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OUR 25TH ANNUAL

Icon of The Year

GEORGE CLOONEY Plus

TREVOR NOAH MEGAN THEE STALLION THE

BEST THINGS ABOUT THE

WORST YEAR EVER

Inside The Great NBA Bubble Experiment

DEC 2020/JAN 2021

The 2020 GQ Fashion Awards

OUR 25TH ANNUAL

Rapper of The Year

MEGAN THEE STALLION Plus

DEC 2020/JAN 2021

GEORGE CLOONEY TREVOR NOAH

THE

BEST THINGS ABOUT THE

WORST YEAR EVER

The 2020 GQ Fashion Awards

Inside The Great NBA Bubble Experiment

OUR 25TH ANNUAL

Newsman of The Year

TREVOR NOAH Plus

GEORGE CLOONEY MEGAN THEE STALLION THE

BEST THINGS ABOUT THE

WORST YEAR EVER

The 2020 GQ Fashion Awards

DEC 2020/JAN 2021

Inside The Great NBA Bubble Experiment

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CONTENTS

GQ MOTY 2020 The Fix

On the Covers

38 Baller Holiday Drops With JAYL EN BROWN . . . . 29 PL AY BOI CART I:

Leader of the Lost Boys . . . . . . . . . . 38

on New Looks for Classic Watches. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

BENJA MIN C LY ME R

The Best Things About the Worst Year Ever. . . . . . . 50

Features

Photograph by Jason Nocito. T-shirt by Giorgio Armani. Sunglasses by Ray-Ban. Both his own.

Cover Story: GEO RGE C LO ON EY .. .. . . . . . . . . .. .. . . . . .. 60 Cover Story: MEG A N THEE S TAL L ION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Cover Story: TRE VOR NOAH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76

M O B O L A J I D AWO D U : PA O L A K U D A C K I . AWO L E R I Z K U : J O H N JAY. M O S I S E C R E T: K A R I S H A H I C K M A N .

The 2020 GQ Fashion Awards......................... 86 Six Men Whose Families Were Shattered by Police Brutality Reflect on Black Fatherhood..... 98 NBA Commissioner ADAM SILVER Goes Long on a Historic Year for the League..................... 110

Photograph by Adrienne Raquel. Styled by Eric McNeal. Necklace and drop earrings (prices upon request) by Bulgari. Diamond stud earring, bracelets, and rings, her own.

Inside the Great NBA Bubble Experiment.......... 114 Contributors

MOBOLAJI DAWODU Fashion director

AWOL ERIZKU Photographer

MOSI SECRET Writer

Dawodu styled six men whose families have been devastated by police brutality. “Ever since I became a father, I love and respect dads even more,” he says. “It was a beautiful experience.”

Erizku, who photographed the men, was inspired by them: “Despite all the obstacles that have come their way, they’re all highly revered leaders in their respective communities.”

“These guys become public figures when they’re still grieving,” says Secret. “I was interested in how their sense of fatherhood changes amid all of that.”

Photograph by Shaniqwa Jarvis. Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu. Coat $5,900, and turtleneck, $630, by Salvatore Ferragamo.

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REACHING THE TOP IS JUST THE BEGINNING THE WORLD’S MOST AWARDED SINGLE MALT SCOTCH WHISKY

WHERE NEXT?

CONTENTS

GQ MOTY 2020

For our story on George Clooney, our Icon of the Year, see page 60. Jacket by Emporio Armani. Shirt by Giorgio Armani. Both his own.

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ST YLIST, ERIC MCNE AL .

GQ MOTY 2020

For our story on Megan Thee Stallion, our Rapper of the Year, see page 68. Dress, $1,500, by Rick Owens. Necklace (price upon request) by Jacob & Co. Bracelet (price upon request) by David Yurman.

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BEST

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CONTENTS

ST YLIST, MOBOL A JI DAWODU.

GQ MOTY 2020

For our story on Trevor Noah, our Newsman of the Year, see page 76. Jacket, $1,995, by Giorgio Armani. Sweater, $230, by Sunspel. Sunglasses, $610, by Jacques Marie Mage.

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

(PROLOGUE)

torture y’all by summarizing what made this year so tough. But I do believe the most important thing you can do—on good days and bad days, in good years and bad years— is give thanks. So here, in celebration of our 25th annual Men of the Year issue, are 25 things (in no particular order) I’m grateful for in 2020.

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1. For the weeks that gave way to months of uninterrupted time spent with my universe partner, Heidi, and our two cats. It was glorious, spacious, and totally unexpected. 2. For the chance to set the record with 17,013 home-cooked meals in a row. 3. For long hikes. 4. For epic, life-a∞rming phone calls with old friends, and with my mom. 5. For the fearless members of the mighty GQ squad, who proved we can make GQ feel unmistakably, well, GQ—no matter how weird the circumstances. (The issue you’re holding is one of our best yet, IMO.) 6. For Zoom. Yes, Zoom. And all the whiz-bang modern technology that allowed our team to WFH. It was humbling that we could keep working (and earning) when so many others were unable to punch the clock. 7. For the songs of John Prine and Bill Withers, two kings we lost in 2020. (Luckily, their music is immortal.) 8. For Dave Chappelle. 9. And Phoebe Bridgers. 10. And LeBron James. 11. And Naomi Osaka. 12. And Dr. Anthony Fauci. 13. For Barbara’s Jalapeño Cheese Pu≠s. 14. For Evan Kinori elastic-waist pants. 15. And house shoes. (I prefer Sabahs.) 16. For George Clooney’s salt-and-pepper Caesar. 17. And The Daily Show. 18. And “WAP.” 19. For cell phone cameras. 20. For the young people who led us out of quarantine and into the streets to march for something undeniable and pure: racial equality. 21. For Sharpies and cardboard. 22. For the First Amendment. 23. And the right to damn vote! 24. For face masks. 25. And for the human capacity to hope and—most of all—to change. For more of the best things about the worst year ever, turn to page 50. And I’ll see you in 2021.

Will Welch EDITOR IN CHIEF

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Shirt, $840, pants, $1,210, sunglasses, $790, necklace (gold), $2,060, necklace (silver), $4,400, bracelet, $415, ring, $670, backpack, $5,350, Keepall, $3,500, and Phone Box, $2,430, by Louis Vuitton Men’s.

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Jacket, $3,400, shirt, $935, pants, $1,210, and tie, $220, by Louis Vuitton Men’s.

VARSITY CARDIGAN The LV capsule is designed around three key occasions in the life of an NBA player: press conferences, travel, and the all-important game arrival, where in recent years the cardigan has become a go-to move.

FROM THE BUBBLE TO THE STARS WITH JAYLEN BROWN

stumped. Our Zoom call was rounding the hour mark and our conversation had hit a lull, so I threw out what should have been a softball question: If you could have dinner with any three people in history, who would they be? “That’s a great question,” the young Celtics guard said, perking up. “Give me a sec.” Brown is one of the most thoughtful minds in the NBA, and at 24, he’s already emerged as one of its most enlightened voices on social injustice. He stared down at his chest and, after a minute or two, glanced up and proposed an alternative: Instead of three, could he pick four? A former Berkeley student who’s spoken at Harvard and was named a fellow at the MIT Media Lab, Brown represents a new generation of activist-athlete, as likely to organize a protest against police brutality (in May, he drove 15-plus hours from Boston to Atlanta to lead a peaceful protest for George Floyd) as he is to throw down a 360 dunk in a game (which he did during a breakout playo≠ run this year). Brown was raised just outside Atlanta by his mother, Mechalle, who’s a professor. His father, Marselles, was a professional heavyweight boxer (and stands seven feet tall). Growing up, Brown was an inquisitive child who devoured Eragon and the Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket books. He says he was both a beneficiary and a victim of an education system that he refers to as our “most aggressive form of racism.” “Putting kids on a certain track throughout schooling— gifted, accelerated, regular classes—it’s a track you stay on pretty much for your whole career, which impacts your social mobility in the future,” he says. “In America you pay for your education.… It’s hidden, but it’s clear as day.” He adds, “That’s just how capitalism works.” Back to the dinner-party question: His first three picks are Harriet Tubman (“I’d just want to shake her hand”), Nelson Mandela (Brown visited his prison cell in Johannesburg), and Malcolm X (“I’d love to sit down and ask him, ‘What should we do?’ ”). The fourth is Albert Einstein. “I’m fascinated with science and math. Quantum physics,” says Brown. Pending scheduling conflicts, he hopes to take NASA up on an internship he says it previously o≠ered him. It’s an opportunity that he doesn’t want to miss. — M I C H A E L P I N A AYLEN BROWN WAS

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JERRY WEST SUIT Virgil Abloh is a master of smart self-reference, and here he flips the print from one of his showstopping-est LV garments—an Africa Houndstooth coat—with the NBA’s iconic logo.

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RIGHTEOUS RAIN BOOT Cross a Croc with a Chelsea boot and you get Bottega Veneta’s delightfully deranged biodegradable-polymer Puddle boot ($650).

ARTFUL POTTERY If a Cubist and Yves Klein walked into a pottery studio, they might come up with something like these Raawii Strøm ceramics designed by Nicholai Wiig Hansen (jug, $108, bowl, $118, and vase, $118, at MoMA Design Store).

DANGLY DRIP The hanging diamond earring—like this one by Maria Tash—has won over adventurous dressers Lil Uzi Vert and Harry Styles. What are you waiting for? ($2,875)

SIDELINE COAT Peep the raglan cut on this beefy wool-andcashmere-blend Todd Snyder overcoat—a tailoring trick that ensures the coat drapes over your shoulders like a blanket ($898).

VARSITY FASHION UNIFORM Since its introduction in 2013, the Saint Laurent Teddy jacket has been rocked by everyone from Jonah Hill to A$AP Rocky—and it’s as essential today as ever ($2,990).

HOLIDAY GIFTS FOR THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON ON YOUR LIST: YOU.

MIRRORED SUITCASE Fashion’s favorite luggage maker, Rimowa, collaborated with Moncler on a roller you can take fit pics in ($3,200).

PROP ST YLIST, STELL A REY AT MARK EDWARD INC.

SLASHED TURTLENECK Bypass the obligatory festive turtleneck with Judy Turner’s slyly sexy V-neck iteration ($495).

HEIRLOOM GLOVES We’re going to be spending a lot of time outdoors this winter, so there’s never been a better moment to invest in luxurious lambskin gloves by Emporio Armani ($195).

SHOWSTOPPING PRINTED SHIRT Another season, another printed Prada shirt that will go down as a collector’s item and an all-time grail ($920).

SLEAZY SHADES Young sunglasses label Lexxola burst onto the scene this year with a perfect ’60s-inspired frame that makes anyone who wears it look vaguely famous ($250).

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THE SKATERCHAIN UPGRADE All Ursa Major by Kate Jones pieces—like these heart-emblazoned enamel charms—are handmade from recycled metals (sterling silver necklace and charms, as shown, $258).

CHRISTMASDINNER FLEX The holiday-card turtleneck doesn’t have

GROOVY SUIT The latest traffic-stopping Gucci suit features a cropped, flared leg, runway-size lapels, and a plaid so bad it’s very, very good (jacket, $3,800, and pants, $1,250).

RECYCLED(!) WATCH Tom Ford’s latest Swiss timepiece is made entirely of ocean plastic— from the case to the strap to the packaging—making a strong argument for eco-conscious watches as luxe as those made of gold or steel ($995).

STATEMENT SCARF Consider this silk scarf your passport to A. Sauvage’s republic of ultra-louche tailoring ($550).

LEATHER LOUNGERS There are as many styles of leather pants as there are regular pants, and this season we’re feeling Dolce & Gabbana’s easy-fit pleated leather trousers the most ($3,995). 3 4

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ARTIST-EDITION VEST With acid-washed punk denim pieces like this, artist Sterling Ruby’s fashion project—S.R. Studio. LA. CA.— evokes an apocalyptic ’90s Los Angeles ($995).

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MADE-IN-ITALY HIKER Weighing in at only 1.5 pounds, the Asolo hiking boot is the gorped-out equivalent of a bench-made Italian dress shoe ($275).

PROPER CROSSBODY Now that we’ve moved beyond the “clout pack,” the ideal crossbody bag looks something like Dunhill’s Lock satchel, with luxurious hardware, muscular lines, and enough room for an iPhone ($1,750).

CENTERPIECE LIGHTER This poured-acrylic tabletop lighter—with a nesting ashtray!—from haute head shop Flower by Edie Parker is to a Bic as a Maserati is to a Citi Bike ($695).

CREAMY PLAID This tonally textured button-down from New York label 345 AM is reminiscent of a shirt you’d find in an out-of-the-way Tokyo thrift shop—which is to say, it’s great ($245).

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HOLY GRAIL FLEECE This damask-patterned deep-pile fleece is one of many reasons why the fashion-obsessed make pilgrimages to Kapital’s far-out Kojima HQ ($495).

YOUR NEXT WALLET Liberate your back pockets by throwing one of these A.P.C. molded-leather coin purses in your bag ($250).

PURPLE PLEATS Once upon a time, if you needed the perfect gray trouser, you went to Boss. You can still do that, but now the label also makes the perfect dusty-purple trouser too ($398).

ARTISANAL PARKA Italy’s Ten C crafts its military-inspired parkas out of a hyper-advanced knit fabric called

DROOL-WORTHY BAG With cowboy-inspired embroidery, this Hermès Haut à Courroies (which is like a supersized Birkin) is the latest ultra-collectible duffel coming soon to Drake’s closet ($21,800).

IT’S NOT A MASK. IT’S A BALACLAVA. Ever since Raf Simons’s brilliant and controversial spring 2002 collection, the slightly sinister (but incredibly cool) balaclava has been one of the designer’s staples ($343).

SENSITIVE SKULL RING In Anthony Lent’s world, the skull ring—usually hulking and badass—is pensive, almost Shakespearean ($1,500).

FESTIVE GLASSES Upgrade your happy-hour ritual with Estelle’s handblown jewel-toned wine/cocktail/kombucha tumblers ($65 for set of two).

THE DOWN SWEATER If your go-to insulation piece isn’t filled with Goldwin’s signature ceramic-fiber-embedded down, which helps trap and increase body heat, your winter layering system might need an upgrade ($460).

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YOHJI TIME Yohji Yamamoto’s brooding, cerebral aesthetic is having a major moment: On the heels of a Supreme collab, the Japanese master has stamped his signature on

SNEAKER SCULPTURE At a time when we’re inundated with retro-sneaker revivals, the first independent original design by Pyer Moss founder Kerby Jean-Raymond zooms forward to 2050 ($595).

The F i x

Playboi Carti’s mumbled lyrics and ghoulish approach to fashion have made him an elusive object of hip-hop obsession. With a much-hyped album and a new Givenchy campaign on the way, he reflects on the underground Atlanta scene that birthed his unusual— and very undead—style.

Fashion

BA R B E R, JA L E N K E A RS E . H A I RST Y L I ST, R H O N DA PA L M E R. M A K E U P, O M A R SFREDDO. MANICURE, SHARNISE MCMICHAEL . PRODUCER, VIRGINIA RIDGERS.

By JEWEL WICKER

Leader of the Lost Boys

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a student at North Springs Charter High, Jordan Terrell Carter started going to house parties hosted by an older rapper he knew, a fixture on the Atlanta scene known as Key. Carter was already in the orbit of Awful Records, the lo-fi collective of self-described “weirdos” that would later sign him, and the crew would often make their way to Key’s parties, on Moreland Avenue in East Atlanta, which were as legendary for the stars they launched— it’s where Future filmed his “Trap Niggas” video—as for their chaos. Over time Carter began performing at the parties, and on one particularly rowdy New Year’s Eve, he got all three floors of guests going so hard HEN

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that the house itself buckled. “We broke the fucking ﬂoor,” he recalls. Carti’s not playing house parties anymore—the 24-year-old has become the face of the sputtered ad-libs and slurred vibe that pervade hip-hop today. “Bought a crib for my mama o≠ that mumblin’ shit. Made a mil o≠ that mumblin’ shit,” he brags on his 2018 Die Lit cut “R.I.P.” But even as Carti has graduated into mainstream stardom— running around SXSW with future mentor A$AP Rocky, collaborating with Solange, walking the runways for Virgil Abloh—he’s maintained the eccentric energy of his underground days. Cultivating a kind of vampire-punk look, Carti has grown calculating about how and when he pops up in public—he has mostly retreated from social media as anticipation for his second album continues to build. The more elusive he becomes, the larger his legend grows. When we meet in October, Carti looks downright gothic: a sheer black long-sleeve shirt, black skinny jeans, black slides, and black nail polish; cross earrings dangling

from his ears and his bright red hair freshly twisted tightly against his scalp. It’s ten o’clock on a Sunday night in a dimly lit studio just north of downtown Atlanta, one of the stone walls illuminated by a lurid red glow. His manager watches the Lakers secure the NBA Championship on a TV in the background. “You ready?” Carti asks me as he takes a sip of “lean”—Sprite and cough syrup—from two stacked Styrofoam cups. An introvert who prefers to move in silence, Carti ﬁnds quarantine to be his natural state. “I’m always at home by myself,” he says. “I don’t really go out like that at all, unless I have to. Studio and the house. That’s it.” After living in New York and Los Angeles for a spell, the rapper returned to his native Atlanta in 2018, moving into the upscale Buckhead neighborhood with fellow rapper Iggy Azalea, with whom he had a baby boy in the spring before they split up this fall. If Carti is notoriously mum about his personal life, he’s even more secretive about his sophomore studio album,

p r e v i o u s pa g e

Jacket, $1,750, and pants, $980, by Bottega Veneta. His own shoes by Rick Owens. t h i s pa g e

Coat, $3,000, and shirt, $1,200,by Yohji Yamamoto. His own jeans (throughout) by Rick Owens. Jewelry (throughout), his own.

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The F i x

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Coat, $5,725, and boots (throughout), $1,145, by Rick Owens. Shirt, $970, by Alexander McQueen. o p p o s i t e pa g e

His own shirt by Issey Miyake.

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Whole Lotta Red, which is set to be released by A$AP Rocky’s label, AWGE, and has been two years in the making. Carti is evasive about the reason for the delays but reports that new music—which he describes as “alternative” and “psyched out”—will be coming this year. As far as whether fans can expect him to release the full album in 2020, Carti simply says, “We’ll see.” Taking another sip of his dirty Sprite, Carti prefers to ruminate on what it was like to come up in the Atlanta orbit of Awful Records and its o≠beat stars, including Ethereal and Father. He’d been a good student

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and a standout basketball player, but once he got serious about music, he found he had little time for anything else. “As I got older, I started smoking weed and I was just like, ‘Fuck school.’ I didn’t want no more basketball, none of that. But I always used to freestyle and shit,” he says. Carti rarely talked about his songs with classmates, but they eventually discovered his music on SoundCloud, and it was their validation that kept him going. “People saying they fuck with my music—that shit put a battery in my back,” he says. Among these early supporters, the aforementioned Key was particularly

helpful, taking on the young rapper as something of a protégé, certain that Carti would soon be a star. “You could tell he was just sitting around observing,” Key says. “He called us ‘big bro’ all the time and was watching what we were doing. He would try to impress us, too, sometimes. We had to kind of tell him not to do little stu≠. But we already knew where he was going.” Shortly after graduating from high school, Carti moved to New York City, living with family in the Bronx and then eventually connecting with A$AP Rocky, who’d become a friend and mentor. Key says that time away from Carti’s hometown was critical. “When he really got alone, I really think he opened up and found himself,” he says. Carti broke through as a star almost instantly with his 2017 self-titled mixtape, which peaked at No. 12 on the Billboard 200 and featured such hits as “Magnolia” and “Woke Up Like This.” And though he’s still tending to his early rush of fame, he’s begun looking to cultivate and support other rising talents, much like Awful and A$AP Mob did for him in his younger years. “If I got a young nigga with me, I’m probably trying to sign or manage him,” Carti says, noting that he’s currently working with producers, photographers, and artists. He’s still looking to expand his career outside of music and aims to one day design his own clothes. His distinctive features—a searing gaze, a chiseled jawline, an oval-shaped birthmark on his left cheek—have already landed him on runways for Kanye’s Yeezy line and in ads for Nike, and earlier this year, the rapper’s signature voice was featured in a campaign for Givenchy, the ﬁrst under new creative director Matthew Williams. “It’s big for me,” Carti says. “I’ve waited all my life for shit like this.” His foray into fashion and his work with the storied Paris label conjured memories for Carti of his bygone days working in fashion in a much di≠erent capacity: folding clothes at H&M. Lighting a blunt, the rapper recalls the afternoon when he ﬁrst got the motivation he needed to take rap seriously. “I remember one day a guy walks in and he’s like, ‘Yo, you’re Playboi Carti,’ ” he says. “I’m in school. I’m broke. I’m at work. Retail. And the dude said, ‘I fuck with your music.’ I think I quit H&M like two days later.”

jewel wicker is an Atlanta-based freelance writer. She wrote about Lil Baby in the October issue.

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His own T-shirt by Raf Simons.

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EVENTS

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Two Icons Achieve Even Greater Heights

The F i x Watches of the Year

OUR NEW WATCH COLUMNIST, BENJAMIN CLYMER

Announcing the watches of the year: the new Rolex Submariner and Omega Speedmaster 321. Never mind the familiar look— each of these timepieces is actually redefining perfection, says Hodinkee founder and CEO Benjamin Clymer.

been the oddest, most confusing, most mind-meltingly exhausting in memory. To its credit, the watch industry—not known for its nimbleness— seemed to respond, and the timepieces released during the past 12 months shared an abiding practicality, a godsend in a year when time itself seemed to slow down. At the top of the pile are two icons among icons that capture what I love most about mechanical watches: the Omega Speedmaster caliber 321 and the Rolex Submariner. Both epitomize craft over cost and celebrate a bygone era while nodding toward where watchmaking is headed. And the new models somehow improve upon two archetypal designs. First, in January, Omega announced a product many of us had been dreaming of for literally decades: a stainless steel Speedmaster packing the legendary 321 movement. The handmade caliber, once considered among the ﬁnest ever to come from Switzerland, was taken out of commercial production by Omega in 1969 in favor of industrially manufactured movements. But its legend was only beginning. Due to its exceptional reliability, the 321 would go on to be used for all six Apollo lunar missions. Save for its metal coating, the new 321 is an exact re-creation of the original (Omega 3D-scanned the Speedy that astronaut Gene Cernan wore on the moon in 1972 in order to remake the parts), HIS YEAR HAS

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and each is built by hand. It’s almost three times as expensive as a standard model, but for the price, you’re getting a piece of history wrapped up in a case and bracelet that exemplify the best of modern watchmaking. Then, in September, Rolex shocked us all by announcing that its benchmark product, the no-date Cerachrom-bezel Submariner, would get a larger, 41-millimeter case and an entirely new movement. Untouched since 2012, the Submariner is widely considered the perfect dive watch, so even the slightest change feels seismic. And yet the new Sub is indeed the ﬁnest ever. The case has been made one millimeter larger, a seemingly strange choice at a time when tastes are shifting to slimmer silhouettes, and yet with thinner lugs and a slightly wider bracelet, it achieves an elegance unmatched by any previous version. Then there’s the updated caliber. Since Rolex remains one of the few watchmakers to use only solid casebacks, you can’t see the new movement it spent all those years developing. So the point is precision, plain and simple. At Hodinkee, we often debate the perfect two-watch collection. Well, here it is. The models that most represent dependability and utility—from the moon to the bottom of the sea, literally—have somehow gotten even better. It’s a small comfort in a year marked by so much confusion and uncertainty, but I know which watches I’ll be looking at as we count down to 2021.

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The Best Things About the Worst Year Ever

The

Yes, there was suffering, heartache, and noise. But if you look carefully, this strange year also served up something surprising: reasons to be hopeful. Here are 18 new ideas that just might shape our whole future. B y DANIEL RILE Y

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

youtube.com/gqsports

The F i x

Grounded flights. Emptied streets. The pandemic offered a trial run on what reducing carbon emissions could look like— and proved we’re now more conditioned than ever to make dramatic changes.

We Realized What It Takes to Fix the Planet

Silver Linings

UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME GOT A LOT MORE PRACTICAL UBI cheerleader Andrew Yang on how the once far-fetched idea began, this year, to seem downright reasonable.

