Innholdsfortegnelse for May-14 i Vanity Fair

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…

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…

Ahmir Khalib Thompson—better known as the genius drummer Questlove, of the Roots—has a new album out next month, beguilingly titled And Then You Shoot Your Cousin. It was excuse enough to meet at one of his favorite places, Han Dynasty, in downtown Manhattan, as his chauffeur-driven black Mercedes waited outside. The Roots are now famously The Tonight Show’s hip-hop house band. “You’re a million miles away from Doc Severinsen,” I said, and mention of Johnny Carson’s bandleader, renowned for his gaudy clothes, made him laugh. “Matter of fact, he’s more flamboyant and radical than I’ll ever be! He had ducks on his jackets.” Questlove, who is six feet four inches—and down from 400 pounds to about 300, thanks to his personal chef—was wearing a modest gray hoodie with a Lego…

For all his deadpan cool, Colson Whitehead is one of our most merciless and astute social satirists. In The Noble Hustle (Doubleday), he converts his awkward introduction to high-stakes poker into a comedy jackpot. Classic tales get a clever female spin in story writer Rivka Galchen’s American Innovations (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Anthony Doerr again takes language beyond mortal limits, this time in his W.W. II novel, All the Light We Cannot See (Scribner). A son suspicious of his single mom’s new beau turns spy in Mona Simpson’s Casebook (Knopf). Two tortured brothers seek transcendence in Michael Cunningham’s The Snow Queen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The second edition of Betty C. Monkman’s The White House (Abbeville) is impeccably curated. Sandra Tsing Loh lets rip in her riotously funny menopausal memoir,…

“Whatever we do, it starts with the name—we visualize the words,” declares Rolf Snoeren of the Dutch designing duo Viktor & Rolf, known for their avant-garde couture and conceptual glamour. He is speaking of Bonbon, their new, one-of-a-kind caramel-infused fragrance, out this spring at Saks Fifth Avenue. The idea of Bonbon started with a simple bow, a concept that’s always been in their runway repertoire. “The bow is an archetypal way of decorating something, making something special out of something ordinary,” says Viktor Horsting. The face of Bonbon is model Edita Vilkeviciute, whose nude body is painted with rows of pink ribbons and bows while an oversize fragrance bottle is steady on her lap. The ad reinforces the notion that “fragrance is something that is very intimate—it’s about the skin,…

At the risk of outing myself as an uncommon churl, news of an HBO adaptation of Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart didn’t exactly ring my dinner bell with excitement. My response was more along the lines of “Why this? Why now?” Like an Arthur Miller classic brought down from the attic, another rollout of Kramer’s stage drama threatened to release the dust bunnies of a diligently worthy uplifting enterprise; it seemed like a noble gesture, a solemn nod from the premier paycable outft that has stormed the ramparts with Game of Thrones and fshed godless dread out of the mazy bayou with True Detective. Like a lot of us, I’ve gotten spoiled by HBO’s freshness. To be presented on HBO over Memorial Day weekend, The Normal Heart touts a…

He catches your eye with a sideways glance and an enigmatic expression. Indicating what? Curiosity? Trepidation? A little insecure arrogance? Anthony Van Dyck’s final self-portrait is a work of mesmerizing depth and dexterity. Within a year he would be dead. Is there a whisper of premonition? Van Dyck is the godfather of British portraiture, the artist who put a face to the 17th century and the birth of the new-model middle class. And that, perhaps, is what’s on this face. It is the first glimpse of upwardly mobile anxiety. The painting is considered one of Britain’s greatest cultural treasures, and it was recently sold for $20 million to a buyer who wants to take it to Los Angeles. The National Portrait Gallery in London badly wants to keep the Van…

AGE: 28. PROVENANCE: Regina, Saskatchewan. NORTHERN START: The television darling started dancing at an early age, which led to auditioning for musicals and theater. “There’s just something in me that wanted to play and make believe.” ON THE SPOT: Maslany honed her acting talents by performing with a professional sketch troupe for 10 years. “I owe a lot of where I’m at now to what I learned doing improv. It’s a large part of who I am.” SERIAL SUCCESS: A fixture in Canadian television since the age of nine, Maslany hit the jackpot after landing the lead role in the cult-favorite science-fiction series Orphan Black. “I fought so hard [for the role]. I remember when I read the pilot script and synopsis, I started salivating!” SECOND ACT: With Season Two…

