANS.

Eighteen feet underground, the air is humid, warm, and thick. I’m on my hands and knees inside a drug-smuggling tunnel between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico, that’s three feet in diameter, with barely enough room to turn around.

There isn’t a dose of CBD oil massive enough to make the place feel remotely comfortable; by comparison, the back middle seat on a full United commuter plane seems as spacious as center field.

But for U.S. Border Patrol agent Lance LeNoir, this is normal—this is the office.

LeNoir, a 50-year-old son of a cop from backwoods Oklahoma, heads up the fiveman Confined Space Entry Team, San Diego Sector, which is tasked with finding, mapping, and “remediating”—or closing off and destroying—drug-smuggling tunnels throughout Southern California. The team, in existence since 2010, is colloquially known as the Tunnel Rats—an homage to the U.S. forces who flushed out Vietcong tunnel complexes during the Vietnam War. LeNoir creeps through the tunnel ahead of me, wearing hard-knuckle gloves and tactical pants with pads that protect his knees, one of which was reconstructed in three surgeries. He wears a helmet with a communications system onboard; on his back is a rucksack filled with tools; at his side is a 40-caliber Heckler & Koch P2000 service revolver. He stops to explain that his team has investigated so many of these tunnels that they’ve started to recognize the narco-trafficking construction teams who built them, from clues like nailing patterns, the types of wood used to shore up the walls, even the severity of their keystone arch.

LeNoir chews some sor t of limeflavored, minty gum, and a mojito-scented cloud follows him as we continue to crawl along. His language is sharp and sardonic, and his diction rolls downhill; as he speaks, you can tell that his mind is already a couple of sentences ahead.

We move slowly—perhaps he’s testing out how much I can take—and every few feet, he stops to riff on some tunneling concept or point out some feature.

While describing the differences between the four types of cross-border tunnels, he takes umbrage that the particular one we’re in—discovered in 2016, secured, and now used for training—would be classi-

070

fied as “sophisticated.” It’s a misleading term, he says. “In reality, they’re anything but sophisticated,” LeNoir says. “They’re crude, hastily built, and inherently unsafe—due to physical conditions, atmospheric conditions, electrical conditions, water conditions, even geological conditions. I mean, there’s no structural engineer giving their blessing to this thing.”

Gulp.

I am sweating through my shirt, trying to use as much of my mental bandwidth as I can to hang on LeNoir’s every word, in order to keep fast-forwarding through moves I’d need to make to back out of here—and to keep from estimating how many minutes and seconds I am from the surface, should I need to tap out.

Perhaps LeNoir senses this; he comes in with some gallows humor.

“Can you smell it?” he asks. “Each tunnel has its own note.” A pause. “It’s like learning to drink wine. You learn to appreciate the nuances.... Most of them have earthy tones—a little oaky, sometimes, actually.... Granite has more of a piquant, a kind of mustiness, because it traps water.... Then there are the tunnels that have more of a bum feeling because they’ve been heavily used.”

We crawl on.

“Hey,” he says. “Make sure you get the word piquant in your story.”

A BRIEF HISTORY OF TUNNELING: AS

the Border Patrol concentrated its efforts to stop a huge number of illegal crossings in the late ’80s and early ’90s, cartels sought alternate means to move people and product into the U.S. Traff ickers increasingly ventured by boat into the Pacific Ocean, backpacked drugs across remote mountains and deserts, and took to the air to shuttle product via ultralight planes (and, more recently, drones). And thanks to the Sinaloa cartel’s notorious leader, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, they went underground.

The first tunnel was found in 1990, between a warehouse in Douglas, Ari-

zona, and a house in Agua Prieta, Mexico, less than 300 feet away; its entrance was concealed under a hydraulically lifted pool table, controlled via an outdoor spigot.

Since then, more than 200 tunnels have been found—from “gopher holes” burrowed six feet under a border fence to “interconnecting” tunnels, which use the sewer systems between the two countries. (You enter a manhole on the south side, pop up on the north.) Then there are so-called sophisticated tunnels, such as the one we’re in— which, like the Sinaloa original, can take months or even years to build, and make back their sizable cost in a single shipment.

Some are more impressive than others.

“We’ve seen armor-plated steel doors, elevators in vertical shafts, electrical carts with repurposed motors from pallet stackers, multilevel tunnels 3,000 feet long,” LeNoir says. “We’ve seen them as deep as 90 feet. Ninety feet! When you’re looking down, it could be 900.” Though El Chapo was recaptured—presumably for the last time—in 2016, the Sinaloa cartel continues to burrow down. “Cut off the head of the snake, and two come back,” LeNoir tells me.

“There’s just too much money to be made.”

AT SOME POINT, 18 FEET DOWN AND

maybe 75 feet in, laterally—maybe more, maybe less, it’s hard to know—my lizard brain kicks in. My body simply refuses to crawl any farther into the dark. LeNoir expects this. “That’s the normal response,” he says. LeNoir continues onward a short bit with our photographer; I backtrack

Above: LeNoir descends a ladder through a vertical shaft retrof itted for training purposes. Below: Tunnel Rats (from left) Justin Kourt, Orlando Chavis, Rudy Nava, and LeNoir.

about halfway to the entrance, where a faint bit of light from the vertical entrance lends some comfort. That’s where one of LeNoir’s comrades, Orlando Chavis, has been bringing up the rear. We sit sideways across the tunnel and talk.

