James' World 2

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For decades, GQ was the place men learned to dress themselves. We’d teach you how to talk to your tailor, introduce you to your next game-raising boots, and—crucially—lay down a handful of hard and fast rules about style that you, the reader, were meant to follow religiously. Like: Never wear a tie wider than three inches. Plaid flannels are fine for a lumberyard or a hardware store, but not a formal office. Don’t go shirtless at a music festival. (That one is still true.) On occasion, we’d even explain how to properly break the rules with panache.

But a few years ago, GQ pumped the brakes on all the lawmaking. The thought was: We had entered menswear’s Wild Style era, where stylish guys began exploring new modes of self-expression at every turn—ditching their tuxes for flowy tunics and jumpsuits on the red carpet; dabbling in makeup and nail polish; investing in flashy It bags. Dictating exactly what one should and shouldn’t wear suddenly felt curmudgeonly and antiquated. Who were we to stand in the way of progress? It was a time for unbridled experimentation—for freaking it without restraint—and our precious style rules fell by the wayside.

In 2023, though, the moment finally feels right for us to lay down a few new sartorial edicts. The anything-goes abandon of the last couple years has given way to a return to elegance—and quite frankly, some of you have been allowed to dress yourselves unchecked for too long.

That’s why our team has come together to devise this new list of Dos and Don’ts for a new age of men’s style. Some of the advice is traditional, like which tie knots to avoid like the plague; some of it is extremely right now, like how best to parse TikTok menswear trends (hint: don’t). Unlike in the past, however, when GQ would’ve issued definitive rules as an institution, these new guidelines are a little more fluid and subjective, based more heavily on the personal style and lived experiences of our staffers (and a handful of our fashionable friends) than ever before. Follow them, ignore them, debate them, share them—it’s really up to you. These are GQ’s Dos and Don’ts for getting dressed right now.

Repeat your outfits over and over and over.

Trust us: No one but you is keeping track of how often you’ve worn those jeans with that shirt. Part of the beauty of holding onto clothes for the long haul is finding new things to enjoy about them—how good your ass looks in those jeans, say, or how sick a tie looks with that shirt—once you’ve worn them, so thoroughly you thought they had no secrets left to reveal. —Avidan Grossman

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Gabriel Alcaia

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Congress averted a shutdown on Saturday by mere hours, passing a measure that extends government funding for the next 45 days. The stopgap bill funds the government at the current $1.6 trillion annual rate until Nov. 17, the deadline by which it needs to pass another bill to avoid a government shutdown.

But while the Senate’s 88 to 9 vote salvaged the wages of millions of federal employees and social security payments for those in need, the act omits funding for what some deem critical—including Ukraine aid—while also increasing tensions between Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his more conservative colleagues.

McCarthy attempted to pass a separate resolution that would better appease his far-right colleagues on Friday, but that bill fell short by 21 votes, prompting the Speaker to seek an alternative route. “It’s alright if Republicans and Democrats join together to do what is right,” McCarthy said.

McCarthy has since faced criticism from the President for his failure to abide by funding agreements settled during the debt ceiling deal in May, and faces threats to his speakership.

“We should never have been in this position in the first place. Just a few months ago, Speaker McCarthy and I reached a budget agreement to avoid precisely this type of manufactured crisis,” said Biden in a statement. “For weeks, extreme House Republicans tried to walk away from that deal by demanding drastic cuts that would have been devastating for millions of Americans. They failed.”

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President Biden

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The Luddites have a bad reputation.

These days, the word is most commonly used as an insult—shorthand for somebody who doesn’t understand new technology, is skeptical of progress, and wants to remain stuck in the ways of the past.

That perception couldn’t be more wrong, according to Brian Merchant. In his new book, Blood in the Machine, Merchant argues that understanding the true history of the Luddites is vital for workers today grappling with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation in the workplace. 

“At least in my lifetime, the Luddites have never been more relevant,” Merchant, 39, tells TIME. “We are confronting a series of cases where technology is being used by tech companies and executives in different industries as a means of trying to drive down wages and worsen conditions so that the entrepreneurial class can make more money.”

Who were the Luddites?

If you know anything about the Luddites, you probably know that they were English textile workers who, at the dawn of the industrial revolution, resisted the introduction of new machinery. They would sneak into factories in the dead of night and destroy the power-looms they believed were threatening their jobs.

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The felled tree at Sycamore Gap, beside Hadrian’s Wall, on Thursday. The authorities said they had arrested a teenager and a man in connection with what they described as an act of vandalism. Credit…Owen Humphreys/Press Association, via Associated Press

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In 2011, when she was in college studying abroad in Peru, Alice Robb ran out of reading material and picked up a copy of Stephen LaBerge’s Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming. Her initial skepticism quickly dissolved, and she and a friend spent the summer practicing LaBerge’s tips: they recounted their dreams to each other; they did “reality tests” during the day to trigger similar checks while sleeping. Robb began keeping a rigorous dream journal and found that, after very little time, she began remembering her dreams in detail.