The dark and beautiful images collected by Larry Fink in The Beats (out this month from Powerhouse) were taken back in 1958 and 1959, when he was just 17 or 18 years old. They are of a group he identifies as the second generation of the mid-20th-century social and literary movement for which his book is named. (Jack Kerouac introduced the phrase “Beat Generation” in the late 1940s to describe the fledgling phenomenon in New York.) These are artists he lived with—poets, musicians, painters—who, by occupying the underground space beneath the Sullivan Street Playhouse, in New York City’s Greenwich Village, were not just spiritually and metaphorically “subterranean,” but literally so. The playhouse was on the same block as the famous jazz club the Village Gate, and by digging their way…

A few facts about Suki Waterhouse: she’s London-born, 22 years old, best ies with Georgia May Jagger, the face of Burberry’s fragrance Brit Rhythm, and—oh—then there’s her relationship with Bradley Cooper. “Suki means ‘beloved’ in Japanese. They just wanted to call me anything weird,” Waterhouse says of her parents. “They were going to call me Kooky.” She started modeling as a teenager and initially worked mostly with the fashion photographer Rankin. “I wasn’t taking it very seriously, but Rankin always believed in me and would book me for everything and basically put food in my mouth. He set me off in the right direction.” Up to that point, Waterhouse had been focused on a different skill set entirely. “I was really into karate. I was competing heavily—doing competitions nationally—and then…

Folks can argue over the best baseball book (The Boys of Summer? Veeck as in Wreck?) or the most madcap P. G. Wodehouse (Joy in the Morning? Leave It to Psmith?), but can there really be any spat about the best coming-of-agein-the-theater memoir? This is not exactly a teeming genre, but nothing can top Moss Hart’s Act One in its glossily romanticized telling of how a poor boy besotted with the stage ended up, at 25, working with one of Broadway’s comedic gods (that would be George S. Kaufman, then 40) on Hart’s first hit play, Once in a Lifetime. The book (published in 1959) ends with the play a triumph, giving no hint of Hart’s lifelong struggle with depression. He wrote seven more plays with Kaufman, including The Man…

Kiernan Shipka is the 14-year-old actress who plays Sally Draper on Mad Men. She was six when she started working on the series, which debuted in 2007, and as Jon Hamm, who plays Don Draper, Sally’s dad, points out, “She’s been on the show longer than she hasn’t, in her life. That’s just a function of math.” She is, he says, “a preternaturally mature kid, and a pleasure to be around—in a way that sometimes most kids that age can not be so fun to be around.” Perspective she has in unyouthful abundance. “It’s such a blessing to be able to play a character for as long as any of us on the show have,” she told me recently over iced coffee. “And to play someone from the age of…

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…

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…

In recent decades, automotive design has been elevated into the realm of fine art. And, starting next month, some of the most imaginative, museum-worthy automobiles will be presented in a cutting-edge exhibition at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. The show, “Dream Cars: Innovative Design, Visionary Ideas,” guest-curated by veteran automotive writer Ken Gross, features 18 radical concept cars—one-of-a-kind or limitededition models with advanced capabilities—that have helped redefine automotive design. “They’re dreams on wheels,” says Gross, “each of which represents an interesting idea on the part of a designer who had a vision of what the automobile could be.” The show—created in consultation with Sarah Schleuning, the museum’s curator of decorative arts and design—also includes sketches and models that provide historical context and help explain what Gross calls the “visual thinking”…

