The Crash of One-Eleven Heavy

Swissair Flight 111 crashed on September 2, 1998 with 229 souls aboard. No one would ever put it all back together again. [View in Browser]( [Esquire Sunday Reads]( [The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy]( The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy This year marks the 25th anniversary of the crash of Swissair Flight 111. The story about the crash, and the efforts to determine how it happened, was originally published in the July 2000 issue of Esquire. _____________ Late summer, a man and woman were making love in the eaves of a garishly painted house that looked out on the lighthouse—green light revolving, revolving—when a feeling suddenly passed into them, a feeling unrelated to their lovemaking, in direct physical opposition to it: an electrical charge so strong they could taste it, feel it, the hair standing on their arms, just as it does before lightning strikes. And the fishermen felt it, too, as they went to sea and returned, long ago resigned to the fact that you can do nothing to stop the ocean or the sky from what it will do. Now they too felt the shove and lock of some invisible metallic bit in their mouths. The feeling of being surrounded by towering waves. Yes, something terrible was moving this way. There was a low ceiling of clouds, an intense, creeping darkness, that electrical taste. By the lighthouse, if you had been standing beneath the revolving green light on that early-September night, in that plague of clouds, you would have heard the horrible grinding sound of some wounded winged creature, listened to it trail out to sea as it came screeching down from the heavens, down through molecule and current, until everything went silent. That is, the waves still crashed up against the granite rock, the green light creaked in its revolutions, a cat yowled somewhere near the church, but beyond, out at sea, there was silence. Seconds passed, disintegrating time...and then, suddenly, an explosion of seismic strength rocked the houses of Peggy's Cove. One fisherman thought it was a bomb; another was certain the End had arrived. The lovers clasped tightly—their bodies turning as frigid as the ocean. That's how it began. [Read the Full Story]( [MORE FROM ESQUIRE]( [It’s Chris Pine Time!]( It’s Chris Pine Time! Monday morning in the hills above Hollywood. We’re in Pine’s sauna, a cube of wood and glass near the edge of his property. Pine—lightly bearded, shock of graying hair, wearing only orange board shorts—is perusing little bottles, dripping essential oils into a waist-high chimney topped with hissing hot stones, fine-tuning the vibe. “I love any sort of ritual,” he says. “I can even get into a Catholic Mass because I like the aesthetic. And a sauna is a whole ritual. It’s about gifting yourself a period where there’s nothing to do other than to purify, to release, to cleanse, to start again.” When he’s alone in the sauna, Pine will stretch or listen to a podcast, but because I’m here, we talk about his last big moment out in the world: the seemingly quite nutso Don’t Worry Darling press tour, consumed soap-operatically by a diversion-craving populace when the film premiered in Venice last September. “If there was drama, there was drama,” Pine says of the shoot, but for the record, “I absolutely didn’t know about it, nor really would I have cared. If I feel badly, it’s because the vitriol that the movie got was absolutely out of proportion with what was onscreen. Venice was normal things getting swept up in a narrative that people wanted to make, compounded by the metastasizing that can happen in the Twittersphere. It was ridiculous.” He speaks well of Olivia Wilde and Harry Styles (“a sweet guy”), loves Florence Pugh—whom he first worked with in 2018’s Outlaw King—“to fucking death,” and maintains that nobody spat on anybody in Venice. [Read the Full Story]( [My Bug-Out Bag, The Wilderness, and Me]( My Bug-Out Bag, The Wilderness, and Me In late November, on a Tuesday afternoon, my husband locked me out of the house. It was the first real day of snow in northern Wisconsin, gray and cold, and sticky flakes dusted the forest around our home. Not the weather I’d have chosen for a night unsheltered in the woods, but in a way, I reassured myself, that made the experiment realistic: survivors can’t be choosers. The week before, a package had arrived in the mail from a company called Echo Sigma (motto: “Be ready for anything”) with a backpack, or “bug-out bag,” containing all I needed—supposedly—to survive for three days in an emergency, after “bugging