Chavis, 45, an Air Force vet from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, did a tour in Iraq before getting into federal law enforcement. Three years ago, bone cancer claimed part of his finger; a week after the amputation, he was back underground.

“Normally when we enter a tunnel, this is what it is,” he says. “No lights, no visibility. We just have headlamps, and before we start mapping, we’re pulling out the dope, looking for environmental hazards, checking for atmospherics—bodies if there’s anybody in there.”

Underneath us is a pair of metal rails; it looks like the same stuff used to make a basic bed frame. Chavis explains that as teams of tunnel builders work farther into the ground, at up to 10 feet a day, they lay down a rudimentary rail system, using iron laid atop two-by-12 lumber. Baggedup dirt is then rolled up the rails on homemade carts. Once a tunnel is completed, traff ickers use the rail system to send drugs in the opposite direction.

Most tunnels are dug with consumergrade tools—the same corded rotary hammer drills you can buy for $800 at Home Depot. The builders install power lines to run the drills and sometimes rig up basic lighting. By some accounts, the men holding the drills are forced laborers, held in warehouses on the Mexican side, and moved before they complete a job, so they never know a tunnel’s exact location.

Most sophisticated tunnels have some type of makeshift ventilation, using PVC pipe, duct tape, and—this is suitably macabre—blower fans repurposed from bounce castles seen at kids’ birthday parties. Collapses rarely kill tunnel builders—bad air does. So the most important device in a Tunnel Rat’s tool kit is a handheld, always-on gas monitor, which monitors O2 levels, hydrogen sulfide, and carbon dioxide. The farther into the tunnel you go, the worse the air gets.

Historically, tunnels chiefly have been used to move marijuana. Weed is bulky, stinky, and more difficult to hide in the floorboards of a van than hard narcotics, so it makes sense to push bales of it through tunnels. But with marijuana’s legalization in California, seizures have dropped—in the San Diego district, the amount of weed captured by the Border Patrol fell 58 percent in 2017; nationwide seizures dropped by a similar amount in 2018. Weed is just not worth as much money as it once was.

So increasingly, the cartels are pushing the hard stuff through, including the synthetic opiate fentanyl. In 2018 in Arizona, a briefcase containing three kilos of the stuff—enough to kill more than half a million people—was captured after being sent through a tunnel that terminated in an abandoned KFC restaurant a couple of hundred feet from the border.

Chavis explains that sophisticated tunnels are only seldom used to traffic humans, for a simple reason: Drugs don’t talk, and people do. “The more people you run through, the more snitches you’ll have,” he says. The locations of a tunnel’s entry and exit points are valuable secrets; the fewer people who know them, the less likely that information could be used to tip off the authorities.

The tunnel we’re in, unnamed and in an undisclosed location, is kind of an outlier. It was discovered by the Mexican government in December 2016 but was incomplete, with no exit on the U.S. side.

But in the months while the tunnel was eventually mapped and then filled with concrete, a locally based transnational criminal organization took advantage of lax security on the Mexican side, entered the unfinished tunnel, burrowed upward, and used it to send undocumented aliens through. In August 2017, a group of Chinese nationals was found wandering the streets of Otay Mesa at 2 in the morning.

They had emerged from the very tunnel that Tunnel Rats now use for training.

Though we’re deep underground, you can hear the traffic of Otay Mesa overhead. Cartels tunnel in the area because the ash and bentonite clay is pliable but maintains its structure, and the water table is low. But just as vital to a tunnel’s success is the ability to conceal it; the Otay Mesa warehouse district overhead offers the perfect cacophony. Even at 9 on a sunny Friday morning, you feel like you’re in the first scene of an action movie broadcast late at night on USA Network.

Hundreds of unmarked import and export businesses house product in warehouses that look pretty much the same, and are moving cargo in and out, legally, through

Orlando Chavis explores a tunnel. “I don’t have fear,” he says, “just awareness of the environment.”

the nearby port of entry, via truck traffic, all the time. Everything looks sketchy.

Since ground-penetrating radar has proved unsuccessful at locating tunnels in the mixed soil of Otay Mesa, finding them requires shoe-leather detective work.

Border community liaisons go business to business, asking warehouse owners for intel on anything unusual—“sketchy” in SoCal copspeak—such as deliveries happening at off-hours, people acting suspiciously. While some exits have been discovered in warehouses on the U.S. side, thanks to intel gained from these door-todoor efforts, most tunnels are discovered

by Mexican authorities after tips from locals in Garita de Otay, across the fence.

For most of a tunnel’s life span, it has only one entrance, after all, on the Mexican side, and the displaced dirt has to come out of it.

BY NOW, OUR PHOTOGRAPHER HAS

crawled back, followed by LeNoir, explaining the unique nature of the gig. “We may come off as cowboys and risk-takers and all that other stuff in there,” he says, “but we don’t have death wishes. Is this an adventure? Do we like what we do?