Why did public support for UBI shift in 2020? Americans saw our economy shut down by the pandemic. We needed to get relief to millions of families, and there was only one straightforward commonsense way to do that: Send them checks. We sent them, and every economist who’s looked at it has said that had a tremendous effect. It’s become clear that UBI is not a “future” idea; it’s a “right now” idea.

days of the pandemic, much was made of the inadvertent positive e≠ects the environment might experience. Business ﬂights were grounded, commuter tra∞c thinned. The air cleared! But for all the carbon not released, the temporary shifts in personal behavior have made relatively small di≠erences. And as soon as people can get back to doing business the old way, they almost certainly will. Consequently, what has been made ever more apparent this year is the need for a more fundamental shift: Driving to the IN THE EARLY

What did we learn in that experiment in UBI? Millions of Americans got stimulus checks of $1,200 or more—and they loved it. And it did not make them instantaneously lazy. There’s universal basic income in the abstract, but then when people experienced a version of it, it became clearer how positive it would be for our health, mental health, trust in each other, optimism, faith in government, and the health of our small businesses.

The Book World Got an Overdue Makeover With the #BlackoutBestsellerList, a surge of unprecedented sales at Black-owned bookstores, by the #PublishingPaidMe revelations, and new Black editors in top roles in publishing, there were the beginnings of a shift in book publishing that will

What would you like to see next? The big step we have to take is to start measuring our society and economy by how we are doing—and not how the GDP or the stock market is doing.

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o∞ce a bit less just isn’t going to cut it. One idea we’re sold on—promoted by big thinkers and engineers like Otherlab founder Saul Gri∞th, who proposes a World War II–style mobilization—is that everything must be electriﬁed and powered by wind, solar, or other renewable sources. Start with your car. Then chip away at your home. You’ll save money. You’ll contribute to a real impact. “Don’t travel for business when you don’t need to” is a good lesson to learn from quarantine. “Electrify everything” is an even better one.

for decades to come.

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We Saw That Women Leaders Lead Better

We Found That Working From Home Really Works

The F i x

YANG: JOSEPH PREZIOSO. WOMEN LE ADERS, MARIN: RONI REKOMA A; JAKOBSDÓT TIR: CUNE Y T K AR ADAG; FREDERIKSON: WOLFGANG KUMM; A R D E R N : H A N N A H P E T E RS ; TSA I : B E TSY J O L ES ; M E R K E L : C H R I ST I A N M A RQ UA R DT. R AC I ST SY M BO LS, WAS H I N GTO N T E A M H E L M E T: K I R BY L E E ; AU N T J E M I M A B OX : J O H N N A C I O N ; U N C L E B E N ’ S B OX : R O N A D A R ; L A N D O ’ L A K E S B OX : G U A N ; R I C H M O N D, VA : RYA N M . K E L LY. A L L : G E T T Y I M A G E S .

A global disaster can tell us a lot about who ought to be in charge. Among the heads of state who distinguished themselves during this crisis, a disproportionate number had something obvious in common.

The pandemic forced employers to acknowledge something that was a long time coming: Everyone works from everywhere now. Which makes it a great moment to toss out some old ideas. Consider what Salesforce is up to. Back in March, when just about everybody’s relationship with home and work began to change, the San Francisco–based software giant started evolving its work-fromhome policies on the fly. Now each of its 54,000 employees has the option to work away from the office until August 2021. To make things more practical, Salesforce reimbursed employees up to $500 to build out a home office and expanded paid familycare leave by an additional six weeks so parents can assist children with remote learning. The old perceptions that things like productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness suffer when workers are out of the office feel long gone. The new idea? Meet employees’ needs where they actually exist. “We’re not going back to the way it was,” says Brent Hyder, Salesforce’s president and chief people officer. “Offices will reopen, but in this new all-digital environment, companies will be required to adopt new ways of engaging their employees and customers. This new normal isn’t somewhere off in the distance—we are living it now.”

Silver Linings

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1. SANNA MARIN

3. MET TE FREDERIKSEN

5. TSAI ING-WEN

Prime minister of Finland

Prime minister of Denmark

President of Taiwan

The country’s age-old culture of preparedness allowed Marin to tap stockpiles of medical and protective equipment that were the envy of nations confronting shortages that occurred early on.

Denmark’s second female prime minister presides over a country with high confidence in government and an ethic of collective responsibility— helpful things to have in a crisis.

Boasts the world’s fewest deaths per capita. The keys: speed and vigilance. Began monitoring flights from Wuhan last December. Now leading the world in re-opening as well.

2. KATRÍN JAKOBSDÓT TIR

4. JACINDA ARDERN

6. ANGELA MERKEL

Prime minister of New Zealand

Chancellor of Germany

Implemented a plan to go “hard and early” at the virus, leading to what is often cited as the most effective response globally.

Now in her 15th year in office, Merkel set the standard, balancing safety and openness in a country with Western Europe’s largest population and economy.

Prime minister of Iceland Oversaw rigorous and early contact tracing (and mandatory visitor testing)—a move that helped save the vital tourism economy.

WE STOPPED EXCUSING RACIST SYMBOLS The consensus was overdue: All the odious emblems in our daily lives—the racist logos on our butter and syrup, the monuments to oppression in our parks, and the offensive mascots in our sports— need to be removed. High schools, colleges, and pro franchises take notice: Do the work now, so that none of you are forced to wear your stubborn resistance to change on your uniforms all season like the Washington Football Team.

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Silver Linings

We Admitted That College Is Kinda Broken In a year of closures and quarantines, serious people—like NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway—suggested this could be the time to rethink the antiquated ideas that govern our overwhelmingly expensive approach to college.

A NEW ERA OF ATHLETES-AS-ACTIVISTS DAWNED As sports stars increasingly raise their voices, two of the WNBA’s best players set an inspiring example by stepping away from the game.

MAYA MOORE Forfeited the past two seasons to focus on criminal justice reform—including working to free wrongly convicted Jonathan Irons, who was imprisoned for two decades. After he was released this year, he and Moore were married.

RENEE MONTGOMERY The Atlanta Dream star devoted her time to social justice reform and voting rights—and to blasting Dream co-owner and GOP senator Kelly Loeffler, who wanted American flags on team jerseys instead of BLM messages.

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have a social purpose. It is there so that the graduates and the people who work there can feel like they are Chanel. “The opportunity is with our stateschool systems, our public-school institutions that educate more than two thirds of American students, to dramatically expand admittance rates. If we take 50 percent of classes online— and the dirty secret among most professors is that half our classes probably could be done online without much of an erosion of quality or outcomes—we e≠ectively double the potential supply. “We need to break this B.S. notion that we’re luxury brands, not public servants. We need to embrace big and small tech. We need to dramatically increase admit rates while dramatically decreasing the cost and the burden that have been levied on middle-class households in America. “By doing so, we might be able to restore higher ed to its rightful place as the greatest upward lubricant to the middle class in the history of Western democracy.”

We Reimagined Our Cities The pandemic forced cities to make shrewd urban land-use discoveries to accommodate social distancing: More outdoor dining in public spaces. Streets closed off to cars. Arenas transformed into voting sites. May these temporary solutions last well beyond a vaccine.

MOORE: MAT TEO MARCHI. MONTGOMERY: RICH VON BIBERSTEIN. BOTH: GE T T Y IMAGES. REIMAGINED CITIES, RESTAURANT ROW, AND NEW YORK: ANDREW H. WALKER /SHUT TERSTOCK.

enormous opportunity. First, we need to recognize the bloat and arrogance that have resulted in a transfer of $1.6 trillion from middle-class households to universities, administrators, and endowments. From there we have a chance to break the wheel. Universities have to feel the same economic pressure that middle-class households and other businesses have been subject to the past 40 years. There’s no way to sugarcoat this: A lot of people will lose their jobs. A lot of people will have their compensation reduced. And perhaps even some of those endowments the size of the GDP of Lithuania might actually have to be dipped into and serve their original purpose: beneﬁt students. “This isn’t just about the Ivy League. The Ivy League could dramatically expand its enrollment, but the schools won’t, because they’re drunk on luxury. They’ll maintain their Hermès status. Elizabeth Warren accused Pete Buttigieg of doing a fundraiser in a wine cave. She teaches in a wine cave. Harvard is a giant wine cave. It doesn’t “WE HAVE AN

The Opportunity “This is a movement that’s really built on the backs of youthful energy. Folks are saying: ‘It doesn’t need to be the way it’s always been.’ Forget about the people who have accumulated all the resources. We can make it so that regardless of position of birth, everybody has a say in terms of how we’re going to set up the system that serves all of us. That’s a radical notion in the context of human history.”

The F i x

We Began Asking: What Is the Purpose of the Police? Our long-overdue reckoning with policing in America is surfacing important questions—and a slew of new opportunities. Phillip Atiba Goff, a Yale professor who heads the dataobsessed Center for Policing Equity, shares what he finds most encouraging about this moment for change.

PEOPLE FINALLY STARTED… …DRESSING FOR THEMSELVES… Quarantine was a golden age for personal style. With nowhere to go and no one to see, looking back at you in the mirror.

…AND COOKING MORE… while leveling up his culinary game: 1. When to use salted versus unsalted butter (basically, salted for savory; unsalted for sweet). 2. The little rubber thingy that magically peels garlic (thus demanding the use of more garlic in everything). 3. That cookbooks are for reading, not just for

The Barbuto Cookbook.

…AND SETTLING IN AT HOME

Still need help? GQ’s Mark Anthony Green FANCY COFFEE-TABLE BOOKS: Get some inspiration without looking at a screen—and enhance your Zoom backdrop. ODDITIES: Vases, wall clocks, ceramics, a salt shaker that looks like David Hockney. Try the MoMA Design Store for surprising and wonderful things. PLANTS: Not cacti. Plants. That need your attention. You’re finally home; don’t hold back. You’ll be surprised by the energy they’ll pump into your place.

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Where Cities Can Begin “Activists have won the day in terms of public messaging. But as a society, we’re trying to figure out: How? How exactly? There’s a whole bunch of commonsense stu≠ that we always knew lots of people wanted—from law enforcement to activists. But it wasn’t getting done. And so what we saw was municipal leaders say: ‘We’re going to ban choke holds.’ ‘We’re going to take away qualified immunity.’ ‘We’re gonna create a mandate where we’re not just going to track data on racial profiling but we’re gonna analyze it and hold these departments accountable.’ At CPE, we put together a road map for change that 66 departments to date have picked up, asked for, and done some portion of. An intentional destruction of the old and construction of the new are both necessary and possible.” Rethinking the Simple Stuff “Right now, what happens when you dial 911 is: ‘Nine-one-one—what’s

your emergency?’ It’s an emergency response. They’re sending you one of three things. The ambulance is gonna respond. A ﬁre truck is gonna respond. Or a SWAT car is gonna respond. I would love for them to respond with an SUV. Or a minivan. Where someone’s like, ‘It seems like you’re having a hard time. Let’s talk it through.’ And it doesn’t mean that the person who shows up can’t go, ‘Oh, you’ve got a knife, so I’m getting back in the minivan—we need somebody to come deal with the violent component of this.’ We want to have services available and responses that are appropriate to the crisis the person’s in. It’s not that hard to imagine, once you’ve said it: We have a single phone number we go to in a crisis—we should just have more options for the kind of response.”

Expect Changes “Take a look at what’s starting to happen in cities like Indianapolis and Ithaca, New York. In Indianapolis, they’re saying, ‘We’re gonna put all of our data together, and we’re gonna rebuild systems that center vulnerable communities, that center the actual crises and harms people are having.’ The ﬁrst couple of cities that try to really make good on the cries of activists, that’s gonna be really exciting to see. We’re gonna get new forms of democracy. That’s not something you get every day.”

We Glimpsed the Future of News The newsletter may seem like an odd place for journalistic innovation, but as more writers use them to sell their work to readers, it’s growing clear that when it comes to reporting, the future isn’t free. Tech writer Casey Newton on why he made the jump. IF IT’S BROKE, FIX IT Newton, formerly of The Verge, was beginning to feel like “the first person in the world who had seen his life disrupted twice by the internet.” First, when the web came for print; then again, when the tech platforms came for the web. Establishing his subscription-based newsletter—Platformer News—with Substack felt like a fix. “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life,” he says. “So how can I set it up so that it can just be my job forever and it does not rely on someone I’ve never met selling a Samsung ad next to it?”

A JOURNALIST NEEDS MORE THAN A WEBSITE Substack, a new home for some of the writers you probably love, provides many of the things a gig at a traditional publication would (health care assistance, a Getty Images account), without the troubled ad-based business model. Most helpful for Newton— and other journalists chasing stories about rich and powerful (and litigious) figures—is the legal-defense program. “Every journalist has a different set of fears of why they couldn’t go independent,” he says. “Substack is trying to figure out all those terror points.”

WHAT READERS GET Newton thinks readers are hungry for things the web increasingly doesn’t provide because of the effect of algorithms. “[Outlets] are trying to muddle through by generating as many page views as they can. And so as a reader, you visit that publication and it feels completely incoherent. The publication is not about anything. It’s just a series of financial arbitrages.” Newton thinks readers want authenticity and integrity. “And,” he says, “it turns out, a really good way to do that is to shrink the publication all the way down to a single person’s point of view.”

A New Generation of Star Athletes Arrived

The

Silver

We entered quarantine with one set of icons. We’ll come out with another—including these world-beaters.

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WE WITNESSED THE TRIUMPH OF SCIENCE… …Which Affirmed Our Faith in Experts…

It’s been a tough run for experts. They’ve been brutalized by the hurricane assault on good old-fashioned knowledge and reason. And yet, this spring, wisdom became a matter of life and mass death. Dr. Anthony Fauci—an expert!— emerged as one of the more trusted figures in America. Expertise, and those with the courage to share it, never felt more essential. …And Touched Off a Medical Renaissance

PROTEST: ERIK MCGREGOR. STAR ATHLE TES, OSAK A AND DECHAMBE AU: MAT THE W STOCKMAN; MAHOMES: JAMIE SQUIRE; TATÍS: TOM PENNINGTON. ALL: GE T T Y IMAGES (5). FAUCI: KEVIN DIE TSCH/GE T T Y IMAGES.

The precipitating events were bad; the possible lingering effects could be good. As labs around the world pursue a vaccine, scientists expect to stumble upon other related health advances. This sort of rapid research and development could yield extremely beneficial knock-on effects. And if we’re ever going to combat other civilizationthreatening forces (in health or in climate), it’s going to take some global competition—and willing collaboration—in science, medicine, and engineering to land on those solutions too.

1. NAOMI OSAKA

4. FERNANDO TATÍS JR.

Tennis | 23 years old

Baseball | 21 years old

Emerged as a leading voice in BLM athlete activism and immediately reasserted herself as the game’s top player and most bankable star when she won the U.S. Open, her third major, at the end of the summer.

The breakout star of baseball’s shortened season. Power. Speed. And ceaseless swagger. “El Niño” led this fresh iteration (a.k.a. “Slam Diego”) of the typically lowly Padres deeper into the playoffs than they’ve been in 14 years.

2. BRYSON D E CHAMBEAU Golf | 27 years old Completed an overhaul of his body and game during quarantine to burst out onto the other side as the longest hitter in the history of the pro sport. While many raised an eyebrow at the quirky golfer’s gains in mass, his single-minded pursuit of length and speed paid immediate dividends with his first major victory, in September at the U.S. Open.

3. PATRICK MAHOMES Football | 25 years old Began the coronavirus lockdown as a reigning Super Bowl champion and the Super Bowl MVP; returned with an unequivocal claim to the mantle of the game’s most exciting player in years.

5. CHRISTIAN PULISIC Soccer | 22 years old Limped into quarantine fighting injury and searching for a place in Chelsea’s starting 11. Emerged from quarantine with one of the best restart performances in all of the Premier League. And ends 2020 wearing Chelsea’s No. 10—the leading light of a new generation of American under-25s impacting top European teams like no collection of players from the U.S. ever has before.

We Started to Change Our Minds About What Matters Most The lasting legacy of 2020, if we’re fortunate, may be the enduring shift in perspective that transpired during the shutdown. For the first time in living memory, our collective anxieties were about the same thing: life and death. About being careful of one another—of our loved ones and our neighbors. For so many, it was a year spent reconceiving what is actually important and what isn’t—a moment when a lot of people maybe realized that life’s too short for the horseshit. Amen for pandemic-induced YOLOing. Here’s hoping it has rewired us for a better future. M O T Y

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MOTY 2020 Icon of the Year

neck surgery this morning, and they gave him fentanyl. “I’m out of it now,” he says, not seeming out of it at all. Clooney shows me the neck brace they sent him home with. It’s the typical big white priest’s collar thing, which he has decided not to wear, except when he needs some sympathy. Then he’ll reach for the brace and put it on and grin like George Clooney. The neck surgery was relatively minor, for a disk problem, but when the doctors got in there, they found all kinds of other stu≠ too. “It looks like arthritis, unfortunately,” Clooney says cheerfully. “Which: Hey, isn’t it nice getting older?” The disk problem was the result of a 2018 motorcycle accident Clooney had in Italy, or maybe it started before then. An interesting and perhaps surprising fact about Clooney, who projects comfort and ease like a lighthouse projects light, is that he’s actually been in a significant amount of daily discomfort for the past 15 years. While he was shooting a scene in 2005’s Syriana, someone kicked over the chair Clooney was sitting in, and he tore his dura mater, which is the wrap around the spine that holds in the spinal fluid. The spinal fluid was leaking out of his nose. Clooney has said before that he was in so much pain he contemplated suicide. He spent “three or four months really laying into painkillers,” he told me. Then he went to a pain guy. The pain guy told him that the thing about pain is that it’s just the body registering a departure from what it regards as “normal.” If you can train yourself to think of pain as normal, then the pain will cease to exist. “Basically,” Clooney says, “the idea is, you try to reset your pain threshold. Because a lot of times what happens with pain is you’re constantly mourning for how it used to feel.” But Clooney is not the mourning type, and he’d sooner leak spinal fluid from his nose again than be maudlin or boring, so he tells this story about excruciating pain and the way he mindfucked himself out of it with a wry grin and a good deal of self-mockery, as he does most sad stories. GEORGE CLOONEY HAD

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Clooney says it felt like “euphoria” when his brain ﬁnally tricked itself into feeling normal again. Then, a year and a half ago, while riding 75 miles an hour on his motorcycle to the set of Catch-22 in Sardinia, he hit a car. “He literally turned directly in front of me,” Clooney says. There is CCTV footage of the accident, and you can watch if you want. Clooney has. “I launched. I go head over heels. But I landed on my hands and knees. If you did it 100 times, maybe once you land on your hands and knees, and any other version you land, you’re toast. It knocked me out of my shoes.” Literally. He lost his shoes. He also crushed the guy’s windshield with his helmet. “When I hit the ground,” Clooney says, “my mouth—I thought all my teeth were broken out. But it was glass from the windshield.” He also knew, just from years of riding motorcycles, that any injury that involves ramming your neck into someone else’s car generally results in paralysis, so he lay there “waiting for the switch to turn o≠.” But it didn’t turn o≠. He was more or less ﬁne, aside from whatever he did to his neck and his knees when he landed. I ask if he was in the air long enough to have had a profound thought before he came back down. “You know, not really,” he says. “Although my kids were like a year old, and mostly it was just the thought that this was it and that I wasn’t gonna see them again.” He says his wife, Amal, has since forbidden him to ride again, which he has accepted. “But I will remember, there is one moment.…” Clooney wasn’t alone that day. He was riding with his longtime friend and producing partner, Grant Heslov,

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and after Clooney landed on the pavement, Clooney says, “I was on the ground. I was really screaming. Like, really screaming. And Grant came back, and he was screaming at everybody to get an ambulance, and I remember everybody got out of their cars, they stopped in the middle of the street, and all these people came and stood over me and just pulled out their phones and started taking video.” At first, Heslov says, he thought Clooney was dead. “While we’re waiting for the ambulance, I’m literally holding his head in my lap, saying, ‘It’s okay, it’s going to be fine,’ ” Heslov tells me. “Meanwhile there are people taking pictures.” And here even Clooney gets somber for a second. “It’s a funny thing. I’m not a cynical guy, and I really tend to look at life and try to find the good in everything. But I’ll never forget the moment that what I thought might be my last few moments was for everyone else a piece of entertainment.” Actually, Clooney says, he remembers one other thing about this day. It’s what they were saying while they were pointing their phones at his bloody, wrecked body. He holds out his hands, summons up an exaggerated Chef Boyardee accent, and delivers the punch line that wipes away whatever sadness you might feel. “They were like: A-George Clooney!” H E ’ S I N T H E L I V I N G R O O M of his house, the same three-bedroom house, situated on five acres, that he bought for $600,000 in 1995. Though I live just a few miles away, Clooney is keeping his distance. His son,

Alexander, has asthma; Clooney is 59. There are enough risk factors on and o≠ the property that Clooney hasn’t left it much this year. He has been editing his newest ﬁlm, The Midnight Sky, from here, and doing everything else too. “I cut my own hair and I cut my kids’ hair and I’m mopping it and vacuuming and doing the laundry and doing the dishes every day,” he says. “I feel like my mother in 1964. You know, I understand why she burned her bra.” But mostly he’s happy—he’s got a group text he calls a “chat line” that is busy 24 hours a day with his buddies checking in on one another, and he’s got his family. “It kills me that I can’t go see Bruce Springsteen in concert,” he says. “It kills me that I can’t go see Bono, can’t go see U2 in concert right now. But…you know, there’s a lot worse things in the world. People are dealing with a lot bigger problems.” His beard is rugged and snowy. His quarantine cut is the full Julius Caesar. His eyes, noble and recessed, look like something that should be on the side of a coin. He jokes about being old and looking older, but this itself is an old joke. Most of his best parts—going back to 1998’s Out of Sight—have involved playing guys 10 years older than he is. He’s tried it the other way—he and Paul Newman were once going to do The Notebook together, with Clooney in the part that eventually went to Ryan Gosling, playing the younger version of Newman—but it never works. Clooney can’t even play the younger version of himself. For The Midnight Sky, which he produces, directs, and stars in, he had to cast Ethan Peck, the grandson of Gregory, to play his character as a younger man. “We have similar eyebrows,” Clooney says, arching his. He is in his living room because what used to be his combination bar and o∞ce is now a nursery for his twins. “It breaks a man down,” Clooney says, not looking

at all broken down. “I sneak a bottle of tequila inside a couple of stu≠ed bears, just so I can go hang in the room every once in a while.” He does interviews and most other socializing—FaceTime dinners with his buddies, with candles and a glass of wine next to the laptop—right out in the open these days like the rest of us, slumped in a chair in a black T-shirt as his wife and children wander past and occasionally join in. “Do you have kids?” he asks. Not yet, I say. But we do have an open-ﬂoor-plan house. “So you guys are right on top of each other,” he says sympathetically. Yes, I say. We really are. “Yeah, my wife is literally— Like, today she’s in the middle of sort of standing up against the British government, you know, deciding that they’re gonna break international law. So she had to retire as the envoy, and she’s in there doing that,” Clooney says, gesturing somewhere I can’t see. “And I’m in here doing this interview.” He says this not to boast. He is just evidently proud: Amal Clooney has only hours before submitted a letter to the U.K.’s foreign secretary, resigning her post as the U.K.’s special envoy on media freedom in protest of Boris Johnson’s intention, as part of the Brexit deal, to pass a bill that would violate international law and breach British treaty obligations. It’s all over the news. In The Midnight Sky, Clooney plays a ravaged, lonely scientist who believes himself to be the last surviving man on the planet until he locates a returning spaceship, full of living astronauts, bound for Earth. “Gravity meets The Revenant,” he calls it. Clooney gives a performance, in its stillness and sadness, that has echoes of characters he has played in The American and Syriana and even Michael Clayton—men sunk deep inside themselves and

