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ow do you prefer your high? The 
sting of a well-aged whiskey after 
a hard-fought week, the explosion 
of sweat and blood when an uppercut con- 
nects, the sight of an exotic shoreline, the 
scent of a beautiful woman? True intoxica- 
tion is something you earn. Consider this 
issue your game plan. Those who need a 
harder hit will identify with the adrenaline 
junkies in "s Extreme, the first 
gut-punching installment of a three-part fic- 
tion serial in which thrill-seeking athletes 
live and die by the rip of a parachute cord 
(part two appears next month). If exploring 
uncharted realms is more your speed, check 
out Flight Plan, in which and 
uncover the last vestiges of 
tourist-free travel. Learn to smuggle exotic 
foods, kill jet Lag and pick up locals like a 
local. Sometimes great natural beauty is 
no farther away than your couch—actress 
reveals in 20Q how she bal- 
ances her "nice girl" nature with errant roles 
on House of Cards and in Transcendence. 
From a talented woman we turn 
to the plight of man, as seen by 
author in Forum. 
Reed maintains that those who 
lambaste the male gender aren't 
thinking it all the way through. 
Life is peachy, however, for an 
emerging mob of Russian cyber- 
criminals. In From Russia With 
Code, journalist 
explores how cheap software 
and nonexistent law enforcement 
have created the next generation 
of hacker heists—easier to pull [ m. 
off than you think—with multi- 
millionaires bragging about ы | 
their exploits online while ruining ШЕШ ЖО 
American lives. 
then takes us to Uruguay to witness the old- 
est and most dangerous endurance horse 
race in the world. As Manning putsit in They 
Call It El Raid, "It's part Kentucky Derby, 
part Daytona 500, a chaotic mash-up of 
Seabiscuit and Mad Max.” Award-winning 
photojournalist captures 
the pandemonium of the race in phenom- 
enal pictures, Here's another tough sport: 
boxing. argues that ever since 
Tyson vs. Holyfield, the sweet science has 
Lost its cultural traction. He explains the 
reasons for its downfall in Down for the 
Count. Imagine working in an office where 
Garth Brooks drops by to deliver 400 pizzas, 
you're encouraged to take 10-hour phone 
calls and having fun is a codified corporate 
value. In 's world, it's all busi- 
ness as usual. The Zappos CEO explains in 
our Playboy Interview how he plans to revi- 
talize downtown Las Vegas and change the 
nature of business itself. Our most intoxicat- 
ing issue yet awaits, just beyond this page. 
Time to drink it all in—you've earned it. 2 Tony Hsieh: 


Ishmael Reed 


There is 
some thing 
within us all. 


Josh Härtnett Th alton Буа Сайа 


PENNY DREADFUL 
A MAY 11 SUNDAYS 10pw: SED WTIME 


SHO.OM 


| FEATURES | INTERVIEW 


54 FROM RUSSIA 49 TONY HSIEH 
WITH CODE The off-kilter and vision: 
The software is cheap, the ary Zappos.com CEO is 


thieves are invisible and revolutionizing retail and 
tealing your data is the reinventing city life. B; 
goal. SARAHA. TOPOL DAVIDHOCHMAN 


reports on a terrifying 


64. THEY CALL IT 84 KATE MARA 
ELRAID STEPHEN REBELLO 
This is no ordinary horse explores the softer side 
race, It's a 60-mile tes! and NFL familyties of an 
of man, beast, pride and actress known for her icy, 
insanity. SEAN MANNING tough-gal roles. 


chronicles the most pun: 
ishing derby in the world | FICTION | 


88 FLIGHT PLAN 70 EXTREME (PART 1) 
Smuggle Okinawan Defying death is the 
bonito, hiton С 


»rmans only way these athletes 


in German and feast om know how to live. By 
Fogo Island with our DON WINSLOW 
guide to world tfavel, 


-style. 


COVER STORY 
Playmate Amanda 
Booth puts the class 
infirstclassas a crew 
member onour Air 


PHOTOGRAPHY THIS PAG i Playboyjet. 
ANO cover, sy TONY KELLY z 


PLAYMATE: Dani Mathers 


BEING AMAN 
IS EASY? 

makesa 
compelling case that men 
don't always have it made, 
no matter what you hear. 


READER 
RESPONSE 
endangers 

; exploiting 
greed to go green; fighting 
the oil pipelines. 


THE GREAT PORN 
HUNT 

"s porn habits 
involve much less smut 
than you might think. 


MAKING YOUR 
GIRLFRIEND A 
SPORTS FANATIC 
shows 
that getting a woman 
interested in sports takes 
nothing more than a 
humantouch. 


THE DOCTOR 
IS OUT 


Women may be partly to 
blame forthe growing 


physician deficit, 


reports. 


TREATMENT 
COMPLEX 


the corruption of 
psychology inour 
criminal just 


and 
explore 


VOL. 61, NO. 4- MAY 2014 


PLAYB 


CONTENTS 


A PLACE IN 
THE SUN 

David Bellemere 
captures a sun- 
drenchedafternoon 
with the inimitable 
Monique Jacqueline. 


RED DAWN 
Playmate Dani Mathers 
channels another 
famous blonde in this 

beach romp. Say hello to 
the next Pamela. 


AIR PLAYBOY 

Skip the TSA and leave 
all your baggage at home. 
On Air Playboy, flying 
high means joiningthe 
xiest party in the sky. 


WORLD OF 
PLAYBOY 

Pitbull and Hef hit it off; 
behind the scenes of Air 
Playboy; atribute to 
Harold Ramis, our much- 


loved former colleague. 


PLAYMATE NEWS 
Katie Vernola takes the 
eel in the Lu 
UTV circuit; Amanda 

Cerny prepares to take the 


209: Kate Mara 


PLAYBILL 
DEAR PLAYBOY 
AFTER HOURS 
REVIEWS 

RAW DATA 
PLAYBOY 
ADVISOR 
PARTY JOKES 


PLAYBOY ON PLAYBOY ON 
FACEBOOK TWITTER 


PLAYBOY ON 
INSTAGRAM 


Keep up with all things Playboy at 
facebook.com/playboy, twitter.com/playboy 


and instagram.com/playboy 


PRINTED IN USA. 


PLAYBOY 


HUGH M. HEFNER 
editor-in-chief 


JIMMY JELLINEK 
editorial director 
STEPHEN RANDALL deputy editor 
МАС LEWIS art director 
JASON BUHRMESTER executive editor 
REBECCA H. BLACK photo director 
HUGH GARVEY articles editor 
JARED EVANS managing editor 
JENNIFER RYAN JONES fashion and grooming director 


EDITORIAL 
COPY: WINIFRED ORMOND Copy chief; BRADLEY LINCOLN senior copy editor; CAT AUER copy editor 
RESEARCH: NORA O'DONNELL senior research editor; SHANE MICHAEL SINGH research editor 
STAFF: GILBERT Macias editorial coordinator; CHERIE BRADLEY executive assistant; TYLER TRYKOWSK! editorial assistant 


CARTOONS: AMANDA WARREN associate cartoon editor 


CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: BRANTLEY BARDIN, MARK BOAL, TC. BOYLE, ROBERT В. DE SALVO, STUART DYBEK, MICHAEL FLEMING, NEAL GABLER, KARL TARO GREENFELD, 


KEN GROSS, DAVID HOCHMAN, ARTHUR KRETGHMER (automotive), GEORGE LOIS, SEAN MCCUSKER, CHUCK PALAHNIUK, ROCKY RAKOVIG, STEPHEN REBELLO, DAVID RENSIN 


WILL SELF, DAVID SHEFF, ROB MAGNUSON SMITH, ERIC SPITZNAGEL, JOEL STEIN, ROB TANNENBAUM, CHRISTOPHER TENNANT, DON WINSLOW, HILARY WINSTON, SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK 


A.J. BAIME, LEOPOLD FROEHLICH editors at large 


ART 
OBERT HARKNESS associate art director; AARON LUCAS art coordinator; LAUREL LEWIS designer 


JUSTIN PAGE senior art director; 
PHOTOGRAPHY 


STEPHANIE MORRIS playmate photo edilor; MATT STEIGBIGEL photo researcher; 


GAVIN BOND, SASHA EISENNAN, TONY KELLY, JOSH RYAN senior contributing photographers; MERT ALAS AND MARCUS PIGGOTT, DAVID BELLEMERE, MICHAEL BERNARD, 
MICHAEL EDWARDS, ELAYNE LODGE, DAN SAELINGER, SATOSHI, JOSEPH SHIN contributing photographers; нетот vove contributing photo editor; 


kevin Mugen director, photo library; CHRISTIE HARTMANN senior archivist, photo library; KARLAGOTGHER assistant, photo library: 
DANIEL FERGUSON manager, prepress and imaging; AMY KASTNER-DROWN senior digital imaging specialist; OSCAR RODRIGUEZ senior prepress imaging specialist 


PRODUCTION 


LESLEY к. JOHNSON production director; HELEN YEOMAN production services manager 


PUBLIC RELATIONS 


THERESA M. HENNESSEY vice president; TERI THOMERSON director 


PLAYBOY ENTERPRISES INTERNATIONAL, INC. 


SCOTT FLANDERS chief executive officer 


PLAYBOY PRINT OPERATIONS 
DAVID с. ISRAEL chief operating officer, president, playboy media; 


том FLORES senior vice president, business manager, playboy media 


ADVERTISING AND MARKETING 
JOHN LUMPKIN senior vice president, publisher; MARIE FIRNENO vice president, advertising director; AMANDA CIVITELLO vice president, events and promotions; 
HELEN IMANCULLI executive director, direct-response advertising NEW YORK: SEAN AVERY luxury director; BRIAN VRABEL entertainment and gaming director; 
ADAM WEBB Spirits director; KEVIN FALATKO associate marketing director; NIKI DOLL promotional art director; ERIN CARSON, marketing manager; 
ANGELALEE digital sales planner CHICAGO: TIFFANY SPARKS ABBOTT midwest director LOS ANGELES: LORI KESSLER west coast director; 
LINDSAY BERG digital sales planner SAN FRANCISCO: SHAWN O'MEARA h.0.m.. 


ТНЕ WORLD HEF SIGHTINGS, 


MANSION FROLICS 


оғ PLAYBOY AND NIGHTLIFE NOTES 


Pitbull, also known as Mr. 305, was in the 310 for Hef to welcome 
him as Playboy's new artist in residence, While on the Mansion 
grounds the Miami-born rapper shot the music video for "Wild 
Wild Love" with Playmates Jaclyn Swedberg, Raquel Pomplun 
and Gemma Lee Farrell. A sample lyric from the track: "Ladies 
and gentlemen, you're Looking at the new playboy" 


SUPREME 


Playboy and cool-kid 
clothier Supreme joined 
forces to launch a Supreme 
x Playboy spring-summer 
2014 capsule collection. 
Among the offerings are a 
hooded Leather jacket, an 
array of football jerseys 
and shoes by Vans. Five 
minutes after the kicks 
were posted to Supreme's 
website they sold out 


аламай Л 


Тһе world got less funny 
this February with the 
passing of Harold Ramis. 
The comedic genius 
behind Animal House, 
Caddyshack and Ghost- 
busters honed his wit at 
PLAYBOY as an associate 
editor working on Party 
Jokes in the 19705. "The 
editors wanted to mod- 
ernize the jokes a bit, to 
make them more coun- 
terculture; he said in an 
interview. “A big part of 
my job was changing 'the 
farmer' into 'a swinging 
advertising executive.” 


The thought behind this month's classy cover 
was to fly you back to the golden age of aviation. 
Photographer Tony Kelly brought Miss February 
2014 Amanda Booth to a former Air Force base 
in Victorville, California that now serves as an 
airplane boneyard. Amanda Looks like a glam- 
orous pinup who came alive and jumped off the 
nose of a World War II bomber. 


DESIGN, MEET < 


PERFORMANCE. - 


PLAYBOY 


MURDER TRIAL UPDATE 
Vince Beiser's article on prescription- 
painkiller use in War, West Virginia (Pre- 
scription for Death, March) illuminates 
the severe drug issues in the area, but 
the case also speaks to the larger na- 
tional problems in the pharmaceutical 
industry and the justice system. It is up- 
setting to hear about lives destroyed by 
substance abuse, in this instance span- 
ning generations of a single family. I 
hope for the best for all involved, par- 
ticularly the young son. Are there any 
updates on the murder trial? 
Marianne Eagan 
Los Angeles, California 
Becky Hatcher was acquitted of the murder 
of her father-in-law, Tom Hatcher. Her brother, 
Earl Click, was found guilty of first-degree 
murder and conspiracy and sentenced to life in 
prison. Click, 27, said he was sorry for the vic- 
tim’s family and thanked the court for giving 
him a fair trial. However, the judge cautioned 
Click that thanking him for a fair trial might 
hurt his chances of appeal, so Click took it back. 


CHECKING IN ON GAWKER BOSS 
The best thing about Gawker has been 
its ferocious independence and transpar- 
ency, with Nick Denton (Playboy Interview, 
March) leading that charge, even if it cre- 
ated chaos within his own system. That's 
an admirable position and one not many 
of his fellow moguls can claim. However, 
hypocrisy is the number one transparen- 
cy killer, and when I heard about the іп- 
tern lawsuit at Gawker, the walls of admi- 
ration and respect started to crumble. If 
Gawker can't carry that mantle, who can? 
Via the internet 


Denton is an incredibly intelligent 
and spot-on thinker. He seems far more 
focused than any of the contemporary 
heroes he mentions. Frankly, your inter- 
view is the most compelling thing I have 
read in a long time. Denton is either a 
powerful futurist or the product of one 
scary alien hive-mind. 

Via the internet 


WHERE THERE'S А WILL(IE).... 

In the interesting article "Beyond 
Condoms" (After Hours, Talk, March), 
one of the condoms mentioned con- 
tains graphene, which is “more than 
200 times stronger than steel." One of. 
my longtime fantasies involves fully іп- 
serting my member into a vagina and 
then walking around the room, sup- 
porting my partner without using our 
hands, arms or her legs for support. In- 
stead, we would rely exclusively on the 
strength of my willie. Do you think this 
super-strength condom would help me 
reach my long-cherished goal? 

Lanny Middings 
San Ramon, California 

We don't have a structural engineering degree, 

but give it a try and let us know how it goes. 


Miss March Wins Hearts 

On behalf of all beautiful women 
who have short or alternative hair- 
styles, thank you for Miss March 
Britt Linn. 


Lexi Moscovitch 
Montreal, Quebec 


I was intrigued by the statement 
that Miss March Britt Linn is the first 
short-haired Playmate in more than 
15 years. You neglected to mention 
the one before her. Who was she? 

Jason Laroe 
St. Albans, Vermont 

Before Britt, the most recent compa- 
rably short-haired Playmate was Miss 
July 1997 Daphnee Lynn Duplaix, and 
before Daphnee was Miss July 1984 
Liz Stewart. 


As a 31-year-old gay male reader, 
I'm thrilled to see pLaysoy break- 
ing the mold. I regard Playmates 
as works of art, not just objects of 


ROCK AND ROLL REBORN 
As I read Rick Moody's eloquent essay 
on the passing of the rock icon (In Search 
of the Lost Rock & Roll Icon, January/ 
February), I was struck by the familiarity 
of the words. We've heard it all before. 
Is there any way rock can survive the 
most recent virus to infect it? Rock and 
roll is a living entity born of the souls of 
creative individuals, and anytime those 
souls are confiscated by profiteers there 
will be a visceral reaction. We will sur- 
vive the downfall. The drive of the cre- 
ative spirit refuses to be strangled by the 
hands of profit and bad taste. If you put 
your ear to the rail, you can already hear 
the rumbling. History tells us that some- 
thing amazing is just around the corner. 

Benjamin Barrett 

Santa Barbara, California 


CALLING ALL CONSCIOUS CONSUMERS 
In What Is a Brand? (January/February) 
Slavoj Zizek reduces all consumer 
impulses to a desire for an ultimately 
meaningless individualistic notion of 
authenticity, albeit one with a social 
character. Zizek's examples (rotten organic 
fruit, Starbucks, Coke) reinforce a banal 
notion of authenticity, but the essay hardly 
addresses social consumerism that is also 
consumer advocacy or (even better) labor 
activism. Buying a T-shirt from a company 
or a country with labor standards may 
make me feel good, but it can also support. 
those workers and working conditions 
in general. The real question is, short of 


sexual desire. I am mesmerized by Britt 
Linn's Centerfold. She has my vote for 
2015 Playmate of the Year. 
Josh Fehrens 
"Toronto, Ontario 


hoping for a real socialist revolution, can 
we consume in a way that also produces 
positive social change? 

Clement Clarke 

Los Angeles, California 


GOTTFRIED'S MISSED OPPORTUNITY 
Gilbert, I've had the good fortune of 
being your acquaintance for almost two 
decades, and 1 consider myself the bet- 
ter for it. I'm writing in response to your 
п.лувот essay Г Want a Guy With a Sense of 
Humor (January/February). It was smart. 
and funny and true. I've long thought 
that when women and men claim that 
the trait they most desire in a mate is a 
sense of humor, what they really mean 
is they want their partner to laugh at all 
their pathetic attempts at being funny. 
They want a raucous audience with the 
bar for jokes set so low it's nearly invis- 
ible. However, 1 feel your article needs 
an addendum—something like “This 
article is applicable to everyone except 
Nikki Cox.” Whenever І have fallen in 
love, it has always been with men who 
paid their bills by making people laugh. 
The love of my life—my husband, Jay 
Mohr—makes me laugh harder than I 
ever thought possible. Gilbert, you have 
always made me laugh. If I were single 
and you asked me out, I would say, with- 
out hesitation, "Absolutely." 
Nikki Cox 
Los Angeles, California 


E-mail LETTERS@PLAYBOY.COM or write 9346 CIVIC CENTER DRIVE, BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA 90210 


e Жете tee 


APTA RA 
us s 


LONGMIRE | 


WÉ/Lengmirearrv Wl eazrv 


new season 
SUMMER 2014 


aetv.com/longmire 


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Now Available on 
NOOK HD, NOOK HD+, 
NOOK Color’ and NOOK Tablet 


PLAYBOY 


BECOMING 
ATTRACTION 


Photography by MICHAEL EDWARDS/ 
MEINMYPLACE.COM 


16 


TALK | WHAT MATTERS NOW 


as ESPN3.com. On April 26, Klitschko 
faces Samoan Alex Leapai, his most 
anonymous challenger yet. 

How did heavyweight boxing, which 
dominated the country for the better 
part ofa century, end up flat on its back? 
Although viewers were obviously turned 
off by Tyson's hijinks, that incident is 
hardly to blame. The fight itself was 
more of a tipping point: It was the last 
fight that truly mattered between two 
American heavyweights. In reality, the 
death ofthe American heavyweight has 
multiple causes. Start with boxing's 
transition from mainstream to cult 
sport due to a traffic jam of sanctioning 
bodies handing out titles and making 
it tough for fans to know or care who 
is the current “world champion.” Add 
the migration of the biggest fights to 
pricey pay-per-view events and the rise 
of mixed-martial-arts promoters who 
do a better job targeting young viewers. 
Then consider Muhammad Ali's post- 
career physical condition ав a compelling 
argument against athletes donning 
gloves. America's heavyweights, at least. 
those who were left, were finally wiped 
out by Englishman Lennox Lewis. 

Today, the Klitschkos—Wladimir and 
his brother Vitali—continue to suck the 

life out of the post-Lewis heavyweight 
DOWN FOR THE COUNT 3... 


fighting styles. Two-time heavyweight 


WHAT KILLED THE AMERICAN HEAVYWEIGHT BOXER? champ George Foreman, who fought in 
both the golden age of the 1970s and the 
he damage to Evander testing of Holyfield's ear, what was silver age of the 1990s, sees the brothers’ 
Holyfield was easily once the most prestigious individual lack of razzle-dazzle in the ring as only 
surveyed. Blood title in all of sports—the heavyweight half their problem. “There's nothing 
streamed down his neck championship of the world—barely front-page about them,” Foreman says. 
and onto his shoulder, registers with American sports fans, “There's not one quote. Ali said, Tam 
where it mixed with The current champ is Ukrainian the greatest.’ Tyson made the statement 
sweat.Somewhere onthe Wladimir Klitschko, who has been ‘Tm the baddest man on the planet.’ 
canvas at the MGM Grand Casino lay recognized as the top heavyweight for There's nothing like that coming from 
a bloody hunk of his ear. The ear could the past eight years but is best known the Klitschkos.” 
be fixed. The damage to heavyweight to mainstream America as the towering Wladimir Klitschko, with his 
boxing would prove more complicated. fiancé of actress Hayden Panettiere. doctorate in sports science and numerous 
Seventeen years removed from Only two of his last eight title defenses humanitarian causes, isn't the type to bite 
“the Bite Fight,” which ended with have been televised in the U.S. on HBO; an opponent's ear. The sad truth, however, 
Mike Tyson being disqualified in the the others have been relegated to upstart is this: Heavyweight boxing might be 
third round after his second taste- network Epix or internet streams such betteroffifhe were.—Eric Raskin 


Yuriorkis 
Gamboa 


Mikey 


Carl VS. George Sergio 
le Garcia 


Froch Groves Martinez 


VS. 


V Miguel 
e Cotto 


May 31 June 7 Date TBD 
> Groves looks for revenge > Cotto challenges for the э Two unbeaten junior 
after the previous bout middleweight throne at Madi- lightweights on a collision 
between these two British son Square Garden. Incredible course—each with one- 
super middleweights was atmosphere and a fight that punch power and the chins 
controversially halted. might live up to it. to go down at any time. 


¥ 


Wingsuit jump 

from 30,000 feet 
above the Swiss 
Alps in 2010. 


uy. I'm the com 
ite of that— 


PLAYBO' 


JOBY OGWYN E 


THE FASTEST AMERICAN TO SUMMIT EVEREST РЕАМӘ 
TO LEAP FROM THE TOP. WE HAD TO ASK WHY 


+ Joby Ogwyn's unbruised face doesn't exactly scream "the next Evel 
Knievel," but the daredevil has been setting records on the world's most 
treacherous peaks since the age of 18. This month he'll attempt a his- 
toric, death-defying and downright crazy wingsuit leap from the sum- 
mit of Mount Everest in a live broadcast on Discovery Channel. “It’s not 
about the danger; it's about the beauty," says the 39-year-old. Easy to say 
when you're not looking down on 29,035 feet of ice.—Tyler Trykowski 


TALK |WHAT MATTERS NOW 


CUDDLING WITH 
CONTROVERSY 


A PROFESSIONAL SNUGGLER FINDS HERSELF IN BED 


WITH TROUBLE. 


o men really crave more 
snuggling? Yes, says 
Jacqueline Samuel, 

and they're willingto 
pay for it. Samuel is the 
founder of the Snuggery, 
astart-up in the suburbs 
of Rochester, New York where clients— 
mostly men—drop $60 to snuggle for an 
hour. Samuel also offers a $120 “double 
cuddle,” which lets you spend an hour 
gently sandwiched between Samuel and 
her sidekick, Colleen. 

Touting the physical and psycho- 
logical benefits of “nonsexual touch, 
Samuel emphasizes that “just snug- 
gling” means just that. Sexual arousal is 
an occupational hazard, she says, but it’s 
surprisingly rare. Controversy is a big- 
ger problem. Although Samuel has con- 
sistently explained that sexual activity 
is not part of the package, neighbors still 
petitioned to shut the Snuggery down. 

“They thought clients would be sex 
offenders,” Samuel explains. “They 
set up surveillance cameras and said 
what I was doing was prostitution. 


Photography by ANDREW B. MYERS 


‘They wanted undercover cops to come 
in.” She pauses and laughs. "Imagine— 
undercover cuddlers.” 

Nosy neighbors weren't the only 
problem. The publicity got her “kicked 
out" of Nazareth College, where she 
was close to earning a graduate degree 
in social work. Samuel claims that col- 
lege officials said her profession would 
deter social-service agencies from hir- 
ingher for a required internship. She 
was also told "full disclosure" required 
that she include snuggling on her 
résumé. Samuel says she appealed to 
three levels of college administrators 
without success. (A Nazareth spokes- 
person stated, "The college is not able 
to comment on the story.") 

With the Snuggery now settled ina 
more remote, low-key location, all the 
fuss still befuddles Samuel. A pretty 
and petite brunette who is pictured in 
alacy white dress on her website, she 
says she has always been more comfort- 
able communicating and connecting 
through touch. Since the Snuggery 
opened, she has snuggled with hun- 


dreds of clients, many of them married 
middle-aged men starved for affection. 

Samuel says that while clients have 
respected her rule that snuggles are 
not foreplay, men occasionally desire a 
deeper emotional relationship. "There 
have been a few times I've had to ter- 
minate the relationship with a client 
because they were hoping for some- 
thingthat was deeper than just snug- 
gling," she says. 

Oncesnuggling up to 14 hoursa day, 
Samuel has since cut back, snuggling 
only with a core group of regulars 
and rarely taking on new clients. She 
is focused on training and hiring 
new cuddlers, having recently added 
another to her crew, and still hopes 
to one day finish her master's degree. 
Tn the meantime she vows to remain 
an advocate for the benefits—and 
acceptance—of therapeutic snuggles. 

As she wrote in a blogentry not long 
after the Snuggery's opening, “Today, 
Isnuggled. It was great. I'm living my 
own version of the American dream." 
—Scott Westcott 


The History of a Legend: 


Now in a sumptuous trade edition 


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HUGH HEFNER'S 


The Life and Times of Hugh M. Hefner: An illustrated autobiography with highlights from Playboy's 
first 25 years. This six-volume anthology celebrates the sophistication and wit of Playboy magazine. 
With never-before-seen ephemera from Hef's private archives, along with a vast selection of 
personal photos, this is the definitive history of Playboy and its legendary founder. 

First published as a limited-edition series. Now available іп a popular edition. Hardcover with 
25 fold-outs, six volumes in box, 1,910 pages. 7.0 x 9.8 inches. $150. ISBN: 978-3-8228-2613-3. 


CONTACT PLAYBOYSTORE.COM TO ORDER 


Y TASCHEN 


Testa Rossa 


If you're a fan 

of that bracing 

and bitter cocktail 
called the negroni, 
you'll like this 
Italianate shot that 
includes the aperitif 
Campari 

+ 10z, Campari 

* Тог, grappa 


Combine 
ingredients in a 
mixing glass filled 
with ісе. Stir and 
strain into a two- 
ounce shot glass 


+ While mixology has immeasurably 
improved happy hour, the shooter remains 
a neglected outpost of the cocktail kingdom. 
Ifyou're going to the trouble of actually 
mixinga shot instead of tossing back 

some bourbon neat, do yourselfa favor and 
use the best booze you can get your hands 
on. The trick is to balance 
something sweet 
with something 
strong. Here are six 
upgraded shooters to 
get your night started 


SHOT CLOCK 
To mix up a round of 
these drinks for your 
guests, quadruple 
the measurements 
and make in 
batches of four. 


B Black Eye 


Think of this shot 
asa sugar-free take 
on Irish coffee—and 
а super-speedy 
replacement for the 
disco nap 

* Тог. cold coffee 

+ 102. Irish whiskey 


Combine 
ingredients in a 
mixing glass filled 
with ice. Stir and 
strain into a two- 
ounce shot glass. 


13.) Smoke Out 


Full-flavored 
Mexican mezcal 
makes this drink a 
smoky spin on 
the margarita. 


» Тоғ. mezcal 

* hoz. simple syrup 

+ oz. fresh lime 
juice 


Combine 
ingredients in a 
cocktail shaker 
filled with ice. 
Shake and strain 
into a two-ounce 
shot glass. 


Orange Alert B Zoo York B Dirty Monk 
Old-school = 102. navy-strength The potentrye + 102. 100-proofrye Chartreuse 
gin and juice is gin whiskey in this whiskey made by monks 

improved with + Тог, orange juice shot turns it into + Woz. sweet in France adds 
the addition of -- a tiny but tough vermouth an herbaceous 
aromatic, high- Combine variation on а sweetness to this 
octane, 100-proof ingredients in a manhattan. Combine spicy shot. 
navy-strength gin. cocktail shaker filled ingredients in a 

with ice. Shake and mixing glass filled 

strain into a two- with ice. Stir and 

ounce shot glass. strain into a two- 


ounce shot glass. 


* Тоғ. Chartreuse 
* Тог. pepper vodka 


Combine 
ingredients in a 
mixing glass filled 
with ice. Stir and 
strain into a two- 
ounce shot glass 


Photography by DANNY KIM 


+ When southern California shoe company Vans released its first waffle- 
г m up: They rugged, cheap and 

low-key cool. And they still are (abasic pair runs around $45). But that hasn't 

kept fashion houses from Gueci to Givenchy from producing similar slip- 

for more than 10 times the price in high-end fabrics and leathers. As sleek and 

stylish as they are, we'd rather spend our money on a closetful of the classic. 


Photography by DANNY KIM 


МЕУ/ 


SUPER 
PLAYBOYY 


FOR HIM 


playboystore.com playboyfragrances.com 


A 


MADE WITH LOVE 
BY 
REALLY REALLY 
PRETTY 
BLONDE GIRLS 


БО. 


moods of norway 


{ 
LOS ANGELES - 7964 MELRO: 


www.moodsofnorway.com 


JE AVE | NEW YORK - 75 GREENE ST. | MALL OF AMERICA - 60 E BROADWAY 


26 


AUTO 


SPRIN 
FLINGS 


FAST, SMART AND 
STYLISH: THIS 
MONTH'S FAVORITE 
TEST-DRIVES 


yyyy 
-» We have а list of reasons to 
love Subaru's WRX—most of 
them involve horsepower. It's 
an off-road rally car for week 
end warriors, a daily com- 
muter with a load of interior 
room and an all-wheel-drive 
ass-kicker that can tackle any 
weather. Plus, it does it all 
with a base price of $27K, pro- 
viding an insanely impressive 
fun-per-dollar ratio. Its 268 
horsepower feels like twice 
that much, and a six-speed 
manual comes standard. 

The interior is all busi- 

ness, appropriate for 
the driver who's in it 
for thrills and not for 
status. For ап extra 
$8K, upgrade to the 
WRX STI—supercar 
action without the 
supercar price tag. 


WRX 
Stands for World 
Rally racing and (the 
X) for all-wheel drive. 


REMIX 
Slightly reshaped, the 
trademark WRX hı 

scoop remains 


INTERIOR 
Upgraded seat 
comfort and a six- 
speed manual shifter. 


Engine: two-liter turbo boxer four 


Horsepower: 268 


Torque: 258 foot-pounds 


0-60 mph: five seconds 
MPG: 21 city/28 highway 
Price tag: $27,000 


yyy 

> The luxury-crossover category is a 
traffic jam of hot cars. Here's о 
go with the QS: the new clean-diesel 
three-liter V6 version. Bathe yourself in all 
that Audi interior awesomeness while spit- 
ting out fewer emissions and getting more 
torque and better mileage (31 mpg high 
way) than the gas-fed Q5. Tag: $46,500. 


yyy 

> Since its launch іп 2009, the Panamera 
has outrun all expectations. For 2014, 
Porsche has redeveloped its engines, 
adding more power. Тһе 45 (for all-wheel 
drive and sport, of course) now pumps 420 
horsepower from a twin-turbo three-liter 
V6. Comfortable enough for road trips, 
fast enough to top 175 mph. Tag: $98,300. 


yy 
— Put an average dude in a finely tailored 
rock-star suit and his cred skyrockets, 

right? That’s the idea behind the 300C 

John Varvatos Luxury Edition, with stitched 
leather interior, platinum-chrome mesh grille 
and 20-inch wheels. Under the hood: the 
usual 3.6-liter V6 (292 horsepower, 31 mpg 
highway). Tag: $41,415 


FAST 
BALLER 


Behind the wheel with 


C.J. Wilson, 
league baseball's 
biggest gearheod 


Q: You're a pitcher for the 
Los Angeles Ang 
-52 career record, and 


Is with a 


yet you're obsessed with 
s and racing. What's in 
your garage right now? 
A: A Porsche Carrera GT, 
a BMW SIOOORR 
bike and a Mi 
12C. l'm getting a McLaren 
P1 hybrid supercar soon. 
ntifically 
advanced, it would have 
n unthinkable just a 
few years agi 


G: Tell us about C.J. 
Wilson Racing. 
A: | have a pair of 
race teams. My junior 
team compel 


my pro team races in 

the Continental Tire 

SportsC. nge. I've 

done lots of racing, but I 

can't drive now because 
of baseball. 


Ө: When you we 
kid, what was your first 
ation: ballplayer or 
race driver? 
My first dream was to 
bea fighter pilot, then a 
race car driver. My dad 
kept me realistic. Racing is 
expensive, he told me 
So baseball became the 
e focus of my life for 
t a dozen years. Now 
here | am, loving both. I 
had to make a lot of hard 
et a lot of 


27 


Roasting 
Frenzy 


> Blame the mid- 
night sun, but Oslo's 
inhabitants have 
coffee coursing 
through their veins. 
The 1960s-era coffee 
shop Fuglen 

tipped off a kaffe 
frenzy when it was 
reimagined as a 
midcentury furniture 
store offering exqui- 
site coffee by day 
and craft cocktails by 
night. Microroaster 
and former world 
barista champion Tim 
Wendelboe sources 
sustainable beans 
from all over the 
world and serves new 
flavor profiles at his 
slender espresso bar 
in Grünerlekka. The 
beautifully branded 
Jacu Coffee Roastery 
best expresses the 
New Nordic style of 
light roasts. Sample 


1] 


Oslo—one ofthe fastest-growii 
cities in Europe—is glamorous, 
ly pricey and literally buz 

ingwith a new coffee obsession. 
Where it once lagged behind Scandinavian sister 
cities, Oslo is making up for lost time with fine 
art acquisitions, New Nordic cooking and shiny 
new architectural landmarks. Go in early sum- 
mer, when the sun lingers late into the evening 


MMM 


COMM 


ing that hosts the 
new district's piece 
de résistance, Astrup 


Culture their smooth style at 
TET Fearnley Museet the coffee bar within 
Shopping Once centered Scotch & Soda, a 
on American art, super-cool retail 
> The trendy Tjuv- its collection has shop in Aker Brygge. 
holmen neighbor: transformed into an Order a short kaffe at 
hood (a.k.a. Thief international who’ Java Espressobar & 
Island), sitting ona who of the modern Kaffeforretning and 
peninsula that juts art scene: Damien drink it black to get 
into the Oslo Fjord Hirst, Matthew thejolt you need to 
inlet, is an oasis of Barney, Maurizio power through the 
contemporary art Cattelan, Takashi > New Scandinavian next 24 hours. 
and design on the Murakami. Next cuisine collides with —Jeralyn Gerba 
newly revitalized wa- door, the impeccably European market-hall 
terfront. Renzo Piano appointed boutique tradition at Mathal- |. the unequivocal 
designed the build- hotel the Thief len, where you weave 
cocktail spot for 
opened by an art- your way through a ^ Ca rmixed drinks 
collecting billionaire, _ series of high-end Seh ن‎ the ی‎ 
showcases famous specialty shops, Vesper. Pace your- 
designers along cafés and tasting 
self, though, as 
with up-and-coming ^ stations to order bas- young Scandinavians 
Norwegian talent kets of reker (peel- ке DIA ола 
not to mention (һе and-eat shrimp) and 
the Norwegian cur- 
views fromroom bal- bottles of microbrew. 4 
rency (the krone) is 
conies thatopenup The much-lauded, ДАҒЫ Mond. 
to the lapping waves Michelin-starred Es 
ofthe Oslo Fjord. Maaemo has 


sprouted the casual 
restaurant Koloni- 
hagen (D) and, with 
its locally procured 
menu, more effort- 
less Scandinavian 
minimalism—bare 
floorboards, bricks 
and bulbs, Locals 
gather at Pjoltergeist 
for Asian-Icelandic 
bites served on china 
bearing the Scandi 
cartoon character 
Mumin. Nummer 19 


HUNDREDS OF 


P^ — YOUR FAVORITE 
£. PLAYBOY MAGAZINE 
> ISSUES, PAST 
« & PRESENT 


find your favorites at 


PLAYBOYMAGAZINESTORE.COM 


30 


TEASE 
FRAME 


-> Chasty 
Ballesteros is 
a 33-year-old 
Canadian actress 
of Fllipino descent 
who is fluent in 
the international 
language of 
lovemaking in the 
late-night Cinemax 
series The Girl's 
Guide to Depravity 
(pictured). See her 
next on the big 
screen opposite 
Seth Rogen and 
Zac Efron in the 
comedy Neighbors 


DVD OF THE MONTH 


< Fora perfect allegory of our growing 
attachment to technology wrapped 

up inan old-fashioned love story, look 
no further than Spike Jonze's tragi- 
romance starring Joaquin Phoenix as a 
lonely writer living in near-future L.A. 
Socially awkward, witha Groucho mus- 
tache and a penchant for high-waisted 
pants, he interacts with womenonly 
through cybersex, meetings with his 
estranged wife (Rooney Mara) and the 
odd run-in with his ex-girlfriend (Amy 
Adams). So when he fires up hisnew 
operating system, Samantha (voiced by 
Scarlett Johansson), its a husky breath 
of fresh air. She organizes his life, "gets" 
his weirdnessand turns him on. It isn't. 
longbefore hefalls for her and she for 
him. Questions are raised: What will 
people think? Can you have sex? How 
do we define “love”? Making it work 
requires more than just a strong wi-fi 
connection. (BD) Best extras: several 
making-of featurettes. Y Y Y 


MOVIE OF THE MONTH 


GODZILLA 


+ Godzilla, the screen's 
most iconic, city- 
stomping, radioactive 
kaiju, has been 
waiting for a modern 
film worthy of his 


status since 1954's 
Gojira. After dozens 
of cheesy sequels and 


a disastrous 1998 American redo, the 
Kingofthe Monsters may reign again 
thanksto the megabucks reboot starring 
Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Bryan Cranston, 
Elizabeth Olsen and Juliette Binoche. 
“We wanted to give the audience 

thrills, suspense and goose bum 
says director Gareth Edwards, "Our 
movie definitely deliverson size and 
insanecarnage, but it's important that 
it feels emotional as well as epic. We've 
harkened back to movies we grew up 
with, like Close Encounters of the Third 
Kind. So many films since then have 
gotten the spectacle right but without 
characters and journeys you care about. 
There will be moments when the real 
Godzilla will fist-punch the a 


MUTANT 
MANIA 


X-Men: Days of 
Future Past scribe 
Simon Kinberg unites 
two X generations 


What hasn't 
been done in an 
X-Men movie that 
made you want to 
write this one? 
harles Xavier 
is such a beloved, 
perfect character 
in the comic and 
the movies. In this 
one, Wolverine 
goes back in time 
and meets the 
young Charles 
Xavier, whom 
we made a drug 
addict full of 
anguish, rage and 
hopelessness. 
That was a radical 
thing to do. 

Did you or 
director Bryan 
Singer come up 
with the idea to 
merge casts? 
Bryan said, 
“What if you do 
a time-travel 
story?" | thought 
it was a good 
idea at first, 
but it seemed 
impossible to 
get all the casts 
together. Bryan 
was concerned 
about making 
sure the logic of 
the time-travel 
paradoxes lined 
up and made 
scientific sense. 


What's next for 
the mutants? 
A: Moving for- 
ward, we'll most 
likely be following 
the X-Men: First 
Class story. At 
the end of X-Men: 
Days of Future 
Past, Jennifer 
Lawrence's Raven 
is the most unre- 
solved character. 
Her soul is tipping 
in one direction or 
the other. In sub- 
sequent movies, 
there's more work 
we can do to 
explore her final 
choice.—5.R. 


24: LIVE ANOTHER DAY 


By Josef Adalian 


Jack Bauer defeated 
death countless times 
during the eight-year 
run of 24, so cheating 
cancellation? No biggio. 
As when we left him in 


2010, our hero is a fugitive 
from the same government 


he once served. He has 
found refuge in London, 
but dogged CIA agent 
Kate Morgan (Yvonne 
Strahovski) is closing in. 
And then, asis always 
the case on 24, the shit 
gets real. Further plot 
details are almost beside 
the point, since only two 
things matter: Will Jack 
find creative new ways 

to kill bad guys, and will 
Chloe return? The answer, 
on both counts, is yes. 

Go ahead and clear your 
Monday nights right now. 


GAME OF THE MONTH 


FIFA 
WORLD 
СОР 


* Sports and technology 
don't always play nicely 
with each other. Hockey's 
attempt at adding a 
digital “puck trail” to 


TV broadcasts? Awful. 
This year's FIFA World 
Cup in Brazil will be the 
first to use a new chip- 
embedded ball and a goal- 
line sensor to confirm 
when a player scores. We 
have our doubts. Luckily, 
video games are one 
arena in which sports 
and technology always 
get along. Developers 
crammed 100 new 
animations into 2014 


FIFA World Cup Brazil 
(360, PS3) to sharpen 
game mechanics for 
dribbling and passing. 
With 203 teams, 21 
stadiums (including all 
12 from this year's World 
Cup) and a new penalty- 
kick interface, this is as 
close to real life as you 
can get without being in 
the center ofa riot over a 
malfunctioning goal-line 


sensor. ¥¥¥¥ 


ALBUM OF THE MONTH 


EMA 


== 


Ev 


Erika M. 
Anderson hates 
technology and 
loves it too, so on 
The Future's Void, 
her second album 
as EMA, she cel- 
ebrates it by tell- 
ing us how much 
it sucks, In П omi- 
nous songs she 
coos or caterwauls 
about satellites, 
selfies and dead 
celebrities over an 


indie-rock mix of 
hooks and what 
she calls "harsh 
tones." Maybe 
modern life is "just. 
a big advertising 
campaign,” as she 
sings, but these 
smart, chilly cri- 
tiques couldn't 
exist without her 
mastery of synths, 
drum machines 
and other tech- 


nology. ҰҰҰУ 


I NEVER MET A 
STORY I DIDN'T 
LIKE: MOSTLY 
TRUE TALL TALES 


Todd Snider 
calls himself a 
folksinger, but 
he's what your 
dad would refer 
to as a card. 
Snider, who is 47 
on the outside 
and 12 on the 
inside, begins his 
riotous memoir, / 
Never Met a Story 
I Didn't Like, with 
a tale of being it is.” Because 
pelted with fruit Snider doesn't 

by Jimmy Buffett narrate іп chron- 
Сапа not in а ological order, 
playful way”), you'll probably 
thenproceedsto lose count of how 
arrests, booze many times he's 
drugs and yarns ^ been in rehab. 
that involve Basically, this 
people named undeservedly 
Trog, Bonehead, ^ unpopular singer 
Moon Bitch has led a life like 
and Matthew Keith Richards's 
McConaughey. He but without fame 
clearly declares ог money to hold 
his one goal: to іт down. —RTT. 
"keep my life YY Y 


as fucked ир as 


31 


SIGNIFICA, INSIGNIFICA, STATS AND FACTS 


Y RAW.DA 


Š 
F - 
HEAVY WEIGHTS 


* 39.8% of male Chinese 
internet users and 
38.7% of females are 
now obese, according to 
the Chinese Communist 
mouthpiece Peoples 
Daily. China has put 
оп as much weight in 
the past 10 years as 
Westerners have over 
the past 30. 


14 P 


The size of 
Netflix's master 
hard drives 


Ei 


containing every 
film and TV 
series it offers 


Total time of 
HD streaming 


On any given day, 


population will 
eat pi: 


* Age at which 
female movie 
stars reach 
their earnings 
peak 


mal 


their 


* Age at which 


stars reach 


е movie 


earnings 


peak 


* Amount Hollywood's 10 
top-earning actresses made 
from June 2012 to June 
2013: $182 million 


* Amount their male 
counterparts made 
during the same. 
period: $464 million 


* Between 
2011 and 
March 2013, 
the State 


Department 
spent H 
$630,000 i 
10 increase i 
its Facebook { 
"likes" on four 
of ils pages 
from 100,000 
to more than 
2 million. 


* Nearly 25% 
of American 
adults did not 
read a book in 
the past year, 
a percentage 
that has tripled 
since 1978. 


HOUSE OF CARDS 


+44 BILLION 


* Total value of 
unused gift cards 
Americans h: 
accumulated 


M WALK 
RELATED THE WALK 


* The average 
* People who text 


child reads 
40 minutes 

while walking move 
more slowly, hunch 


per day— 
more than 

their shoulders and 
walk erratically, 


the average 
American 
according to a 
University of 


adult. 
Queensland 
study. Researchers 


described those who 
walk and text as 
"elderly robots." 


LIKE A 
VIRGIN 


. wom 


who took part 
in a study cited 
in the British 
Medical Journal 
claimed to have 
given birth 
despite never 
having had se: 


Wi d 


n RA 


+ Percent 
who signed 
a “chastity 

pledge” prior 
to becoming 
pregnant: 


di 


” 


+ Percent 
of "virgin 
mothers’ parents 
who claimed 
they didn't 
haze enough 
knowledge to 
discuss sex and. 
contraception 
with their 
daughters: 


DON'T CELEBRATE 
WITH JUST ANY 
TEQUILA. 


HORNITOS 


— 100% PURO AGAVE TEQUILA — 


FOLLOW ФНОВМІТО5, ӘРІ. АҮВОҮ 
AND @RPOMPLUN THIS YEAR FOR 
ALL THE FUN. HAPPY CINCO DE MAYO! 