Abso-freaking-lutely! We do. Of course we do. We’re not crazy. Well, we might be a little crazy, but that’s—Orlando, let me see that air monitor.”

LeNoir fiddles with the device, then hands it over.

I ask LeNoir if he’s chewing the gum as some kind of ritual, to keep calm. Nah, he says. Doesn’t have a ritual, carries no totems. “I f ind it to be pretty peaceful down here, actually,” he says. “Silent. You know, when I’m running point, getting a trajectory, economizing movement, making sure the path forward is clear and that everyone is safe, it can be very serene.”

It’s hot, and we all need water. I check my recorder and am surprised to see that we’ve been underground for nearly an hour. We head up the ladder.

The sunlight is a relief. LeNoir, Chavis, and our photographer climb up the ladder and back to the surface, out of the manhole entrance, surrounded by sagebrush.

“It’s kind of like…a hole!” LeNoir shouts at the Border Patrol agents waiting up top, feigning that this is his first trip.

“That right there is typical Lance,” says another agent, Rudy Nava, holding back a laugh. Nava is wearing a long-sleeve Tun-

072

nel Rat tee with the text “Non gratum anus rodentum”—not worth a rat’s ass. He’s been keeping watch over the entrance with team member Justin Kourt; a fifth teammate, Jeremy Wilkins, isn’t on duty today.

We walk across the road to a new section of secondary border fence, completed just a few weeks ago, and sit on its concrete base. Shadows from its 30-foot-high steel beams fall across the road, where an endless procession of 18-wheelers inch their cargo toward the port of entry.

Over the clatter of shifting truck transmissions, I ask if the agents ever fear retaliatory action from the cartels—after all, every tunnel they kill costs someone a lot of money. “The thought is there,” says Chavis. “When you’re out with your family, you’re always…aware of your surroundings. It just comes with the job.”

The agents point out that vengeance by crime syndicates toward Border Patrol agents is extremely rare. After all, a calm and quiet border is good for business.

Our conversation turns to a new tunnel found a few days ago just across the fence, in the Garita de Otay. News of its discov-

ery by police on the Mexico side hit just the previous afternoon. I ask if it came as a surprise. LeNoir sighs. “Nothing is surprising,” he says. “To be honest, tunnels are such a perfect conduit for pushing whatever, illicitly, to the north side. It’s pure stealth, and since they can do it in volume, that’s the key.

They don’t have to piecemeal it through the ports, and they don’t have to put 50-pound rucks on mules in the backwoods somewhere. They get tonnage through in a relatively short amount of time.”

And how, I ask, will President Trump’s border wall—or even just more of the fence towering over us—affect the Tunnel Rats’ work?

“We’re government employees,” LeNoir says. “There’s a tunnel down there; it’s our job to get rid of it. It’s literally that simple.

What happens with this fence—there’s people who get paid to deal with that stuff, put the political spin on it, and it ain’t me.”

He pauses for a moment. “As long as there’s a demand over here and a willingness to try to smuggle something from point A to point B in secret, we’ll be here,” he says. “We got to do it.” MJ

ED M IS

U

NC

O R OMP

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JOHN TURTURRO IS LIONIZED FOR HIS PORTRAYALS OF OUTCASTS AND SCOUNDRELS. YET, FOUR DECADES INTO HIS CAREER, THE ACTOR—AND STAR OF THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA—IS STILL HUNTING FOR FRESH WAYS TO PROVOKE AND PERPLEX.

the Brooklyn neighborhood where he has lived for 30 years.

I married my husband. The 62-year-old actor and filmmaker is sitting across from me at Bar Pitti, an Italian spot in New York’s West Village that he has patronized for three decades, dipping bread in olive oil. Thrown off by the intimacy of his question, I blurt something about how I like the way my husband smells. Turturro

Turturro, moreover, has directed four of his own well-regarded but little-seen films, along with the upcoming The Jesus Rolls, out February 28. In it, he reprises Jesus, the bowling-obsessed, jumpsuited registered sex offender he depicted in the Coen brothers’ 1998 classic, The Big Lebowski.

But Turturro isn’t just interested in looking back. In March, he’ll appear in the HBO miniseries The Plot Against America, based on the Philip Roth novel of the same name. Adapted by The Wire’s David Simon, the series imagines the United States if the nationalist Charles

GROOMING BY LOSI FOR HONEY ARTISTS

JOHN TURTURRO WANTS to know why

breathes in deeply, as if remembering body odors past. “I’ve thought about armpits for a long time,” he says. The scent of sweat glands, he adds, is “very underrated.”

As Turturro zips up his black Patagonia f leece, he recalls one of his favorite scenes from the 1999 film Holy Smoke!, in which Kate Winslet smells her own underarm as she dances. “But she did it very unconsciously,” he explains. The pit sniff is why Turturro decided to cast the actress in 2005’s Romance & Cigarettes, one of the first films that he directed. “She was like an animal,” he says, growling.

Turturro keeps the questions coming; during our time together, he asks more about me than any actor I’ve interviewed.

