When Esquire’s relatively new Editor-in-Chief Jay Fielden decided to bring back the magazine’s “annual” Dubious Achievement Awards after a seven-year hiatus, he did not have far to look for the team to put it together.
The awards ran from 1962 until 2008, and David Hirshey, the deputy editor for 12 years, was in charge of the list.
After leaving Esquire, Hirshey became an executive editor at HarperCollins, a job from which he recently retired.
Hirshey and the merry band that put together the awards list over the years had kept in touch and amused themselves by putting together their own private Dubious Achievement lists.
“When Fielden contacted me about reviving Dubious Achievements for the December issue, I got in touch with the guys who produced the act with me for all those years — Michael Solomon (now at Forbes) and Stanley Bing (aka Gil Schwartz, executive VP of corporate communications at CBS) — and we did a mini-version of the awards,” Hirshey said.
There was no contest when it came to the new list, which is hitting newsstands this week, according to Hirshey.
“[Donald] Trump won bigly,” he said. “He stood hair and shoulders above the rest of the truly dubious figures — Ryan Lochte, Martin Shkreli, Hillary Clinton, Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, those creepy clowns hanging around schoolyards and anyone who played Pokémon GO.”