SOMETIMES THE JOURNEY 

15 MORE FUN THAN THE 
omparatively, watching porn is 

Г productive. The hours I truly re- 
gret are the many I've spent search- 

I've lost evenings just scrolling through 
hundreds of tiny squares on porn search 
engines, rolling my cursor to analyze a 
and clearing my browser without ever 
choosing one. If online porn had wait- 
ers, mine would be annoyed at having 
he would be annoyed at not having stud- 
ied harder in high school so he wouldn't 
wind up as an online porn waiter. 
tion when I turned оп my computer. 1 
fully intended to watch some porn. Ac- 
tually, І meant to do some work, but I 
work was going to happen and 1 should 
just let myself watch porn. But I could 
not even accomplish watching porn. 
I wasn't even trying to watch an entire 
porn film but just one part of one scene. 
That's how low I had set the bar. And 
ited goal because the porn search engine 
offered me a glimpse into the infinity of 
the universe. Or at least the infinity of 
naked people and colorful pieces of 
plastic can do to one another. Which is 
still pretty infinite. 
only for wasting my time but also for 
disrespecting how the medium was de- 
signed to be viewed. What would these 
dured a double-penetration pile driver 
so I could watch a few one-inch-by-one- 
inch squares at a time? It's like reading 
I've had enough of The Merry Wives of 
Windsor—which, by the way, is a horrible 
name for a porn film. 
searching for the perfect lighting and set 
decoration, unable to remain turned on 
thanks to continuity errors. No, I know 


HUNT 
DESTINATION 

ing for porn and not finding what I want. 
few staccato frames, bookmarking some 
to check my table so many times. Also, 
Coming up empty was not my inten- 
eventually accepted the fact that no 
Which is a particularly simple task, since 
yet I was distracted from my very lim- 
really weird things naked people, semi- 
I become weighted with guilt not 
porn stars think if they knew they'd en- 
four quotes from Falstaff and deciding 
It’s not that I'm some perfectionist 
34 from my few camping experiences that I 


can masturbate to forest shadows. I also 
know that, to a large extent, all porn is 
exactly the same: People fall deeply in 
love, express their love and, I assume, 
nine months later form a family, some- 
times a very nontraditional one with one 
mommy and a dozen daddies. 

No, I have the same problem third- 
world refugees who relocate to subur- 
ban America report after visiting their 

first supermarket. They 
BY 


are paralyzed by the 
JOEL 


overwhelming options, 
unable to choose from 
STEIN 


so many nearly identi- 
cal but clearly different 
brands of pasta sauce. 
They are stuck in a per- 
manent, unpleasant state of browsing, 
fearful of making the wrong choice. 
Now imagine how much more difficult 
that decision would be if pasta sauce 
gave you an erection. 

The human brain was designed for the 
task it had to do for tens of thousands of 
years: check out the few women in our 
tiny tribe we weren't related to, invent. 
disgusting fantasies about them and re- 
play those fantasies nightly. But between 
porn, amateur porn, Reddit selfies, Eu- 
ropean porn and those weird sites where 
girls take photos of themselves in yoga 
pants, our tribe has expanded to include 
the entire globe. Yet, in order to ensure 
our tribe's survival, our brains still try to 
collect information on all the members. 

Physiologically, we're doomed. Seek- 
ing pleasure floods our brains with 
dopamine, whereas actually getting. 
pleasure stimulates our opioid system. 
Sure, watching porn makes you feel like 
a heroin addict, but that's a lot more 
pleasant than the meth-head І become 


when I search for porn clips. I lose 
all sense of time, possibly because our 
sense oftime might be controlled by the 
dopamine system, which I am throw- 
ing out of whack. Or it could be that I 
lose all sense of time because I'm really 
lazy and it's easy to look at flickering 
pictures of naked people. I prefer the 
dopamine theory. 

Brian Knutson, a Stanford neuro- 
scientist, has done MRIs on people as 
they played investment simulations and 
found we are more stimulated by the 
possibility of high returns than we are 
when we get them. The possibility of 
great porn is more exciting than great 
porn itself. It’s the same impetus that 
keeps everyone dating online instead of 
getting in a relationship, or wasting a 
night clicking through BuzzFeed lists, 
or spiraling into online shopping holes, 
or reading tweet after tweet we can't re- 
member 10 minutes later. The internet. 
is a dealer of mini hits of speed that blur 
our eyes and eat our time. We are not 
surfing; we are drowning. At least, un- 
like BuzzFeed and Twitter addicts, I’m 
drowning in things that social mores 
prevent me from boring other people 
with over dinner. Though, to be honest, 
1 would prefer those dinners. 

What I need is to have my choices tak- 
en away from me. Or to stop watching 
porn. But it would be way easier if some- 
one would just work up an algorithm, 
based on my particular perversions, 
that delivered only one porn clip per 
search, with no options. A porn omakase 
that removes the menu from my hand. 
If Google would just focus on doing this 
instead of stupid things like driverless 
cars, it would free up more than enough 
of my time to drive my own car. 


MARK NASON 
FOOTWEAR 


MARKNASON.COM 


36 


YES, IT CAN BEDONE. 
HERE'S OUR SUREFIRE METHOD 


grew up in Texas but always hated 
sports. When I wanted to talk to 
boys, they were watching sports. 
When I wanted to talk to my dad, he 
was watching sports. When my de- 
bate team needed money for a trip, 
the money went to sports instead. 
(I was a bit of a nerd, but it was still 
unfair!) Like most women, I’ve pre- 
tended to like sports for a boyfriend 
or 10, sat by as his team “got the job done” 
or not, taking solace in chips and dip. But 
I secretly wanted to get to a point where I 
could insist we watch something else or 
I could slip into the other room to read 
(still a nerd). I know men are onto this 
lady behavior. They know we don't want 
to be there. They know we live for half- 
time and dread overtime. They know we 
want to spend our time doing anything 
else, like going outside. You know what 
I'm talking about. But...what if you could 
change that? What if you could get your 
sports-loathing girl to love sports? Well, 
it’s possible. It happened to me. 

What changed sports for me was the 
story of Bill Buckner. You know the one: 
Buckner let Mookie Wilson’s ball roll be- 
tween his legs, which ultimately led to 
the Red Sox losing game six of the 1986 
World Series and simultaneously ruined 
Buckner's life. It might seem crazy I 
made it to adulthood without hearing 
the story, but I did. 1 heard it in a doc- 
umentary, The Curse of the Bambino, in 
2003, and it changed everything. I cared 
about Bill Buckner. I cared that he wore 
his history like chains and that his fam- 
ily did too. I cared about the Red Sox. 
I wanted them to win the World Series 
the next year just to take the pressure off 
Bill Buckner. And that’s when I realized 
I didn’t care about the “sports” of sports 
but I did care about the players. There 
was a riveting human-drama-filled Life- 


time movie on every major sports team. 
And I love me some Lifetime movies. 
My anti-sports approach to sports 
drives guys crazy. I'll say things like “I 
want this guy to score because his mom 
just got out of the hospital.” But it gets my 
butt in a stadium seat or оп а couch, not 
questioning what it would be like to be at 
brunch. And you can get your girl to feel 
the same. Throw some human-interest 
sports stories at her. Girls like to feel 
things. Dare her not to care. And start 
with a gateway sport: college basketball. 
There's nothing better than the NCAA 
tournament for attracting fresh blood. 
How can your girl not care about these 
kids? All eyes on them. Hearts on the 
court. Most will never play profession- 
ally and this is it. So much pressure. So 
much emotion. Remember the year that 
star from Gonzaga rolled around on the 
floor crying when his team lost to UCLA? 


BY HILARY WINSTON 


I mean, they're kids. They're missing 
shots that will haunt them for the rest of 
their lives (remember when Chris Web- 
ber called a time-out he didn’t have?) or 
making shots they'll dine out on for the 
rest of their lives (ask Bryce Drew from 
Valparaiso, who made “the Shot” in 1998). 
And you know what they call teams that 
come from behind in the tournament? 
Cinderella stories. March Madness is the 
gateway for any non-sports-loving lady 
witha heart. Just show her a “One Shining 
Moment” montage. Last season one of the 
most talked-about stories was Kevin Ware 
and his grotesque broken leg that shot 
through his skin, too horrifying to show 
on TV. But the bigger story was the guy 
who went to his aid, Luke Hancock. While 
some of his teammates were throwing up, 
Luke comforted Kevin, even though Luke 


himself needed comforting. His dad was 
sick. Dying. But he put his problems aside 
to help his teammate. Without the star 
Kevin Ware, Luke, a pretty uncelebrated 
player, went on to lead his team to the 
championship title. He was named the 
tournament’s most outstanding player. 
And his dad was watching. It's a sad but 
beautiful story. What a moment. What a 
guy. That's a jersey I can get behind. 
Sports are metaphors for life. Triumph 
and tragedy. There's always a winner 
(Yankees often) and always a loser (Mets 
often). Heroes and villains. Fathers and 
sons (the Mannings). Brothers (also the 
Mannings). Legacies and underdogs. (I 
still get choked up when I talk about my 
hometown team, Texas A&M-Corpus 
Christi, making it to the tournament for 
the first time.) It showcases man's great- 
est moments (Olympic "miracle" hockey 
team) and his worst (Black Sox). Super- 
stars and utility players alike go out there 
and show you not just what they are but 
who they are. It's not a coincidence the 
New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl 
after Katrina. It's just throwing and tack- 
ling, but it really meant something that 
Sunday. Guys were staring at their feet іп 
living rooms all across America. Just like 
when the Boston Red Sox won the World 
Series afier the bombing. That story alone 
can get a girl who hates sports to make you 
a buffalo-wing cake with BOSTON STRONG 
written in blue cheese dressing. So that's 
your angle: the soft underbelly of sports. 
People may say I'm watching for the wrong 
reasons, but I'm watching. And next year, 
while you and your newly sports-loving 
girl are deep into your brackets (you're 
welcome), I'll be at the Final Four (my guy 
can thank me for the tickets). I don't know 
which teams will be playing, but it doesn't 
matter, because any team will have a story 
worth rooting for. ГЫ 


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How close are scientists to cre- 
ating a real sexbot?—R.S., Toms 
River, New Jersey 

If you mean a walking, talk- 
ing, sex-obsessed fembot à la Austin 
Powers, not close at all. The sex robot 
is one of those futurist fantasies that, 


like the flying car, have captured the 


PLAYBOY 


cell phone. She sits there for 
hours looking through every 
single action I've taken. I've 
tried password protection, but 
aused a problem. I'm not 


tha 
doing anything wrong, but I 
feel like a prisoner in my own 


home. When I confront her 


imagination but have so far failed to 
materialize. In the next few decades 
we could see the convergence of, 
say, а sexy Siri and an extremely 
dexterous, ambulatory android, but 
today's offerings are a far cry from 
that reality. True Companion makes 
a $6,995 silicone-covered product 
that responds to touch, has motor- 
ized private parts and is capable 
of rudimentary conversation. But 
if you're dead set on experiencing 
sex with minimal emotional attach- 
ment, a better use of your $6,995 
would be to avail yourself of an elite 
member of the warld's oldest profes- 
sion. Better yet, you could spend it on. 
psychotherapy and figure cut how to 
overcome your fear of intimacy. 


уе long been fascinated with 
time capsules and have finally 
decided to make one. Among 
the objects I'd like to include in 
my capsule is a bottle of some 
sort of alcohol. It will be bur- 
ied in a remote location in the 
Texas Panhandle and so will be 
there a long time, possibly 100 
years or more, until someone 
has the opportunity to discover 
and open it. What would be the 
best kind of alcohol to bury? I'm 
thinking some brand of whiskey 
or a bottle of a good red wine.— 
H.G., Canyon, Texas 

With the exception of the best sweet 
wines, such as French Sauternes, 
very few wines will be drinkable after 
100 years, even when stored in a 
climate-controlled wine cellar. Given 
the extreme temperature fluctuations 
in the Texas Panhandle, we recom- 
mend going with an 80-proof spirit. 
It will never freeze (unless the tem- 
perature drops to minus 30 degrees 
Fahrenheit). Whiskey is a great 
idea—particularly high-end Ken- 
tucky bourbons, which are currently 
in short supply (collectors are buying 
and hoarding them at unprecedented 
rates). Plus, should you find yourself іп а tight 
spot financially, you'll be able to break open your 
lime capsule and cash out your liquid assets. 


What color deck shoes would you rec- 
ommend to wear with black pants? Can 
you suggest a particular style?—T.H., 
Cambridge, Massachusetts 

When pairing pants with shoes of any style 
you generally want some contrast in shade. Pale 
tan or camel looks nice against black, whereas a 
dark brown would look too similar in tone and 
thus seem a bit like an accidental mismatch. 


What is the etiquette for asking a waitress or bar- 
tender out when she’s working? Some of the places 
I frequent have very attractive servers, but I don’t 
want to be distasteful and put them on the spot.—J. 
Scottsdale, Arizona 
The etiquette is you don't. Of course there's the occasional 
exception to that rule (a friend of ours once closed a bar with 
а hot bartender and took her home, but he looks like a young 
Tom Cruise and is guilelessly charming and a gentleman of the 
highest order). Bul we've heard many more stories from wait- 
esses complaining about douchey male patrons hitting on them. 
Many a good dinner has been ruined by the ice-cold dessert of 
rejection. Of course those attractive servers are dating—and 
they're often dating other servers, bartenders and chefs. If 
you're determined to date someone in the food and beverage 
industry, you might consider changing careers. 


With a casual look you can play more with 
the contrast. Top-Siders, the Sperry-branded 
version of the classic boat shoe, come in doz- 
ens of styles and colors. If your personal style 
is more flamboyant, push the contrast to the 
maximum with red or white shoes. Or revert to 
the “like with like” (i.e, monochromatic) rule of 
fashion and wear black Top-Siders. Get a pair 
with white soles so the bottom half of your body 
doesn’t completely disappear. 


Every time 1 go to bed my wife of 
eight years checks my computer and 


about this, we always start to 
argue and she wants to know 
what I'm hiding that she can't 
see. What's going on here?— 
‚ Birmingham, Alabama 

"he fact that you describe your 
attempts to discuss your wife's mon- 
itoring of your activities as “соп- 
fronting her” leads us to believe 
you're behaving defensively, as 
does the fact that you tried to lock 
her out. Soften your approach and 
open up more. If you truly have 
nothing to hide, then ask her to tell 
you specifically what she’s worried 
‘about: What are her concrete fears? 
Was there a past breach of trust, 
whether actual or perceived? Some- 
times a small suspicion or insecu- 
rity can grow into something bigger 
than is warranted. If it's all in her 
head, then you should take the fo- 
cus off you and empathize with her; 
whatever is in her mind is obviously 
causing her at least as much mental 
anguish as it is you. Let your digi- 
lal life be an open book to her and 
take steps to figure out what is caus- 
ing her anxiety. If letting her open 
up while remaining open to hear- 
ing her fears doesn't help, couples 
therapy would be a safe place to 
explore this together. 


М, friends say I pay too much 
for my glasses—$600 a pair 
versus two pairs for $120. Pm 
convinced my eye doctor uses 
a better lens material than the 
discount places. Is there a dif- 
ference? Also, what is the make 
and model of the sunglasses 
John Elway wore at the Super 
Bowl? —L.K., Salem, Ohio 

The biggest difference is the busi- 
ness model: Discount eyeglass stores 
are built on value, volume and 
vanity. As much as stylish glasses 
can improve your look, that's not as 
important as how they improve your 
looking. In a 2011 study, research- 
ers ordered a total of 200 pairs of glasses from 
the top 10 online discount-eyeglass companies 
and discovered that in some cases prescrip- 
tions were incorrect, special coatings weren't 
applied and, most alarming, nearly 25 per- 
cent of the glasses included lenses that failed 
impact testing. Glasses are much more than 
a functional fashion statement; they're medi- 
са! devices, and an optometrist puts that as 
the priority. As cool as it is to virtually “try 
on” glasses on a fancy website to see how the 
frames fit your face, ап optometrist is trained 
to make sure the frames are positioned to best 


39 


PLAYBOY 


40 


improve your vision. This can be done only in 
person. As for John Elway's glasses, if you're 
talking about the wraparound shades with the 
gold trim, our best guess is they're a slightly 
older style of Prada shield glasses. 


М, wife and I have been together for 
more than 15 years. She has no inter- 
est in having sex with me anymore. In 
the past the sex has been good and we 
enjoyed playing with various toys and vi- 
brators, but I recently discovered she has 
been using our favorite vibrator alone. 
She got really angry when 1 discovered 
this and she refused to discuss it. The 
next day she packed up the vibrator in 
question and put it away as if it were evil. 
Why does being discovered upset her? 
And why is she going it alone? I didn't 
disapprove of what she was doing other 
than the fact that I felt left out. In fact. 
I'm pleased that she wanted any sex at 
all, even if it was by herself. She gets up- 
set if I ever "go solo," so I stopped for 
years. But out of sheer frustration I have 
started again, this time in secret, which 
I'm uncomfortable with. What do you 
say?—N.M., London, Ohio 

We suggest telling her everything you just 
told us. But before you do, ask yourself what the 
issue is with going at it alone, which is by no 
means abnormal, particularly in a relationship 
as long as yours. You sound a lot like the couple 
in “The Pina Colada Song” (anyone younger 
than 40 should google the lyrics), who over the 
years have grown out of touch with each other's 
dreams and needs. It sounds as though you and. 
your wife are both adept at self-love. Admit why 
you've drifted apart, commit to remedying the 
situation and then work on rekindling your 
desire to be intimate together. Maybe the first step 
is to join self-loving forces and compare notes. 


Now that pot is legal in Washington 
state, I'm considering using it for medic- 
inal and possibly recreational purposes. 
I have trouble with insomnia, and I сап 
no longer take sleeping pills because of 
the adverse effect they have on me. Mar- 
ijuana is said to help with sleeplessness, 
so I'm going to give it a shot. Here is the 
problem: I have two kids, and my wife 
hates smoking of any kind. I’ve started 
to look into vaporizers, but I'm kind of 
lost when it comes to deciding which 
to go with. Can you give me any advice 
on tackling this? The smaller the device 
the better—I don’t want to have to ex- 
plain a new appliance to my kids.—H.R., 
Seattle, Washington 

While marijuana can certainly be used to 
treat insomnia, for some people it can have 
negative effects. Some respond to it as they 
would a stimulant. Others find it increases 
their anxiety. Others don't like the mental fog 
the next day. Before you invest in a pricey 
vaporizer, talk to a reputable doctor about dos- 
ages and strains. (It sounds as though you've 
tried marijuana before, but be warned: Weed 
is more powerful than ever these days.) You'll 
know soon enough if it’s right for you. If it 
turns out it is, buying your own weed and 


grinding it for vaping allows you more free- 
dom with choosing strains. Since you have 
kids, don't let anyone talk you inio buying 
edible marijuana candies, cookies or other 
sweets. That's an accident waiting to happen. 
The Pax model from Ploom is a quality vapor- 
izer that’s only about four inches long, has a 
sleek, low-key design and is rechargeable. 


Several porn videos I've seen show 
couples having anal sex and then switch- 
ing to vaginal sex. Do they stop filming 
and clean up to make the switch, or are 
they taking a risk here? Isn't it unwise to 
go from anal to vaginal? Also, in some 
other videos a man may lick a woman's 
anus—without using any protection— 
and then lick her vagina. I'm surprised 
they wouldn't take some sort of precau- 
tion. Isn't this risky behavior as wellz— 
S.S., Englewood, Colorado 

Porn videos are shot over hours, wilh 
multiple takes and much resting and wash- 
ing and lunch breaks and hair and makeup 
adjustments and water breaks and fluffing 
and a lot of other boring stuff that civilians 
don't have to bother with while having sex. 
But practicing sexual hygiene is one way the 
porn industry stays in business, and its the 
one thing you should emulate, even though 
you don't have the benefit of editing your sex- 
position changes into one seamless narrative. 
Yes, it is absolutely risky to go straight from 
anal to vaginal or oral sex without either 
washing your penis thoroughly with soap and 
hot water or changing condoms. 


For the past few months Гуе noticed my 
typical morning wood has turned into a 
raging, all-night-long hard-on. It actu- 
ally wakes me up in the middle of the 
night. That may notsound like much оға 
problem, but it seems to be the only time 
I get hard. Strip joints, online porn and 
even regular sex with my wife don't seem 
to do much. Is this a physical or a mental 
problem?—M.P, Chicago, Illinois 

The medical term for what you describe is 
“nocturnal penile tumescence.” It's used by 
sex therapists as the primary test to determine 
whether the reasons for erectile dysfunction 
are psychological or physical. Clearly your 
hardware is up to snuff. Tackle this problem 
by seeing a sex therapist who can help you get 
your two heads in sync again. 


How long is it okay to keep a cigar out- 
side of a humidor before lighting it up? 
Is there a better way to preserve it than a 
ziplock bag?—M.C., Wichita, Kansas 

Ideally less than an hour, as a cigar instantly 
begins to lose moisture in a dry climate. Immedi- 
ately transferring a cigar to a metal tube can buy 
you a day of freshness. You can also buy cigars 
from a smoke shop in factory-sealed glass tubes. 
All of these are elegant and effective alternatives 
to the plastic sandwich bag. If you're going on 
а trip, you can get a decent dopp-kit-size travel 
humidor for around 30 bucks. 


First of all, I’m not the guy who wrote 
in about a threesome in the Decem- 


ber issue. However, I have had several 
threesomes and I’m an average guy. 
Тһе first was 15 years ago when I was a 
freshman in college. The last was with 
the love of my life, my wife of 10 years, 
and a lady we met at a bar while on 
vacation. All I can say is, almost every- 
one is curious and nobody wants it to 
be weird. Take a deep breath, enjoy all 
the bits and pieces and never bring it 
up after the fact. After our threesome, 
my wife and I actually began to feel like 
some modern-day Bonnie and Clyde.— 
Т.М., Montauk, New York 

Unlike Bonnie and Clyde's, may your luck 
never run out. Thanks for the report from 
the front lines. 


Му husband and I were high school 
sweethearts and have been together 
now for more than a decade. We have 
always had (and still have) a healthy and 
satisfying sex life and are both comfort- 
able expressing our fantasies. Although 
he is the only sexual partner Гуе ever 
had, he was pretty experienced when 
we met. Until recently Га never met 
anyone else for whom I felt the same 
sexual attraction I do for my husband. 
However, a few months ago I started 
having intense fantasies about one of my 
husband's friends. I'm mortified. I can't 
bear to say anything to my husband. I 
love him so much and he never disap- 
points me sexually, but I just can't stop 
thinking about his friend. Is there some- 
thing wrong with me? How can І get 
these fantasies to stop? We see this friend 
often and I'm wondering if I should be 
avoiding him.—M.M., Muncie, Indiana 

There is nothing wrong with you at all. 
Studies show that anywhere between 60 and 
80 percent of women fantasize about men 
who aren't their partners. So don't beat your- 
self up. However, obsessive fantasies often 
provide a handy escape from real-life chal- 
lenges. Do an honest inventory of your feel- 
ings: Are your career, family life and social 
life as satisfying as your sex life with your 
husband? Is the rest of your marriage what 
you want it to be? If all that's in order, we 
Suggest channeling the bonus arousal into 
your sex life with your husband. The fanta- 
sies will most likely diminish with time. You 
haven't told us anything about how your 
husband's friend is behaving. If he's flirt- 
ing with you or has any part іп encouraging 
your attraction, we'd suggest keeping some 
distance until either he gets the message or 
your fantasies subside. The last thing you 
want to do is jeopardize the great thing you 
and your husband have built. 


For answers to reasonable questions relating 
1o food and drink, fashion and taste, and sex 
апа dating, write the Playboy Advisor, 9346 
Civic Center Drive, Beverly Hills, California 
90210, or e-mail advisor@playboy.com. The 
most interesting and pertinent questions will 
be presented in these pages each month. 


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fter leaving the local cinemaplex and watching 

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We Only Need to Look Around Us to See the Real Thing. 
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scene, an ambulance driver trimming lifesaving seconds at break- 
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Woe is тап 


A MAN 
IS EASY? 


We hear a lot about the 
plight of women in our 
society, but not all men 
have it made 


BY ISHMAEL REED 


riting on the Tikkun 
Daily blog, Harriet 
Fraad notes that the 
feminist movement 
began as an integrated 
working-class movement only to be coopt- 
ed by "privileged, educated" women. The 
producers of some network programs to- 
day are women who appear unaware of 
this hierarchy among women, whom they 
lump together. So, on a number of shows, 
these privileged and educated women, suc- 
cessful academics and pro- 
fessionals, complain about 
the war against them. Even 
Abby Huntsman, a billion- 
aire's granddaughter, says 
the war against women 
is a war against her. Co- 
median Nancy Giles ap- 
peared earlier this year 
on Melissa Harris-Perry's 
MSNBC show. On Harris- 
Perry's program men get shamed every 
week. Some men even appear on camera 
to confess their crimes against women or 
to exhibit their uncritical support for the 
bourgeois version of sisterhood. But Giles 
appeared on air and said, “It's hard to be 
a woman.” Does this mean being a man is 
easy? Statistics tend to refute that. 
Many years ago, І referred іп a mag- 
azine article to the rising suicide rate 
among white men and blamed iton popu- 


On her 
program men 
getshamed 


every week. 


lar media's image of white men as people 
with closets filled with superhero capes. 
Just take a look at the ads for movies and 
television shows. The white men are at 
the macho kick-ass center, with women 
clinging behind them. Their black, Asian 
or Hispanic sidekicks are shown with less 
prominence. They're sidekicks, after all. 
Even though Jamie Foxx was the star of 
Django Unchained, when the movie's pro- 
ducers went after some serious money, 
the ads featured Leonardo DiCaprio. 
The same thing happened 
with 12 Years a Slave when 
the Italian distributor 
made (and later apolo- 
gized for) posters for the 
movie that featured en- 
larged images of white ac- 
tors alongside a small im- 
age of the film's black star. 

Since I wrote that arti- 
de, the suicide rate among 
white men has worsened. While in 2010 
the suicide rate among black males was 
8.7 per 100,000, the statistics for white 
men were 22.6 per 100,000. White men 
are also more likely to suffer from depres- 
sion than black men, and the health statis- 
tics for black men stink. Life expectancy 
for black males was 4.7 years less than for 
white males in 2010. This difference is 
due to higher death rates for black men 
from heart disease, homicide, cancer, 


ILLUSTRATIONS BY JUSTIN PAGE 


READER 
RESPONSE 


HOW ABOUT SOME PRIVACY? 


I was glad to see Heidi Boghosian's 
article on private corporations and 
government spying ("The Surveil- 
lance Industry” October 2013). 
Boghosian emphasizes the loom- 
ing danger that comes from lack 
of true oversight and transpar- 
ency in the surveillance-industrial 
complex—something we've seen 
time and again in American his- 
tory. For example, Martin Luther 
King Jr. and other major figures 
in the civil rights movement were 
under FBI surveillance. A congres- 
sional committee later reported 
that agents harassed the domes- 

tic activists, actively trying to 


FORUMS 


undermine their cause. But out 

of this dark time came important 
legal changes: Congress passed 

a surveillance-reform law. The 
Supreme Court recognized that 
members of groups such as the 
NAACP have a right to privacy 
even though they publicly advocate 
for controversial causes. 

‘As Boghosian describes, the gov- 
ernment now practices a more 
technologically sophisticated form 
of domestic spying that affects all 
of us. As a means of fighting ter- 
rorism, it collects nearly every 
American's phone records and 


43 


44 


EJ Forum 


Y 


READER RESPONSE 


compiles databases that can reveal 
our associations— political, social, 
intimate and otherwise. The gov- 
ernment claims this is harmless 
because, unlike FBI activities in the 
1950s and 1960s, it does not target. 
political groups. 

History shows that's wrong. 
Widespread collection of informa- 
tion about individuals' associations 
is dangerous to democracy. Тһе 
Electronic Frontier Foundation, 
where I work as a legal fellow, is 
suing the National Security Agency 
on behalf of 24 politically diverse 
advocacy groups to stop this sur- 
veillance and preserve the political 
freedoms so hard-won by civil 
rights activists. It’s time to take 
another lesson from history and 
update our surveillance laws to 
offer true privacy in this digital age. 

Andrew Crocker 
San Francisco, California 


PERCHANCE TO DREAM... 


Sleep must be for losers, because 
I've been up all night (“Sleepers 
Awake,” March). Jonathan Crary 
worries that time spent asleep is 
undercapitalized, but I have a pro- 
posal for him. Put his book on tape 


so I can listen to it when I can't 
sleep. That would put me to sleep 
for sure—and then Playmates can 
keep me company in my dreams. 
Greg Scott 
Portland, Oregon 


A sleepless society is surely not 

a desirable one, considering the 
implications of how cranky people 
are even after a good eight hours. 


DOES THE PORTRAYAL OF WHITE MEN AS HEROES 
DISTRACT US FROM WHAT'S REALLY HAPPENING? 


strokes and other conditions. While ac- 
knowledging there are racial disparities in 
the health industry that are exacerbated 
by the refusal of some state governments 
to extend Medicaid to segments of the 
population, Dr. Michael LeNoir, presi- 
dent of the National Medical Association, 
says some of the disparity is self-inflicted. 
“Black men have worse health because 
they often don't take care of themselves,” 
says LeNoir. “They often won't go to the 
doctor for regular checkups or until the 


problems are far advanced. You can't put 
it all on low socioeconomic status, because 
black men die more often and are sicker 
across all socioeconomic groups.” Invol- 
untary medical experiments on blacks 
since slavery, which continue to this day, 
have caused some black men and women 
to be suspicious of the medical community. 

MSNBC has a number of pundits who 
tackle issues affecting women but no 
shows addressing issues of men. It may be 
hard to be a woman, as Giles exclaimed, 
but statistics show that being a man ain't 
no walk in the park either. 


THE 
DOCTOR 
IS OUT 


Why is there a shortage of 
doctors in the U.S.? Maybe 
because we have toomany 
women physicians 

BY MELBA NEWSOME 


hen Erika Gantt 

graduated from Har- 

vard Medical School 

in 1997, hers was the 

first class in which the 

number of women outnumbered men. 

This was touted as proof that women had 

made significant progress in cracking one 

of the hardest glass ceilings. It proved 

that women had finally achieved parity 

with men in a competitive field at the na- 

tion's premier university. More than 15 

years later, the influx of women into med- 

icine is being blamed for exacerbating 

one of the country's largest health care 
problems: the growing doctor shortage. 

A study from the Association of Ameri- 

can Medical Colleges’ Center for Work- 


force Studies estimates that by 2020 the 
U.S. will experience a shortage of more 
than 90,000 physicians, and 130,000 by 
2025. This accelerated shortage in doctors 
is due in large measure to the millions of 
aging baby boomers who will need more 
medical care. There's also no denying 
that we aren't turning out enough doc- 
tors to keep pace with population growth. 
The U.S. population has increased by 
more than 35 million since 2000, while 


NICE SET OF DOI 


С) = 


ТНЕ МЕУ/ МІМІ 
HARDTOP. 


МІМІ СООРЕК 5 


"You're right. It's a lot bigger than I thought!” 


the number of available residency slots to 
train new doctors has barely increased. 

Although the enrollment rate at medical 
schools has remained steady, the number 
of female medical students has increased 
every year since 1969, when they account- 
ed for just nine percent of all medical stu- 
dents. That number peaked in 2003, at. 
49.6. In 2012, 47 percent of medical school 
students and 30 percent of physicians in 
the workforce were women. The latter 
is expected to grow significantly as more 
physicians retire. Here's a stark reality: 
Women doctors, on the aggregate, have 
shorter careers, take more time off and 
work fewer hours than male doctors. The 
primary care field is increasingly popular 
with women, perhaps because residencies 
are shorter and there are more opportu- 
nities for job sharing. Primary care is also 
the area with the greatest shortage. 

Adding to the problem is the number 
of cumulative hours doctors work. Since 
2005 the part-time physician workforce 
has expanded by 62 percent. According 
to 2010 survey data from the American 
Medical Group Association, nearly four in 
10 female doctors between 
the ages of 35 and 44 work 
part-time. Another study 
found that female physi- 
cians also tend to work an 
average of 4.5 fewer hours 
than their male colleagues. 
It may be unfair, but this 
explains why women are 
blamed for the looming 
shortage of doctors. 

Should medical school 
admission continue to be 
gender blind? What hap- 
pens when these women 
leave the profession to 
become stay-at-home moms or decide to 
work part-time? “We don't have enough 
doctors, even today," said Los Angeles 
anesthesiologist Karen Sibert in an inter- 
view on NPR. "And now the estimates are 
that for every doctor in their 60s who re- 
tires, it’s going to take between one and 
a half and two doctors to replace him ог 
her because of the expectation that pco- 
ple just don't have to work as hard." 

Gantt, an orthopedic surgeon, believes 
attempts to blame women for the short- 
age are wrongheaded and signal a double 
standard that ignores her male colleagues 
who choose not to practice. "Becoming a 
doctor takes so long, 1 don't know many 
women who give it up completely. But 
many male doctors in my class also leave 
medicine to go into business and industry 
such as biotech." 

Gantt's specialty continues to be domi- 
nated by men. Of the 100 partners in her 
practice, only four are women, a statistic 
she attributes, in part, to societal atti- 
tudes. Even in this highly skilled profes- 
sion, women are expected to take оп a 
larger share of family responsibilities than. 


About 34,000 
medical school 
graduates 
competed for 
roughly 29,000 


available slots 


last year. 


their male counterparts. And unlike their 
male counterparts, many don't have stay- 
at-home spouses. 

It seems a simple fix would be to just. 
train more doctors, but that's easier said 
than done. Medicine differs from other 
professions because education and train- 
ing are heavily subsidized by the govern- 
ment and there are only so many slots 
available. In 1997 Congress imposed a сар 
on the number of subsidized residencies, 
the final hurdle to obtaining a medical 
license. About 34,000 U.S. and interna- 
tional medical school graduates competed 
for roughly 29,000 available slots last year. 
Although bills have been introduced to 
increase that number, those efforts һауе 
gone nowhere because the cost is con- 
sidered prohibitive. Should the country 
continue to spend its limited resources 
subsidizing medical training for those who 
are not in it for the long haul full-time? 

Sibert and others say too often doctors 
make personal decisions that have a nega- 
tive impact on patients and society. Does a 
student who obtains one of these coveted 
spots have a responsibility to make the 
most of it? “If doctors aren't 
making full use of their 
training, taxpayers are 
losing their investment," 
wrote Sibert in a New York 
Times op-ed. "With a grow- 
ing shortage of doctors in 
America, we can no longer 
afford to continue training 
doctors who don't spend 
their careers in the full- 
time practice of medicine." 

Gantt is not convinced 
doctors owe a career-long 
debt to the taxpayer. She 
believes the grueling na- 
ture of the residency alone is more than 
enough payback. "During residency we 
did our part by providing medical help 
at a greatly reduced cost," she says. "We 
were working 80 to 100 hours a week, 
making $50,000 a year alongside physi- 
cian extenders—nurse practitioners and 
physician assistants—who make double 
that. All the while your student loan debt. 
continues to accrue. I'd feel more grateful 
if I hadn't paid so much for my education. 
We leave school with enormous debt." 

The cause of the shortage is twofold: 
There aren't enough doctorsand the doc- 
tors we have don't work enough hours. 
"The latter is largely a generational issue. 
Regardless of gender, more physicians 
are concerned with "work-life balance," 
a term that didn't exist in the profession 
years ago. There is no denying that, com- 
pared with men, more women leave the 
profession and work less while practicing. 
But until society modifies its expectations 
of the role of women as primary caregiv- 
ers, don't expect that to change. You can 
expect your wait time to see a doctor to 
change, however. It will get longer. Ш 


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On the other hand, the idea that 
we need eight hours of sleep 
each night is ridiculous. With an 
impeccable diet, you can thrive on 
only five hours of sleep if need be, 
and you can work phenomenally 
after six hours, though that isa 
whole different topic. 

I believe sleep is a bother. Asa 
writer, I hate when the feeling of 
exhaustion comes over me and 


the only thought that rules my 
7 


> 
mind is the fantasy that I might hit 
the bed and not wake until next 
spring. I often dream about what it 
would be like to live a life without. 
sleep—how much I could get done, 
what I could read and so on. I've 
learned to make use of my hours 
of rest by indulging the most enter- 
taining show ever: my dreams. 
Everyone has wacky dreams, and 
T'm no exception. Then again, I 
practice the art of lucid dreaming, 
which is being conscious of when 
you're dreaming and thus control- 
ling your thoughts and actions in a 
dream. This makes simple dreams 
as memorable as real-life occur- 
rences. Last week I lay down for a. 
nap around 3:30 р.м. and, after fall- 
ing asleep, “awoke” in a dream. I 
looked at my hand and saw seven 
fingers, as well as a stubbly one, 
and realized I was dreaming. I was 
ecstatic, seeing how you can do any- 
thing in that state. At one point I 
was riding Pegasus. After I woke up 
it felt as if I'd spent a day wander- 
ing in my head. When I checked 
my phone it was only 4:30 р.м. It 
was one of the rare occurrences 


45 


46 


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READER RESPONSE 


when I felt my time sleeping was 
spent productively. 
Josh Fredette 
Palmdale, California 


The Centers for Disease Control and 
Prevention recommends adults get seven 
to nine hours of sleep—more time for 
frolicking with Pegasus and Playmates. 


IT’S A GAMBLE 


Human greed may in part have led 
to global warming, but perhaps by 
exploiting mankind's infinite greed 
we can fix the problem (Reader 
Response, March). If we installed 
vast arrays of windmill farms, 
devices to harness power from 
waves and ocean currents, and 
solar-cell panels all over the world, 
the “free” clean electricity gener- 
ated by these systems that derive 
juice from wind, sea and sun would 
enable us to greatly minimi, 
dependence on coal-burning power 
plants that emit carbon 
a dioxide and related 
6 N greenhouse gases 
into the earth's 
atmosphere. We 
would need a 
way to pay юг 
these expensive 
devices. This 
is wherea 
global lottery 
with a global- 
warming tax 
comes іп: The 
U.S. and the 
United Nations 
should create a 
“global 50-50 lottery,” the world's 
first truly international lottery, to 
fund the fight against global warm- 
ing. This idea has a few logistical 
problems but nothing we couldn't 
remedy if we tried. 


Robert G. Schreib Jr. 
Toms River, Neu Jersey 


WORTH FIGHTING FOR 


It is easy to look at TransCanada's 
Keystone export pipeline and 
think, What's the big deal? It's a 
line on a map, and we have lots of 
pipelines already. But it is more 
than that, and the people it would 
affect are many. We are small- 
business owners who rely on dean 
water for good beer. We are farm- 
ers and ranchers growing food that 


COMPLEX 


Can effective mental 
health treatment exist in 
a criminal justice system 
driven by profit? 


BY GALEN BAUGHMAN 
AND ANDREW EXTEIN 


osh Gravens, now 27, was sen- 

tenced to the Bill Clayton De- 

tention Center іп Littlefield, 

Texas when he was 13. He was 

told to expect a jail stay of nine 
months, but he spent 42 months under 
the supervision of the Texas Juvenile 
Justice Department. He was not fully re- 
leased until he was 21, having been de- 
tained for years without cause, he says. 
“I never even had a write-up,” he says. 
“Behavior was never the issue. Grades 
were never an issue. We engaged will- 
ingly and aggressively.” 

In Texas, the state contracts corporate 
prisons to jail juvenile offenders. Com- 
pensation per prisoner escalates by level 
of care. However, these facilities aren't 
guaranteed children at specific compen- 
sation levels, so it's often in a corpora- 
tion's best interest to keep profitable 
offenders for as long as possible. This 
isn't what correctional supervision is 
supposed to accomplish, and it seems to 
be enabled by psychologists who falsify 
treatment records to extend incarcera- 
tion times. Texas's juvenile sentencing 
system works by assigning indeterminate 
terms to offenders, with release possible 
only after a vague set of treatment pro- 
grams has been fulfilled. 

Melvin Tomison, a case manager at 
Clayton during the time of Gravens's 


sentence, spent two hours a day discuss- 
ing personal problems with the children 
while providing life-skills instruction. 
He says 10 case managers had come and 
gone in the 11 months prior to his ar- 
rival. "There were no problems with my 
reports on these kids for the first five ог 
six months," he says. "But when a new 
supervisor came along, every report I 
filed was wrong. He would edit them to 
change the meaning of my observations." 
In one instance, a 10-year-old's report of 
abuse at the hands of his stepbrother was 
deleted from his file. "That was some- 
thing that would have made a profound 
difference in how anyone would view 
his behavior and psychological state," 
Tomison says. "My supervisor wanted to 
get rid of me,” he concludes, “because 1 
was the only one getting kids out." 


he legal precedent that allows 
psychologists to testify about 
the presence of mental disor- 
ders is found in the 1962 U.S. 
Court of Appeals decision Jen- 
hins v. U.S. Use of psychologists as expert 
witnesses has increased since, but recent 
investigations have revealed that their tes- 
timony is often little more than propagan- 
da. A 2011 study in Virginia found that the 
state attorney general's office relies on a. 
small stable of experts in court arguments. 
These experts side in favor of prosecutors 
80 percent of the time. Similar practices 
are used in 20 states and federal trials. 
Whena group of unscrupulous psychol- 
ogists lobbied to add a slew of sexual dis- 
orders to last year's D$M-5—the definitive 
mental health manual—they revealed the 
toxic relationship between psychology and 
prosecution. If paraphiliac coercive disor- 
der, hypersexuality and other suspect men- 
tal illnesses had been allowed to be listed, 
they would have become available for use 
in trial. "The civil commitment industry 


=: 


and the psychologists it employs lobbied 
for these disorders so they could use them 
in testimony instead of shady ‘unspecified’ 
diagnoses,” says Karen Franklin, a foren- 
sic psychologist in California. Assigning a 
defendant an “unspecified” diagnosis is a 
practice employed by co-opted psycholo- 
gists to justify detention of offenders with- 
e: out legitimate mental illnesses. Having 


the disorders they proposed officially 

recognized in the DSM would pro- 

vide even firmer ground for such 
convictions, but the disorders are not 
recognized by the broader medical com- 
munity and "didn't even end up becom- 
ing ‘conditions for further study, ” Frank- 
lin says, evidence of their 
tenuous scientific standing. 
When psychologists lobby 
for diagnoses as shady as 
these to be listed in the 
definitive mental health 
manual of our age, one can 
be sure their intentions аге 
far from honest. 

Twenty thousand sex of- 
fenders are released from 
our prisons every year. No- 
where has psychology be- 
come more removed from its fundamental 
principles than in the post-incarceration 
treatment of these offenders. The vast 
majority are required to undergo mental 
health treatment, and while community 
safety can and should be held as these pro- 
grams’ utmost goal, psychology is corrupt- 
ed by law-enforcement aims. This means 
little is done to address the roots of criminal 
behavior or to protect communities. “Judg- 
es and citizens mistake these treatments for 
psychotherapy," says Phil Taylor, who spent. 
90 years as a licensed treatment provider. 
"It is not treatment. It is police work." 

Post-release law-enforcement supervi- 
sion masquerades as therapy in the “con- 
tainment model,” whereby therapists and 
polygraphers share information about 


LUCRATIVE CONTRACTS ARE MOTIVATION TO 
KEEP OFFENDERS AS LONG AS POSSIBLE, 


“There is an 
inexorable 
drifttoward 
treatment as 
punishment." 


patients with officers. It is often provided 
by companies that exist solely to fulfill 
treatment contracts, which is obviously a 
perverse financial incentive. Confidenti- 
ality is signed away, refusal to cooperate 
is a jailable offense, and patients are sub- 
jected to treatment that would never be 
tolerated in private practice. 

"When states certify practitioners, 
and definitions and prescriptions come 
under the control of politically be- 
holden agencies," says Taylor, "there is 
an inexorable drifi toward treatment 
as punishment and treatment as post- 
adjudication inquisition." 

It is akin to assuming anyone convicted 
of theft is recidivist and 
worthy of the same mode 
of rehabilitation. The con- 
tainment model lumps 
together a diverse popula- 
tion of convicts and fails to 
rehabilitate them. Long- 
standing evidence-based 
treatment models could 
bring real help to these pa- 
tients, but they are failed by 
an overzealous state. 

With 7 million Ameri- 
cans under law-enforcement supervision, 
the demand for mental health services has 
never been greater. But professional objec- 
tivity and the goals of psychology have been. 
abandoned in pursuit of lucrative contracts. 

These compromises set dangerous 
precedents for the future of mental health 
policy. They fail to reduce recidivism, fail 
to promote public safety and fail to allevi- 
ate incarceration rates. To promote true 
public safety, they must be addressed 
across disciplines and through broader 
cultural conversations. Until then, the 
lowest bidder wins. = 


Galen Baughman was convicted in 2004 of 
а sex offense with a minor at the age of 19 
and served nine years in prison. He is now an 
advocate against the civil commitment model 
and co-founder of the Center for Sexual Jus- 
tice with psychotherapist Andrew Extein. 


Forum [EJ 
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READER RESPONSE 


families across our country eat. We 
are tribes who look at the land as 
sacred and part of our very being. 
We are moms and dads who look 
at our kids and have no choice but. 
to stand up and fight the pipeline. 
In December, PLAYBOY ran a 
brilliant article about the people 
fighting tar-sands oil in their com- 
munities ("Don't Drill on Me”). I 
work with farmers, ranchers, tribes 
and other citizens to stop the Key- 
stone pipeline from threatening. 
our land and water. Communi- 
ties in Michigan, Arkansas and 
elsewhere are feeling the devastat- 
ing impact of what happens when 
tar-sands corporations view us 


= 


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as justa line on a map and a line 
item in their budget. These 
often foreign corporations think if 
they spend enough money we will 
simply go away. But with media 
coverage and tools such as Twitter 
and Facebook, we are connect- 
ing with one another to show our 
faces and to stand up for our land 
and water. Small beer companies 
like Bell's Brewery in Michigan 
and small-batch distilleries like Cut 
Spike in Nebraska rely on clean 
water for their livelihoods. There's 
a saying I think is apt: Whiskey is 
for drinking; water is for fighting. 
1 hope tar-sands corporations get 
the message real quick, because we 
are in this fight to win. 

Jane Kleeb 

Hastings, Nebraska 


E-mail letters@playboy.com. 
Or write 9346 Civic Center Drive, 
Beverly Hills, California 90210. 