He wonders whether I believe Hillary Clinton would’ve been elected president had she divorced Bill. (Yes.) He solicits my opinion on Robert Pattinson’s performance in The Lighthouse. (Certainly the most acting I saw last year.) These queries do not feel compulsory (see: Why did you marry your husband?), or like occasions to intro-

Lindbergh had defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt for president in 1940. Turturro plays Lionel Bengelsdorf, an inf luential conservative rabbi who stands to gain from Lindbergh’s anti-Semitic administration.

Though Turturro is decidedly Italian, “he has an unbelievable Jewish energy,” Simon tells me later. “[He’s] very verbal and quite capable with rhetoric—basically, the Jewish condition.”

“Very verbal” is perhaps an understatement. At Bar Pitti, as Turturro talks—and talks and talks and talks—he offers up, in his deep, outer-borough murmur, minutiae about his old lease on Grand Street, the philosophy of Primo Levi, and the fact that his dentist and his barber both attended James Madison High School in Brooklyn. At one point, he acts out a lengthy story involving Robert De Niro’s handsome doctor, who persuaded Turturro to get shoulder surgery. When a waiter informs us that the restaurant doesn’t serve vermentino by the glass, Turturro negotiates an appropriate whitewine substitute, in Italian.

These topics could all be powerfully dull. But in the weeds is the best place to be with Turturro. And his command of esoterica—and the dynamism inspired by that esoterica—can perhaps explain a career that has been both illustrious and under the radar. He has played a vast spectrum of schnooks, each alike in indignity—a buffoonish convict in O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the agoraphobic brother on Monk, the embodiment of writer’s block in Barton Fink. Yet Turturro is somehow always dazzling, without distracting from the larger project. He attributes this feat to his being “more of a worker” than anything else. Even so, if you watch the Turturro canon—or spend a day wandering around the West Village with him—it feels as though the worker is always sniffing for things to turn him on.

TURTURRO GREW UP primarily in Queens,

the middle of three brothers. His mother, Kitty, was a housewife. But “she could have done any thing if she’d had the opportunity,” Turturro tells me. She sang, made dresses, danced beautifully.

His father, Nick, was a contractor who did work for clients that included Fred Trump; one summer, in the early 1980s, Turturro hung dry wall for his dad at

In HBO’s new The Plot Against America, Turturro plays a rabbi who supports the nationalist Charles Lindbergh.

TURTURRO SUDDENLY INVERTS HIS SMILE AND RAISES HIS EYEBROWS TOWARD HIS GRAYING FLATTOP. THEN HE LUNGES, JUTTING OVER HIS MINESTRONE. the now-closed Lincoln Plaza Cinema.

When Turturro was young, his parents would regularly engage in wordless spats—part foreplay, part fight. They’d make “all these faces, back and forth,” he says. Their erotic sparring matches would escalate until one of them “won” by provoking a response from the other.

As Turturro and I eat, he decides to reenact one of his parents’ psychosexual

in character. “What’s so freakin’ funny about that?”

His enormous hands splay upward, as if cupping his parents’ chemistry. “It was just brilliant,” he says, himself again.

“They had a hot—they had something.”

Turturro has worked with the top shelf of Hollywood—Jack Nicholson, Nicole Kidman, Tom Cruise, George Clooney— but he maintains that his parents’ fights are some of the finest acting that he has ever witnessed. And if he’s aware that it’s perhaps unusual to derive such pleasure from the horny anger of one’s parents, he doesn’t let on.

At times, once his folks’ performances concluded, his mother would mock her husband’s sexual potency. “He’s all talk, no action,” she’d say in front of Turturro and his brothers. “Falls right to sleep.”

Nick would sit at the kitchen table, working his way through a cigarette. “Yeah,” he’d say. “Maybe not tonight. Maybe I won’t.” Sometimes this all went too far, and Turturro’s dad could get rough with his mother. Turturro sided with her. “If I’m being honest, maybe [it was] me protecting her,” he says. But when nothing bad happened physically—when everything remained a performance—it was powerful.

After high school, Turturro left New York City for undergrad at the State University of New York, New Paltz, then earned an MFA at Yale. His f irst f ilm job, before he’d even graduated, was as an uncredited extra in Martin Scorsese’s 1980 Raging Bull. Nearly a decade later, Turturro entered the public conscious-

CHARACTER STUDY AN ABRIDGED HISTORY OF JOHN TURTURRO’S WILDLY VARIED, AND EQUALLY STELLAR, PERFORMANCES.

DO THE RIGHT THING (1989) ROLE: Pino, the clueless eldest

son of a Brooklyn pizzeria owner who resents the black people who patronize his dad’s store.

THE BIG LEBOWSKI (1998) ROLE: Jesus, a jumpsuited competi-

tive bowler who famously declares, “You ready to be fucked man? I see you rolled your way into the semis.”

O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? (2000) ROLE: Pete Hogwallop, an escaped

convict turned treasure hunter turned bluegrass singer.

THE NIGHT OF (2017) ROLE: John Stone, a low-rent,

eczema-plagued attorney who defends a young PakistaniAmerican accused of murder.