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their past sins. The film is about regret, but it’s also about the possibility of redemption; its stubborn optimism is what makes it a George Clooney movie. “I thought it was a very hopeful film,” he says about why he took it on. “I thought it was a film that said, ‘Although we may not get out of it alive, we might get out of it intact somehow.’ And I liked the idea of that.” Felicity Jones, who stars opposite Clooney in The Midnight Sky, says she thought the search for meaning at the end of things had extra resonance for him, especially as the world began to fall apart this year. “We’re all asking ourselves in this situation, ‘What is the point of our lives?’” Jones says. “I think for George, the fact that it taps into broader existential and philosophical issues was a pro.” The Midnight Sky is also a reminder that Clooney, who has had one of the great acting careers in modern Hollywood, rarely actually appears onscreen anymore. Since 2014, he has taken on only a handful of roles, choosing instead to focus on directing. When he has acted, it’s mostly been in his own stu≠—2014’s The Monuments Men, last year’s television series Catch-22—because the presence of George Clooney in a project still goes a long way toward getting it made. His reasons for stepping back from most other acting jobs are complex and surprising, and in time we’ll discuss them in detail. But at least one of those reasons is very simple, and that reason is that he feels great a≠ection for his wife of six years and would generally rather spend time with her than do anything else. “I literally have never seen him happier,” Heslov, who has known Clooney since the ’80s, tells me. Clooney will tell you about Amal unprompted and then return to the subject again without ever having been asked. “I was like, ‘I’m never getting married. I’m not gonna have kids,’ ” he says. Clooney, whose 1993 divorce and subsequent bachelor years were objects of great and enduring tabloid fascination, says he was content with his life—more than content, even. Work was enough; it was more than enough. He’d decided: “I’m gonna work, I’ve got great friends, my life is full, I’m doing well. And I didn’t know how un-full it was until I met Amal. And then everything changed. And I was like, ‘Oh, actually, this has been a huge empty space.’ ” Marriage changed him in the simplest way, he says, “because I’d never been in the position where someone else’s life was infinitely more important to me than my own. You know? And then tack on two more individuals, who are small and have to be fed.…”

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“I feel like over the last, you know, 10 or 15 years or so, I got to the point where I was like, ‘I can’t sit around and try to prove to people what I can do as an actor.’ I’m much more comfortable in my own skin.” 6 6

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And here, in fact, comes one of them now, bombing into the frame. Clooney’s whole face lights up. “Oh, hey! Here’s Alexander. Here’s my son. Come here! Say hi! Say hello! Say ‘Hi, Zach!’ ” Alexander has a mop of brown hair and chaotic teeth and looks like the son of George and Amal Clooney. Clooney gathers his son in his lap, and for a while he forgets about me and just talks to his boy. “You’ve got chocolate on your face. Do you know that? What is that? Did you have chocolate?” “Yeah.” “Yeah? You did? Hey, Alexander? Let’s see. How old are you now—15?” “No.” “How old are ya?” “Three. Because I got my birthday.” “Yeah, you had your birthday! And do you speak fluent Italian?” “Yeah!” “Say something in Italian. Let’s hear you say something in Italian. Say ‘It’s very hot today’ in Italian.” “Molto caldo,” Alexander says. “Molto caldo!” Clooney repeats proudly. conversation, has a way of making asides that prompt you to sit up and blink, like: “Having talked to Snowden,” meaning Edward, or “I talk with Vice President Biden all the time.” He is not bragging. He is describing his life. What you are glimpsing, in these moments, is the halo of a career so improbable, so dependent on luck and timing, that it will likely never be re-created. For instance, another aside: “Once ER hit, and 40 million people a week were watching the show—” I interrupt to note that ER, the television show that first made Clooney a star, began in 1994. And yet, apparently, he still remembers the number of people who watched it, 26 years later. “Well,” he says, “I mean, when you look at numbers now and 14 million is the number one show—it’s hard to explain to people. A 10 p.m. show doing those kinds of numbers was just unheard of. And for me, it changed everything.” Clooney was 33 and had already been acting for a while when ER first aired, but what he would experience next is the kind of fame and recognition that only a handful of people in the history of this country have ever been able to know or understand. He was the interest we all shared. Arguably, he still is: 40 million Americans have rarely come together on anything since, beyond presidents Barack Obama (good friend; they play basketball together) and Donald Trump (bitter enemy; “I have his phone number in my book. He was just a dude that came out to nightclubs in New York and chased chicks. I mean, that’s all he was. He was this guy with bad hair who chased chicks and seemed funny”). Now, at 59, Clooney tends to the myth of himself, built and burnished over the years, and to his actual domestic life, which used to be lived between film sets and plummy talk show appearances and now is what makes him happiest. There are those who retire or otherwise disappear, and those who hang on tighter than they should, past when they should, but there are vanishingly few like Clooney, who is still here, albeit on his own exact terms, giving us something to agree on long beyond the time of us agreeing on anything. (continued on page 121) CLOONEY, IN CASUAL

MOTY 2020 Rapper of the Year

THE

YEAR

THEE

STALLION BY ALLISON P. DAVIS PHOTOGRAPHS BY ADRIENNE RAQUEL STYLED BY ERIC M CNEAL 6 8

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INSIDE THE

EXUBERANT

AND EMPOWERING

RISE

OF MEGAN THEE STALLION— THE IRREVERENT AND

MAGNETIC

RAP SENSATION WHO’S

HERE TO STAY.

dedicated to defending himself, to seizing a narrative, to calling Megan a liar. It may seem jarring to lay all this out at the beginning of the story, to start with a sudden cold plunge into a life-fracturing subject. In a year marked by undeniable success of Megan’s own making—the viral moments and omnipresent bops and joyous social media antics—this lone and shitty incident (that she didn’t create) has loomed persistently. Instead of sinking into the muck of a bad situation, Megan has chosen a way forward— not only by continuing to live her Hot Girl life, but also by transforming the ugliness of it all into an urgent message about how Black women in this country should be treated. She presses her finger to a spot above her left eyelid, as if there’s an emergency O≠ button for her tear ducts hidden somewhere within the socket. She slides lower in her chair, parked on the top floor of the penthouse hotel suite she’s rented for the week. She’s dressed like she’s about to attend a particularly luxurious sleepover party— makeup-free, she’s wearing a cute red Kangol bucket hat and dusty-pink cashmere leisurewear so formfitting it must feel like a constant hug. It isn’t so much the incident itself that’s upsetting her, though to listen to her explain what happened that night in July is tough. In her honeyed alto voice, she delicately tells me how she left a pool party in the Hollywood Hills and jumped into an SUV with the rapper Tory Lanez and two others. She didn’t even put clothes on over her bathing suit. The night was over; she was just going home. Megan often tells herself, “Always trust your first mind”—her way of saying, “Listen to your gut.” That night, her first mind told her to get out of the car and find another way home. She tried exiting the vehicle to call for a di≠erent ride. But her phone died, it was late, she was in a bikini, and everyone was telling her to just get back in, so she did, even though there was an argument brewing.

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Megan doesn’t want to get into the specifics of the dispute—who started it, what it was about—but ultimately it doesn’t matter. As has been reported, when she tried to get out of the car again and walk away, according to Megan, Lanez started shooting at her feet, wounding her. She tells me the rest with disbelief still in her voice. “Like, I never put my hands on nobody,” she says. “I barely even said anything to the man who shot me when I was walking away. We were literally like five minutes away from the house.” After he shot, she says, Lanez begged her not to say anything. She says he o≠ered Megan and her friend money to stay quiet. “[At this point] I’m really scared,” Megan says, “because this is like right in the middle of all the protesting. Police are just killing everybody for no reason, and I’m thinking, ‘I can’t believe you even think I want to take some money. Like, you just shot me.’ ” (A lawyer for Lanez denied that the rapper o≠ered Megan and her friend money.) When the cops arrived, Megan says, she just wanted to avoid trouble—she worried they’d get arrested or end up victims of police brutality if they were found with a weapon. The first thing she said to the responding o∞cers who noticed her bloodied feet was, “I got cut.” Later, in October, Lanez would be charged with felony assault, but in the immediate aftermath, as details and questions dripped into the news and onto social media, the incident became the kind of “He said, she said” that Twitter loves to litigate. Megan confirmed that she had been shot. People accused her of lying. Eventually, in August, she went on Instagram to name Lanez as her assailant. He denied it, creating a controversy that spawned insults, jokes, and memes made at Megan’s expense. Stories were leaked to the press, including screenshots of Lanez’s text apology. Members of Lanez’s team fabricated emails to undermine Megan’s account. Somehow, before the Los Angeles County district attorney had even weighed in, the case had been tried on social media—and improbably Megan had become, to some people, more of a villain than a victim. To her, the comments of critics seemed louder than ones from her supporters. To defend herself, she felt compelled to reveal more than she’d wanted to—she posted a now deleted photo of her feet, with stitches, post-surgery, as proof that she had actually been injured. Finally, she tweeted: “Black women are so unprotected & we hold so many things in to protect the feelings of others w/o considering our own. It might be funny to y’all on the internet and just another messy topic for you to talk about but this is my real life and I’m real life hurt and traumatized.” Megan had discussed all of it—the shooting itself, the social media shitstorm—with relative calm, but it’s recalling her decision to tweet this that kicks up all the emotion she’s struggling now to hold back. The simple feeling that she was out there alone, fighting for herself, and almost nobody took her pain seriously—as well as the realization that the same is endlessly true for other Black women, including the one who raised her. She clears her throat. “When I was growing up, my mom didn’t have any help with me,” Megan says. “Everybody was doing everything that they could do to help. But it was only so much that my grandmother could do. And it was like, there’ll be times that I’m in an apartment with my mama and I know something’s wrong, but I don’t know what it is.” (text continued on page 74)

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“I feel like men think that they own sex, and I feel like it scares them when

She pauses and tugs down on her hat. Megan’s mother, Holly Thomas, died from a brain tumor in March of 2019. They were incredibly close. When she was growing up in Houston, Megan says, her family wasn’t rich, but it was her mom who made her feel not just that she had every-

she wanted, either.

girls learn that early. I did. I do that a lot.” shooting, what surprised Megan most was that even though she had been a victim, she felt an expectation to project strength. “Like damn,” she says, “I have to be tough through all this? All the time? It was like, who really checks on us or who protected us? You just go your whole life with that mentality. And then when something actually happens to you, when you properly should have protected yourself, your first instinct was not to protect yourself, it was protecting other people.… So it was like, ‘What do I do?’ ‘What do I say?’ Like, ‘Is anybody going to believe what I’m saying?’ ” Megan falls silent, giving herself another moment. She starts again carefully. “It was weird,” she says. “I saw something that said, ‘Check on your strong friends.’ And, like, a lot of people, they don’t do that because they think, Oh, this person is just so strong, so I know they got their stu≠ together.… I feel like I have to be strong for everybody, and I don’t want my friends or anybody around me to feel like it’s a pressure on me, ’cause I feel like they all start freaking out.” She says she reached out to her friends and asked, “Why didn’t you call me?” And it helped. “Now they’re like calling me every five minutes,” she says with a laugh and a faux-petulant eye roll that lifts us out of the dark moment and into a lighter one. Megan might have felt to cover the heavy stu≠ so quickly in our conversation was superseded by a need to confront it, to say her piece, and to move on to fully experiencing everything happening in her life. She was in the middle of an almost absurdly wild week, a week during which practically a career’s worth of achievement was condensed into a six-day run. She was on the cover of Time, picked as one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People. She had a new single and music video about to drop. She was preparing for her first solo Saturday Night Live performance in a few days. It was the kind of week that confirms that Megan is at a specific, rarefied point in a young artist’s rise—that moment of rapidly growing fame when the big changes to life are sudden and noticeable. There is more attention, there are more opportunities, more followers, more freebies—fewer friends, though, she notes. All at once, the icons you’d rapped about in unreleased songs are now your collaborators—the people who support you and reach out by phone. (Yes, Beyoncé and Jay-Z call her and give advice. “She’s so calm,” Megan says of Beyoncé. “She ANY RELUCTANCE

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she established herself as Hot Girl Meg—an aspirationally fun, powerfully sexy artist who rapped about the importance of being fun, powerful, and sexy—Megan has made it her mission to inspire a legion of fans, called the hotties, to be as flagrantly confident as she is. Her music is juicy self-help wrapped in wit and buoyed by preternaturally dazzling rap skills. And all of it is paired with a personality that somehow feels simultaneously genuine and like a built-for-Instagram exercise in branding. She’s a cultural powerhouse perfectly pitched for the moment. Even a pandemic couldn’t stop her; if anything it was an accelerant. In March she released the song “Savage,” which got an immediate boost when 19-year-old Keara Wilson created the “Savage” dance challenge, which was taken up by a captive audience, stuck inside during the early days of the lockdowns. “Savage” became a monster hit on TikTok, basically ensuring that by the time Megan dropped the remix with Beyoncé, it was destined to be the biggest track of 2020. This, of course, was before Megan and Cardi B. released “WAP,” a pussy-exalting anthem that now has a historic place in the annals of timeless fuck tracks. “WAP” hit No. 1 on the charts without breaking a sweat, but it also set o≠ a surprisingly loud freak-out amongst pearl-clutching, spirit-of-Tipper-Gore-runs-through-me conservatives. The acronym made the nightly news program my 66-year-old father watches, which led me to receive and ignore an earnest text asking what WAP stood for. Megan laughs recalling those reactions. “I saw somebody…some Republican lady, you know how they be. Some goddamn Republican lady, like, ‘This is a terrible example,’ ” she says, slipping into Republican-lady voice. (Megan is referring to former congressional candidate DeAnna Lorraine, who tweeted: “America needs far more women like Melania Trump and far less like Cardi B”.) “And I was like, ‘Girl, you literally had to go to YouTube or to your Apple Music to go listen to this song in its entirety. How are you in your Republican world even finding your way over here to talk about this? You must not have noooo WAP if you’re mad at this song.’ ” It doesn’t bother or surprise her much, though. “Sometimes people are really not comfortable enough with themselves, and I don’t think they like to watch other people be comfortable with themselves. And I don’t think they want anybody to teach other people how to be comfortable with themselves,” she says both thoughtfully (continued on page 124) and dismissively.

Newsman of the Year

AT A TIME OF IMMENSE

POLITICAL POLARIZATION IN WHICH BOTH SIDES SEEM TO BE SPEAKING IN TONGUES,

BYWESLEYLOWERY PHOTOGRAPHS BY

SHANIQWA JARVIS STYLED BY

MOBOLAJI DAWODU

TREVOR NOAH TO HELP TRANSLATE.

MAYBE THATâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S WHY

WE KEEP TUNING IN.

“Trevor? Is that you?” It’s the last night of September in New York City, and a homeless man is calling out to Trevor Noah. A smiling Noah had just ridden his electric bike through the entrance of a park near the Daily Show studio in Hell’s Kitchen, for a socially distanced conversation with me. Minutes before, a homeless white man had set up a blanket and pillows on a nearby bench. Noah dislodged his kickstand and stepped toward him for a few moments of small talk. As Noah would soon explain, the man has lived for four years on a sidewalk in the area, and the two have developed a bit of a relationship. Noah and his sta≠ have attempted to help the man, but so far he’s refused. “I remember once, when I first got here, I felt guilty. I was like, ‘Hey, man, can we do anything?’ He said, ‘No…I’m fine living the way I live.’ And I thought, Well, this is a very weird experience,” Noah says, adding that he came to realize the man wasn’t as laid-back as he appeared. “He’s homeless, but he’ll say super-racist or sexist shit to my employees, like the women. Sometimes I have to check him. Never says anything to the white guys who are with us. And it’s that weird power dynamic where you go, ‘So wait, let me get this straight: You’re homeless, but in your head, you’re like, Yeah, I’m still white.’ And I’m like, ‘But you’re homeless,’ ” Noah explained. “It’s a really interesting dynamic. In the rules of wokeness, I don’t know how it works. I don’t know what the rules are.” This was all very Trevor Noah. Relentlessly kind—of course he’s friendly with the neighborhood homeless man—and infuriatingly earnest. He’s the sort of guy who asks questions and then actually listens for the answers. A person who is just as analytical about racism as he is outraged by it. Growing up as a biracial child in apartheidera South Africa, he floated among the nation’s racial castes, often serving as a literal translator between countrymen who spoke di≠erent languages. Now he’s positioned himself similarly in America. In a moment of political absolutism and polarization—of good guys and bad guys, of di≠erent partisan realities—Noah stares through the television and tries to coax us toward something approximating common ground. It’s a Barack Obama style of thinking that can feel jarring in a Donald Trump world. And there’s an argument that it’s dangerously naive, that the liberal desire to compromise with and befriend bad-faith actors—to coddle fascists instead of punching them in the face—has a lot to do with our current peril. But I have to admit, in this moment of shared cynicism and despair, it can be refreshing to speak with a self-described optimist like Noah. We’d met up the night after a first presidential debate so disastrous that many were openly calling for the remaining ones to be canceled—and Trump would test positive for COVID-19 later that week. But even now, Noah found hope in the calamity. He had been watching the debate on Fox News, marveling as the hosts admitted—at least briefly, just after the debate ended, before pivoting to spin—that the president’s performance had been rude and unhinged.

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“The debates are one of the few times where all of America is watching the same thing,” Noah remarked. “Realities have become so fractured that the debates are the one moment where we are all coming together. We’re not watching Fox. We’re not watching MSNBC. We’re watching the same thing.” A Y E A R O F C H A O S and confusion, it’s often been Noah’s own show that we’ve all found ourselves watching. While we were struggling to Zoom into meetings back in March, Noah made a seamless transition to shooting The Daily Show in his apartment. As the nation convulsed over the latest viral videos of police killing Black people, Noah looked squarely into his cell phone camera and found what felt like the right words to say about George Floyd. If 2020 was a year that most Americans would like to forget, Noah’s work is one thing we’ll remember about it. “For me, this has been one of the most liberating years mentally and emotionally, because it freed me from a lot of the paradigms and anchors that I had created for myself,” Noah told me. “For me, the coronavirus, if you look at it objectively, has stripped away a lot of the bullshit.” The first thing stripped away was the format of the show itself. The Daily Show faced the same conundrum as most o∞ces: Do we treat the coronavirus as a temporary aberration? Or as a new reality? The show quickly chose the latter, pivoting to The Daily Social Distancing Show, on which Noah and the correspondents filed nightly dispatches from their apartments. At first, the segments were being posted directly to YouTube. But before long, they were airing in place of the studio broadcast. Gone were the tightly tailored news-anchor suits. Noah grew his hair out into an Afro and began wearing hoodies on air. He felt free to be more experimental. “The first part of the show was trying to just provide a moment of respite,” Noah told me. “The second thing I’m trying to do is keep myself and my audience informed of what is happening so that you don’t have to live on social media, so that you don’t have to do 24 hours of cable news, so that you don’t have to watch people fighting the whole time.” At a time when CNN repeatedly used a key primetime slot for the governor of New York to be playfully interviewed by his younger brother, Noah persuaded Dr. Anthony Fauci to do one of his first in-depth interviews anywhere. When the nation’s attention again turned to police killings of Black Americans, Noah—one of the few Black television hosts currently on American airwaves— turned directly to the camera, delivering monologues that would be viewed millions of times online. After the killing of George Floyd on Memorial Day, Noah uploaded an 18-minute cell phone video to YouTube in which he walked through the series of events that had sparked national outrage and pain: Amy Cooper calling the police on a bird-watching Black man in Central Park, the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery as he jogged in Georgia, and now a Minneapolis police o∞cer kneeling on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes. “I don’t know what made that video more painful for people to watch. The fact that man was having his life taken in front of our eyes? The fact that we were watching someone be murdered by someone whose job is to protect and serve? Or the (text continued on page 82) IN

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fact that he seemed so calm doing it, you know?” pondered Noah, his face unshaven and his hair ungroomed. “One ray of sunshine for me in that moment was seeing how many people instantly condemned what they saw. And maybe it’s because I’m an optimistic person, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like that, especially not in America.” In August he was back again, now further enraged by the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. “People don’t want to be marching through the streets, clashing with police, getting tear-gassed, getting beaten, getting arrested. They would much rather be living their lives,” Noah declared after the announcement that only one of the three o∞cers involved in Breonna Taylor’s death would face criminal charges. “But they protest because other people can’t live their lives.” The at-home version of the show worked so well that Comedy Central executives expanded it from half an hour to 45 minutes in April. “In a way, we can be a little bit more personal, we can speak a little more honestly,” notes correspondent Desi Lydic. “And Trevor is completely unafraid to have an honest conversation.” As a global pandemic and the legacy of American racism dominated newscasts, Noah seemed almost predestined for the moment, as correspondent Ronny Chieng put it, “like a cyborg constructed for the times.”

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This was not always the case. Noah got o≠ to a rough start when it was announced in 2015 that he would become host and controversy erupted around old tweets that many deemed sexist, and the show lost nearly 700,000 viewers a night, compared with Jon Stewart’s ﬁnal year. Back then, “goal number one was to survive,” remembers David Kibuuka, Noah’s longtime friend, Daily Show colleague, and roommate at the time. Noah obsessed over critiques of his accent and pronunciation (“Sometimes I’ll just sit by myself and say, Con-tro-versy? Con-tra-versy? Add-id-das? A-di-das?”) and nasty tweets, prompting his friend and Daily Show writer Joseph Opio to scold him. “He said, ‘Basically [you’re] complaining that birds are shitting on your Ferrari,’ ” Noah recalled, “ ‘but you’ve got a Ferrari!’ ” On the park bench, as we sit beneath a billboard that features a building-size picture of his smiling face, it’s clear that Noah has let go of those insecurities. The ratings eventually rebounded as the show expanded its online reach, he settled into the job, and he was no longer the Black kid permanently guest-hosting for Stewart. Also, it doesn’t hurt that Donald Trump is a better foil than Barack Obama. Five years after he was given one of the most powerful platforms in America, Noah is not just here to stay—as this year has underscored, he’s at the center of the conversation.

been a source of social and political commentary, “particularly at times of social turbulence,” according to Caty Borum Chattoo, an American University researcher who studies the impact of comedy on social change. For the bulk of the Bush and Obama years, Jon Stewart’s scathing critiques of politics and the media transformed The Daily Show into appointment viewing. Yet while Stewart openly bristled at the suggestion he was a newsman, famously sniping at Tucker Carlson that “the show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls,” his Daily Show progeny have been at the forefront of a generation that often veers eagerly into a sort of activist journalism with a comedic streak. John Oliver’s weekly segments make explicit public policy arguments. Samantha Bee and Hasan Minhaj are best understood as newspaper columnists in stand-upcomic form. Jordan Klepper and Michelle Wolf deploy open mockery to say the things the establishment media are too polite or professionally compromised to say themselves. And then there’s Noah, who has always talked more about his Daily Show as a global newscast than as a comedy series. “I grew up in a world where we would watch the news,” he says. “They would tell us about an earthquake. Then they would tell us about something happening in Burundi. Then they would tell us about something in South Africa. Then they would tell us about something in America. And that would be the news,” he added. “And I still love that for the show.” Noah thinks that most political media presents news as a game in which conflict draws eyeballs, incentivizing networks to focus on nursing those conflicts. “My instinct as a person has always been to try to translate what people are saying to each other,” he told me. “What I’m trying to do on the show is say, ‘Look, man. I don’t have 24 hours. So I don’t profit from keeping you here for 24 hours.’ ” As a result, Noah’s segments often serve as vital news reports. In late October, as thousands took to the streets of Nigeria COMEDY HAS ALWAYS

to protest an abusive police force, Noah’s nine-minute piece on the demonstrations was as informative as anything that appeared on cable news networks. Like Stewart, Noah hosts political figures and celebrities, but his interview choices have also included a who’s who of Black writers and thinkers, from Eve Ewing to Mychal Denzel Smith to Nikole Hannah-Jones to Tressie McMillan Cottom. When I appeared on the show in 2016 to discuss my book about the Black Lives Matter movement, Noah had both read and highlighted it. “What I’ve learned in America is people don’t like the complexity and the messiness of nuance,” Noah told me. “What I’m doing on the show is I’m just gonna speak my truth and appeal to fellow human beings and say, ‘Yo, man. A lot of things that we’re gonna deal with in the world are messy and complicated.’ ” One of his first ventures into that messiness occurred in late 2016, when Noah invited Tomi Lahren, the conservative media personality then known for viral videos in which she scornfully screamed right-wing talking points, to appear on the show. It was one of the few times in the Trump era that two media figures on diametrically opposed sides of the culture war sat for an extended conversation on television, as opposed to trading shouty sound bites. For Noah, who told me he’d grown up admiring the way Nelson Mandela, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin would eagerly debate their ideological enemies, it was all part of the work of translation. As I watched the segment again four years later, I found it to be a revealing, if frustrating, exchange. Noah asked Lahren for factual explanations of her most incendiary statements—that Black Lives Matter was “the new KKK,” for instance—and she responded, in most cases, with more talking points. After the segment aired, Lahren was inundated with death and rape threats. Noah was furious and invited Lahren and her producer to get together for a drink with him and his producer. “I thought to myself, Maybe we can have a further discussion about things like the intersection of misogyny and sexism,” he says. Instead, a photo from the meeting— with the producers cropped out—went viral. Online commenters alleged that Noah had Lahren on the show only so he could take her on a date. “The thing with Tomi Lahren taught me that a lot of the time, things may not be what they seem,” Noah said of the breathless coverage of their meeting, “and that changed my perspective on a lot of things.” For the next few minutes, he lamented that journalists, whether they’re covering the White House or police departments,

