Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2024 i Vanity Fair

Inside The Sun Rose room at Pendry West Hollywood, a hidden oasis steps from the Sunset Strip, Vanity Fair and Goldman Sachs Private Wealth Management hosted an intimate group of guests for an exclusive discussion between editor in chief Radhika Jones and Yves Béhar, acclaimed designer and founder of industrial design firm Fuseproject. Béhar, a Swiss-born designer who found international success designing for Silicon Valley startups, recognized early in his career the potential of technology to shape human experiences. Since then, he has co-founded and collaborated with more than 90 startups. The core focus of Béhar’s work is human-centricity: designing technology that integrates within the lives of users. A smart baby bassinet, an ultra-condensed electric pickup truck, a robot that helps autistic children acquire social skills, and a bionic sleeve…

A 1911 PHOTOGRAPH shows Madam C.J. Walker in the driver’s seat of an automobile portering a carful of women—a veritable metaphor for collective success. At the time Walker had recently incorporated her hair-care enterprise, which ultimately made her one of the nation’s first Black millionaires. As the Louisiana native later told Booker T. Washington, “I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing goods and preparations…. I have built my own factory on my own ground.” Walker trained “hair culturists” at the Lelia College of Beauty Culture (named after her daughter, A’Lelia) and brought the “talented tenth” of intelligentsia and wealth into her orbit. Renowned for their fantastic glamour, the two Walkers lived not far from the Rockefellers at their estate, Villa Lewaro, in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York. After C.J.’s death in…

FOR THOSE OF us on the outside, the “fog of war” is beginning to resemble a total eclipse of the sun. With the contraction of print publications, the front pages of newspapers and the covers of newsmagazines have essentially disappeared, no longer providing a unifying focus. With a multitude of factions weaponizing media, using fake or misleading imagery in a parallel media war, viewers have been left largely in the dark, not knowing with whom to empathize, their tribal loyalties reinforced. And now, with mounting skepticism fueled by such manipulations, the photographs and videos that actually depict the conflict between Hamas and Israel are increasingly considered suspect. As a result, the BBC can publish an article on how two four-year-old boys, Omer and Omar, one Israeli and one Palestinian, were…

THE ENTRANCE TO the Everglades Club, on fashionable Worth Avenue, is almost hidden from view. The mirrored façade, behind carved wrought iron, deflects the intrusive glances of passersby. Its heavy, imposing door rebuffs the curious or unworthy. A strong push and the right pedigree are required to gain admittance, as you might expect from a club that considers itself one of the landmarks of Palm Beach. Inside its dark foyer, a gray-haired attendant scans a list of the chosen for your name. When it appears, she lifts her palm to guide you up narrow steps to a hushed white courtyard, framed by blue-and-white-tiled arcades and softly lit by rows of white rice paper lanterns. Palm trees and pink bougainvillea provide a pop of color. Here and there are the entrances…

JOHN DONNE WROTE that “no man is an island,” Sartre that “hell is other people” — two ways of describing our intrinsic entanglement with each other, us humans. Leslie Jamison’s Splinters (Little, Brown) and Sloane Crosley’s Grief Is for People (MCD/FSG) tender another two takes. In Splinters, Jamison braids the at times volcanic dissolution of her marriage, her overwhelming love for her infant daughter (even as she yearns to return to unfettered art making), and the memory of her parents’ own split—turning a keen eye on how both she and her ex-husband foundered, offering grace for each party. In the droll and poignant Grief, Crosley (a VF contributor) confronts two calamities that occur a month apart: A thief steals her jewelry and her closest friend dies. What might seem like…

YOU’VE PROBABLY READ ABOUT BRYAN JOHNSON, THE TECH ENTREPRENEUR WHO’S TRYING TO LIVE FOREVER. After making a killing (about $400 million) in the payments processing business in Chicago, Johnson has devoted himself to becoming a “rejuvenation athlete” in Los Angeles, spending his waking hours tending to his body and his sleeping hours tracking everything from his heart rate variability to the duration and hardness of his erections. He calls this endeavor Project Blueprint. Johnson doesn’t have a publicist. Yet his quest for immortality, which is overseen by a rotating staff of health care professionals and costs him an estimated $2 million a year, has been extraordinarily well documented in the press—fueled by our fascination with the “quantified self” movement, atomized into millions of social media posts and swept up into…