He’s still particularly enamored of The Sopranos actor James Gandolf ini’s collaborative capacity. “He was just a slab of humanity,” Turturro says, scrunching his face as if he’s trying to smell him. “It was like he came out of the forest. He was just this bear.” Turturro cast Gandolfini in his 2005 film, Romance & Cigarettes, and admired the sensuous actor so much that, in an interview supporting the movie, he likened Gandolfini to a “beautiful, large, Italian woman.” When the article came out, Gandolfini called him, furious. “That’s a compliment!” Turturro recalls telling him. “Because you’re so feminine and so masculine.” Gandolfini threatened to kill him. (He was joking! Sort of.)

A few years later, Turturro almost joined Gandolfini on The Sopranos, first as a director, then as the unhinged horseand pregnant-woman-murderer Ralph Cifaretto. (“Joey Pants was more correctly cast,” Turturro says, cackling. “And they couldn’t afford me anyway.”) Gandolfini died of a heart attack in 2013. Six years later, Turturro’s voice coarsens with grief and his giant eyes shine when he ref lects on him. “It’s funny how you can work really intimately with people and not be best friends,” he says, pretzeling his long arms across his chest. “But you can fall in love with each other [creatively].... He was my kind of person.”

WHEN WE’RE DONE with the spinach, Tur t ur ro of fers me a dent ist-g rade toothpick, then we head across town to his favorite glasses store. Having spent nearly seven decades in New York, he navigates the crowded sidewalks at a trot. A Fresh Direct delivery guy points at him and says, “You!” Turturro nods and smiles: Yes, it is.

When my teeth start clacking in the cold, Turturro offers me a hat, then asks if, by chance, I’ve ever interviewed Jeff Goldblum, whom he almost worked with once and identifies as a “big f lirt.” I have, and Turturro follows up with the kind of delicious, impertinent questions anyone would want to know about a famous person.

Turturro’s curiosity has helped him to age gracefully compared with other actors in his age bracket. I don’t know many men in their 60s who actively solicit challenges to their worldview; rather, it often feels like they’ve put in the 10,000 hours required for mastery and are now experts at feeling entitled to do things the same way they’ve always done them, thanks.

Turturro, meanwhile, delivers and seeks pushback rather than validation, much

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ness playing a racist dope in Spike Lee’s 1989 breakthrough, Do the Right Thing.

(Barack Obama took Michelle to see the movie on their f irst date; Turturro says the president once told him, “You brought us together.”) Lee decided to cast Turturro after seeing the odd 1988 drama Five Corners, in which his character beats a penguin to death after a woman (Jodie Foster) rejects him. The scene is, objectively, insane. Turturro somehow manages to avoid it feeling that way.

Even in these early roles, Turturro’s beauty was a bit off, thanks to his googly eyes and vulpine teeth. He cops to having a “prominent nose.” Still, when fans come up to him in the street to show off photos of their cousin who, they swear, looks just like him, “it’s the most crazy face,” he says.

“It’s like someone made a caricature. Never a normal person, or even in the vicinity.

It’s always these outcast of outcasts.”

Turturro’s appearance has allowed him to convincingly play many fictional outcasts of outcasts. But their onscreen nuttiness isn’t generated by him—it’s ref lected. Turturro’s personal life is as sturdy as a glacial rock. He has lived in bougie Park Slope, Brooklyn, for 30 years, and has been married to actress turned social worker Katherine Borowitz for 35.

They’ve raised two children, and Turturro serves as the legal guardian for his older brother, a former musician who has mental-health issues. Turturro extends the caregiving instinct to me. “Do you want something more?” he asks, concerned that I haven’t eaten enough. “Want to share some spinach or something?”

He explains that he “steals” from others to create his characters. He based his manic role as Agent Seymour Simmons in Transformers on the franchise’s famously bonkers director, Michael Bay, known for spewing obscenities at cast members and for having Megan Fox hand-wash his Ferrari as part of her audition. Bay failed to realize that the character was based on him. “He was like, ‘I love everything you’re doing!’ ” Turturro says. “Of course: I’m doing you.”

Turturro welcomes these outside influences. “There’s two different kinds of creative types,” he explains, gesturing to the plate of spinach we’re splitting.

The first, he says, tells you, “This is my spinach. I’m sharing it with you.” The second, like Turturro, enjoys the process of navigating a meal together—the awkward, interesting negotiation between forks, the warmth of generosity. No, no, you take some greens.

In The Jesus Rolls, Turturro reprises the bowling-obsessed creep he played in The Big Lebowski.

like his parents did. “To be enlightened, you have to be open,” he says. “I want to know. I’m thrilled by knowing.” This openness balances his more avuncular tendencies—like public dental care and the lusty appreciation he expresses for pinups like Barbara Stanwyck (“So sexy!”) and Pam Grier. (“I did an episode of Miami Vice, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, how am I going to act with her?’ ”) He has an equally lusty desire to tell you about how enriching he finds the writing of W.E.B. DuBois and Ta-Nehisi Coates (“beautiful and so poetic, and so not breast-beating”).

