The Sunday supplement: no. 79
Thoughts on the new GQ story, a bunch of watch resources including dealers for new and vintage, some autumn music, recent reading, and more
Thursday saw a new feature of mine drop online for The Quarterly. It’s also in print, with Chris Evans on the cover. The magazine promotes it as such:
Masculinity is evolving, and that shift has left some men feeling unmoored. At the foot of the Rockies, the operators of a dude ranch retreat are proposing a novel solution: a blending of cowboy culture and group therapy.
This one was challenging for being so personal, which is similar to another story last year about the death of my friend Lars. Profiling a celebrity is much easier than this sort of thing! And I was never dying to spend weeks watching Andrew Tate videos, etc., for research. But I’m glad I got to experience and learn what I did, and I’m very grateful to everyone who spoke to me, especially the dozens of people I interviewed on background about their experiences. If you’re one of those people (you know who you are), thank you.
Here’s a quote from the article to give some gist:
If the ranch had one distinctive approach to help men make sense of their feelings and find their inner confidence it was: horses. Each guy was assigned a horse for the duration of the experience—animals with whom we would develop genuine connections, or at least attempt to. For Steve and Tim, equine-assisted coaching was integral to their system primarily because horses are extraordinary readers of humans. The animals, they explained, exist in one of two states—afraid or not afraid—and when a person comes near, they immediately sense whatever is being projected: confidence or insecurity, intention or confusion. Maybe we didn’t know what was going on inside our minds and bodies, but the horses did and would respond in kind.
Eat, neigh, love.
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