Innholdsfortegnelse for Jun-15 i Vanity Fair

1 Sebastian Junger In “The Bonds of Battle” (page 106), Contributing Editor Sebastian Junger draws on his experiences embedded with the Battle Company of the 173rd Airborne for Vanity Fair to examine why American soldiers get PTSD at rates far higher than those of any other military in the world. “In war after war, casualties have plummeted while PTSD and disability rates have skyrocketed,” says Junger. “The reason has nothing to do with war. It has to do with us.” 2 Robert Lacey Biographer Robert Lacey considers Ford Models founder Eileen Ford—the subject of his book Model Woman, adapted in “The Call of Beauty” (page 128)—not unlike Margaret Thatcher. Both were “criticized by feminists, but Eileen did so much through her own example to empower women,” says Lacey. To that…

On the one hand, “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Shakespeare, circa 1600). On the other, “the simplest explanation is best” (the American public, 2015). Or so we claim to believe, even when strange things happen. And yet. Around a quarter of Americans subscribe to some sort of conspiracy theory surrounding the death of Princess Diana, the death of Jesus, and the attacks on 9/11. (Sadly, no data is available on how many of us suspect curious links among the three.) Even more of us—7 in 10, in fact—are skeptical of the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was alone responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy. (The C.I.A. and the Mafia are prime alternative suspects, though Lyndon Johnson tallied…

‘All of this has been a shock,” says Pharrell Williams, about the astounding success of both “Get Lucky”— his Grammy-winning collaboration with Daft Punk— and his Oscar-nominated worldwide sensation “Happy.” “I didn’t think I was going to make my own music until a few years ago.” The 10-time Grammy winner’s rise to international stardom came after years of producing others—Nelly, Jay Z, Britney Spears, Gwen Stefani, Justin Timberlake, and the Neptunes (Pharrell’s duo with Chad Hugo). In addition, he’s a coach on the hit TV show The Voice and an artist-designer who’s worked with, among others, Louis Vuitton, Uniqlo, and his own Billionaire Boys Club—and was just named the C.F.D.A.’s fashion icon of the year. Here, he talks with Lisa Robinson about music, his optimism for the future, and that…

Since 2008, La Mer— which for three consecutive years has partnered with the National Geographic Society—has donated more than $2.6 million to help promote oceanconservation efforts globally. This month, in honor of World Oceans Day (June 8), the brand launches Crème de la Mer Blue Heart moisturizing cream. The limited-edition jar, with colors emblematic of the sea, helps support future generations of ocean explorers. ($450 for 100 ml.; lamer.com) —SUNHEE GRINNELL LUXE LOCALE Hair guru Serge Normant is now staging his talents out of a newly restored, early-20th-century Chelsea town house in N.Y.C. The Serge Normant at John Frieda Salon has romantic sensibilities with a contemporary twist. (sergenormant.com) —SHG…

As with so many impressionable boomers who received their cultural education at drive-ins and double features, it was the movies that first impressed Las Vegas on my bubblegum brain. Not Ocean’s 11, the Rat Pack caper movie— too drab-looking and middle-aged—but Viva Las Vegas (1964), starring Elvis Presley as a racecar driver with the quintessentially dopey name of Lucky Jackson and Ann-Margret wiggling her sugar bowl like a go-go dancer possessed. The movie was the standard Elvis combination of travelogue and bozo frolics, but the anthemic title song transcended all. So celebratory! It made Las Vegas sound like a nonstop fiesta, one big trampoline. On-screen, such happy-go-lucky hedonism lost its spell as Vegas movies began to dwell on the dark, abusive, addictive, pathological side, the busted loves, broken dreams, grandiose…

The sounds of ice tinkling in Pimm’s, lawn mowers buzzing, and the clunk of a mallet on a ball— such are my memories of summer days in the English countryside with childhood friends, enjoying pleasantries and a game of croquet. Croquet has been a favorite English pastime since at least the 1850s, when it reportedly migrated from Ireland to London, where it was played in a slightly different form from today’s version. Though this time-honored ball-and-mallet game has traveled the world, with players as distant as the South Pole, it is an English game through and through. You won’t come across a more exquisitely groomed croquet lawn anywhere in the world than those you’ll find across England at schools and universities (the game is popular at both Oxford and Cambridge),…