JANUARY 14, 1964 LONDON I was ready to head to Kenya in the morning. Then the phone rang. It was my boss, Frank Spooner, the picture editor of the Daily Express. “I’m taking you off the Africa assignment,” he said. “We’d like you to go to Paris. The Beatles are on tour there.” My heart sank. Yes, I’d heard of the Beatles. They were getting bigger—hit song after hit song. But, at 31, I considered myself a serious journalist. As a staff photographer for London’s leading daily paper, I’d covered the rise of the Berlin Wall and broken stories in Egypt, Northern Rhodesia, and Russia. I was more interested in Kenya’s new government than in following around some rock-and-roll group. “Frank, I’m supposed to go to Africa tomorrow,” I told…

Fred RITCHIN “THE FOG OF WAR,” P. 36 In light of the Israel-Hamas war, “writing this essay was particularly painful because the credible photograph—the fulcrum of my career—has been so undermined,” says the dean emeritus of the International Center of Photography and former professor of photography and imaging at NYU. Mike TOFANELLI “LATE BLOOMER,” P. 88 With his unique brand of visual humor, the illustrator and party caricaturist wanted to convey “irreverent fun and silliness” in his imagining of Conan O’Brien — “a staple of his late-night show,” he says. Adrienne RAQUEL “FOREVER SIMONE,” P. 40 In a series of images inspired by the simplicity and chicness of the ’90s, the bicoastal photographer and creative director wanted to “not only celebrate Simone Biles as a brilliant Olympian but also a…

RUNAWAY by Larry Keigwin, 2008 After seeing this dance piece, which Reid calls a “bizarre combination of animal-like behavior and rigid mannequins” in 2010, “it stuck with me so much” that she wrote a modern dancer character into Come and Get It. KNOCKING THE HUSTLE by Lester Spence, 2015 This “transformative,” “beautifully written” book — “specifically in its position against the political narrative of inevitability” — informed Reid’s shaping of one character “for whom hustle is a cornerstone of her personality.” FUNNY GAMES by Michael Haneke, 1997 Reid describes the film’s “egg scene” as “a perfect example of characters breaking the rules of decorum, resulting in a fantastic low-level dread.”…

WHEN REAL ESTATE developer Octavio Aguilar saw the decadent Mexico City mansion at Luis G Urbino 84, home to only two families since it was built in the 1940s, he knew it would be a hotel, his hotel. Lodging had never been a part of Aguilar’s portfolio, but he’d spent his whole life traveling around the world, developing a passion for boutique hotels along the way. One trip he took as a teenager with his mother and sister, to France’s Loire Valley, was particularly foundational—they stayed in three smaller spots, he says, never needed a reservation, and the service was perfect and personal. When he got older, he’d flip through the Relais & Châteaux book to find the places he thought “had the most character.” And so Aguilar, who still…

“MAYBE HE HAS a crush on you,” Simone Biles says to me—playfully but also seriously. It’s a Thursday evening in The Woodlands, a tony Houston suburb, and the greatest gymnast of all time and I are having dinner at Sixty Vines, known for its seasonal cuisine and 60 wines on tap. Biles picked the restaurant; it’s one of her favorites and she comes often. But as a succession of dishes arrives, compliments of the kitchen—seared bass, sliced tri tip, and later, sticky toffee cake and Basque cheesecake delivered by chef Mikail Sayeed himself—she notes this “has never happened before.” According to Biles, he must be trying to impress me, an unrecognizable writer, and not her, a two-time Olympian and holder of 37 Olympic and World Championship medals, the most in…

ON THE NINTH floor of the New York Times headquarters, high above the bustling newsroom, a group of editors are doing the Sunday crossword. Or, rather, they’re undoing it. The editors already accepted this submission, one of the 150 to 200 puzzles arriving weekly, and are now working through it clue by clue—questioning, waffling, rewriting. They nitpick and fact-check. They debate the timelessness of a hint; whether the solver’s reaction will be Oh, I guess versus Aha! There’s a completed puzzle onscreen, along with little video boxes for editors beaming in, including Sam Ezersky, joining from upstate New York, and Christina Iverson, from her Iowa home, where a cat can occasionally be heard meowing in the background. A few seats away, Joel Fagliano, sporting a New York Times T-shirt, a…

If you tuned in to NBC at 12:35 a.m. on September 13, 1993, you witnessed late-night history in the making. Jay Leno had inherited The Tonight Show from Johnny Carson in 1992, and a deeply pissed-off David Letterman had decamped to CBS. That meant a new host for Late Night had to be found. NBC turned to Lorne Michaels, who tapped 30-year-old Conan O’Brien. When NBC announced the identity of the man who would take over their decade-old franchise, TV critics, audiences, and even Letterman himself had the same question: Who? O’Brien, now regarded as one of the best hosts in the medium—one who spent nearly 30 years on the air—had minimal on-camera experience when he landed the job. As he once quipped to a journalist who’d called him a…