47 


| 3 EA 


ЕУ ы” "o 


was LON Y HSIEH 


A candid conversation with the visionary CEO of Zappos about reinventing 
online shopping, turning Las Vegas into a utopia and why he hates shoes 


Markets rise and fall, but one thing is certain: 
Tony Hsieh is having way more fun at work 
than the rest of us. His résumé says "CEO of 
Zappos.com,” the online retailer, but Hsieh 
(pronounced “Shay”) could easily dub himself 
High Priest of Happiness or even Partier in 
Chief. No meeting is too serious for Tony (first 
names only, please, among Zapponians) to 
break out shots of Grey Goose or to introduce, 
say, a guy in a hot-dog suit who comes in 
doing backflips (this actually happened). 
Wackiness aside, business is booming. 
The shoe and clothing website was topping 
$1 billion in annual merchandising sales when 
Amazon acquired Zappos in 2009. Now the 
customer-service-focused company is reportedly 
more than twice as rich, though it no longer 
discloses revenue. At the same time, Hsieh, 40, 
is investing $350 million of personal pocket 
change to revitalize the bleak downtown Las 
Vegas neighborhood surrounding Zappos 
headquarters. Real estate, restaurants, tech 
start-ups, а school, a health center, arts, music, 
even а 40-foot metal praying mantis that 
breathes fire during a nighily drum circle—it's 
all part of Hsieh's new urban utopia. 
Anthony Chia-Hua Hsieh was born De- 
cember 12, 1973 іп Urbana, Illinois to hard- 
working Taiwanese immigrants who later 
moved to California's Bay Area to work even. 


harder. Tony's dad was a chemical engineer 
and his mom a social worker; they demanded 
excellence from Tony and his younger brothers, 
Andy and David. А prestigious Marin Coun- 
ty private school paved the way to Harvard, 
where Hsieh studied computer science but. 
barely went to class. Fortune found him any- 
way. Campus jobs led to computing jobs and 
a tech start-up of his own, a banner-ad ag- 
gregator called LinkExchange, which Micro- 
soft bought for $265 million when Hsieh was 
24. In 1999 he nearly deleted a voice-mail 
message from a guy looking for investors in 
an online store called ShoeSile.com, which 
eventually became the Zappos of internet suc- 
cess stories. Today the company makes nearly 
every list of best places to work, though Hsieh 
remains just another guy in a Zappos T-shirt 
one cubicle over. He even answers phones 
sometimes in the company's 24/7 call center. 
Contributing Editor David Hochman, who 
last interviewed comic-book icon Stan Lee, 
hung out with Hsieh in downtown Vegas 
for several days al Zappos headquarters 
and at the Ogden, where Hsieh lives alone 
in a sprawling condo almost always open to 
employees and friends. The тап Носһтап 
encountered surprised him. "You go in 
expecting Tony Robbins or егеп Ronald 
McDonald because of the rah-rah corporate 


culture," Hochman says. "But Tony is shy to 
the point of being awkward and much more an 
observer than a showboat. Then again, there's 
enough mirth-making around Zappos—the 
name is short for zapatos, the Spanish word 
for shoes—to make work a fiesta, even if 
Hsieh doesn't say a thing." 


PLAYBOY: Tutu Tuesdays, Kilt Fridays, 
Godzilla-size bottles of vodka every- 
where. How does anyone get anything 
done around here? 

HSIEH: You get used to it. When there's 
an employee parade coming through 
the office or someone from finance 
brings a horse up to the 10th floor for 
Chinese New Year, it's just another day 
at Zappos. You learn to adapt. It's all 
about framing, really. When you need to 
party, you party. When you need to pro- 
duce, you produce. And by the way, it's 
the Year of the Horse. 

PLAYBOY: Whatever happened to nose to 
the grindstone? 

HSIEH: Work isn't about being chained 
to your desk, staring at a screen. What 
we're focused on is employee engage- 
ment. Plenty of studies show that the 
more engaged employees are, the hap- 
pier and more productive they are. 


"When you need to party, you party. When you 
need to produce, you produce. Work isn't about 
being chained to your desk, staring at a screen. 
The more engaged employees are, the happier 
and more productive they are." 


"Most companies are organized from high to 
low, where a boss commands people, whereas 
a holacracy operates less like a bureaucratic 
institution. In a pure holacracy, you do ашау 
with all job titles, managers and levels." 


PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARIUS BUGGE 


“I can't keep up with all the new social media 
stuff, but l'm already hearing kids in high 
school comment that Tuitter is for old people. 
People forget how early on things are in terms 
of digital technology.” 


49 


PLAYBOY 


50 


And the best predictors of engagement 
are things like whether you have a best 
friend at work and how much freedom 
you have on the job. It's a powerful 
thing to know you can turn your work 
space into a tiki lounge and invite every- 
body to happy hour at five o'clock. 
PLAYBOY: What's to prevent employees 
from being wasted all the time? 

HSIEH: We trust our employees to use 
good judgment, which 99.9 percent of 
them do. We'd rather not create policies 
to address the 0.1 percent at the cost of. 
fun for the other 99.9. 

At our quarterly merchandising- 
awards ceremony this year, people 
showed up early to grab a beer or wine. 
Then we spent an hour recognizing the 
people who met their sales numbers. We 
watched a few SNL-type skits some em- 
ployees put together, and then we had 
happy hour afterward a block away. 
PLAYBOY: Work hard, play hard? 

HSIEH: Why not? We also encourage 
managers to spend 10 to 20 percent of 
their time outside the office with their 
team and the people they work with. 
When new managers hear this, they go, 
“What? How? Why? Where?” It’s one of 
those bad habits we have to untrain out. 
of our employees. And productivity and 
efficiency go up anywhere from 20 to 
100 percent. It's because communication 
within departments is better and people 
are willing to do favors for each other, 
not just as co-workers but as friends. 
PLAYBOY: Your employees must be hook- 
ing up like crazy. Do you have to police 
the office nap rooms? 

HSIEH: We've had quite a few Zappos 
marriages, but again, we trust our em- 
ployees. Our nap rooms are for resting. 

Listen, if you're not enjoying work, 
what's the point? Prior to Zappos, I co- 
foundedacompany called LinkExchange 
back in 1996 and grew it to about 100 
employees before selling it to Micro- 
soft two and a half years later. A lot of 
people don't know the real reason we 
sold the company: It ended up not be- 
ing a fun place to work anymore. When 
we were smaller, in the early days, it was 
super exciting and fun, We were hiring 
friends and friends of friends. Then at 
some point we ran out of friends and 
had to hire people based on interviews 
and résumés, which we had never done 
before. We were fresh out of school, and 
work suddenly became a job. 1 dreaded 
getting out of bed in the morning, even 
though it was my company. That's a ter- 
rible situation, and it's why we got out. 
PLAYBOY: You left $8 million on the table 
by not sticking around with Microsoft 
that first year as your contract stipulated. 
That had to hurt. 

HSIEH: It would have hurt a lot more to 
waste my life waiting for the money. Trust 
me, I still walked away with more money 
than ГЇЇ ever need for the rest of my Ше. 
[Editor's note: Hsieh received $32 million] 
But it was a philosophical shift too. We'd 


been offered millions before and always 
held out for more. But while hanging 
around after the sale, I thought about all 
the things I wanted to be creating and 
experiencing. That's when I decided to 
stop chasing the money and start chas- 
ing the passion 

PLAYBOY: Following your passion is easy 
when you're sitting on millions. What 
if someone's out of work? They need to 
chase the cash. 

HSIEH: I think it's hard to give univer- 
sal advice, because it depends on your 
expenses, how much savings you have, 
your work experience. But when you're 
out of work, it's essential to focus on your 
interests and passions. Sometimes when 
I speak at a conference, people ask me 
what's a good market to get into where 
they can make a lot of money. My advice 
to them is, rather than having money 
be your primary motivator, think about 
what you'd be happy doing for 10 years 
even if you didn't make a cent. That's 
what you should be doing. I think if you 
do that, ironically, it'll greatly increase 
your chances of making more money, 
because your enthusiasm will rub off on 


I have zero interest in shoes. 
If anything, I have nega- 
tive inlerest in shoes. And 
fashion. My outfit is the 
same every day: a Zappos 

T-shirt, jeans and sneakers. 


employees and customers and have this 
ripple effect on your whole business. 
PLAYBOY: You must be really passionate 
about shoes. 

HSIEH: І have zero interest in shoes. If. 
anything, I have negative interest in 
shoes. And fashion. My outfit is the same 
every day: a Zappos T-shirt, jeans and 
sneakers. What happened was I formed 
an investment company with my happy 
little core group of friends. We invested 
in about 20 different companies, and 
things went great for a minute, but pret- 
ty quickly I got bored again. I felt I was 
sitting on the sidelines. I missed build- 
ing something. Of all the investments we 
had, Zappos was both the most promis- 
ing and, more important, the company 
with the people I liked the best. I joined 
full-time within that first year and have 
been here ever since. 

PLAYBOY: 15 there any advantage in not 
being in Silicon Valley or some other 
tech center? 

HSIEH: Zappos started in San Francisco, 
and in 2004 we decided to relocate to the 
Las Vegas area. Seventy people moved 
with us. We're a customer-service com- 


pany, and it was really hard finding 
people in San Francisco who wanted to 
do customer service as a career. Vegas 
is service-focused 24/7, so we knew it 
would fit with our core values. 

PLAYBOY: Core values? 

HSIEH: We have 10 core values that serve 
as a formalized definition of our compa- 
ny culture, and everything is driven by 
those ideals. They bond us like a family; 
they guide us through good times and 
bad. Some of our core values: Embrace 
and drive change. Build open and hon- 
est relationships with communication. Be 
passionate and determined. Ве adventur- 
ous. Be open-minded. Embrace growth 
and learning. Have fun. Be humble. 
PLAYBOY: Value number one is to deliver 
"wow." What does that mean exactly? 
HSIEH: When you think about getting a 
“wow” reaction from someone, it shifts 
your attitude. You can't just do things the 
expected way to get a wow. You have to go 
above and beyond. You're going for spine 
tingling, earthshaking. You're shooting 
for emotional impact. It's why we have 
this thing in our call centers called PEC, 
or personal emotional connection. You 
don't want to think of your customer as a 
dollar sign. You want to truly and authen- 
tically connect to their humanity. That's 
why our reps have the freedom to send 
flowers or handwritten notes or cookies 
just as a friendly thank-you or follow-up. 
It’s why one employee spent 10 hours оп 
the phone with a customer in 2019. 
PLAYBOY: Ten hours? 

HSIEH: A little longer than 10, actually. I 
have no idea what they talked about for 
all that time, but I don't need to know. 
What matters is that our people go the 
extra mile. I'll call Zappos sometimes if I 
need an answer for something. If I'm with 
а bunch of friends at a bar and there's a 
question we can't answer, we'll call Zap- 
pos and ask. I shouldn't tell people that, 
but it's true. If you're looking for a great. 
pizza place near you or want to know 
how many seats are in the theater you 
happen to be walking past, maybe give 
Zappos a call. You'll be amazed when the 
person answering actually makes an ef- 
fort. Our reps don't have quotas. They 
don't have scripts. They never up-sell. 
PLAYBOY: Remind us again why you don't. 
go bankrupt doing things this way. 
HSIEH: Interestingly enough, most phone 
calls that come in don't result in an im- 
mediate order. Somebody might want to 
see if they can get something delivered 
by tomorrow or if we have a shoe in a 
certain color. They're not calling to buy 
something. What matters is using each 
interaction with a customer to build a 
customer-service brand, to let our reps 
shine in each interaction. That way, 
we're creating a moment, a memorable 
and favorable experience, and yes, that 
does bring customers back for more. 
PLAYBOY: The promise ofthe internet was 
that we'd all be working remotely from 
hammocks somewhere and ordering 


pizza with a click of a mouse. But your 
company culture demands that employ- 
еез show up and stick around. 

HSIEH: We've always taken the view that 
we have to physically be together from 
an employee perspective. People don't 
work as well remotely. The author Steven 
Johnson writes about something called 
the “adjacent possible”—this notion that 
great ideas bubble up from unexpected 
places and random interactions over 
time. We want employees all in the same 
physical space to have more collisions. 
In fact, we've done weird things to 
prioritize collisions over convenience. 
PLAYBOY: I assume you're not talking 


HSIEH: Here's the idea. Maybe 15 or so 
years ago I used to throw a lot of parties. I 
noticed that when you have multiple bars, 
it always works best if you shut down the 
first bar during the first hour. Trust me, 
people will always find the alcohol. Then 
an hour later, open that first bar again, 
and it promotes circulation. It's a simple 
strategy, but people don't do it. Itled me at. 
Zappos to think about how to get employ- 
ees to circulate and run into each other. 
PLAYBOY: And you call yourself an 
introvert? 
HSIEH: Yes, but I like to surround myself 
with extroverts. I can't explain why. It's 
definitely harder for me to make small 
talk and interact the way some people 
do, so 1 guess I had to build it into the 
program. For instance, in our new bui 
ing everyone enters through a central 
courtyard plaza, which becomes a daily 
congestion point. You see almost ev- 
erybody in the company at some point 
every day. Also, there used to be a sky 
bridge from a parking garage leading 
to the former city hall where our office 
is now. The city employees all used to 
park and walk across the bridge and into 
the building. When we moved in, we 
shut down that bridge, which forces all 
the employees out into the streets. That. 
builds connection not just within the 
company but between Zappos and the 
surrounding neighborhood and city. 
PLAYBOY: You recently declared Zappos 
a holacracy. First, congratulations! Sec- 
ond, what's a holacracy? 

HSIEH: Holacracy is a different way of or- 
ganizing a company. Most companies are 
organized from high to low, where a boss 
commands people and so on, whereas a 
holacracy operates more like an urban 
environment and less like a bureaucratic 
institution. Everyone is together, and yet. 
they don't order each other around. In 
a pure holacracy, you do away with all 
job titles, managers and levels. We're 
still experimenting with the form, and it 
will have a unique Zappos flavor, but the 
key is to enable employees to act more 
like entrepreneurs. Instead of being 
told what to do by managers, we trust 
that employees will know what needs 
to be accomplished and then figure 
out the best way to make that happen. 


Its always a concern as a company 
grows—and we're approaching 9,000 
employees—that you remain innovative. 
When companies get bigger, productivity 
and innovation per employee generally 
go down. From the Zappos perspective, 
we're trying to avoid that fate. So the 
model we're using isn't a corporate 
one. Rather, it's the city. Every time the 
size of a city doubles, innovation and 
productivity increase by 15 percent. 
PLAYBOY: Speaking of cities, you've іп- 
vested $350 million of your own money 
to revitalize a forlorn area of downtown 
Las Vegas. That's a huge bet. 

HSIEH: People hear the $350 million 
number and think it’s a phenomenal 
risk. But Downtown Project is about 
300 different projects going on simul- 
taneously. Roughly $50 million goes 
to small businesses to help build a 
sense of neighborhood and commu- 
nity; $50 million goes to tech start-ups; 
$50 million goes into arts, educa- 
tion, music and health care, and then 
$200 million goes to real estate. 
PLAYBOY: But you don't have any experi- 
ence in urban planning. 


Our goal is to make 
downtown Vegas a place of 
inspiration and innovation. 

What we're trying to do is 
the TED conference meets 


SXSW meets Burning Man. 


HSIEH: That's right. None. Up until three 
years ago nothing related to urban plan- 
ning was even on my radar. 1 had about 
as much interest in it as I did in shoes, 
but I've always loved thinking about how 
people interact. 

We focus on what we refer to as the 
three Cs: collisions, as I've described, 
plus co-learning and connectedness. A 
lot of urban revitalization projects de- 
pend on having an expensive sports 
team or stadium or a Harvard or Stan- 
ford, but not every community can have 
that. We're thinking about relatively 
simple concepts, such as how to get more 
people colliding with each other or how 
to help people learn together in interest- 
ing ways. We initiated something called 
Learning Village. Anyone can go in and 
take part in whatever theme we have on 
a particular week. Because our popula- 
tion is creative and entrepreneurial, we 
might offer something fashion-focused 
where we hear from emerging design- 
ers, or we'll have a week devoted to tech. 
It's like we're throwing a mini confer- 
ence every single week. 

PLAYBOY: A city is not a conference, 


though. One criticism of Downtown Proj- 
ect is that it doesn’t address real urban 
issues such as homelessness, public trans- 
portation and affordable housing. Yes, 
you have a retail village made of super- 
cool shipping containers, but what about 
a decent neighborhood supermarket? 
HSIEH: Yeah. I guess the simplest answer 
is we're not the government and we're 
not trying to solve every problem. 1 will 
say it's challenging at times. I come from 
a tech background; I'm used to being 
able to go from an idea to launch in 24 
hours. Here, everything's much slower. 
Building buildings takes time. Еуегу- 
thing is a process, so you stick to your 
goals. Our goal with Downtown Project is 
to help make downtown Vegas a place of 
inspiration, creativity, entrepreneurship, 
innovation, discovery and upward mo- 
bility. Over time I hope we can expand 
our scope, but right now we're focused 
on helping accelerate the number of 
people from the creative class and entre- 
preneurs on both the small-business side 
and technology side to this area. What. 
we're trying to do is the TED conference 
meets SXSW meets Burning Man. 
PLAYBOY: Downtown Project took over 
the old Gold Spike casino but replaced 
all the gaming tables and slot machines 
with pool tables and games like corn- 
hole. Are you not a gambler? 

HSIEH: No. 

PLAYBOY: Weren't you once a serious 
poker player? 

HSIEH: I don't consider playing poker to 
be gambling. It's not a game where the 
house wins. I did play in the World Series 
of Poker once, but that was way before it 
was famous. 

PLAYBOY: Give us some pointers on 
winning. 

HSIEH: Well, you need to define what you 
mean by winning. Is your goal to make 
moncy? Is your goal to have a good 
time? Is your goal to build relationships? 
Is your goal to build a certain brand 
or persona? If you walk into a random 
casino, it’s probably to make money, so 
you can break it down from there. Let's 
say you do make money; you can break 
down how long you spent playing and 
how enjoyable it was. Or did you feel you. 
were just grinding it out? If I play poker 
at a tech conference, depending on who 
else is playing, it's a good way to get ca- 
sual face time with someone and build a 
relationship. Even if I lose money, I'm 
still winning. 

PLAYBOY: What if your goal is simply not 
to lose your shirt? 

HSIEH: Then don't play. But if you can't 
help yourself, realize that poker is very 
similar to business. Don't play if you 
don’t understand it. If you’re not win- 
ning at your table, you have to think 
about switching to another table. If there 
are too many competitors, even if you're 
good, success is going to be harder. Don't 
cheat. Be patient. Be humble. Be nice. 
Be prepared for the worst. And the guy 


51 


PLAYBOY 


52 


who wins the most hands isn't the guy 
who makes the most money in the end. 
Also, have fun. You don't want to be up 
all night worrying. 

PLAYBOY: Speaking of that, you're run- 
ning a billion-dollar company in addi- 
tion to overseeing a huge urban renewal 
program. When do you sleep? 

HSIEH: І basically don't sleep. 1 have 
meetings from eight a.m. to 10 р.м. al- 
most every day. І split my time pretty 
much 50-50 between Zappos and Down- 
town Project, which works out to around 
60 hours a week on each. 

PLAYBOY: What does that equal in Red 
Bull ounces? 

HSIEH: I've actually switched from Red 
Bull to coffee almost completely, though 
I do like fernet on occasion. 

PLAYBOY: Fernet? 

HSIEH: It’s an Italian liqueur I've intro- 
duced to a lot of people. Definitely an 
acquired taste. 1 didn't like it when I first 
tried it, but my pitch to friends is that 
it's a "healthy" alcohol. It's flavored with 
herbs including ginseng, myrrh and 
chamomile. It tastes and smells like Chi- 
nese medicine, but it's a digestif, so 60 
seconds after you drink it, it coats your 
stomach and helps get rid of any nausea. 
T like to experiment with my liquor. 
PLAYBOY: Is it true that when you were 
writing your number-one best-selling 
business book, Delivering Happiness, you 
ate coffee beans drenched in vodka to 
write faster? 

HSIEH: Yes. I found it w sy to write 
once I was in the mood, but it was hard to 
get in the mood. So I tried various things 
based on feedback from writer friends. 
Vodka first, then coffee and then, yes, 
I actually soaked coffee beans in the 
vodka. But I found the most effective 
technique was taking Excedrin when I 
didn't have a headache because there's 
actually a lot of caffeine in Excedrin. I 
ended up writing the whole book in 
about two weeks’ time. 

PLAYBOY: Were you always so driven? 
HSIEH: 1 always fantasized about making 
money because I knew it would give me 
the freedom to do whatever 1 wanted to 
do. I was always doing little businesses. I 
started a worm-farming business when I 
was nine, which went okay until all the 
worms escaped. I tried other things, but 
what took off was a button-making busi- 
ness I advertised in the back of a maga- 
zine. I was the Asian kid making around 
$200 a month in middle school from that. 
PLAYBOY: Is there truth to the tiger- 
parent stereotype? 

HSIEH: I think there's some truth to it in 
my case, certainly. 1 grew up in Marin 
County, and we were one of the few Asian 
families among mostly white people. My 
parents emigrated from Taiwan. My dad's 
an engineer. My parents definitely pushed 
me a little harder toward traditional 
success. For instance, in middle school, in 
addition to running my button business 
and having to get straight A's, I had to 


play four musical instruments—violin, 
trumpet, French horn and piano—and 
I had to practice half an hour a day on 
weekdays and an hour a day on weckends 
on each instrument. 

PLAYBOY: You write in your book that you 
sometimes faked your way out of prac- 
ticing. Instead of playing the piano, you 
would play back an hour-long session 
you'd recorded earlier. Did you eventu- 
ally get caught? 

HSIEH: The funny thing is my parents 
didn't know about that until they read 
the book. It was the part I was most ner- 
vous about them reading, even after all 
these years. I felt like I was back in mid- 
dle school, afraid I was going to get in 
trouble. But then my mom said, "Oh, I 
know that didn't really happen and you 
just wrote that to make it sound interest- 
ing." I was saved! 

PLAYBOY: You also said you almost nev- 
er went to class as an undergrad at 
Harvard. How did that work? 

HSIEH: Well, freshman year I skipped 
a lot of classes. I guess it depended on 
the class and if there were notes avail- 
able afterward. You see, I invited my 


I always fantasized about 
making money because I knew 
it would give me the freedom 

to do whatever I wanted to 
do. I started a worm-farming 

business when I was nine. 


fellow students to participate in a study 
group and was able to compile a study 
guide for classes that 1 then distributed 
and sold for $20 each. I'd assign topics 
to students, and you could buy one only 
if you had contributed research to it. 1 
never really had to open a book because 
I had these comprehensive guides that 
were completely aboveboard. 

PLAYBOY: What life lessons came from 
running a student pizza grill at Harvard, 
aside from the fact that your best 
customer, Alfred Lin, later became your 
chief operating officer at Zappos? 

Hsien: Just like anything else, to get pro- 
ficient at something, whether it’s play- 
ing piano, playing a sport or being an 
entrepreneur, you need to put in 10,000 
hours of practice. Running the pizza 
business helped me get closer to that 
10,000 hours faster. 

PLAYBOY: New subject. Let's say someone 
has $5,000 to invest. Any tips? 

HSIEH: The first question to ask is, why are 
you investing? Even if the answer is “To 
make money,” ask yourself why. Maybe 
you'll find out what you really want is to 
make money so you can travel around 


the world. If that's your dream, take the 
money and spend it on a plane ticket. So 
many people have these "one day" con- 
versations. One day I'm going to quit 
my job. One day I'm going to become a 
writer. One day I'm going to Paris. But 
then they're so busy working, they never 
get there. I'd go so far as to say that if you 
have a great business idea, it might be 
worth spending the money you'd invest 
in college on starting the idea right now. 
PLAYBOY: Again, that's easy for a guy with 
a Harvard diploma to say. 

HSIEH: I don't think college needs to 
be the instant default. Maybe it's more 
important to expose yourself to a lot 
of different things and people first and 
do stuff outside your comfort zone. So 
many people stay on the predictable, 
comfortable path. That's boring. There's 
a great quote by Jim Collins, who said 
when it comes to business, “good is the 
enemy of great." When things are just 
good enough, you're cutting yourself off 
from getting to that next level. 

PLAYBOY: Amazon acquired Zappos in 
2009 for $1.2 billion in stock. Brad 
Stone's book on Amazon recounts the 
fierce tactics Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos 
used to negotiate, including lowball ac- 
quisition offers and pricing shoes lower 
on Amazon to pressure you into selling. 
HSIEH: I haven't read that book, but I 
think the acquisition went down the best. 
possible path given the variables and 
circumstances. Ours was different from 
most of Amazon's other acquisitions, 
where the plan is for the company be- 
ing acquired to integrate with the par- 
ent company. Amazon buys you and you 
іріп the mother ship. We told them we'd 
consider doing the deal only if Zappos 
could remain independent, which we 
are. We needed to retain our own brand, 
our own culture, our own way of doing 
business, and all that's separate from the 
rest of Amazon. They accepted that. It's 
been almost five years now, and they ге- 
main true to their word. From our point 
of view it's basically as if we swapped our 
previous board of directors with a new 
one. Then on top of that we get access 
to all this free technology from Amazon. 
PLAYBOY: And now you get to hang out 
with Jeff Bezos too. What's he like? 
HSIEH: I don't know him that well. I proba- 
bly see him randomly, I would guess, once 
a year for less than five minutes. But I will 
say Amazon's success has been amazing 
and the marriage has worked well for us. 
PLAYBOY: Is there a company whose suc- 
cess baffles you? 

HSIEH: Snapchat. They turned down 
$3 billion from Facebook. I just wonder 
how they pay their bills and what their 
business model is. I'm not saying they 
don't have one. І just can't imagine what 
it is. I’m not behind the scenes, so I don't 
know anything. It's more just curiosity. 
PLAYBOY: Is Google too powerful? 

HSIEH: Google is interesting because it's 
a monopoly, (continued on page 112) 


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MEET THE HACKERS WHO ATTACK TARSET AND 
OTHER U.S, COMPANIES. HHO ARE THEY? WHAT 
DO THEY WANT? THE ANSWERS HILL SCARE YOU 


In an empty Japanese restaurant on 
the northeast outskirts of Moscow, 
Nikita Kislitsin, a 28-year-old Russian 
with blond hair, blue eyes and trans- 
lucent skin, із showing me how to pull 
offa multimillion-dollar cyberheist 
on his MacBook Air. The ace hacker 
is methodical; his slim fingers click 
quickly through a series of ap- 
plications to activate a virtual 
private network that will blur 
our real location from prying eyes. 
"Which IP address should we use?" 
Kislitsin asks. Kislitsin was the editor 
in chief of Russia's Hacker magazine 
for six years before taking a job 
with Group-IB, a private Russian 
internet-security firm. We peruse 
a list of half a dozen international 
locales like a pair of newlyweds pick- 


ing through possible honeymoon 
destinations. "Chicago," I decide— 
and with one click we've transported 
ourselves from Russia's capital to 
America's heartland. Now, with our 
location cloaked, we can operate on 
the fringes of the law with impunity. 
While pulling off online larceny 


: bY SARAH П, TOPOL 


requires strategy, the tools to do it 
are readily available for a reasonable 
fee. Kislitsin logs on to several hid- 
den forums and scans the Russian- 
language conversation threads. 
We're looking for a good deal on a 
Trojan: a program that infects com- 
puters and forces them to perform 
unauthorized actions, extracting all 


E 005 Ш/: 55 


manner of personal data and transmit- 
ting it back to the program's command- 
and-control server, like a droid seeking 
out the mother ship. The computer 
then becomes part of a vast botnet, a 
network of infected computers whose 
information—such as account bal- 
ances and passwords—shows up on the 
hacker's dashboard. Armed with this 
info, criminals can filter out victims to 
rob and begin to drain their accounts. 
Kislitsin shows me one dashboard 
Group-IB hacked into on which a 
cybercriminal had made his own handy 
notes. Next to infected computers he'd 
listed account balances, “password in- 
correct," “missing login" and several 
notes of bomj (Russian for “homeless”), 
a reference to someone too poor to be 
worth robbing. 

Once a computer is compromised, the 
next step of the heist is taking money 
out of an account. A favorite lifting 
method is autozaliv (Russian computer 
slang for "autotheft"), which requires a 
separate program that сап be bought 
on the same forum. When you log on 
to your banking profile, the hacker can 
see that you're online. Through the au- 
tozaliv program, the hacker directs your 
computer to automatically wire your 
money into another account. In some 
cases the hacker even obtains control of 
your laptop's online banking screen so 
that when you look at your account, you 
see the balance you were expecting— 
but the money is already gone. It's only 
when you try to pay a bill or go to an 
ATM that the bank will notify you that 
you have insufficient funds. Your money 
is long gone. 

The stolen funds are now snaking 
their way across the world through a 
network of people known as money 
mules, whose services can also be bought 
on the forum. It is a separate criminal 
network that specializes in illicit courier 
services, organizing all the stops—and 
there are quite a few—the money will 


make before it lands in the hands of the 


cybercriminal. From the victim's account 
the lucre is sent to another American 
bank account. Sometimes the mules are 
Eastern Europeans studying in America 
who are in on the scam; other times the 
mules are down-on-their-luck Ameri- 
cans who responded to online ads about 
making money from home. Typically the 
ad claims a foreign company working 

in the U.S. needs an American business 
partner to help it collect its money. For 
a percentage, the American uses his or 
her own bank account to collect wire 
payments for “services rendered” and 
then sends the money through Western 
Union to the “company” on the other 
side of the Atlantic. 


bove: "Sera" a Russian The recipient 
across the ocean is 
possibly as clueless 
or as desperate as 
> я ће Атегісап оп 
ор e U.S. soil. He or 
ering A she picks up the 
wire transfer and 
sends the cash onward to the actual 
hacker. Kislitsin tells me the Western 
Union collector could be a poor grand- 
mother in Ukraine who collects the 
funds with her real passport, packs a 
television set with bundles of cash, per- 
haps for a salary of about $200 a week, 
and physically sends it on its way to the 
original hacker. One way, he noted, is to 
cross borders on a train. The train at- 
tendant charged with moving the pack- 
age probably doesn't know he's deliver- 
ing a hollow television set stuffed with 
cash. The money-mule network takes 
50 percent of the stolen funds as its cut. 

From desktops to laptops to mobile 
phones and tablets, the reach of cyber- 
crime is growing at an alarming rate. 

On forums like the ones Kislitsin is 
showing me, anyone can buy hundreds 
of stolen credit card numbers, malware 
(programs that clandestinely enter a 
computer and damage or hijack its 
operations—a Trojan is a kind of mal- 
ware), viruses, space on bulletproof host- 
ing servers (online domains maintained 
by dubious companies that will not shut 
them down despite nefarious activities 
such as child porn and drug scores), 
money-mule services and much more. 

There are many ways to pull off 
cyberheists that don't involve hacking 
into victims' bank accounts via their 
computers. From producing fake debit 
cards to drain ATMs to stealing credit 
card numbers and shopping online, 
the opportunities for cybercrime are as 
ubiquitous as the technology that has 
crept into our daily routine. 

At a private cybersecurity conference 
in New York last August, then FBI di- 
rector Robert S. Mueller cautioned, “In 
the future, the cyberthreat will equal or 
even eclipse the terrorist threat.” The 
more connected the world becomes, the 
greater the risk (continued on page 120) 


“А penny for your thoughts, Mr. Silverstein.” 


MONIQUE JACQUELINE SOAKS UP RAYS AND GIVES OFF 
HEAT ON A CLOUDLESS CALIFORNIA AFTERNOON 


oddamn you half- 
Japanese girls/Do it 


sings Rivers Cuomo on 
Weezer's “El Scorcho.” 
he allure of 
Monique Jacqueline—a 
woman of such 
lineage—plus the eye 
‘of photographer David 
Bellemere created the 
perfect setting for a 
photo shoot, where the 
sun and shadows played 
across Monique’s body. 
“Only one word can 
describe him: inspired,” 
Monique says. “David 
Bellemere is a sculptor of 
ht and the human 
Monique's secret 
ambition is to take her 
human form to the big 
screen and become the 
action starl 


he pole juts up from 
Mi Santa's back, held 

in place by a rope tied 
under the mare’s belly. 
Bags of saline soak in a 
bucket of warm water. 
“It's better if the saline 
goes in warm," explains 
Ignacio "Nacho" 
Cardozo, the horse's 
co-owner. He hangs 

the bag on the pole 

and connects it to the 
1V in Mi Santa's neck. 
Another member of her 
entourage, or “stud,” 
holds her by the reins. 
When the bag is half 
empty, Nacho cuts off a corner with his knife. Using a large 
syringe, he squirts in liquids that turn the saline from clear 
to pink to yellow. The bags read ELECTROLYTES, REHYDRATE, 
METABOLISM. Nacho will repeat this process for the seven other 
bags of saline—in total more than two gallons of fluid. 

Eight men make up the stud, including Nacho, Leo Ruiz 
and Nacho's older brother Marcos. They arrived in the small, 
5,000-person city of José Pedro Varela earlier in the day, 
driving two hours south from their hometown of Melo. They 
аге in their late 20s to mid-30s, except for one 14-year-old 
errand boy. All of them are crowded into the tiny stall, made 
even more cramped by Nacho's imposing size. If this меге 
America, he'd be playing defensive end in the NFL. 

Тһе stall has plank walls, a metal roof and a single lightbulb 
that gives the space the warm glow of a Nativity scene. А few 
men sit in folding chairs. The rest stand or sit on the sawdust 
floor. They drink whiskey using only two glasses, passing 
them back and forth, as is the custom in Uruguay. Now and 
then they step outside to smoke. 

"The night is full of sounds—noise from the carnival in 
the city square, less than a mile away, barking dogs, pa: 


motorcycles, crickets, cumbia music on the battery-powered 
radio. The horse that usually occupies the stall snorts, upset 
at having been cast outside to the small corral. It’s mid- 
October, carly spring, and chilly enough that the horse is 
draped in a jacket. 

Тһе men discuss strategy. 

“Hay caballos que vienen а largar” 

“La yegua está bien entrenada.” 

“Ciriaco los pela, pero hay unos cinco caballos que le van a 
dar pelea.” 

They are collectively optimistic about Мі Santa's chances 
of winning tomorrow's race. Or if not winning then at least 
finishing in the money. Looking at her, it's easy to see why. 
The nine-year-old yegua is all rippling muscle, with a lustrous 
brown coat, a handsome white stripe down the length of her 
nose and white rear ankles that give her added panache. 
There are standard equine terms for these white markings: 
blaze and half cannon. But on Mi Santa they look original, 
unprecedented. АП horses are beautiful. Mi Santa is exquisite. 

Around the fifth bag of saline, two men leave the stall for 
Nacho's truck, parked in the driveway. Two 200-gallon blue 
barrels take up most of the bed. The men fill the barrels with 
water from the garden hose, careful to do so quietly. The host 
family is already asleep, their small house dark and silent. 
aline is finished. Nacho removes the 
ion. The pole is taken to the truck, 
along with Nacho's medical kit. The men pile into the truck 
bed, and Nacho drives them the few blocks back to the salón 
comunal for more drinking and eating. The pig that has been 
cooking since early afternoon is nearly ready. 

Тһе jockey, however, stays behind. His name is Maximiliano 
de Cunto. He is 28 and has been a jockey since he was 16. 
This will be his first time running Mi Santa. "She's the whole 
package," he says, "especially in her gallop, which is long and 
consistent." He takes Mi Santa for a short walk, guiding her 
along rutted dirt roads unlit by street lamps, past the single-story 
whitewashed houses with their log-and-wire fences, laundi 
laden clotheslines, side-yard chicken coops and the oc 
satellite dish. Her clip-clopping lingers in the brisk air. 


68 


"I care a lot about the horses I ride,” he says. “Like a good 
friend—that type of closeness. This is much more than just a 
profession to me.” 

"Tomorrow Мі Santa and 50 other horses will sprint 60 
miles across eastern Uruguay among a convoy of roughly 
400 people piled into a battalion of pickup trucks, creating a 
swirling hurricane of thundering hooves, car crashes, blinding 
dust, utter pandemonium and possibly even death. It's been 
like this for more than a hundred years. They call it El Raid. 


Endurance horse racing is said to have originated in 1955. 
That's when five Auburn, California businessmen and riding 
enthusiasts sought to prove 
the 100-mile journey between 
their hometown and Lake 
Tahoe could be completed 

on horseback within 24 
hours. They succeeded, 

and the first Western 

States Trail Ride became 

an annual affair, growing 

in size each year. Now calle 
the Tevis Cup, it remains the 
most famous endurance horse race in the world. More than 
150 entrants, some from as far away as Japan and Australia, 
entered the 2013 race. 

The Tevis Cup isn't shy about its legacy. Its website declares 
the Tevis “the oldest modern-day endurance ride" and “the 
inspiration and model for the most challenging endurance 
rides worldwide." In 2010 The New York Times proclaimed, 
"The modern-day sport of endurance riding began in the 


HORSES JOCKEY FOR POSITION: 
TRUCKS SWERVE, COLLIDE, BRAKE 
AND SPEED UP. IT'S PART KENTUCKY 
DERBY, PART DAYTONA 500, 


1950s in California.” By then, El Raid had already been 
taking place in Uruguay for four decades. 
Originally called El Raid Hípico (el raid referring to any 
long-distance sporting competition and hipico meaning 
“all things horse”), the first was held in 1913. The route 
ran roughly 90 kilometers (about 60 miles) in a round-trip 
between the town of Sarandi Grande and the city of Florida. 
Thirteen horses participated. 
When the event was repeated 
the following year, the results 
were disastrous: Riders 
pushed their mounts so hard 
that only one horse survived. 
As a result, the event was 
disbanded for more than two 
decades until it was revived 
in 1935 to commemorate 
the 110th anniversary of 
the Battle of Sarandí, which helped Uruguay secure its 
independence from Brazil. By 1944 there were seven Raid 
clubs and a new governing body, the Federación Ecuestre 
Uruguaya. Today the Federación oversees 45 clubs, some with 
as many as 150 members subdivided into studs consisting of a 
horse's owners, jockey and trainers. Mi Santa is one of seven 
horses Nacho has part ownership in. All of them fall under the 
banner of Centro Raidista de Cerro (continued on page 114) 


“I thought you liked cartoons with cats and mice...!” 


69 


THE NOIR MASTER TAKES SPORT ТО NEW 
HEIGHTS IN THIS EXCLUSIVE SERIAL 


EXTREME (ADJ.) 1: GREAT OR INTENSE 
2: NOT REASONABLE 3: FARTHEST OUT 
4: SEVERE 5: SENSATION SEEKING. 


or example: Kurt and 
Paige hold hands and 
jump off the Royal 
Gorge Bridge. This is 
great, intense, not rea- 
sonable, farthest out, 
severe and (definitely) 
sensation seeking. They 
plunge through the sky 
together like hawks in 
love. Mile-High Club, 
bullshit. Try hurtling together through the sky 
at triple digits. Jump out of the plane, launch 
together through the open air, there's a rea- 
son they call it falling in love. Human beings 
have only two innate fears. Snakes and fall- 
ing. Both come from our days in the trees. 

Kurt and Paige. 

Free-falling in love. 

Adrenaline merge. 

The Arkansas River is just under a thousand 
feet straight down (although Kurt would observe 
there is no such thing as crooked down) and you'd 
better fall straight because the gorge is narrow and 
if you miscalculate by even a little bit you're going 
to smash into its rock walls at 80 miles an hour. 

(Limestone is considered а "soft" rock, but 
at 80 miles per hour there is no such thing as 
a soft rock.) 


ILLUSTRATION BY THOMAS EHRETSMANN 


Two seconds after Kurt and Paige jump, they throw their 
arms and legs out into a double X shape to open the fabric 
of their vingsuits. 

A wingsuit—a ka. a birdman suit, a bat suit and a flying- 
squirrel suit—is just what it sounds like. Basically a bag that 
makes a human being resemble a flying squirrel. Its fabric 
stretches out from under the arms and between the legs 
to increase surface area, which allows said human to glide 
through the air. 

In technical terms, the suit increases the amount of lift as 
related to the amount of drag, creating a glide ratio of 2.5:1. 
Which is to say that the flier moves forward two and a half 
feet for every foot he or she drops. A free-falling parachutist 
descends through the air at speeds between 90 and 140 mph. 
Proper technique with a wingsuit slows you down to somewhere 


between 70 and 90 mph. 
BY DON 


Now Paige and Kurt push 
their shoulders forward to 
gain velocity and straighten 
their legs to reduce drag. 
They tuck their chins into 
their necks for the same 
reason—reducing drag 
increases speed. 

Words to live by. 

BASE jumping off a bridge through a narrow gorge is 
dangerous, duh. 

Tandem BASE jumping off a bridge through a narrow gorge 
is DD2 (dangerous duh, squared) because one partner can 
knock into the other, which at that speed and relatively low 
altitude could send both of them into an unrecoverable spin 
and smash them against the rocks. 

Turning your wingsuit into a bag of (broken) bones. 

178 STCKY. Pronounced sticky. (continued on page 102) 


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PLAYBOY'S PARTY JOKES 


Regular marriage and gay marriage are like 
bikini tops and bras. They re exactly the same 
thing, but only one is taboo in public. 


What's the difference between a cocktail 
waitress who works in a strip club and an 
actual stripper? 

About two weeks. 


Girls are like roads: The more curves they 
have, the more dangerous they are. 


Í hear you're dating a little person,” а man said 
to his brother. 

“Oh yes,” the brother replied. “I’m just nuts 
over her.” 


А woman walked into a drugstore and asked 
the pharmacist if the store carried extra- 
large condoms. 

“Yes, we do,” he said. “Would you like to buy 
some? 

“No,” she replied. “But do you mind if I 
wait around until someone does?” 


А guy called a law office and said, “1 want to 
talk to my lawyer." 

[he receptionist replied, “I'm sorry, but he 
died last week." 

The next day һе phoned again and asked 
the same question. The receptionist replied, "I 
told you yesterday, he died last week." 

The next day the guy called again and asked 
to speak to his lawyer. The receptionist was get- 
ting a little annoyed and said, “1 keep telling 
you, your lawyer died last week. Why do you 
keep calling?” 

The guy said, “Because I just love hearing 
your reply." 


Pavlov was sitting in a bar when the phone rang. 
“Damn,” he said, “1 forgot to feed the dog." 


I scared the crap out of my sister and her 
friends last night," a teenager told his friend. 
“I walked in on them at a slumber party 
masturbating." 

"What did they say?" the friend asked. 

He answered, “They all screamed at me to 
put my pants back оп.” 


What is the difference between a dog and 
a fox? 
Four beers. 


A bank manager noticed one of his new clerks 
was terrible when it came to counting money 
and adding figures. *Where did you get your 
financial education?" he asked. 

"Yale," replied the lad. 

“Wow,” the manager said, "glad to have you 
aboard, and what is your name again?" 

Тһе guy replied, "Yim Yohnson." 


А young man excitedly told his mother he'd 
fallen in love and was going to get married. 
He said, “Just for fun, Ma, I'm going to bring 
over three women, and you can try to guess 
which one I want to marry." 

His mother agreed, so the next day he 
brought three beautiful women to the house 
and sat them down for a chat. Afterward, he 
asked, "Which one am I going to marry?" 

“I know it's the redhead,” his mother imme- 
diately replied. 

Stunned, the young man said, "That's 
amazing. How did you know?" 

She answered, “Because I can't stand her.” 


Dia you hear about the blind hooker? 
You have to hand it to her. 


With a sheep under his arm, a man walked 
into his bedroom and stood in front of his 
wife. "This is the pig I have been having sex 
with," he said. 

The wife looked at him and replied, "That's 
not a pig, it's a sheep." 

He answered, "I wasn't talking to you." 


What do you call 13 guys watching the NBA 
Finals on TV? 
Тһе Los Angeles Lakers. 


What's the ultimate rejection? 
You're masturbating and your hand falls 
aslecp. 


Send your jokes 10 Playboy Party Jokes, 9346 
Civic Center Drive, Beverly Hills, California 
90210, or by e-mail to jokes@playboy.com. 
PLAYBOY will pay 8100 io the contributors whose 
submissions are selected. 


al 

PLAYBOY: Many know you from 

your “nice girl” roles in big mov- 

ies such as Brokeback Mountain and 

127 Hours, but TV viewers have 
» watched you unleash your inner 

bad girl as the icy, ruthlessly ambi- 

/ tious journalist on House of Cards, 
/ аз a vengeful sexual supernatural 
stalker on American Horror Story and 
as a bisexual cheerleader on Nip/ 
Tuck. And now in Transcendence you 
play a militant revolutionary oppo- 
site Johnny Depp. What is Holly- 
wood trying to tell us about you? 
MARA: There's always a reason 
people get cast in certain roles, so 
1 feel maybe there is something of 
that underneath. I take all that as a 
compliment. I don't think of myself 
as icy, but I'm definitely ambitious. I 
do think of myself as strong and very 
driven. I've had to audition for most. 
of the roles I've done, so I still have 
to go in and prove I can be driven. 
I'm also comfortable saying that I’m 
pretty vulnerable with people I trust. 


Q2 
PLAYBOY: You were raised in New 
York's wealthy Westchester County 
with an older and a younger 
brother, as well as your also famous 
younger sister, actress Rooney 
Mara. Your father’s family founded 
and still owns the New York Giants, 
of which he’s an executive. Your 
mother’s family founded and 
still owns the Pittsburgh Steelers. 
With that background, should we 
imagine you growing up beautiful, 
spoiled, headstrong and, when 
you got old enough, breaking the 
hearts of Giants and Steelers team 
members you dated? 
MARA: Thank God no, because 
doing that would not have gone 
down well. I respected my dad way 
too much to ever even have that 
тит "гросс ATE sort of temptation. The Giants are 
ГПЕ ACTRESS HOLLYWOOD LOVES TO my family, Eg ТЇЇ always look at 


TYPECAST REVEALS HER NICER SIDE, the team that way. Even going to a 
football game in sneakers and jeans, 


RELIVES GROWING UP IN AN NFL DYNASTY getting drunk with friends—that 
AND DEFENDS ALL THOSE RACY SEX SCEN was so not the experience I ever 
had. We'd go into the box and sit. 
with my grandma, dressed as nicely 
BY STEPHEN REBELLO as if we were going to church. It was 
PHOTOGRAPHY BY KURT ISWARIENKO very much a place of business. 


‚ou’ve sung “The Star-Spangled 
Banner,” and you also sang very well 
in the 2010 indie movie Happythankyou- 
moreplease. Should other sin; 

actresses such as Anne Hathaw 
Amanda Seyfried lose sleep’ 

MARA: My first dreams of a 

about bein; 


what I wanted to do. As kids, my 
and I were even in a local production 
of The Wizard of Oz together, and 
neither of us played Dorothy. 1 guess 
we've shown (hem. 


Q 
PLAYBOY: How did y 
at those Giants games? 
MARA: The first time was at the age of 
14 when my uncle or my dad asked me 
ging it. I was so naive 
perienced that I thought, 
I'm just singing in front of my family 
and all these drunk people who don't 
care who's singing. Аз 1 got older and 


u start singing 


more successful in the acting world, 

I became harder on myself. I haven't 
done it for at least four years now, and 
the thought of doing it is definite 
scarier now than it used to be. 