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too often parrot what those in power tell them. News outlets are so eager to move quickly on a viral story that they don’t stop to get the facts right. These currents opened the door for Donald Trump’s attacks on “fake news,” Noah said. Trump’s broadsides were overblown and politicized, but they also spoke to a real failing of the press. Noah’s analysis felt astute, admittedly in part because it echoed arguments I’ve made myself. “There is a problem in America where the media isn’t held accountable to anything,” Noah told me. “I’m saying this broadly, obviously, but I come from a world where if you write a false story, your retraction should be in the same place [as the error]. So if you had a front-page fuckup, you should have a front-page retraction.” It did not surprise me that Noah was so a≠ected by the Lahren controversy: There are few things that bother the earnest more than the perception that they’ve been treated inequitably. Noah urges his Daily Show sta≠ to be fair to the politicians they cover, even as they mock them; of course he couldn’t stand the thought of his words or actions being knowingly mischaracterized. Such moments were the only times any of Noah’s friends and coworkers could recall him losing his cool. Once, in Johannesburg, he’d calmly negotiated with a mugger who was attempting to rob his friend. “ ‘Hey, Dave,’ ” the friend recalled Noah instructing nonchalantly, “ ‘give this guy some money.’ ” But when he felt his years-old tweets were taken out of context after he got The Daily Show job, Noah was beside himself. He hasn’t invited anyone as polarizing as Lahren on the show since, but he does continue to debate conservatives via private messages on Twitter. “It’s really interesting how much more conversation you can have with people when the peanut gallery isn’t watching,” Noah told me. “When no one’s goading you on.” Yet even Noah admits that there are limitations to his style of discussion. As it turns out, it’s impossible, even irresponsible, to have polite conversations with tikitorch-wielding neo-Nazis. It’s hard to have a high-minded dialogue about reopening the economy with people who insist the pandemic is a hoax. “For many countries around the world, I think the idea has been ‘This thing is real, but how do we deal with it?’ In America, from the get-go, it was “Either it’s bullshit or it’s very real,” Noah said. “Wait, what? It’s been very interesting to live through this in America.… The fact that we can’t even agree that there is a problem is very strange.” Noah added, “Here’s the perfect example. Herman Cain’s Twitter account is still tweeting about the coronavirus being a hoax and being blown out of proportion. Herman Cain’s Twitter account. Herman Cain is no longer with us as a human being because of the coronavirus.”

the Daily Show anchor chair ﬁve years ago, the narrative in America was that he’d been plucked from obscurity. In fact he was a massively successful international comedian living semi-retired in Cape Town. Once, he was in the same South African airport terminal as a young Justin Bieber. The throng of teenagers rushed right past Bieber and mobbed Noah. His origin story is out of a movie: He stumbled into stand-up after a cousin’s dare and quickly became the most famous man in South Africa. Before long he was touring internationally, and after becoming a global star, he self-ﬁnanced a two-year American tour playing small-town gigs. Noah (continued on page 123) WHEN NOAH TOOK

CELEBRATING THE HEROES AND HIGH POINTS OF THE WEIRDEST YEAR IN FASHION HISTORY.

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the inefficacy of historical precedents as a guide for the oppression of Black people and wrote, “America is not our country, Instagram is not our platform.” Soon after, he posted an infographic with his biographical data points and wrote, “THIS IS NOT A CORPORATE ANNOUNCEMENT OF VALUES—THIS IS AN ANNOUNCEMENT THAT: THE BAG IS BACK.” He found brands’ businessoriented responses to Floyd’s death and the ensuing protests unnerving. “I live this, you know?” he says. “Like, I need to list my business values and where I stand? You see me, you see what I do and what I’ve done.” His customers have always known that his products stand for style, individuality, and nonconformity. “Everything in my actions, how I live, is to actually be free and do what I like,” he says. Long before this summer, Clemens was the most talkedabout designer in America, and for good reason. Having

presented his collections in New York since 2004—where he was beloved by the downtown scene but overlooked by the fashion establishment—he took his show to Paris last fall and was then Pitti Uomo’s guest designer in January, showing a collection of “romanticized” baggy jeans and armor-like puffers. Later that month, he announced a major collaboration with the Gap—a surprise given Clemens’s penchant for unorthodox partnerships with brands like White Castle and Budweiser. (“The further away it was from fashion, the more successful it was for us,” he says.) Then the pandemic hit and the collab was canceled. “Old worlds,” he says, waving a hand. Will he ever share the scrapped designs? “People have the sweatshirt. I want one. I don’t have one, so somebody Grail me one.” The affront only fueled consumer lust for the Telfar brand—particularly the Shopping bag, the cult item he debuted in 2014 that’s been dubbed the Bushwick Birkin for its delicious collision of status and affordability (it runs from $150 to $257). That a bag at that cost became a status symbol is a testament to Clemens’s masterful grasp of fashion seduction, an act most designers can pull off only with the help of thousanddollar price tags. It became the summer’s must-have accessory and a social media phenomenon, trending on Twitter and spawning countless memes during its semiweekly restock. The internet practically imploded in August when a preorder sale was announced, allowing anyone and everyone to “secure the bag.” It didn’t hurt that Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents Clemens’s district in Queens, rolled up to the Capitol carrying an oxblood Telfar tote. “She sent me the cutest note,” he says. Seeing one of the most visible politicians in the country support his work makes him feel hopeful. “It’s adding a lot more meaning to what I do.” Bags were selling out rapidly, Clemens says. “Stores will order like 200 bags, and that’s supposed to be a big thing. We were selling more than that in seconds.” The craze sparked

the deal is.”

want to do.”

CLEMENS: GROOMING, L ATISHA CHONG.

the store, and then you came home, and then you went with your friend to eat something, and then you went to a club, and then you had sex,” he says. “That’s the story.” Fashion has long been about big brands with crazy money promoting luxurious, exclusionary whiteness—all while relying on Black and brown creative talent and consumers to prop up that dream, to make it interesting, to keep it hot. Telfar is the rare brand that designs not for the spectators but for those who star in the fantasy. Telfar has always been about it: the brand for those who grew up worshipping fashion but rarely saw themselves in the magazine imagery they pored over. When the world erupted in protests this summer after police murdered George Floyd, most brands took to Instagram to perform the awkward task of pretending they’d always cared about Black lives. Clemens, meanwhile, posted a video of James Baldwin speaking about

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JAC O B S : M A K E U P, A N D R E W C O LV I N ; H A I R A N D C R E AT I V E , J U L I O E S PA DA . M A S KS , L AB E O U F : THE MEGA AGENCY; ELORDI AND GERBER: RICHARD HARBUS/GETTY IMAGES; JAMES: GARRETT ELLWOOD/GETTY IMAGES; OSAKA: AL BELLO/GETTY IMAGES; BIEBER AND HADID: GETTY IMAGES.

coat scarf gloves Marc Jacobs turtleneck John Smedley pearls Mikimoto cuff HermĂ¨s ring Solange AzaguryPartridge

SB launched, but delirium for the shoes has had a banner year in 2020. The manic energy kicked off in February with a plaid-and-paisley Travis Scott collaboration, ran through spring and summer with the Chunky Dunky and a fuzzy Grateful Dead â&#x20AC;&#x153;Jerry Bearâ&#x20AC;? version, and even seeped into

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the Swoosh mainline through a crystal-covered, discoready Dunk from Cactus Plant Flea Market in November. Strange times call for strange sneakers, and in these absolutely strangest of times, the Nike Dunk has been a welcome, kooky beacon of light in the darkness.

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STORE OF THE YEAR

meant to be a year of refocusing for Union. Starting in 2009, owner Chris Gibbs had built the store in Los Angeles into a place where you could ﬁnd delicate shirts from Bode hanging next to aggro tees from Brain Dead. But as the 2010s drew to a close, things were a little o≠. Finances were tight, and the brand mix was out of whack. “We had kind of fallen in love with the bright shiny new toy, which was high fashion,” Gibbs explains. “We hadn’t visited a room in our house in a while, which is this place for up-and-coming designers, THIS

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particularly Black and brown designers.” The dials needed adjusting. So when the pandemic hit in March and the protest movement rolled down Union’s block of La Brea in late May, Gibbs and his wife, Beth, saw their opening. They scaled back on mainstream fashion labels while stocking up on upstarts like Brownstone and Nicholas Daley. They found a Blackowned company to handle their in-house label’s screen-printing needs. And then they turned the release of their sure-to-be-a-hit Air Jordan 4 collaboration into a testing ground, booting up an initiative—called Spread Love—that included local Blackowned businesses in the marketing and cut them in on the sales for the sneaker. The program isn’t a half-hearted BandAid—it’s meant to be a rethinking of

the relationship between store, customer, and community. In a year when shopping was both imperative (support small businesses!) and more than a little futile (do I really need new clothes?), Union stood tall. All of the things a store needs to do in 2020—balance mainstay brands with new discoveries, foster a community, push out the occasional white-hot sneaker collab—are things Union’s been doing for years. Business hasn’t been easy, but it just might wind up being the way forward. Gibbs says that “2020 forced us to do things that we were already trying to do. It got uncomfortable, but change is uncomfortable. In a weird way 2020 has given us a lot of opportunity for growth. And not just growth ﬁnancially. I mean that more, I don’t know, metaphysically.” —SAM SCHUBE

the most gamechanging idea throughout fashion—and the world, really— was caring for others. The notion has clear business implications. “You can’t grow a market if you’re talking to yourself,” explains Samuel Ross, founder and creative director of the London-based label A-Cold-Wall. “You need to have a model that is scalable, and empathy and good intention are definitely a scalable model.” He laughs at the obviousness of it all, but in 2020 he put his money where his mouth is by contributing directly to Black-owned businesses in the form of 10 grants worth 2,500 British pounds (roughly $3,200) each. “Helping people and lifting up your brother as

IN 2020,

NIKE: PROP STYLING, MEGAN KIANTOS. A-COLD-WALL: COURTESY OF A-COLD-WALL.

BIG HEART OF THE YEAR

P H O T O G R A P H

a guide is super important,” Ross says. It was a prompt and unprecedented response from a small, independent designer in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic and new civil rights movement. Within just 72 hours of announcing his program in June, he reviewed 2,000-plus submissions and selected recipients. The relatively small size of his company makes this kind of swift action possible— it’s also what makes Ross’s initiative even more remarkable, especially in the middle of a global health crisis that has ravaged many fashion businesses just like his. For too long fashion thrived on exclusivity. Now, with leaders like Ross, is a time to focus on community. — C A M W O L F

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accustomed to, the Pledge o≠ers a gloriously simple path forward—one that can be interpreted in many di≠erent ways for all types of businesses. For Sephora and West Elm, the Pledge ensures that at least 15 percent of the brands stocked are Black-owned. For publications like Vogue, the Pledge will guarantee that at least 15 percent of freelance commissions are made to Black creatives. And with Yelp, James is helping to amass a database of Black-owned businesses and is working with the platform’s marketing team to create tools to increase visibility. She says she intends for the nonprofit that she’s created to act as a long-term collaborator, assisting the businesses that commit to the Pledge. “We actually work with every single company that takes the Pledge,” James stresses, noting that many of the entities that sign up are on a five-year contract. “We make recommendations of Black-owned businesses that we’ve been in contact with that we think might be a really good fit. We talk to them about best-practices onboarding. In some cases we work on marketing strategies with these companies so that they can understand how they can let their existing customer base know about a new Black brand, but also connect companies to consumers that maybe they haven’t had access to traditionally.” For the businesses committed to transforming noble intention into actual change, James wants to be a lasting partner. Some companies, she explains, “just want to make a donation and move on. The reality is, we need a lot more than a one-time donation. Black people in this country are worth ongoing, meaningful, large-scale impact and support.” As James moves into 2021, she is writing a memoir, continuing to develop the Pledge, and designing at Brother Vellies. With so much ahead of her, her most radical act of change might be to stay small, humble, and independent. “Success to me has nothing to do with what Brother Vellies’s gross revenue is, and truly it never has been,” James says. “I could live in a bigger house, but am I going to be more free?”

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JAMES: HAIR, MICHAEL DAVID; MAKEUP, YACINE DIALLO AT BRIDGE USING CHANEL . JAY-Z: THE IMAGE DIRECT.

BY STEFF YOTKA

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BREAKTHROUGH DESIGNER OF THE YEAR

slumped on the porch behind his studio in San Francisco, taking in the air “between ash falls.” The sky behind him itself was an Evan Kinori color: gray-brown, powerful-looking. In a few hours he would release his newest collection of clothing—twopocket shirts and wide elasticwaist pants in elusive shades of orange and gray and green; lambswool sweaters; dark, solidly constructed jackets and anoraks—which is something he does only a few times a year, with some guilt and a great amount of effort. But for now he was simply sitting and patiently listening to me as I told him an anticlimactic story of briefly losing, and then finding again, a T-shirt he’d made. I’d lost sleep over something he’d created. Not because it was expensive, or rare, though Kinori’s clothing is fabricated in small enough quantities that it usually does become rare, after a while. I’d lost sleep because I’d developed a deep emotional connection to a piece of fabric stitched together just so, and now that I was talking to the guy who’d made it, I wanted to know: How? Why? Kinori, who is 32, with a chaotic wave of brown hair, creates objects that are “ripe for connectivity,” as he put it. “That idea of a connection between the human, like their spirit, and the garment—that’s kind of the pinnacle to me,” he said. He has been making clothing—more or less the same cut of shirt, jacket, and pants in different fabrics— for five years now, but always with great ambivalence. “Making product is an absurd thing to do,” he said. “The world is well beyond the point of needing products.” Both times, Kinori pronounced the word “product” like it was an ancient curse. But the world has decided it needs Evan Kinori. Even as

EVAN KINORI WAS

COMEBACK BRAND OF THE YEAR

a banger 2020: The California skate brand dropped its second collection with Givenchy creative director Matthew Williams (using Loro Piana fabrics), a sellout collab of upcycled deadstock with the Our Legacy Work Shop, and one of the year’s coolest suits, made with No Vacancy Inn. In between came partnerships with Gramicci, Birkenstock, and Nike—an unbelievable range that speaks to Stüssy’s far-reaching appeal. (It didn’t hurt the brand’s buzz that Shawn Stüssy, who left the company in 1996, created a collection with Dior late last year too.) Oh, and 2020 marks its 40th year in business. None of those projects are intended as part of an anniversary celebration, per se; they’re the fruits of an e≠ort to redirect Stüssy that dates back to 2015. Creative branding director Fraser Avey and CEO David Sinatra realized that while there was so much love for Stüssy, the people who loved it didn’t actually dig the clothes. “We wanted to make good clothing for our friends that they appreciated,” Avey says. Avey, who began as a manager in the Vancouver store 15 years ago, started the Stüssy reinvention by rebooting the Tribe—Stüssy parlance for the crew of people who are both ambassadors and creative collaborators. He brought on No Vacancy Inn’s Tremaine Emory to handle the marketing and art direction (which is now funkier than that of most high-end fashion brands that peddle clothes for 10 times the price) and put Israel Gonzalez and Jayne Goheen in charge of design, making the overall aesthetic crisper and more elevated. The Tribe is now an alchemy of luxury-fashion taste and renegade spirit, counting DJs Benji B and Hank Korsan, Bone Soda cofounder Skinny Macho, and Our Legacy’s Jockum Hallin as members. Suddenly the label we all grew up wearing looks better than ever. The collaborations and marketing concepts are fantastic—but more importantly, the products themselves are once again instant streetwear classics. — R .T. STÜSSY HAS HAD

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he’s done everything possible to keep his brand small and outside the greater fashion establishment, his clothes sell swiftly, in carefully selected stores all over the world. Very few young American designers have had his kind of success; even fewer have been able to succeed while keeping their operations as intimate and human as Kinori does. It is exactly what we might want from our clothes, and the people who make them, in this cursed year of 2020: something that builds an actual connection between one person and another. To wear Evan Kinori is less to consume than to participate. He hand-numbers his clothing, which is partially meant as a “fuck-you to big companies that can’t do it,” he explained, and partially because doing so “speaks to the humanity, speaks to the scale, speaks to the specialness, speaks to the provenance” of the clothes. “The point is to say: Slow the fuck down,” Kinori explained. “Look at this number. What does it tell you about your other clothes?” He wants you to think enough about what he makes, he said, that you might care enough not to replace it every six months—or worse, to lose it, as I almost did. The idea is: A human made this. There are not infinite versions of it. Be mindful of the thing, and the thing will be mindful of you. It is product, if we must use that word, to be bought like you might buy a couch, or a table, or even a house—something you intend to have around for a while. Choose wisely and you might never have to choose again. “And people constantly ask,” Kinori said, “ ‘Any new shapes?’ ‘Any new styles?’ ‘When’s the new stuff?’ It makes me want to just make the same white shirt for the next 20 years.” He laughed. “Just cool out, you know? Everybody’s gotta fucking chill out.”

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STÜSSY: COURTESY OF STÜSSY (3).

BY ZACH BARON

MOTY 2020

HOW DOES IT FEEL WHEN THE L AT E S T V I C T I M O F P O L I C E B R U TA L I T Y I S YO U R O W N S O N ?

W E A S K E D T H E FAT H E R S A N D FAT H E R F I G U R E S O F M I C H A E L B R OW N , T E R E N C E C R U T C H E R , DA N I E L P R U D E , R AYS H A R D B R O O K S , G E O R G E F L OY D , A N D JAC O B B L A K E T O R E F L E C T O N T H E V I O L E N C E T H AT F O R E V E R A LT E R E D T H E I R FA M I L I E S ’ L I V E S — A N D W H AT I T M E A N S T O R A I S E A B L AC K M A N I N A M E R I C A .

BY M O S I S E C R E T P H O T O G R A P H S BY AW O L E R I Z K U S T Y L E D BY M O B O L A J I DAW O D U

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SELWYN JONES Uncle of George Floyd

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since a Minneapolis police o∞cer killed George Perry Floyd Jr., and already the subsequent storm of fury and hope that spawned so many anti-racist dreams seems to have lost its charge. A recent Pew survey points to a decrease in support for the Black Lives Matter movement among all racial groups except Black people since June, a reflection of the American, and perhaps human, tendency to return to life as normal, even if today’s normal is very weird. One hopes, at least, that a new awareness has been brought to daily life. For a dedicated few, though, Floyd and the other Black people killed and wounded by police will forever remain front of mind—for those activists and civil rights lawyers and family members with a heroic, if sometimes tragic, resolve. Notable among the steadfast are the men who raised the injured and slain, who tend to be Black and are themselves more likely to have been battered by the forces that undid their kin. It is not possible for them to quit imagining a more just future for the United States. Yet as the movement lulls, they are an easy group to overlook. One could be forgiven, for example, for thinking that no man helped raise George Floyd. Postmortem profiles in the press took us back to Floyd’s youth in the public-housing projects of Houston’s Third Ward, where his single mother, Larcenia Floyd, did her level best to help raise him and his siblings. Some accounts, searching even deeper for the causes of Floyd’s demise, went further back, to his family’s roots in the sharecropping South, where his mother grew up as one of 14 children in a small house in the tobacco fields of eastern North Carolina. There was a way in which Floyd’s story seemed to adhere to a very old myth, hardly questioned now, of the fatherless and thus doomed Black child. That Floyd in his final moments on earth cried out for his mother, already deceased, was a kind of heartbreaking capstone to this tale. The big man that Floyd was—six feet four inches, 223 pounds—without a big man in his life. This was rendered an implicit part of his tragedy. But Floyd’s mother had a brother, Selwyn Jones—or Unc, as Floyd called him—a man large in stature and spirit, and a fixture in Floyd’s life. Jones is remarkable in the family for having evaded the traps awaiting poor Black men, through pro sports and later a career in sales and hospitality, and he tried to lay a path for Floyd. “I talked to his ass often,” Jones told me. “ ‘Yo, man, you know you need to get your butt right.’ ” Jones, who lives in central South Dakota, a six-hour drive west of Minneapolis, visited Floyd frequently when his nephew moved north from Houston. “It breaks my heart to know that happened to one of mine,” he said. “And I just… I cannot stop.” So here we explore Jones’s role as a father figure, alongside the stories of five biological fathers of police-brutality victims—men who have persisted in the face of harrowing loss, fueled in part by memories of the times that were. The Reverend Joey Crutcher smiled as he reminisced about singing gospel in church with his son Terence. “You always wanted the best in your choir,” Reverend Crutcher told me. “So I just nurtured him into being a great male soloist.” Terence was unarmed when a police o∞cer in Tulsa killed him in 2016, at age 40. Larry Barbine, a maintenance man who has survived three openheart surgeries, regained his health just in time to meet the 26-yearold son he’d never known, Rayshard Brooks, who had come from Atlanta to Toledo to see him. Soon they were living together, and their

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love was as intense and youthful as it was short. “I felt that he was still a little kid at heart,” Barbine said. They had known each other for just 14 months when an Atlanta police o∞cer shot and killed Brooks in a Wendy’s parking lot in June; protesters would burn down the restaurant one night later. Joe Louis Cole, whose son Daniel Prude was killed in March by police in Rochester, New York, thinks about the two years when he and his son lived together in Atlanta, working side by side at a UPS warehouse. “The old man and the young guy,” Cole recalled. The son of Jacob Blake III, who shares his name, still lives. The younger Blake was paralyzed after a police o∞cer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, shot him seven times in the back. So the elder Blake’s sacrifice is di≠erent. “My option,” he said, “was to stand for my son that cannot stand.” Michael Brown Sr. often reflects on the promise he made when his son was born—that he would never let tragedy befall his namesake. In the six years since Michael Brown Jr. was shot and killed by a police o∞cer in Ferguson, Missouri, Brown senior has emerged as a kind of patriarch for all grieving parents. Giving speeches around the country, running a foundation for families who have lost loved ones to police and community violence, traveling to memorials for Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, he is driven by the belief that he has been called on to prevent more bloodshed however he can. Each of these men, like all Black father figures, fights against the still pervasive stereotype of the absent Black father. It’s a notion that gained currency in the 1960s as the political advancements of the civil rights movement failed to translate into economic and social progress for everyday Black Americans, and social science research turned away from structural explanations for inequality toward a search for behavioral causes. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant secretary of labor, delivered a report to the Johnson White House, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, arguing that the plight of Black American communities was in decline due to a simple factor: the crumbling of the family unit and, in particular, children being raised in fatherless homes. Just weeks after the study’s release, riots broke out across the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles and critics latched onto the report to blame the ensuing violence on what Moynihan called “the deterioration of the Negro family.” The number of fatherless families, Black and otherwise, would rapidly grow in the following decades—a trend partly driven by the nation’s primary welfare program, in which for a period some states considered families ineligible for benefits if an adult male was a member of the household. The legacy of that policy and Moynihan’s report continues, and the notion of troubled, fatherless Black men has resurfaced after each national reckoning with racial injustice, including in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing. In August conservative commentator Larry Elder, in an op-ed for Fox News, wrote of the unrest in Minneapolis and around the country: “Many of the protesters decry income and net worth ‘inequality.’ But the most serious ‘inequality’ is the unequal percentage of fathers in Black households.” Such sentiments mostly assign blame to Black men and serve to deny the headwinds they face as they advance toward self-fulfillment in the United States—gusts that sweep a disproportionate number into jails and prisons, into ghettos, into the criminal justice morass, or o≠ the face of the earth altogether. These myths obscure the deep and enduring roles these Black fathers and sons played and continue to play in each other’s lives. There is a bond there, among Black men surviving in the United States, which crosses generations and even the boundaries between life and death. If those bonds weren’t convincing enough, a 2013 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that among fathers living with children under the age of five, Black fathers were more likely than Hispanic and white fathers to have bathed, dressed, diapered, or helped their children use the toilet every day, and that

SELWYN JONES: HAIR, DOM CLUCAS, BLACK HILLS BARBERSHOP; SKIN, ANGELA MILLER.

