Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2019 i Vanity Fair

1.K. Austin COLLINS “The Idris Experience,” “Idris was a fun hang,” Vanity Fair’s film critic says of this month’s cover subject. “I’m extremely fond of his work as Stringer Bell on The Wire, but seeing him imitate a frying egg was pretty fun.” Collins also writes crosswords for the New York Times and The New Yorker. 2.Tierney GEARON “The Coast of Utopia,” Gearon was touched by the authenticity of the surfer moms she photographed in Byron Bay, Australia. “I instantly connected with the girls,” she says. “With social media, you can make something look like one thing when, in reality, it is another. But it was just genuine, beautiful moments that melted one into the next.” 3.Bethany McLEAN “Bitter Pill,” “I was struck by David Sackler’s willingness to speak out…

FILM THE THIN BLUE LINE “Genius documentarian Errol Morris tells the story of a police officer’s murder in 1976 and the man wrongfully convicted of the crime. Morris—who briefly worked as a private detective in the ’80s—made an unforgettable, troubling film that helped free an innocent man.” BOOK THE RED PARTS BY MAGGIE NELSON “Poet and critic Maggie Nelson’s aunt, Jane, was murdered in 1969, thought to be a victim of a serial killer. Nelson had never met her, but death preoccupied her; she took baths, she writes, ‘with coins placed over my eyes.’ In 2004, DNA evidence implicated a new suspect. A probing look at how it feels to be caught up in a court case and a media frenzy.” PODCAST IN THE DARK, SEASON 1 “Over nine episodes,…

SHOP A Racing Machine on the Wrist Swiss watch manufacturer Richard Mille is enhancing its most emblematic ladies timepiece—the RM 07-01 Automatic—with a first-of-its-kind bracelet crafted from shockingly light Carbon TPT®. The timepiece combines the architectural complexity of a 200-part metal bracelet with the elegance of this technical material. The bracelet is formed of dozens of carbon plates placed on a grade 5 titanium skeleton by means of 44 of Richard Mille’s characteristic spline screws. This micromechanical gem combines suppleness and extreme rigidity, and weighs a mere 29 grams. www.richardmille.com WATCH This Short Film Will Open Your Eyes Follow the incredible journey of Qusay Hussein—a young man who barely survived a suicide bombing in Iraq, rebuilt his life at a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Jordan, and is now reinventing…

Spoiler alert: This story contains frank discussion of Avengers: Endgame; Game of Thrones; the larger conversation surrounding Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood; Jordan Peele’s Us and Get Out; and 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back. Proceed with caution. Spoilers—and a wider discussion of etiquette surrounding them—have been everywhere this year. Back in April, as Avengers: Endgame wound its way to theaters, the movie’s directors, brothers Anthony and Joe Russo, took to Twitter to beg fans not to ruin the film for others after what appeared to be key plot points leaked online. (“Remember,” they reminded their acolytes, “Thanos still demands your silence.”) The next month, Game of Thrones, the series that’s arguably done more than any to usher “spoiler alert” into the mainstream vernacular, reached its fiery conclusion,…

In early 2006, before the indictment and the headlines, before he was abandoned by most of the people he knew, Joseph Skowron III and his wife, Cheryl, were living in a tidy three-bedroom ranch home in Greenwich, Connecticut. In the early 20th century, Greenwich attracted flocks of industrialists and their descendants—Rockefellers and Morgans, beneficiaries of Carnegie Steel—who built manor homes on generous acreages. Always prosperous, the town was in the midst of another boom, and Skowron, who goes by Chip, was a member of the town’s new elite, a partner in a hedge fund called FrontPoint Partners. Since 2000, drawn by Connecticut’s relatively low taxes, the hedge funders had all but taken over Greenwich, occupying much of its office space and replacing its stately Victorians with garish mansions, priced to…

I remember when it was possible, at least in theory, to spend the summer catching up. Summer was the slow season, the sultry season, the season of reruns. It’s not like that anymore. The days stretch out before us, but they overflow with new things to see. Chernobyl, check. Fleabag season two, check. When They See Us, check. Women’s World Cup, ongoing check. Democratic primary debates, check check check. In advance of the second season of Big Little Lies, I interviewed four of its stars at the women’s collective the Wing in Manhattan; Sunday nights will be appointment viewing through late July because I cannot miss one minute of Meryl Streep, in the performance of a lifetime, being salty to Reese Witherspoon. But the dream of slowing down and catching…