Historian Donald L. Miller has a soft spot for the pulsing New York of the Jazz Age. In his encyclopedic new book, Supreme City (Simon & Schuster), he traces the birth of modern urban life and lifestyle through that period’s grandest buildings, its incandescent bit players (the Daily News sleuth who snapped the 1928 execution photo of murderer Ruth Snyder; ironworkers—many of them Mohawk Indians—who helped erect the skyline), and a cavalcade of large metropolitan lives, from impresarios (Flo Ziegfeld and Texas Guinan) to bootleggers (William Vincent Dwyer), to power brokers (architect Raymond Hood and book publisher Horace Liveright). Supreme City captures a vanished Gotham in all its bustle, gristle, and glory.—DAVID FRIEN…

On a nondescript street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side lies an architectural treasure that has been tucked away for 100 years. Up narrow stairs, through the back of a Chinese bakery and a laundry room, is a steel door. Inside, lit by votive candles and candelabras, are tiers for long-gone balcony seats, organ bays, walls painted blood red. These are the bones of the cavernous Clinton Star Theatre, built in the 1910s for vaudeville shows. Today, however, it is a one-of-a-kind recording studio. “This is the last private playhouse in New York City—and it’s totally unknown,” says its beaming proprietor, J. Ralph (also known as Josh), the 38-year-old composer, recording artist, and music producer who has retrofitted the vast performance space as an audio refuge—shown here for the first time.…

My friend Nicholas Lemann, who recently stepped down as dean of the Columbia Journalism School, has done his time and then some at symposia and similar gatherings to discuss the Future of Newspapers in the Age of the Internet. Nick says he has one firm rule about such discussions: “You’re not allowed to say, ‘It will all work out somehow.’” If you want to play with the big boys, you’ve got to say how. Unfortunately, having thought about it for a bit, I’ve more or less concluded that the ongoing crisis of newspapers—going bankrupt, being sold for peanuts, firing staff, cutting foreign bureaus, and so on—will all work out, somehow. I can’t tell you how, but I can tell you why. It’s partly Stein’s Law, named after the late Herbert…

On May 23, 2012, a 30-year-old Georgetown University law student and former Marine captain, adapting to his newly reduced circumstances as a freelance journalist, crawled under a fence from southern Turkey into northern Syria. Austin Tice had not yet published a single article, but it didn’t matter. Since mass demonstrations had spilled over into a full-scale armed insurgency against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad six months before, Syria was the story that everyone wanted—all the more so because, with the Syrian government keeping a tight lid on visas, hardly any journalists were in the country. Just about the only way inside was to smuggle yourself under the protection of armed rebels, which suited Tice just fine. As a soldier, he already had tours in Afghanistan and Iraq under his…

FRANCIS: Kanye, you are always welcome in my hostel. What brings you to the Vatican? WEST: Well, what if we made it the Kanyatican? Went in as partners? ’Cause I’m the Pope of my world, you feel me? I am the black Ray Kroc: billions and billions served. But I am still marginalized by the powers that be. And you, you got the capital, but your or ganization has P.R. problems. FRANCIS: What I am hearing, Kanye, is a young man who has allowed himself multiple opportunities for pleasure, but few for joy. Besides, I think you sell yourself short. From what I gather, your successes have been myriad. WEST: But they ain’t Ralph-level! At the end of the day, I ain’t in control of nothing. François Pinault still controls…

It’s the rare story—Child Star Becomes Bigger Star—but Neil Patrick Harris made Doogie Howser, M.D. a springboard to his great love, musical theater, and then How I Met Your Mother. As Harris leads Hedwig and the Angry Inch on Broadway (and stars in A Million Ways to Die in the West), actor-lyricist LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA explains why N.P.H. is such a mesmerizing act. Watch: Neil Pat rick Harris at age 20, on the other side of four years as Doogie Howser, M.D. This is usually where the tabloid headlines start. A child star in a well-loved show? Welcome to oblivion. People will shout “Hey, Doog!” in the streets; VH1 will come calling when it’s time for I Love the 90s. What does N.P.H. do? He doubles down on his passions: magic…