The first time I experienced what I now understand to be posttraumatic stress disorder, I was in a subway station in New York City, where I live. It was almost a year before the attacks of 9/11, and I’d just come back from two months in Afghanistan with Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance. I was on assignment to write a profile of Massoud, who fought a desperate resistance against the Taliban until they assassinated him two days before 9/11. At one point during my trip we were on a frontline position that his forces had just taken over from the Taliban, and the inevitable counterattack started with an hour-long rocket barrage. All we could do was curl up in the trenches and hope. I felt deranged…

The love goddess Venus rises from the sea, gold-wreathed, and her latest incarnation hails from Orlando. Charlotte McKinney first made waves as the blonde bomb-shell in a 2014 ad campaign for Guess, made another splash in early 2015 with a sassy Super Bowl ad for Carl’s Jr. all-natural burgers, and then dived right into Season 20 of ABC’s Dancing with the Stars. Though her image swims through the In-ternet, her profile still needs to fill out. Who is this new girl, seemingly born for a bikini? “I grew up in Florida,” McKinney says. “I have two parents that are still together. They own a busi-ness—they sell exotic cars. To me, nowadays, it’s so lucky to have two parents still together. I believe that’s how I’ve made it so far, having…

You can’t go home again, but maybe you can go bro again. That’s what the guys from Entourage, HBO’s male fantasia about Queens boys mak-ing it big in Hollywood, are looking to do with the release of the Entourage movie, opening June 3, four years after the hit series ended its eight-season run. Film history is littered with bad movies made from beloved TV shows, but the Entourage gang—including writer-director Doug Ellin, producer Mark Wahlberg, and co-stars Kevin Con-nolly, Jeremy Piven, Kevin Dillon, Adrian Grenier, and Jerry Ferrara— seems undaunted by making the tricky transition from small screen to big. There was “not one iota of hesitation” about doing the proj ect, says Grenier, who plays the Wahlberg-esque movie star Vincent Chase. Maybe they’re encouraged by the success of the…

In May 1977, George Lucas and Twentieth Century Fox released the first Star Wars movie. And from that moment on, you could say, the Force was with us. The Bond folks might disagree, but many would argue that no recent cultural phenomenon has achieved an international, multi-generational fan base of greater magnitude than Star Wars has. Star Wars had all the balls-out, heartstopping fun of a B-movie adventure romp, and the giddyup-and-go of a great Western. At the time it was the highest-grossing film in history. Over the next four dec ades, the Star Wars saga spawned two billiondollar-earning trilogies as well as myriad toys, video games, books and comics, and more than one TV series. Lucas, who also has four Indiana Jones films under his belt, is a near-singular…

COURTNEY EATON AGE: 19. PROVENANCE: Bunbury, Western Australia. GROWING UP DOWN UNDER: The stunning Aussie, who grew up in a remote port city, recalls, “When you are younger you’re like, ‘Ahh, I want to get out.’ But now it’s really nice to go back. The beaches are amazing.” TO THE MAX: Eaton credits two people for her acting debut, in this month’s Mad Max: Fury Road, a reboot of the post-apocalyptic franchise, starring Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron: “I’m grateful to [director] George Miller for plucking me from Perth by casting me in Mad Max, and to my dad, who, when I didn’t know if I wanted to audition, kind of made me do it. He was like, ‘It’s Mad Max—you can’t say no.’” ON SET, IN THE MIDDLE OF…

Sally Mann—renowned for her sen suous, spirit-stealing photographs— exposes herself in her memoir Hold Still (Little, Brown), a mesmerizing portrait of the artist as a child, wife, and mother. Maggie Nelson slays entrenched notions of gender, marriage, and sexuality with lyricism, in tellectual brass, and soul-ringing honesty in The Argonauts (Graywolf). Lisa Grunwald and Ste phen Adler bequeath The Marriage Book (Simon & Schuster), a dowry of wisdom from writers, artists, sexperts, and politicians. Mar tha Fay frames the art of Jules Feiffer in Out of Line (Abrams). Jonathan Galassi’s debut novel, Muse (Knopf), is an “entirely fictional” story about two literary-world lions who come to blows over the work of an iconic female poet. David Gates again plucks the sublime art of the ordinary in A Hand Reached Down…

