Along with archival photography, Jones also studied documentaries such as 1971’s The Murder of Fred Hampton and spoke to Hampton’s fiancée, Akua Njeri, and his son, Fred Hampton Jr. She and director Shaka King realized they had enough material to recreate Hampton’s looks as faithfully as possible. “He wears his crewneck sweatshirt a lot. He
Pop Culture
This story is part of GQ’s Modern Lovers issue. The first thing Russell Wilson and Ciara do together in the morning—right around 6 a.m., after one kid or another has chosen to wake them up—is pray. The prayer is always the same: They say thank you for the day. They set their intentions. They ask
This is Wait, What?, a column that explains the seemingly incomprehensible. This week, Bruce Springsteen—America’s boyfriend and also its dad—has been making exclusively vehicular-related news. No, it’s not because the country is remembering en masse that “Racing in the Street” is a perfect song about car parts and broken dreams. On Sunday, the Super Bowl
What’s the best advice he gave you? I was asking him questions about how to handle the media and press when I was getting news articles written about me whenever I lost. And that was really stressful. I remember he told me, “Imagine that you’re a lion and you’re hunting your prey. So you see
Sixty to 70 percent of the articles were written by the FBI. So yeah, it’s total course-correction. It’s counterpropaganda. What specific inaccuracies were you looking to address? To start, that they hated white people. That they weren’t an organization engaged in self-defense—or rather, that they were reactionary and warmongering. I wanted to address that, but
I followed along from the sidelines, sharing posts and couples’ portraits with LGBTQ+ friends, texting harmless gossip about who might be dating. It felt like watching my life—my new queer life—get mainstreamed and affirmed in real time, and all by the same people who had helped shape my adolescence. “This summer…we were on TV a
This March, GQ presents our Modern Lovers issue, an exploration of the many forms and facets of love today. For the three print covers of this special project, we turned to three couples who are setting exciting examples for what love can look like in 2021 (and beyond). Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird Between the
When the GQ team and I started planning a special edition of the magazine called the Modern Lovers issue, the mission was clear: We wanted to tell a bunch of love stories that we’d never heard before. No disrespect to Romeo and Juliet or Sid and Nancy, but what about marriage in the time of
And so it seems very natural to me that when you look at his later collaborations with women, whether they were with actresses like Meryl Streep or Glenn Close or Julia Roberts or Whoopi Goldberg, or with non-actors—writers like Nora Ephron and Ann Roth, the costume designer—not only was Mike not insecure about working with
This past weekend, Aaron Rodgers accepted his third MVP award with a minute-long speech in which he dropped a number of newsworthy tidbits in less time than it takes for an Oscar winner to get played offstage. The most discussed was the fact that he got engaged at some point last year. Though he chose
Between last year’s Super Bowl and last night’s Super Bowl, the country has been plagued with a pandemic, political unrest, and most of us abiding by little to no socializing of the physical sort. The more things change, however, the more they stay the same. The Super Bowl LV ads were littered with gimmicks, celebrity
Can you believe the Weeknd’s gotten this far? When Abel Tesfaye released the massively influential House of Balloons nearly ten years ago, he was cloaked in anonymity and cool. Now he’s amassed a catalog loaded with hits, he’s appearing in critically acclaimed films and not embarrassing himself, he’s collaborating with modern-day avant-garde luminaries, he’s on
And, despite the staunch individualism implied by a handle like “the Last American Man,” it was never Eustace’s intention that anyone would. From the outset, his vision has always been communal. He co-founded the Preserve with two close friends, hoping that, within a few years, they would all have families living on the property together.
Sometimes actions have consequences, even for a successful white man in Nashville. That’s the conclusion you might draw after the country music industry’s apparently swift and unequivocal response to a video showing Morgan Wallen using the phrase “pussy-ass n****r” as he returned home with friends after a night out. The video, taken by the 27-year-old
I think it was problematic for Warner Bros. at the time. I had an exec there tell me one time, “This is a great script, it just needs a different ending. It needs to have a more formulaic ending. We need to know because the audience won’t take this.” To a degree, I’m sure he
Even if you were able to accept the split rationally, as an amicable parting of ways, there’s still this hard truth to swallow: The Patriots didn’t pay to keep Brady around. They let him walk, only to turn around and see that his 43-year-old revenge body was just fine without them, pliable enough to make
When videos surfaced of Kyrie Irving — the enigmatic Brooklyn Nets guard who delights and infuriates fans in equal measure — walking the edge of the court in Boston holding a burning smudge stick in his hand, the kinds of responses you’d expect filled social media. People made jokes about Irving cleansing the bad vibes from his
Passing pairs Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga as old friends who lead very different lives thanks to one crucial detail. Rebecca Hall makes her directorial debut with this adaptation of Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen’s tale of two childhood friends who reunite as adults. Irene (Thompson) has settled into life as a philanthropist and wife
By the early 2010s, pop music had forgotten how to embody the future. This, at least, was the view of Mark Fisher, the British critic and theorist who thought the cultural output of the early 21st century was defined by the persistence of the past. “It doesn’t feel like the future,” he wrote in Ghosts
There’s never been a great reason for the Golden Globe Awards to exist. At best, they’re a kind of diet soda version of other awards shows, a slimmed-down combination of the Oscars and the Emmys, At worst, they’re a pale imitation of those institutions that devalues the loftier honors by throwing out nominations and awards