The actress Susan Sarandon has appeared in several Turturro films, including The Jesus Rolls. “I didn’t think there was a chance in hell he’d get the money, so I said yes,” she says. The semi-unintentional collaboration was a happy one. “Working with John is a joy,” she says, before taking a hard conversational turn. “He and Bobby Cannavale were so funny. There’s a lot of threesomes in this movie, and I said, ‘Well, I’ve never done that.’ And they said, ‘We

have,’ and told all these stories from back in the day. John’s just so Italian, in his love of food, women, everything. He’s so open and confident and generous. He allows you to try anything.”

When Turturro and I reach Selima Optique on Bond Street, we’re greeted by Selima, the eponymous French optician.

She outfitted Turturro with his everyday bone-rimmed glasses, as well as the silver frames he sports in The Plot Against America. She offers us apple cider and cabernet sauvignon and is professionally f lirtatious. Turturro immediately rises to her emotional temperature. “She’s my acting coach,” he says, wiping her fuchsia lipstick from his cheek.

Turturro inspects a tray of vintage brown Persols, all appropriate for a 1970s poolside cocaine binge. The frames have a dual purpose: to give Turturro a visual foundation for a character he’s working on and to send a photo to a potential director, to test his willingness to collaborate. At this point in Turturro’s career, he pre-

Now Turturro is vibrating with stimulation, strutting around the store imitating a dripping Italian man in a Speedo. He tells a story about working on Sugartime, in the ’90s, with the actress Mary-Louise Parker. “We had good chemistry together,” he says, sipping cider as he shimmies.

“Very good chemistry.” He says that his mother warned him not to let his wife see the movie. (She still hasn’t.) And perhaps his mom was right. “When nothing happens, there’s more to imagine,” Turturro says. Performances can be powerful, even if they’re just in a kitchen. MJ

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WORKOUT OF THE MONTH

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An overlooked gym tool is the key to unlocking a slew of strength and endurance-building moves. by MARJORIE KORN

travel in two directions: up and down. But using a landmine—a hefty base on the ground with a sleeve to fit the end of a barbell—the heavy metal can move in more directions. “A landmine is more complex, allowing the barbell to move rotationally and around a person,” says Ryan Hopkins, founder of Soho Strength Lab in New York City. The TYPICALLY, BARBELLS

base offers stability, streamlining movement patterns and allowing for safer high-intensity training.

So Hopkins invited us to his gym to show us how familiar moves can be done using a landmine to make them more dynamic. The first time, start with an empty bar—it already weighs 45 pounds. As you get more comfortable, increase the weight in increments of five to 10 pounds.

MEN’S JOURNAL

THE WORKOUT

MARCH 2020

FITNESS

1

2

Cross-body Row

Deadlift

Stand facing landmine, end of barbell between feet, legs slightly wider than hip-width apart, to start. Grab barbell, and, with soft knees, rise until back is flat and arms hang straight down to start (A). Press hips forward and rise to standing (B), then return to start for 1 rep. (Note that this is one move to which you can add weight more quickly. Do the first set with an empty bar to get used to the movement pattern, then work up to a weight where you feel like you can do 12 reps max and then do sets of 8.)

082

MARCH 2020

MEN’S JOURNAL

4

Standing Reach

E XPERT TIP

3

Snatch

Stand with feet staggered, right foot forward, barbell perpendicular to body and holding it in left hand close to the floor, to start (A). In one fluid movement, explosively spring up, pulling left elbow back (B), then swing body 90 degrees to face landmine, pushing hips back and extending barbell overhead (C) for 1 rep.

Do all reps on left side, then switch sides.

STABILIZE THE SHOULDER BLADE

MEN’S JOURNAL

MARCH 2020

083

FITNESS

5

6

Reverse Lunge

Traditional Squat

Stand facing landmine, holding barbell fist-over-fist so thumbs are on top. Step back so body leans forward, placing some bodyweight into barbell (A), to start. Drop down into a squat so barbell is just under chin (B), then reverse for 1 rep.

A

B 7

Bilateral Overhead Press

Stand facing landmine, holding barbell fist-over-fist, thumbs on top, end of barbell near top of chest. Step back so body leans forward and creates a straight line, placing some body weight into barbell, chin gently tucked, to start. In a swift movement, engage hips and press hands overhead, so arms are alongside face.

Return to start for 1 rep.

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MARCH 2020

MEN’S JOURNAL

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Get Shredded It’s not often that one of the finer things in life—imported cheese—gets classified as a health food.

But in this case, pass the Parmesan. by MARJORIE KORN

N THE VENN diagram of

has 121 calories with 11 grams of complete MARCH 2020

And it packs a f lavor punch. An ounce of mozzarella is unsatisfying, while a

athletes—so much so that by European standards, it’s considered a functional food. One ounce of Parmesan contains a third of your day’s calcium needs. Athletes need sufficient calcium to grow, maintain, and mend bone tissue, which helps stave off fractures, nutrition scientists at Purdue University advise.