SIX MONTHS HAVE PASSED

LARRY BARBINE Father of Rayshard Brooks

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among fathers who live with their children, a greater percentage of Black fathers than white fathers took their children to or from daily activities and assisted their kids with homework. It’s true that such data coexists with other, more sobering statistics: More than half of all Black children live in homes headed by one parent, and Black children are more likely than white and Hispanic children to be born to unwed parents. But most Black Americans are aware of the myriad factors shaping these demographics. I’m reminded of something the late Toni Morrison said in an interview, about Ralph Ellison’s great novel Invisible Man, which distilled the Black urban experience for 1950s America. “The title of Ralph Ellison’s book was Invisible Man,” Morrison said. “And the question for me was ‘Invisible to whom?’ Not to me.” Not to these men, either. They already see one another. So we asked them to tell us what they know: Joe Louis Cole, Larry Barbine, Rev. Joey Crutcher, Selwyn Jones, Jacob Blake III, and Michael Brown Sr. What a strange experience they share. Their lives were transformed by the worst kind of news, a blow that left everything that followed so suddenly and painfully di≠erent. Not only have they su≠ered the abrupt and traumatic loss of their loved ones, but often just hours after being stunned by tragedy, they grieve before news cameras. They are transformed from ordinary people into symbols of this country’s injustice, symbols onto which so much meaning other than their own is projected. How easily could that parent have been me, grieving my child, the thinking goes. And yet these fathers endure such moments in uneasy juxtaposition with the mythical assumption that they don’t even exist. A father losing a son upsets a belief in inexorable progress, the American idea that children will fare better than their parents. Who is to blame for upsetting this natural order? This is the question that nags at these fathers. Was it something as small as a few words left unsaid or a deed not done? Or something as big as the history of state-sponsored violence against Black people? Was it an outside force or an inside darkness that was passed from father to son? With time comes the realization that they will likely be saved not by anger and hardness but, rather, by an understanding of their own pain, of their feelings. Tides of emotion overwhelm their attempts at masculine reserve. In order for these men to survive, they must find tenderness, and they must do it while the world is watching. And suddenly there is an expectation that they emote with fluency. “Everybody wants to know how you feel,” Reverend Crutcher said. “I’m hurt. Still hurt.” Even when these men are not in physical contact with other grieving fathers, they maintain an awareness of one another, through the media, through lawyers, through movement groups, that in some small but important way legitimizes their own experience. I am not alone. My experience is real and valid. As I was trying to figure out what I wanted to learn from these men, some of whom have watched their sons die on video—videos that I cannot bring myself to watch—I texted my own father to ask what he would want to know. His answer came quickly: “Did he have the talk with his son? Does he think that prior to this moment his son understood what he faced in the street from day to day?” The men were so open with me in their responses, and I wonder now if it was because of a common experience that even I share, with them and with my own father, not so much in our daily lives but in the ways we’re often perceived. A quick bond was forged in each conversation, like a passing nod on the street—a fleeting but unmistakable acknowledgment of a loose brotherhood. Despite everything else, it felt very good. Here we elevate these men for doing what we perhaps could not do, for continuing to push for the truth. So few of them have gotten the justice they seek in their own sons’ cases, and yet they persist. “We’ve been living with normal,” Jones told me. “It’s been 400 years. So I just have it in my brain, in my heart and my soul, that we got to make things not normal and make changes. And I’m not giving up.”

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SELWYN JONES Uncle of George Floyd, Gettysburg, South Dakota A robust, gregarious man who once played pro arena football, Jones became a kind of father figure to the children of his sister Larcenia Floyd, especially to George, an exemplary athlete himself. After Floyd was killed in May when Derek Chauvin, a white Minneapolis police o∞cer, knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes, Jones decided to take a stand. Now the owner of a motel in Gettysburg, South Dakota, he demanded the local police department remove its insignia, which included the Confederate flag, and it did, and he has continued to fight for racial justice in Floyd’s name. “A big change has been done by my nephew’s passing,” he says. “And it’s up to me to keep it going.” I think one of the worst things in the world is when he’s looking back and he’s got that petrified look on his face, not knowing that he wouldn’t be here 15 minutes later. Imagine being scared. Imagine being held down, where there’s nothing you can do but just take it. When I first saw it, I’m like, “Oh, my God— they’re going to kill this dude. Man, why don’t somebody help him?” One of my sisters called me and tells me it’s my nephew. And I haven’t watched the video since then. Everybody has had trials and tribulations. Fortunately, most people didn’t have the ones that he had. Because of the economic place that my sister was in—three babies, no husband—they were always moving. She moved to Houston, and they lived in Third Ward. This is like New York City used to be back in the day. If you’ve got a nice car and you’re driving down Third Ward, you see somebody walking at the stop sign, you don’t stop, because they’re about to rob your ass. And these are environments that George had to grow up in, but he adapted, because he was a ghetto superstar, I would call it. I would go to Houston, and we had sports. He played basketball and football. I was the catalyst that pushed everybody to be good because I was a bad dude back in the day. But he listened to a bunch of idiots who said, “Hey, man, you don’t have to go to college to play pro ball. You’ll get drafted.” Well, if you don’t take the correct steps to move forward in any kind of endeavor, you get pushed to the side. So he wasn’t Big Floyd the basketball player no more. He was Big Floyd in the hood now. So I talked to his ass, often: “Yo, man, you know you need to get your butt right.” And he got himself in situations that he shouldn’t have. He paid for them. Five years ago, he had an opportunity to come to Minneapolis. They had a rehab program up there.

JOE LOUIS COLE Father of Daniel Prude

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If you have a demon, that demon will catch up with you anywhere you go. But for most people, the demon is easier if you’re not around familiar situations. So he decided to go to Minneapolis, and he got two jobs, working at the Salvation Army, doing a lot of things right. And then my sister died. That broke him up. I go down to my sister’s funeral, and I’m in the church house, and he shows up 30 minutes late for his mama’s funeral. I meet his ass coming in the door. Me and him have a discussion. This isn’t the way that you were raised. This isn’t the way you show respect to the person that you loved the most. You need to get your mind right and get back to Minneapolis and get away from Houston. And he came back to Minneapolis, and he started driving trucks. He started doing good things.

life. But I believe that because he was walking around on this earth, not fulﬁlling the potential and destiny that the Lord gave him, the Lord sacriﬁced him to say, “You are going to change the whole world.” And that’s what he did. You know, there hasn’t been a civil rights movement like this, ever. Before my nephew got murdered, I was a good dude. I worked hard. Me and my wife renovated that motel by ourselves, and the day that he got buried, we had a comment come over the phone that says, “You are selling drugs to buy a motel. Why don’t you stop living o≠ your nephew’s coattails?” People said that I should go back to Africa, that this wasn’t my community. Stu≠ like this is what I got to deal with. I have a four- and a seven-year-old. So at 54, I got to battle a little bit. I just want to make sure that my little baby don’t have the same kind of life that I had to live because of racism and the color of my skin. And I’m not giving up. Uncle Selwyn ain’t going to let his nephew go out like that. ’Cause when you come from nothing, like we did, all we know how to do is get it, man. I got a lot of work to do. As long as people can see my ugly face and hear my scraggly voice, that means that somebody’s listening, that means I have an opportunity to make a change.

LARRY BARBINE Father of Rayshard Brooks, Toledo Two years before Rayshard Brooks, a 27-year-old Black man, was shot and killed

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“It was just a shock to both of us that we looked so much alike. We just stood there and looked at each other; then we hugged each other and we just

meet his father, Larry Barbine, for the ﬁrst time. “It was just a shock to both of us that we looked so much alike,” Barbine recalls. “We just stood there and looked at each other; then we grabbed and hugged each other and we both just wept some tears.” Before he got back into my life, I was a very sick person for about 10 years. I was put on a heart-transplant list for two years. And after having three operations, I had two artiﬁcial hearts and then I was donated a regular heart. I spent months in the hospital on my back. I was in the hospital for four months and I lost track of everything. I mean, I didn’t know I was alive, other than being there. We only knew each other for that short time. I felt he was still a little kid at heart. He’d be like, “Come on, Pop. Let’s do this, that, the other.” I’m like, “Man, you know I can’t keep up with you.” And he like, “Well, do the best you can.” He was always in a joyful, playful mood with me. I had big hopes, especially after I seen that he was doing the same things that I grew up doing, home maintenance. I was head maintenance over di≠erent apartment complexes, a little heating and air-conditioning, carpentry work. I still do odd jobs. So he was proud to hear that, and he actually started going to my doctor’s appointments with me. And I was like, “Man, you ain’t got to do all this.” “Pop, I want to be there because I haven’t been there for you and I appreciate you reaching out to me.” And I apologized to him for not being in his life. We had hopes. We had the rest of his life, my life of him helping me. I’m like, “I don’t

need any help. I’d like to see you and your family come up here and enjoy it and not have to be running all them miles down there getting from point A to point B.” He wanted to do carpentry work, and he was venturing into other things. He was working day and night, di≠erent jobs. At that time he didn’t have a way of getting around, and he was doing a lot of stu≠ in Michigan, so I would drive him to Michigan, just spend the day up there while he worked. I tried to stop watching the news, because I knew it wasn’t bringing him back. I felt that the reason he ran is because he didn’t want to break his daughters’ hearts. I’m going to jail again, here I go again. I promised my daughters. He had it hard as far as the times that he was incarcerated and got out of jail,

He is going to be greatly missed, because he just wanted to bring his family back up here to live. He went sledding for the ﬁrst time here. He’d never seen snow, and at that time, there was snow on the ground. I couldn’t get him to sleep. We was up day and night just enjoying each other. He didn’t o≠er anything about what he’d been through, and I really didn’t want to hear it, because I didn’t want him to bring up nothing in the past at all.

JOE LOUIS COLE Father of Daniel Prude, Tampa On the evening of March 22, 2020, 41-year-old Daniel Prude called his father, Joe Louis Cole, to say he’d made it from Chicago to Rochester, where he was visiting his elder brother Joe. The second call Cole would receive, early the next morning, was from Joe—Daniel was undergoing a mental-health episode and had run into the night wearing only long johns and a tank top. Cole told Joe to call the police. After locating Prude, Rochester police handcu≠ed him, covered his head in a spit hood, and held his body against the pavement. He was taken to a hospital and declared dead a week later—a death the autopsy ruled a homicide. As of late October, an investigation by the New York State attorney general’s o∞ce was still ongoing. Cole says he will never again tell his family to depend on law enforcement. “That’s just like telling them to jump into the lion cage,” he says. “And that’s sad. It’s real sad.”

REV. JOEY CRUTCHER Father of Terence Crutcher

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He was born on my birthday. Yeah, my birthday present. We was talking about getting together for his birthday. Having a party or a barbecue. In my last conversation with him, I told him, “Do what you got to do, get your stu≠ together, you and your brother. Now y’all can ﬁnally have a bond type of relationship with one another.” My plan was for him and his brother to stop here in Florida and get me. I was going to go and stay with my oldest son for a while, while Daniel was up there with him. But that never got a chance to happen. I’ve lost three sons: my baby boy, my second-oldest, and Daniel, my third-oldest. Every time I looked up, I said to myself, “Not me again. Not me again. Why me?” The police are supposed to have better training. My son, he was out there, having a meltdown or whatever you want to call it. Get him some help. Don’t make him sit on no ground like that. And he was out there in the freezing rain, in the cold. I said to myself,

“Now my son may never walk again. And that’s something we have to deal with as a family. That’s not a goal that we put in front of ourselves. But you understand that now we have to embrace it.”

law enforcement.”

to him, instead of trying to say, “Okay, Mr. Prude…just calm down. We’re going to get you help, fast as we can.” No, you’re going to make him sit down, nude, in the freezing rain. It was sleet weather. The rain turned into snow. And that hurt me. Y’all supposed to serve and protect. Y’all not serving, y’all not protecting. They ain’t doing nothing but criticizing and cracking jokes. I would say that wasn’t cool at all. That was kind of fucked up to me. When that happened, I didn’t know if I was going or coming. I almost lost it. I had just had a stroke. My oldest son, we started having a conversation every day. Almost every two hours he called me. We bonded even tighter than we was, even though we was far o≠ from each other. He was really trying to make sure I was all right. I’ve got two sisters here. One sister, she got seven kids of her own. She got 21 grandkids. My other sister, she got nine kids of her own. I got a whole slew of nieces and nephews. And they basically check on me every day. What’s really been keeping me going is my family. I’m just now starting to get my strength back, where I can almost be independent again. I go out, communicate with people a lot more. And stay in tune with my kids, have a relationship with my grandkids and my great-grandkids. Everything that I missed with Daniel, I’m trying to make it up with his kids. I still see him in his kids, and they give me motivation and strength.

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THE REVEREND JOEY CRUTCHER Father of Terence Crutcher, Tulsa On the evening of September 16, 2016, Terence Crutcher, a 40-year-old Black man, abandoned his SUV in the middle of a Tulsa street. In an ensuing encounter with police, Crutcher held his arms in the air as o∞cers approached him; when he returned to his vehicle and appeared to reach into his driver-side window, a white o∞cer shot and killed him. Crutcher was unarmed and had no weapon in the vehicle. In May 2017, a jury found the o∞cer not guilty of ﬁrst-degree manslaughter. The victim’s father, Rev. Joey Crutcher, maintains that what happened to his son was murder. “It’s been a rough ride, man,” he says, later noting that there is no escaping the memory. “I get up and think about it every day of my life.”

You begin to become an expert at dealing with the tragedy. The ﬁrst year, it was really awful. But in the last three years, I’ve come to understand a lot of things. It should be a one-in-amillion chance that you would lose your child to a police shooting, and I ﬁnd myself being one of those people. But I’m just looking at all of the rest of the fathers, and I know what they’re thinking. I’m writing my memoirs right now. I wrote a chapter on my oldest son, who died of colon cancer. And I wrote about my second son, who lived to be only three months old. He died

from crib death. And I’m on Terence’s chapter. I don’t know what I’m going to call it, but it’s Terence. I’m getting ready to start writing about his birth. August the 16th, 1976. He just turned 40 years old on August 16, 2016. And then he was dead a month later. The first Sunday in September 2008, I lost my grandson. He was shot in a drive-by shooting, coming from church. His brother is paralyzed from the waist down. So I’ve dealt with a lot as it relates to the males in my life, my sons especially. I really can’t make sense of it. But then when I stop to think about all of these things, they deal with humans. There’s a human that kills, there’s a human that gets killed. I’m kind of crazy into God. And with a lot of stu≠ like this, even the killing of my son, I always say, “All of this stu≠ is beneath me, because there’s a higher power.” I quote the Scripture that says, “All things work together for good to them that love the Lord and who are called according to His purpose.” Me and Terence, we had good times together. I’m a musician. My whole life is about singing gospel music. My mother got us into that. So I always try to find out who in my family got this gift, and found out Terence had the gift. Terence became the main soloist in my choir. If you ask, “What do you miss about Terence?” I miss one thing—me and him singing together, in the ministry and in church. When I lost him, I lost three fourths of my whole ministry, because he was that much of it. The George Floyd incident, it was just like those firecrackers that go up in the air. All of the shootings, all of the families, it woke it back up again. In our town, we had the “Terence Crutcher” signs up, to let the world remember that Terence got killed the same way. And it was happening in all of the cities, to all of the fathers, all of the mothers. That’s why the protest happened, simply because they were sick of it. My human body, I hurt. I hurt every time I think about a police o∞cer taking a gun out and shooting him. I was always there for my children. But that might not be good enough. A lot of things that were on their minds I never did understand, because I never asked. I didn’t know how to ask. I know it’s a lot deeper than just going to basketball games, or getting new shoes, especially when you find out your oldest son is not taking care of his self physically. For those type of things I blame myself. I think fathers should have talks with their young men about those things that plague males. You figure that these are the golden years in your life, and you can do the things that you couldn’t do when you were raising your kids. You always know you want grandkids, but due to circumstances—Terence’s death and the kids’ mother not being able to care for them—we were awarded guardianship. We’re starting all over again now.

JACOB BLAKE III Father of Jacob Blake

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They love their father. The oldest girl, she was 16, I think, when he passed. The other one was about 10. Little Terence was four years old, so he really didn’t know what was going on. But they had to decide within themselves how they were going to be able to handle this. And this situation is something they’re going to have to deal with the rest of their lives. So we talk all the time. We try to create situations that help us feel better. I left the house just a few minutes ago to come over here to do the interview, and Little Terence was up and he was ready to go, because he’d go with me everywhere I go. But I didn’t let him go this time. So he’s mad now. He’ll probably be calling me soon, asking, “Where are you?” He’s my running buddy, you see. We run together every day.

JACOB BLAKE III Father of Jacob Blake, Chicago On August 23, in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Jacob Blake was shot in the back seven times by a white police o∞cer who was responding to a

a third. For Blake’s father, Jacob Blake III, the discrepancies between the police’s treatment of Rittenhouse and his son exposed the inherent racism of our criminal justice system. And his son’s shooting recalled harrowing episodes of police brutality in his native Chicago, where he has been staying intermittently between trips to protests in Milwaukee and Washington, D.C., and bedside visits with his son. There’s two justice systems. There’s a justice system for white people. And then there’s just us. The young man with the long rifle in Wisconsin killed two people and blew another man’s arm o≠. They gave him water. They gave my son seven in the back. That is the clearest justification of the two-system definition. My son had no gun but still got seven in his back, when that white boy almost got a ride home and some water. So we’ve been patching the system instead of fixing the system. And African Americans, people that are brown, people that are not white, are systematically put in a situation that can only be corrected by a system being fixed. We need unity. We need to change laws. We need to rewrite a broken system, because if we don’t and we just patch it, the hole comes back bigger than it was before. One shot, okay, maybe he’s being overzealous. Two shots, then we begin to think, “What’s going on?” Three shots… But seven

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“My mother told me I was always going to be a preacher or a teacher, and sadly it got thrown in my lap the way Michael left this earth. I had no choice but to have a voice. This is my life.” —MICHAEL BROWN SR.

Now my son may not ever walk again. And that’s something that we have to deal with as a family. That’s not a goal that we put in front of ourselves. But you understand that now we have to embrace it like it is one of our goals, because it’s something we have to deal with. We can’t back away from it. When you’re scared of something, you meet it head-on and then you take it out. We have no choice but to march on forward. I was raised by a heck of a father, the best father, in my opinion, ever on the planet. I understood that in a time of need, it’s your job. And I didn’t have any other choice. My option was to stand for my son who cannot stand. Once you have unadulterated love for your children, you have no conditions set on what you’ll do for your children. It takes precedence over everything else. This is part of being a dad, man. You take the good with the bad. And you can’t judge your kids. You have to take everything, because they have to be able to trust that they can sit down and tell you anything. I didn’t know what to expect. I know what I got: a whole lot of diapers, a whole lot of vomit, and a whole lot of wipes. And they’re shaking and moving. I never knew babies could move like that. He can laugh a little bit now, so we tell jokes. A lot of jokes, and a lot of talking junk. You know, he’s a ﬁghter. So he’s dealing with this pain all day, every day. And his mindset is better than it was, but it’s a daily process.

He’s looking forward to getting out of rehab and trying to initiate life the way it’s going to be. But I’m sure he’ll give you guys insight on how he feels when he’s able to.

MICHAEL BROWN SR. Father of Michael Brown Jr., St. Louis In August 2014, when 18-year-old Michael Brown Jr. was shot and killed by Darren Wilson, a white police o∞cer, after an altercation on Canﬁeld Drive in Ferguson, Missouri, his death set o≠ nationwide protests and helped solidify the nascent Black Lives Matter movement. For his father, Michael Brown Sr., the pain of his son’s death was renewed this summer when a new St. Louis County prosecutor declined to bring charges against Wilson after a grand jury did not deliver an indictment in 2014. Yet Brown senior remains unﬂagging in his e≠orts to help other bereaved families. “You heal yourself,” he says, “but then you heal other people.” I had a brotherhood of people who were a≠ected like I was. Tracy Martin, who is Trayvon’s father. Uncle Bobby, who is Oscar Grant’s uncle. Ron Davis, who is Jordan Davis’s father. Day one, when I met with them, they told me if I ever needed a shoulder to cry on, if I ever felt like just screaming, they didn’t care what time in the morning it was, just call them: “Just don’t hold that all in. Because you have to release, Mike.” I’ve been rocking with them ever since. And then a lot of it I had to learn on my own. People asked me, How did I get through? I tell them I got a praying wife and a praying mother. If it wasn’t for them, I don’t know where I would be. It’s all about the positive notes that come from your support group. And learning to release. Not say you have given up, that you forgive anything, but release a little bit of that pain and hatred, and put it in a di≠erent category and use it that way. That’s why I do those speeches. I use that same energy in a di≠erent light. I just got back in town. I was in Detroit, working with the sheri≠ ’s department. This sheri≠ in Detroit, he’s working on trauma classes for people in county jail. There ain’t that many jails doing that type of stu≠. I told them I had a forgiveness program and hopefully we would work together. It’s a full-time thing. My mother told me I was always going to be a preacher or a teacher, and I ran from it, and sadly it got thrown in my lap the way Mike left this earth. I had no choice but to have a voice. But I have accepted it. This is what I have to do. This is my life. Police have to do their part, we have to do ours. But when you got people that never interacted with Black people, it’s hard for them to be (continued on page 123)

PRODUCER, STUDIO LOU.

MICHAEL BROWN SR. Father of Michael Brown Jr.

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Financially, how dire would the consequences have been if the season had to be canceled? ADAM SILVER: I mean, I wouldn’t use the word dire, only because I tend to look at our business over a longer-term horizon. Even though we had an opportunity, of course, to restart the season, the financial implications are still pretty traumatic. The players will still take a significant pay cut, and most of our teams will also lose significant amounts of money—not just from their NBA team but [also from their] arenas and all of those nights that have remained dark. Again, I’m trying to take a longer-term perspective and with a recognition that this too shall pass, whether it takes another six months for a vaccine to be widely distributed or it takes another year to get back up and running. Meanwhile, we’re watching what’s happening around the world. For example, we have Game 4 of the Finals taking place on Tuesday night in Orlando. So on Wednesday morning in Shanghai, in fact, there is a viewing party at an arena where they’re going to have 5,000 fans, and they’re comfortable doing that. They have protocols for doing that. GQ:

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What were the bubble negotiations like with the players, as they were the ones who were going to have to bear the brunt of the isolation? When we first began proposing playing in a bubble-type environment, I had many individual calls with players who were nervous, understandably, as to how safe that would even be. At that point, people were still sheltered at home. Part of it was the sense that the players were going to be dependent on the behavior of everyone else in the bubble community: players, staff, employees—anyone who was part of it. And they realized we were only going to be as safe as the least compliant participant. So I think the players really did their homework, balancing economic issues with health and safety issues. We spent probably hundreds of hours on Zoom calls directly with players, helping them understand what the environment would be like in which they were playing, how they would be living. Right. Now, there wasn’t complete confidence that [the bubble] would work. I should point out what makes it not quite the bubble people

long quarantine periods. Some people think that the testing is what prevented the spread. But given that we’ve had zero cases, essentially what prevented the spread were the same practices that ultimately proved successful around the 1918 flu: physical distancing, quarantining, mask wearing, handwashing. There’s nothing more high-tech than that at the end of the day, and that seemingly is what has proved to be effective here. As you entered the bubble, how concerned were you with the mental health of players, given what an artificial habitat they were going to be in for months? I was very concerned. And in fact, when you’re down here in the bubble, there’s an app. And you do a daily check-in and you answer questions about COVID symptoms. And the only other question, other than COVID symptoms, is: Would you like to speak to a mental health professional? So we asked the players that question every day, and obviously when they [want to speak with someone], it’s confidential. All I know is, the overall use rate of the psychologists, on and off campus, has been fairly high. I’m really encouraged, and I’ve said this many times, but thank you again to DeMar DeRozan and Kevin Love,1 because something that was completely unacceptable a few years ago in the league is now part [of it]. Players think of it like they would going to a shooting coach. I think if I had to [pinpoint] the single biggest issue for players, it’s been the separation from their children. I think what they’re feeling is some sense of guilt: Are they putting themselves above their families by being here? Are they putting themselves above their community on social justice [issues] by being here? And again, I don’t want to just think about the players. We also had hundreds of team personnel and coaches, many of whom also have young children. And as tough as it is for people to be away from other family members, I think adult relationships are 1. In 2018, DeMar DeRozan and Kevin Love publicly detailed their respective struggles with depression and have since become outspoken advocates for mental health.