“IF YOU CAN’T FIX IT, DECORATE IT.” Who knew, until Netflix’s Orange Is the New Black came along, that the “women in prison” premise, long the province of pulp novels and sexploitation pictures, could be re-purposed for prestige television? By the end of 2013, its first year of existence, the hour-long show, based on Piper Kerman’s memoir of the same name, was reportedly the streaming service’s most watched original series— a distinction it still holds today, with its third season on the verge of release. The architect of O.I.T.N.B. is Jenji Kohan, the program’s creator and coexecutive producer, who, in putting the fictional Piper (Taylor Schilling) through her paces at Litchfield Correctional Institution—the humiliations, the small victories, the scraps, the friendships, the betrayals, the doorless toilet stalls—has exposed her viewers…

Every group has a goat—the one member all the other boys and girls make fun of and don’t invite to their parties. Whether you’re a teenage girl or an adult about to embark on a cruise with a bunch of strangers, it’s vital to designate someone else as the goat in order to make sure the goat isn’t you. In the 2012 Republican presidential primaries, the goat was Rick Perry, governor of Texas. This was far from inevitable, and you could see how Perry found it puzzling. He is much more used to being the alpha male in the room. When he started wearing glasses in an attempt to refute rumors that he’s a moron, the cause became hopeless. Being a moron isn’t necessarily a disqualification for becoming president. But…

One afternoon in March, at the offices of his Bad Robot production company, located in a nondescript two-story building on what passes for an industrial stretch of Santa Monica, the director J. J. Abrams was reviewing special-effects shots for his next film—known colloquially as “the hotly anticipated new Star Wars movie” and more formally as Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens. Abrams, a boyish 48, with wiry hair and black-framed nerd glasses, was seated in a small, plush screening room with a dozen or so associates, including visual-effects supervisor Roger Guyett and Abrams’s longtime producing partner Bryan Burk. The group was teleconferencing with Industrial Light & Magic, the San Francisco–based effects company, as well as a second unit in London, with the artists and technicians represented on-screen by their works…

First, let us consider the question of Sumner Redstone’s delicate health. He is 91 and clearly ailing. But he has been living for years with physical disability, ever since he was terribly burned in a March 1979 fire at Boston’s Copley Plaza hotel. Redstone survived only by hanging onto a third-story windowsill as his right hand burned, until he was rescued by a ladder from a fire truck on the ground below. He endured five operations, more than 60 hours of surgery, to repair the damage, which included burns over 45 percent of his body. The incident left his arms and legs scarred and his right hand a gnarled hook. It took him a full year to recover. Every time his bandages were removed, he was pumped full of morphine.…

This past February 19, fans and friends of Oliver Sacks learned, by way of an article he published in The New York Times, that the great neurologist and medical chronicler had terminal cancer. “Nine years ago,” he explained, “it was discovered that I had a rare tumor of the eye, an ocular melanoma. The radiation and lasering to remove the tumor ultimately left me blind in that eye. But though ocular melanomas metastasize in perhaps 50 percent of cases, given the particulars of my own case, the likelihood was much smaller. I am among the unlucky ones.” “I COME UP FOR AIR, DESCEND, AND RE-EMERGE.... ONE OF MY NEIGHBORS ONCE MISTOOK ME FOR A MIGRATING WHALE.” I have been both a longtime fan and a longtime friend of Sacks’s—and, what…

What is your idea of perfect happiness? Happiness is going to come and go, but to have a chance at intermittent happiness you need to be free from fear. In our culture, in our day, we can lose sight of what a rare gift that is: to live free from fear … What is your greatest fear? Still nuclear annihilation. Which historical figure do you most identify with? Woody Guthrie. Which living person do you most admire? Noam Chomsky, Barack Obama. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Greed. What is your greatest extravagance? Construction. What is your favorite journey? Falling asleep. What do you consider the most overrated virtue? Stoicism, self-control. On what occasion do you lie? Backstage, after a show … What do you dislike most…

In “Wall Street’s Flash Mob” (April), Michael Lewis reported about a charge the S.E.C. brought against the Swiss bank UBS in January 2015. A UBS spokesperson disputes his characterization of that charge. Her letter follows. The order to which Mr. Lewis refers is called a Primary Peg Plus or PPP order, which was only in use at UBS from June 2010 to March 2011. UBS settled with the S.E.C. in January regarding our PPP orders and our alternative trading system (A.T.S.), commonly known as our “dark pool.” The S.E.C. order does not allege that UBS benefited high-frequency trader clients over UBS private clients. The S.E.C. order does not allege that any retail orders were harmed because of the PPP order type. In fact, the order explains that when a PPP…