And research from the University of

of the few dairy products that people with

and the next time you cook a vegetable strain. It adds depth of f lavor and a nice texture. Since wine has health benefits, too, pair Parmesan with a nice Italian red. Q

MAXIM SHEBEKO/GETTY IMAGES

good foods and bad, cheese has traditionally occupied the intersection—healthyish. But new research is bumping cheese into the good-for-you circle, and there’s a standout—Parmesan.

It’s aged, which is key. Time spent in the cellar helps protein develop, causing Parmesan to have a higher percentage of the muscle-building macronutrient compared with softer cheeses including

I

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WHAT WORKS FOR ME

GlobeTrotter Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian is forever on the road.

Here’s what keeps him going.

T

Chain Reaction

Black Coffee and Clean Living

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NEW !

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E XPERT TIP

These exercises to improve hold strength bolster everyday functioning—and gym performance. by JESSICA MIGALA

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3/ Red Meat Swap Pan’s Mushroom Jerky If lunch was heavy on animal protein, opt for a light snack. Mushrooms are meaty and carry umami flavor, making them a good stand-in for beef. Plus, ’shrooms contain more filling fiber. $9; mushroomjerky.com

A Better Refuel The vending machine is not your friend. For an afternoon pick-meup, grab one of these. Each has true nutrition to power you through your workday—and evening workout. by MARJORIE KORN 4/ Flock Rotisserie Chicken Chips

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Cherrish Tart Cherry Juice With 96 Montmorency (tart) and sweet cherries in each bottle, Cherrish offers energy without the crash of another cup of coffee, lessens post-workout soreness, and even helps you sleep. $26 for 6; cherrish.net

Ark Foods Cauli Mac + Cheese Tastier than a bag of crudités, this is a great way to crowbar extra veg into your diet. The 140-calorie heat-and-eat dish has a big helping of vitamin C and fiber. For best results, add hot sauce. $6; arkfoods.com

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INTEL

Run for Your Life

Health News

You may not be as fleet-footed as you were in your 20s. But even when you’re plodding along, running helps extend your life. A meta-analysis in the British Journal of Sports Medicine gathered data on more than 232,000 people during studies spanning up to 35 years and found that any amount of running, at any speed, lowers a person’s risk of death by a staggering 27 percent. Other researchers have suggested that running is a life extender because the sport has positive effects across the body—on blood pressure, body weight, heart health, cancer risk, and more.

Plus, it contributes to mental well-being. And people see benefits after a weekly run.

There’s no wrong way to do it, so if pavement pounding is boring, try trails. Hate long distance? Do intervals, or measure runs in minutes—go for 15 or 20 at a time.

A TOAST TO THE END OF OBESITY

CAN T CAUSE BLOOD CLOTS?

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FROM TOP: GETTY IMAGES; TINA SEDERHOLM/EYEEM/GETTY IMAGES

A warning to men under 65: A JAMA Internal Medicine study found that men on testosterone therapy are about twice as likely to suffer a deep vein blood clot versus before treatment, even if it’s for hypogonadism, a condition in which the body doesn’t produce enough T. The odds go up if you’re under 65. Some think testosterone may thicken blood and increase the number of cells that help with clotting.

Think hard before taking T to reverse the symptoms of aging.

In the battle of the bulge, points go to beer. Lab mice on a high-fat diet that were fed a certain compound extracted from hops gained weight more slowly than mice that didn’t get the supplement.

“Xanthohumol, found at low levels in beer, improves obesity and metabolic syndrome in part by changing gut microbiota,” says Adrian Gombart, a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at Oregon State University. Xanthohumol isn’t concentrated in beer enough for a weightloss effect, but a supplement may be down the road. For now, if you’re worried about weight, still opt for a light beer.

THE HIDDEN COST OF LIVING IN A POLLUTED CITY You’d probably guess that air pollution is bad for your heart and lungs, but how about your eyes?

According to scientists at the University College London, people who live in cities with high pollution levels are at least 6 percent more likely to develop glaucoma, a debilitating eye condition that can lead to irreversible blindness. And glaucoma is 50 percent more common in urban areas versus

FROM LEFT: GETTY IMAGES; KAROL SEREWIS/SOPA IMAGES/LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES

TO STRENGTHEN THE BRAIN, GET A DRUM KIT

50% The percentage of calories in the average American diet from ultraprocessed foods, per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. For every 5 percent increase in processed foods a person eats, there’s a corresponding decrease in heart health.

through the blood to nerves in the eyes, which can, over time, damage the retina. Other research found that even short exposure—think hours—can permanently damage and shrink blood vessels. If you live in a city with high air pollution, avoid exercising outdoors during peak pollution hours, choose parks over busy streets, and install a good air filter in your bedroom— after all, you spend a third of your day breathing the air in there.

THE SLEEP-STRESS CONNECTION A reason to avoid all-nighters at all costs: Just one sleepless evening can sap emotional well-being. A UC Berkeley study found that 30 percent of sleepdeprived people suffered anxiety the next day, and half of them had distress levels akin to people with anxiety disorders. Even minor disruptions in sleep—a 2 a.m. car alarm—can harm how centered you feel, since sleep may mediate the fight-or-flight response. Take no chances: Sleep with earplugs in a totally dark bedroom.