out” of modern life. My mission was to live out of it for twenty-four hours, and to learn something along the way about survival, or at least about the ways that we try to prepare for it. I hadn’t peeked in the bag; I wouldn’t know its contents until I got into the woods. I wore insulated coveralls—I’m not a complete masochist—and brought nothing else with me but a camera and Pepé, my most competent dog. The pack was the size of a high school book bag, which seemed awfully small to hold food, water, shelter, and warmth, but at eighteen pounds, at least it had a comforting heft. I crossed a broad meadow and entered the trees, where it was instantly colder and darker. Pepé trotted ahead. Already the snow was starting to stick. I found a rock to sit on, took off my pack, and unzipped it, waiting to learn my fate. [Read the Full Story]( [Here's Where to Get Pedro Pascal's 'The Last of Us' Jacket]( Here's Where to Get Pedro Pascal's The Last of Us Jacket The much-anticipated adaptation of The Last of Us has finally landed on HBO Max. Arriving with a gut-punch premiere episode, the new series is based on the 2013 video game of the same name, and drops us into a post-apocalyptic world ravaged as much by humans as the zombie-like Infected. The narrative focuses on Joel Miller, played by Pedro Pascal. A onetime carpenter who lived in Austin in 2003 when people first started turning into bloodthirsty fungus monsters—yes, really; they're legitimately terrifying—Joel washed up at some point in the next 20 years in a quarantine zone (QZ) in Boston, where he does odd jobs and the occasional bit of smuggling. He was already a tough guy pre-apocalypse, and he's even tougher in the narrative's version of 2023: a world populated by grotesque creatures, an authoritarian military government, and hordes of raiders and slavers lying beyond the walls of the QZ. Naturally, he dresses the part. In jeans and denim shirts, henleys and boots, he's outfitted for hard-wearing utility. And though there is very little about Joel's world that seems particularly desirable to those of us living in this version of 2023, we've gotta say—his wardrobe is the exception. [Read the Full Story]( [Ray Liotta: An Oral History]( Ray Liotta: An Oral History For decades, he was always there, the Goodfellas icon who made everything he was in better. Here, we present the full story of the man, told by those who knew him, respected him, worked with him, and loved him. _____________ Gary Hecker: There’s a restaurant in Venice called 72 Market Street that was there for many years. It was owned by Dudley Moore. Ray and I and a date of his and my then-fiancée, we would go to dinner at 72 Market Street. Ray was not the kind of guy to go up to a group of people and start talking. That’s something that I would do, but it was not something that he would do. But we’re at dinner and he gets up and leaves the table to go talk to somebody at another table. And it was Irwin Winkler, who would go on to produce Goodfellas. So he went up to Irwin. I may have given him a push and said, “You should go talk to these people.” Ray said, “Irwin, can I talk to you outside?” It’s really ballsy to go up to Irwin Winkler and say that. I remember Ray was gone for fifteen minutes, which was really a long time. It was all happenstance—getting Ray out and going to 72 Market Street, Irwin Winkler being there, Ray going up to him, which he rarely did. But that helped to grease the wheels for him to get that part. [Read the Full Story]( [The 50 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time]( The 50 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time Since time immemorial, mankind has been looking up at the stars and dreaming, but it was only centuries ago that we started turning those dreams into fiction. And what remarkable dreams they are—dreams of distant worlds, unearthly creatures, parallel universes, artificial intelligence, and so much more. Today, we call those dreams science fiction. Sci-fi brings out the best in our imaginations and evokes a sense of wonder, but it also inspires a spirit of questioning. Through the enduring themes of sci-fi, we can examine the zeitgeist’s cultural context and ethical questions. Our favorite works in the genre make good on this promise, meditating on everything from identity to oppression to morality. As the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing said, "Science fiction is some of the best social fiction of our time.” Now, here are the best science fiction books of all time. 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