G5 
PLAYBOY: Does that mean you've 
iven up wanting to sing on-screen too? 
m role would be to 
Lee in a movie of 
s 14 or 15 when they were 
bringing back The Sound of Music to 
Broadway and I got five callbacks. 
They had picked one kid for each of 
the roles, and though I'm a very small 
person—five feet three inches—they 
were afraid I'd grow taller than the 
girl they'd cast as the oldest daughter. 
I swore to them, “No, I'm not going 
to grow any taller," and I haven't. But 
when I didn't get that job, 1 thought I 
would die from the rejection. 


G6 
PLAYBOY: When you were growing 
up, were your friends and would-be 
friends always hitting you up for Giants 
and Steelers tickets? 


MARA: Maybe it's where I grew 
up, in a beautiful town, but I wasn't 
surrounded by people who ever tried 
to get things from me. 1 had very 

few friends, and I come from a huge, 
really close family. The need to have 
a big group of friends has never been 
a part of me. I love the Giants and 
Steelers so much that I sort of have 
an agreement on the set that if either 
team is in the Super Bowl, I have to 
be off the next day. 


PLAYBOY: Did your lack of friends 
re young mean you were 
an introvert? 
ke a lot of actors, I was 
painfully shy. School was terrifying to 
me, and I don’t even know why. My 
mom was kind of shocked that acting 
was my chosen profession, given the 
ct that I could barely look people 
in the eye. But she was amazing, 
putting my sister and me into all these 


ions. Having to be friendly 
and open to new people helped get me 
out of my shell. (continued on page 118) 


WB 4 ; 
FRANCINE 5 FRUIT a 


FARM FRESH 


“Yes, everything you see here is all natural—and the fruit is too.” 


WAYS TO TRAVEL IN 2014 


“l 
GO HIGH-LOW IN CAPE TOWN 


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Dublin, the South too: Capetonian 
African city of Cape biker shop Los 

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the World Design (B) triples as an 
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Along with shiny pleasing coffeehouse 


accolades there will апо film production 
be site installations, studio ("Love kills, 
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and public worksof House of Machines shop Latitude 33 
art. But high-minded (А, С) serves all your combines Aussie 


masculineneeds— surf gear, art and 
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accessorizing, under one civilized, 
drinking—with well-designed roof, 
its lifestyle shop, welcoming riders of 
café and top-shelf bone shakers, crotch 
bar (operating rockets, опагу 
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rights). Concept trends alike. 


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Illustration by 
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TOP 5 SMUGGLE-WORTHY FOODS 


For dar- 
ing travelers who 
develop a hankering 
for deep-fried scor- 
pion in Singapore, 
note that they're a 
no-go souvenir under 

the “no meat" law. Hang it from a 

necklace and maybe Customs won't 

Some European 

brands of the acid-green, high-octane 

spirit still contain thujone, a suppos- 
edly hallucinogenic chemical that’s 

banned in the Û 

is thujone free, hallucinogenic images 


notice. 


on the label could get it confiscated, 
Raw (unpasteurized) milk 


Even if your bottle 


cheeses aged under 60 days (a.k.a, 

the smelly, runny good stuff) are off 
limits. Freeze the cheese before you 
travel to minimize the funk. 

Caviar from wild sturgeon is protected 
under the U.S. Endangered Species 
Act. There are good alternatives, but 
for caviar purists—or those who just 
want what they can't have—there is no 
That baton of Tus- 
can wild-boar salami or the pistachio- 
flecked mortadella you bonded with in 
Bologna is, no matter what the zealous 
vendor may claim, banned. You can- 
not bring meat—any meat, fresh or 
cured—into this country. Which isn't 
to say you can't try.—Carolynn Carreño 


substitute. 


RNDREW 
ZIMMERN'S RULES 
FOR SMRLL-TIME 
FOOD SMUGGLERS 

% 


1. 5. 

BEST WAY TO GET IT BEST STRATEGY 

THROUGH WHEN FACED WITH A 
ic. Take your OFFICIAL 


TRANGEST THING 
I'VE EVER SMUGGLED 


BIGGEST 
IGGLING MYTH 


pping stir ont quality 
s in di from anything 

othes. The cloth an get in an 
ll only American marke 

the 

food. And if officials 7, 

RULE OF THUMB 
Never smugg 

anything youd 

mind having taken 

from you 


find everything 
inside. It's a gam 
гош 


8. 
WHAT I DON'T 
SMUGGLE 


OST MEMORABLE 
CONFISCATION 
The minister of 


tourism for V 


immigrat 


promptly agriculture. 


against a 
Andrew Zimmern 


having your 


"2 GO NATIVE ON FOGO 


—> On a remote, vel of glass walls, survivalistmode 7 

rugged archipelago saltbox shapes, solar looks like: Every 

on the eastern edge panels and steel textile and piece of 

of the North Ameri- stilts that rise from furniture in the 29 

can continent stands the windswept sur- minimalist, ocean- 

the hypermodern, roundings (like crag- ^ viewrooms is made 

hyper-hard-to-reach gy moors and rogue locally by hand; the 

Fogo Island Inn (A), arctic ice floes). kitchen staff scours * Things can get 
ап architectural mar- This is what luxury the island for kelp, competitive at the 


baggage carousel, 


mushrooms, spruce bou just beyond the ere Vene 
and seafood to bonfire. Of course, imer REL 
Serve you modern you may prefer to 5 
Newfoundland опа watch the fog rollin DOSE SER, 
plate. It's the kind of from the comfort of all start to blur 
place where you'll your natural-fiber bed together, The 
meet boat builders in front of your per- aluminum and 
at the bar, artists-in- sonal wood-burning calfskin-leather 
residence at the roof- — stove. There's по Orion suitcase 
top sauna and cari- FOMO on Fogo. Trom Hermes 


costs as much 
asa first-class 
No. ticket to Dubai 


GO COLONIAL арра 
ІМ ТНЕ САЅСО E cunc 


durable carry-on 


we've ever seen, 

—> Once graffitied buildings are inter- just buildings but peo- 
and gang-laden, spersed with gourmet ple, reforming gang 1 
Panama City's coffee shops and members and involv- 
350-year-old colonial landscaped gardens. ing local artisans in 
neighborhood of Savvy travelers stay every aspect of the 
Casco Viejo is making а! boutique properties restoration. Luxe 
а comeback, Crum- such as the newly details such as Frette 
bling pastel facades ^ opened American sheets and Aesop 
and dilapidated Trade Hotel (A, B),a Бай products mix 

restored landmark with handmade Pana- 

building from the manian furnishings 

guys behind the Ace and timber reclaimed 


Hotel empire. Atelier through underwater 
Ace, along with Com- logging in the Pana- 


mune Design and ma Canal. A 50-seat 
Panama City-based ^ nightclub is run by Herria Oron 
Conservatorio, set out Panamanian jazz suitcase, 512100 
to reinvigorate not pianist Danilo Perez. 
N DILEMMA TRY THIS TRANSLATION 
USEFUL On a train in Ecuador “La mejor cura рога *The best cure for 
PHRASES * While admiring snowcapped mountains from the la enfermedad de motion sickness is a 
PHhRHoE- newly rehabbed luxury train Tren Crucero, you movimiento es un stiff cocktail, Meet 
spot a better local view—of a seriously beautiful cóctel rígido. ¿Nos you in the bar car?’ 
Phrase books female passenger. vemos en el bar?' 
are handy when 
you're traveling Ata nudist colony in Germany “Entschuldigung, “My apologies. I 
abroad, but what + Sylt is a nudist's—sorry, naturist's—paradise. ich wollte dich nicht wasn't staring at you; 
happens when What's the etiquette when dropping trou in this anstarren, ich wurde the sun was in my 
northern European St.-Tropez? nur von der Sonne eyes: 


you're in a jam 
and need to get 
specific? Here 


geblendet." 


are a few useful Ata bar in Tokyo “Sharudone no kono "Does this glass of 
phrases for + Feeling lonely in Roppongi, you strike up a garasu wa-sha yori chardonnay cost less 
traveling to 2014% conversation with a sexy lady in a bar. Is she really mo sukunai hiyo ша than a car?" 

5 E into you, or does she put the ho in hostess? kakaru no?" 


hottest spots. 
—Mickey Rapkin ч 


“A GO PALEO ON THE PAMPAS 


are spent on the disappointed with 
barbecue terrace, Sculpture, the double 
learning how to cook curved titanium 

beef like the gauchos; and glass building 


days are meant for ^ — designed by architect 
watching bronzed Carlos Ott, or the six 
bodies soak in the smaller surrounding 
hot Uruguayan sun. casas decked out 
The hotel's dramatic мй the owner's 

—> Feed your black-stone pool (B) insane art collection: 

carnivorous cravings hovers 32 feetover a mix of prominent 

at Playa Vik (A), ап Playa Mansa and international and 


avant-garde retreat in — lights up at night with South American 
José Ignacio, South a fiber-optic celestial — artists including 
America's must-visit map of the Southern Anselm Kiefer, Pablo 
bohemian beach sky. Architecture Atchugarry and 
village. Evenings junkies won't be Montserrat Soto. 


~ GO ARTSY IN CHICAGO 


— Art takes action on Chicago's South Side, 
where enterprising artist and instigator Theaster 
Gates continually blurs the line between artwork 
and neighborhood project, working as real estate 
developer, civic hero, wheeler-dealer and cultural 
archivist. Young creatives and longtime locals 
hang around his Dorchester Projects (A), on the 
6900 block of Dorchester Avenue, where Gates 
acquired several vacant and abandoned proper- 
ties for adaptive reuse. One building is now an art 
and architecture library stocked with books he 
bought from a closing city bookstore. Another, 
Black Cinema House, is home to a vintage-slide archive donated by the 
University of Chicago and a serious vinyl collection from Dr. Wax, the 
defunct record store. His latest project, Arts Incubator, takes shape in a 
1920s corner building that is all things at once: exhibition space, concert 
venue, artist residency and main line for tapping into the local pulse. 


CHARLES JOLY 


When Charles Joly isn't 
creating avant-garde 
cocktails at the Aviary 
in Chicago, he’s doing 

bibulous research on the 

road. He brings us his six 
favorite sips worth a trip 


92) 


Еш” 


BATANGA 


La Capilla, 
Tequila, Mexico 
+ Forty miles outside 
Guadalajara, at the 
base of an extinct 
volcano, sits the 
town of Tequila. If 
you plan to stay for 
thelong haul, set 
down your glass of 
straight booze and 
head to La Capilla. 
to belly up with 
80-something-year- 
old Don Javier. His 
signature batanga is 
as legendary as his 
smile, The generous 
pour of blanco te- 
quila, lime juice and 
Coke stirred together 
with an old knife 
and served ina salt- 
rimmed glass will 


SAZERAC 


French 75 Bar, 
New Orleans 

+ Just steps off the 
beautiful stink that 
is Bourbon Street 
rests the historic 
French 75 Bar, Its 
crack team, led by 
bon vivant Chris. 
Hannah, will quickly 
make you forget the 
ubiquitous frozen 
cocktail machines 
that litter the strip 
The official cocktail 
of the city of New 
Orleans, this combo 
of rye whiskey, ab- 
sinthe, bitters and 
sugar із a whiskey 
drinker's dream 
Just don't ask them 
to drop the lemon 
peel in (it's all 


SACHACOOL 


Astrid y Gastón, 
Lima 

* Gastronomy may 
bethe big draw in 
Latin America's 
culinary capital, 
but I'm here to 
tell you to come 
thirsty as well. 
With access to 
some of the most 
exotic ingredients 
from the Amazon, 
mixologist Aaron 
Diaz will wow you 
with his signature. 
sachacool cocktail. 
A combination of 
native pisco, Tahiti 
lime, peppercorns 
and sacha culantro 
(similar in taste to 
cilantro) will take 
you on a Peruvian 


keep you on track. about the oils). flavor trek. 
== = = 

‘TI PUNCH PRAIRIE OYSTER HAND-CARVED ICE 
Habitation Clé- 69 Colebrooke DIAMOND 

ment, Martinique Row, London Bar High Five, 

+ "Chacun prépare. “Tucked away іп Токуо 


sa propre mort" 

or "Each prepares. 
his own death" 
Intrigued? Time to 
dust off the French- 
English dictionary 
and head to the 
paradise that is 
Martinique. After 
strolling the gardens 
of Habitation Clé- 
ment, cool off with 
theisland's most 
famous cocktail. Tra- 
ditionally, guests are 
given an entire bottle 
of rhum agricole (lo- 
cal rum made from 
fresh cane), sugar 
and slices of lime 

to mix their own 'ti 
punch and take fate. 
into their own hands. 


London's Angel 
neighborhood, 69 
Colebrooke Row 
has for years served 
some of the most 
forward-thinking 
libations across 

the pond. This one- 
slurp cocktail com- 
bines a tomato juice 
"yolk" horseradish 
vodka and an oyster 
leaf. The result is 

а deconstructed 
then reconstructed 
bloody mary. An 
infusion here, a little. 
spherification there 
and voilà, a spicy, 
savory explosion 
that will have your 
taste buds doing 
backflips. 


“Та sooner drink 
a spirit neat than 
pour it over lousy 
ice. This isnt a 
problem at world- 
acclaimed Bar 

High Five. Watch in 
awe as owner and 
master bartender 
Hidetsugu Ueno 
wields a razor-sharp 
knife to carve the 
perfect diamond, 

all while being the 
most gracious of 
hosts. The Ichiro or 
Yamazaki whiskey 
you choose will be 
honored to rest on 
this masterpiece. 


“Are you sure you want this thing stuffed and hanging on your wall?” 


I E 
LATEXTRA 


ла 
WX 


SOLDEN AGE OF 
OF FOUR BEAUTIFUL 
LLENT HANDS. 


102 


EXTREME 


(continued from page 71) 
Stuff That Can Kill You. 

But that's the point. 

That's what hypes the adrenaline. 

That's why they do it. 

Their adrenaline screeches. The lime- 
stone walls flash past them, the river 
lunges up. One mistake 

The wrong tilt ofan arm. 

Тһе wrong angle ofa spine. 

An errant gust of wind —— 

Can kill them. 


Paige and Kurt are not interested in dying. 

"They're interested in living. 

At the highest possible level. 

The max. 

So at the count of 10 they let go of each 
other's hands and pull the ripcords. (Now 
there's a metaphor for a successful relation- 
ship.) They want a little distance from each 
other when the parachutes deploy, lest they 
get tangled up and fall to their deaths in a 
twisted knot. (Now there's a metaphor for 
a successful relationship.) 

There are sounds to like and sounds to 
love. 

Sounds to like 

The cry of a red-tailed hawk. 

The май ofa Sonny Stitt sax riff. 

The crackle of a fire on a cold night. 

Sound to love—— 

The pop ofa parachute opening. 

Better, in this case, the sound of two para- 
chutes opening, (The sound of one parachute 
opening would be very depressing for both 
parties involved. But lets be stone honest— 
much more depressing for the party in closer 
proximity to the nonsound.) 

They aren't big parachutes. They don't 
have 10 be; they just have to be big enough 
to slow them down before they hit the 
water, because water at 80 per isn't that 
much different from rock (as any suicidal 
bridge jumper knows or should know). 
Тһе chutes jerk Kurt and Paige up and 
then float them down to the river where 
Latchkey and Lev—fresh from their own 
jumps—wait in a Zodiac to haul them out. 

Kurt—bigger, heavier—hits first. Reaches 
up and detaches the chute before it can 
smother him under the water. Then he comes 
up and sees Paige in the water just upstream, 
dear of her parachute and swimming. 

“Fun!” she yells. 

He smiles and nods and they swim 
toward the boat. 

Yeah, fun. A thousand-foot tandem free 
fall through a narrow canyon into a river. 

Extreme. 

Except. 

Tt was just a warm-up. The real adrena- 
line rush goes off tomorrow. 


. 
Adrenaline (n.): a hormone secreted by 
the adrenal gland in response to stress. 


The problem with adrenaline is the same 
as with any drug. Tolerance. 


That is, it takes more and more of it to 
get you ой. 

Until you die from it. 

"But," Kurt says, "you die high." 

Kurt, Paige, Latchkey and Lev sit at the 
bar at the Quality Inn & Suites in Сайоп 
City, Colorado, the nearest town to the 
Royal Gorge Bridge. The jump is two 
hours behind them and they re knocking 
back a few celebratory beers to sand the 
adrenaline edge a little bit. 

Latchkey got his name because, come 
on, he was a latchkey kid who used the 
PAT (parental absence time) to jump off 
the garage roof, the house roof and the 
neighbors’ roofs when he was not per- 
forming physics-defying stunts on his 
skateboard that put him on a first-name 
basis with most of the staff at the Glenwood 
Springs emergency room. ("Mrs. Latch- 
кеу? We have your son here....”) 

Latchkey—there is a remote memory 
that his given name is Kevin—has broad 
shoulders, shaggy brown hair and a beard. 
He comes off as sort of a clown, but don't 
let it fool you. Bozo don't BASE jump off 
the Royal Gorge Bridge (and a cat as cool 
as Kurt isn't going to trust a clown to fish 
him out of the water). 

Latchkey can flat-out fly. 

He's a birdman. 

In fact, Latchkey has often expressed 
his belief that he actually is a bird—a Fijian 
peregrine falcon to be precise. He says it's 
a reincarnation thing, but Paige thinks it's 
more of a peyote thing. She came across 
him sitting outside the motel the morning of 
the Western States Ultramarathon, dutifully 
scraping the strychnine out of the peyote 
buds, but she sort of doubts he got it all. 

Now beer foam bubbles on his mustache 
as he crushes another pint and listens to Kurt 
hold forth on the subject of adrenaline. 

Adrenaline, Kurt explains, is a chemical 
released by cortisol that gives you the physical 
and mental energy to do what you have to do. 

“Neanderthal days,” Kurt says. “Bonk 
and Gronk- ” 

“Bonk and Gronk?” Paige asks, laughing. 

“Bonk and Gronk,” Kurt insists, “go out 
after the mastodon. Mastodon gets wind of 
them and charges. Bang—the body releases 
adrenaline that gives Bonk and Gronk the 
wherewithal to run. Fast. It's Darwinian.” 

“I don't think," Paige says, “adrenaline 
was designed to give you the biochemical 
wherewithal to jump off bridges. That's 
counter-Darwinian.” 

Every chemical in your brain and body 
screams at you not to jump off a bridge, a 
cliff or the top of a building, or an antenna 
at the top of a building—all of which these 
four people have done. Darwin would indi- 
cate that people who do such things have 
less chance of reproducing and would 
therefore be selected out of the population. 

A professor of biophysics, Paige knows 
about these things. 

"It's an abuse of adrenaline,” Lev adds. 

Lev means lion and Paige says it’s an 
aptonym, because there is something 
leonine about Lev. Not that the young 
Russian has a mane—in fact his head is 


shaved—but he has the lean, killer look 
ofa cougar, a.k.a. (mountain) lion. It’s the 
eyes. Slate gray. 

You don't want to mess with Lev. Don't 
want to jam him on the trail, cross him оп 
a ski run, take his line on a cliff face or a 
big wave. 

He'll give you that headstone look. 

Then run you down. 

Lev is a world-class speed climber. A frec- 
soloist without belays or protection, and not 
on artificial walls in tony suburban gyms 
where the thwack of you falling onto a thick 
mat makes someone spray his cappuccino 
foam. No, on mountains, real mountains, 
where the thwack of you falling makes 
someone puke his guts out—and he holds 
the current solo record on Half Dome. 

He and Latchkey jumped the bridge 
together—albeit not holding hands—swam 
to the Zodiac and then crewed for Kurt. 
and Paige. 

If you're looking down a thousand-foot. 
drop, those are two people you want to 
see waiting for you. You really do, because 
they are ultracompetent, maximum frosty, 
and they are never going to give up until 
they pull you out of whatever shit you got 
yourself into. 

An example— 

Kurt got sideways at Mavericks one time. 
First wave of a set, so he's in the impact 
zone with three more waves scheduled 
like German trains to come down on his 
head—and Lev and Latchkey roar in on 
the Z between waves. The next wave could 
crush them—flip the Z over and roll it like a 
toy. But they come in anyway—Lev driving. 
and Latch behind him—and Latch reaches 
down and grabs Kurt on the first try (there 
isn't going to be a second try), pulls him 
onto the sled and they bust out of there with 
the next wave looming over them like a 
pissed-off giant cheated of its fee-fi-fo-fum. 

The sound that Kurt remembers from that 
wasn't the wave going off like a hissing fuse, 
but Latchkey giggling like a 19-year-old girl. 

What he also remembers is that Latch- 
кеу and Lcv didn't hesitate. 

Neither would he. 

Now Kurt lifts his Dos Equis and says, 
“Here's to adrenaline abusers.” 

“Adrenaline addicts,” Paige corrects. 

As usual, she's right. 

Forget about nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, 
cocaine and heroin. You get hooked on 
adrenaline, game over. You will chase that 
dime until you just can’t run anymore. 

“A drug you can't buy,” Lev says, “but 
can only earn.” 

"They clink their boules in a toast to that. 

“Everyone,” Kurt sums up, “has the 
biochemistry to survive. Few have the bio- 
chemistry to live.” 


Dig the scene at the bar. Extreme athletes, 
photographers, video artists, support peo- 
ple (pilots, gear riggers, EMTS), groupies 
and sponsors quaff designer beers and 
check out the clips from the day's activi- 
ties on iPads. They talk about who made 
it onto YouTube, how many views, who's 


"No, silly. When I said I wanted a sex-change operation, I didn’t mean 
I wanted to become a man. I already am a man." 


PLAYBOY 


104 


trending, who got that great shot, that clip 
that's going to go viral, make a household 
name, grace the cover ofa mag. 

Adrenaline porn, Paige calls it. 

The room is filled with literally beautiful 
people. Young, healthy and decked out in 
North Face, Patagonia and Nike, these are 
people who run, who bike, who ski, who 
climb, who jump, who fly. Negative body- 
fat percentages, serene resting heart rates, 
natural tans. Chemicals so thick you could 
scoop them out of the air with а spoon— 
adrenal, cortisol, testosterone. 

A lot of testosterone, hence the groupies. 

"These aren't rock (and roll) groupies—or 
baseball, basketball, football semipros—these 
are mostly beautiful, accomplished, intelli- 
gent women who are usually athletes in their 
own right. They just like to go to bed with 
guys who jump off bridges. 


Danger is an aphrodisiac. 

Kurt could hook up 58 times a night if 
he wanted to. 

He's drop-dead (okay—unfortunate) 
good-looking. Broad shoulders, V-shaped 
frame, legs designed to run down those 
mastodons. Killer handsome face. Deep 
brown eyes, thick brown hair cut short now. 

And he’s an extreme sports superstar—a 
runner, skier, surfer, climber and flier whose 
rugged face is all over the net and the mags. 

The A-Male, the current king. 

But he's already hooked up. 

With Paige. 

Talk about beautiful, accomplished, intel- 
ligent women. 

Tall, short sandy hair (but don't call it a 
“Paige Cut,” like one of the mags did; just 
dont do it), all legs, abs and taut muscle. 
A face that would be described as more 


“Before you ask me what sort af day Гое had, lock the doors, turn off 
ell 


the lights and keep w 


away from the windous...." 


handsome than pretty. Mensa-level IQ, 
youngest full prof ever at Colorado State, 
owns the women's records at Leadville and 
Western States. Speed-climbed the Nose at 
El Cap and then BASE jumped down. 

An extreme sports celebrity, Paige could 
hook up too, with any of the guys and more 
than a few of the women, if her gate swung 
both ways, which it doesn't. In any case, she 
doesn't want to. 

She has Kurt. 

Latchkey and Lev, different story. Even 
now they ve started to check out the poten- 
tial candidates. More Darwin. 

Тһе fit mate with the fit. 

Although it's an open secret that Latch- 
key has, and has had, an unrequited crush 
on Paige that would pancake an elephant. 

Paige is a little discomfited by it but oth- 
erwise doesn't mind, although she does wish 
Latchkey would "find somebody," and for 
more than one night. 

Kurt doesn't mind either. He's an emo- 
tional libertarian. 

Strike tha 

He's an Emotional Libertarian. 

He doesn't believe anyone has the right 
to tell anyone else whom, or what, he or she 
should love. 


Gatherings like this happen all over the 
world. In North Shore, Oahu when the big 
waves go off, in Chamonix for the Mont 
Blanc Ultramarathon, here in Canon City 
for the Speed Thrills Games at Royal Gorge. 

Anywhere anyone is shredding the freak- 
ing envelope. 

A photographer comes up to Kurt and 
Paige at the bar. 

“Show you guys something?" 

They know him. Brian Bentner, a free- 
lancer who shoots for Outside, Men's Journal, 
51. He holds up his Nikon and shows them 
the digital screen. Taken from the bridge, it 
shows Kurt and Paige, hand-in-hand, spread 
out in full flight, the gorge and the river 
beneath them. 

"Beautiful," Paige says. 

“It'll be on Outside's website in the morn- 
ing," Brian says. "But I just tweeted it." 

Brian has 100,000 followers. 

"You going to shoot tomorrow?" Kurt asks. 

^I'm thinking," Brian answers, "of har- 
nessing off the bridge and getting a shot 
as you come past. Would I be in the way?" 

“Hopefully not,” Paige says. 

Brian laughs. “Domani.” 

He walks away. 

“Nice of him to ask," Paige says. 

“Brian's cool," Kurt says. "We should go 
talk with Jay.” 

They get off their stools and walk over 
to a booth where Jay Michaels sits tapping 
into his laptop. Sandy Burrows sits across 
the table. Sandy's with a hot young ad firm 
out of Palo Alto. 

Jay is his client. 

His outdoor clothing line sponsors Kurt 
for Speed Thrills and other events. Jay is 
41, looks 33 and is a multimillionaire. He 
moves over so Kurt and Paige can sit down 
and points to the screen. “Sandy was show- 
ing me your footage from today.” 

Kurt and Paige wore GoPro cameras 


оп their helmets to record the flight from 
their POVs. 

"Good?" Kurt asks. 

“Tasty. 

They'll put it up with an ad banner for Jays 
company and it will get half a million hits. 

“What are your thoughts about tomor- 
row?" Sandy asks. 

"m thinking we go," Kurt says. 

Jay shakes his head. 

“What?” Paige asks. 

“Тһе forecast calls for gusting winds out 
of the west.” He punches up a weather site. 
Kurt and Paige lean over and look. "I think 
we should shut it down.” 

Because it's already crazy. 

To wingsuit out of a plane at 12,000 feet, 
hit a speed of a buck 20, "slow" to 90 and 
then fly under the bridge. Close under the 
bridge. Like, at arm's length, close enough 
to reach up and grab little plastic red ban- 
ners attached to the bottom beam on your 
way through. 
uh-raaa: 
he slightest miscalculation, the tiniest 
mis-execution and you smash into a steel 
girder at 90 per. Not strapped in a car. Or in 
a plane. Just you in a plastic suit. Will make 
a great video if it works. (And a better one 
if it doesn't, is the ugly truth.) 

Now you throw gusting winds into the 
equation and you have something that's 
truly out of your control. If a gust occurs 
at, say, 10,000 feet, okay, maybe you have 
time to deal with it, but if it hits when you're 
near the bridge? 

Random. 

‘Totally random. 

“We already announced it,” Kurt says. 

“Who cares?” Jay says. 

Kurt shrugs. 

“Don't think about letting me down," Jay 
says. "I'm not that guy. I'm not that ghoul.” 

Kurt chuckles and looks at Sandy. 

"I want great video,” he says. “I don't 
want snuff video.” 

“Let's see what tomorrow brings,” Kurt says. 

It's the West—weather changes on a 
whim. Truth is that they'll probably make 
the decision in the plane. 

No sense worrying about it now. 

Life is short. 


Q: How many people who previously 
attempted to йу under the bridge were killed? 
A: Both of them. 


Postcoital comedown 

Kurt and Paige, up in their room. 

"Tomorrow," Kurt says. 

“Yes?” 

“I don't think we should do it.” 

Kurt, the Uber-Man, she thinks. Nietzsche 
would have gone gay for him. Shit, Nietzsche 
would have blown him. Her friends warned her: 
Paige, he has testosterone dripping out his eyes. 

Uh-huh. 

“I wonder,” she says now, ignoring the 
topic, “if there’s such a thing as a rehab cen- 
ter for adrenaline addiction.” 

You go there for a month and do dull 
things?” Kurt asks. 

She riffs with him. “If you want to BASE 


jump, you call a friend and she talks you 
out of it.” 

"The meetings must be boring," he 
says. "And how do you know when you're 
‘recovered’ 

“I don't know. I guess you just live.” 

Just live, Kurt thinks. 

"The phrase itself is instructive. 

Kurt comes from a family of ski bums who. 
cobbled together a living working Colorado's 
slopes, lodges, bars. He moved seven times 
before he was 16, went to three different 
high schools—in Vail, Telluride, Steam- 
boat. He didn't mind; in fact, he liked it 
New mountains, new slopes, new snow, and 
he made friends easily. Skied in the winter, 
climbed in the summer. Hiked, biked, chased 
(and caught) girls, drank beer, smoked a lit- 
tle weed. Easygoing, genially messy loving 
home—two parents, three sisters—so he was 
used to feminine attention. 

Three semesters at Northern Colorado, 
then he decided it wasn't for him. Dropped 
out, trained his ass off and caught on with 
the Aspen Mountain Ski Patrol, the elite of 
the elite alpine rescue squads. Made some 
dramatic, risky saves, saw some pretty grisly 
shit. (You pick up the pieces of somconc 
who's fallen 200 feet down a cliff face, it's 
grisly shit.) 

Training, he discovered that running was 
more a joy than a chore. Made the progres- 
sion from marathons to ultras. One of the 
latter took him out to California and he 
stayed to explore surfing. Hopped over to 
Kauai and North Shore to do the big waves. 

Here's the thing—he was just skin- 
popping adrenaline; now he's mainlining 
it. Marathons—cool, but why not run more 
than a hundred miles across a mountain 
range with no rest? Downhill skiing—cool, 
but maybe instead heli-jump onto a recent 
avalanche and ski down that? Rock climb- 
ing? Absolutely, but let's do it without ropes 
or protection and sec how many slopes we 
can summit in a given period of time. 

Surfing—nice, but how about we go out 
to a freezing, shark-ridden mid-ocean reef 
into a north swell and try to survive a 70-foot 
bomber? Parachuting? Try BASE jump- 
ing. BASE jumping? Go for wingsuiting. 
Wingsuiting—let's do it out of a plane instead. 

He does it all—the world's greatest poly- 
extreme athlete. 

Because the high 
doesn't last. He В.В. 

Тһе thrill is gone. 

He needs more and more adrenaline. 

Now it has to be Xtreme. 

Xiremer. 

Xiremest. 

Has to do something no one's done. 

Feel something no one has felt. 

Without that, life is just life 


sts for a while, but it. 
ngs. 


Paige took an alternate route to the same 
location on the psycho-physiological map. 
She grew up in Boulder, the daughter and 
only child of two respected academics. They 
had expectations. 

A 4.0 GPA wasn't good enough when 
there was extra credit to be had. She needed 
4.2s and 4.55. Honors classes and Advanced 
Placement in every subject. (Shit, she 


VITAMIN 
WORLD' 


MAGNUM BLOOD-FLOW 
SEXUAL PEAK PERFORMANCE 
FOR MEN 


SAVE 53 


ШИ MANUFACTURERS COUPON 


1 


PLAYBOY 


106 


thought, I'm going to be halfway through 
my B.S. before I get out of high school.) IF 
she got a B on a test, tutors were brought. 
in to “get her grades up." (Shit, I might as 
well be Chinese.) 

She nceded a sport for her résumé, so she 
joined the cross-country team. 

Salvation. 

Time on her own with no one yapping at 
her, and she loved the simple left-right lefi- 
right that seemed to get her brain back in 
the center. Of course, she was Paige, Perfect. 
Paige, so she had to be great at it. She had 
expectations. She had to be state champ, 
state record holder, and with her reindeer 
legs she was built for it. 

But still, it was a relief. 

Solitude. 

Her against distance. 

Her against time. 

Her against herself. 

She loved it. 

Then she discovered rock climbing. 

Her parents were appalled. 

“What if you fall?” 

“I won't fall.” 

"But what if you do?" 

Then ГЇЇ be in a peaceful coma and 


maybe you'll stop nagging me, she thought 
but didn't say. Other girls were sneaking out 
to get high or sleep with boyfriends; Paige 
was lamming it on dirty weekends in Moab. 

Climbing was good, free climbing better. 

(Look, Ma, no ropes.) 

It was her against height. 

Her against fear. 

Her against gravity. 

(If you can escape gravity, you can escape 
anything, cven your parents. It's the ulti- 
mate rebellion.) 

Spurning Yale, Smith and Georgetown, 
she stayed home for undergrad so she 
could be close to the running trails and the 
mountains. Did varsity cross-country, but 
her heart was with the crazies running for 
three-day stretches across ranges or racing 
up faces and jumping off them. 

Did a semester abroad in Switzerland. 
Where they keep a good portion of the Alps. 

Did her M.S. at the runner's paradise of 
Corvallis, her Ph.D. at Berkeley, close enough 
to the Sierras to get in a run and a climb. 

‘The job market was basically а smorgas- 
bord for her, but she selected the relatively 
modest Colorado State to be close to her 
beloved mountains and her passion. 


“Yes, you'd better work faster. Your clay isn't the only thing that's 
starting to harden.” 


Adrenaline pursuit. 

Ultramarathons and free climbing. 

Now she's hooked. 

Just another thrill whore on the cover of 
Trail Runner. 

Stanford is trying to steal her. But she 
doesn't know if she wants to go to Palo Alto. 

It would have to be Palo Soprano. 

Palo Tenor, Palo Alto, Palo Soprano. 
High, higher, highest. 

“When do we hit the max?” she asks Kurt 
now. “How will we know?” 

“We won't,” he says. 

We'll be dead. 


They'd met at the starting line of the Lead- 
ville Trail 100, in the freezing predawn. He 
asked her where she thought she'd finish. 

"First." 

“In the women's?” 

“First,” she repeated. 

First is first, there are no qualifications. 

The LT100, also known as the Race Across 
the Sky, forces racers to ascend (and descend) 
15,600 feet at elevations that range from 
9,200 to 12,620. Fewer than half of the start- 
ers finish in the maximum-allowed 30 hours. 

Ever see a football team gas out in the 
fourth quarter playing Denver? That's at 
5,280 feet. For one hour. With halftimes 
and huddles and TV time-outs. Gatorade, 
steroids, pain-numbing injections and 
multimillion-dollar motivations. 

This ordeal starts at 9,200. 

That means you can't breathe by the time 
you get there. 

Unless you're a mountain goat, like Paige 
and Kurt. 

And then you run, over rugged trails, ир 
and down, sometimes in the dark, some- 
times at an elevation more than twice that. 
of Denver's stadium, for almost four mar- 
athons. And you'll get some Gatorade or 
other energy drink, and some protein қоор 
and a granola bar, and maybe some Advil or 
‘Tylenol, some Band-Aids for your blistered, 
bleeding feet, and you do it for more than 
a full day and at the end of it you'll ge 

Nada. 

You won't even go to Disney World unless 
you pay for it yourself, 

Just the glory. 

Тһе satisfaction. 

The joy of pure, unadulterated insanity. 

That's extreme, Jack. 

The story goes that the founder of the 
127100 started it in order to make Lead- 
ville famous, and when someone objected 
that he'd get someone killed (STCKY), he 
answered, “Well, then we'll be famous, won't 
we?” Kurt loves that story. 

You ask him, he'll tell you he fell in love with 
Paige right there, when she repeated “First,” 
even though he could barely see her face 
under the woolly she had pulled down half 
over her eyes. You ask her, it took her more 
time. She didn't even like him when she met 
him, thought he was a sexist, arrogant asshole. 

‘The thing is, he literally chased her. 

For 100 miles. 

That's love, Jill. 

Another way of saying that he chased her 
is to say that he pushed her, because every 
time she looked back she saw that asshole 


coming and it motivated her because she was 
not was not was not going to let that arro- 
gant prick catch her, no way. 

Of course, another way of saying that һе 
pushed her is to say that she beat him, which 
she did. As hard as Kurt tried, and he tried 
hard, he couldn't catch her, and the last 10 
miles Paige found her kick and left him way 
behind. She finished first (among women), 
sixth overall, wasn't happy with it, but she 
was there waiting when he staggered across 
the line, 11th among the men. 

She rang a cowbell for him. 


“For what?" 
“You paced me.” 
You outpaced me 
Yeah, well.” She saw blood seeping out of 
his left shoe. "You'd better have that taken 
care of." 

“You offering?” 

“Hell no," she said. “But I'll show you to 
the aid station. 

She walked beside him as he limped to 
the big tent, and she would now tell you that 
she started to fall in love with him when she 
realized that here was a man who damn near 
killed himself just to keep her within sight. 

And it doesn't get much better than that, 

They slept together that night. 

Literally slept. They were too tired to do 
anything else. 

Kurt was, anyway, and while Paige was а 
little offended, she had to like a man con- 
fident enough to admit that, for one night 
anyway, he preferred sleep to sex. A little 
humility, after all, is the difference between 
an A-Male and an A-Hole. 


But should he let her do this tomorrow, he 
wonders? 
Let her? Like І can stop her. 
"The Basic Rule of their relationship. 
They each do what they want. 


One force of nature you can't beat. 

You can't even negotiate with it. 

Time 

Ain't no wingsuit gonna give you glide 
ratio against time. Ain't no parachute gonna. 
slow it down. Ain't no Zodiac gonna pull you 
out of it. Maybe someday science comes up 
with the perfect pharmacological cocktail 
and you live forever, but 

Don't count on it, because 

It aint here yet, and 

Time will still move оп 

So even if you believe in living for today— 
as Kurt does—tomorrow is going to come, 
with the day after hard behind, and the bru- 
tal truth is that your legs aren't the same 
at 30 as they were at 20 because nature is 
planned for designed obsolescence. Dig it, 
we were born to wear out and be replaced. 

There will come a time when you just can't 
do what you used to could. 

And if you try? 

Nature will kill you for it. 

They say speed kills? 

Nothing kills like slow. 

Just ask Bonk and Gronk. One day they 
slowed down and became mastodon toe 


jam and somebody younger told their story 
around the old fire. 

Time kills. 

This is all a three-in-the-morning insom- 
niac meditation for Kurt. He lies there 
knowing he can't keep doing this extreme 
shit forever. He has to either 

Піс young 

A real possibility, or 

Do something different. Or 

Discover another option before he runs 
out of 

Time. 

And money. 


Because, let's face it—he's making enough to 
keep doing what he’s doing but not enough to 
put any away. Another way of putting it is that 
he's not living from paycheck to paycheck, 
but he is living from ех! 

He's good with that but here's the 
problem — 

What happens when he can't do the cash- 
worthy extreme? 

And the extreme has to keep getting 
extremer. 

That is, no one's gonna cut him a check to 
shoot him going over a bridge anymore. Only 
under the bridge. And if he does that, they're 
not going to sponsor him to do it again. 

Compare and contrast 

Elite extreme athletes to other elite athletes. 

LeBron can make the same shot 50,000 
times and that's a plus. He's setting records. 
Peyton and Tom B. can complete the same 
pass over and over again and it's a good thing. 

But if Kurt does it—it's boring. 

What if LeBron had to slam-dunk a ball 
into a basket while hurtling down the Grand 
Canyon? Very cool, yes. Say he does it and 
survives. Ain't no one interested in seeing 
him do it again 

Say Peyton and Tom had to thread the 
needle to a receiver while plunging down the 
face of an 80-foot wave that's about to crash 
on their heads, or while trotting through 
Death Valley, or free climbing El Capitan? 

Trust me—we'd watch them do it 

Once. 

Dig it, Kurt would BASE jump, big-wave 
surf and ultramarathon run just for the sheer 
joy of it. Over and over again and be blissfully 
And he'd keep doing it—happily 
the knowledge that he's not getting bette: 
it, but worse, that the replacement parts, as it 
were, are already on line. But that would be 
okay. He doesn't need the attention, doesn't 
need the admiration, ditto the adulation. 

He does need the money. 

Extreme sports are expensive. 
uipment, transportation, food, lodg- 
ing, ibuprofen.... 

Somebody got to pay for it. 

And Kurt can see a day when he can't and 
the sponsors won't. 

He can see 

Time coming up at him like a canyon floor. 


me to extreme, 


Kurt and Ley talk about it. 
One of those steely-silver predawn we- 
might-die-today conversations. 
‘Tends to cut down on the small talk. 
Lev is a smart guy. 


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He's thought about these issues. 

He's even come up with an answer. 

"What we need is a big score,” Lev says 

“What?” Kurt asks. "A book that turns 
into a movie? It's been tried; it doesn't 
work. Maybe if Paige does it, she gets on 
Oprah, but” 

“You're talking millions." Lev goes Carl 
Sagan on it. "I'm talking billions." 

Billions, Kurt thinks. 

That's extreme. 


Oligarch (n.) 1: а ruler in an oligarchy 2: (esp. 
in Russia) a very rich businessman with great 
political influence. 


We're more or less concerned with defini- 
tion number two here. 

It turns out that Lev's stepfather is a very 
rich businessman with heavyweight political 
connections, especially Russian. 

Lev and his stepfather hate each other. 

Let's be sure we understand each other here: 

Lev and his stepfather hate each other. 

Lev thinks that his Yegor Chubaiv is a 
philistine criminal. Yegor thinks that his 
(trophy) wife's only child is a spoiled brat, 
a condition he tried to remedy with his 
big fat oligarch belt until (16-year-old) Lev 
got a belt (black) of his own. after which 
Yegor resorted to alternative weapons such 


as sarcasm, insult and (eventually) exile. 

Lev is now proposing to rob him. 

“Tm not a thief,” Kurt says. 

While Lev generally agrees with Kurt's 
moral rectitude on this subject, he goes on 
to explain why it shouldn't be a concern in 
this particular case. 

"Yegor makes his billions," Lev says, "from 
the illegal sales of armaments. He'll sell to 
anyone—governments, insurgents, terrorists, 
drug cartels, mafias of any ethnicity. He is a 
criminal and a mass murderer. My beloved 
mother is a disgusting whore for marrying 
such a man. Taking his money to finance our 
lifestyle would be a public service.” 

"That's your rationalization, anyway,” Kurt 
says. Lev won't take his stepfather's money 
but he will take his stepfather's mon: 

“The root word of rationalization,” Lev 
counters, "is rational. I'm merely saying, we're 
not talking about mugging nuns here, and if 
it salves your conscience, we could drop a few 
million on the worthy charity of your choice." 

*But we would be the primary charity of 
our choice." 

Lev is sort of a Robin Hood of 
meritocracy—he believes in robbing from 
the rich to give to the worthy. 

“It’s guilt-free money,” Lev says. “A rare 
commodity." 

As previously discussed, Kurt is used to 
making leaps. 


"You will meet an auburn-haired young lady with a wonderful 


personality and a terrific body. She wili 


not be interested in you, 


and you will spend a lot of time masturbating.” 


Now he has to make the leap from whether 
to if to how. 

“Yegor has a yacht,” Lev says. 

“Sure.” 

“Periodically,” Lev continues, “he loads 
that yacht up with cash and sails it to 
the Cook Islands, where it is stored and 
laundered.” 

“I thought they did all that electronically 
these days.” 

“They used to,” Lev says, “but Inter- 
pol has gotten very good at tracking 
digital transfers. So the criminals have 
gone retro and now move actual physical 
cash. What I am proposing is that we use 
our extreme skills to drop onto that boat 
in mid-Pacific, relieve it of its ill-gotten 
gains and escape.” 

“Sort of Ocean’s 11 with an actual ocean.” 

“I have no idea what that means,” Lev 
says, “but if it helps your comprehension, 
yes, all right.” 

“Theoretically the boat is also heavy with 
security,” Kurt says. 

“Not theoretically—actually,” Lev 
answers. “Armed to the clichéd teeth.” 

“So we'd have to kill people,” Kurt says. 
“Sorry, not in.” 

Kurt has few scruples, but he knows 
he can't live—happily, anyway—on blood 
money. 

“It’s all in the execution, isn't it?” Lev 
says. "Pun intended. If we execute prop- 
erly, we won't have to execute anyone." 

Kurt's entire adult life has been about. 
proper execution as a matter of life and 
death. It's appealing. 

“Won't they come after us?" Kurt asks. 

"Of course." 

"And. 

It doesn't matter, Lev basically responds, 
because we're just better than they are. 
Whether it's up (a mountain), down (a 
wave, the sky), across (desert, ocean), they 
just can't catch us. 

“We put together a team,” Lev says, 
“of like-minded individuals—you, myself, 
Paige. Latch, whomever we need—with 
a highly developed and diverse skill set. 
Fortunately, we know such people, and 
there will be more than enough money 
to share ош.” 

“If we survive,” Kurt says. 

“There's always that,” Lev admits. 

But, Kurt thinks, there is always that. 

That's a daily reality. 

Kurt's life is a constant risk-reward equation. 

Lev's proposal has high reward. 

But the risk? 

Higher. 

It doesn't pencil. 

It's too... 

Extreme. 

Kurt says no. 


Paige wakes up sad. 
Scared, yes, excited, juiced but ennui-blue. 
Like, what's next after this? 
What's the next bigger high? 
Тһе junkie's lament. 


. 
to think that 


Kurt says, "I'm beginnin; 
maybe you shouldn't do this. 


Make someone happy with 
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And this, Paige thinks, from a man who 
is so absolute he doesn't believe in adverbs. 

“You don't think I should jump?” Paige asks. 

It is windy. 

The hotel window rattles. 

“Т don't think you should go under the 
bridge,” he says. 

“If you're going, I'm going," she says. 

“It’s not a competition, Paige.” 

Since when? she thinks. 

Run harder, ski harder, fly harder, fuck 
harder, come harder—"er" is a competition. 

То wit: 

“Maybe I don't think you should do it,” 
she says. 

His shrug is eloquent. 

I have to. You don't. 

I'm the YouTube sensation. 

"So superior," Paige says. 

But he is. 

Übermensch is by definition superior. 

"I'm doing it," Paige says. 

Kurt shrugs again. 

Übermensches believe in individual free- 
dom and responsibility. 