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Stretching back to kindergarten at Buckley on New York’s Upper East Side, Hobson Brown and Billy Nachman, the founders of Criquet golf shirts, have been friends since they were in short pants. Thirty-five years later, there remains a youthful quality to the guys’ Clubhouse, on South First Street in Austin, where they founded their label in 2010: You can grab a free beer, play lawn games out back; dogs are welcome, encouraged even. You can also try on one of their vintage-inspired polos and button-downs—brightly colored tops with flap pockets and removable collar stays that take the Caddy shack aesthetic to a grown-up level. “My favorite shirt was one I found in my grandfather’s closet; I loved that it was four-button, with a hard collar,” says Nachman. “We knew that…

“SEVENTY WOMEN? THAT’S INSANE!” Aziz Ansari, who is among the most popular stand-up comedians in the country, met me for lunch at Cherche Midi, on the Bowery, New York, looking like a hip, surprised sprite. Mr. Ansari famously went from playing a delusional Lothario on Parks and Recreation to having 5.6 million Twitter followers and selling out Madison Square Garden twice with his one-man show. “Are you into splitsies?” he asked me. It was a firstie. We had a hamachi crudo, followed by his choice of panseared salmon and steak frites to share. “Absolutely!” said the waiter. “Thank you, sir,” said Aziz. We were meeting to discuss his first book, Modern Romance (for which he received a reported $3.5 million advance), written with the sociologist Eric Klinenberg and published this…

I used to dream of being able to go to a restaurant near where I live that would serve the freshest and most local vegetables nearly naked, so that diners could taste them in their just-picked glory rather than lost in cloakings of purslane pesto and thick almond romesco sauce. Where simply grilled pieces of meat and fish would arrive glistening with the lightest painting of olive oil. Where chefs would seek out local cheesemakers and farmers who cared about the pigs and cattle and chickens they raised, like the food producers and farmers I’ve made it a practice to seek out, buy from, and write about in an attempt to keep them in business. Why couldn’t the restaurants I went to and reviewed save me the trouble of finding…

Write what you know, novelists are often advised, and Judy Blume knew many things when she wrote the books that proved so influential and iconic that their author eventually became a question on Jeopardy!, and the inspiration for an episode of South Park and a Saturday Night Live skit, not to mention a hero and sentimental favorite of generations of readers. Among those things is that growing up is a time of powerful, dramatic occurrences. It’s been more than 45 years since Blume’s first book was published, but she is still writing what she knows, and still turning to the early years for that knowledge. Except this time, with In the Unlikely Event, instead of looking inward, examining the emotional upheaval evoked by bodily changes and new physical sensations, Judy…

‘When I was growing up, my parents were these awesome eccentric artists. I would have been the black sheep if I was to be a lawyer or doctor or something more useful,” Nat Wolff says. The 20-year-old actor-musician wunderkind son of actress and writer Polly Draper (Thirtysomething) and jazz pianist Michael Wolff was already playing gigs at age six around New York City, where he grew up and still lives. He went on to star with his younger brother and musical partner, Alex, in Nickelodeon’s The Naked Brothers Band, produced, written, and di-rected by his mother. Think This Is Spinal Tap for tweens. Last summer, Wolff stole the screen as the blind best friend in The Fault in Our Stars, the teen block-buster based on John Green’s best-selling Y.A. novel,…

When Eileen Otte and Jerry Ford eloped to San Francisco in November 1944, in the midst of World War II, it was hardly surprising that Jerry should declare his profession as “Naval Officer” on his marriage certificate. His new spouse, however, set down an occupation that was more unusual in a time of war, “Stylist,” and she listed her employer as a “commercial photographer.” Earlier that spring, around the same time the young couple first met, Eileen had embarked on the career path that would lead to her creation with Jerry of what would become the Ford modeling agency. It had started not far from her Great Neck, Long Island, home. Lying on a towel on Jones Beach, Eileen was engaged in one of her favorite activities: perfecting her tan.…