The GQ Punch List: 8 Things You Need to Watch, Hear, and Read this Week

1. Be a Trap Lord. Like A$AP Ferg. The rapper's debut studio album—titled Trap Lord, obvs—is out tomorrow, and features collaborations with the likes of A$AP Rocky, French Montana, and Waka Flocka Flame. Plus, tracks like "Hood Pope," in which we learn he's the Hood Pope. But first and foremost, he's a trap lord—A$AP Ferg stopped by GQHQ last week, where he explained to our own Ren McKnight just what the heck that is. GQ: How would you define a "trap lord"?
A$AP Ferg: A trap lord is basically the lord of the trap, and my trap is rap.

GQ: Sometimes we call Michael Hainey, GQ's deputy editor, the "trap lord." Are you okay with that?
A$AP Ferg: Is he a hustler? As long as he's jiggy, I'm cool with it.

2. Contemplate The World's End with help from Simon Pegg. We've seen the apocalypse a lot this summer—it destroyed James Franco's house, gave Matt Damon robot arms, and made Will Smith...weird. But The World's End is different: It has beer. Part of the "Three Flavours Cornetto" trilogy (the first two chapters were Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) from British comics Simon Pegg and Nick Frost and director Edgar Wright, The World's End follows a group of friends who reunite for an epic bar crawl that ends at the title pub. That is, until they realize everyone in their hometown has become alien robots hell-bent on destroying humankind. We enlisted Pegg to school us on what to expect when you're expecting the end of the world.

3. Learn three facts about comedian Kurt Braunohler. Recorded live at rock clubs in Seattle and Portland, Braunohler's debut comedy album, How Do I Land?

is due out tomorrow. And it's really, really funny. (Oh, and the album title comes from a Kickstarter project Braunohler pulled off in which he raised $6,000 to hire a pilot to write the words, "How Do I Land?" across the sky in L.A. YESSS.) Spoiler alert: one of the facts is that he was breast-fed until he was FIVE YEARS OLD. In Braunohler's words, "That's some Game of Thrones shit, motherfuckers." Here's the, uh, aptly-titled "Breast Fed" track from the album:

4. Have a beer with Anna Kendrick. Sort of. In her new movie Drinking Buddies—which opens in theaters Friday—she plays Jill, the sweet, functionally alcoholic girlfriend of Luke (Jake Johnson) with whom she wants to talk marriage but he's too busy flirting with his co-worker Kate (Olivia Wilde) at a Chicago craft brewery. In real life, YOU MARRY HER. Reasons why include: this. And this. This too. Oh, and that time she talked to GQ's Lauren Bans about how much she likes beer. See also: that photo you're probably staring at instead of reading this.

 

5. Play this at your end-of-summer BBQ. The bad news: Summer is almost over. But, good news: John Mayer's new album—Paradise Valley, due out tomorrow—is a folksy soundtrack to the end-of-season. (Like the lead track on the album, "Wildfire": "'Cause a little bit of summer's / What the whole year's all about.") Also, no more sweating. Check out the lyric video for "Wildfire" below...just, um, ignore that bandana-scarf thing on his head.
 

6. Think about dying...with David Copperfield. No one wants to die—Exhibit A: the entire premise for Elysium—and that's why Adam Gollner wrote his latest work, The Book of Immortality: The Science, Belief, and Magic Behind Living Forever. Gollner's book, available tomorrow, explores the insane, often mistaken, lengths we'll go to feed our immortality obsession, as he writes in his introduction:

    We're drowning in misinformation. How-to books such as Why Die? A Beginner's Guide to Living Forever and Young Again! How to Reverse the Aging Process and Physical Immortality: The Science of Everlasting Life each outline various ways to defeat reality by harnessing miracles of technology. Finding such miracles is abundantly easy, especially online. Searching "immortality device wanted" leads to a site called www.achieveimmortality.com that claims to own US patent number 5,989,178 for "the most imporatnt [sic] invention in human history," a gear-based magnetic pinkie ring that "ALLOWS HUMANS TO STAY PHYSICALLY YOUNG FOREVER."

Gollner spent five years researching the subject, chatting up a range of immortality-obsessed characters, from anti-aging researchers at Harvard to "radical life-extensionists." And he goes to magician David Copperfield's private island, where he claims he's found the fountain of youth.

7. Don't expect Sharni Vinson to scream. You're Next, out in theaters Friday, has already made its mark on horror movie history twice. First: best slasher movie title EVER. So good, yet so simple, it's amazing no one's used it already. Second, its signature line of dialogue, possibly the most insane sentence uttered by anyone, ever, anywhere: "I wanna fuck you in this bed next to your dead mother." For our August issue, we dubbed the film's star Sharni Vinson our Kick-Ass Movie Girlfriend. Here's more from our own Devin Gordon's conversation with Vinson.

8. Relive last night's Breaking Bad with the best GIF of the night. Also, the coziest. Sleep tight, Huell.