Take that from someone, you've taken 
her life. 

You don't do that to someone you love. 


Kurt's wingsuit is black-and-white (of course). 

Paige's is pink. 

“A girlie-girl wingsuit,” she says. 

She calls that skyrony. 

Latchkey rocks a Superman motif. (Would 
have gone with Underdog but they don't 
make them.) 

Lev's is midnight blue. 

They look like Marvel Comics super- 
heroes as they walk toward the plane. 

The wind, gusting in out of the west, 
freaks the sponsors out. 

“Maybe not today," Jay tells Kurt. 

Even though a crowd waits on the bridge 
and the cameras are in place. But no one 
wants that deposit in the karma bank. Мо 
one wants that weight tilting the scales of 
astral justice. 

“No,” Kurt responds. 

Today is fine. 

Today is the day we have. 

"Doesn't have to be,” Jay says. 

“Тһе forecast says it's a three-day blow," 
Kurt answers. “It will be fine.” 

"Any doubt," Jay says, "pull out." 

Again, words to live by. 

Walking to the plane, Paige says to Kurt, 
"You're afraid of being afraid." 

"Isn't that a tautology?" 

"You're not afraid to free-fly under a bridge, 
but you're afraid that other people will think 
you're afraid," she says. "What is that?" 

“Ипине.” 

“Totally true. 

“Something is either true or it isn't,” Kurt 
says. “You can't have relative degrees of truth." 

“Totally.” 


This is the plan. 

Kurt and Paige go ош first and do their 
thing. 

Land in the river, gather up their stuff 
and crew for Lev and Latchkey, who do the 
second jump. 


“Fair is fair," Paige says regarding pickup 
duty. 

They do it for us, we do it for them. 

And just as if yow're Kurt and Paige, you 
want to see Latchkey and Lev waiting down 
there to fish you out, if you're Latchkey and 
Lev, you want to see Kurt and Paige because 
you know that they would die, if necessary, 
to bring you back. 

You get tangled in the chute underwa- 
ter, you want Kurt diving for you because 
(a) he's a world-class waterman, and (b) he's 
never going to give up, and (c) you'll have 
cool-headed Paige directing him what to do. 

So that's the plan. 

That's the way you visualize it with every- 
thing going perfectly. 

You do your jump. 

You live. 

You let the adrenaline settle as you watch 
your friends come down and then you pick 
them up. 

Beer time. 

The four of them get into the plane. 

Your basic Cessna 182. 


From 12,000 feet above the Royal Gorge. 
They can see the bridge. 


They strap on their helmets. 
They turn on the GoPro 
cameras to record the trip in 
HD. This is the Information 
Age. Nothing is real without 
a video record. 


The people on the bridge, looking up 
expectantly. 

Can see Brian the photog lowering him- 
self off the bridge on a harness, getting 
ready to shoot. 

Can't see the red flags, but then again, 
they're under the bridge. 

Can see the red canyon walls. 

Way down they can see the silver ribbon 
that is the river. 

They strap on their helmets. Headsets 
inside the helmets and throat mikes so they 
can talk and listen to each other. 

This is the Information Age. 

They turn on the GoPro cameras to 
record the trip in HD. This is the Informa- 
tion Age. Nothing is real without a video 
record. More info, more data. 

Computers like wristwatches tell time, dis- 
tance and speed. 

Kurt takes one more shot at it. "You sure 
you want to do this?" 

"No," Paige says. 

But nothing is duller than certainty. 


Jumping out of a plane is fundamen- 
tally different from launching off a cliff or 
other static structure because the plane is 


moving, already creating airspeed. You 
have to be more careful coming out of 
the airplane because you might go Veg- 
O-Matic, i.e., fly into (or more accurately 
through) the propellers. 

Once airborne (the word is cautionary 
if you really explore it), the flier controls 
his or her descent through body posture, 
angle and maneuver against or with the 
wind, by changing the relative tension 
of the squirrel-like fabric until she or he 
comes to a place where it is deemed desir- 
able to pull the ripcord and float gently to 
earth or water. 

That's the theory, and among Kurt's 
favorite passages of instructional copy 
may be found the following: The absence 
of a vertical stabilizing surface results in а 
little damping action around the уаш axis, 50 
poor flying technique can result in a spin that 
might require an active effort on the part of 
the flier to stop. 

Kurt isn't sure what a passive effort 
might entail, but he knows that when 
you go into a spinout you'd better give 
it “active effort" in a hurry or you'll die, 
because the velocity of the spin causes 
thousands of microconcussions that soon 
render your brain incapable of any effort, 
active or passive. 

Latchkey actually likes to spin out. 

(“What's a little more brain damage?") 

Yeah, Latchkey's crazy but not that crazy— 
he's flying over the bridge. 

“I know my limitations," is what he says. 

A blast of wind knocks the plane sideways. 

The nudge of a psycho on a subway 
platform. 

The shark bumping against the life raft. 

What they should do is call it off. 

But these are people who have rarely 
done what they should. 

Paige goes out first. 

Kurt goes tumbling after. 


Kurt spreads his arms and legs to activate 
the fabric wings, then he pushes his shoul- 
ders forward to get velocity. 

Straightens his legs to reduce drag. 

Tucks his chin into his neck. 

‘Then he brings his arms back in. 

The greater the mass of the wings, the 
slower the flight. 

A flier can slow himself down to just over 
60 with maximum spread 

Kurt isn’t interested in slow. 

Only fast. 

Keeps his arms in to hita buck 50. 


Paige has maybe 15 seconds to decide. 
Over or under. 


‘Try to grab the flags or don't. 
You have to make small moves in a 
wingsuit. 


Small adjustments. 

Big moves can send you into a spin. 

She sees the bridge below her and knows 
that it’s the moment to spread her arms, 
open the wings, maneuver, decide. 

But it's so hard. 

So hard to let go of the speed. 

Tamp down the adrenaline. 


Break off their dance, their lovemaking. 109 


PLAYBOY 


110 


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As the bridge comes up at her—— 

“Break offi" Kurt yells. 

She does. 

Opens her wings and "slows" to only 100. 

Ninety. 

Eighty. 

Arches her spine downward to control her 
angle of attack and turns her neck to the 
right to look at him and he looks back but 
he doesn't open. 


One eighty-five. 

Fast, faster, fastest. 

Even the tiny act of raising his right arm 
to look at the dial knocks him off course but 
he shifts his left shoulder and straightens. 

Seventy-degree angle. 

Cuh-raazy. 

Running out of clock to pull up. 

But it doesn't get any better than this. 

Adrenaline coursing, wind slapping him, 
this is freedom, the will to live or die, he 
aims for the bottom steel beam and sees 
the flags. 

It will never get any better than this, so—— 

What's the fucking point? 


Тһе wind takes her. 

Throws her sideways and sends her 
spinning. 

Out of control. 

The world whirling around her—the sky, 
the bridge, the canyon, the sky—her neck 
feels like it might fracture, head fly off. She 
sees him for only a microsecond as she spins, 
his black figure plunging, and she knows 
he's hit the max but Paige... 

Decides to live. 

Superb athlete. 

Prime conditioning. 

Cool head. 

Indomitable vill. 

She gets very active, arches her back 
up, points her face up toward the sun 
and flies. 

Up. 

A graceful arc up and over the bridge and 
then she arcs down, tucks herchin and hits 
the ripcord. 

Floating down toward the river. 

Looks back toward the bridge and sees 
Kurt coming. 

Like a stooping falcon diving at its prey. 

Paige has seen a falcon kill. 

Тһе violent impact, the spray of blood 
and feathers. 


Kurt aims at the bottom of the bridge atan 
impossible speed, aiming for the bottom, 
cutting it so close, too close. 

Wind in his ears, he can't hear the scream 
of the crowd 

He spreads his wings. 

The steel beam comes at his face. 

He goes under the bridge. 

Reaches his arms up for the flags and 
grabs them. 

Тһе motion throws him up toward the 
steel beam. 


. 
She loses sight of him. 


He's gone. 
Then he emerges under the bridge. 
His chute opens. 
And Paige, the scientist, thanks the gods 
of earth and air. 


They meet in the water and swim to the 
Zodiac. 
"Amazing!" Kurt hears Jay scream 
through the headset. “Freaking amazing!" 
They climb into the гай and look up. 
“I hate you,” Paige says to him as they 
watch Lev's flight. 
“Easy to do,” 
understand.” 


Kurt says. “And I 


Lev's flight is beautiful. 
This is the day that we have and it's a 
beautiful day. 
Then it goes wrong. 


Latchkey is coming fast. 
Wind buffets him but he's in control. 
Heis, after all, a falcon reborn. 

Almost over the bridge when the down- 
draft hits him. 

And drives him into the railing. 

At 80 per. 

Paige has seen a falcon kill. 

‘The violent impact. 

Тһе spray of blood and feathers as the 
crowd on the bridge screams, moans, “Oh 
no oh no.” 

Look or shield their eyes as Latchkey 
makes YouTube. 


They scatter Latchkey's ashes in Moab. 

Among the red rocks that he scrambled 
up and jumped from. 

Kurt cries. 

Paige sobs. 

Lev bought a falcon ($57K on the black 
market, no wonder he needs money) and 
releases it. 

Into the vast blue Western sky to be 
reborn. 


That night the tribe gathers at McStiff’s (the 
name is cautionary if you really explore it) 
for the wake. 

‘The fliers, the jumpers, the climbers, 
the runners, the ultras, the extremes, the 
restless, the mad souls— 

And drink beer and whiskey and tell 
Latchkey stories. 

Remember when, remember when, 
remember that time Latchkey. 

Somewhere in there Kurt takes Lev out- 
side into the parking lot. 

Under a yellow moon and says... 

"I'm in." 

“Yes?” 

“Let's do it.” 

"This last thing. 

This. 

Extreme. 


(70 be continued. 


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TONY HSIEH 


(continued from page 52) 
but ultimately it's justa brand. 1 don't think 
we'll always live in a world run by Google. 
The amount of time it takes to build a 
brand and reach a lot of people keeps 
compressing. At some point, someone else 
will come along and be the new Google ог 
Facebook or Twitter. We just don't know 
what those things are yet. I can't even keep 
up with all the new social media stuff, but 
I'm already hearing kids in high school 
comment that Twitter is for old people. We 
already know the next generation doesn't 
care about e-mail. People forget how carly 
on things are in terms of digital technology. 
Everyone thinks it's been around forever, 
but it's been only a couple of decades. 
PLAYBOY: Where do you visualize it going? 
HSIEH: Have you heard of the singularity? 
It’s this idea that technology is changing so 
quickly that at some point we'll have tech- 
nology that’s changed by technology. Right 
now, technology is still directed by humans, 
but there are predictions that within the 
next 40 to 60 years artificial intelligence 
could surpass human intelligence. 
PLAYBOY: What would that look like? 
HSIEH: It’s completely unfathomable. That's 
the whole point. We can't imagine it. But 
1 believe we're already іп a pre-singularity 
phase. There's all this buzz about 3-D print- 
ing right now. The prediction is that 3-D 
printing will have a bigger impact on so- 
ciety 20 years from now than the internet 
had in the past 20 years. It's crazy to think 
about, but we're almost at a point where a 
3-D printer will be able to print out another 
3-D printer. When that happens, it’s kind of 
game over. Just drop one off in Africa and it 
will spread itself through every village and 
city, and the whole world changes. It’s ex- 
citing and terrifying at the same time. 
PLAYBOY: You spent a lot of time at raves 
when you were younger. What did you get 
out of those all-night dance parties? 

HSIEH: A huge amount. In the begin- 
ning, it was this idea of peace, love, unity 
and respect—the guiding principles of 
the culture. You could talk to anyone, 
with no ulterior motive; it was about be- 
ing open to people. But the most impor- 
tant understanding was about something 
called the hive switch. Psychologist Jona- 
than Haidt writes about it in The Righteous 
Mind. Basically, if you look at nature, you 
discover that certain animals, like chim- 
panzees and wolves, compete for food 
and mates, while others—bees are the 
best example—organize themselves for 
the greater good. They live together as a 
unified force because the DNA is the same. 
Bees are always working together for the 
benefit of the hive. 

As humans, we go back and forth be- 
tween both states. Serving our self-interest 
is kind of the default mode. But certain 
things trigger the hive switch and cause us 
to behave in а way that makes us care about 
the greater good. When you experience it, 
it is pure awe, like when you see something 
in nature that’s bigger than yourself. A 
synchronized movement does that as well, 
112 which is why when you join the military 


you spend the first six weeks just learning 
how to march in units. 

For me, the hive switch got turned on 
by raves. It was a feeling of unity with the 
other people in the space, unity with the 
music and with one another. That's why I 
go to Burning Man. The art, especially at 
night, just puts you in a state of awe. These 
things are hard to describe until you've ex- 
perienced them, I guess. 

PLAYBOY: You really have an open mind. 
The question has to be asked: How much 
weed do you smoke? 

HSIEH: [Laughs and pauses] Let me answer 
this way: I think there’s a lot of interesting 
research that looks at the health effects of 
pot versus alcohol, and pot certainly doesn’t 
have a negative health impact. And since 
Washington and Colorado have legalized 
its use, it's something to keep an eye on. 
PLAYBOY: You're avoiding the question. 
What about ecstasy? Nobody was going to 
raves in those days without it, right? 
HSIEH: Okay, my hesitation in answering 
questions like these is that there’s a percep- 
tion that you need to do drugs in order to 
have certain experiences. People have a 
visceral reaction to that idea, so I don't like 
to state a preference one way or the other. 
People think with raves, for instance, that 
ecstasy is what that scene was all about. 1 
mean, there were definitely people who 
went to raves in those years and were on 
ecstasy. I don’t have a judgment about 
that, but for me it was really the feeling of 
unity I described. 

Did you ever see the movie Milk? I gen- 
erally don't get teary-eyed or cry out of 
sadness in movies. In that movie there's the 
scene where gay rights activist Harvey Milk 
gets shot. That didn’t make me cry. What 
made me teary-eyed was the scene toward 
the end when thousands of people show 
up for a candlelight vigil. That was really 
uplifting. To me, it wasn't about Milk; it 
wasn't about his politics; it wasn't about his 
death. It was about the response he trig- 
gered in all those people. 

PLAYBOY: Incidentally, you've been rather 
ambiguous in discussing your sex life. 
Can you explain what you meant when 
you told The New York Times, “I hang out 
with a lot of people, guys and girls. I don’t 
really have this one person I am dating 
right now. I am hanging out with multiple 
people, and some people I hang out with 
more than others”? 

HSIEH: Oh that. Because of the way it was 
worded, everyone started assuming I'm 
bisexual, which I'm not. I meant it as an 
analogy. 

PLAYBOY: You're 40 and single. Is monoga- 
my overrated? 

HSIEH: I think, biologically, from a Dar- 
winian perspective, From a purely 
evolutionary point of view, the guy who's 
monogamous will have fewer copies of 
his genes in the next generation than a 
guy who's not. I think it’s pretty hard to 
find one partner and call it a day. Using 
the analogy of friends, why not find just 
one friend and call it a day? The answer 
is because you get a different type of con- 
nection, different conversations, different 
experiences with different friends. I would 


say the same thing is true on the dating side. 
PLAYBOY: You've mentioned before that 
you're a fan of the literature of pickup art- 
istry, including Neil Strauss’s The Game. Do 
those techniques work for you? 

HSIEH: I think I have different goals. The 
Game is more focused on how to pick up 
girls, but 1 found it interesting in thinking 
about how to use similar concepts to build 
relationships in general. I've read a lot of 
stuff by people in that world, so I don't 
remember who said what, but I remem- 
ber hearing that if you're going on a date 
with a girl, the best thing to do is change 
locations every half hour or hour and do 
something different. Basically, at the end, 
if you've gone to seven different locations, 
it will have the same effect on memory as 
going on seven dates in single locations. So 
it's about time compression and memory 
and so on. The point is to seduce a girl 
faster, but that technique has other applica- 
tions as well. It’s part of what I’m trying to 
do with Downtown Project. When people 
come visit us we basically hop from loca- 
tion to location to location, so even though 
they've been here only two or three nights, 
it will seem as though they've been here 
two weeks. It'll have a big impact on their 
memory. Humans remember things in 
terms of geography and number of stories. 
1 want a city where all this stuff is within 
walking distance so you can have a bunch 
of different experiences. 

PLAYBOY: Just to confirm: You're designing 
a city based on techniques used to get into 
women's pants? 
HSIEH: Well, we're not using the techniques 
to pick up girls. But I did have someone 
here from that world who said what we're 
trying to do is basically seduce people into 
moving to downtown Vegas. 

PLAYBOY: And have a Tesla in every garage. 
HSIEH: It’s true. We placed the largest order 
in the United States for Teslas. Project 100 
is going to have car sharing and bike shar- 
ing, and we'll also have a bunch of ultra- 
compact electric vehicles called Twizys. But 
yeah, we bought 100 Teslas. 

PLAYBOY: What's your opinion of Tesla's 
chief executive, Elon Musk? 

HSIEH: He's not doing enough, that 
slacker. He's got to think bigger. That was 
sarcasm, if you couldn't tell. 1 have huge 
respect for all he's doing. It's definitely a 
company I admire. 

PLAYBOY: What other companies make 
the list? 

HSIEH: I definitely like and appreciate 
the Virgin brand. I've always been inter- 
ested in anything that's a consumer-facing 
brand. Red Bull, Apple, In-N-Out Burger. 
Great service for the masses. Consistency. 
Тһе employees seem happy; the customers 
seem happy. 

PLAYBOY: By the way, did you really order 
the “100 by 100” off the secret menu at 
In-N-Out? 

HSIEH: Absolutely. 1 like a challenge. It was 
Halloween; we were hungry. If you don't 
know about it, the 100 by 100 is a massive 
burger. It's 100 patties and 100 cheese 
slices, all within two buns. There were 
eight of us, and we ate the whole thing. 
The plan was to go out and party the rest 


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of the night, but we just ended up lying 
on the apartment floor in a collective food 
coma. But we were happy. 

PLAYBOY: You talk about happiness fre- 
quently, but is it realistic to think we should 
be happy all the time? Аз Louis С.К. has 
said, “No one has a full year of love and 
happiness. I mean, even rich, happily mar- 
ried, in-love people have diarrhea three 
times a year." 

HSIEH: I wouldn't characterize myself as 
someone constantly seeking happiness, 
but I do think it's worth striving for. In my 
book I talk about a framework from the re- 
search perspective that happiness is about 
four things: perceived control, perceived 
progress, connectedness—meaning the 
number and depth of your relationships— 
and being part of something bigger than 
yourself that gives you meaning or pur- 
pose. On a daily basis I'm conscious of 
which of those areas are present and which 
need work, whether it's for myself or how 
we think about making employees happy 
or making customers happy. 

PLAYBOY: Zappos has a 365-day return 
policy with free shipping both ways. That 
keeps customers happy, but people must 
abuse the hell out of it. 

HSIEH: There have been a few isolated cases. 
You hear about the occasional person tak- 
ing a pair of hiking boots and going off 
into the mountains for three muddy weeks 
before trying to return them. We let them 
know we're not a shoe-rental company. 
But we actually don't mind when custom- 
ers order 100 pairs of shoes and return 99. 
We're trying to simulate the experience of 
going toa shoe store where the salesperson 
comes back and forth with box after box of 
shoes until you find the ones you like. 
PLAYBOY: Why was Kanye West picking 
on Zappos last fall? He accused you of 
"selling shit product" on Bret Easton El- 
lis's podcast. 

HSIEH: When that story came out, we were 
shocked. It was totally from left field, but 
we used it as an opportunity to have fun. 
We created an actual shit produci—a toilet 
plunger in a toilet bowl—and put it up for 
sale on Zappos.com for $100,000. 

PLAYBOY: Did Kanye buy one? 

HSIEH: Not yet. І haven't heard a word 
from him since. But the reviews our cus- 
tomers wrote on the page are really funny. 
It's weird. Celebrities usually love us. Garth 
Brooks came to Vegas and bought some- 
thing like 400 pizzas for the entire staff. 
PLAYBOY: You were a judge on The Celeb- 
rity Apprentice with Donald Trump. Do you 
ever see him around town? 

HSIEH: I don't know Donald very well. We 
interacted briefly during the filming, but his 
daughter Ivanka and I have become friends. 
She's one of the smartest, most authentic, 
most genuine businesswomen I know, and 
I have a lot of respect for her. We had a 
great time when she and her husband came 
to check out everything going on in down- 
town Vegas and with Downtown Project, and 
somchow we all ended up eating deep-fried 
Twinkies at the end of the night. That's prob- 
ably the first and last time ГІ ever do that. 
PLAYBOY: By the way, what is the secret to 
getting over e-mail glut? 


HSIEH: You have to get up four hours ear- 
lier than you normally would. [laughs] 
Actually, there's a technique I like called 
Yesterbox. I’m able to stay on top of 
things because every morning when I 
wake up, in my inbox or to-do list are 
yesterday's e-mails. I know exactly how 
many e-mails I need to get through, and 
there's a sense of progress. At some point 
there's completion. Then, any e-mails 
that come in today become tomorrow's 
mail. So some days, if I've gotten up early 
enough, I'm done with all my e-mail ob- 
ligations by noon and can stop stressing 
about that part of life. 

PLAYBOY: What other websites or apps do 
you like? 

HSIEH: I think what Inside.com and the In- 
side app are doing is pretty interesting. 
PLAYBOY: Inside is a news aggregator. Are 
you one of those rich guys looking to buy 
а newspaper? 

HSIEH: [Laughs] No, I'd rather steal one. 
PLAYBOY: What's next for Zappos? 

HSIEH: Today we sell a lot more than shoes. 
We've been making a big push into cloth- 
ing. Looking ahead, we want to continue 
to build on having the very best custom- 
er service and customer experience out 
there, and that could translate into any 
realm. There could be a Zappos airline or 
a Zappos hotel or something else that stays 
in line with our core values. 

PLAYBOY: Do you have any plans to deliver 
products by drone? 

HSIEH: Not yet, but that would be pretty 
cool. We had a demo once at the Zappos 
plaza, and people were really excited. 
PLAYBOY: The retail landscape is pretty 
dismal for many companies. If you were 
a struggling company like JCPenney or 
Barnes & Noble, what would you do to 
turn things around? 


HSIEH: Listen to the customers. With brick- 
and-mortar retail in general there hasn't 
been much innovation in a very long time. 
Buying from а store today is not that dif- 
ferent from buying from a store 30 or 50 
years ago. But if you look at the innovation 
at the Apple Store, let's say, you see that 
success comes in figuring out how to take 
the customer experience to the next level. 
"That's true online and offline. That's cer- 
tainly where wc found success. 
PLAYBOY: Incidentally, how can someone 
get a job at Zappos? 

: We're hiring. All our jobs are posted 


PLAYBOY: What are you looking for? 

HSIEH: People who are right for our cul- 
ture. We do two sets of interviews. The 
hiring manager will interview for the stan- 
dard stuff like fit within a team, relevant. 
experience, technical ability and so on. 
Then our HR department does a separate 
set of interviews purely for culture fit, and 
those can get interesting. Applicants have 
to pass both assessments to be hired. We've 
said no to a lot of smart, talented people 
we knew could make an immediate impact 
on our top or bottom linc. If thcy didn't 
get the job, it could have been because 
they weren't nice to the Zappos shuttle-bus 
driver on the way from the airport. And 
you have to like living in Vegas. 

PLAYBOY: The history of famous people 
living in Vegas is kooky at best—Howard 
Hughes, Elvis, Liberace. Do you think 
you'll stay for the long term? 

HSIEH: I have no plans to leave. I think 
the world we're creating here is very dif- 
ferent from the one they lived in. It's 
turning out to be a different world in gen- 
eral for all of us. 


ТОТ ШҚ У 
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ІШІ ШШШ ma 


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“According to your journal, you're paying way too much for sex.” 


113 


PLAYBOY 


114 


EL RAID 


(continued from page 68) 


Largo, one of two clubs in Melo—which, 
with some 50,000 residents, is the capital 
city of the Cerro Largo department. (Uru- 
guay is divided into 19 departments—states, 
essentially.) 

"Horses are a huge part of the culture 
and economy of Cerro Largo,” Nacho says, 
“from back in the days when the caudillos 
were living in Uruguay's version of the Wild 
West. The Raid is really a part of the whole 
tradition of Melo.” 

It was Nacho and Marcos's father, Jorge 
Cardozo, who founded the Centro Raidista 
club in the early 1980s. Behind Jorge’s 
house is a small barn where Mi Santa is 
boarded with a couple of other horses, 
while the house itself—its stucco walls and 
tiled roof modestly middle class by Ameri- 
can standards but a mansion in Melo—is 
a shrine to El Raid. Trophies and framed 
photos cover the countertops and cabinets. 
In each of the photos, many of them black- 
and-white, is evidence ofthe key difference 
between El Raid and all other endurance 
horse races, the crucial factor that makes 


comparisons to the Tevis Cup or any other 
competition irrelevant. 

The vehicles. 

Unlike other endurance racing, which 
takes place on trails, El Raid is run on com- 
muter roads: 30 kilometers and back, an 
hour rest period and veterinary inspection, 
then another 15 kilometers and back. Dur- 
ing the race, trucks speed alongside the 
horses, each with a numbered placard that 
matches the number painted on the flank 
of their horse. The stud acts as a sort of 
mobile pit crew, spraying the horse from 
a hose connected to barrels of water in the 
truck bed so the animal, averaging 20 miles 
an hour, doesn't overheat. As horses pass 
and jockey for position, trucks swerve, col- 
lide, brake and speed up. It’s part Kentucky 
Derby, part Daytona 500, a chaotic mash-up 
of Seabiscuit and Mad Max. 

Today, Raid is a major sport, second 
only to soccer. There are several maga- 
zines dedicated to it and TV and radio 
broadcasts of events. Racing season lasts 
from carly March through late November, 
and almost every club hosts a race, mean- 
ing there is a race nearly every weekend 
for nine months—42 races in 2013. Most 
are 90 kilometers, though they can range 


ADWELL | 


“Can I call шш back, Tina? I’m right in the middle of a ménage à 


/ Anybody know the French word for 11?" 


from 80 to 115 kilometers. First prize is 
usually 100,000 pesos, or about $5,000. If 
$5,000 doesn't sound like much, consider 
the average Uruguayan's yearly income: 
roughly $13,000. No matter how many 
horses the field comprises, one fifth of them 
receive some prize money—provided they 
survive the race, of course. And that's far 
from guaranteed. 


Salón comunal translates to “community cen- 
ter.” The one housing Nacho and the rest of 
the stud is a bare cinder-block shelter. The 
men unfurl bedrolls around the perimeter 
of the concrete floor, though there's little 
need. Just after midnight, when they've had 
their fill of the pig, they drive into town for 
the remate, the Raid betting system. 

Raid is more than a race. Uruguay is 
roughly the size of the U.S. state of Florida, 
but its population is less than 3.5 million, 
compared with Florida's nearly 20 mil- 
lion. Almost half the country lives in the 
capital city of Montevideo. Only one other 
Uruguayan city has more than 100,000 resi- 
dents; most have only a few thousand. There 
are few restaurants and even fewer movie 
theaters. Soccer is popular, but of the 16 
teams in Uruguay's premier league, only 
two are based outside Montevideo. So the 
weekend El Raid comes to town is a hedo- 
nistic free-for-all, a sleep-deprived orgy of 
drinking and eating and gambling and danc- 
ing. It puts the Churchill Downs infield to 
shame. Hell, it puts Coachella to shame. The 
only equivalent is what Pamplona’s Fiesta de 
San Fermin must have been in Hemingway's 
time, before all the tourists ruined it. 

Things kick off Saturday morning. Spec- 
tators, drinking beer and yerba mate and 
eating chorizo sandwiches called choripán, 
gather ata corral to watch the horses check 
in and undergo an initial veterinary inspec- 
tion. This is followed in Ше early evening 
by shorter races—roughly 10 kilometers— 
when there's even more drinking and eating. 
Many of the younger men, including Nacho 
and his stud, dress casually, in polo shirts and 
hoodies. But even they wear at least one tra- 
ditional item—the beret, the bombachas—as 
a tribute to their ancestors. Uruguay is an 
impressively progressive country. It has uni- 
versal health care. It averages a 96 percent 
voter turnout as the result of mandatory vot- 
ing. (Ifyou don't cast a ballot, you're fined.) 
Ithas legalized gay marriage and marijuana. 
But when it comes to haberdashery, it is envi- 
ably stuck in the past. 

The country is also lagging in technology— 
at least when it comes to the remate. There 
are no tote boards, no pari-mutuel win- 
dows. The process is closer to a live auction. 
There are multiple rounds of betting, and 
a horse can be bet on by only one person— 
whoever offers the highest bet each round. 
Bets are for “win” only; there is no “place” 
or “show.” If the horse you bet on wins, 
you receive the total money bet in that par- 
ticular round—minus a 30 percent cut for 
the local club. There are as many rounds 
as there are people who wish to bet. There 
is also a roughshod strategy. Betting in the 
early rounds yields a bigger pot for the win- 
ner, since there are more people eager to 


place their bets—and on a wider variety of 
horses—than in the later rounds. Yet you 
also have to put down—and risk losing— 
more money than in the later rounds, when 
there are fewer bettors to compete against. 
To an outsider, it’s an utterly confounding, 
absolutely maddening system. 

“We just don’t have the technology here 
to do real-time betting like in the States, 
Leo explains. “That's just the way we do it. 
We like it that way.” 

The remate for Sunday's Raid is held 
Saturday night in the Varela Raid club's 
headquarters: a large, hot, windowless hall 
with an attached bar facing the city square, 
which this weekend is filled with carnival 
rides, game booths and choripán vendors. 
Hundreds of people jam the hall, overflow- 
ing the many tables and chairs and squeezing 
tight against the walls, abandoning their 
places only for more beer. On a stage, a 
large white canvas is strung between a pair 
of tall wooden beams. Onto this is projected 
a spreadsheet with the names of all 51 horses 
entered in the race and columns for each 
round of betting, updated by laptop. An MG 
paces the stage, rapidly yelling the horses’ 
names and escalating bets into a microphone 
while pointing to the flashing hands of bet- 
tors. Ata table near the stage, a group of 
officials exchange money for claim tickets. 

Some horses don't receive a single bet. 
Most horses, including Mi Santa, receive bets 
of $10 or $20 per round. Then there is the 
favorite, Ciriaco, a hulking bay represent- 
ing Club Nacional in the city of Sarandí del 
Yi. So far in the 2013 season, Ciriaco has 
competed in six Raids and won four. The 
bets on him range from $250 to $700 per 
round. Since bets and total pots vary from 
round to round, overall odds are not easy 
to tabulate or even applicable. But Mi San- 
ta's chances of finishing ahead of Ciriaco are 
clearly slim at best. A total of $200 is bet on 
Mi Santa—most of it coming from Nacho 
and his stud—and $3,500 is bet on Ciriaco. 
Between the short races Saturday, Sunday 
morning's Raid and a few short races Sun- 
day afternoon, the weekend's combined 
wagering will total $50,000. Saturday night's 
remate begins at eight р.м. and doesn't finish 
until two А.М., after 28 rounds of betting. 

By then, the night is just beginning. As is 
tradition, a dance is held, this time in a drab 
ballroom on the opposite side of the square 
from the Varela Raid club. At three A.M. the 
line stretches down the block and around the 
corner. Inside, the dance floor is packed with 
couples grinding to live cumbia and singles 
cruising for partners, their faces obscured 
by the scanning fluorescent spotlights and 
the smoke machine's artificial cumulus. The 
guys arestill in gaucho garb, but the girls pay 
little mind to sartorial tradition. Their heels 
are high, their dresses cut low. Many of them 
are still dancing at six a.M., as Mi Santa trots 
by on her way to the starting line. 


Ruta No. 14 bisects Uruguay east 10 west. 
In the summer, the road is used primar- 
ily by those bound for the beach town of 
La Coronilla. During the rest of the year 
it’s busy with big rigs transporting milk, 
harvested crops and other provisions from 


the farms that dot the pastureland span- 
ning to the horizon. It's still dark as 6:35 
comes and goes. Nothing happens. I wait 
in the bed of Leo's truck with the rest of 
Mi Santa's stud, about a mile from the 
starting line. A car unaffiliated with the 
race speeds past, away from town. Wher- 
ever they're headed, they know to leave 
early. Later in the morning, a milk truck 
isn't so wise and is forced to the side of the 
road for more than an hour 

At last: the glimmer of approaching 
headlights and the faint sound of hooves. 
It starts as the patter of light rain, builds 
to a steady drumming and crescendos to 
an ear-pounding hailstorm. And yet, in the 
enveloping dark, still none of the horses are 
visible, only the headlights fast bearing down. 

Finally the lead horse passes, ridden by 
a female jockey. (There are one or two in 
every Raid, rarely more.) Then a second 
horse, followed by a third and a fourth. One 
by one they go, the orderliness as magnifi- 
cent as the animals themselves. Then the 
scene unravels into complete disarray. 
Trucks overtake us in a flood, streaming 
by on both sides, kicking up dust and grass 
as they brake hard, the men in the truck 
beds signaling with raised arms that there 
is congestion ahead. Most trucks have four 
men packed into the bed: one has four in 
the bed, four squeezed into the rear of the 
cab and two up front. Most of the men 
stand casually in the beds without hold- 
ing on to anything or sit perilously on the 
edge. They look unfazed by the unfolding 
frenzy, smoking and sipping ycrba maté and 
passing thermoses of hot water between the 
speeding trucks. I flop around in Leo's bed, 
struggling not to get thrown as the wind 
whips dirt into my eyes and mouth. 

With little distance separating the 
horses, especially early on, and anywhere 
from 20 to 100 trucks trying to stay abreast 
of their horse—on a two-lane road, no 
less—the result is sheer chaos: Drivers 
honk and yell at one another as members 
of the stud dangle off the side of the truck 
with one hand as they lean out to spray 
down the horses. Steam rises off the charg- 
ing steeds as they're doused. Jockeys dart 
their mounts between trucks to the other 
side of the road to get ahead of the pack. 
A police motorcycle weaves and wobbles 
between horses and trucks, as if ensuring 
some measure of order. A few compact cars 
with press signs on their dashboards zip 
by, providing the radio play-by-play. Every 
truck is tuned to the broadcast, and every 
truck's windows are rolled down, giving the 
effect of one giant loudspeaker shattering 
the early-morning tranquility of the Uru- 
guayan countryside. 

Around mile 10 the sun begins to break 
through the clouds. Spectators line the 
roads. By now the horses have divided 
into three groups: in the lead group, half 
a dozen; in the second, 20 or so; followed 
by the rest. This is typical for a Raid, and it 
means nothing. Although Ciriaco is in the 
lead group, most of these horses won't fin- 
ish. The pace is simply too fast. 

Mi Santa is near the front of the second 
group. Through the cab's sliding rear win- 
dow, I ask Leo how she looks. 


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“Good,” is all he says, with a hint of sur- 
prise, leaving me to suspect she's exceeding 
even the stud's most optimistic hopes. I find 
myself wondering if Mi Santa can actually 
win this damn thing. Soon, though, I'm 
faced with another, entirely alternate likeli- 
hood. It is the one scenario that, in all the 
narratives I envisioned for this weekend, 
somehow never occurred to me. 

It happens just as the horses make the 
30-kilometer turn and begin heading back 
toward the rest area: Mi Santa exhibits an 
odd tic. Every few strides she jerks her 
head to the left, as if annoyed by something 
behind her. It's a small change in her poise, 
barely noticeable. She isn't losing speed and 
Leo hasn't commented on it. Atop her, Maxi- 
miliano de Cunto remains stone-faced. I try 
to dismiss it, but I can't: Something is wrong 
with Mi Santa. 


"The Federación employs strict rules to pro- 
tect the horses. Along with the veterinary 
inspection the day before the race, horses 
must have blood drawn for drug testing. 
Blood is tested again, along with urine, on 
the Monday after the race. If the results come 
back positive for those horses within the 
money, they forfeit their winnings. And the 
jockey and owner of any horse that tests posi- 
tive for doping are suspended for one year. 

There's another veterinary inspection 
during the rest period—after the first 20 
minutes of which the horse must exhibit a 
heart rate of 65 beats or less per minute or 
face disqualification. Horses that pass the 
pulse test can still be disqualified at the vet- 
erinarians' discretion. Vets can also label a 
horse “with observation,” which means they 
noticed something but can't definitively say 
it merits a disqualification. In such cases it 
is left to the owner to decide whether or 
not to proceed with the last 30 kilometers 
of the race. However, if a “with observation" 


horse continues and suffers an injury, the 
owner faces a suspension of anywhere from 
six months to life. And after a horse runs a 
Raid—finish or no—it's not allowed to race 
again for three weeks. 

"The owners are also extremely careful 
with the horses. Preparing a horse to com- 
pete in a Raid is a lengthy and expensive 
process. Horses are confined to running 
on a sand track until they're four or five 
years old. From then until they're seven or 
eight, they compete in shorter races, slowly 
increasing their distance. But even when a 
horse has proven it can handle a full-fledged 
Raid, it's not immediately allowed to com- 
pete. It then has to make the transition to 
running on paved roads. Different surfaces 
call on different muscles, and if the owners 
are too hasty, the horse can easily break an 
ankle. Raid horses cost several thousand dol- 
lars. And with an average horse competing 
in eight Raids per year—barring injury— 
there are many more thousands in prize 
money to be won. 

“With horses you have to get to know 
their manner to understand what they 
want,” Nacho says. “If one is brave or 
timid, you'll take care of the horse in a dif- 
ferent way. The training changes as we get 
to know the horse's nature. That's what 
excites me, every day learning something 
new about the horses.” 

Sometimes safeguards are not enough. 
Ninety kilometers is still a hell of a long 
way for a horse to run in a single morning. 
During the 2012 Raid season, roughly 1,600 
horses competed. Five died. In 2013, prior 
to the Raid in Varela, four horses had died. 

That weekend it looked like it might hap- 
pen again. 


Around the two-hour mark, the first group, 
including Ciriaco, arrives at the rest area, a 
huge, lush green field with a tiny pond that 


looks more like Ireland than South America. 
Jockeys leap from their horses as members 
of their stud furiously tear off the saddle and 
hand it to the jockey, who sprints to a nearby 
scale. The jockey, holding the saddle, must 
weigh within a couple of kilograms of 85 
kilograms, or about 185 pounds. (This is to 
make sure jockeys don't have an advantage 
by being too light, as well as to protect the 
horses against carrying too much weight. 
There arc also jockey weigh-ins before and 
after a Raid.) The crew then leads the horse 
to a line of 14 barrels filled to the brim with 
water. Men dunk plastic buckets and metal 
pails into the barrels and in the same motion 
fling the water onto the horse, desperate to 
cool the beast and bring its heart rate to 65 
beats per minute or less. Eventually, all 14 
barrels will be emptied. 

Some studs forgo the barrels and lead 
their horses straight into the pond. One 
jockey wades in himself, submerged to his 
waist in the water, dumping buckets of it 
over his horse. A member of another stud 
holds two soda-bottle-shaped blocks of ice 
against each side of his horse's neck. All this 
is accompanied by whistling from the jock- 
cys and other stud members: The sound 
encourages the horses to urinate. 

Veterinarians and their assistants roam. 
through the maelstrom. When a stud is 
ready, the vets are called over. If the horse 
does not pass the pulse test, it is done for 
the day and the stud breaks out the IV, the 
pole and the bags of saline. In a weekend of 
surreal sights, two dozen horses meander- 
ing around a Technicolor-green field with 
IV poles extending from their backs ranks 
first. Fifty-one horses enter that weekend's 
Raid. Forty-seven depart the starting line. 
Twenty continue to the race's second half. 

Mi Santa is not among them. 

At the rest area, her odd tic becomes 
something more. She is now in plain dis- 
tress, violently lashing her head back and 
stamping her right front foot. Nacho doesn’t 
wait for the vets to tell him she's finished. He 
hooks her to the IV, not even wasting time 
with the pole but rather holding the bag 
himself. The entire stud—all eight men— 
gather around Mi Santa, each with a hand 
on her. Together, they walk her around, 
farther and farther from the pond and 
the rest of the crowd, hoping to give her 
space and privacy. A second IV is quickly 
inserted, another member of the stud hold- 
ing the bag. The fluid doesn't help—not fast 
enough, anyway. Mi Santa begins to stagger. 
Then she goes down. 


In the end only a dozen or so horses cross the 
finish line. Ciriaco pulls up lame somewhere 
along Ruta No. 14. The final result is even 
more unlikely than Mi Santa winning: a tie. 
More inconceivable still, a tie between two 
jockeys from the same town. Twenty-three- 
year-old Diego Prego and 54-year-old José 
Gussoni, both of Sarandí Grande, are neck 
and neck with three kilometers to go. The 
old friends decide to finish the race together 
and cross the line holding hands, arms raised 
high. They split the first-place prize money, 
and anyone who bet on either horse wins that 
particular round, though only halfits pot. 


The finish line is situated just outside 
the ballroom. The crowd swells on both 
sides ofthe road. As soon as the men cross 
the line, they are mobbed— pulled down 
from their horses and showered with hugs 
and congratulatory shouts, then seized by 
TV and radio reporters. The horses are 
led around the block and sprayed with 
cold water from a gas-powered hose. The 
pressure is firehose strength. The horses 
don't even flinch. 

Such a tie in El Raid is called a puesta. It is 
extremely rare. It's been years since the last. 
And no one can remember when, if ever, a 
puesta involved two jockeys from the same 
town. “You don't know how lucky you are to 
see this," Leo says in the midst of the surg- 
ing, cheering crowd. It certainly would have 
been a magical, even 
providential end 
to this story, made 
even more meaning- 
ful by the difference 
in the riders' ages. 
Two men, one 
barely out of ado- 
lescence, the other 
on the back end of 
middle age, holding 
hands as they cross 
the finish line. What 
better metaphor for 
the current state of 
Uruguay, a country 
rich in history and 
tradition, trying to 
reconcile with the 
present and embrace. 
the future. Yes, it 
would have been опе 
hell of an ending, if 
that were where this 
story ended. 


An hour later, with. 
the crowds gone to 
the short track for 
the weekend's final 


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races, the inflatable a 
arch over the fin- лоса 
ish line carted away 

and Ruta No. 14 

once more clear for 

milk trucks and other 


traffic, Mi Santa still 
lies on her side in 
the field —now empty except for a couple 
of lingering studs and their supporters. The 
shadows of the surrounding trees encroach. 

When she first went down, Mi Santa 
tried to get back up, with the stud's help. 
Leo and a few of the other me 
behind her and pushed, 4 
shoulders into her as if she were a foot- 
ball blocking sled. The consensus was that 
she was cramping, in which case lying 
down would only make her tighten up 
and increase her discomfort. She stayed 
upright only a few moments, then fell 
again. After getting her up once more, for 
an even shorter time, the stud changed 
strategy. A few of the men lay on top of 
the horse to keep her down and help con- 
serve her strength. Mi Santa resisted at 


first, kicking so hard that she tossed two 
of the men into the air. Vets injected her 
with a painkiller. After a few minutes she 
settled down and just lay there. 

Now, two of the men sit in the grass beside 
Mi Santa, stroking her for reassurance. They 
drink beer. The entire stud does. Nacho 
has driven his truck over and the cooler is 
steadily depleting. 

Veterinarians confer to the side. It has 
been determined that the horse's stomach 
is the problem. This is likely due to dehy- 
dration and is not uncommon for horses 
during a Raid. They almost always feel bet- 
ter after the fluids and painkillers, which 
can take up to six hours to work. So it's still 
early. But the vets are concerned. If in the 
next hour or two Mi Santa can't get back on 


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her feet, surgery will have to be considered. 
However, the nearest veterinary hospital is 
four hours away, and to keep Mi Santa suf- 
ficiently sedated and comfortable for that 
long of a ride would be difficult. Surgery 
could be performed right here in the field, 
but that too is problematic. 

“There are much better conditions at the 
hospital versus doing it in the field,” says the 
eldest vet, Ruben Acosta Fernández. “The 
surgery is two to three hours. Could be a 
piece of dead intestine. We'd just cut it out 
and sew it together and close her up." 

But if it's something more serious, some- 
thing the vets are ill-equipped to treat 
outside of a hospital, they'd then have lit- 
tle recourse but to euthanize the horse. 
That's another option: Just put Mi Santa 


down and spare her and everybody else 
the ordeal of surgery. 

It's still too soon for any of this talk. And 
none of this has been proposed to Nacho. 
Not yet. But his worry is plainly visible. He 
gnaws his bottom lip, shakes his head dole- 
fully, runs a hand through his short black 
hair, puts his hands on his hips and paces. 

"Every horse is different," he says. “Мі 
Santa has responded well i 
we first started training her. 
horse always endears herself to a trainer 
or owner, because it's a good feeling to 
see her understand and improve. She 
has so many of the traits I like to see in 
a Raid horse. Sometimes a horse will get 
hurt early on and can't compete anymore. 
It always hurts when it's a horse you've 
developed a close 
relationship with." 

“I thought the 
yegua could get her- 
self right in there 
and place in one оГ 
the top positions," 
Maximiliano de 
Cunto says. “Win- 
ning a Raid is really 
complicated, so many 
factors..." 

It is time for my 
photographer and 
me to leave. Nei- 
ther of us has slept 
and we don't want to 
navigate the strange, 
sparsely lit highway 
in the dark on our 
four-hour drive. As 
we cross the field 
toward the car, we 
hear shouting and 
look back. Mi Santa 
has risen. The men 
drop their beers, 
bolt up from where 
they're sitting and 
rush to her side. Each 
places a hand on her, 
as if hoping to some- 
how confer a bit of 
their own vitality. She 
looks steady, walking 
in a circle. Several of 
the men back away 
and begin backslap- 
ping and cleaning up 
the empty beers. It is a celebration, a victory, 
еуеп this far from the finish line. 

Then she falters and goes back down. 

Later that night, back at my hotel room 
in Montevideo, 1 receive an e-mail from 
Leo. Mi Santa finally managed to stay up 
and walk to the trailer. She'll be taken to 
the hospital the next day for an X-ray. But 
first she'll attend the trophy ceremony in 
the Varela city square. The Monday after 
a Raid, all the studs show up for the tro- 
phy ceremony with their horses, even if 
they didn't finish. 

"That way they show to everyone else that. 
their horse is okay,” Leo tells me. “It’s a mat- 


ter of pride." 