DAVID E. KLUTHO/SPORTS ILLUSTRATED/GE T T Y IMAGES.

started out uncomfortably for NBA commissioner Adam Silver. Back in October 2019, three weeks before the beginning of the season, Daryl Morey, the former general manager of the Houston Rockets, tweeted an image that said “FIGHT FOR FREEDOM / STAND WITH HONG KONG” in support of protesters who were demonstrating against a bill that would allow extradition to China. The tweet ignited a firestorm of controversy in the world’s most populous nation, which threatened a lucrative revenue stream for the league. As a rebuke of Morey, and to force the NBA to discipline him, Chinese state television stopped airing games for the duration of the regular season and well into the Finals. But even that financial catastrophe paled in comparison with what happened on March 11, when it was revealed that Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert had contracted the coronavirus. Almost immediately, Silver halted on-court operations, and professional basketball did not return until four months later via an ambitious public health experiment that would be called the NBA bubble. Adding to the precarity of the league’s restart was that everything was happening against the backdrop of a historic civil rights movement. Two months before the season resumed, George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis. The sights and sounds captured on video gave America pause like never before, spawning nationwide protests and a reckoning with racism that made sticking to sports impossible for leagues across the world. The concerns were more acute for the NBA; players weren’t even sure if returning to the court was a good idea. To top it all off, everything nearly fell apart again on August 26, after the Kenosha police shooting of Jacob Blake, once games were already under way inside the bubble. In response, the Milwaukee Bucks stayed in their locker room before Game 5 of their first-round playoff series against the Orlando Magic, effectively putting the league on pause. At the center of the yearlong storm was Adam Silver, who spoke to GQ during the NBA Finals via FaceTime from his hotel room inside the bubble—which, against long odds, exceeded most expectations.

very different. The real hardship has been the separation from kids, who may not understand [what’s going on]. When we had a reduced number of teams and the families could bring their children onto the campus, I think that made a big difference. Was there anything in planning the bubble that proved to be more difficult than you expected? Not even something that’s major in terms of the health and safety protocols, more like you get to the end and you figure out, “Wait, we have to have a barbershop.” There were a lot of discussions about the food early on—putting aside the taste— that the vegetables weren’t organic. That was something we were focused on. Finding other suppliers of the food inside the bubble. We did plan for the barbershop, and I think we were surprised by the amount of grooming of our players who frequented the barbershop. But I think one thing we hadn’t planned sufficiently for was the amount of package deliveries. At the height of the campus operation, with 22 teams, we were getting over a thousand packages a day. I mean, everything from books, on one end of the spectrum, to exercise bicycles and gym equipment that guys wanted in their room. We had to set up an entire warehouse facility on campus to handle just the enormous load of delivery trucks.

“I kept reminding myself of the bedrock principles underlying this league. Those values that have been in place long before

post–George Floyd’s killing. And the discussion was a very open one, between the teams and the league and the players union: Would players have a stronger voice if they’re on campus or off campus? And then, on the other side of the coin, there was discussion about, well, if we are going to restart the season and we are going to be in the bubble, what can we do collectively to draw attention to these issues rather than just play games? I think it was then that the Players Association proposed to the league that we, for example, include the social justice messages on the jerseys or something. We ended up putting “Black Lives Matter” on the playing floor and finding other ways systematically to focus attention on these issues, rather than leaving them to the individual players. What was the process like for the league And I think ultimately the conclusion in determining how it would respond was that the unified voice of the players to the killing of George Floyd? on campus would be more I think there was a lot of selfpowerful. That together here examination from the players Adam Silver presents in the bubble, they could and the teams as to whether the Larry O’Brien use their platform to have a to even move ahead, whether Trophy to the Los Angeles Lakers. voice in the conversation. this all made sense, given

owners with engaging in what some might consider to be a political stance? Particularly on the floor. Before this, the phrase “Black Lives Matter” was considered a controversial statement. By the time the bubble had opened, a majority of Americans supported it. I think they wanted to support the players. I think this was regardless of their individual support for the movement. I shared many of those views that players have, but where do you draw the line? And once you move into what undoubtedly many will perceive as a political issue, what will be the impact on our fan base? I think we ultimately understood that in an election cycle in the current environment, virtually anything we did would be viewed through a political lens. I mean, if mask wearing is viewed as political, certainly Black Lives Matter as a movement would be viewed as political. Having said that, and putting aside the precise expression of it, whether it said “end racism” on our floor or “Black Lives Matter,” I kept reminding myself of the bedrock principles underlying this league. Those values that have been in place long before me, and long before most of the governors in this league. And that is a support of racial equality and social justice. Have we been perfect on these issues? Of course not. But it’s been a bedrock principle, just like it is for this country, and the country’s been far from perfect on it. The ongoing discussion with players has been: What is the best way to effect change? Now, I recognize that making people uncomfortable isn’t inconsistent with making a change. But disenfranchising them potentially is, and discerning between the two is hard. And it (continued on page 120) 2. According to a September report from The Ringer, only seven owners of NBA teams are not white. And during the 2020 election cycle, outside of Clippers owner Steve Ballmer’s contributions to a gun-control organization, 80.9 percent of political donations from NBA team owners have gone to Republican causes.

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BY TAYLOR ROOKS ILLUSTRATIONS BY KAGAN MCLEOD

PROLOGUE:

BEFORE THE BUBBLE

Rudy Gobert felt panicked and scared. And so he did what you do when you feel panicked and scared: He tried to call his mother, Corinne, but he was having trouble reaching her. “She was sleeping because it was about 4 a.m. in France at the time,” says Gobert. “But I was calling her every 10 minutes to make sure I was the first person she talked to, before she saw the news on Facebook.” It was early March, and Gobert hadn’t been feeling well. He’d been in bed at the 21c Museum Hotel in Oklahoma City, getting ready to watch his Jazz teammates face the Thunder. He was showing symptoms that he says he’s had “a thousand times” in his life, symptoms he believed he could just sweat out, drink some ginger tea, and be right back healthy. Only this time, that wasn’t quite the case. When the game was about to start, someone came out onto the court to talk to the officials. “I was like, Oh, shit,” Gobert recalls. “Thirty seconds later they called me and said I was positive for COVID-19.” Gobert, as it turns out, learned that he had the coronavirus at the same time that the rest of the world did. Which is why he was frantically calling his mother, especially since there was a humiliating viral video circulating that night of him touching a bunch of reporters’ microphones as a joke earlier in the week—a video he says does not accurately portray who he is. “I had to tell her that I was okay,” he recalls. “I would always tell her that I’m good even when I’m not, because me not being good would hurt her literally more than me.” Gobert wound up being the first NBA domino to topple, and within hours commissioner Adam Silver would announce that the rest of the season was suspended indefinitely. Basketball would not officially resume until 141 days later, on July 30, inside what would come to be called the NBA bubble, in Orlando, Florida: the daring, temporary, artificial home of the world’s greatest basketball players.

CHAPTER I: This Must Be the Place In early July, 22 NBA teams descended on Disney World in central Florida to take part in a once-in-a-lifetime experiment. More than 300 athletes boarded a series of repurposed Mickey Mouse tour buses and were scattered among three di≠erent hotels—the Gran Destino, the Yacht Club, and the Grand Floridian—each designed to cater to the needs and wishes of the kinds of people who travel vast distances for the immersive family fun of the Magic Kingdom. It was a strange time for the NBA to be restarting. The George Floyd protests were still going strong across the country, and a lot of people—including players—were questioning whether we even needed basketball. I ﬂew into Orlando on July 12 from New York, a city that, at the time, appeared to be on its way to successfully containing the spread of the virus. I was there to cover the NBA for Bleacher Report and Turner Sports, and was one of the few media members granted “Tier 1” clearance, meaning we were to be tested every single day and, once we completed a seven-day quarantine, were allowed to inhabit the same spaces as the players themselves. But my experience inside got o≠ to a rocky start. I was assigned a fourth-ﬂoor room next door to the Gran Destino, a vaguely Southwest-themed space with lots of natural light and pictures of cacti on the walls.

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I was tested the night I arrived, and by the following afternoon, a doctor had called and told me I had tested positive for the virus. I was shocked and scared but mostly confused, because I had rarely left my apartment and had tested negative a few days prior. So I got retested and spent the next two days incredibly worried. (This time, it was me calling my mom crying.) After more tests, the doctor called again to tell me that the initial result was a false positive. After quarantining for a week and passing all the required medical exams, I was cleared to ﬁnally enter the bubble—ostensibly the safest place on the planet, thanks to daily testing, mandated masks, and strictly enforced social distancing from the outside world. When people ask me what the bubble was like, I tell them it felt like summer camp, except most of the campers were multimillionaires and a considerable percentage of them were seven feet tall. There were times I’d be heading to the Maya Grill for lunch (my go-to was the chicken nuggets, vegetable pasta, and a strawberry-lemonade Popsicle) and I’d see the Lakers’ LeBron James and Anthony Davis casually ride past me on their bikes. Or I’d spy Kyle Lowry of the Raptors, walking alone across the same bridge every morning to go grab breakfast. In a surreal way, the campus granted athletes the rare freedom to move through the world unbothered. No security details, no fans stopping

them for photos. It’s something I imagine a lot of them haven’t been able to experience since they were teenagers. Inside, we devised all kinds of ways to pass the time. Once, I played Heads Up! (the charades-like game where you hold your phone up to your forehead) with Kemba Walker of the Boston Celtics at the end of an interview. The answer on the screen was “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” and the clue he gave me was “They be flying on brooms and shit.” Ja Morant of the Grizzlies and I would play Connect Four on the iPhone (he still hasn’t beaten me), and Chris Paul and Russell Westbrook—who were traded for each other before the season began—would team up and play spades on their phones against Chris’s brother, C.J., and his mom, Robin. Westbrook in particular was a model bubble citizen. He always made sure his hotel room was “clean and in good shape,” and he reportedly left an $8,000 tip for the housekeepers. (When we spoke, Westbrook confirmed he wrote a thank-you note and left a good tip, but wouldn’t confirm the amount: “The money doesn’t matter. I just like to do the right thing. That’s it.”) Perhaps because of the strange environment, a few of the players seemed to relax and let down their guard. George Hill of the Milwaukee Bucks said he missed the national anthem before a game against the Magic because he was busy taking “a shit,” something he tells me he does every pregame when there’s six minutes left on the clock. He joins the layup line, shoots a single layup, and then, like clockwork, sprints o≠ to the bathroom. All the actual basketball took place about 10 minutes away. After games and practices, the players would race to the bus in order to get back to their hotels first. (Bam Adebayo was always dejected when he was late to the first bus and had to wait for the second one.) Once back at the hotels, the guys would mostly spend the nights playing cards (after Heat practices, I’d sometimes hear Jimmy Butler yell, “We playing Phase 10 tonight?!”) or drinking together at the hotel bar. Like a lot of people in lockdown in the outside world, players spent their free time inside the bubble drinking. And seemingly at the center of it all was CJ McCollum of the Portland Trail Blazers, who became something of the NBA’s uno∞cial source for wine. McCollum stacked his hotel room with cases of his own Pinot Noir blend, McCollum Heritage 91, keeping the thermostat at a cool 65 degrees. He gifted dozens of bottles to players, and CJ’s wine became a hot-ticket item—a bubble grail. Kawhi Leonard once stopped CJ to ask questions about the Pinot Noir and say he was a huge fan. (“I got the endorsement from Mr. Leonard!”) As was Anthony Davis, who, according to McCollum, stood next to

him at the free-throw line during a Round 1 playo≠ game to tell him: “Thanks for that wine. That shit was good.” But no one was a bigger fan than Damian Lillard. McCollum’s backcourt running mate said Heritage 91 was a magic elixir, the good-luck charm behind his historic bubble hot streak. Every time Lillard drank some, he’d go out and drop 50 on the other team, so he made it a point to incorporate McCollum Heritage 91 into his nightly routine. According to CJ, Dame was like, “ ‘Don’t bring me nothing besides that Heritage— I only want to drink the Heritage!’ So I was bringing him it, and we was drinking it for, like, a streak.” This being central Florida in the summer, players would spend a lot of their free time poolside. The Houston Rockets would ritually gather at the Grand Floridian pool to eat and drink, and James Harden would rave about how good the hotel’s hot dogs were. (Teammate Austin Rivers o≠ered a similar review: “That shit almost changed my life.”) One night at the pool, players from the Rockets and the Trail Blazers—two longtime rivals—both happened to be watching the Clippers play the Mavericks on their iPads. The Blazers’ stream was a couple of seconds ahead, and the Portland guys were shouting and hollering before the Rockets players knew what was happening. “So we turned o≠ our iPad and went over to where they were at,” says Rivers. “We’re all talking like, Nah, this guy’s going to take that. Oh, no, they can’t leave him open.… You can see guys, like, delving into the game. It wasn’t about, you know, Dame versus Russ. Like everybody’s just cool, you know what I mean?” The collegial atmosphere made it easy for the guys to bond, and friendships new and old blossomed in Orlando. Some of the O.G.s

used it as an opportunity to connect with the next generation: like Carmelo Anthony, a 17-year veteran, who said his most memorable conversation took place over drinks at the Yacht Club with younger players Kyle Kuzma and Devin Booker. Melo told them that they were the “future of the NBA” and to “start using your voices more and stop relying on us to do all the talking while y’all sit back.” When Lakers guard Danny Green won his third championship, he says, his old coach Gregg Popovich sent him a text: “Tell LeBron and AD I said congrats as well, but tell them to play a little more defense.” Meanwhile, a few players used the new proximity to let go of old grudges. Raptors president Masai Ujiri said his favorite moment o≠ the court happened while he was on the sidelines, watching his team play the Lakers, and one of his former players came up to him. “I’m sitting down there, and I see this person walking straight to me with a blue tracksuit,” says Ujiri. It was DeMar DeRozan, who had spent nine seasons with the Raptors before he was traded to the Spurs for Kawhi Leonard. The trade had left DeRozan feeling “extremely hurt” and betrayed but earned the Raptors the franchise’s ﬁrst championship. “And he walks up to me,” Ujiri continues, “and he gives me a big, big hug. This was really the ﬁrst time that we’ve really had that kind of

“You really just had to accept the fact that, man, I’m going to see these four walls every day.” —JAYSON TATUM

contact since the trade. I left the game and I felt that we had crossed a certain…we’d reached a new place.” My whole time in the bubble, I never once saw Jayson Tatum of the Celtics without his teammates Kemba Walker and Javonte Green. It was natural for players to form cliques, but the trio were inseparable. Tatum says his favorite night in the bubble was when he was sipping a drink (he rotated between a Hennessy and pineapple, a Crown Royal Apple, and a Moscato) and Walker said he had a confession, something that he had to get o≠ his chest. It was a revelation that brought the already close teammates even closer, according to Tatum: “Kemba was like, ‘Yo, before I met you, I thought you were just…like, the epitome of a light-skinned dude with good hair who went to Duke. But being around you, you’re just a country dude from St. Louis!’ ” CHAPTER II: Groundhog Day Pro athletes are already creatures of habit, but the limitations of the bubble forced a lot of the people inside it to adopt routines in order to preserve their sanity. For example, every day at 5 a.m., inside room 950 in the Gran Destino (where all the top-seeded teams stayed), Masai Ujiri would wake up, read his book, hop on the Peloton, and work out before heading down for breakfast. He thought nothing of his daily ritual until one morning, several weeks into the bubble, when he got a text from another former player of his: “Morning boss, you good up there?” The text was from Kawhi Leonard— Finals MVP with the Raptors, now a star on the Clippers—who was staying in room 850, directly below his old boss. Ujiri had been waking Kawhi up with his noisy workouts for weeks, but Kawhi was reluctant to say anything. Ujiri told Kawhi that he would stop for the time being and joked that he would continue again when the Raptors met the Clippers in the Finals, messing with Kawhi’s sleep. Kawhi responded with the kind of trash talk that’s best read aloud in Kawhi’s dry monotone: “Haha, you know the saying ‘Don’t poke the bear’? I’m gonna call the NBA on you…get you out the bubble.” Everyone coped with the monotony as best they could. One small way George Hill managed it was by eating the same exact breakfast every morning: a bacon-egg-andcheese croissant with a hash brown casserole; a double serving of bacon; a co≠ee; and a tangerine juice. Doc Rivers, who was head coach of the Clippers, put the endless repetition to me this way: (continued on next page)

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“It was Groundhog Day, I swear to God it was. Every morning I woke up, I did the [COVID-19 check-in] app, ran downstairs, did the testing. Went to watch film with my coaches, watch film with the players, practice, and rode my bike. And then I was back in the room. Every day.” “You really just had to accept the fact that, man, I’m going to see these four walls every day,” says Tatum. The isolation also took a toll on players mentally, especially with everything going on in the outside world—and here they were, hermetically sealed inside a Disney resort. Many of them had an especially hard time being away from their families. “I didn’t tell anybody, but I was going through mental problems,” says Ja Morant. He says his daughter, Kaari, is the joy of his life, all “light and energy,” and he missed her first birthday while inside the bubble. (“I wanted to just sit in a room that day by myself.”) The first time he heard her clearly say the word “Dada,” he was talking to her on FaceTime. Her mom would ask, “Where’s Dada?” and Kaari would point at the screen: “Dada!” The moment broke him.

“For me, shoot—I needed somebody to talk to at times.”— chris paul “Some don’t really know how serious that can be,” Morant says when I ask him how hard it was to be conﬁned in the bubble. “And, you know, a lot of people want to make jokes and stu≠ until they actually go through it.” Chris Paul, the head of the NBA players’ association and a 15-year veteran, said he similarly struggled with being away from his family, especially when he missed his daughter’s eighth birthday. “You ever seen on social media the thing that says, ‘Make sure you check on your strong friends’?” Paul asks me. “A lot of times, it’s the guys who may seem like they got everything together, you know? For me, shoot—I needed somebody to talk to at times.” But for all the loneliness, for all the outside life that the players missed, there were some moments of real joy inside the bubble, memories they say they’ll never forget. There was Morant, taking his ﬁrst legal drink—a bottle of Don Julio 1942 tequila—when his teammates and coaches threw him a surprise party for his 21st birthday. There was LeBron and AD, rushing back to the hotel after a win so they could celebrate their victory

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with a big glass of red. There were the Houston Rockets and how, after practice, they’d all look at one another and shout, “Lil Yachty! Lil Yachty!”—which meant they were going to the boat to drink. “There were a lot of really good times in the bubble,” Paul adds. “As much as people talk about how tough it was to be away from their families and stu≠, to me there were probably a lot of better times than not.” A few players took the isolation in stride and just appreciated the quietude. Around 7:30 every night Austin Rivers says he would sit out on his balcony, put on some headphones, and take a moment for himself. “My room had a view of the little magic castle or whatever,” he says. “It was nice.” Whenever the sun went down, Bam Adebayo would take a left out of the back lobby of the Gran Destino and go for a long walk along the perimeter of the hotel’s campus to clear his head and “get a somewhat di≠erent look from Groundhog Day,” he says. He went on his walk after losing Game 6 of the NBA Finals, even though the route took him past the Three Bridges restaurant, where the Lakers were celebrating their championship win over the Heat. “At that point you realize the season’s over,” says Adebayo. “That was part of what was going through my mind: This is the last walk for my routine. Of being in the bubble.”

CHAPTER III: Everything but Basketball I remember being at Fred VanVleet’s post-practice press conference after Jacob Blake was shot in Kenosha, Wisconsin. VanVleet’s eyes were glazed, and he didn’t want to take any questions about basketball. When it was my turn to speak, I simply asked him how he was doing; the games just didn’t feel important in the moment. VanVleet collected himself and gave an answer that was at once raw and multidimensional: He said he was heartbroken and had survivor’s remorse. That he felt isolated in the bubble. That people can’t underestimate the trauma that comes from watching videos on their phones of Black men dying and seeing comments that argued they should have just listened to the police. He told me about his father, who was killed when VanVleet was young. It was a heavy moment for all of us, and when that press conference was over, I looked down at my phone and saw I had a text from Fred asking me how I was doing. My answer was the same as his: I was heartbroken too. Most of the players felt the same way. On August 26, a few days after Blake’s shooting, George Hill asked for a breakfast meeting with head coach Mike Budenholzer and the rest of the coaching sta≠. Hill ordered the same breakfast he always did, with his double serving of bacon and a tangerine juice, and told them that he “didn’t feel comfortable playing” and wasn’t going to. “That was the last thing on my mind,” says Hill. “I didn’t want to do it.” It wasn’t just Blake who sparked his decision to sit out: It was Kyle Rittenhouse, a white 17-year-old who crossed state lines into Wisconsin and shot three protesters, leaving two dead and one seriously

injured. “We let that kid go all the way back home,” Hill tells me. “They didn’t slam him on the ground. They didn’t put him in handcu≠s. They didn’t do anything. They let him go all the way back to Illinois and arrested him the next day. If it was the other way around, would that have happened? I don’t think so.” Hill had seen enough, and his coaches informed the Bucks of his decision to sit out. One of those players was Sterling Brown, who was tased and arrested by Milwaukee police in 2018 over an alleged parking violation. For Brown, this was personal. It wasn’t long before the Milwaukee Bucks organization collectively made the unprecedented decision not to play in Game 5 against the Orlando Magic, e≠ectively bringing the NBA to a halt. And if George Hill hadn’t sat out, there was a strong possibility that a league-wide strike still would have taken place. The Raptors were set to play the Celtics the day after the Bucks decided to stay in the locker room. While the Bucks were deliberating, Raptors players Fred VanVleet and Kyle Lowry quietly met with members of the Celtics to discuss what they should do, and Masai Ujiri ran into Celtics coach Brad Stevens, and the two talked about not playing. “It was going to happen, to be honest,” says Ujiri. If it hadn’t been the Bucks who initiated the strike, it probably would have been the Raptors and the Celtics. Meanwhile, players inside the bubble were all wondering the same thing: What can we do? A few wanted to end the season then and there. They all had a decision to make, and so later that evening, the remaining teams agreed to convene at the Gran Destino for a historic meeting to discuss what was next.

