My Favorite Teacher’s Heinous Crimes

Sometimes, role models do bad things. Very bad things.

View in Browser My Favorite Teacher One night twenty years ago, my biology teacher picked up a seventeen-year-old hitchhiker named Jefferson Wesley. Hitchhikers were rare on Chicago's exclusive North Shore, where kids owned Camaros and carried plenty of taxi cash. Even rarer were high school teachers who picked them up. It was midnight. Mr. Lindwall pulled over his yellow Toyota Land Cruiser and told Wesley to hop in. Down the road, Mr. Lindwall stopped the Land Cruiser and asked Wesley to wait a second, the spare tire was rattling in back. Wesley said cool. Mr. Lindwall shut off the headlights, exited the vehicle, and popped open the back hatch. Among a pile of tools, he found his hunting knife, which he unsheathed and poked at Wesley's back. He ordered the boy to bend over and locate the hangman's noose by his feet. Wesley found it and tightened it around his neck in the way Mr. Lindwall instructed. Read the Full Story Esquire's Best New Restaurants in America, 2021 To shine a spotlight on a larger number of our favorite new places this year, we enlisted not one, not two, but four people to eat around the country: seasoned food writers Omar Mamoon and Joshua David Stein, our former food and drink editor Jeff Gordinier, and Kevin Sintumuang, Esquire's Lifestyle and Culture Director. Together and separately, they traveled thousands of miles and dined at hundreds of restaurants to deliver a list nearly twice as large as last year's. Read the Full Story So What's the Protocol for Unvaxxed Family Members This Thanksgiving? As the host of any gathering, your job is to make your guests feel comfortable, but on Thanksgiving, you are really expected to go ham. You have to have something for everyone: presumably you've got a vegan option, a choice of stuffings, that sweet-potato casserole Grandma loves. At this holiday, we make way more food than can be eaten in one sitting, because we want everyone to come away from the table satisfied. We prioritize our guests' comfort over our own time scrubbing dishes. But this is your house, and you are free to set the terms. Read the Full Story Loftie Does the Impossible: Divorces You From Your Phone at Bedtime If you enjoy staring at your phone until exactly one second before you click off your lamp and close your eyes to sleep, this product is not for you. (Also, seek help?) However, if you are like me, attempting to curate the perfect bedtime space, both psychologically and physically, like an asshole, then you might very well be tempted by what follows. This product, Loftie, is an alarm clock. Never heard of it? It's a clock, with an alarm built in to wake you up each morning. It has a snooze button. But it is more than that. It is a nighttime phone-replacer, a piece of bedside decor, and a sleep machine in one. Let us explain. Read the Full Story The Endurance of Ann Dowd Ann Dowd interrupts her breakfast because something over my left shoulder has her attention. "Look at that guy, holding his granddaughter," she says with a familiar squint—one reminiscent of her Aunt Lydia character from The Handmaid's Tale, albeit significantly kinder. When I turn around, I see a whole bevy of people, doing construction and walking through the street, and behind them, I spot an older man, gray-haired, walking past our restaurant, holding a sleeping girl who can't be more than four. Read the Full Story The Easiest Part of the Pandemic? Getting My Kid the Covid Vaccine This moment—right here, in this poorly lit CVS—is one we've been waiting for since March 2020: the day the youngest member of our family can finally get vaccinated. I secured the appointment for our six-year-old six days earlier in the dead of night, which felt like a dream, the house dark and quiet. As I clicked the "schedule" button on the big-box pharmacy website, I wept. Once everyone was awake, it was a party. My wife and I and our six-year-old son danced around the house, singing and laughing in a way that hasn't happened since the house became the only real place we went. Read the Full Story Follow Us Unsubscribe | Privacy Notice/Notice at Collection esquire.com ©2021 Hearst Magazine Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Hearst Magazines, 300 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019