117 


KATE MARA 
(continued from page 86) 
Qs 
PLAYBOY: Are you now the life of the 
party? 
MARA: I'm okay at a party, but if I'm 
going out with a group of friends, I'd 
rather it be four of us than 10. Otherwise 
I'll wind up talking to just the two peo- 
ple next to me. I'm always much more 
at ease when there are fewer people. I 
wasn't a loner as a kid, but I'm 31 now 
and still like small groups rather than 
big crowds. 


PLAYBOY 


9 
PLAYBOY Many "—— 
they were partly motivated to pursue 
careers in show business because of the 
astonishing-looking women who work in 
and around it. What about you? 

MARA: TIl bet women don't say that. It’s 
silly. Attractive people are everywhere. I 
was very focused on a career and still am. 
I was never boy crazy. 


10 

PLAYBOY: Would you cop to feeling slight- 
ly jealous over the fact that David Fincher 
directed you in the first two episodes of 
House of Cards, but he directed your sis- 
ter in both The Social Network and The Girl 
With the Dragon Tattoo, the latter of which 
got her an Oscar nomination? 

MARA: We've never had any kind of com- 
petitive thing between us, thank God. 
We're really close. Oscars aren't every- 
thing, but 1 watch them and I'm not 
super-cynical about them. Would I love 
to earn an Oscar nomination someday? 
Of course. But we were all together when 
we learned Rooney had gotten the nomi- 
nation, and we all celebrated together. 
We went to the Oscars together. She and 
I have auditioned for some of the same 
parts, and we've actually checked with 
each other, like, "What time is your audi- 
tion?" because it would be just awkward 
to see each other there. 


11 
PLAYBOY: Has a red asked for an au- 
tograph and looked surprised when they 
read the signature, thinking you were 
your sister? 

MARA: As a redhead, I've been confused 
with other redheads like Amy Adams—but 
hey, ГЇЇ take that. She's amazing. I had 
someone come up to me for an autograph 
and say, "I loved you in The Devil Wears 
Prada,” but no, that's not me either. I've 
signed autographs, and when 1 realized 
they thought 1 was someone else, I've ac- 
tually called the other actor to tell them 
Maybe 1 need to start asking who people 
think I am before I sign. 


12 
PLAYBOY. The е episode of the зес- 
ond season of your TV series, House of 
Cards, caused shock waves when the inti- 
mate relationship between your journal- 
ist character and Kevin Spacey's charac- 

118 ter turned fatal. Shouldn't a character as 


smart as Zoe Barnes, already suspicious 
that her boyfriend has murdered a U.S. 
congressman, have scen that he's capable 
of pretty much anything? 

MARA: She would never have entertained 
getting into a personal relationship 
knowing it was going to get so danger- 
ous or that he was 100 percent capable of 
murder. Even though I obviously knew 
what was going to happen this season, 
I was able to watch in a pretty objective 
way. Because the show is so well-made, 
it's easy to forget about the scenes I'm in 
and not in and just sort of watch it like а 
regular person would. Thar's a real tes- 
tament, because usually I have to watch 
something I'm in a couple of times before 
I can start to appreciate it for what it is. 
But with House of Cards, it was easy to get 
caught up in it. 


Q13 
PLAYBOY. Please annihilate the silly ru- 
mor that they used a body double for 
your naked backside in that memorable 
scene in the first season. 

MARA: Who would say that? I met Da- 
vid Fincher when my sister did The So- 
cial Network, so 1 knew him long before 
І ever read for him. When he said, “I 
really want you to play this role." he told 
me about the series and what was going 
to happen with the character. 1 fell in 
love with her because she's so ambitious 
and driven. She's attracted to power. ОҒ 
course, having seen his films and knowing 
what I knew about House of Cards, 1 ex- 
pected there might be a lot of nudity and 
edgy stufT required. But I trust David. 


Q14 
PLAYBOY: Were you ultimately surprised 
at the amount of nudity and sex scenes? 
MARA: I'd read all the scripts way in ad- 
vance, so nothing shocked me. It just 
happened, and it wasn't uncomfortable. 
From day two of working with Kevin, 
I found him just as playful as I am. He 
would definitely up my game. I tried 
to get him to laugh by wearing pasties 
with his face on them. Of course, because 
Kevin wants to wîn whatever the game is 
and because he always wins, he did not 
laugh. He waited until the director said 
“Cut” and then he laughed. Kevin has an 
amazing sense of humor, but he's also a 
great professional and he's really fuck- 
ing good at it. 


015 
PLAYBOY: How does your family react to 
seeing you in nude and edgy movie and 
TV scenes? 

MARA: They have a sense of humor about 
it that they didn't used to have. They were 
very upset when I was 19 and had a scene 
in Nip/Tuck that showed only my back 
but suggested nudity. I tried to explain 
that it's acting and part of the craft, and 
if it's important to the story and tastefully 
done, I will choose to do certain things. 
By the time House of Cards came along, 
my family had dealt with plenty of other 
difficult things to watch with my career 
and my sister's career. 


Q16 
PLAYBOY: You recently landed the role of 
Sue Storm in the Fantastic Four reboot. 
You've finished shooting a thriller called 
Captive, and you've just been in Tran- 
scendence, the directing debut of Wally 
Pfister, the cinematographer for Christo- 
pher Nolan's Batman movies and Incep- 
lion. Any tales to tell? 

MARA: Wally is so talented and such an 
enthusiastic person. I loved working with 
him on Transcendence, playing someone 
who is anti-technology. 1 really hope he 
directs more movies. Caplive is interesting 
too. I made it with David Oyelowo, who 
is a friend. It’s based on the real story 
of a man in Atlanta who broke out of a 
courthouse jail, shot a number of people 
and took a single mother who was a meth 
addict hostage in her own apartment. 
It was intense and I probably wouldn't 
have made it with anyone but David. So 
it's been busy. I still have plenty of time 
for binge watching, though, given cer- 
tain conditions. 


017 
тлувоу: Which are? 

MARA: I try to work out six days a week, 
mostly doing the Bar Method, ballet- 
inspired classes mixed with Pilates. I have 
to run for an hour every day. If I put that 
time in, then I feel I can do whatever I 
want for the rest of the day, even if it's just 
watching movies or catching up on a TV 
show. I barely watch live TV now. 


18 

PLAYBOY: Are you «гейш working ош? 
MARA: No. It's not about being too thin or 
too fat or anything. It's not about weight. 
It's confidence. I'm a vegan, but that 
doesn't mean I get up and leave if I'm 
out to dinner with someone who orders a 
steak. My friends don't care about me not 
eating meat. Their biggest surprise is that 
1 won't eat cheese anymore, and I don't 
blame them because cheese was definitely 
the hardest thing to give up. 


19 

PLAYBOY: What's хо biggest professional 
frustration? 

MARA: I'm grateful for the opportunities 
I've won already, but there аге certain as- 
pects of me that I haven't played yet. I'd 
love to do a love story and I haven't. Do- 
ing a movie or TV show that centers on 
two people can be the most challenging 
for an actor. That's something I would 
love to do. 


20 
PLAYBOY: Sue Storm in Fantastic Four pos- 
sesses the power of invisibility. You're 
photographed whenever you're in pub- 
lic, but if you could be invisible for 24 
hours, what kinds of mischief would you 
get up to? 
MARA: I feel I have that power already. I 
can go almost anywhere and not be rec- 
ognized. I already do what I want to do 
and just live my life. 


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120 


FROM RUSSIA 


(continued from page 56) 
we all run of getting hit. The websites we 
visit every day—Chase, Visa, Amazon, 
eBay—can be infected with malware that 
will establish dominion over our password- 
“protected” data. Those with the know- 
how can pilfer a single mom's life savings, 
gut a local gym owner's capital, hit small 
businesses or go after bigger fish such as 
Sony or Home Depot. 

One hit can have massive ramifications. 
As Target customers learned this past 
Christmas, even if your own machine is as 
secure as possible, your information can be 
compromised anyway. Between November 
and December last year, thieves hacked into 
‘Target's system and stole up to 40 million 
credit and debit card numbers, as well as 
addresses and phone numbers of about 
70 million customers. The hackers probably 
gotin through Fazio Mechanical Services, a 
small business in Pittsburgh that provided 
refrigeration to the stores. According to 
analysts, the hackers appear to have used 
malware to infect Fazios computers and 
then moved into Target stores’ point-of-sale 
systems—the computers where customers 


nt 


physically swipe their cards—and transmit- 
ted that information back to the mother 
ship. ‘Typically criminals will wait months 
to use their loot, long after the media fire- 
storm has died down and customers have 
dropped their guard and stopped moni- 
toring their accounts. Hackers can also sell 
the data on the forums I saw with Kislitsin. 
Credit card numbers can be bought for 
about a dollar, which adds up when you sell 
data by the thousands or millions. 
According to Symantec, an American 
security-research firm, cybercrime cost 
8113 billion globally іп 2013. The United 
States was hit hardest, losing $38 billion. 
Every day more than I million people 
are victims of cybercrime—or 12 victims 
per second, nearly three times the global 
birthrate. That includes people whose 
private data you'd expect to be protected 
to the gills. Last spring Michelle Obama, 
Joe Biden, Jay Z, Hillary Clinton, Ashton 
Kutcher, even then FBI director Mueller 
(among many other high-profile victims) 
saw their credit card information, Social 
Security numbers and previous addresses 
posted online in one massive dump 
for the entire world to see. The website 
was registered to a .su (short for Soviet 


“Come on, baby, haven't you heard? We're in danger of 
becoming extinct!" 


Union) domain, leading experts to point. 
to Russian handiwork. 

This was no surprise: Russia is ground 
zero for cybercrime. Of the FBI's 10 most- 
wanted cybercriminals, four are Slavs, one is 
a Swede and two are Pakistani. China has its 
fair share of cybercriminals too. The more 
we try to fortify our security systems, the 
quicker these hackers evolve to outwit us. 

Since I'm new to cybercrime, Kislitsin 
is setting me up to pull off a heist as саз- 
ily as possible. We're looking for prewritten 
malware (the most skilled cybercriminals 
design their own, Kislitsin explains). With- 
in 10 minutes we've found three kinds of 
Trojans for sale: SmokeBot, Andromeda 
and Citadel. Of the three, Kislitsin makes 
the strongest case for Citadel—at 5350, it’s 
inexpensive and perfect for pilfering from 
U.S. bank websites. (A quick tally yields that 
it would cost a newbie about $3,300 to buy 
the necessary components to launch a су- 
berheist. “It is a business, so you have to put 
up some money to start,” Kislitsin explains.) 

“In Russia we have a saying: cheap and 
reliable,” Kislitsin says with a grin. He 
dicks over to his anonymous chat service 
and fires off a buying inquiry. 

‘Then we wait. 


In February 2013, three days after re- 
porting $1.1 million in fraudulent wire 
transactions, Daniel Grenshaw—the now 
57-year-old founder and owner of Effi- 
cient Services Escrow Group in Hunting- 
ton Beach, California—got served. Police 
officers stormed Efficient Services” office, 
brandishing badges. They confiscated 
Crenshaw's computers, kicked out his em- 
ployees and changed the locks on the of- 
fice doors. In December 2012 Crenshaw 
had worked with his bank to recover a 
mysterious wire that had sent $432,215 to 
а bank in Moscow; then, over one week in 
late January 2013, two more wires totaling 
$1.1 million were sent to a northern region 
of China near the Russian border. Efficient 
reported the fraud in accordance with state 
regulations. The California Department of 
Corporations gave the company three days 
to come up with the money. It couldn't. 
The money was gone, so the police came 
in. (When an escrow company reports a 
fraudulent wire transfer in California, the 
law gives it three days to recover the funds, 
whereupon the state is mandated to take 
possession of the company.) 

‘The firm that Crenshaw and his older 
brother, Rob, 39, had started in 2009 had 
been on its way to becoming one of the big- 
gest escrow outfits in southern California. 
‘They'd just opened a second office and were 
hiring new employees. Suddenly every- 
thing was gone—the Crenshaws went from 
getting a cushy salary to no paycheck. They 
hid off their staff, and they owed money to 
their clients that they couldn't return. 

‘The reputational damage from a cyber- 
attack alone is jarring—money has myste- 
riously disappeared from a company. The 
Crenshaws' competitors were beginning to 
whisper, saying they'd always known the 
brothers were shady. Although criminal 
charges were never filed, that didn't make 


it better. “We were getting threats from 
our clients, from the Department of Cor- 
porations, from the bank,” Daniel recalls. 
“You don't know how to defend yourself. 
You didn't do anything wrong. Overnight 
you've lost a company that you spent five 
years building." He says he is being forced 
to walk away from the real estate industry. 
“Even when all the dust settles, it still doesn't 
go away. Now they want to blackball us from 
the industry.” His brother's membership 
in the California Escrow Association has al- 
ready been revoked. Daniel's hearing with 
the association is pending. “Until the public 
knows that we had no doing in this matter, 
our names will not be cleared,” he says. 

Online bank theft often targets Ameri- 
can small businesses. They are more lucra- 
tive than individual accounts because they 
tend to have fatter balances, and they are 
checked less often, Small businesses also 
have laxer online security than big firms 
do. (That's why hackers could get into Tar- 
get through Fazio Mechanical Services in 
Pittsburgh.) And although the U.S. govern- 
ment insures personal accounts, small busi- 
nesses with commercial accounts have no 
government guarantees to recover stolen 
funds—as the Crenshaws learned, if a busi- 
ness gets hit, the cost is its to bear. 

Losses from cybercrime can be stagger- 
ing. The U.S. Internet Crime Complaint 
Center (IC3), a government initiative for 
victims of cybercrime, received 289,874 
complaints in 2012, an 8.3 percent increase 
from 2011. And that includes only individ- 
uals who reported some kind of loss. Many 
people who get hacked never go public. 
They are frequently targeted while looking 
at porn: A common scam involves infect- 
ing a victim's computer with malware that 
installs another program, called Ransom- 
ware, which locks the computer and flashes 
a warning that the owner has violated U.S. 
federal law. The scam goes further, declar- 
ing that the user's IP address was used to 
visit child-pornography sites. It then in- 
structs victims to pay a fine to the U.S. De- 
partment of Justice through prepaid mon- 
ey card services in order to regain control 
of their machine. Most people pay. 

“The first trap that many infected users 
fall into is thinking that this is personal in 
some way,” says Brian Krebs, a journal- 
ist specializing in cybercrime investiga- 
tions who blogs at KrebsOnSecurity.com. 
"You're not some unique snowflake that 
the bad guys want to attack. Unless you're 
some big juicy target, most of these attacks 
are opportunistic. Your machine can be 
monetized a hundred ways from Sunday.” 

It took Mark Patterson more than three 
years to recover from the hit. Over a six- 
day period in 2009, a ZeuS Trojan snared 
$588,000 from his Maine-based company, 
Patco Construction, by infecting the busi- 
ness's work computers. The hackers tapped 
into both the company's account and its line 
of credit. "We're going to get our money 
back, right?" Patterson said when he called 
the bank. But the bank rep was stumped: 
“We don't even know what's going on." 
Within 24 hours the bank managed to halt. 
about $200,000 of the money, recover- 
ing funds that had been moved to the first 


money-mule account. But the rest was gone. 

Patterson sued the bank—and lost. АП 
the while, the bank continued to charge 
Patterson interest, which would total about. 
another $100,000 over the course of his le- 
gal ordeal. In 2012 an appeals court over- 
turned the decision; the bank settled, but 
the damage had been done. By then Pat- 
terson had spent hundreds of thousands in 
legal fees—none of which was reimbursed. 
He had been so focused on the case that 
new business opportunities had slipped 
away. “1 guess you can feel good about win- 
ning, but not really winning.” Patterson 
says. “There are still people losing hun- 
dreds of thousands of dollars, continually." 

Much of that money is winding up in 
Russia, the birthplace of cybercrime. With 
the collapse of the USSR, well-educated 
Russian programmers, lacking job оррог- 
tunities, began to look for ways to monetize 
the internet. They excelled at spamming 
and developing networks of infected com- 
puters under the control of one command 
center, which would drive internet traffic 
to paid porn sites. That in turn spawned 
the fake credit card industry. Soon Rus- 
sian hackers had developed all the mov- 
ing parts they needed to graduate to bank 
heists. Since the early 2000s Russians have 
produced the most effective banking Tro- 
jans, specifically targeting America and 
Western Europe. Today Russia is home to 
the best hackers and the most banking hits. 

Russia's refusal to cooperate with the 
U.S. government to arrest its own citizens 
has created a cybercrime safe haven. Usu- 
ally only hackers who attack Russian banks 
serve time. The only way to stop the oth- 
ers is to arrest them if they step on Euro- 
pean or American soil. Last July the FBI 
indicted four Russians and a Ukrainian for 
stealing more than 160 million credit card 
numbers from major U.S. companies, in- 
cluding Visa, Discover, NASDAQ, 7-Eleven 
and JetBlue. They stole $300 million in 
total —one of the largest cyberheists in his- 
tory. Two of the culprits were arrested іп 
the Netherlands and one of them was ex- 
tradited to the U.S., but three of the mas- 
terminds are still at large. 

Since the government isn't cracking 
down on them, Russians can do pretty 
much anything with the money they make. 
And when money comes easy, it's no sur- 
prise that those with gaudy streaks flaunt 
it. Group-IB showed me a profile on 
vKonnect, the Russian version of Facebook, 
ofa 19-year-old kid who had stolen millions 
from U.S. point-of-sale registers—the same 
kind of heist that hit Target. His photos 
feature him wearing thick bedazzled chains 
and making gang signs with his friends. 

Invincibility on Russian soil led one 
hacker, VorVZakone, to make a video of 
his life as a well-to-do cybercriminal and 
upload it to YouTube. “I decided to meet 
you, let's say remotely,” the brick of a man 
in a black trench coat and wraparound 
shades boasts to the camera. “Now you will 
see how I live.” He calls himself Seroga 
and takes viewers on a tour of his gated 
community. Seroga and Oleg, a younger 
guy with an aquiline nose and highlighted 
blond hair pulled back with a headband, 


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121 


PLAYBOY 


act like guests on a bootleg episode of MTV 
Cribs. After a drive through their hood, 
the two jump out and examine Seroga's 
second car, a white Hyundai Solaris, as 
birds chirp placidly in the background. 
The camera follows him to his house and 
into a redbrick foyer, where he shows off a 
walkie-talkie by calling his cleaning lady on 
the other end. The residence itselfis a typi- 
cal nouveau riche affair. “This is my setup," 
Seroga says, pointing to an open laptop 
and a desktop facing two white leather 
couches along the walls. “You don't need 
anything more," Oleg chimes in. At the 
end of the video, Seroga sits down alone in 
his kitchen to a plate of caviar sandwiches 
his housekeeper has prepared. 

Тһе video caused a stir on underground 
forums. Hackers mocked Seroga, defaming 
him as a phony, a police plant or just an id- 
iot who wasn't taking his security seriously. 
In September 2012, VorVZakone posted a 
battle summons called Project Blitzkrieg, 
trying to recruit other hackers to coordi- 
nate mass attacks on 30 U.S. banks before 
they upped security measures, claiming 
he had been developing the Trojan since 
2008 and had already successfully stolen 
$5 million. The announcement prompted 
security companies to issue warnings of an 


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impending attack. McAfee Labs found that 
VorVZakone's touted pilot Trojan had al- 
ready infected more than 80 victims across 
the United States. He was never caught. 


While the FBI has made headway in bust- 
ing cybercrime rings in recent years, U.S. 
banks and businesses are deeply resistant to 
admitting they've been hit for fear of dam- 
aging their reputations. They increasingly 
rely on private companies such as Group- 
1B that work under nondisclosure agree- 
ments to track down their stolen funds. 

Founded in 2003 by several college kids 
at Russia's equivalent of MIT, Group-IB is 
housed in a gated business compound on 
the northeast edge of central Moscow. In- 
side the squat, grimly utilitarian building 
is a labyrinth of corridors divided by key- 
coded doors. In this hushed atmosphere, 
young employees peer fixedly at their 
double flatscreen monitors, sipping from 
steaming mugs. They work on behalf of 
various banks and internet empires, includ- 
ing Microsoft, tracking down cybercrimi- 
nals and trying to hack into the companies’ 
servers to test their security systems. 

I'm sitting behind Dmitry Volkov's 
desk. Tall and taciturn with wavy brown 


[ x dust TENES 24 Anp XE Y 
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hair, the 29-year-old head of Group- 
IB's cybercrime-investigation team flicks 
through the files of criminals it has tracked. 
down. We pause on Ivan. On his vKonnect 
profile, Ivan (Volkov asked that I withhold 
Ivan's real name), who lists his age as 24, 
has the kind of blond bowl cut, button nose 
and wide-set blue eyes found on Soviet-era 
propaganda posters beseeching comrades 
to fell hay for the motherland. He's mar- 
ried to a buxom, blue-eyed blonde with a 
round face and pouty lips. She's 23. They 
have a young son. 

A few years ago, Volkov says, Ivan began 
to visit Russian-language hacking forums. 
He started to write injects—software pro- 
grams that transfer money from a specific 
bank—which he advertised and sold in 
the online netherworld for between $200 
and $500. Soon hackers began posting en- 
dorsements: Ivan delivered what he prom- 
ised. Then, around 2011, Ivan decided 
to perpetrate his own heist. He bought 
prewritten malware called SpyEye to hit 
Bank of America, He and a partner used 
Ivan's own injects and contracted some- 
one to hack a server to spread the Trojan. 
They then transferred the cash and hired 
а money-mule service to pull it out of the 
accounts. In 2012 they hit Italian and 


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German banks. Last year Ivan hit а Rus- 
sian bank and grabbed at least $2 million. 
“If he wants to make a million, he needs 
to steal two,” Volkov explains, “because he 
gives 50 percent of the money to mules.” 

lvan lives in a provincial city hours 
outside Moscow. Russia's provinces are 
notoriously poor, their capitals filled with 
concrete-slab apartment blocks. Jobs are 
scarce, and drug and alcohol abuse runs 
rampant. Volkov hails from a similarly 
neglected far-flung city in Petropavlovsk- 
Kamchatsky, an underpopulated peninsula 
in Russia's far east where tundra winds 
beat down on the city. When Volkov was 
a kid, his parents enrolled him in pro- 
gramming classes where he and his friends 
would send one another computer viruses 
as practical jokes. He ended up at the best 
technical university in Moscow, where pro- 
grammers make three times as much as 
those in the provinces. 

For those who remain behind, it's not 
hard to understand the temptation to go 
rogue. The guys at Group-IB could easily 
have been on the other side of the coin. 
There's a universal appeal to hacking, 
finding errors in codes and gaps in security 
and proving your worth. 

Group-IB knows Ivan is working on a 
new project, trying to write his own mal- 
ware, but whom he intends to target, they 
can't tell. For now, Volkov tells me, Ivan 
is still at large. Volkov isn't sure Ivan will 
actually serve time if he's caught. There 
are many ways to avoid sentencing in Rus- 
sia's corrupt legal system—even if you steal 
from Russians. For crimes that target the 
U.S., the arrest rate is nonexistent. U.S. 
and Russian authorities rarely work to- 
gether on cybersecurity cases, and officials 
from Russia's Federal Security Service, the 
Russian FBI, tend to look the other way 
when the victims are abroad. Moscow's 
decision to grant Edward Snowden tem- 
porary asylum when he is wanted by the 
U.S. for leaking National Security Agency 
surveillance programs is unlikely to make 
cooperation smoother. 

Kislitsin published his first article in 
Hacker at the age of 15. It was about how to 
get multiple uses off a single internet credit 
scratch card, which back then was used to 
top up credit and log in to the internet. (Не 
admits he used it a few times before notify- 
ing the company of the security glitch. “It 
was just to make sure it worked," he tells 
me coyly.) “There are lots of poor people in 
Russia, and some of these poor people still 
have access to a good education. If a smart. 
student sees that he can write software and 
each copy would cost $50,000, wouldn't he 
do this?" Kislitsin says. 

“This well-educated guy might grow up 
in an intelligent family in which his par- 
ents taught him it is bad to steal money or 
things. Psychologically, he's not ready for 
stealing money," Kislitsin continues, "but 
on the other hand, he can see that many 
people in Russia steal from their own coun- 
try, from the government budget, and feel 
great. So he might think, Okay, what if I 
write this piece of malware? I'm not even 
stealing anything. I'm just a software devel- 
oper, and psychologically it's okay." That's 


exactly how Ivan started. But the more 
money they make, the more sophisticated 
the heists get. 

Unlike his colleague, Volkov has no sym- 
pathy for the hackers he's employed to 
catch. He refers to them with unmasked dis- 
dain as the "golden youth." "These people 
are for some reason convinced they are not 
stealing from actual people but from bad 
people or from the government, like Robin 
Hood," Volkov says, shaking his head. “I've 
never seen anyone on comments say, This 
is a small business. Let's not steal from it.’ If 
there's money, they'll take it.” 


On a Thursday morning in March 2010, 
Ken Hollomon, 49, an IT consultant in Los 
Angeles, got the call. His longtime friend 
Michelle Marsico was frantic—the bank ac- 
count of her recently founded escrow com- 
pany was missing $450,000. Over three 
days, 26 wire transfers had gone out across 
the U.S. Hollomon rushed to the office. 
“It was like the beginning of a nightmare, 
when you know it's going to be a night- 
mare and you're trying to stop it,” he says. 

Тһе bank was unresponsive, telling Mar- 
sico it could no longer communicate with her 
without a lawyer present. The police depart- 
ment gave her a receipt with a case number. 
"I'm so sorry,” was all the officer said. Even- 
tually, the Secret Service called Marsico. Af- 
ter discussing the situation, she asked for her 
case number so she could follow up. 

“This happens so much we would run 
out of numbers, so there's no case num- 
ber,” the agent told her. 

Marsico was incredulous. She had never 
expected anything like this to happen to 
her; she had barely heard of cases like this. 
Someone had been through her accounts 
and taken everything—she didn’t have the 
money to keep running the business. It 


took all her strength just to get out of bed 
every day. “It feels like you've been raped; 
you don't want to broadcast how that 
feels. You feel like you've done something 
wrong, like you're a bad person, like you 
weren't responsible enough. All this stuff 
goes through your head, like I shouldn't 
own my own business if 1 can't handle 
this. I totally ripped myself a new one,” 
she says. “My whole livelihood was taken 
away, and 1 had nobody to help me. All the 
government agencies were just.... 1 felt like 
nobody cared. Here I am, a taxpayer, an 
American citizen, working my butt off to 
make it, and there was nobody on my side. 
1 was alone, and that was the most alone 
I've felt in my life." 

Marsico and Hollomon decided to take 
matters into their own hands. From the 
names on the fraudulent wire statements 
the bank provided, they began to track 
down the mules, plugging the names into 
Facebook and LinkedIn. Most of the peo- 
ple they found were Americans who'd re- 
sponded to employment ads online. Most 
didn't realize they were acting as money 
mules in a global mafia heist; they thought 
they had gotten a good deal doing hon- 
est work for a company overseas. “A lot 
of them were decent people,” Hollomon 
says. "Some of them got out of college and 
didn't have any money. Some of them had 
just lost their jobs. They were Americans 
hurting for money.” 

Оп their own, Hollomon and Marsico 
were able to track down $78,000 of the 
money. Then things got weirder. When 
Marsico was talking to her bank's IT ex- 
pert, he asked her whether she had ever 
tried to access her bank account remotely. 
"From home?" she asked. “No, from Glen- 
dale," the rep said. Hollomon knew Mar- 
sico would never have logged on from 
Glendale, California—she didn't even log 


“You know I love you. Look, I even have a guy guarding 
your clothes!" 


123 


PLAYBOY 


on from her house. So Hollomon started 
huntingin online forums and soon learned 
that Glendale was а well-known hacker ha- 
ven, right in their own backyard. He says 
he walked into a Glendale bar and ran into 
a kid who told him, “Yeah, I work for these 
people." Oh my God, Hollomon thought, I 
have to get out of here real quick. 

“I just wanted to see if the addresses of 
the people we'd found were true, and they 
were,” he explains. "These hackers aren't 
scary. They aren't thugs. They're just kids.” 
In 2012 Marsico settled with her bank. It 
was a big payout that brought her company 
back from the abyss. Her settlement was a 
precedent for the industry: Since the wire 
transfers were unusual—to foreign coun- 
tries Marsico had never sent money to be- 
fore, in sums she didn't normally transfer— 
the bank took responsibility for allowing the 
funds to go through without sending up a 
red flag, But Marsico had lost two years of 
her life just fighting to survive. Since then, 
Hollomon has been contacted by other small 
businesses with the same problem. "They re 
trying to protect themselves, but they're try- 
ing to conduct business with these tiny IT 
budgets. It's really difficult," he says. 

One of the most daring ATM heists 
happened last February. Two coordinated 
strikes involving people in 27 countries 
netted $45 million from thousands of 
ATMs around the world. Hackers targeted 
two Middle Eastern banks, raising the with- 
drawal limits and increasing the balances 
on prepaid MasterCard debit cards issued 
by Bank of Muscat of Oman and National 
Bank of Ras Al Khaimah PSC of the United 
Arab Emirates. Money mules then strolled 
through cities across the world, simultane- 
ously draining ATMs. 

In New York City alone, the thieves hit. 
2,904 ATMs over 10 hours using a single 
Bank of Muscat account number. Saunter- 
ing around Manhattan, hitting ATMs and. 
stuffing the money into backpacks, they 
withdrew $2.4 million. In May рговеси- 
tors indicted eight men of Dominican ori- 
gin living in Yonkers, New York. But they 
were just the cogs of the operation; their 
job was to withdraw stolen funds and trans- 
fer them to the mastermind's account for a 


commission. (This was the riskiest part of 
the heist because it happened on U.S. soil 
and ATMs are under camera surveillance.) 
While money mules are frequently caught, 
the real kingpins remain free. The brains 
behind the Yonkers crew operation remain 
unknown, but according to prosecutors, 
one of the arrested men sent an e-mail to 
“support@wmirk.ru,” an address "associ- 
ated with an organization based in St. Pe- 
tersburg, Russia that specializes in launder- 
ing the proceeds of criminal activity." 

"The Yonkers crew seemed as if they 
couldn't believe their own luck. After the 
heist, the perpetrators took a selfie: Sit- 
ting in a car, two men in their early 20s 
in black jackets pull the universal boo-yah 
face, dimpling their still-baby-fat cheeks 
while pointing to four thick stacks of 
cash between them. They purchased Ro- 
lex Oyster Perpetual Datejust watches, a 
Mercedes SUV and a Porsche Panamera. 
They stacked cash on top of Coors Light 
cans and took pictures—remorse seemed 
lacking. At one point they deposited nearly 
$150,000, in the form of 7,491 $20 bills, at 
a bank branch in Miami. One of the two in 
the selfie had listed Domino's as his place 
of employment on his passport application. 
Then they got busted—surveillance foot- 
age from the heist shows one of the mules 
wearing a Domino's hat. 


A week after our attempts to buy the 
Trojan in the Japanese restaurant, Kislitsin 
e-mails me that he has heard back from two 
of the three sellers. The guy offering the 
Citadel Trojan upped his price for techni- 
cal reasons—now, for about a grand, he's 
selling a whole kit that includes multiple 
components for a cyberheist that would 
allow users to manage and control their 
own botnet. Kislitsin bargains the price 
down 200 bucks and they have a deal. The 
seller gives Kislitsin his number for Web- 
Money, a service that doesn't require bank 
accounts—you can deposit funds by using 
money orders, wire transfers or exchange 
offices and prepaid cards. “I was supposed 
to pay him and never did,” Kislitsin writes 
me. We could have made a fortune. 


УАН, SURE! 


Even while online banking struggles to 
keep up, new banking methods—from 
smartphones to tablet apps—are creating 
new battlegrounds for the same war. Syman- 
tec estimates half of smartphone users sleep 
with their phones within arm's reach. Half of 
them also use no security precautions on their 
phone—no passwords, no security software, 
no backup files. Forty percent of smartphone 
and tablet users have experienced mobile 
cybercrime in the past year, and nearly 60 
percent of users don’t even know security for 
smartphones and tablets exists. 

Yet even the most secure are vulnerable. 
In March 2012 NASA disclosed it had been 
hacked 13 times. In one go, hackers had 
stolen 150 user credentials that could be 
used to gain unauthorized access to NASA 
systems. That same month the Depart- 
ment of Homeland Security warned of a 
cyber-intrusion campaign on American gas 
pipelines that had been in the works since 
2011. In July 2012 the NSA director said 
there had been a 17-fold increase in cyber 
incidents at U.S. infrastructure companies 
in the previous three years. In January of 
last year, The New York Times, The Wall Street 
Journal, the Washington Post and Bloomberg 
News revealed they had been the victims of 
persistent cyberattacks, possibly originat- 
ing in China. The following month the De- 
partment of Energy was hit; 14 computer 
servers and 20 workstations were pen- 
etrated, affecting hundreds of employees 
and compromising their personal informa- 
tion. In May 2013 the U.S. government re- 
vealed that the country's electrical grid is 
under near constant attack from multiple 
unknown entities 

As I look over copies ofthe logs Kislitsin 
sent of our attempts to buy malware and 
lvan's cyberforum postings that Volkov 
shared with me in Moscow, I realize the 
user name is the same on all of them. Ivan 
is not just somewhere out there in Russia's 
vast hinterlands, working on a new plan: 
He's selling all the components for others 
to do it too. One of them could be me. One 
of them could be your Domino's delivery 
guy. And you'll never see us coming. 


hisis Miss June 

2010 Katie 

Vernola as you 

may remember 

her: beautiful, 

well-groomed, 
camera-ready. But in 
her other life as an 
off-road UTV (utility 
task vehicle) racer she's 
often covered in dirt. 
“Tt usually takes me 
two showers to get all 
cleaned up from the 
muddy track," she says. 
Part of the Lucas Oil 
Off Road Racing Series, 
she zooms around at 
75 mph in the slop, 
catching about 12 feet 
of air off the jumps, 
and rubs against other 
racers around a winding 
course. "I modeled my 
ass off to save enough 
money to buy my 
Polaris RZR XP 900,” 
she says. “Once 1 had 
the opportunity to drive 
one of these bad boys it 
sparked a fire in me to 
do whatever I could to 
race. The feeling I get 
in it is like an O.” 


2 @MissAshley 
1 Hobbs, our 
[ Miss December 


2010, shows off 
the goods. We 


x are, of course, 


speaking of her 
enchanting eyes. 


1 Girl Tal 


The very 
altruistic Miss Miss Jahary 
October 2011 2010 Jaime Faith 
Amanda Cerny Edmondson is 
edi engaged to her 


longtime boyfriend, 
Tampa Bay Rays 
third baseman Evan 
Longoria. The couple 


chairwoman of 
Play Foundation. 


Founded by has a one-year- 
electric-music old daughter and is 
planning a January 
nr 2016 wedding. 
company Darty K Philadelphia 
Dutch, the native Val Keil, Miss 


August 2013, recently 
returned home and 
traded her Bunny 
ears for wings. She 
was a special guest 
at the local buffalo- 
chicken-wing-eating 
competition. 


charity uses 
music to help 
youths grow 
creatively. 


Commerce Casino 
held a Playboy 
Poker Tournament, 
hosted by Playmates 
Marketa Janska 
and Irina Уогопіпа, 
during the L.A 
Poker Classic. The 
big winner was a 
shark by the name of 
Adam Weinraub. 


4 


Miss December 2001 
Shanna Moakler will 
be featured on the new 
season of VH T's Hollywood 
Exes. Shanna has had her 
share of high-profile 
relationships: She was 
once engaged to boxer 
Oscar De La Hoya 
and married to Blink- 
182 drummer Travis 
Barker. “Гуе been 
single for a while," she 
says. "It's working out. I 
think I'm the one.” 


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128 


WHICH PLAYMATE DEMANDS AN ENCORE? 


ROOT, ROOT, ROOT FOR THE HOME TEAM: A RED SOX ORAL HISTORY. 


NEXT MONTH 


KEVIN HART IS THE NEW KINGPIN OF COMEDY. 


AND THE WINNER IS.. TWELVE FINE LADIES VIED FOR YOUR 
HEARTS—AND VOTES-WITH THE HOPE OF BECOMING OUR 2014 
PLAYMATE OF THE YEAR. NEXT MONTH WE REVEAL WHO WON 
YOU (AND HEF) OVER. TRUST US, SHE WON'T DISAPPOINT. 


THE CLASH—IRAN'S AYATOLLAH HAS EFFECTIVELY DECLARED 
WAR ON WESTERN MUSIC, CALLING IT "NOT COMPATIBLE" 
WITH ISLAMIC VALUES. BUT DESPITE THREATS OF ARREST 
AND LASHING, A SYNDICATE OF PUNK ROCK MUSICIANS PLAYS 
ON. WE TAKE YOU TO THE FRONT ROW WITH A PHOTO ESSAY 
SO CONTROVERSIAL THE PHOTOGRAPHER CAN'T BE NAMED. 


TAKE TWO—JONAH HILL HAS TRANSFORMED INTO AN ACTOR 
WORTHY OF LEADING-MAN STATUS. IN A PLAYBOY INTERVIEW 
WITH DAVID HOCHMAN, THE TWO-TIME OSCAR NOMINEE 
CHATS ABOUT THIS SUMMER'S 27 JUMP STREET SEQUEL, 
JOINING FORCES AGAIN WITH LEONARDO DICAPRIO AND 
WHAT HE STOLE FROM THE WOLF OF WALL STREET SET. (HINT: 
IT'S A PROSTHETIC.) 


MOD MEN-IT'S TIME TO UPDATE YOUR DIGS ACCORDING TO 
THE NEW RULES OF MASCULINE STYLE. TO HELP, WE TURNED 
TO THE NATION'S TOP ARCHITECTURE FIRMS, INCLUDING XTEN 
AND BATES MASI, FOR EXAMPLES OF THE ULTIMATE MODERN 
BACHELOR PAD. THE FIRST RULE? DITCH THE BLACK LEATHER. 


LET HIM EXPLAIN—STAND-UP COMIC KEVIN HART TAKES A 
BREATHER FROM BREAKING BOX OFFICE RECORDS FOR A HILAR- 
IOUS 200 WITH ERIC SPITZNAGEL, IN WHICH HART DISCUSSES 
LIFE AS A HAPPILY DIVORCED BACHELOR, IMITATING JAY 2 AND 
WHAT IT'S LIKE BEING A FIVE-FOOT-FOUR SEX SYMBOL. 


CITY OF CHAMPIONS—HOW DID THE BOSTON RED SOX, BUR- 
DENED BY MORE THAN 80 YEARS OF LOSS, TURN AROUND TO 
WIN THREE CHAMPIONSHIPS IN LESS THAN A DECADE? KEVIN 
СООК LOOKS BACK ON THE GREATEST COMEBACK STORY ІМ 
SPORTS HISTORY. PETE ROSE, MIKE VACCARO, CONAN O'BRIEN, 
JONNY GOMES, DENIS LEARY AND OTHERS REGALE US WITH 
THEIR FAVORITE—AND MOST HEART-POUNDING—MEMORIES. 


DANCE, DANCE, REVOLUTION—SKRILLEX, EDM AND MUSIC FESTS 
SUCH AS LAS VEGAS'S ELECTRIC DAISY HAVE REINVENTED 
THE RAVE SCENE AS BROAD-DAYLIGHT BACCHANALIA. BUT IN 
ABANDONED WAREHOUSES ACROSS THE COUNTRY, AN UNDER- 
GROUND CIRCUIT OF ALL-NIGHT PARTIES FUELED BY DRUGS 
AND SEX SURVIVES. RACHEL R. WHITE JOINS A NEW GENERA- 
TION OF CLUB KIDS UNDER THE LASER LIGHTS. 


PLUS-THE SECOND INSTALLMENT OF DON WINSLOW'S 
ADRENALINE-PUMPING THREE-PART FICTION SERIAL EXTREME, 
THE TRANSCENDENT MISS JUNE AND MORE. 


Playboy (ISSN 003 
Civic Center Drive, Beverly Hils, California 9 
No. 40035534. Subscriptions: in the U.S. 
From ime to time we ma 


Towa 50037.04 
mailings, please send your current mailing label to: Playboy, PO. Box 


1478), May 2014, volume 61,number 4. Published monthly except for combined January/February and July/August isues by Playboy in national and regional editions, Hayboy, 9344 
Ù. Periodicals postage paid at Beverly Hills California and at additional mailing offices. С 

Postmaster: Sendall UAA to CFS (sce DMM 7 

scriber list available to companies that sell goods and services by mail 

50037-0489. For subscription-related qui 


da Post Canadian Publications Mail Sales Product Agreemey 
facilities, send address changes to Playboy, PO. Box 37489, Boon 
we believe would interes our readers. Ifyou would rather notreceive зис 
ions, сай 800-999-4438, or e-mail plycustserv@cdsfulfilment.con] 


2 5) nonpostaland mili 


PLAYBOY 


HARD PHILIPS 


$ 
É 
$ 
$ 
8 
5 
2 
8 
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COVER: BUN 


‘CONTRIBUTORS: JOHN BAIDESSARI, RAE BOXER, JEFF BURTON, 
JENNY CAPTAIN, PHILIP CASTLE, SARA CLINE, SIMON CRITCHLEY, 
ROBERT CRUMB, AKARI ENDO-GAUT, HANS FEURER, MARY САПКА 
ADRIAN GALT, RALPH GIBSON, А.А. GILL, HUGH HEFNER, DOOGIE 
HORNER, JIM KRANTZ, MARYAM MALAKPOUR, RYAN MCGINLEY, 
MARILYN MINTER, HAMILTON MORRIS, ELE MULIARCHYK, MARK 
MULRONEY, KELLY OXFORD, CAMILLE PAGLIA, RICHARD PHILIPS, 
RICHARD PRINCE, HENRIK FURIENNE, STEFAN RUIZ, CHRISTOPHER 
RYAN, ОМА SCARRY, HOWARD SCHATZ, WILL SELF JUERGE 
TELLER, DAVID VANDEWAL, JAMIESON WEBSTER 


SPECIAL THANKS; ADVANTAGE DESIGN, ZAREEN AHMAD, AMERICAN 
DIA, INC, AN ART SERVICE, AUTO METER, TAMARA FAITH BERGER, 
SANDRA BERNHARD, CASS BIRD, AARON BONDAROFF, CANUN 
BOWER, IAN BRADLEY, SALCHILEMI, CIRCLE RACING WHEEL, 

GIA COPPOLA, LISA ELIN CRAIGHEAD, JOHNNY CRAWFORD, LEANNA 
DECKER, ERNE ЕШОП, INC, ROE ETHRIDGE, SCOTT FLANDERS, 
MARK FLETCHER, TOM FLORES, RUPERT FREND, ROSE GARNETT, 
JACQUI GETTY, LAUREN GOLDBERG, HAMPTONS LOCATIONS, INC. 
JEANNETTE HAYES, SHEILA НЕТ, HRE MOTORCARS, INC, ALEX ISRAEL, 
DAVID ISRAEL JIMMY JELINEK, JEREMY KENIK, SANDY KIM, 

ADAM KIMMEL, JENNE LOMBARDO, ARI MARCOPOULOS, MALERIE 
MARDER, BENJAMIN MARRA, FIONA MAYNARD, CAROUNE 
MCCLOSKEY, JOHN MCDONALD, SAM MCPHEETERS, TOBIAS MEYER, 
STEVEN MILLHAUSER, RASSA MONTASER, JESSE MOYNIHAN, 

‘AIMEE MULUNS, JAMES OAKLEY, BOB ODENKIRK, WILL OLDHAM, 
CHRISTOPH PACHLER, MAX PAPIS, KRISTIN PATRICK, BRITTANY PEIFFER, 
PENN COLLISION, АША PENNER, WILLO PERRON, SIMON PROSSER, 
INES RAU, BENJAMIN REYER, MIKE КЕШУ, SUZIE НЕШУ, DAVID RINELLA, 
JORDAN ROBIN, JOHNNY RYAN, MARIA FYNN, RACHEL SAGAN, 
RICHARD SALA, PETER SAVILLE, MATTATHIAS SCHWARTZ, LANDIS 
SMITHERS, KAREN SNEIDER, DEAN SPADE, CAMILA JORQUIERA 
STAGNO, MAVISTAIANO, COURTNEY SUITAN, THE STANDARD EAST 
VILAGE, MATTHEW THURBER, TRIBORO DESIGN, T 
АША WAGNER, LAUREN WEINSTEIN, STEVEN WEISSMAN, CINTRA 
WILSON, JONATHAN WONG, KATIE WOOLRIDGE, AARON YOUNG 


RNER, MIKE TYSON, 


PLAYBOY was founded at a moment when 
social, cultural and economic change was 
transforming every aspect of American life. 
And from the start, the magazine stepped 
right into the fray as an advocate for radi- 
cal liberation from the lamely prevailing 
norms of squaredom and prudery. PLAYBOY 
encouraged men and women alike to think, 
speak, consume, produce and fuck in new 
and ever more exciting ways. It functioned 
as both record and instrument of a mas 
sive moral transformation, and in doing 
so, it became an indispensable part of 
our culture. 

Now, six decades on, PLAYBOY a-z offers 
a new take on the philosophies and out- 
looks that Hefner & Co. have been develop- 
ing since day one. PLAYBOY a-z was created 
by people both fresh and familiar to 
the magazine, and we hope our lexicon 
entries add a surprising voice to the 
PLAYBOY ethos. Here you'll find serious 
ideas butting up against frivolity, hedo- 
nism against intellect and men against 
women. What we ve engaged in here is 
frottage of the highest order, and what 
our alphabet speaks to is a classic PLAYBOY 
curiosity—the urge to look at the world in 
unaccustomed мау 


CREATIVE DIRECTOR 
NEVILLE WAKERELD 


EXECUTIVE EDITOR 
JESSE PEARSON 


MANAGING EDITOR 
LUCY SILBERMAN 


ART DIRECTORS. 
PIERRE CONSORTI & ZACHARY OHLMAN 


CREATIVE CONSULTANT 


MEL AGACE 


PHOTOGRAPHY DIRECTOR 
JUDITH PUCKETT-RNELLA 


PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR 
RORY WALSH-MILLER 


ASSOCIATE EDITOR 
ERIN GALPERN 


CONTRIBUTING EDITORS 
SARA CLINE & FIONA MURRAY 


JUNIOR DESIGNER 
ABBY MILLS 


ASSISTANT PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR 
REBEKAH LICHTER 


INTERNS 
EMMA CRIMM, TANNA KIMMERLING 
& COLEMAN NEEDLES 


A. ALPHA B. BUSH C.CENTERFOLD D. DESIRE E EVOLUTION F FREEDOM С. GIRL NEXT DOOR 


H. HEFNER PHILOSOPHY 


LIGNITION J. JOKES K.KINK L LOVE M.MONOGAMY N. NATURE O.ON-SET P.PIEASURE Q.QUICKIE R. REPRODUCTIVE WRONGS 
S.SUIT Т.ТП5 U.USA М. VIRTUAL W. WHAT SORT OF MAN READS PLAYBOY? Х. XEROX Y.YES/NO Z. ZIP 


Who's afraid of the big bad alpha female? 
Well, just about everyone, The dominant, 
free-roaming alpha female is a human 
invention. Among wolves in the wild, the 
alpha female isn't leader of the pack but 
merely the alpha male's main squeeze. Не 
always gets to gorge on the kill first and 
to lope off after any she-wolf he chooses. 

