Innholdsfortegnelse for Holiday 2017 i Vanity Fair

Donald TRUMP & Hillary CLINTON Because, love ’em or hate ’em, they are the magnetic poles of this polarizing year. Theirs was a clash of titans pitting woman power versus male prerogative, pantsuit versus panty-raider. On November 8, the Day of Decision, our long national nightmare was supposed to end and our long national healing to begin, but the voters had other ideas. The pop of the champagne cork to celebrate the Times Square ball drop for 2017 can’t come soon enough. Two thousand sixteen is a leap year, with an extra day tacked onto February, but it has felt a lot longer than that. The year didn’t leap so much as crawl under a heavy bombardment of bad headlines. It seemed as if the graveyard shift would never end.…

The night it happened, right after midnight on August 10, Bill Marczak and his girlfriend were staying up late to watch Star Trek reruns in their spare one-bedroom apartment, in El Cerrito, California, just north of the University of California at Berkeley campus. A trim Ph.D. candidate with dense brown hair and a disciplined beard, Mar czak wasn’t just another excitable, fast-talking Berkeley grad student. He was a pioneering analyst in a new and unusual theater of cyber-warfare: the struggle between Middle Eastern freedom activists and authoritarian governments in countries such as Bahrain and Egypt. He was also a senior fellow at Citizens Lab, the University of Toronto “interdisciplinary laboratory” that had almost single-handedly discovered and alerted the world to how these governments were monitoring dissidents with spyware quietly marketed…

Some nights, Brian Chesky wakes up with his heart pounding. It’s a familiar feeling—one that he’s had since the early days of Airbnb, the online lodging company he co-founded nearly 10 years ago. Back then, his fears were not unlike those that plague most entrepreneurs: he worried about running out of money, building a product no one wanted, his company going bust. There is little danger of that now. Airbnb, worth $30 billion, operates in every place in the world except Iran, Syria, Sudan, Crimea, and North Korea. Roughly 100 million people—including Beyoncé, Kendall Jenner, and Gwyneth Paltrow— have used the site. And Chesky, at 35 years old, is a billionaire and one of the most powerful C.E.O.’s in Silicon Valley. Still, in the quiet dark hours, when there are…

It’s not A Wonderful Life anymore. It hasn’t been since 1983, the year of A Christmas Story—the now classic film about nine-year-old Ralphie Parker’s thwarted desire for a forbidden Christmas pres ent: an official Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-Shot Range Model air rifle with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time. A sleeper of a movie, A Christmas Story forever changed the cozy, sentimental holiday-movie genre. When we think of pre-1983 holiday movies, we think of plum puddings like Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (the best of several incarnations being the 1951 version, in which Alastair Sim plays Ebenezer Scrooge); the 1942 Irving Berlin musical Holiday Inn and its 1954 cousin, White Christmas; the rather dark 1946 Frank Capra drama starring James Stewart, It’s a Wonderful…

One day in September 2014 the publisher of Gawker Media, Nick Denton, sent an e-mail to Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and billionaire. It could easily have been a message to a friend, or at least kindred spirit, for, as many people who know them both have noted, the two have so much in common. They are contemporaries: Denton turned 50 this past August, and Thiel 49 two months later. Both were born in Europe— Denton in England and Thiel in Germany. Both graduated from fancy universities— Denton from Oxford and Thiel from Stanford. Both made their fortunes in the digital world; in fact, it had brought them together in San Francisco a dozen or so years earlier. Both are gay, and both came out relatively late. Both…

8:00 The punctilious Khans, Khizr and Ghazala, arrive on time, invitation in hand. 8:13 Mistaking the event for a costume party, Roger Ailes and Gretchen Carlson enact one of his favorite fantasies and arrive as Jabba the Hutt and Princess Leia. 8:59 Misdirected by a special version of Pokémon Go customized for players hoping to reconstitute the Soviet empire, Vladimir Putin wanders in and spies mutualadmiration-society co-founder Donald Trump, who is loudly calling attention to himself by inviting guests to go furniture shopping with him. 9:04 Suspecting a better party at Robin Roberts’s pad, Michael Strahan ghosts his date, Kelly Ripa, leaving her to make small talk with other suddenly solo acts Angelina Jolie, Huma Abedin, and AlexRodriguez. 9:13 Loaded with benjamins earned from Hamilton, LinManuel Miranda seeks investment advice…

