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Saudi Arabia deported three guys for being “too handsome,” so Gosling, consider this your warning. 

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Live on TV: The Fall of Greece

We already knew about the economic crisis, the mass unemployment, the riots. But this summer we saw the tensions and turmoil of a nation erupt in a single act of startling violence on a morning television program. Within days, it was beamed around the world. Chris Heath uncovers the truth of what happened in that TV studio, a cautionary tale not just for the future of Greece but for the rest of us, too.

Pussy Riot: The Jailhouse Interview

They’ve become global heroes and foils to the macho rule of Vladimir Putin. But not even a two-year prison term can keep Russia’s celebrated punk band muzzled. Michael Idov smuggled a few questions into the grrrls’ gulag. Judging by their answers, the riot is just getting warmed up.

GQ: Does it bug you as feminists that your global popularity is at least partly based on the fact that you turned out to be, well, easy on the eyes?

Nadya: I humbly hope that our attractiveness performs a subversive function. First of all, because without “us” in balaclavas, jumping all over Red Square with guitars, there is no “us” smiling sweetly in the courtroom. You can’t get the latter without the former. Second, because this attractiveness destroys the idiotic stereotype, still extant in Russia, that a feminist is an ugly-ass frustrated harridan. This stereotype is so puke-making that I will deign to be sweet for a little bit in order to destroy it. Though every time I open my mouth, the sweetness goes out the window anyway.

GQ: This is perhaps an insensitive question, but what’s more useful for the progressive movement in Russia right now: Pussy Riot at large or Pussy Riot in jail?

Nadya: We will know the answer only after the next wave of protests. I would love to see that, even imprisoned, we can still be useful and inspiring. In any case, I’m happy I got two years. For every person with a functioning brain, this verdict is so dumb and cruel that it removes any lingering illusions about Putin’s system. It’s a verdict on the system.

Masha: At large, of course. That’s why the authorities don’t want to let us out. But we still have things to say, and we still want to say them. And even locked up, we’re not doing too bad of a job.

“We couldn’t even imagine that the authorities would be so dumb that they would actually legitimize our influence by arresting us. Sure, they tried to intimidate us constantly. But unlike Putin, we’re not chickenshit.”

Read the full interview at GQ.com

“Is He Coming? Is He? Oh God, I Think He Is.”

A blond man in a black outfit is climbing the hill. He is not hurrying. At the top of the hill, he turns left, toward the field where the kids have staked their tents. Last night, when low clouds curtained the moon and stars, those tents glowed red and blue and yellow from the lamps lit inside, and Adrian marveled at how pretty they were. Like Chinese lanterns, he thought. Now he’s stepping around them, walking backward parallel to and ten meters off of the path. The man appears to be dressed in a police commando’s uniform: black trousers over what seems to be a black wet suit, a vest with many stuffed pockets and the word politi on the right breast, a backpack. He also is carrying two guns—a rifle with an elaborate sight and a bayonet affixed to the muzzle and, in his right hand, a pistol. Adrian stoops into a half-crouch. He now suspects that he should, in fact, be afraid. But why would a policeman shoot people? This must be a prank, he tells himself.

—From GQ correspondent Sean Flynn’s account of the massacre at a summer camp on the Norwegian island of Utoya, when a right-wing terrorist murdered dozens of people, mostly teenagers, in a single, terrible afternoon

[awesomeness via Dave Weigel]

Seven New Obama Conspiracies!
How The Radical Fringe Will Freak Over the New Biography

These are hard times for birthers. The moment seems to have passed, the “evidence” rejected. But salvation awaits! David Maraniss’s exhaustive biography, Barack Obama: The Story, stretching from before his birth to the start of his political career, is out this month—and sure to inspire a new wave of conspiracy theories about our Kenyan Muslim commie in chief. GQ contributor Yoni Brenner puts on his tinfoil hat to predict the paranoias to come. Two new theories below. Click here for the rest.

Uncatchable:
Your Longread of the Day

From GQ contributor Michael Finkel’s gripping account of George Wright, America’s most elusive fugitive, who ran for forty years after escaping from prison and then successfully pulling off the most brazen hijacking in history:

The Delta ramp supervisor at the time, in charge of loading and unloading baggage, was Buster Cooper. He was 27 years old, in the operations center, listening to the radio chatter. The FBI was trying to persuade Wright to release the passengers. Then, says Cooper, he heard a statement over the radio that will forever be seared into his memory. It was Wright speaking from the cockpit.

“If you don’t bring us the money,” Wright said, “we’re going to throw some motherfucking heads out the motherfucking door.”

“Everybody in operations,” says Cooper, “went, ‘Whoa, this is getting serious.’ ” The First National Bank of Miami was contacted, and soon the money was on its way.

The bills, fifties and hundreds, were placed in “a cheap-ass suitcase” plucked from customer service, recalls Cooper. The black case, with a Delta Air Lines luggage tag, bulged at the sides.

There was discussion in the cockpit about how, exactly, the handoff would occur. Wright was worried about an ambush. “I want that man to come out here nude,” he told May.

“Be reasonable,” said May. News of the hijacking had spread, and dozens of people were rubbernecking just beyond the airport’s chain-link fence.

The plane’s copilot, Darl Henderson, had an idea: “What about a skintight bathing suit?”

Wright agreed. So a Delta employee ran over to the men’s store in the airport and purchased two swimsuits, with dark vertical stripes and a thick white waistband.

Cooper changed into the suit. An FBI agent named Bob Mills did the same. Then Cooper drove the mobile stairway out to the plane. He stopped twenty feet away. They’d promised to arrive unarmed, but in fact Mills kept a six-shot revolver on the seat.

“If I had my way,” says Mills in Melvin & Jean, “I would’ve shot them. Because I didn’t think they deserved to live.”

He didn’t get his way. Wright shouted instructions through the partially opened side window of the cockpit—the only way for him to communicate with Cooper and Mills. He made each of them walk away from the truck, barefoot and shirtless, then turn around to verify they were unarmed.

Mills dragged the suitcase to the base of the plane. One of the flight attendants opened a door and tossed out a length of red vinyl “escape tape.” Mills tied it to the suitcase. The attendants hauled it up and handed the million dollars over to the hijackers.

[Photo illustration by John Ritter]