Before the emancipation of women that 
was triggered by the industrial revolu- 
tion, the only way a female could claw her 
way to alpha status was through political 
power borrowed from a father or husband. 
Cleopatra, Elizabeth I and Catherine the 
Great were tough, shrewd operators who 
played the royal hand they were dealt to 
the max. 

Over the past 50 years, the top echelons 
of business, government and education 
have been opened to women to an unprec- 
edented degree. But women remain rare 
as hen's teeth at the corporate-CEO level, 
and the U.S. still hasn't elected a woman 
president or even vice president. 

What's screwing it up? Sex, of course. 
What else is new? Old-guard feminists may 
squawk, but sex fiendishly complicates the 
alpha female's relationships at the office. 
and out and about in the mating game. 

Men don't have it easy. Their boring, sex- 
less professional dress has barely budged 
since the I9th century. They still have to 
suit up in a rigid, body-shrouding uniform 
with only a dangling phallic tie peeking 
out for fun or flirtation. But women's office 
dress these days can cock-tease up a storm— 
sensuous fabrics, curvy silhouette, bare 
legs and drop-dead designer shoes with 
dominatrix stiletto heels. What's a guy to 
do? The alpha female boss says “Shut up 
and fallin line.” But on the subliminal level 
where sexual desire percolates, her fash- 
ionista look beckons and winks, signaling 
that it’s animal time. 

How should an alpha female handle 
her off-site love life? Does she drop the 
cool command-and-control mask and 


lation by the woman 
with a whip? In short, does the rise of the 
workplace alpha female require the emas- 
culation of men? Surely, alpha females, 
with their competitive drive for A-list ser- 
vice, won't really be happy with a cowering 
legion of limp-rag lovers. 

‘A gnawing problem for the alpha female 
is her interactions with other women. In her 
duties as supervisor, she can come across 
as a bitch on wheels—whereas male man- 
agers are just called demanding. But too 
much friendly collaboration can make her 
authority leak away. 

The battle of the sexes has been a hot issue 
since the dawn of civilization. The Bible 
trumpets that God made man in his own 
image and that Eve was an afterthought, 
patched up from Adams rib. Then Eve 
goes alpha by forcing the forbidden fruit on 
weak-willed Adam. Result: our exile from 


Eden and God's law that wives must submit 
to their husbands. 

Jehovah's sexism was a tactic in the 
Hebrews' struggle against paganism, then 
overrun with alpha females. А remnant of 
those pushy ladies can be seen in Lilith in 
the Apocrypha, popular tales that never 
made it into the canonical Bible. Lilith 
was Adam's first wife, whom he divorced 
because she wanted ascendancy in the sex 
act. What we call the missionary position, 
with the man in charge and the woman 
pinned down, was the only way to go. 

Lilith was originally a wind demoness 
whom the Hebrews encountered during 
their captivity in Babylon, a great metro- 
polis portrayed by the Bible as a sewer of 
sin. It's true that prostitution was pretty 
open there. But Lilith was a pale shadow 
of Babylon's main alpha goddess, the fierce 
Ishtar, who ruled love and war. Another 
regional bruiser was the Mistress of the 
Beasts, a shapely maiden always depicted 
strangling two large animals with her. 
bare hands. 

Judeo-Christianity's fear and horror of 
the alpha female are vividly displayed in 
the Book of Revelation's nightmare appa- 
rition of the Whore of Babylon. Why hasn't. 
this gal gotten her own movie yet? She's 
pictured riding a seven-headed, horned 
beast (symbolizing the seven hills of deca- 
dent Rome) and holding a golden cup filled. 
with “the filthiness of her fornication.” That 
cup is her insatiable vagina, brimming 
with semen that she has extracted from 
men's balls like crushed grapes. 

Тһе alpha female waxes and wanes like 
the moon throughout cultural history. In 
the Victorian era, women were idealized as 
the sanctified mother and devoted house- 
wife. But movies soon discovered that the 
alpha female was great box office. After a 
spate of saccharine Victorian moppets in 
early silent film, Theda Bara, the man- 
destroying vamp, became a smash hit. The 
ultimate alpha female of film and fashion 
would be embodied in Marlene Dietrich, 
who was channeling the recreational sado- 
masochism and bisexual gender-bending 
of super-sophisticated Weimar Berlin. 

Alpha female stars marched boldly into 
careerism in 1930s and 1940s movies in 
which manic Bette Davis and obsessive- 
compulsive Joan Crawford had trouble 
keeping sexual chemistry alive with their 
male leads. But eroticism returned with a 
bang in the postwar sex bombs inaugurated 
by Marilyn Monroe. In the naked material- 
ism of "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," 
Monroe, wrapped in incandescent hot 
pink, did sashaying burlesque moves to 
advertise her alpha conquest of a herd of 
tuxedoed male clones. 

In the 19605, alpha females got more 
athletic and Amazonian, as typified by 
bikini-clad Ursula Andress in her sensa- 
tional emergence from the sea in Dr. No, 
a knife strapped to her waist and pink 
conch shells in her hands (a conflation of 


male and female genitalia). The next big 
step was taken by the formidable stars of 
blaxploitation films, above all the curva- 
ceous Pam Grier as ruthless Foxy Brown, 
who mowed down everyone in her path. 

Alpha females brassily reclaimed career- 
ism in the 1980s, starting with Joan Collins's 
campy Alexis Carrington on the prime- 
time T V soap Dynasty. Glamorously recycl- 
ing Joan Crawford's mannish shoulder 
pads, Collins showed how to combine sultry 
sexuality with a hard-nosed lust for busi- 
ness. That decade also spawned Madonna's 
Dietrich-inspired blonde ambition, with its 
predatory chain of boy-toy pickups. 

Angelina Jolie seemed to inherit the 
alpha female mantle in the 1990s, first 
as the punk fashion model Gia Carangi 
and later as superheroine Lara Croft, but 
she lost interest when she morphed into a 
global humanitarian. There was a trace 
ofthe surly, Knife-wielding Gia in Rooney 
Mara's brooding performance as a biker- 
chick computer hacker in The Girl With the 
Dragon Tattoo, but that character was too 
paranoid and recessive for a true A-list. 
alpha female. 

Jessica Chastain's steely undercover CIA. 
agent in Zero Dark Thirty had balls to spare 
and, as a fanatical loner, may have been 
hurtling toward Joan Crawford territory. 
In The Hunger Games, Jennifer Lawrence 
created an appealingly human portrait of 
a future-world alpha female, armed like 
the goddess Diana with a lethal bow and 
arrow ina passionate struggle for survival. 
Nevertheless, Lawrence's stubborn girliness 
(light-years away from Ursula Andress's 
tawny tigress) may limit her reach to her 
own age demographic. 

Consider Rihanna, for example, who has 
channeled Halle Berry's stylish Catwoman 
to pose as a killer vixen in scrumptiously 
seductive Instagram photos scattered to 
the world. But alas, all that dominance із 
just a ruse to win back her scummy abuser, 
rapper Chris Brown. The multitalented 
Rihanna, so charismatic behind her shim- 
mering haze of smoke, seems oddly uncom- 
fortable with her own power. 

Is the alpha female starting to fade 
again? Today's young women, raised in 
a communal milieu of coed dorms and 
casual hookups, may be more team play- 
ers than sexual autocrats. Significantly, in 
E.L. James's soft-porn trilogy, 50 Shades of 
Grey, a mammoth international best-seller 
among women readers, the alpha male 
reigns supreme, making the young hero- 
ine his eager sex slave. 

But after every eclipse, the alpha female 
always returns. She is embedded in human- 
ity's collective unconscious. What she герге- 
sents is the magic and mystery of sexual 
desire, which wells up from irrational 
depths and which neither men nor women 
have ever been able to fully control. 


TEXT BY CAMILLE PAGLIA 
PORTRAIT OF AIMEE MULLINS BY HOWARD SCHATZ 


A 


1 found my first pubic hai g a sleep- 
over at Kyla Warren's house. It was hei 
h birthday, and while every 

Exorcist in the living room, my 
best friend, Aimee, and I—terrified hid. 
in the bathroom. During our sequester- 
ing, conversation turned to puberty, and 
that naturally led to our standing back- 
to-back and checking ourselves for pubes. 
*Oh my God," I said. "I have one hair! 


Through thick and thin. 

A personal history of 
(and a modest theory about) 
bush 


How long has this been here?" I'd grown 
my first real live pubic hair —the beginning 
ofa bush. And though I didn't know it at 


the time, that moment was the genesis of 


в 


а cycle ofremoval and regrowth that would 
be more merciless than Linda Blair's pro- 
jectile vomiting. 

I grew up in the 1980s, back when 
Madonna spread for м.лувоу and you 
couldn't even seea slit through all that fur. 
When I was a kid, women's locker rooms 
were full of thick, musky, lush bush. My 
mother would lead me by my hand through 
the changing rooms; I was eye level with 


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muff after gloriously full muff. But the 
reality was, boobs were what I avoided 
looking at while being led through that 
wiry jungle, because boobs are naked and 
looking back at you. A bush is modest; 
it’s basically 3-D underpants. Nowadays, 
locker rooms offer up a smorgasboard of 
adult vagina, from “bare like a baby” to 
“Howie Mandel's soul patch” to “Oh my 
God, you can have that much hair?” Kids 
must be confused. 

For me, bush alteration began with sim- 
ply trimming my bathing-suit line. As I 
became sexually active, I moved toward 
bushlessness in tiny increments. At first, 
it was cutting the hairs shorter but still 
keeping the full bush, then it moved on 
to removing all the hair in what I call my 
“undercarriage” (because I’m kind of 
modest). I eventually adopted the Howie 
Mandel soul patch, but these days my 
pussy is all over the place. Not in a promis- 
cuous way but in the manner of a uniform 
hairstyle. I don't keep myself permanently 
waxed, because I'm lazy and it isn't a life- 
style necessity. I mean, I'm always bikini 
ready—because I live in California. That's 
just state law and I'm a law-abiding citi- 
zen. But I've tried everything, at various 
times, to keep up with the glamorous life 
of well-oiled pornographic vaginas. I’ve 
endured many Brazilian waxes, includ- 
ing one brutal mishap when she waxed 
the same area twice, fully removing a 
layer of actual labia. That double wax put 
me out of sexual commission for a week 
and made my vagina look like Freddy 
Krueger’s face—sorry, Robert Englund, 
not very glamorous. 

One thing I don't do is politicize bush— 
or the lack thereof—as a feminist state- 
ment. The closest I've come to making a 
statement with my pubes, albeit subcon- 
sciously, was letting them really fucking 
grow out—Jerry Garcia 50 hours into 
Woodstock style—because I wasn't inter- 
ested in a boyfriend anymore. That's when 


you know it's over, boys. Basically, 1 do 
what 1 feel is right for me sexually. (But 
maybe that is feminism.) 

Alot of people think the hairless look is 
a modern invention. But they're wrong. 
Among the Egyptians, the Romans and 
even the otherwise hirsute Vikings, 
smoothly shorn women were considered 
fancy as fuck. And why not? Cleopatra? 
Waxed. It took good old Western religious 
zealotry to make bare labia feel immodest, 
and by Victorian times, the bush was in full 
bloom. It was like sex didn't even exist! In 
fact, pubes were so au courant then that. 
the merkin became super trendy. That's 
right, people—a toupee for your vagina; 
you know, just in case your hair wasn't 
hairy enough. That was when we officially 
lost the clitoris for a period in time. The 
lost clit years. I'm sure Cleopatra had men 
and women bowing down to/on her clit 
and the Vikings were absolute clit wor- 
shippers. Then religion was all, "No! Stop 
enjoying the fucking around! Just marry, 
shoot sperm and make babies!" Boom. 
Covered vaginas. 

Shaved vag was kind of a hush-hush 
thing women could start doing with the 
arrival of cheaper home razors in the 
19505, and shaving grew in popularity 
but was still considered “fetishy.” It wasn't 
until Carrie Bradshaw got a Brazilian wax 
on Sex and the City that hairless vaginas 
went from underground quirk to some- 
thing you could acquire at every strip mall 
in North America. We couldn't all afford 
Fendi baguettes, but we could scrape up 
the cash to get the hair ripped from our 
mounds and reintroduce our clitorises to 
the world, together. 

1 recently had a conversation with an 
Oscar-winning woman who told me the 
bush is back. (І mention the Oscar only 
because it clearly means her pop culture 
observations are more valid than ours. 
She did win an Oscar, after all.) “Young 
girls aren't waxing," she told me excitedly. 


"Kim Kardashian is an “old lady’ to teens 
and 20-year-olds, and bald pussies and 
landing strips are considered very 19905. 
Kim had hers permanently removed, 
and young girls consider that an old-lady 
thing.” Wait, Kim Kardashian has old-lady 
vagina forever because her hair is perma- 
nently removed? 

So if waxing and Kardashians are syn- 
onymous, and Kardashians are considered 
“old,” is the official return of the bush 
imminent? We live in a society that rejects 
the concept of being even slightly senior. 
Carrie Bradshaw is pushing 50, so logi- 
cally no lithe thing is trying to emulate her 
vagina in 2013. 

Tn the past few years I've noticed young 
women with a little fuller, more natural 
bushes appearing in my Tumblr feed more 
often (though I follow "artistic photo- 
graphers," which might stack the deck, 
pube-wise). Either way, I have to say it's a 
nice change. Maybe what's happening now 
is, since every single bush look has had its 
moment to shine and be accepted en masse 
with this generation of vaginas, women can 
finally choose how to adorn their mound 
without having to categorize themselves 
or feel categorized by partners or by kids 
in the locker room. Now that we all know 
how to use a clitoris, hiding it behind a 
little hair—if you want to—isn't going to 
make us forget about it. 

Whether we go for full-blown 1970s 
beaver between our tanned thighs or a 
bald and vajazzled place to land, each 
woman should be doing what she wants 
to do with her pussy. If the big, big bush 
totally comes back, that's fine: As 1 men- 
tioned, I'm lazy. And if enough women 
have had their pubic hair permanently 
removed to necessitate the return of the 
merkin, that's cool too. ГЇЇ be the first to 
send one to Kim Kardashian. 


TEXT BY KELLY OXFORD 
ARTWORK BY MARILYN MINTER 


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My first knowledge of the cornucopia 
of goodness that was American sex was 
PLAYBOY magazine. My father got it every 
month, because of the writing, obviously. 
I never read a word. I looked at it for the 
astonishing breasts. These otherworldly 
women, standing astride Harley-Davidsons 
or getting out of baths, playing with drum 
kits and skis, and lying on many, many, 
many beds. Oh, the pneumatic glossi- 
ness of them. The heavy, shiny pages of 
the magazine weren't big enough to hold 
them. They needed their own, larger 
sheets to contain their smooth, glowing, 
undulating pulchritudinousness. They 
were perfect, ripe. It was like seeing some 
dreamy fruit at the point of optimum, 
plumptious juiciness. PLaYboy was the har- 
vest festival of sex: offerings of plenty. Asa 
marketing invention, the Centerfold was 
sublime brilliance. It didn't feel prurient 
or dirty or seedy to look at these naked 
women: They weren't remotely like any- 
one we knew. PLAYBOY was the National 
Geographic of urbanity. My mother would 
snort and say, “They're not real, you know, 
those girls,” and they weren't. That was 
their joy. In 1960s England our girls 
weren't even from the same species. We 
had jolly ladies in Health and Efficiency 
magazine, supposedly produced for nud- 
ists but really for 13-year-olds with their 
vests tucked into their Y-fronts. Or Rev- 
eille, a newsprint magazine for the armed 
forces, where the girls were swaybacked, 
tummy-sucked, with lantern jaws, squinty 
eyes, a straw hat and probably a judicious 
beach ball. They were obviously rude, 
and no better than they should be. But 
the ғілүвоу girls. That was like looking 
at the next rung of evolution. There was 
no sense that I, or any of my friends who 
came to snigger, would ever graduate to 
having a woman like this, any more than 
we'd be spacemen or cowboys. It wasn't 
just that we couldn't imagine what to do 
with them—we could imagine—but they 
plainly wouldn't have any idea what to do 
with us. What we saw at school were girls 
who played netball, with drippy noses and 
National Health spectacles. These women 
were like tableaux from High Renaissance 
mannerist paintings. Cloud-borne god- 
desses, evocations of justice and victory 
and charity. They were parables of Amer- 
ica in their brilliant pink bodies that had 
been bred from the promise of fecundity 
and the harvest of fresh air and space and 
sun and lawn sprinklers. The dryads of 


everything, of plenty: plenty of freedom, 
plenty of orange juice, plenty of recre- 
ational fucking. 

Every month in PLAYBoy there was an 
advertisement with a headline that went: 
"What sort of man reads PLAYBOY?” It was 
selling subscriptions. But I always imag- 
ined it was advertising the men. What sort 
of man did read pLaysoy? What sort of 
man got to mount the foldout women? 
I was particularly fascinated with them. 
The picture was always taken in what 
would probably be called a romper room, 
or the den, on two levels with cushions 
and leather armchairs. There was a sense 
of insouciance, opulence and technocratic 
ease. Three or four men, all best friends, 
would be arranged around, say, a piano. 
One of them would be playing silent jazz, 
the others holding crystal glasses, laugh- 
ing. There would be a black one, one 
with a polo-neck cashmere sweater, one 
with a trimmed beard, one would smoke 
a pipe. And draped over them and 
around them like cashmere duvets would 
be girls. Great-breasted, wide-mouthed, 
sleek-limbed girls. The recreation of 
champions, resting their arms on the 
men's shoulders, looking deep into 
their eyes. My dad was a man who read 
PLAYBOY, but he wasn't like this. I was a 
boy who sneaked looks at т.лүвоу. Was 
there perhaps space for me under the 
piano, or behind the leather sofa? 

Tve just bought a book, The Complete 
Playboy Centerfolds. It’s taken me some 
time to get through them, they're a thick 
read. Or perhaps a thick dribble. They've 
shrunk. They're now unfolded, staples 
removed, but it's an extraordinary jour- 
ney through the postwar social history of 
American sex, and may well be the most 
wordlessly eloquent book on American 
sexuality and taste ever published. As 1 
turned the pages, I would recognize girls. 
They'd come back to me like old school 
photos after 35 years, some Miss March 
or November would drag me back. Actu- 
ally, not like old school photos. They 
begin in the 19506 and the 1960s as very 
odd-mannered tableaux, seminaked in 
everyday mundane settings, like the sec- 
ond act of a bedroom farce. The watcher 
can make up little scenarios for them: "I 
was just cleaning out this cupboard in the 
nude, except for these toweling pants and 
a bowler hat," and we just walked in, and 
they turned to the camera with a look 
of mild surprise. Not like, "Oh my God, 


what are you doing in my bedroom?" Not 
like you were the window cleaner or leery 
Uncle Wilf, but like, “Oh my, you're early, 
hon. You caught me just like this on tip- 
toes, with nothing on but an artist's palette 
and a nylon polar bear." We, the invis- 
ible men in this little drama, we'd come 
in with our fishing rod or briefcase, or 
golf clubs, and she'd be surprised, a nice 
surprise, she was pleased to see us. "Oh, 
you should have told me you were going 
to be early, I'd have cleared away my old 
lacrosse kit and the balloons. Do you want 
to come on my magnificent breasts now, 
or shall 1 tell you about my day?" As they 
get into the 1970s, the pretense, the tiny 
pretense, of a scenario, of role-play, that 
the viewer can usc to slip in, vanishes. 
They just pout. She gives you a name so 
that you can grunt something that isn't 
"bitch." She's a girl on brown satin sheets, 
whose look says, "What took you so long? 
I'm hotter than a George Foreman grill 
set to sear. Get in here and knock one out 
on these frankly unbelievable breasts." 
The 1990s are the autumn of the PLAYBOY 
Centerfold. Not only have the girls 
reached a level of stratospheric match- 
readiness, but the airbrushing makes 
them look as fine and shiny as customized 
Chevys. These ladies are pimped, and 
the century ends with a naked troika— 
wham!—the Dahm triplets. 

The м.лувоу Centerfold was never arty 
or cool. It was never chic or cutting-edge. 
They were rarely ever more than mildly 
raunchy. All through the decades they 
appeared behind the curve, and their 
curves are not negligible. pı.AvBov Cen- 
terfolds are an American trophy. The 
nation's hood ornament, from the limo 
of state. Every boy has passed under the 
shadow of those perfect breasts on the 
way to adulthood. They looked up and 
knew that this was the statuesque of lib- 
erty. Tom Sawyer messed about in rivers; 
postwar American boys messed about in 
garages with Centerfolds. 

The Centerfolds of 1957, from January 
to December, are June, Sally, Sandra, Glo- 
ria, Dawn, Carrie, Jean, Dolores, Jacquelyn, 
Colleen, Marlene and Linda. In 2007 they 
were Jayde, Heather Rene, Tyran, Сіші- 
ana, Shannon, Brittany, Tiffany, Tamara, 
Patrice, Spencer, Lindsay and Sasckya. 
Bunny girls went from being the girl 
next door to the pole dancer upstairs, 
and they confirm a particular Ameri- 
can sexual trope. This is breast country. 


E 


Bosoms аге American. The rest of the 
body is really a delivery system for the 
great forward momentum of Mount 
Rushmore breasts. 

In the great tradition of childish nam- 
ing of taboo things, there are surprisingly 
few commonly used American vulgarisms 
for vaginas. It's a pussy, the anthropomor- 
phic euphemism. Bottoms are tushies, 
botties, fanny—which over here is a 
front-bottom. In Europe there are hun- 
dreds and hundreds of words for vaginas: 
funny, fond, disgusting and fearsome. 
Тһе most commonly used—cunt—is the 
“nigger” of body parts in America: unsay- 
able in company, even young, liberal, cool 
company. You can't say "cunt" at the din- 
ner table. At least "cunt" still retains а 
full battery of juice to shock. It is a votive 
obscenity. But the embonpoint has been 
doused with dozens of commonly used 
slang terms: babbaloos, badoinkies, bal- 
loobas, bazukas, bazoomas, bejongas, boobs, 
boonies, boobsters, boulders. And that, if you 
hadn't noticed, is just the Bs. Not even all 
the Bs. My personal favorite this week is 
chesticles: deeply misguided and wrong on 
every level, from the aesthetic to the bio- 
logical. But what you can't fail to notice 
about these names is how toddlerish they 
are, how utterly infantile. Sound repeti- 
tions and visual onomatopoeia. 

Breasts are a secondary sexual char- 
acteristic. They originally won their shot 
at stardom when we became bipedal, 
thereby robbing the bottom of its eye- 
level uxorious attraction. The breasts 
were pressed in to imitate the lost bum. 
The cleavage resembles buttocks, red lip- 
stick mimics an excited vulva (if you've 
never seen an excited vulva). American 
fashion, art and popular culture vener- 
ate the cleavage, elevate those teetering, 
heavy breasts. Nowhere else in the world 
could have invented a chain of restau- 
rants called Hooters. And in the PLAYBOY 
Centerfolds you can see how the shape 
and the style, the semaphore of breasts 
has changed. In the 1950s they have a 
spectacular, gravity-defying, cantile- 
vered pointiness. In the 1970s they fall 
into braless teardrops. In the 1990s 
they're globular and solid, and every so 
often there are girls with small—well, 
smaller—breasts. Sort of normal-sized but 
still perkier than meerkats on coke. But 
it’s merely a nod to sophistication, to the 
European girls who have petite booballala- 
boobettes. They are only a pair of 


placebos from a disappointing month. 
"Where's the meat?" said Mr. America. 

Tom Ford has a theory that Ameri- 
can design follows the shape of idealized 
American breasts. The 1950 are pointy, 
echoing the motorcar fins and the sci-fi 
look of things: missiles, UFOs, the bru- 
talist, mechanical, cantilevered and 
aggressively questing breasts of optimism. 
In the 1960s and 1970s they elegantly 
slope in the rhythm of swirly, floaty, 
swinging, free, hippie-dippie design. The 
unstructured parabola breast. The racks 
of the 1990s were buffed and pumped. 
And now they're puffed up, symmetri- 
cal, and design is all puffed up, engorged. 
And there it is, America’s gift to interna- 
tional eroticism: breast implants. 

It's salutary to go from looking at 40 
years of Centerfolds to the before-and- 
after shots for plastic surgeons on the 
hundreds and hundreds of websites for 
cosmetic empowerment. The photographs 
that the surgeons advertise themselves 
with are as shocking and as ghoulishly 
enticing as zombie movies. Cartoonishly 
globular, caricature breasts, made out of 
the tired and worn-out dugs of mother- 
hood, breasts that have done their best, 
have been up in the middle of the night, 
have seen in exhausted dawns, done their 
thing creating. Breasts that you would 
have imagined would have earned a rest 
are due some manners. But here they 
are, made like the drawings from lava- 
tory walls, the scars livid and jagged, 
puce and purple wounds. “After a year, 
the scars should be much decreased. Dis- 
comfort is generally negligible after two 
months.” The manufactured breast is 
such a familiar, common thing that they 
no longer have to look natural. They are 
“good jobs"—the job itself is a matter of 
aesthetic pride. 

Breast enlargement changes and dic- 
tates fashion. A woman who's suffered 
the surgical pain, the scars like open- 
heart surgery, is always going to boast a 
cleavage: those banging, bim-bam bazoo- 
kas are going to be out and proud. The 
mannequins in the kids’ clothes shops in 
South Beach, Miami are all made with 
impossibly augmented breasts. You look 
in the windows and you're staring at plas- 
tic models of women who themselves have 
plastic tits, and the girls are going, "That 
halter neck would look great on me." 

Whatever the morality, the aesthet- 
ics, the politics of erotic imagery, what is 


also amazing is that American thing: the 
commitment. When all’s said and done, a 
secondary sexual characteristic is not the 
arena, it's not the VIP area. Breasts аге 
the advertisement, the flyer. And it's the 
willingness to believe that you need to 
go to any lengths: “Yo, girl, you get those 
34FFS, you deserve them. You've earned 
them.” There is an odd egalitarianism 
about cosmetic surgery. Don't be cheated 
of the dream by genetics, or diets, or age. 
You can have the bam-bam-bing-boings 
of an 18-year-old pLavsov Centerfold, 
because that's America. If you work for 
it, if you really, really wish for it with all 
your might and your eyes tight shut, then 
you'll get it. 

But it won't do what it promised on the 
box. A nation that is as breast-conscious 
as America does something else to its 
women. This obsession means that men 
are always, always, always staring at your 
cleavage, your nipples. And it means that 
women who meet men face-to-face are 
always made aware with the handshake 
and the name exchange that they are, if 
not sexually available, sexually account- 
able. They are being assessed. Men can't 
help it. Heaven knows they try not to 
stare; they maintain fierce eye contact, 
but they grow up programmed to follow 
a ball with Centerfolds and these boom- 
bam-bubbubs. It's in the culture, what can 
I say? “Nice top bollocks.” 

Women can do one of three things. 
They can ignore it, which is easier some 
days than others, or they can confront 
it: “Hey, soldier, eyes up and front.” But 
that’s not always practical or helpful. Or 
you can dress for breast, like going out 
оп a mission, like wrapping up for the 
cold. A woman says, “There's going to be 
men out there,” and she can either go 
offense or defense. In America you see 
women wrapped up with their shoulders 
hunched forward and bowed backs, in 
bras that are too small for them, and you 
know these are the mammary martyrs: 
self-conscious, exposed, resentful. Or you 
go proactive, DEFCON ballistic, and get 
them out for the boys. Make it their prob- 
lem: “Deal with it, guys. You are never, 
repeat never, going to geta soapy tit wank 
from these bad babies.” 

If you visit the vacationing, flirty, balmy 
bits of America, you'll see men and women 
being pulled around by breasts, like mag- 
nets, both defined by this strange and 
original cultural obsession. And just while 


E 


postwa 
American 
boys 
messed 
about 


we're here, whatever happened to the are- 
ola? Most girls under 30 didn't even know 
they'd got a couple, or that they had a 
name (not to be confused with the aure- 
ola, the golden corona that unds a 
saint's head). Areola is that pink or tan 
ring around the nipple. In the 19505 they 
were huge: They stood out like the ends of 
ice cream cones, but now they're shrink- 
ing. They grow paler, nipples get smaller 
and longer, they go digital, changed from 
being the big switches and dials of old 
stand-alone radiograms and appliances. 
Now they're touch-sensitive on and off 
buttons. Like touch-screen technology, 
you just scroll them up and down. 

And the last thing you notice about the 
pLavsor girls is their pubic hair. The sex- 
ual alopecia. I feel nostalgic for bushes; 
it’s where I came in. But they've shrunk 
down to nothing. Past the American wax, 
the French wax, the landing strip, the 
Hitler moustache, the arrow, then the 
Brazilian or the Hollywood. Sometimes, 
I'm told, called the Sphinx, after a bald 
cat discovered in Canada (pussy, geddit? 
Of all the places to be a bald cat, Can- 
ada must be the worst). So it isn't named 
for the female-chested, lion-eagle-snake 
creature who met men on mountain 
passes, asked them three questions, then 
tossed them off. 

You have to consider the immense 
commitment to aesthetic satisfaction, 
to arrange the mise-en-scene just so, to 
arrange the decoration, the walk-through 
ambience, to be that minimal. To put up 
with the pain, the regular, awful pain 
and intimate humiliation of having your 
legs hoicked in the air and having hot 
wax applied to your arsehole and then 
ripped off by an uncaring immigrant 
woman who has to do this to maintain a 
tochold job that perpetuates the legend of 
America. “What did you do when you got 
here, Mommy?” “I ripped the stubble off 
strangers’ cunts.” Bring me the huddled 
masses yearning to be hair free. 

I can't choose a favorite PLAYBOY Cen- 
terfold: They are all of them marvelous. 
As we used to say as lads, you wouldn't 
say no to any of them for eating crisps 
in bed. They are the caryatids of free- 
dom and good, hygienic fun. But there is 
one that sticks in my mind: January 2007, 
Jayde Nicole. Jayde has apparently just 
come for a She stands in my door- 
way with this “Hiya, it's only me, fancy 
nailing me to the sofa?” face. Outside 


E 


snowing—one of those lovely, crisp, 
northern days, fir trees heavy. Jayde із 
wearing boots, white socks and a woolly 
scarf with Canadian maple leaves. Silly 
girl. So gagging for it she's arrived with- 
out pants or anything else. She's not even 
got goose bumps, but she stands in the 
doorway, one knee cocked, her big win- 
ter breasts keeping her warm. With a 
snowy grin and one hand on the door 
handle, she's completely Sphinxed. Her 
vagina looks tight, like a little, neat, hair- 
less, minimal Wendy-house noo noo. And 
there, just above where her pubic hair 
would have once grown, is a tattoo. They 
haven't airbrushed it out or put concealer 
on it because it's telling, it's cute. It's part 
of who Jayde is. She's standing there 
naked, shaved, available іп a Centerfold 
in the noughties, smiling at strangers, 
and above her prepubescent pudenda is 
one indelible word. Respect. Who says this 
is a nation without irony? 


TEXT BY А.А. GILL 


From To America Wilh Love by А.А. Gill 
Copyright © 2011 by A.A. Gill 


Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 


In 


\ 


A young factory worker skilled in black- 
smithing spends his youth crafting the 
wroughtiron gates, handrails and chan- 
deliers that serve to keep the mansions of 
Rue Mallet-Stevens private and rarefied. 

War comes, and his hands are employed to 
create a portable barracks for the French 
army. After the war, he's contracted to build 
refugee housing. Through this experience, 
the crafisman imagines a future in which 
he becomes self-taught in the architecture, 
design and mass production of a prefabri- 
cated house made of sheet metal that can 
be flown anywhere in the world and setup 
within hours. This was not an obligation to 

: This was desire. 

In the U.S. alone wecount 36 companies 
that spend more than $1 billion a year on 
advertising, the craft of which is rooted in the 
stimulation ofa belief in the consumer that 
you need something you don't have and 
without it you will feel empty. 

Desire isn'tabout what you think you need; 
it’s about what you want. It's the longing 
for everything and nothing at the same 
time, a pendulum careening between simul- 
taneous demands of megalomania and 
self-sufficiency, of global domination and 
isolation, of nuclear-capable Intruders and 
storm matches. 


Тһе 
Elements 


To connect with the natural world, boyhood 
fantasies and waking dreams, we must 
allow the hunger for solitude and speed, 
and expose ourselves to the thrill and chaos 
of the elements. With classical technology 
as instruments, we are given a return not to 
nature as pure state but to the blade, the 
grind and purr of the open road, the 
domicile that elevates us above the ordi- 
nary, the dazzle of our own imprint upon 
the mass-produced. 

Time is the commodity that affords us our 
desires. The unearthed skull ofa dinosaur 
consumed by the soil 90 million years ago 
invokes visions ofa lost world just as the per- 
fect inhalation of the ball by the net emits a 
sound that reinforces us for a fragment of 
a second with a feeling that's not for sale. 

We are elemental beings: The tools we put 
in our hands become talismanic remind- 
ers ofa more spiritual quest. True desire is 
the compass by which we locate ourselves 
within a life of inundation by technology 
and product. Time, speed, accuracy, inti- 
macy, play, refuge, security, survival, sex 
(and the odd sandwich) can return as the 
guiding instincts of an existence often dis- 
tracted by emptiness we are provoked to fill. 


CCAR: PATRICIA VAN LUBECK; MOTORCYCLE: COURTESY OF STEELBENT 
CUSTOM; SKULL: POPULAR SCIENCE/GETTY IMAGES; SKATE WHEELS: 
COURTESY OF SUPREME; BASKETBALL: WILIAM CARPIO; FIGHTER JET: 
COURTESY OF THE NATONAL NAVAL AVIATION MUSEUM; CONSTRUC: 
TION AT THE CONSTRUCTION SITE IN MAXÉVILE, 1949, JEAN PROUVE 
© CENTRE POMPIDOU MNAM/CCI BIBLIOTHEQUE KANDINSKY. TREE 
HOUSE: NEIL ROGERS/THE ICE COUECTION; MARIJUANA: SHUTTER: 
STOCK; GEAR X CUSTOM EARPHONES POWERED BY KIND; MATCHES: 
Т FORSHAW/EDCGEARCO UK; HATCHET: COURTESY OF OSCARDULOW. 


Look at this woman; she is beautiful. Нег 
voice is sticky sweet and butter soft. Her 
orgasms, by her admission, are deep and 
ecstatic. She drinks coconut water. She has a 
particular affinity for Kiehl's products. The 
first thing she does after climbing out of bed 
is brush her teeth. 

"In some cases the body into which we 
arc born docs not reflect the gender we 
are." At 24, she is still developing and refin- 
ing her worldview, her interests, the type of 
man she's looking for. Her name is Ines. 

At eight years old she knew she was fe- 
male. This instinct came before her first 
palpable crush on a boy, before the spring 
of puberty, before the trembling joys of 
sex. As she came of age, this awareness 
remained distinct from her sexual orienta- 
tion. It was a matter of who she was—and 
who she was did not fit along the confines 
of gender roles ascribed by Western culture. 

Ines began her transition from male to 
female (МТЕ) at the age of 14. By the time 
she was 16, her anatomy reflected her 
gender identity. The sex-reassignment sur- 
geries (SRS) took place in the vibrant city 
of Montreal. She had the support of her 
family. Her greatest fear in going through 
the transition was of being misunderstood. 

Тһе beautiful thing about this fear: It's 
one that every single human being on Earth 
can identify with. 

Gender is not a new construct. It is a 
classification of identity, refracted and inter- 
preted through the lens of societal norms. 
In France, where our heroine resides, it is 
called genre, a term we might more quickly 
identify with cinema. In cinema there arc 
subgenres: the spaghetti Western. The road 
movie. The romantic comedy. In gender, 
subgenres also exist. 

The term transgender has been murky for 
some time but has increasingly come to rep- 
resent the third gender: a gender that does 
not fit within the binary of male/female and 
instead umbrellas the myriad subgenres of 
gender fluidity. The array is dizzying— 
transsexual, transvestite, cross-dresser, 
genderqueer, androgyne, bi-gender, pan- 
gender, agender, gender fluid, to reference 
a fraction. The distinctions between them 
are important. 

“The primary instinct in my experience 
and, I believe, for many is simply the desire 
to rectify a mistake of nature at birth.” Ines 
is not an activist or a performance artist. 
She is not a drug addict. She is not a prosti- 
tute. (Before she drew the attention of Vogue 
Italia, she was a student at the Sorbonne.) 
Until this moment, she has remained stealth, 


concealing from those beyond her most inti- 
mate circle that she was born into the body 
ofa male. 

Ines is asked on more dates than your 
average wallflower and fewer than Taylor 
Swift. To dispel any possible confusion: She 
is not a gay man with female anatomy; she 
isa woman. She is attracted to straight men. 
Unsurprisingly, straight men are attracted 
to her. “It all depends on the man, his story, 
his vision of the world. Religion, everything.” 

She's talking about his reaction to her 
truth. 

There are two worlds: the tangible world 
we experience through personal journey 
and present context, and the one that 
unfolded long before our birth and will con- 
tinue long after our existence. The first is a 
rolling tide that gathers us in its current, a 
world in which we choose what we believe, 
what we feel, how we act, how we respond 
to the external. In this world we are pro- 
pelled by the oars of fear and desire. 

The otheris the primary world, in which 
wars have been lost and won and lost again, 
territories conquered, acquired, colonized 
and abdicated in the wake of surrender. A 
world in which past would mirror present, 
would we consult it. But we freak at the 
thought; we have come so far, or perhaps 
because we feel so close to the future. 

The third gender belongs to the primary 
world. It was present in prehistoric times 
and resurfaced in the Middle Kingdom of 
Egypt, in ancient Greece and in the Galli 
of ancient Rome. It was integral to Vedic 
culture and early Mayan and Incan civili- 
zations. The Sworn Virgins of the Balkans. 
The two spirits of Native American tribes. 
The hijra of India. The Thai phet thi sam. 
The ashtime of the Maale. Mashoga of 
Mombasa. Mangaiko of the Congo. Muxe 
of Mexico. The bissu of the Bugis of Indo- 
nesia. Fa'afafine. Mukhannathun. Xanith. 
Mahu. The third gender has been both 
celebrated and persecuted, sacred and 
taboo. What's undeniable is that it exists 
and will continue to evolve in tandem with 
medical, sociological and scientific advances. 

SRS, long considered an extreme mea- 
sure, becomes less easily stigmatized when 
placed in the context of the booming indus- 
try of face-lifis, botox, labiaplasty, hair plugs, 


Breaking binary: 
inside the brave new world 
of the third sex 


TEXT BY SARA CLINE 
PHOTOGRAPHY BY RYAN McGINLEY 


rhinoplasty, liposuction, breast augmenta- 
tion, cheek implants, chin implants, penis 
implants, knee lifts, abdominoplasty, buttock 
lifts, otoplasty, acid peels and self-sculpting 
procedures we haven't invented yet. 

Past being prologue, “homosexuality” 
was classified as a mental disorder in the 
DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of 
Mental Disorders, a.k.a. the Bible of Psy- 
chiatry) until it was finally reclassified and 
withdrawn in 1987. Twenty-six years later 
the Supreme Court overturned DOMA, 
effectively passing the landmark ruling 
that paves the path for gays to be legally 
married. That's one generation between 
mental illness and equal rights. The precur- 
sor to this revolution is a long legacy of civil 
rights movements: equal rights for blacks, 
equal rights for women. History would sug- 
gest that—at least in the free world—equal 
rights for all is inevitable. 

Let's posit this: IFAndy Warhol rose from 
his permanent slumber to throw an exclu- 
sive party for the third gender, he would 
find himself quietly observing cardiologists, 
video game designers, a professional golfer, 
iticians, sociologists, computer scien- 
World War II fighter pilot, a Grand 
Prix motorcyclist, classical musicians, a Thai 
boxer, a Cuban politician and a few nervous 
economists. Fashion models and pop sing- 
ers. Ghosts of the Civil War. A professional 
tennis player. A Tokyo municipal official. A 
senior vice president at Prudential Financial. 
А neurobiologist, a Navy Seal, playwrights, 
the co-director of The Matrix, schoolteachers, 
lawyers, philanthropists and a double-bass 
musician, Warhol would stand immersed in 
a brave new world (which he might even be 
right to take some credit for). 

Unlike Warhol's thriving fringe commu- 
nity—a reflection of his time and context— 
Ines does not live in the margins; for the 
past eight years she has architected her 
body and gender in a way that has enabled 
her to blend into the mainstream. 

“[SRS] is very intimate, and in my case it 
was a family decision that took place when 
I was very young. I have often not felt obli- 
gated to give this very personal information 
to people I've just met. Its not to be decep- 
tive; it's because I have been a woman for so 
long that it didn't feel relevant. This is the 
beauty of being. What I have suffered from 
is the fear of being rejected by someone who 
cannot process the information. I don’t like to 
hurt people. It is alot of pressure. That's why 
I'm coming out. I want to be accepted the 
way I am without the fear of being judged.” 

Look at this woman. 


EVOLUTION 


E 


IES RAU AT LA. MODELS, 


1 
$ 
5 


ITH AT TOTAL MANAGEMENT; MAKEUP BY КАВАМ FRANJOLA AT MAS 


PET 


Free *dom | fre дәт | noun (1) The power or right to act, speak or think as one wants 
without hindrance or restraint (2) absence of subjection to foreign domination or despotic 
government (3) the state of not being imprisoned or enslaved (4) the state of being 
physically unrestricted and able to move easily (5) archaic familiarity or openness in speech 


72 what you're 
oking for is right in your 
е own backyard 


PHOTOGRAPHY BY HENRIK PURIENNE 


HUGH HEFNER’S PLAY BOY PHILOSOPHY: Excerpts 
from his original credo, 1962-1966 Е vc» We do not con- 
sider sex either sacred or profane. The logic that permits a 
person to call down God's wrath on anyone for displaying 
a bit ofGod's own handiwork does, we must admit, escape us. 
nw» You dont have to be a homosexual to read Oscar 
Wilde or an alcoholic and а drug addict to appreciate the prose 
and poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. EJ «Man's new zest for 
living can be seen in his interest in a car that has style and 
speed, in his savoring the pleasures of the senses with 
good food and drink and stereo sound, in his involvement 
in the decor of his apartment and the cut of his clothes. 
E] oss We've successfully sustained our freedom of re- 
ligion, but not freedom from religion. EJ ~» » We do not 
believe that a satisfactory definition for obscenity can 
ever be established. It has long seemed quite incredible— 
indeed, incomprehensible—to us that detailed descriptions 
of murder, which we consider a crime, are acceptable in our 
art and literature, while detailed descriptions of sex, which 
is not a crime, are prohibited. It is as though our society 
put hate above love—favored death over life. В «cons 
Modern American morality is an amalgamation of the 
superstitious paganism and masochistic asceticism of 
early Christianity; the sexual anxieties, feelings of guilt 
and shame, witch-hunting sadism and sex repression of the 
medieval Church; the desexualized courtly love of the trou- 
badours; and England’s Romantic Age, wherein love was 
presumed to conquer all. В »« »» The anti-intellectual 
syndrome in America is a part of our society’s subconscious 
desire to elevate the mediocre and demean the uncommon 


н 


in education and intellect. We think it is natural and right for 
the individual to be principally concerned with himself. 
Society should exist as man's servant, not as his master. The 
purpose in man's life should be found in the full living 
of life itself and the individual pursuit of happiness. 
nw ves Each man's freedom should be limited only to 
the extent that it infringes upon the freedom of others. 
resrvary vos Sin and crime are not synonymous. But many of our 
laws are evolved from old ecclesiastical laws, from reli- 
gious beliefs and dogma, to which some of our citizens 
subscribe, and many others do not. No one can reasonably 
question the powerful role that sex plays in all our lives. It is 
a dominant force in society. It can be a force for either good 
or evil, but sex in itself is neither. Control over marriage 
gives the government control over sex. E] ^» » The Amer- 
ican male's concern over his masculinity amounts to an 
obsession. And as we have observed in our consideration 
of the history of antisex in our culture, such an obsession 
usually represents a repressed fear. EJ s» Though we 
are free citizens in most other respects, in sex we are the 
slaves of society and the state. It is fortunate that no exam- 
ining officer can single out the majority of the men who 
have had some homosexual experience, since the ranks 
of our Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines would be severely 
depleted if the one male in every three who has engaged 
in such activity was not permitted to serve. Е »«Pros- 
titution flourishes specifically because of the double stan- 
dard that exists for male and female sexual morality, and 
the prostitution laws of the United States are, themselves, 
patently anti-female. From The Playboy Philosophy, Parts XXV 


н 


"God! Your Jackson Pollock always puts те in а frenzy." 


SALESMAN.. WRONG JONG], 1987; OPPOSITE: UNTITLED (COVERING FOLLOCK) 2009. ARTWORK BY RICHARD PRINCE 


THIS PAGE: UNTED [A TRAVEUNS 


A traveling salesman’s car broke down one evening 
on а lonely road and he asked at the only farm 
house in sight. “Can you put me up for the nite?” 


“I reckon | can,” said the farmer. “But you'll have to 
share the room with my young son ." *How about 
that!” gasped the salesman. “I’m in the wrong joke." 