When 60 Minutes veterans David Gelber and Joel Bach set out to produce a documentary on climate change, they knew they needed A-list talent. They just didn’t know how to get it. Then Bach remembered a college friend who had an uncle. Two weeks later the phone rang: “Hey, it’s Jerry Weintraub. How can I help you?” Weintraub (onetime head of United Artists, and producer of Nashville, Diner, and Ocean’s Eleven) and James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar) signed on as executive producers. Doors began to open, and in came Arnold Schwarzenegger, Matt Damon, Jessica Alba, Harrison Ford, and others. Topflight journalists joined the project, among them Chris Hayes, of MSNBC, and Lesley Stahl, of 60 Minutes. Years of Living Dangerously weaves together several strands of storytelling, Homeland-style—for instance, the increasingly savage…

Iwas obsessed with Nancy Drew growing up—I couldn’t get enough,” says Alexandra Daddario, the breakout star of television’s most talked-about new drama, True Detective, starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. “There is nothing better than a really cool mystery: you don’t know what’s going to happen, so you keep turning those pages or watching that series.” But the role of Lisa Tragnetti, which gave viewers an eyeful—the Upper East Side native bared all in a titillating handcuff scene with Harrelson—almost didn’t happen for her. “I never read for Lisa,” Daddario says of her auditioning process. “I initially read for the part of Beth [yet another of Harrelson’s character’s mistresses, played by Lili Simmons], but they wanted me for this bolder, more adult role.” Prior to this, the 28-year-old Brearley and…

Daniel RADCLIFFE At age 11 he first cast his spell on the world as Harry Potter. He and his boy wizard may be all grown up, but the star of this spring’s Broadway premiere of The Cripple of Inishmaan admits he still likes pancakes for dinner What is your idea of perfect happiness? Eating breakfast foods at a time of the day other than breakfast. Pancakes for dinner—I’m happy. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? My ability to invariably say exactly the wrong thing in any given situation. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Arrogance. What is your favorite journey? From the airport to home. What do you consider the most overrated virtue? Of the seven? Chastity. On what occasion do you lie? Press…

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…

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…

Kyle DeWoody, the 29-year-old daughter of artist James DeWoody and philanthropist, collector, and Whitney Museum board member Beth Rudin DeWoody, always knew she was destined for a career in the arts. “Well, you can’t un-drink the Kool-Aid,” she deadpans about a childhood of museum tours and studio visits. Her apartment in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, occupies the second floor of a three-story former Masonic lodge; the first floor houses Grey Area, the company she and business partner Manish Vora founded in 2011. “Grey Area is this undefined space between art and design where art is made functional and the functional is made art,” DeWoody says of her assembly line of whimsical, unexpected artist collaborations. Her wares can be found in specialty shops around the world, including the Guggenheim Museum gift shop.…

V.F. contributing editor William D. Cohan calculates The Price of Silence (Scribner) in the Duke lacrosse rape scandal. The 40s (Random House) brims with The New Yorker’s hits. Brett Forrest exposes The Big Fix (Morrow). Glenn Greenwald profiles Edward Snowden, the N.S.A. whistle-blower with No Place to Hide (Metropolitan). Boris Friedewald spotlights Women Photographers (Prestel). Carla Sozzani’s 10 Corso Como (Rizzoli) will spin your head. Richard Corliss hits home with Mom in the Movies (Simon & Schuster). Laurie David, Kirstin Uhrenholdt, and Katie Couric champion healthy recipes in The Family Cooks (Rodale). Amanda Vaill trips after Hemingway and his cohorts in Hotel Florida (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Pope Francis blesses us in The Church of Mercy (Loyola Press). Joel Selvin’s Here Comes the Night (Counterpoint) shadows rec ord producer Bert…

STARRY, STARRY NIGHT A star-studded parade of guests posed for paparazzi on the green-and-white striped carpet at the Vanity Fair Oscar party before entering this year’s custom-built venue, in West Hollywood. STARRY, STARRY NIGHT This year, the Vanity Fair Oscar party was granted its own address at a new location on Sunset Boulevard, elevating its glamour and intrigue to new heights. The evening kicked off with an intimate dinner prepared by celebrated chef Thomas Keller. After the awards, the room began to pulse with music, laughter, and excitement as movie stars, musicians, business tycoons, models, and politicians made their way in to the hottest party in Hollywood. The revelry—toasting, kissing, posing, and partying—continued until nearly dawn.…