CHAPTER IV: The Meeting The players all gathered in what was described to me as “a big-ass room.” Media weren’t present; it was players and coaching sta≠ only. “It was a bunch of circles—each team was in a circle,” says Austin Rivers. “And then other players started going to other circles.” “I was worried that night because it was more emotional than it was anything else,” Doc Rivers says. “It was great to see, because I don’t think people feel like guys who are millionaires care. But I saw guys with tears in their eyes, guys with anger, guys who were mad. Guys who wanted to do something. And then I also saw a bunch of us not knowing what to do.” “It was like chaos,” says Austin. “We were just throwing ideas back and forth o≠ of each other,” says George Hill. “Why we should play, why we shouldn’t. What’s going on in the world? What are we standing for?” At some point, money became a point of contention. The fact of the matter was there were guys in the bubble in di≠erent financial situations, and not everyone could a≠ord to forgo the season. A few of them were max players, with multiyear contracts in the hundreds of millions, while other guys were just trying to carve out a career for themselves. “It definitely felt that a lot of what was talked about was the social injustice part,” says Hill. “And then there was a handful that would talk about the financial loss. A lot of us were

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saying, ‘What does money mean if you have no humanity?’ And a lot of [other people] were saying, ‘We want the money.’ So sometimes money trumps humanity, I guess. But that’s what it was, and I don’t fault anybody. Everyone has a di≠erent life, and everyone has di≠erent values.” Carmelo Anthony put it another way: “We want change around the world, but then you start talking about money? Money is the root of all evil.” Pretty much the whole room was upset that the Bucks decided not to play without informing the other teams. Multiple players told me that everyone felt like one team made the decision for the rest of the league. “Then Jaylen [Brown of the Celtics] stood up and said that the Milwaukee Bucks don’t owe anybody no apology,” Hill recalls. “They did what they thought was right, and that’s what it was. It was very special. As a young man himself, to stand up and say that? It meant a lot.” Everyone was looking for leadership. The Clippers and the Lakers were so adamant about doing something that at one point they just walked right out. “We were just willing to make a stand, willing to put it all on the line,” says Lakers guard Danny Green, “even though we knew we had a really good chance at being the last team standing.” Tensions were high, and with teams storming out, the night ended without any real resolution. The following morning, members of the NBPA executive committee had a phone call with owners and executives across the league. Some of the most powerful people in sports were on that call, including Charlotte Hornets owner Michael Jordan. “Michael was a calming influence,” Mavericks owner Mark Cuban tells me. “I think that was really impactful. Because in the back of everybody’s minds, people think, ‘Republicans buy sneakers too.’ And here was Michael Jordan stepping out and really connecting to players and really saying, ‘Okay, we’re all in this together. What do we need to do?’ ” It was LeBron James who had the final statement on the call. “I thought [LeBron] was really compelling,” Cuban recalls. “He talked about how we need to be able to connect to young African American kids. What really stuck with me was when he said a lot of kids where he grew up can’t a≠ord cable and that the only way to watch our games is on cable. And we have a challenge [in addressing] those types of issues and lifting people up, so that it’s not about cable or watching the NBA on cable but more about: How do we help these kids improve where they are in life?” The players and owners landed on a plan. Not only would the league commit to making social justice a cornerstone of its mission going forward, but it would form an o∞cial coalition within the NBA that, per a joint press release, focused on “a broad range of issues, including increasing access to voting, promoting civic engagement, and advocating for meaningful police and criminal justice reform.” This coalition would be composed of players and owners, with hundreds of millions of dollars behind it. And it was the players who made it all happen. They were fighting for real change, something they could point back to, something that

would have a lasting impact beyond their time in Orlando. And once they had that plan in place, the games resumed.

CHAPTER V: The Right Space at the Right Time By the end of August, basketball had resumed and continued at a high level—and a few breakout stars were playing out of their minds, including Jamal Murray, who competed in a custom pair of Adidas sneakers painted with the faces of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor that he wore into the ground—but I was beginning to feel a sense of exhaustion creep into the bubble. Guys seem fatigued. Fewer players lingered in the common areas after practices or games. “It was a lot tougher than I ever thought it would be,” says Doc Rivers of his time inside. Doc’s Clippers came into the postseason with lofty aspirations, and it seemed like a foregone conclusion that we’d get a groundbreaking L.A. vs. L.A. Western Conference Finals. But the bubble was not kind to the Clippers, and Paul George in particular was heavily criticized for his playo≠ struggles. A press conference following a win over the Mavericks provided a little clarity: George said he was feeling “anxiety” and “a little bit of depression from being locked in here.” It was notable because it was the ﬁrst time any of us had witnessed George be vulnerable. “PG, clearly [the bubble] was bothering him,” says Doc Rivers. “And because he’s such a quiet guy to begin with, I honestly didn’t see it until I heard about it and I saw it. And then it was real for me.” It was up to the players to be there for one another. During the Finals, when Danny Green missed an open three at the top of the key to clinch a Lakers championship at the end of Game 5, he and his ﬁancée started to receive death threats online, which made an already di∞cult situation even harder. “It was one of those nights that you don’t sleep much,” Green tells me. He was thankful for the brotherhood of players who had his back, including George, who reached out to Green directly and also posted a message to his Instagram Stories: Stay blessed bro…One of the best guns out there. That realness hit us all at di≠erent times. You’re in a place that’s safe from the coronavirus, doing the exact same thing every day, and it’s easy to feel like you aren’t a part of the outside world. The problem with that feeling is that everyone you love is in the outside world and their lives are moving at a pace that yours is not. That realness hit me when I learned about my great-uncle, Lou Brock, who played for the St. Louis Cardinals. He passed away back home in Missouri. The day after he died, Jayson Tatum—St. Louis’s very own and someone I’ve known since he was 15—wore his Cardinals-colorway Jordan 34 shoes and wrote “R.I.P. Lou Brock” on the side. After the game, he found me to make sure I was okay, and it was one of the few times inside the bubble I remember feeling at home. A couple of players said one of the rawest moments happened during that big meeting, when Houston Rockets assistant coach John

Lucas launched into a speech and talked about how stressful the bubble was for everybody. It had been particularly stressful for him, as someone who’s struggled with alcoholism. “I know most people in here are just drinking every night because there’s nothing else to do,” he said. “And at some point a lot of people are going to turn into alcoholics.” The moment hit hard for a lot of the players. “We’re [in the bubble] going crazy, the testosterone levels are through the roof, no one’s significant other is there, and the single men are probably really going crazy because they’re used to just doing what they want,” says McCollum. “So it was just like a lot of tension and stress. And then [John] just comes out and starts saying what everybody was thinking.” When his speech concluded, the players all erupted and gave Lucas a standing ovation. For me, there was one moment in the bubble that sticks out above all the others. It was the week that Jacob Blake was shot, and I was sitting outside the Coronado Springs convention center ballroom waiting for the Raptors’ practice to end. Masai Ujiri walked up to me and another reporter unprompted and said, “We should have never come to the bubble.” Ujiri was emotional. He is intimately familiar with how it feels to be wronged by police just because you’re a Black man. The week prior, body cam footage from the 2019 NBA Finals had surfaced, showing a white police o∞cer grabbing and shoving Masai as he tried to step on the court after his Raptors beat the Warriors for the championship. There it was, plain as day: Even a powerful Black man, the president of an NBA team, wasn’t safe from being brutalized by the police. Ujiri knew he had to show his players before they saw it elsewhere. “I cried when I showed the players my video,” he says. “And I cried when I got the video from the lawyer. And when my wife watched it [with me]… That was emotional, and I cried again.” In hindsight, Ujiri says he doesn’t regret returning to the bubble: “Honestly, Taylor, sports brings us all together. We have the ability to address these issues head-on and galvanize and hope for change and try to create that change. We have to be in that space, and the bubble was that space at that time.” I left the bubble for good right before the Conference Finals to attend my uncle’s funeral. As I passed the cartoon signs on the ride to the airport, the sense that I was there for a moment in history finally hit me. Here were these players fighting for equality, fighting with each other for a championship while fighting for each other. These were men who were constantly checking on each other, who showed us all that while being great is impressive, being good can be just as meaningful. “When I first got out and got home, I’m like, ‘Damn, what am I supposed to do now?’ ” Jayson Tatum tells me. “I got no plans. I’ve got nowhere to go. I’m not waking up to get tested every morning and check my heart monitor and take my temperature. The first couple days were weird. “I was like, ‘Damn, do I miss the bubble?’ ” taylor rooks is a host and reporter for Bleacher Report and Turner Sports.

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may take some reﬂection after the season ends to better understand how people reacted to us, and in what cases. If we had not done certain things, would we have been responding to people who honestly weren’t fans of the league to begin with, as opposed to engaging those people who are our fans? The cofounder of Nike, Phil Knight, came and spoke to our 30 teams two years ago. Someone asked him for marketing advice. And he said, “It’s very simple. Focus on the people who like you, not the people who don’t like you.” Right. I know that many of our core fans were far from tuning us out—they became more engaged in the league as a result of these messages. We’re proud of our players for taking the position, and not just on Black Lives Matter but for becoming more engaged civically. I mean, [National Basketball Players Association president] Chris Paul announced just earlier this week that 90 percent of eligible NBA players were now registered to vote. We’ve converted much of our messaging directly to civic engagement under the notion that protest is great, but it has to be paired with action. Your predecessor, David Stern, particularly early in his tenure, had to fight the idea that the NBA was “the Black league.” And that has affected the way the NBA has done some things. But now it sounds like there are some people that you have decided that you’re not going to be able to win over and that it’s no longer a primary fight of the NBA in terms of the messaging and promotion of the league. It’s interesting that you raise that issue with regard to David, because even when I got to the league, in the early ’90s, that was still an issue. And in the same way that I think anybody would have been naive to think we were post-racial, of course those issues have never gone away. I wouldn’t say that our goal still isn’t to win those fans over; of course, my goal is to win everybody over. And part of winning them over is to listen to them and to maybe engage with them so they better understand our perspective. I’d say part of the issue with Black Lives Matter was that we were subject to how others 3. After ﬁerce blowback from Chinese fans, Morey seemed to walk back his original tweet, and American politicians, both Democrat and Republican, criticized the NBA for seemingly conceding to denunciations from China.

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chose to interpret that movement. And I could bang the table all day long and say, “No, our support of Black Lives Matter, that is a social justice movement in which 25 million people took to the streets in the United States to support.” Yet others have chosen to label Black Lives Matter as an anti-American Marxist organization. And I recognize because that’s written on our floor, we have to own that point of view as well. I only say that because long before there was even a movement called Black Lives Matter, there was the NBA. There was Bill Russell, there was Oscar Robertson and Wayne Embry and Lenny Wilkens and all these great Black leaders within the league. Part of what I’m focusing on is finding our own voice for next season and putting us in a leadership position on these issues, and—maybe I’m naive to say this—putting us in a role to unify people as well. Now, some people might suggest that the words Black Lives Matter are causing massive amounts of people to tune out the NBA. There’s absolutely no data to support that. And in fact, as I said, there’s no doubt there are some people—and whether or not they were truly our fans to begin with is unclear—who have become further engaged with the league because they believe in our players and they believe in the positions they’ve taken, even if they don’t agree with everything they say. They respect their right to speak out on issues that are important to them. On August 26, when the Bucks announced that they wouldn’t be playing, how wobbly did the bubble begin to feel? I mean, some people referred to it as a boycott, but to me it was a work stoppage. It was generally, I think, a pause in terms of players trying to decide whether to keep going. I think of a boycott as something directed at economic leverage at the league. It wasn’t so much about the management of the league; it was just like, “Should we go on?” We had that discussion with a group of governors. Michael Jordan, as the chairman of the labor relations committee, led that meeting. Out of that meeting, we collectively agreed we would redouble our e≠orts to convert our arenas into polling places. Although we had agreed early in the summer to create a foundation, a partnership between the teams and the players, seeded with $300 million of capital from the team owners and dedicated to economic empowerment, there was a sense from the players that we needed another platform. You know, our voices are being heard, but how do we e≠ect change? And what we decided was, let’s create what we’re calling the National Basketball Social Justice Coalition, which is an organization of owners and players that can e≠ect legislative change. In some ways, we became closer as a result of that work stoppage and at least then we had a course of action. For the players it was: “All right, we now have a new organization that can focus specifically on these issues.” How would you respond to those who struggle to reconcile these established values that the NBA represents and

the business relationship that the league has with China? I think they’re very di≠erent. I don’t think it should be a surprise to people that in a league that is 80 percent Black, that issues of social justice are the issues that they choose to speak out on. To me, that’s the essence of what free speech is. Free speech is your decision as to what to speak out on and where to focus your attention. And through the relationships that we have in China—directly with the hundreds of millions of people in China that follow NBA basketball—we are an exporter of American values. And again, I’m not naive. I don’t mean to suggest that therefore their system of government will change because people watch NBA basketball. But I think through those relationships come commonality of interest and ultimately empathy and a better understanding of each other. I don’t know how else to say it, but I think it’s a net positive, because the alternative is disengagement. But I guess that people could say, “Well, it’s inconsistent with our values.” And I’d say, “Do you make decisions based on one issue?” I still believe that by engaging with people in China, by exporting what is a piece of Americana through the NBA, that we are supporting our fundamental values and that the alternative of not doing it would not improve things. Now, I think there’s been a misinterpretation around the Daryl Morey tweet, and it 3 confuses me in terms of people’s reactions. Our response was “No, we support freedom of expression.” That is a bedrock American principle, and that if they choose to not air our games as a result of that tweet, we accept the consequences. Hopefully, the Chinese will see that. And it’s no surprise: We have a di≠erent system, and that’s what we believe in. It’s two governments having disagreements. Where does the relationship between the NBA and the Chinese government stand now? We don’t have a direct relationship with the government. Our games continue to be distributed on what is a private streaming service there called Tencent. But I think that taking our games [temporarily] o≠ China Central Television has sent a very clear signal to Chinese citizens from the Chinese government that we are being disfavored at this time. And we are continuing to do what we do. And certainly, for Chinese citizens who watch our games, whatever messages are on our ﬂoor, whatever messages are on our jerseys, are seen by them. And certainly our players who choose to speak out on the issues important to them, whatever those issues are, will be heard around the world. I believe that over time, the Chinese will recognize that this kind of engagement is in their interest as well. I believe in diplomacy. That we have to learn to coexist. And it doesn’t mean, by any measure, that we are endorsing particular practices in China. Far from it. But it’s a recognition that we’re all human beings, and sports creates commonality. And we have to learn to live with each other. bomani jones is the host of the ESPN podcast ‘The Right Time With Bomani Jones.’

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Besides the life-altering fame engendered by ER, another legacy of the show, for Clooney, was more complex: For years, people thought he was a bad actor. David O. Russell, who directed Clooney in 1999’s Three Kings, infamously told him on that set, “Why don’t you worry about your fucked-up acting!” That anecdote comes from Clooney himself, as does another one, about Steven Spielberg, who once visited the set of ER, tapped the monitor after watching one of Clooney’s takes, and told the actor that he might be a star someday if he could just stop moving his head all the time. There are acting mystics in Hollywood— Daniel Day-Lewis, for instance, who won the Academy Award for There Will Be Blood the same year Clooney was nominated for Michael Clayton—and then there are guys like Clooney, who for a while was known for the more humdrum art of showing up to a set and reliably hitting his marks or, worse, starring as the least loved Batman in the history of Batmen, a

“For 36 years, I was the guy that if some kid popped up and started crying, I’d be like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ And now suddenly I’m the guy with the kid, you know?” fact he cheerfully owns. “The only way you can honestly talk about things is to include yourself and your shortcomings in those things,” he says now. “Like, when I say Batman & Robin’s a terrible ﬁlm, I always go, ‘I was terrible in it.’ Because I was, number one. But also because then it allows you the ability to say, ‘Having said I sucked in it, I can also say that none of these other elements worked, either.’ You know? Lines like ‘Freeze, Freeze!’ ” Clooney doesn’t talk about acting much— perhaps because it would betray e≠ort, which by nature he’s not inclined to exhibit—but when he does, it’s fascinating. He says that in the beginning his reputation for being an overly busy actor was earned. “I’d had some success doing smaller parts in television, and when you’re doing smaller parts in TV, you’re in general trying to ﬁll it with stu≠,” he says. “And so what Spielberg was right about was that if I was gonna be one of the leads on the show and people are gonna watch it through my eyes, then I needed to take away all of the tricks I’d learned for getting through not very well-written pieces. You know, you’d eat in a

scene that’s not funny, but if you’re talking with your mouth full, it’s funny.” He starts describing the stages of acting, all of which he went through. “The first thing you see is everybody overacts,” he says. “You’re trying to cry. Well, people don’t try to cry. Actors try to cry. People try not to cry. Right? You’re playing the event, which is always a mistake. Then you get a few years under you, and then you learn some skills, and then the next stage is you underplay everything. Nothing is specific. Everything is quiet and important and you’re looking everybody in the eye when you talk to them.” He recalls a day on ER, a scene in which it was snowing and a patient comes into the emergency room and they’re covered in snow. “And each of the doctors who would come in would see the snow on ’em and go, ‘Is it snowing?’ And each of them would play it as if it was, you know, just the question. Like, with no opinion to it. ‘Is it snowing?’ ‘Is it snowing?’ And everyone would come in: ‘Is it snowing?’ ‘Is it snowing?’ And I watched this one actor come in, and he looked at the patient, just looked down, and goes, [in the most irritated, disappointed voice possible] ‘Is it snowing?’ And the di≠erence in tone, the anger, that clearly he had a plan for the day and snow fucked it up, made it specific. And once it’s specific, then that’s sort of the third stage of acting to me.” And forgive me, but I’m going to keep quoting Clooney here, because how often do you get to see an actor of his caliber show exactly how he does what he does? He describes another scene, a hypothetical. “It’s two people sitting on a park bench and they’re talking, it’s a guy and a girl, they’re young, she’s sexy, he’s a good-looking guy, and all of the dialogue is about baseball. ‘Oh, Pete Rose can hit, can’t he?’ ‘Well, I actually like Joe Morgan.’ ‘You like Joe Morgan? I like Ken Gri≠ey.’ ‘Oh, really? Ken Gri≠ey’s good.’ That’s the scene, right? But the event in the scene is the girl is there to pick up the guy, so everything changes, then. The way you talk about the baseball players, the way you look at each other, the pauses in between one another. So you’re not just taking the dialogue and doing it—you’re infusing the actual event. The event: You guys are there to try to fuck. Right? Let’s say the director says that. That’s what these characters are there to do. Now everything changes in the way you deliver those lines.” Clooney says once he learned to understand the exact impression he was trying to convey, he got better at conveying it. (This is true about Clooney o≠-screen as well, I can attest; you watch him gauge his e≠ect as he goes.) Other actors are di≠erent, he says, but that’s how he does it. “Look, Daniel [Day-Lewis], who’s one of our greatest of all time, he is fully submersive, and I can watch him do anything. But I could watch Spencer Tracy do anything just as easily, and Spencer Tracy’s the guy who looks at his mark. Stares at his mark. Looks down at it—literally, like, puts his forehead down—looks at it for 30 seconds as if making sure he’s got his feet exactly on the mark while he’s talking, and then he looks up and talks to you. Never rehearses. And you can’t take your eyes o≠ of him, because everything he did was true. So there’s a lot of ways to get there.”

Clooney has been nominated for eight Academy Awards and won once for his acting, in 2005’s Syriana. “If I get hit by a bus today, they’d say ‘Oscar winner,’ ” he says. But some of his favorite roles, including in The Midnight Sky, are the ones in which he has tried to do as little as possible. “I remember doing The American, and it was like that,” he says. “The American was a version where it was all about: ‘How still can you possibly be?’ ” That ability, Clooney says, to just be still— to do less, in all senses—is something that comes with age. “I’ll give you an example of how this works,” he says, “and I’ll use my aunt Rosemary”—the great Rosemary Clooney, of “This Ole House” and White Christmas—“who was a wonderful singer. And I would say to her, ‘Why are you a better singer now at 65 than you were when you were at 25, when you could hit higher notes, when you could hold them longer?’ And she goes, ‘Because I don’t have to prove I can sing anymore. And because of it, I serve the material. If the material’s good, I can sing, you know, Why shouldn’t I…? and it’s at a di≠erent pace.’ ” And now George Clooney begins to sing, in a voice that is as nostalgic and comforting as a warm ﬁre. “It’s [sings languidly] Why shouldn’t I take a chance…? instead of [sings showily] Why shouldn’t I take a chance…? She doesn’t have to prove she can sing, so she can serve the material. And I feel like over the last, you know, 10 or 15 years or so, I got to the point where I was like, ‘I can’t sit around and try to prove to people what I can do as an actor.’ I’m much more comfortable in my own skin. When you struggled for 12 or so years as an actor, when you get in, all you want to do is prove you can act and all the stu≠ you can do and show o≠ all your tricks. And then as you ease into it, you kind of go, ‘Well, I don’t feel like I have to prove anything anymore.’ ” These days, that feeling of having nothing to prove has led Clooney to act less and less. “I can remember, I did, like, seven television series before ER. A dozen pilots. I’d done hundreds of episodes of television. So if, let’s say, you’re doing a season of ER, which is 22 episodes, and let’s say a movie’s two hours long and our episodes are an hour, that’s basically like doing 11 movies a year, right? In terms of acting, in terms of all of the choices you’re making as an actor, all those things. So you’re getting to the point of saturation, of like, ‘Well, I’ve played it like this, I’ve played it like that, I’ve done this, I’ve done that, I’ve tried this, I’ve tried that.’ So as time goes on, you’re starting to look around, going, ‘Well, how else am I gonna be involved in this business that I really love?’ I love this business. And I also don’t want to be 60 and worry about what some casting director or some young producer or studio executive thinks about me anymore. I wanted to be involved.” So, he says, he’s chosen directing. “Directing is the painter,” he says. “Acting, writing, you know, those are the paints.” I interrupt him again here. Respectfully, I say, this may be true for many actors, but many actors are not George Clooney. We only get so many Clark Gables and Gregory Pecks. Spencer Tracy, to name a hero of his. We only get so many icons. Maybe Clooney could be that too. Maybe he already is. So, I say, perhaps it’s

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not as simple as being like, “Yeah, man, I did a lot of takes on ER. Time to do something else.” “Well, but look at acting careers,” Clooney says. “It’s a funny thing. Go back and look at some of the biggest actors in the world. And take the guys that I love the most, the Spencer Tracys or the Cary Grants, and look at the longevity of their actual careers and you’ll find something really funny: 20 years—15 years, some of ’em. Some of ’em 25 years, maybe. They’re not as long as you think they are. And part of it for me was actors are never in control of their own career. If you’re lucky enough to be able to pick and choose, you can say no to crappy ones and say yes to the good ones, and I’ve done both. But as time goes on, it’s boring to just be an actor.” Can I ask you what became boring about acting? “I’m not saying ‘boring,’ ” Clooney says, changing his mind a little. He points at me: “You watch movies. You get your screeners at the end of the year, you start going through them. It’s hard to find 10 films that you go, ‘Wow, I get it, man. This is great.’ There are moments in films, lots of ’em, but a full film that you just go, ‘Wow, this is great’? It’s not like there are that many out there. It’s not like Michael Clayton comes around every day or O Brother, Where Art Thou? Out of Sight. You know, Up in the Air or The Descendants. There aren’t that many. That’s one every couple of years. And I’d like to work a little more than that, and I also—look, it’s less about being bored about something and much more about loving the other elements. You know?” I ask Grant Heslov about his friend’s decision to step back from acting, to direct and otherwise live his life. “This is how he put it to me when I was trying to do something during the summer recently,” Heslov says by way of an explanation. He says Clooney proposed an exercise. “ ‘Let’s sit down and try to figure out how many summers we have left,’ ” Clooney said. “ ‘Let’s say we were 55 at the time. So let’s say we have 25 more summers left—25 years, 25 summers. That doesn’t seem like that many if you lose a whole summer, right?’ ”

Clooney and I are talking a few hours after the state of Kentucky has decided not to meaningfully charge or arrest the o∞cers who killed Breonna Taylor, and Clooney looks legitimately anguished: sunk into himself and sad. Clooney is from Kentucky. His parents still live there, and he goes back regularly to visit them. “I can’t believe it,” he says. “There’s not even a manslaughter charge for a woman who was lying in bed and got shot to death.” He rubs his eyes. “Imagine if those were three Black o∞cers and they kicked in the door of a white person’s home and shot and killed the woman, the wife, in bed. Imagine that. Fucking ridiculous. You know, it’s just infuriating.” He says he hopes that the protests in his home state remain peaceful tonight. Then, he says, actually: “You know, they talk about looting and stu≠. Well, there have been an awful lot of Black bodies that have been looted for 400 fucking years. And…” He sighs and trails o≠ and massages his neck, into which he got an injection this morning. “I have to do another one tomorrow,” he A B O U T A W E E K L AT E R ,