He’s smooth‐ obviously. And tall. An hour into meeting him, I can’t help but continue to notice as much. We are deep into a conversation about growing up black and British in the ’80s and wanting to be a movie star: what that must have felt like to young Idrissa Akuna Elba, the first-generation working-class son of Ghanaian and Sierra Leonean immigrants, who’d grown up in Hackney and East London’s Canning Town, areas where the far-right National Front party had strongholds. It’s a complicated history. “Needless to say,” he tells me, “if you were black and living in Canning Town, you were probably subject to racial abuse and getting chased down the street by people calling you a black coon.” But he doesn’t dwell, preferring to tell a different story.…

Courtney Adamo’s minimalist, Shaker-style kitchen is gorgeous, but you already know that if you follow her. The house—one of the first built in the historic town of Bangalow, New South Wales—might just be the most overexposed house in Australia. With its clapboard cupboards, wooden stools, bulk dry goods in mason jars, Blanc Marble countertops (“slightly more expensive than the Carrara,” she explains in a blog post about her kitchen renovation, “but we are so happy with the decision”), Dunlin Chelsea Pendant Lights ($669 each), SMEG refrigerator ($2,870), Lacanche oven and stove (“range cooker of my dreams” and, at about $10,000, a “splurge”), the kitchen is like a scene out of Little House on the Trust Fund Prairie. Adamo (@courtneyadamo, 250K Instagram followers) is a midtier family lifestyle micro-influencer, which, if…

Greta Gerwig doesn’t remember reading Little Women for the first time. “It must have been read to me,” she says when I ask for her earliest memories of author Louisa May Alcott’s classic tale of four girls imagining a world beyond their humble surroundings outside Civil War–era Boston. “I always knew who Jo March was,” Gerwig continues. “She was the person I wanted to be.” In that, Gerwig has had plenty of company. Little Women is one of the most popular books in the history of American letters; after the first volume sold out its initial run of 2,000 copies in 1868, the novel has never been out of print. Simone de Beauvoir, born in 1908, pretended as a child that she was Jo—Alcott’s protagonist and stand-in, a determined, stubborn…

On a brilliantly blue spring day, David Sackler, a third-generation member of the now infamous Sackler family, sits in a large conference room high above Manhattan. He’s a big, bearded guy in his late 30s, and he’s dressed casually, in slacks and a blue V-neck sweater that matches the sky. But the tension in the room is palpable. Sackler’s family, which founded and owns Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, is widely viewed as the central villain in the opioid crisis that is devastating America. David has decided to come here today, over what he calls the “consternation” of advisers and family members, to break his silence about the Sacklers’ role in the drug epidemic. Since OxyContin came on the market in 1996, more than 400,000 Americans have died from…

Half a century ago, the acclaimed music critic George T. Simon said everything you need to know about sexism in jazz: “Only God can make a tree, and only men can play good jazz.” This gender bias has deep roots. Jazz has always been a boys’ club, a macho art form reserved for brash, fast-fingered men living on the road, in cramped quarters, hustling from gig to gig. And despite playing a pioneering role in integration and the civil rights movement, jazz has had an abysmal record on gender. The pantheon of jazz giants is overwhelmingly male, comprising musicians who even neophytes know on a firstname basis: Louis and Duke, Dizzy and Miles. Women, meanwhile, have long been celebrated as exceptions. Nothing reinforces this fact better than the Village Vanguard,…

What is your idea of perfect happiness? Being grateful for what you have. What is your greatest fear? Losing my family. And fear that the world won’t become a better place. Which historical figure do you most identify with? Anyone who has struggled. Which living person do you most admire? Women in leadership positions in every field who are using their advantages to inspire younger women. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself ? Biting my nails. What is the trait you most deplore in others? I hate it when my little brothers don’t close their mouths when they’re eating. What is your greatest extravagance? Walking in the gardens or by a river in Oxford. What is your favorite journey? When I travel to a country and I…