It’s Friday, and Max B is free. The staggeringly influential Harlem rapper—who’s spent the past sixteen years in the clink for his role in a robbery that led to a murder—stepped back outside this past Sunday, and GQ’s own Frazier Tharpe was there, rolling with Max as he reunited joyously with friends and family, hit the Jets game and the jeweler, and dropped into the studio to start making up for lost time. This morning rumors swirled that Max or his associates had gotten into it with Ja Rule’s team backstage at a Brandy and Monica concert, but both parties have since denied any ruckus took place. As Max told Frazier on Sunday, “I'm on peace, love, and harmony time, you heard?…I’m with the family, we working, we getting money, we making music. Where's there room for anything else but prosperity and positivity?”
Meanwhile: “To come out and explicitly say the thing you want—to be loved by the person you love most, to be acknowledged for your talent, your hard work, your genius—feels entirely illicit for these suddenly emboldened Midwesterners,” writes Elizabeth Nelson, nailing the sense of nervous possibility that makes the Replacements’ 1984 third album Let It Be such an exhilarating all-timer. Nelson’s essay is adapted from the liner notes of a new deluxe edition of the album that hits stores today; if you’ve never heard this one, you’ve got one of the greatest albums of the ‘80s waiting for you right now.
Also this week in GQ’s Culture section: We reflected on the decline of the “trad” movement (think “tradwives,” for one) and the culture of platform-refusal and offline meaning-making that might replace it. We wondered aloud what Substack thinks they’re doing and checked out some incredible Billy Bob Thornton jackets. We plunged into the weird world of Thanksgiving video games, got hyped for 2026’s biggest movies and TV shows, and questioned whether the combined efforts of Sabrina Carpenter, Jennifer Lawrence, Cole Escola and Seth Rogen can rescue the Muppets from pop-cultural purgatory. We talked to Yung Lean about silent meditation and sobriety, to Morgan Spector and Carrie Coon about playing the scheming Russells in HBO’s The Gilded Age, to Walton Goggins about busting some ribs in a horseback-riding mishap in Mongolia, and to Stephen Lang about how “super kablooey crazy” Miles Quaritch’s life on Pandora is about to get in Avatar: Fire and Ash.
Plus: We recommended some movie remakes that are better than the originals, urged you to catch Christy and Sydney Sweeney’s career-redefining performance therein, got the lowdown on how masked singer and egg-white/leg-day enthusiast Orville Peck shaped up for Street Fighter, and watched Tom Cruise collect his first-ever Oscar live and in person at the Governors’ Awards. (Yes, that means awards season is upon us once again. We’ll get through this together.)
Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you back here (in your inbox) next week.
