Vanity Fair May-14

1 Bryan Burrough As Edward Snowden flew from Hong Kong to Moscow, the entire world watched. These cinematic moments and those that followed—reported from Hawaii, Iceland, and Hong Kong—were the focus of special correspondent Bryan Burrough’s contributions to “The Snowden Saga” (page 152). “To me, the central question was ‘Is Edward Snowden a hero or a traitor?’” says Burrough. “I have to say I’m still not sure how I feel.” 2 Sarah Ellison Reporting from Berlin, London, and Washington, D.C., for “The Snowden Saga” (page 152), contributing editor Sarah Ellison discovered that the proliferation of mass leaks has become our modern-day arms race. “My assignment was to look into how this act of nearly unprecedented journalism came about,” says Ellison, who found that “a battle has developed between the people…

Could any writer outside of that wicked satirist Tom Sharpe or Lawrence Lasker and Walter Parkes (the two fellows who wrote the 1983 film WarGames) have plausibly invented the saga of Edward Snowden? An aimless young man with a passion for computers and video games somehow turns himself into a tech whiz and gets hired as a high-security-level Über-geek by the C.I.A. Before long he is contracted to the National Security Agency, America’s all-seeing and all-hearing eyes and ears, and is grappling with a crisis of conscience over its boundless surveillance. He suddenly finds he has access to everything in its vaults because he is working in Hawaii: the outpost there has vulnerable data lines to the mainland, and so the N.S.A. wants a backup of its vast holdings. It…

As a longtime Vanity Fair reader, I can’t say how pleased I was to see the actors who happily submitted to sit for the photo style of Chuck Close’s brilliant eye [“The 2014 Vanity Fair Hollywood Portfolio,” March]. He managed to capture something so important, especially to readers of a magazine known for its photography (and for its beloved Hollywood Issue)—reality! These days, almost everything we see in photography is airbrushed to hell, leaving many regular humans feeling somewhat … well, less. It’s no big secret that many people overlook or accept this perfection, perhaps as a way to escape the actual world, which can be quite ugly and inhuman. That Close’s amazing pictures seem almost hyper-real here is not just because they captured every line, wrinkle, and imperfection. What…

To begin this installment, a magazine is judged by its (March) cover: “Though the six men pictured looked handsome and quite wonderful, they were dressed all wrong! They wore a combination of black-tie and white-tie attire,” writes Lois Fenton, from Mamaroneck, New York. She elaborates on that nettlesome fact before adding, “I realize this is hardly the most urgent problem facing us today.” So very true—in a time with so many other cover problems facing us. “I am an African-American woman and I am highly insulted by the placement of the black women on this cover,” writes Marie Wilson, of Chicago. “They are isolated in the middle of the picture.” On the other hand, Angie Comer, of Pasadena, California, is “a struggling female writer-director who’s black” and finds it “so…

When it comes to taste in music, predictable is never as interesting as unpredictable. Just apply F. Scott Fitzgerald’s definition of “a firstrate intelligence” to one’s listening choices, and you’ll concede that “the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind” is definitely a positive thing. So we appreciate some of the contradictions in this month’s poll. And yet, one wonders. If Americans feel that the worst music of the last 44 years is being made right now, then why do we also turn to the radio when we want to hear music? So risky. Even selecting stations by genre can’t give us the same kind of control or filter as CD players, turntables, computers, and various iDevices—all of which trail badly in our poll. And if the sexiest instruments…

It’s hard to believe that this August will mark 10 years since David Chang opened his first restaurant, Momofuku Noodle Bar, in New York’s East Village. That place, whose optimized versions of ramen and pork buns electrified the burgeoning food blogosphere of the mid-aughts, has since begotten nine further New York City establishments (if you count his fast-prolif erating Milk Bar dessert shops), five more Chang-branded places in Toronto, and a restaurant in Sydney, not to mention a Wonka-esque culinary lab in Brooklyn. Chang is also a guiding force behind Lucky Peach, a gorgeous, high-production-value literary food quarterly published under the aegis of Dave Eggers’s McSweeney’s imprint. Chang impressed himself upon the food world as a profane, gonzo, emotionally volatile enfant terrible. But now, at the age of 36, he…