The call came shortly after three a.m. on Monday, October 3, from 36 Quai des Or fèvres, the imposing fortress-like headquarters of the Paris criminal police, overlooking the Left Bank of the Seine River. Founded in 1812, “36,” as it’s commonly called, became the model for crime-busting units worldwide, from Scotland Yard to the F.B.I. Pre-dawn calls from 36 are not unusual for Paris police chief Christian Sainte, but the one that roused him from his bed early that October morning would prove to be different. “Kim Kardashian, victim of V.M.A.,” said the night officer—V.M.A. meaning vol à main armée, armed robbery. Conventional time doesn’t exist for the chief of judiciary police in the perpetually roiling city of Paris, France. “I know everything, day and night,” he told me in…

Americans are focused on the wrong border. It’s not Mexico, with all this dubious talk about building a wall, but Canada, with its Mounties, and comedy writers who move among us, betrayed only by the occasional mispronunciation of “about,” that threatens our way of life. If this nation was not founded on the free flow of syrup, it should have been. And now, as anyone with kids can tell you, the price of syrup has remained stable and high; it’s more expensive than oil. Is it Arab sheikhs who did this, Russian oligarchs? No. It’s Canadians, who, organized into an ironfisted cartel, have established a stranglehold on that honey-flavored elixir. In short, fpaq—the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers— is opec. Formed in 1966, the federation was tasked with taking…

I just read Nick Bilton’s “The Talented Ms. Holmes” [October], and I want to compliment him on a great piece. This article hit me as containing the most accurate depiction of Theranos’s culture. The company hired me in 2012 as a formulations chemist, and I was on board for about one year before I left. I worked with chief scientist Ian Gibbons and was quite troubled when he never returned to work. My heart goes out to his family. Thank you, Nick, for properly uncovering the disgusting culture of this company and its founder, Elizabeth Holmes. NIC BLAIR Denver, Colorado I was absolutely spellbound by Nick Bilton’s article. I remember wistfully thinking how nice it would be to create a $9 billion enterprise that hoped to change the world. Bilton…

‘Because of this Hamilton fairy dust, I have so many doors open to me now,” says Tony Award–winning actor-rapper Daveed Diggs, whose dual roles as Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson were standouts in that American musical theater phenomenon. Diggs, currently on the ABC series Black-ish, is also on tour with his rap group Clipping, and has plans to start work on a solo rap album. Here, he talks with Lisa Robinson about life after Hamilton. LISA ROBINSON: You left Hamilton this past summer. Are you sick of talking about the show? DAVEED DIGGS: It’s a good thing that I love the show and the people who built it, because I just as easily could have been in a hit that I didn’t love. But I like that people are…

The bar of the Plaza Athénée, an elegant Upper East Side hotel, is empty save for an elderly French couple sipping Bordeaux at two p.m. when in bursts a tall blonde crackling with energy. It is Jennifer Lawrence, wearing a black cashmere sweater, jeans ripped at the knee, and black boots, her platinum hair chopped into a chic bob. Delicate gold jewelry circles her wrists, neck, and fingers, and her most pronounced accessory, a security team, looms nearby. She orders tea and explains, “I am playing a ballerina in my next movie so my first step is not drinking alcohol for every meal of the day. Obviously I’m still drinking every day,” she adds, in the same engaging, infectious manner America has come to love. While most millennials are navigating…

It was never quite enough, those intermittent doses of Catherine O’Hara and Eugene Levy administered every few years via Christopher Guest’s ensemble movies. Not after SCTV, where the two Canadian actors made their names in the late 70s and early 80s, acclimating their fans to regular hits of their fearless, nuanced, out-there comic brilliance. Which is why the return of Schitt’s Creek is so welcome. The series, in which O’Hara and Levy star as a fallen, formerly wealthy couple reduced to living with their adult children in the show’s titular backwater town, kicks off its third U.S. season on January 11, on the cable channel Pop TV. For Levy, who says he was “scared at SCTV to play anyone who remotely resembled me,” Schitt’s Creek marks a departure, in that…