MEN’S JOURNAL (ISSN 1063-4651) is published monthly except combined January/February and July/August issues, which count as two of 12 in an annual subscription, by Weider Publications LLC, a division of American Media LLC, 4 New York Plaza, 4th Floor, New York, NY 10004. Periodical Rates Postage Paid at the New York, NY, Post Office and at additional mailing offices. Copyright © Weider Publications LLC 2020. All rights reserved. Canada Post International Publications Mail Sale Agreement No. 40028566. Canadian B.N. 88746 5102 RT0001. All materials submitted become the sole property of Weider Publications LLC and shall constitute a grant to Weider Publications LLC to use name, likeness, story, and all other information submitted of the person submitting the same for any and all purposes and cannot be used without permission in writing from Weider Publications LLC. Men’s Journal is not responsible for returning unsolicited manuscripts, photographs, letters, or other materials. Weider Publications LLC and American Media LLC, publisher of Men’s Journal, do not promote or endorse any of the products or services advertised by third-party advertisers in this publication. Nor does Weider Publications LLC or American Media LLC verify the accuracy of any claims made in conjunction with such advertisements. Subscription rate is $24.00 for 1 year in USA; in Canada, $34.00 for 1 year. Outside of USA and Canada, $45.00 for 1 year. U.S. orders outside of USA must be prepaid in U.S. funds. For customer service and back issues call toll-free (800) 677-6367 or write to: Men’s Journal, P.O. Box 37207, Boone, IA 50037-0207. SUBSCRIBERS: If the Postal Service alerts us that your magazine is undeliverable, we have no further obligation unless we receive a corrected address within one year. U.S. POSTMASTER: Send all UAA to CFS (see DMM 507.1.5.2). NON-POSTAL and MILITARY FACILITIES: Send U.S. address changes to: Men’s Journal, P.O. Box 37207, Boone, IA 50037-0207. CANADA POSTMASTER: Send address changes to American Media LLC, P.O. Box 907 STN Main, Markham, ON L3P 0A7, Canada. From time to time we make our subscriber list available to companies that sell goods and services by mail that we believe would interest our readers. If you would rather not receive such mailings, please send your current mailing label to: Men’s Journal, P.O. Box 37207, Boone, IA 50037. Manuscripts, art, and other submissions must be accompanied by a selfaddressed, stamped envelope. Printed in the USA.

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Last Word

Bob Odenkirk The comedian and actor, now appearing in the final season of Better Call Saul, on big families, helpless parents, and why the anchors on Fox News will never, ever be funny.

Who were your heroes growing up?

My scoutmasters. My dad wasn’t around at all, so I was always looking for men who I could look up to.

You’re one of seven siblings. How was it growing up in such a big family?

I loved it. My father was a f lake—a selfish, alcoholic, immature person—so there was a lot of stress. The kids all supported each other and had a lot of laughs together. We just joked around like crazy and played and had a blast.

How should a man handle getting older?

You’ve got to tighten up the corners.

Work harder. Time is running out.

What’s the best advice you ever received?

We had been promised some money to develop Mr. Show, but the money wasn’t coming. I was getting antsy and frustrated, even angry. So my manager, Bernie Brillstein, goes, “Hey, a million dollars is still a million dollars.” It resonated with me. It sounds like it’s just about money, but it isn’t. It’s about how when you get wrapped up in your own drive, it’s very easy to forget what you’re asking of other people.

Who has been the biggest influence on your life?

Probably my mother. She worked really, really hard to raise all her kids. She has real backbone and very strong principles, but she can laugh all day long. It was an interesting mix and a great one.

What human trait to do most admire?

A sense of humor. Funny people make 096

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What role should vanity play in a man’s life?

Be vain about your private principles, not your physical self.

What advice would you give your younger self?

Will you calm down? Just calm down.

Go home and go to sleep.

What’s the hardest thing about being a parent?

You love your kids with everything you have, but you can’t fix their situations.

You have be a coach on the sidelines MEN’S JOURNAL

and you can’t get out there with them.

Who would you invite to your dream dinner party?

Mark Twain. Shakespeare. David Cross. Lucia Berlin, the writer. Her work is just amazing. And Marjorie Gross, a comedy writer who wrote really funny shit. She died young, and I didn’t get to work with her.

How should a man handle regret?

People who don’t have regrets, like our wonderful president, scare me. You should have some regrets. Hopefully you’ve done a lot of things, and some of them were wrong, and you recognized it and let it resonate through your life.

It’s a good thing.

How do you want to be remembered when you’re gone?

Vaguely.

—INTERVIEW BY LARRY KANTER

JOSH TELLES/AUGUST IMAGES

How should a man handle criticism?

When he’s young, he should say, “Fuck you.” When he gets older, he should go, “No, you’re right.”

me really happy. And it’s interesting: People I don’t like tend not to be funny.

They can’t be funny. Have you ever watched the people on Fox News when they try to be funny? Oh my God, it’s embarrassing. It tells you something about dimensions that are missing in their points of view.

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