эла NADAN AB HAVADOLOHA 


кмк 


After a terrible talk with her husband, 
Dylana flew to the wedding of Irina's daugh- 
ter, Bianca. Irina had been a delicious red- 
haired woman (woman, never a girl) with a 
gorgeous fat ass and a soft, eloquent back. 
She had ridden her life hard, had beaten 
the hell out of her liver and aged fast, but 
even with veins in her legs she could still 
wear a skirt, and there was delicious feeling 
in her bright, high-heeled gait. After leav- 
ing home at M, she'd taken her education 
from the street, TV and older boyfriends; 
now she made hats and sold them in her 
own shop. She had raised her three grown 
children almost single-handed, all in the 
same apartment where she cooked up her 
hats. And now here was her oldest, Bianca, 
coming down the aisle in a white dress on 
her brothers arm. 

Dylana looked on with stunned happi- 
ness that was like a rim of fiery light on 
massing darkness. 

Ти sei bellissima. I tuoi occhi, le tue labbra, 
sei cosi bella. Ti amo, ti voglio. 

Her husband didn't say that. It was an 
Italian guy she'd met on a bus. She wanted 
him to fuck her in the ass, and even though 
they couldn't understand each other, he 
knew, he went right for it—but for some 
reason she stopped him and he politely 
switched it up. 

Bianca stood before them, her moth- 
er's bright spirit shining in her eyes and 
shaping her smiling lips. Her whole small 
body brimmed with love. The church was 
filled with flowers. Irina's friend Pamela, 
a former horse trainer, had spent days 
making the arrangements, the bouquets, 
buttonholes, wristbands, pew bows and 
hairpieces; they had all gone to Pamela's 
apartment, where the calloused woman 
sat surrounded by her fragile creations, 
and they had loaded them into the van 
driven by the groom. Pamela had made 
corsages for the guests, and everyone had 
been given a little bottle of bubbles too, 
and a wand to blow them with. 

“АШ” went the Italian guy. “Ai! Ai! 

Dylana's own wedding shimmered be- 
fore her, a beautiful hallucination on 
hot, terrible sand. Tears ran down Irina's 
transformed face; the hallucination rip- 
pled and became real. Dylana had married 
15 years ago. Everyone had turned to 
watch as she walked across the lawn in 
her dress and veil. Dappled trees moved 
against the bright sky, hawks flew over- 
head. David waited, radiant and proud. 
When he lifted the veil, he took her face 
in his hands, and his arms constricted up 
into his shoulders as if tightening against 
too much emotion. 

Тһе minister spoke; the ceremony 
began. Memory rolled in on a dark tide 
of laughing faces and trash talk. She was 
drunk at a bar with women she half knew, 


qm 


A wedding of humiliation 
and bliss 


they were loving the story of the guy on 
the bus: He'd used hand signals to tell her 
he was 55, then raised his eyebrows and 
pointed at her. She wrote “БІ” оп a piece 
of paper. He popped his eyes, pointed at 
her body and gave the thumbs-up. The 
women laughed. 

“Do you take this man to be” 

Тһе filth, the way she'd talked—worse 
than adultery, filth. She had to leave David, 
she'd infect him if she didn't. But she 
couldn't leave, she loved him. 

“For richer, for poorer, in sickness and 
in health —" So they went to therapy and 
she said, “I want an open marriage” 

“Can't we just lie like everybody else?” 
he said. Bianca said, “I give myself fully to 
you as you give yourself to me." "I don't 
mean all the way open, I mean just like a 
cat door. For special situations, like in a 
foreign country, where it doesn't threaten. 
the marriage." The therapist looked at 
David and said, “Do you love this woman 
enough to do that for her?" David said, 
"I'm too proud." "That's not what I asked. 
I asked, do you love this woman?" 

"You may now kiss the bride." 

Music played, people shouted. They un- 
stopped their bottles and filled the church 
with bubbles. A little boy tried to kiss a 
little girl but she pushed him away. Every- 
one went to the reception hall and ate 
heavy food. 

After therapy they went out with David's 
friends to hear live music. The band was 
raucous, and Dylana pounded the table 
and shouted. David looked at her, his 
sadness so pure she could not bear 
to look back. His friends laughed and 
drank, unknowing. When they went 
home she shut herself up and googled 
"humiliated whores." 


The little boy tried to take the girl's hand; 
she pushed him away almost tearfully. 

When Jack asked us to humiliate the fuck out. 
of his incredibly slutty wife, we gladly obliged. 

"But you don't want that, you want love. 
1 can feel you, you're like a little bird, sun- 
ning itself in love." She remembered the 
man who had said that, more like a song 
than a man. They'd danced on Halloween, 
she a vampire victim with a false wound, 
he a priest in bell-bottoms. "Darling," 
he said, “you're drunk, you don't know what 
you're doing." 

And when we were done, the dirty whore 
wanted more! They stuck a gag in her mouth 
and tied her up with her legs spread and 
shaved her. One of them said, "Let us know 
if anything hurts, baby." Then they rubbed 
oil on her and finger-fucked her. 

People made toasts and jokes. Dylana 
saw Bianca's father, a guy who'd beat up 
Irina before she'd kicked him out. He 
looked old but handsome, smiling and 
talking to his son, their collars loose. He 
and Irina didn't get near each other, but 
still he was there. 

They said "humiliate" but it seemed 
like they loved her. They said, "Look at 
those beautiful tits, look at that gorgeous 
pussy." They touched her and rubbed her, 
all of them. One of them took out the gag 
and said, "You're going to suck the first 
cock that comes. Your husband wants to 
see you suck some cock." Dylana wanted 
this too. But with David, not Google men. 
She thought of it all the time, of doing it 
in their bedroom on the coverlet she'd 
given him, the cat rolling on the floor, the 
sun pouring in. The picture of him as a 
baby watching from the dresser. 

"The little boy and girl she'd seen before 
walked across the floor, his arm around 
her, she leaning on his shoulder. 

David wept. He cried, "I wanted to bring 
you happiness!" She kissed him, weep- 
ing too. "You did, you did, I love you, 
you did!” 

It was terrible. But at least he hadn't 
beat her or killed her. That was something. 

Тһе little boy crouched to let the little 
girl climb up upon his back. Music came 
on the sound system and Irina cried, 
"Come on, let's dance!" Even though she'd 
worked at the store all morning and then 
rushed to get her hair done, even though 
the heel on one of her shoes was bro- 
ken, Irina took Dylana's hand and they 
danced, Irina bursting with love and 
Dylana leaning into it blind. 

“Not bad,” said Irina's boy, walking past. 

1 asked, do you love this woman? 1 do. 
Yes. Yes, I do. The children ran through 
the room, the little girl laughing and 
holding on. 


TEXT BY MARY GATTSKILL 


L 


MONOGAMY 


Of all the lies people tell one another, 
there is none that is as ubiquitous, as 
corrosive to happiness and as laugh- 
ably untrue as the classic declaration 
of undying love that excludes all oth- 
ers, forever and ever. “Marriage,” Oscar 
Wilde famously said, “is the triumph of 
imagination over intelligence.” Perhaps, 
but it's not marriage per se that suggests 
a vanquished intelligence; it's the nearly 
universal expectation that a happy cou- 
ple will “forsake all others” for the rest 
of their lives —without coming to despise 
each other in the process. There is a cri- 
sis in modern marriage today (the U.S. 
Census Bureau tells us that about half 
of first marriages end in divorce), and 
the culprit is easy to find. Monogamy 
is what's wrong with marriage. Our no- 
tions of till-death-do-us-part conjugal 
bliss demand that we confuse "love" 
with "lust," even though the two are as 
distinctly different as red wine and blue 
cheese. And sure, they may complement 
each other when they happen to be in 
the same place at the same time, but they 
are discrete, fully autonomous energies. 
Love might settle in for a lifetime, grow- 
ing comfortable and sinking roots; lust 
comes and goes as it pleases. Love is like 
a farmer, tilling the soil, planning for 
future harvests. But lust is an explorer, 
a wanderer, an outlaw. No wonder the 
Spanish word esposas means both "wives" 
and “handcuffs.” 

But this isn't the story we're told by 
popular culture, religious authorities, 
mainstream scientists and a legion of 
therapists who insist—despite a world 
of evidence to the contrary—that stead- 
fast love and burning desire go hand 
in hand. This campaign to misrepre- 
sent the true nature of human sexual- 
ity leaves virtually all of us submerged 
in a rising tide of sexual frustration, 
libido-killing boredom, betrayal, confu- 
sion, dysfunction and shame. The only 
widely acceptable alternative to the one- 
marriage, one- sexual-partner strait- 
jacket—so-called “serial monogamy"— 
stretches before and behind many of 
us like a dismal archipelago of failure, 
islands of transitory happiness in a cold, 
dark sea of disappointment and loss. 

Amazingly, for a problem central to 
so many lives, we rarely dare discuss 


“The prerequisite for a good 
marriage, it seems to me, 
is the license to be 
unfaithful.”—Carl Jung, 
in a letter to Sigmund Freud 
(January 30, 1910) 


the absurdity of expecting our love and 
lust to march in lockstep. When the 
subject is raised, nobody knows what to 
say. Bill Maher asked the obvious ques- 
tion while discussing the Eliot Spitzer 
situation on his HBO talk show: “When 
a man's been married 20 years,” Maher 
said, “he doesn't want to have sex, or his 
wife doesn't want to have sex with him.... 
What is the right answer?... Is it to just 
suck it up and live the rest of your life 
passionless, and imagine somebody else 
when you're having sex with your wife 
the three days a year that you have sex?" 
After a long, fraught silence, Jon Hamm, 
the tortured lothario of Mad Men, sug- 
gested simply abandoning the marriage. 
“Move on,” he advised. "I mean, you're 
an adult." The normally outspoken jour- 
nalist PJ. O'Rourke, sitting with Hamm 
on the panel, just looked down in silence. 

But is divorce really the "adult" re- 
sponse to the inherent conflict between 
adolescent romantic ideals and the in- 
convenient nature of human sexuality? 
Is there no way to accommodate reality 
that's a bit less drastic than the bloody 
sacrifice of an otherwise functional— 
possibly even wonderful —marriage? 

I was recently sitting in a hotel lobby 
when I noticed a sexy woman walk- 
ing across the room. My attention then 
turned to a textbook-miserable married 
couple sitting stiffly on a sofa nearby. 
They were unmoving, but a hurricane of 
resentment was raging all around them. 
He was bitterly pretending not to notice 
the sexy woman. His wife was angrily 
pretending not to notice that he was pre- 
tending not to notice. When they both 
looked at me, І pretended not to notice 
what they were pretending not to notice. 
What a fucking mess! Why is it still con- 
sidered a taboo-busting provocation to 
say out loud that no matter how much 
we love each other, sexual passion for 
the familiar fades? And no matter how 


deep our bonds, we'll still notice—and 
desire—other people? For both men 
and women, erotic engagement with a 
novel partner (even if only іп flirtation 
or fantasy) can be one of life's greatest 
tonics: revitalizing, enhancing, energiz- 
ing. What evil agenda has convinced us 
to pretend otherwise? I'm not saying the 
couple in the lobby should have invited 
the sexy woman up to their room—not 
necessarily—but what would have been 
the harm in acknowledging her obvious 
beauty? Do they angrily pretend to ig- 
nore rainbows and sunsets as well? 

Why should it be surprising that we 
crave variety in our sexual lives? The hu- 
man appetite for something new is taken 
as a natural expression of our species" 
intelligence when it comes to music, art, 
cuisine, architecture and so on. After 
all, Homo sapiens is the ultimate omni- 
vore. No other creature eats more dif- 
ferent kinds of things than we do—from 
seeds to snails, roots to rats, and ants to 
elephants. A hunger for erotic novelty 
is utterly normal for our species. It has 
evolved into our bones, you might say. No 
other creature on Earth spends as much 
of its time and energy obsessing over sex. 
Most mammals have sex only when the 
female isovulating. For them, sexis about 
reproduction. But human beings fuck in 
all sorts of configurations that can't pos- 
sibly lead to pregnancy. Consider the 
raw numbers. In our "natural" state—in 
pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer groups 
without birth control—our species aver- 
ages around 1,000 sex acts per birth. Go- 
rillas are more typical of mammals in en- 
joying only around a dozen or so sexual 
encounters per baby gorilla born. Chim- 
panzees and bonobos, the two apes most 
closely related to us, share our proclivity 
for nonreproductive sex, coming in at 
more than 500 sexual encounters per 
birth. The dolphin, another highly in- 
telligent animal living in large, complex 
social groups, is the aquatic member of 
this libidinous hall of fame. For all these 
species—and especially for our own— 
sex has never been primarily about re- 
production. Babies have always been a 
by-product of sex, not its central purpose. 

Strange as it may sound, many рге- 
agricultural societies aren't very clear on 
precisely how sex results in babies. Some 


M 


hold that a fetus is literally made оҒас- 
cumulated semen. Any sexually active 
woman is thought to be always at least a 
little bit pregnant, but her fetus won't be- 
gin to develop until she reaches a tipping 
point. And like women everywhere, the 
female members of these societies (most 
of them in Amazonia) aspire to have 
children who are smart, strong, funny 
and unique. To that end, the prospective 
mother will “solicit contributions” from 
smart men, strong men and funny men. 
When an anthropologist working with 
the Aché people in Paraguay asked his 
subjects to identify their fathers, he was 
presented with a head-scratcher. The 
321 villagers he polled claimed to have, 
cumulatively, more than 600 fathers. 
Who's your daddies? 

While a society full of shared dads may 
strike us as a recipe for disaster, the en- 
suing interlocking social obligations are 
crucial to the survival of these foraging 


NK 
N 
(SAN 


groups, who still live today as all people 
did until the advent of agriculture just 
a few thousand years ago (a blink of an 
eye in evolutionary terms). And because 
these relationships promote social co- 
hesion, opting out can be problematic. 
Anthropologist Philippe Erikson, who 
studied the Matis people of the upper 
Amazon, reports, "Extramarital sex is 
not only widely practiced and usually tol- 
erated, in many respects, it also appears 
mandatory." If a Matis refuses too many 
sexual advances, he or she risks being la- 
beled "stingy of one's genitals" in a kind 
of mirror reflection of our internet age's 
phenomenon of slut shaming. The isolat- 
ing nuclear family is a thoroughly mod- 
ern contrivance, as is our grim insistence 
that sexual monogamy is an essential 
part of any authentic expression of love. 
Because humans share a highly so- 
cial sexuality along with chimps and 
bonobos—with whom we also share more 


than 98 percent of our DNA—it's very 
likely that all three species have been 
randy, promiscuous apes since before 
they originated. We're just the only ones 
who are "evolved" enough to try denying 
it. We need to take a step back and begin 
again with a clear, scientifically accurate 
sense of what kind of animal Homo sapiens 
is—taboos and religious hypocrisies be 
damned. Our sexual omnivorousness is 
as self-evident as our dietary omnivorous- 
ness, and monogamy comes to us about 
as naturally as vegetarianism. Now, one 
may decide to forgo meat. Many of us do, 
and for good reason. But just because 
you've decided to give it up, don't think 
that bacon's going to stop smelling good. 


TEXT BY CHRISTOPHER RYAN. 
ARTWORK BY MARK MULRONEY 


Christopher Ryan is co-author of Sex at Dawn: 
How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What li Means 
for Modern Relationships. 

His co-author, Cacilda Jethá, is his wife. 


Swiss photographer Hans Еситет takes fashionable artifice to the beach in this perverse trip into... 


PHOTOGRAPHY BY HANS FEURER 


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im. as an artist, Jeff Burton worked 

ү E the porn industry. 

ko the days when his art was ышы 
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PHOTOGRAPHY BY JEFF BURTON 


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Pleasure 


The pharmaceutical 
Nis has been almost 
exclusively focused 
on the management of pain 
and depression. 

But what happened to 
chemical hedonism? 


Modern medicine has neglected pleasure. 
With major depressive disorder being the 
leading cause of disability in the United 
States for people between the ages of 15 
and 44, there is an urgent need to treat 
depression and, arguably, a somewhat less 
urgent need to better the lives of already 
well people. How could the medicinal 
chemist think of something so gauche as 
pleasure in a world plagued by suicidal- 
ity and unremitting despair? And aside 
from the need to triage affective disor- 
ders, there is the unpleasant fact that 
pleasure, for all its apparent virtues, has 
a long track record of creating problems. 
The pleasure of euphoriant drugs can 
result in habituation and dependence, the 
pleasure of food in obesity, the pleasure 
of money in greed and the pleasure of. 
sex in virtually every type of mess known. 
to man. Of these I am most interested in 
drugs, for the specific reason that they 
induce pleasure more reliably than almost 
anything else in life, which otherwise 
provides no guarantee of joy or satisfac- 
tion. Academic, professional and artistic 
achievement may elicit nothing more than 
a moment of somber self-reflection, pangs 
of perfectionist anxiety or the sensation 
that more could have been done and bet- 
ter. This, however, is not the case with 
methamphetamine. 

Scientists have long understood eupho- 
riant drugs as indispensable tools for 
exploring the neurological wells of plea- 
sure that exist in our brains. A researcher 
can reward a mouse with a food pellet or 
а sucrose solution, but these treats pale 
in comparison to the glow produced by 
certain drugs, which, assuming they аге 
sufficiently reinforcing, the mouse will 
choose over food every time. The point 
of these scientific investigations is not to 
create new drugs that will promote human 
pleasure—though there are exceptions 
that ГЇЇ get to ina minute—but to research 
the mechanisms of addiction and the 
nature of dopamine, the mind's chemical 
of reward. It's pure serendipity that many 
illegal and semilegal euphoriant drugs 
were the accidental products of orthodox 
scientific experiments. LSD was the result 
of efforts to produce drugs that would 
increase blood circulation in the elderly. 


Amphetamine was discovered by Gordon 
Alles in the course of investigating nasal 
decongestants. Methaqualone (commonly 
known as Quaalude) was synthesized in 
India as a prospective antimalarial treat- 
ment. Viagra was initially trialed as a 
treatment for angina pectoris. The list 
goes on and on. But outside of therapies 
aimed at treating various forms of sexual 
dysfunction, there are no pharmaceuticals 
intended primarily to induce pleasure. At 
the same time, billions of dollars are spent. 
annually on the development of drugs 
that prevent pleasure in order to assist 
addicts. Antabuse, naltrexone, methadone, 
Chantix—these are all pharmaceutical 
efforts to attenuate the pleasure humans 
derive from the already abundant but 
ever-growing array of euphoriant drugs. 

It would seem that an obvious strategy 
would be to simply give pleasure-inducing 
drugs to the depressed people who might 
benefit from them most. But the aim of 
pharmaceutical treatments for depres- 
sion has rarely been to cause joy (clinically, 
euphoria is sometimes even classified as an 
"adverse effect") but to help the patient 
find and remain on the narrow isthmus 
between happiness and sadness. A 1986 
trial employing 15-milligram intravenous 
doses of methamphetamine found it to 
be a superbly effective antidepressant in 
almost half of all female patients tested, 
though it isn't a drug that most would even 
consider a realistic therapeutic interven- 
tion for depressed patients. (It is, however, 
currently approved for the treatment of 
both ADHD and obesity.) Methamphet- 
amine users have earned a reputation for 
tending to overshoot the mark when left 
to their own devices, choosing feelings 
of manic, transcendent euph over 
euthymia (a nice, general positivity) and 
increased productivity, perhaps limiting 
the scope of methamphetamine's phar- 
maceutical application. Meth addicts have 
given meth a bad name. 

During routine investigations of novel 
tricyclics, then the most prominent class 
of antidepressants, chemists at the French 
pharmaceutical company Servier discov- 
ered a new drug that exerted not only 
an antidepressant but also a pronounced 
stimulant effect. They called it amineptine. 
Mice given the drug exhibited increased 
locomotion and slept less when injected 
with barbiturates. In the 1970s, aminep- 
tine was introduced as a pharmaceutical 
antidepressant in Europe to much fan- 
fare. Its stimulating effects rapidly jolted 
lethargic depressives out of their mal- 
aise and allowed them to resume normal 
lives without the multiweek therapeutic 
lag present in other pharmaceutical solu- 
tions. And while other antidepressants 
resulted in reduced libido, amineptine 
actually induced spontaneous orgasms in 
many females who consumed it—taking 
that dangerous next step, beyond treat- 
ing depression, into the checkered realm. 


of pleasure. It's not surprising that some 
patients began to take large doses of the 
drug in order to revel in the high it pro- 
duced. Medical case reports began to 
emerge, and among the heaviest users 
amineptine was found to produce cystic 
acne on the face, earlobes and genitals 
with such severity that one dermatologist 
characterized the addicts’ appearance as 
“monstrous.” A governmental warning 
was issued and amineptine was summarily 
withdrawn from the international phar- 
maceutical market, leaving a lacuna in the 
synapses of many responsible users who 
had benefited from the drug. 

Servier responded by replacing ami- 
neptine with an antidepressant it hoped 
would have lower abuse potential. It 
was named tianeptine, and it behaved 
more like an opioid, inhibiting the pain 
response in mice whose tails were singed 
on hot plates and the coughing of guinea 
pigs sprayed with citric acid. But, like 
amineptine, tianeptine had a fast onset 
and did not interfere with sexual func- 
tioning. Slowly, the reports of addiction 
to its more narcotic effects began to trickle 
in; a female user in Turkey worked her 
way up to ingesting 150 12.5-milligram 
tianeptine tablets each day. Russian and 
Armenian tianeptine addicts preferred 
to inject the sugarcoated pills to increase 
the high, sometimes resulting in severe 
vascular damage that necessitated the 
amputation of limbs. Now tianeptine is a 
controlled substance in those countries. In 
other countries it's banned entirely. But. 
it should be noted that the abuse of these 
substances occurred only in a minority of 
users. The stories of both drugs, to my 
mind, serve as reminders that the medical 
establishment believes that pleasure has 
no place in the treatment of depression. 

Popular science is caught up in a jug- 
gling act—a state of constant media 
manipulation—that revolves around the 
chemicals in our brains. Dopamine is 
doubtlessly a neurotransmitter of major 
importance, and it plays a crucial role in 
reinforcing certain behavioral patterns. 
But to simply classify it as a “pleasure 
chemical” betrays the versatile role it 
plays in nature, where it is involved just 
as much in encoding aversion, movement, 
lactation and vomiting as it is in facilitat- 
ing bliss. Serotonin, the neurochemical 
target of an immensely lucrative series 
of pharmaceutical antidepressants such 
as Prozac, is widely called the “happy 
chemical"—a characterization based on 
the simplistic idea that elevating serotonin 
levels in the brain is all that is required 
to alleviate depression. But it has yet 
to be definitively proved that low lev- 
els of serotonin in the brain are a cause 
of depression. The association between 
serotonin and mood disorders remains 
poorly understood. Any therapeutic effect 
attributed to SSRI antidepressants could 
instead be the result of far more complex 


effects—the generation of new neurons 
in the hippocampus, for example. Our 
old friend tianeptine actually decreases the 
amount of serotonin available in neural 
synapses, yet it exerts a therapeutic effect 
that Is every bit as potent—and appar- 
ently more enjoyable—than today's most 
popular antidepressants. Oxytocin, often 
called the “love hormone,” is involved in 
parent-child bonding and appears to be 
released as an indirect result of postor- 
gasmic surges in the hormone prolactin, 
but it is just as much involved in fos- 
tering aggression toward outsiders not 
present during the moments of oxytocin 
release. Then there are the endorphins, 
which were once thought to cause run- 
пег high, a feeling now thought to be the 
product of endocannabinoids—chemicals 
that originate inside us and activate the 
same receptors as cannabis. But despite 
their great potential for pleasure, endo- 
cannabinoids are relegated to the dustpan 
of biogenic pleasure chemicals. A phar- 
maceutical disaster called rimonabant, 
an appetite suppressant that blocked the 
activity of endogenous cannabinoids, 
induced psychosis and suicidal depres- 
sion in many users. 

So the intentional design of pleasure- 
inducing drugs is a rare occasion indeed. 
The scientists who have dedicated their 
lives to the creation of chemicals that have 
the sole purpose of inducing good feel- 
ings can be counted on a single hand. Most 
notable among them is Alexander Shul- 
gin, one of MDMA's earliest proponents 
as well as the inventor of more than 100 
novel psychedelics. But the lesson Shulgin 
learned from his pursuit of chemicals that 
provide consumers with a sense of tran- 
scendent euphoria was a difficult one; 
there was certainly money to be made from 
his inventions, which currently support a 
multimillion-dollar black- and gray-market 
industry, but the funds did not come back 
to him. He is currently struggling to pay 
his medical bills as his career comes to an 
end. Meanwhile, the manufacturers of 
dubiously effective yet non-abusable SSRI 
antidepressants luxuriate in vast pyramids 
of pharmaceutical wealth. 

The avant-garde of intelligent recre- 
ational drug design exists in New Zealand 
in the form of a small pharmaceutical com- 
pany called Stargate International. It’s run 
by an entrepreneur named Matt Bowden, 
who has introduced numerous psychoac- 
tive drugs that have the explicit purpose 
of fostering human pleasure. In fact, his 
company possesses the world’s only com- 
mercial laboratory operating aboveground 
in an effort to design new recreational 
drugs for mass distribution. 

And let's not forget transhumanists like 
David Pearce, an Oxford-trained philos- 
opher who has spent his life in the noble 
search for eternal unremitting bliss. He 
refers to his work as “paradise engi- 
neering” and speaks of “the hedonistic 


imperative.” Brushing away the quib- 
bles of those who suggest pleasure can 
be felt only in contrast to the counter- 
weight of pain, Pearce believes that the 
pain caused by disorders like depression 
will one day be considered as preventable 
and unnecessary as the pain one would 
experience while being operated on 
without anesthesia, (The two may even 
converge in the surgical anesthetic ket- 
amine, a.k.a. Special K, which acts as a 
potent antidepressant.) 

While many raise the puritanical objec- 
tion that the pleasure felt as a result of 
these drugs is somehow false or artificial, 
the research of neuroscientist Matthew 
Baggott on MDMA has actually found the 
opposite: One of the defining features 
of MDMA's effect is a feeling of increased. 
authenticity. And Pearce’s work has gone 
past mere speculation. He has successfully 


found a way to alleviate his own depres- 
sion with a unique combination of the 
methamphetamine derivative selegiline 
and amineptine (a personal supply of 
which he secured after its pharmaceu- 
tical banishment). While it’s unclear 
whether the future of human pleasure 
will hinge on the administration of small 
molecules like amineptine or more inva- 
sive means like deep brain stimulation, 
we should feel encouraged by the fact 
that we've already reached a place where 
pure euphoria can be reliably induced by 
chemicals. The question will soon become 
whether we can accept—and withstand— 
readily available pleasure. 


TEXT BY HAMILTON MORRIS 
ARTWORK ЗҮ JOHN BALDESSARI 
Brain/Cloud 
(With Seascape and Palm Tree), 2009. 
Courtesy of John Baldessari/Counter Editions. 


HOMAN SEXUALITY IS SO COMPLICATED! 


ONE LAST RIDÊ... WE'D ALREADY BROKEN UP_WE BOTH HAD NEW 
LOVERS:... SHE "D COME TO SEE ME ABOUT SOME BUSINESS AT MY FRIEND'S PLACE 
IN THE CITY... SHE LOOKED GREAL...] WAS STILL VERY ATTRACTED TO HER. WE HAD A 
FRIENDLY VISIT AND SHE GOT UP TO LEAVE. I COULDN'T LET HER GO JUST LIKE THAT. 


, 1 BLURTED OUT, “How 'BOUT- 
(уе = í 


LETTING ME HAVE ONE 
LAST RIDE ON YER BUTT 
BEFORE. OH, 
ALRIGHT, “SHE SAID, 


i 
E 
E 
2388 
© 
> 
E 


INSTEAD, HER 8 
PHENOMENAL ASS ¿ 
WPS GOING TO BE, + 
| -О GOOD USE! # 
THRILLED WITH = = 
ANTICIPATION AS $ 
HER HEELS KLUNK- 5 
ED LOUDLY ON THE z 
FLOOR? SHE бот = 
DOWN ON HER 
STOMACH ON THE 
LIVINGROOM CAR- 


REPRODUCTIVE WRONGS 


AS HARD-FOUGHT RIGHTS GET ROLLED BACK, PHILOSOPHER SIMON CRITCHLEY AND PSYCHOANALYST 
JAMIESON WEBSTER OFFER A PARADOXICAL PRESCRIPTION FOR A (MISGUIDED) LIFE 


1 
Cheaper than condoms and easier than abstinence, 
impotence is the best method of contraception. 


2 
Internet pornography is the second-best form of con- 
traception. It ensures that none of your seminal juices, 
wasting away in clumps of tissue, will fertilize any embryo. 


3 
The great civilizational advance of the rich north Atlan- 
tic democracies is to have made reproduction effectively 
impossible, which is evidenced in ever-declining birth 
rates (even for the contraception-hating lotharios of Italy). 
Nobody, apart from the mega-rich and the working poor, 
сап imagine having children anymore. 


4 

The growing prevalence of eating disorders among 
young women in the West has the unacknowledged 
though intended consequence of sterility, adding to the 
ever-declining birthrates. The fixation on androgynous рге- 
pubescent bodies, exercise, low caloric intake-i.e., total 
control over one's body-also leads to the draining of the 
libido. And is anything more obsessional than the idea of 
birth control and family planning? 


5 
Hard bodies do not equal hard cocks. Witness Schwarzeneg- 
ger, comparing the euphoric pump of lifting weights to sex: 
“I'm coming day and night!” So, then, why ever actually come? 


6 
Don't you sometimes feel nostalgia for good old-fashioned 
venereal diseases, like syphilis, which our Elizabethan fore- 
bears would treat with leeches and long days in what they 
called the “sweating-tub”? At leastin having sex, one risked 
something. But the clarity of classic STDs has given way to 
a much more subtle low-level pandemic of viruses (like the 
omnipresent HPV, which is like the ether itself) and con- 
tainable disorders. Sex becomes hygiene. It also becomes 
a source of fear, which is an excellent contraceptive aid. 


== = == 
In a recent study оп men's and women's excitement іп 
relation to viewing pornography (reading sexual excite- 
ment through brain waves and a device placed on his 
penis and in her vagina) the expected result of women's 
rapidly declining interest to that of men, on all accounts, 
was detailed. However, what did surprise the scientific 
researchers was that if you spliced the pornography with 
literally anything-pictures of flowers, cars, gay sex, clips 
of President Obama, daytime television, cats jumping off 
fences, even nothing more than a gap—you could keep 
her excitement going, and for much longer than that of 
men. Way longer. Hmm. 


8 
The paradox of sexual liberation is that when everything is 
possible, nothing is possible. When we are liberated from 
all those dreary old bourgeois repressive constraints, we 
are suddenly disoriented and unable to act. The hidden 
consequence of sexual freedom is impotence. With mag- 
azines like рїлүвоү in our hands (or, better, in our hand), 
generations of men have quite literally felt themselves 
to be the quintessential anti-Victorians who willfully and 
joyfully gaze at women's naked bodies. But the truth is, 
it is only repression that keeps desire alive. A woman 
in a burka or concealed by a veil is infinitely more sexy 
than the plastic perfection of a nude model. In a world 
obsessed with contraception (namely, placing barriers 
against anything and everything), perhaps the best bar- 
rier is no barrier. In which case, the battle cry of right-wing 
sexual prudes might well be "Long live the Centerfold!" 


9 
Should you have a couple of hours free on a wet Wednes- 
day afternoon, we encourage you to peruse the pamphlets 
from all across the U.S. aimed at educating teenagers about 
the dangers of sex, teen pregnancy, sexual assault, STDs 
and the rest. "Are you ready to have sex?" proclaims one. 
Apparently one must be able to assent to all of the following: 


(i) Lam comfortable using proper terms such as penis, vagina, 
vulva, clitoris, testicles, etc. without shame or embarrassment. 
(ii) If our birth control fails, | have enough money for emer- 
gency contraception or enough money to have a baby. 
(iii) 1 am comfortable talking to my doctor about my sex- 
ual health. 

(iv) I am comfortable talking openly to my partner about 
my feelings. 

(v) | know my body well enough to tell if | have an infection. 
(vi) Sex is the right thing for both of us. 


One wonders exactly what the etc. in (i) refers to. And the. 
‘odd monetary calculation in (ii) is rather peculiar: abortion 
or baby? As for (iii), who exactly is comfortable talking with 
doctors? Then (iv) and (v) require a genuinely bewildering 
degree of psychological and physiological self-awareness. 
And finally, (vi): When is sex ever the right thing to do? It's 
the wrong thing; that's the point. Isn't this the very definition 
of reproductive wrong? Or are we wrong? 


10 
But two wrongs do not make a right, so please don't get 
us wrong. All we are arguing for is that in the disorient- 
ing wasteland that is contemporary sexuality we might be 
able to revive some genuine eroticism and the experience 
of radical longing and yearning that fuels it-by embracing 
the wrong. Love is not knowledge. Eros is that hot, limb- 
loosening power, what the Greek poet Sappho described as 
"Sweat pours down me, | shake all over, | go pale as green 
grass. I'm that close to being dead" What could be simpler? 


Ralph Gibson uncovers 
the architectural allure of the 
tailored suit 


PHOTOGRAPHY BY RAIPH GIBSON 


"P 


умзопа 'STEGOW "ano TIVA 3н LV АШУ TINY AS апау “AULAS vaa ONISn A2N3OV INOVW 3HL IV ALIVL Ой 28 НУН УО VETO AB ONNALS 


ІШІ 


The (surprisingly) ancient 
roots of virtual sex, as seen 
by novelist Will Self 


To paraphrase Jimi Hendrix's memora- 
ble acid-fueled trope: I stand up next to a 
virtual mountain...and chop it down with 
the edge of my penis. Itoccurs to me that 
in case you didn't catch it the first time I'd 
better, Hendrix-style, say it again: I stand 
up next to a virtual mountain...and chop 
it down with the edge of my penis. Now, 
some of you out there will be only too 
ready to complete the verse for me with 
the assertion that, mutatis mutandis, I must 
be a voodoo child (or even "chile"), so 
bewitched am I by the way the new media 
have made available to the solitary onan- 
ist such a vast plurality of heaving flesh. 
But I say “Balls!”—being of the English 
persuasion—for hasn't the vast majority 
of sexual activity, inasmuch as it can be 
quantified at all, always been virtual? 

For every real glimpse of heaving flesh 
au naturel there have, since time out of 
mind, been many thousands of artificially 
paradisiacal ones constructed in the eye 
of the nonbeholder; for each whiff of 
the perfumes that mask—and mingle— 
with the odors of our desiderata, our 
lizard brains have always summoned up 
an olfactory superabundance so that we 
may flare our nostrils as we slumber in 
the seclusion of our subterranean nests. 
For touch and taste it’s the same: When 
it comes to sexual imagining, the most 
bottom-feeding and pedestrian among 
us are transformed into deep-chested 
Kenyans running tirelessly for mile upon 
mile across the eroticized uplands. 

Of course, I'm not about to deny the 
enormous impact the internet has had 
оп certain aspects of both our social exis- 
tence and our imaginative lives—to do 
so would be worse than reactionary; it'd 
be like struggling into a temple garment 
of the mind, and as I believe I've implied 
above, I'm keener on LSD than on the 
LDS. The Arab Spring has transmogri- 
fied into a long, hot summer of droning 
predation—and that summer has faded 
into a shivering Syrian winter. Now we 
have another long, hot summer, and many 
seem to feel that this accelerating gyre of 
political events must have something to do 
with the new media—that the web, gir- 
dling the earth, has been yanked so hard, 
Ceres starts up. Maybe—maybe not, but 


there's a difference between a change in 
pace and a direct change. If the new media 
have a message, it's simply: Buy More New 
Media. So while we may find ourselves pay- 
ing more to view, no one has been able to 
convince me that the fundamental terms of 
our most passionate endearment have been 
altered. And let's recall that while this may 
seem to be all about me—since it's my penis 
up against that virtual mountain—most 
men, in my experience, regard their man- 
or-mousehood as the measure of all things. 

If there's one certainty beyond our 
mortality and the fiscal question, it's 
that the perverse—like the poor—will 
always be with us. Sacher-Masoch was a 
near-contemporary of Freud’s, and the 
repression cooker that was Viennese sex- 
ual life constrained within the Ringstrasse 
has long since exploded, splattering succes- 
sive generations with its glutinous debris 
of symptoms and interpretations—yet just 
as not many of us really experience pain 
as pleasure, so a vanishingly small num- 
ber find the idea of suiting up in a giant 
oven mitt and being caressed by another... 
giant oven mitt remotely arousing. If you're 
like me—and if you've read this far, I think 
its safe to assume you are—your most 
commonly entertained sexual fantasy is 
probably having sex. 

By “having sex” I don't mean you are 
confined to a stereotypical repertoire of 
positions, partners or practices—far from 
it—but only that what you commonly 
while away your time in suited meetings 
imagining is having sex with another liv- 
ing, breathing, emphatically sentient and 
responsive human being—not some cyber 
zombie of a Second Life avatar. And since 
we've been hardwired to feel this way by 
a selection process that's been going on 
ever since Mitochondrial Eve waved good- 
bye to her hairy and pungent ape consort 
across the steadily widening gulf of the 
Rift Valley, I see no reason to believe it's 
going to change anytime soon. 

Fach successive generation gives birth 
to its own panicky anxiety about the virtual- 
ization of the sexual act. I recall, as а young 
man, going to see Wim Wenderss movie 
Paris, Texas, in which a radiant Nastassja Kin- 
ski funnels her dewy beauty down the line 
of a telephone-sex parlor—a few years 
later "Buffalo" Bill Clinton was get- 
ting his rocks off from reading excerpts 
from Nicholson Baker's telephone-sex 
novel Vox, which was given to him by a 
certain intern. The somewhat viscid cir- 
cularity of this situation—telephone-sex 
novel incorporated into telephone sex— 
shouldn't distract us from the constants: 
Telephone sex has dried and blown away, 
to be replaced by live-chat interactions on 
the web; what remains, of course, is the 
novel and sex itself. Go back another 20 
years and it was the movies and photogra- 
phy that were the great objectifiers: taking 
bodies—almost entirely female ones—and 
reducing them to so much less than the 


sum of their erogenous zones. Retire—in 
good order—a further couple of decades, 
and certain printed words are held to be 
shibboleths too damaging to be printed, 
lest their mutterers find themselves on a 
one-way trip to Sodom with a refreshment 
stop at Gomorrah. 

I would say fuck that if this weren't pre- 
cisely what were trying to get away from 
here. Because, let's face the facts: It’s the 
puritanical and the repressed who've 
always been the most filthy-minded 
among us, right back to that miserable 
moment when a fig leaf was tacked on to 
Adam's penis so he could no longer use it 
to measure anything at all and, instead, 
had to rely on an idea of a dick. Still, it 
should be no surprise that as technologi- 
cal means of reproduction become more 
and more sophisticated, the proportion 
of the perverse who—in the psychoana- 
lytic jargon— negatively cathect with these 
objects increases. I write this strange lex- 
ical entry in the week that the British 
police agency charged with tracking down 
pedophiles involved in the web-based dis- 
semination of images of child sexual abuse 
announced that it is targeting some 50,000 
potential suspects. Ach! How, upon hear- 
ing this baleful news, one longs for the 
innocent era before the web, when child 
sexual abuse was conducted exclusively up. 
close and personal by men in positions of 
trust and authority—teachers, priests, 
scout leaders, politicians and the like. 

Enfin, let us stand together up against. 
that virtual mountain and chop it down 
with the length of our penises, our breasts 
and our clitorises—and while we're at it, 
let us bury it in the depths of our vaginas 
and crush it between our own entirely real 
thighs. Just as the male sexual impulse 
tends, entirely healthily, to superabun- 
dance, so will imagery of all sorts ever be 
subjected to the same multiplier. Гуе no 
doubt that within a half century there will 
be computer programs that allow their 
users to experience a believable simula- 
tion of the act of love—believable, that is, 
for those whose imaginations are painfully 
straitjacketed by inhibition, inexperience, 
religiosity or all three. For the rest of us, vir- 
tual sex will be there—we may even, from 
time to time, dip our wicks in its pixels— 
but just as young men need to be educated 
emotionally to understand that movies and 
pictures are at best a substitute for, or a tem- 
porary adjunct to, the infinitely creative 
organ that lies between their own jug ears, 
so they must be steered out of the shadow 
play of their smelly little bedrooms and into 
the sunny uplands of someone else's. 

As for poor Jimi, I always thought it a 
strange quirk of the virtual that one of his 
final communications with the world was 
an answering-machine message—and this 
was in 1970! Sex, death and technology, 
see— Freud would ve approved. 


TEXT BY WILL SELF 


Y 


WHAT SORT ОҒ МАМ READS PLAYBOY? 


He may be a professional filmmaker or just a weekend camera buff. Maybe he doesn't know what a camera is. Maybe he invented 
cameras. We don't know. But one thing we do know: He's a man who always sets his focus above the ordinary. And naturally 
he applies the same high standards to every single thing he buys, steals or borrows. Fact: PLAv&ov reaches 100 percent of men 
who spend money on goods and/or services of any sort, anywhere. Want him to discover what you have to offer? Put it in PLAYBOY 


New York * Moscow + Baghdad + Skokie + Marfa + Los Angeles * Pyongyang + Vatican City 


(SPITS CHEWING TOBACCO) 
(THE SOUND OF A GONG) 


GOD IS A HGH-TONED. 

WAITRESS NAMED DESIREE, 
A: ALPHA AND YOU'LL DAMN WELL EAT 
WHATEVER SHE BRINGS YOU. 


If man is a product, is 


їнєскоч. This is Marlboro Country. Е 2 
WELL, | CERTAINLY 
DONT SMOKE 
CIGARETTES BECAUSE 
THEY TASTE GOOD. 
NO, HE'S 
JUSTA 


PRODUCT. 
энооги | 
s 
LOOKING ror 
 GEOGRAPIC. Is man a product of his environment? — 


PAS еі. --- 
News flash: You're KN HET 
WB, RT 
| 


IOOPS! | THOUGH 1Y8O) 
Are you the sort of | memet, 


person who reads PLAYBOY? AT YOUNG MEN. 


YES 


TEXT BY DOOGIE HORNER 


| PREFER 


Do you like what you see when you WAAL 
па 003 ISEE WHEN 
look in the mirror? 1LOOK 
IN PLAYBOY. 
THE FRONTIER IS CALUNG. DT | 
| NO эв 
JHE ONLY I 
MIRROR LOOK 
STEP BEHIND THIS 
NIS THE CURTAIN, PAST 
IGNITIO! ІШКЕ SPEED. REARVIEW. THE POOL AND 
WET BAR FOLOW 
МЕ ONTO IHE 
— О THERES A --- 

GREAT VIEW OF 

THE VALLEY 

A 15 THIS. Do you like what you 
Yep, in about d—— iun WHO SAID 
COMINGON | see when you look IMAMAN? — 
two seconds. NS mes 
І W: WHAT SORT OF 


MAN READS PLAYBOY? 


NO. I'M LEAVING. 
WHERE'S THE DOOR? 


ALTHOUGH 
* 
MODELS. THE KIND OF MAN WHO 
i Қане OWNS THE MAGAZINE. 
tacos 
Decl et 


THE KIND OF MAN 'Oh my gosh, Mr. Hefner! 
aves. We didi recognize you!” 
MY SAFE WORD IS LIKE THE ARCTIC HARE, 
a ik E 
QEQUICRIE ENVIRONMENT 


H: HEFNER PHILOSOPHY N: NATURE 


BUTIDONT 
NEED A CAR 
TO GOPIACES, 


— even Gros 


FEATHER 
THEIR NEST. 
Boy, you're а lot of fun. M: MONOGAMY 
"QUICK." HE SAYS TO 
J: JOKES THE ZEBRA, PRETEND 
IM KILLING YOU." 
UONS DONT АТЫ TRUTH IS 
| HAVE WIVES; Ithinklreadtha! | STRANGER 
FE THe ae bes somewhere, yeah THAN FTION! 
THIS DISCUSSION A lion is fucking a 
Б GETING TOO zebra when he sees 
HEWY PORNE his wife approaching. 
es 1S IT TRUE LIONS. 
HAVE SPIKES ON HOLD ON FL GOOGLE IT: “SPIKED 
THEIR DICKS? ANIMAL DICK.” СОН. -M GETTING 
SOME WEIRD HITS. 
| AND MORE 
IS THIS A JOKE? HUMIUATING! 


LET METRY 
"MAJESTIC BEASTS.” 
те THREE FAT, 
SCARED OF R: REPRODUCTIVE SITES ETIN 
K: KINK 
Жон WRONGS DONT MAKE 
——) Seriously? 
І L: LOVE 
[BASHFUL SHRUG) TOMORROW V: VIRTUAL 


CANI HAVE 
When was the lost time you === 1950 G: GIRL NEXT DOOR THEM ALL? 
looked at a high-quality 
adult magazine? 
NOBODY ROBS 
I SPERM BANKS. 
1970 B: BUSH 
rve ALWAYS 
WONDERED DON'T LOOK 
O: ON-SET WHAT FOR TT IN THIS 
YOUR OFFICES MAGAZINE! 


LOOK UKE! I 
| 1 heard George W. Bush the dife 
| J is painting dog portraits. дез pa 
| Isthat what you'd call ar between love and greed? 


TOO MUCH LOVE IS A 
IS NEVER FOUR-LETTER 

NO, | PREFER ENOUGH. WORD. 
BUNNY PORTRAITS, 


IMA MISCHIEVOUS GOD 
-----) WHO OFTEN DESCENDS OLYMPUS 
IN DISGUISE 


I | DONT KNOW, DID Ie 


"НАНА, ТОТАШУ KANG. SORRY, IM HIGH ON METH 


TM UST PASSING THROUGH RIGHT NOW. 
THE FLOWCHART ON MY WAY 
TO MAKE SOME COPIES. 
WANNA HELP?" 
| | P: PLEASURE 
"Did you just say no 
vs no j rm 
(Thunder crackles) 


Hey, can | install some 
roadside art in Texas? 


NS 


"PLAYBOY JrLagpor! 


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with its mind-blowing 
covers. Now, for the 
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Featuring hundreds 

of color photographs 
and behind-the-scenes 
outtakes from cover 
shoots. 


Forewordby Pamela Anderson, text 
by Damon Brown, Sterling Publishing. 
310 pages, $35.00.$42.00 in Canada 
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