In short, she began taking her dreams very seriously — a stance that she has maintained since. In her new book, Why We Dream, Robb, a science journalist, presents a comprehensive and compelling account of theories of and research on dreaming from ancient times through the present day. Throughout, she displays an intense respect for what our minds do while we’re sleeping, and the findings she presents — that dreaming is essential for sanity, that analyzing our dreams can be revelatory, that dreams can be used as diagnostic tools and even manipulated for our own mental health—corroborate her conviction that, as a culture, we would benefit from paying more careful attention.

Robb and I met at a bar near where she lives in Brooklyn to talk about dreams’ predictive power, what it’s like to make your dream journal entries public (hint: uncomfortable), and what closely observing our dreams can offer.

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Wildest dreams

Photo by Eddie Kopp / Unsplash

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[Photo: Yuki Iwamura/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Rawpixel (wave, stock chart)]

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Although Spider-Man started as a comic book character, he has made his way to live-action video several times. I remember seeing him appear on The Electric Company in the 1970s for a short skit; it was cool but a little odd. In the modern era of live-action Spider-Man movies, we had the Tobey Maguire version, followed by Andrew Garfield’s turn, and finally, the Tom Holland version that appears in the current Marvel Cinematic Universe. We got a chance to see all three in Spider-Man: No Way Home, which was great, plus a good excuse to answer the question of whether MJ could really hang on during one of Spidey’s swings.

But now it is time to ask an even tougher question: Which version of Spider-Man is the strongest? Let’s compare the Maguire version in 2004’s Spider-Man 2 to the Holland version in 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, since they perform similar actions: a test of strength that involves using Spidey’s webs to restrain a moving vehicle. Maguire’s Spider-Man stops a runaway subway train, and Holland’s uses webs to hold a splitting ferry together. (It would have been great to include Garfield’s version in this comparison, but there’s just not a scene that shows a similar feat of strength.)

Stopping a Subway Train

Here’s the situation in Maguire’s Spider-Man 2, which you can watch in this clip: After a battle with a bad guy, Spider-Man finds himself at the front of an out-of-control subway train. There are a bunch of people on the train, so he needs to save them. He attempts to slow the train by jamming his feet down onto the track, but that doesn’t work. So he shoots some webs at the buildings on both sides of the track and holds on. The webs stretch and—spoiler alert—the plan works. Spidey stops the train.

If we estimate the force required to stop this train, that will also be an estimate of Maguire’s strength.

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Photograph: Collection ChristOphel/Alamy

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Albert Einstein didn’t know about the existence of antimatter when he came up with the theory of general relativity, which has governed our understanding of gravity ever since. More than a century later, scientists are still debating how gravity affects antimatter, the elusive mirror versions of the particles that abide within us and around us. In other words, does an antimatter droplet fall down or up? 

Common physics wisdom holds that it should fall down. A tenet of general relativity itself known as the weak equivalence principle implies that gravity shouldn’t care whether something is matter or antimatter. At the same time, a small contingent of experts argue that antimatter falling up might explain, for instance, the mystical dark energy that potentially dominates our universe.

As it happens, particle physicists now have the first direct evidence that antimatter falls down. The Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) collaboration, an international team based at CERN, measured gravity’s impact on antimatter for the first time. The ALPHA group published their work in the journal Nature today. 

Every particle in the universe has an antimatter reflection with an identical mass and opposite electrical charge; the inverses are hidden in nature but have been detected in cosmic rays and used in medical imaging for decades. But actually creating antimatter in any meaningful amount is tricky because as soon as a particle of matter and its antagonist meet, the two self-destruct into pure energy. Therefore, antimatter must be carefully cordoned off from all matter, which makes it extra difficult to drop it or play with it any way.

“Everything about antimatter is challenging,” says Jeffrey Hangst, a physicist at Aarhus University in Denmark and a member of the ALPHA group. “It just really sucks to have to work with it.”

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The hardest part of the ALPHA experiment was not making antimatter fall, but creating and containing it in a tall vacuum chamber. CERN

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Most of us are a little bit addicted to a lot of things — Instagram, our email, whatever show we watched way too late last night. It’s human to crave more of what we like, and for the most part, pretty harmless. But sometimes it seems like the entire world is stacked against moderation. That’s what led Michael Easter, a science journalist, professor, and author of the forthcoming book Scarcity Brain, to investigate a tendency known as “the scarcity loop” — a pattern that leads humans (and many other animals) to repeat excessive behaviors that can harm us in the long run.

Here, Easter discusses how the scarcity loop relates to money, shopping, and other tripwires embedded in modern consumption. It’s not all bad — as Easter puts it, easy access to things you want is a fortunate problem to have. The key to reining it in is being aware of it in the first place — and knowing when to walk away.

How did you learn about the scarcity loop, to begin with?
I started learning about the scarcity loop because I’m really interested in bad habits. My background is in science journalism, and writing about health and wellness. People always focus on building good new habits, but I’ve noticed that if you haven’t fixed your worst habits, you still have your foot on the brake. Basically, bad habits hurt people more than good habits help people. And there’s no better place to see this than Las Vegas, which happens to be where I live. This town is built on getting people to do excessive behaviors that often hurt them in the long run. Slot machines are the weirdest. They’re everywhere and people play them around the clock. I started digging into what makes slot machines so appealing, and that eventually led me to interview the guy who designed them. He’s the person who introduced me to the scarcity loop.

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Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photo: Getty Images

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