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says. “It’s a little like the Tin Man with the oil can.” And we go on to talk about other things, but after we’re done, Clooney will sit down and write an angry letter to Deadline about the verdict, or lack thereof, in Kentucky. “I’m ashamed of this decision,” he’ll write. Clooney has always been a letter writer, and sometimes an angry one. “I actually have these stacks of letters and things that my assistant calls George Versus the World,” he tells me. Just the other day, he says, he responded to someone in Saudi Arabia who was asking for permission to edit The Monuments Men for screening there. And they wanted to cut out some of the explicit language, which Clooney was fine with, “but then at the bottom it said, ‘and we want to blur out the Star of David in these three shots.’ And I wrote a really scathing letter two days ago where I just said, you know, ‘I’ve been doing this a long time, and no one in my life has ever asked me to blur out particularly a Star of David in a movie that’s about the stealing of art and then the mass murder of Jews.’ And I just said, ‘So the answer is: No, you can’t have the film, and no, we won’t be making any of these cuts, and go fuck yourself.’ ” Clooney gently misquotes John Lewis, saying he’s always taken pride in picking “good fights,” and this is true. The list of former Clooney enemies—though not particularly long—is extremely deserving: TV Guide, for its habit of omitting Eriq La Salle, ER’s most prominent Black cast member, from its covers back in the day; Russell Crowe (“Just out of the blue, he’s like, ‘I’m not some sellout like Robert De Niro and Harrison Ford and George Clooney.’ I’m like, ‘Where the fuck did that come from?’ ”); a Washington Post film critic, for suggesting that Clooney’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind was actually directed by Clooney’s friend Steven Soderbergh (“At the end of the letter, I said, ‘Letter actually written by George Clooney’ ”). But, he says, these days he’s mostly ceded the fights to other people. “I have much more fun watching Chrissy Teigen,” Clooney says. “Somebody steps into her world and you go, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that, dude.’ It’s so much fun. Like somebody who thinks they’re really smart, and you just go, ‘Ugh, dude. You brought a knife to a gunfight.’ ” But Clooney has always seemed to understand that celebrity is a game to be played, rather than a burden to be endured. It’s not a coincidence that the most successful franchise he’s been a part of was the Ocean’s trilogy—three films built around movie stars playing glamorous people in lavish locations. Clooney is the rare person who makes fame seem fun—an opportunity for mischief and adventure. He has used his voice for innumerable just causes; he has also done things like hand out noise-canceling headphones to fellow airline passengers, for use in case one of his twins started wailing midflight. (“For 36 years, I was the guy that if some kid popped up and started crying, I’d be like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ And now suddenly I’m the guy with the kid, you know?”) In 2017, his good friend Rande Gerber went on MSNBC and told a story about how, years earlier, Clooney had summoned 14 of his closest friends and given them each a million dollars, in cash, in a suitcase. Clooney has never really confirmed or denied doing this, and when I ask him about

it, he rummages around for a moment and, for the first time since he initially showed it to me, comes up holding his neck brace. He wraps it around his neck, the big white priest’s collar, and grins silently. But in the end he can’t resist a good story, and so he tells it anyway. “Amal and I had just met, but we weren’t dating at all,” he says. “I was a single guy. All of us were aging. I was 52 or something. And most of my friends are older than me.” This was 2013. Gravity was just about to come out, “and because they didn’t want to pay us, they gave us percentages of the movie, ’cause they thought it was gonna be a flop, and that ended up being a very good deal.” So he had some money— though not, interestingly, as much as he has now; Clooney’s biggest financial windfall, from the $1 billion sale of Casamigos, the tequila company he started with Gerber and another friend, wouldn’t come for four more years. But in 2013, he didn’t yet have a family, nor any real idea or hope that someday he would. “And I thought, what I do have are these guys who’ve all, over a period of 35 years, helped me in one way or another. I’ve slept on their couches when I was broke. They loaned me money when I was broke. They helped me when I needed help over the years. And I’ve helped them over the years. We’re all good friends. And I thought, you know, without them I don’t have any of this. And we’re all really close, and I just thought basically if I get hit by a bus, they’re all in the will. So why the fuck am I waiting to get hit by a bus?” The next step was how do you lay hands on $14 million in cash? And Clooney did some research, and what he found was that in downtown Los Angeles, in an undisclosed location, there is a place you can go, “and they have giant pallets of cash.” So Clooney got an old beat-up van that said “Florist” on it, like he was in a heist movie, and he drove downtown, and he got in an elevator with the florist’s van, and he took the van down to the vault and loaded it up with cash. He told no one but his assistant “and a couple of security guys that were shitting themselves. And we brought it up, and I bought 14 Tumi bags, and then I packed in a million bucks, cash, which isn’t as much as you think it is, weight-wise, into these Tumi bags.” The next day he had all his friends come over. “And I just held up a map and I just pointed to all the places I got to go in the world and all the things I’ve gotten to see because of them. And I said, ‘How do you repay people like that?’ And I said, ‘Oh, well: How about a million bucks?’ And the fun part about it was: That was the 27th, the 28th of September. A year later, on the 27th of September, just by happenstance, was the day I got married.” And this is a story about a charmed life, of course, but it’s also a story about a guy who is doing his best to keep it that way, to liven up the days, to give himself more stories to tell before his time is up. “You know, it’s funny,” Clooney says. “I remember talking to one really rich asshole who I ran into in a hotel in Vegas— certainly a lot richer than I am. And I remember the story about the cash had come out, and he was like, ‘Why would you do that?’ ” Clooney smiles. “And I was like, ‘Why wouldn’t you do that, you schmuck?’ ” zach baron is gq’s senior sta≠ writer.

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comfortable with our culture, because they don’t understand us. Some of them do not want to understand us. It has to start from somewhere, either it’s us or it’s them. But I feel it’s always been us, because we’re the ones who’ve been forgiving. Mike was 280, six feet four. So I had to have talks with him when he was 15, when he was five feet eleven and 200 pounds. I told him about incidents when I was younger. They used to pull up on us and have us stand up on our tippy-toes and hit us in the back of the neck with a billy club and think that we’re going to stay still. No, we’re not. We’re going to go forward, because that’s our balance. But if we moved, we got locked up. And he was like, “Man, I hope that’ll never happen to me.” And I was like, “Well, I hope it don’t. But sadly, it could, son. You are way bigger than me. When you walk down the street, can’t nobody tell if you’re a grown man or a kid.” Truth is, they can hear the softness in your voice and know that you’re young. But they can play that role that they thought you were a grown man. And that actually happened in his life. When you first see them come out the womb, you make promises to yourself: “I will never let nothing happen to you.” I think it’s just the male nature that almost destroyed me—I felt like I should have been there. Or it should have been me, not him. And I was told that was natural: “It should have bothered you, because it showed us that you were human.” And I was like, “I am human.” But it showed me in a di≠erent light, that I have feelings. I go to the grave for my own peace. That’s where I don’t really see nobody. I can go to Canfield right now, get out the car, and I get blows: “Hey, Mr. Brown!” Which is cool. But people want to talk. And at that point I don’t really be wanting to talk. I just want to remember. So I go to the grave, and that’s where I get my space. I don’t have to worry about nobody stopping me out of whatever thought I have going on. So I can have my moment for him. Like, “Look what you got me into, man.” And I just laugh because I feel like there wasn’t no better person to go through this fight for him. I am his father. We share the same name. I finally got all my strength to withstand this pressure on my back. I still have people that think I can save this world. I know I can’t. But I try to give advice. I know he’s proud of it. And I’m still proud of him from the grave.

often says he really learned how America works during those years. His very first professional show in America was a three-minute set at the Laugh Factory in L.A. The audience didn’t quite know what to make of this tall light-skinned foreigner. “These people were silent; they didn’t know what the hell was going on,” Noah recalled. “And then, midway through the set, I told one joke and nobody laughed. But then one person laughed so hard that everyone turned and looked into the balcony. It was Katt Williams.” “Don’t change,” Williams implored Noah after the show. “People are going to try to change your comedy. Don’t change.” While American audiences tried to figure him out, Noah was quickly embraced by his fellow Black comedians. Arsenio Hall told me he was first turned on to Noah years ago by Eddie Murphy, who insisted they watch one of Noah’s Johannesburg stand-up specials. “This kid is the truth!” Hall recalled exclaiming. To this day, Chris Rock texts him out of the blue to o≠er advice. Dave Chappelle has become both a friend and a mentor. Soon the love spread to Black audiences. “I would get referrals, one Black club to the next, one Black comedian to the next,” Noah recalled. “I came to realize that although we grew up a continent apart, goddamn, so many of our stories are similar. You would think Black Americans grew up in South Africa or in parts of Africa with how similar we are.” Back home in South Africa, schoolmates and neighbors had assumed Noah was “coloured” (the term used to describe the country’s mixed-race caste); in England he was identified first as a South African and secondarily as biracial. America is more binary. “In America they’re just like, ‘Black.’ I guess that’s a vestige of the one-drop rule. ‘Yeah. Black. Let’s keep it moving,’ ” he told me. Noah and I joked about the fascination with which white Americans view biracial people. There is often an assumption that having one Black parent and one white parent must prompt some sort of an identity crisis, that the decision to identify as Black was a monumental choice, as opposed to an obvious conclusion reached after a childhood glance at pigment. A white therapist once asked me if I’d ever thought to consider myself white, and I broke out in laughter. Much is made of the supposed pressure to “act Black,” but American Black communities are generally as accepting as they are diverse. Among people whose lineages have been muddied for centuries, being mixed doesn’t make you special—you’re just part of the family. If anything, the most noteworthy aspects of

mosi secret is a former ‘New York Times’ reporter now working on a book about a social experiment to integrate elite private schools in the American South.

being biracial are the odd beneﬁts that colorism bequeaths you with white people. While biracial people unquestionably face racism, no one crosses the street in suspicion when they see Barack Obama coming; no one is scared of Drake—or for that matter, Trevor Noah. “White folks ain’t afraid of him,” observed Hall, the most successful Black comic in the history of American late-night television until Noah. “If you’re intimidating and you can’t cross over demographically, you can’t win. Trevor is one of those guys that Black people can be proud of and white people can rock with.” The accent, the fact that he’s not from here, and the otherness also work to Noah’s advantage. Darryl Littleton, a historian of Black comedy and himself a stand-up, said that the fact that Noah is Black, but not American Black, puts him at an advantage when analyzing race in the U.S. because “he can look at something from the outside.” Noah believes his foreignness makes white audiences more receptive to his critiques than they would be if the same words came from another Black comic. As he explained it: “Sometimes I ﬁnd some white people are more comfortable with me explaining what’s happening in America because maybe they feel like they don’t owe me anything. They’re not guilty when they talk to me. I’m not going to jump out and be like, ‘Reparations!’ So, I can explain reparations to them.”

at the park, I asked Noah if he could possibly be as calm and collected as his friends and coworkers had told me. Correspondents shared stories of his on-set cool and generosity: He’d insisted Roy Wood Jr. ﬂy to Chicago to watch his beloved Cubs win the World Series and invited Dulcé Sloan to be his opening act when he played her hometown of Atlanta. Daily Show executive producer Jen Flanz told me she could remember Noah getting frustrated only when he had a throat injury that limited his work. It has been reported that he’s paying the salaries of the entire Daily Show sta≠ during the pandemic. “A lot of the time, people know you as you may be but not as you are. What I mean by that is, I’m all of those things because I’ve su≠ered with anxiety and depression for so long,” Noah said. “It will be random, like common things. Sometimes you wake up and you’re like, ‘I don’t want to do this today.’ That’s one of the greatest blessings that The Daily Show has given me. One of the best things for depression is routine and goal-oriented tasks. Every day I have to make a show. Every day I have to ﬁnish the show. Every day I have to let go of the show.” The depression had always been there, some of it no doubt rooted in the traumas and dramas of his childhood. It manifested the same way it does for so many of us: days spent desperate to stay in bed, nights stolen by bouts of anxiety and insecurity. About four years ago, Noah began seeing a therapist. “When you’re a stand-up comedian, you don’t even realize the signs of depression because you don’t have a 9-to-5. So some days you wake up at 4 p.m. and you sleep the whole day, some days you can’t sleep until 4 a.m., and WHEN WE MET UP

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you think this is just the life of a comedian,” Noah said. “And then you realize that it’s not normal—it has control over you.” The subject of his depression was one of only two that caused Noah to fall silent during our conversations. The second was the question of what comes next for his adopted country. After all, for all the insanity that Donald Trump and the coronavirus have visited upon America, Noah has lived through worse. And as with his home country, our multicultural populace is no accident of history. “Every time people talk about melting pots, America’s a melting pot, South Africa’s a melting pot, melting pot, melting pot. What you forget is that what’s making the things in the pot melt is the ﬁre,” Noah said. He ticks o≠ the historical similarities between South Africa and America— native peoples slaughtered and oppressed, foreigners imported and put to work, immigrants systematically demonized: “There are no diverse places in the world where people just came there for good times.” Eventually, though, South African apartheid fell and the government commenced a national reconciliation process. I asked Noah if he could imagine a similar process playing out here. He is an optimist, after all. The answer came quickly: No. First of all, Noah explained, in America white people have been the majority for hundreds of years. They’ve never, collectively,

had to truly surrender power to a system of equality. The Civil War did not result in a conversation about why the South lost. Instead, “It was: ‘Ah, we lost the war. But we’re gonna carry on doing our thing,’ ” Noah said. Besides that, he noted, so many years have passed since the worst of American racialized oppression. “It’s very di∞cult to get people to express remorse for something that they themselves weren’t a part of,” he said. Then I asked Noah how America has changed him. Surely something has rubbed o≠. Had he become more cynical? More materialistic? More vain? He took a long pause. “The one trapping of America that I realized I started to slip into was that America makes you believe that you are perpetually poor,” Noah explained. “America’s the only country in the world where the news will say, ‘Mark Zuckerberg lost $50 billion today!’ He didn’t lose $50 billion. The worth of his stocks dropped, and they’re going to go up. It’s like an imaginary game that people are playing. And it’s a weird game. It tricks people into thinking that they don’t have [enough]. When in fact, we have what we need. “And so that’s what I don’t want to go back to. I don’t want to be the hardest-working man in Hollywood. I don’t want to be on the Forbes list [which ranked Noah as the fourth-highest-earning comedian in the world in 2019]. I don’t want to be part of any

of that. Forbes Happiest List—put me there if there’s such a thing.” To be clear, Noah is still working extremely hard. He’s got a production company and eventually plans a follow-up to his best-selling book, Born a Crime. His agent dreams he’ll end up on the big screen. Noah himself aspires to double the number of languages he speaks, from 5 to 10. “Trevor is going to be able to do whatever he wants to do because of his wisdom,” Hasan Minhaj told me. Minhaj recalled showing up to his ﬁrst Met gala, in 2017, and quickly attaching himself to Noah. “You’re being really nervous, and you have to be more normal,” Noah told him. It didn’t work, so later on, Noah pulled Minhaj aside for a pep talk. “Treat this moment of fame kind of like a rental car,” Noah lectured. “Take it out for a spin, enjoy it, and then give it back at the end of the night.” A few moments later, the pair spotted Nicki Minaj. Noah shouted out, “Hey, Nicki, it’s your brother!” and pointed at Hasan. “What?” the confused rapper replied. “He cracked up, and she marched o≠ into the night being Nicki Minaj,” Minhaj recalled. “Trevor was like, ‘Let’s just have fun with all of this.’ ”

she Instagrammed her hot-girl activities with her friends. She made big statements. And she reminded herself—and her fans and detractors—that she could handle the topsy-turvy moments not because of who she’d become, but because of who she’s been all along.

on whether or not you should text that fuckboy who’s driving you insane. (Do not.) Her rise has been the embodiment of fast and furious—a blitz to the top that just began in 2016, when Megan Jovon Ruth Pete was still a college student, attending Texas Southern University to study health administration, a degree she’s still determined to complete. Fellow students and her followers on Instagram knew her as Megan Thee Stallion—a moniker derived from the compliments she used to get from men about her five-foot-ten stature—but nobody else really did until she took part in a cypher with a group of local Houston rappers. Her mom gave her wardrobe advice and a ride. Video of the performance shows that Megan arrived basically as the fully formed performer we see now—direct, cool and confident and already in possession of that signature tongue-out Stallion yowl. “Everybody’s mouth was open wide like,” she remembers of the audience, “and I was like, ‘Why are you still surprised?’ ” Her mother stayed to watch, even though Megan warned that she was going to curse. But Thomas knew what to expect. She’d had her own rap career and was known around Houston as Holly-Wood. She raised Megan on UGK and Three 6 Mafia, bringing her daughter up largely by herself in the Houston suburbs. Megan’s father spent the first eight years of her life in prison and died when she was 15. Megan calls him her best friend— but her mom was always something more. She was the first person Megan ever rapped for, when she was seven years old. Megan

wesley lowery is a Pulitzer Prize– winning journalist who covers race and justice.

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for her SNL performance, stationed with her team on the top two penthouse ﬂoors of her favorite hotel on the Lower East Side. Her terrace overlooks a bar with a pool, where, I note, there’s a hot lifeguard. “Oh, the one with the dreads,” she says, comparing notes. “You know I be checking.” She loves New York. “It’s always poppin’,” she exclaims. Which is kind of her to say, because New York isn’t poppin’ in quite the way it usually is.“When I was coming up, nobody really knew me anywhere except for Houston and New York,” she says, slipping into a memory of the ﬁrst time she performed here, in a little basement club. “Everybody knew all the words, word for word, in here. It was so packed in there—like, people were onstage with me and the DJ, and someone stepped on the cord and ripped it out of the wall,” she remembers. The sound dropped out, but everyone rapped with her. “So it was me and all the hotties driving the boat and rapping to each other, just a cappella. It was crazy.” She revisits that night like it happened decades ago, but Megan is only 25. It’s easy to forget that when you watch her perform, or listen to her rap, or ask her a question about the state of, say, the environment, or for advice M E G A N I S I N N E W YO R K

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The “WAP” discourse demonstrates the way that nearly everything Megan does prompts discussion and debate. She can proudly describe the appeal of a well-lubricated vagina, and then—bam!—she’s caught up in a dialogue about the fear of Black women’s sexuality. She can go about her business, wearing a dress, or shorts, or something that shows o≠ her enviably muscular thighs, and it’s a ﬂash point in a conversation about what’s “appropriate” for someone with a body like hers (frankly, anything). She can quietly try to heal from being shot, then ﬁnd herself tugged into a national reckoning with racial injustice and the mistreatment of Black women. She’s spent the past six months riding out a storm of things both within her control and completely out of it. After the chaos of the summer, Megan barely took a break. “I was like, ‘I have to take control of this,’ ” she says. She had to remind herself, “I’m still Megan Thee Stallion.” And as soon as she could, she returned to what made her Meg. She performed, she recorded,

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had a Barbie toy that played prerecorded instrumentals and beats, she recalls. “I don’t know who at [Mattel] thought of that,” she says, “but it was fire!” When she was 18, Megan told her mom she wanted to rap. Thomas said fine but had two caveats: Megan had to wait until she was 21, and she had to get a college degree. Until her death, Thomas was Megan’s manager. She taught Megan studio etiquette—to show up on schedule, to make the most of your booked time. She told Megan to rap in her own voice. “I used to rap in a voice that was not my talking voice,” Megan explains. “I would probably sound a little monotone, and she was like, ‘Why are you rapping like that?’ I’m like, ‘What? I sound good.’ So she’s like, ‘Rap like you’re talking to me.’ I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, you right,’ and you know, you hate when your mama tell you something.” The earliest moments of Megan’s career were mostly tumult-free because of her mom. “I always just said, ‘I’m going to call my mama. She’ll know what to do,’ ” she says with a sigh. “Now I can’t just call my mama, but I’m always thinking, ‘Okay, what would she do?’ and sometimes I don’t know, sometimes I do be bumping my head. I’m only in my 20s! But she’s there.” It was more than just business advice and etiquette, though. So much of what Megan raps about, and how she raps about it, and who she is as a woman, is inherited from her mother and grandmothers, she explains. One of her grandmothers, whom she called Big Mama, taught her about the importance of self-reliance; her other grandmother taught her to always be sweet. And her mother, she says, taught her how to be tough. Confidence was instilled early and reinforced by all three women, who were constantly in Megan’s ear with a∞rmations. “They were always like, ‘Megan, you’re great. Hundred percent,’ ” she says. “They would always make me feel really, really good. They would always be like, ‘And you don’t need no boy or nobody coming up to you trying to tell you, “Give me this, and I’ll give you that.” ’ And I’d be like, [imitates her voice as a seven-year-old] Yeah! I don’t need no boys at all!” She often attributes lyrical and sonic inspiration to Southern male artists like Juicy J and Pimp C. Her mom would play Three 6 Mafia, and Megan would study the themes: money, sex, power, high-quality liquor. She heard men rap about, as she says, “what they are gonna do to a girl, or how confident he is, or how tough he is,” and that matrilineal influence reminded her that she could do it too, and better. She thought, “ ‘Damn, this would really be something good if a girl was saying this.’ ” With Megan, it’s never just the words. She has a way of delivering filthy lyrics that can absolutely knock you flat. It’s the way she curls her lips while she says a line or raises her eyebrow right before she drops down in a squat. As a performer, she doesn’t ask for permission or forgiveness or even confirmation. “I know this about me,” she says. “This is my pleasure, this is my vagina; I know this vagina bomb. Sometimes you just got to remind people that you’re magical and everything about you down to your vagina and to your toes is

magical.” In the grand tradition of Trina, Lil’ Kim, Missy Elliott, Jill Scott, and other female artists who write lyrics that simply drip with horn, Megan’s message—and the way she shares it—isn’t for men. “I feel like a lot of men just get scared when they see women teaching other women to own sex for themselves,” she says. “Sex is something that it should be good on both ends, but a lot of times it feels like it’s something that men use as a weapon or like a threat. I feel like men think that they own sex, and I feel like it scares them when women own sex.”

friend and choreographer, bounced into the kitchen of a Brooklyn studio to ﬁnd Megan, hiding out, dabbing her forehead with a paper towel, taking a break from rehearsing. She had just run through the songs she’ll be performing on SNL, “Savage” and a new one, “Don’t Stop,” a truly raunchy gift she was about to release with Young Thug. Knight, who worked with Beyoncé on the “Formation” choreography and similar statement-making moments in music video history, has adopted a sweetand-sour approach to getting Megan back to work, gently demanding that she perform each song twice more. Megan countered with an (unsuccessful) o≠er to do the songs once more—then gave a good-natured groan before taking her place among four backup dancers. She rolled up her SNL T-shirt to reveal her belly ring and readied herself to rip into “Savage” again. For as often as she’s performed the song, this rehearsal was di≠erent. Megan had decided to use her SNL appearance to make a statement about the shooting of Breonna Taylor and the failure of Daniel Cameron, the attorney general of Kentucky, to hold o∞cers accountable for her killing. Two days later, when she took the stage on Saturday night, she wore a black-and-white bodysuit and matching boots and cape, looking like a majorette on an acid trip. During “Savage,” as she stalked the stage and executed her famously high-precision twerking, the backdrop twisted and turned and rearranged itself to reveal the names of several women, all victims of police brutality, as well as “Protect Black Women.” Midway through, the sound of eight gunshots interrupted the music and Megan stared into the audience to deliver a short speech. “We need to protect our Black women and love our J A Q U E L K N I G H T, M E G A N ’ S

Black women, ’cause at the end of the day, we need our Black women,” she said. “We need to protect our Black men and stand up for our Black men, ’cause at the end of the day, we’re tired of seeing hashtags about Black men.” The very next evening, as the SNL clips were still bouncing around social media, Megan was back in L.A., Zooming with me while getting ready to go meet a friend for a socially distant hang. I asked her how she felt about the whole performance. “I’m proud of myself,” she said while—impressively—pulling a paddle brush through her 40-inch weave, then hitting it with a curling iron for bounce. As wide-reaching as she hoped her message was, there also was a part of the performance that was for Megan herself. She wanted to have the last word on her own tricky and di∞cult situation. The shooting had turned her into a meme, a point to be made in a debate; it had forced her into a narrative. Somehow her personhood had gotten lost. If people were going to make meaning out of her, she was going to dictate what that meaning would be. I’d asked her at one point what she wanted for the women who listened to her music, what she hoped she was inspiring women to do. “I want Black women to be louder,” she said. “I want us to be sassier. I want us to demand more, be more outspoken, keep speaking and just keep demanding what you deserve. Don’t change—just get better. Grow from these situations. Don’t be beating yourself up about these situations, because that’d be a lot of problems too. I feel we keep this stu≠ in and there’s some kind of way we ﬂip it on ourselves. We didn’t fuck up—We didn’t do something wrong, and it’s like, ‘No, girl, relax. You just needed somebody to come stir the Kool-Aid.’ ” This is another great Stallion-ism that I hope inspires a song—or even a whole KoolAid x Hot Girl Summer at some point. Here’s how she explains it: “Even if it’s me rapping or if it’s me having a conversation with somebody, I’m going to make you feel like you are that bitch. Because you’re already that bitch— you somehow just need it stirred up for you. It’s like, when you put the Kool-Aid in the water and it all fall to the bottom. But when you mix it up with the sugar, now it’s Kool-Aid. You just need somebody to stir it up for you. That’s me.” allison p. davis is a feature writer at The Cut.

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