Stephen Hough has a mystic’s face—angled, ascetic, inward-looking—that seems right out of a Zurbarán painting. And more than once Hough (pronounced “Huff”), a Roman Catholic convert, contemplated becoming a priest. But in the end he chose a different path—or, to be more precise, paths. At 52, Hough is Britain’s most protean pianist: he has been on an extended North American tour, culminating with a New York recital on April 13. Juilliard-trained, he won the prestigious Naumburg piano competition at 21 and went on to win a MacArthur “genius” grant in 2001: “America,” he says grate fully, “has been central to my life.” Hough’s thoughtfulness masks astounding energy. He’s a poet, professor, painter (his first London show of heavily impastoed, Abstract Expressionist–style canvases sold well), and composer (of, among other things,…

We were living in Westchester County in the early 80s, and we would come into New York on Saturday mornings, stop at Jean’s, and he’d ask us to drive him to pick up some musical equipment that he needed,” remembers Lenore Schorr, who, along with her husband, Herbert, qualify as the most devoted early collectors of the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died at 27, in 1988. “Having us drive him was clearly easier for him than his trying to get a taxi, because of the fact that he was black,” explains Lenore. “He used to joke that he needed to get Herb a driver’s cap, and that he’d buy us a hot dog afterwards.” After he’d lost faith in the art-world establishment, Basquiat even asked Herb, a scientist and…

Scarlett Johansson was my first. Not that I was a virgin. I’d interviewed big-shot people before. Never a movie star, though. Still, I knew how to behave in front of one. The basics, at least. Do not smile or exclaim or look excited or obey your instincts in any way, shape, or form. Just be cool. I entered the Jewel Suite of the New York Palace hotel on Madison Avenue to catch the last hour of the Scarlett Johansson/Vanity Fair cover shoot on a Monday afternoon in late January. The Jewel Suite, in addition to being, as its name would suggest, a pretty oohla-la affair, was also an absolutely enormous one. And that day packed, crammed with photography people and wardrobe people and makeup people and magazine people and public-relations…

Whether hero or traitor, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden is the most important whistle-blower of modern times, one whose disclosures will reverberate for decades to come. With extensive input from Snowden himself, SUZANNA ANDREWS, BRYAN BURROUGH, and SARAH ELLISON have the spy-novel-worthy tale of how a geeky dropout from the Maryland suburbs found himself alone and terrified in a Hong Kong hotel room, spilling America’s most carefully guarded secrets to the world After setting up his personal security systems and piling pillows against the door so no one in the hallway could eavesdrop, he sat on the bed, anxious and alone, in a Hong Kong hotel room. He was 29 years old that night, May 24, 2013, but he looked much younger, thin and pale, like a college…

These days, it is not just a woman who can never be too rich or too thin. You can say almost exactly the same thing about skyscrapers, or at least about the latest residential ones now going up in New York City, which are much taller, much thinner, and much, much more expensive than their predecessors. And almost every one of them seems built to be taller, thinner, and pricier than the one that came before. Few people are inclined to mourn the end of the age of the luxury apartment building as a boxy slab. But what is replacing it, which you might call the latest way of housing the rich, is an entirely new kind of tower, pencil-thin and super-tall—so tall, in fact, that one of the new…

Nobody said anything about The Satanic Verses at the Morgan Library that night, not even the author. But the book gave the evening an aura of the forbidden that will always surround Salman Rushdie. The Morgan is one of New York City’s grandest literary spaces—with three Gutenberg Bibles and a Shakespeare First Folio, for starters. On that night last November it was the site of a gathering to celebrate the Man Booker Prize, the venerable British award for fiction. The guest of honor was Rushdie, winner of the prize in 1981 for Midnight’s Children and then of the “Booker of Bookers” for the best novel in the prize’s first 25 years. He swept in just after seven P.M., natty in a gray suit and patterned shirt, which matched the dress…