Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2017 i Vanity Fair

Sometimes love looks like war. In Dark at the Crossing (Knopf), Green on Blue author Elliot Ackerman delivers a romance for our time. Idealist Haris Abadi, desperate to cross the Turkish border into Syria, becomes waylaid en route. As Haris gets entangled with a couple haunted by conflict, the novel’s beauty cracks open. “They were trapped,” Ackerman writes, “waiting on opposite sides of a divide.” Time to pick a side. Read the books you wish to see in the world: Jonathan Chait’s Audacity (Custom House) looks back at Obama’s success in the face of naysayers. E. J. Dionne Jr. and Joy-Ann Reid organize the president’s orations in We Are the Change We Seek (Bloomsbury), and The Meaning of Michelle (St. Martin’s), edited by Veronica Chambers, praises the groundbreaking First Lady from…

I. The Family The whispers started in the spring of 2016, and got louder as summer began. “You should look into Jared—he is in over his head on the campaign.” The pitch was the same, according to multiple reporters: Look into Jared—he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Corey Lewandowski, the rough-edged early campaign manager for Donald J. Trump, allegedly was trying to plant a negative story about Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Infighting among staffers is a feature of most political campaigns, and the fighting within Trump’s campaign was, as one might expect, more public and vitriolic than most. Lewandowski was known for being aggressive—he clashed with Paul Manafort, another top Trump aide. But this time he had chosen the wrong target. Kushner was growing in influence, and would come to…

@vf.com To watch Petra Collins put on her DANCING SHOES, go to VF.COM/FEBRUARY2017. It’s the sort of emotionally wrought scene one expects in a work by Petra Collins, the 23-year-old, New York– based artist who has created photographs of Selena Gomez as a disillusioned cheerleader and of Kim Kardashian as a sultry angel: doctors tell a 15-year-old aspiring ballerina that she’ll never dance again. Except it’s not a photograph; it’s what happened to Collins in her native Toronto after she snapped her left knee nine years ago. “The doctors told me that I would never dance again,” she says. “My life was over for a second, and I didn’t know what I was going to do. Art was—and is—my biggest outlet. I’d probably die if I didn’t do it.” Collins’s…

In Chapter 2 of John le Carré’s novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, George Smiley sets off “for Heywood Hill’s bookshop in Curzon Street … heapproached Heywood Hill with a merry heart.” How could one not? Time Was Soft There, the title of Jeremy Mercer’s memoir of working and living at the Beatnik bookstore Shakespeare and Company in Paris in 1999, seems equally applicable to Heywood Hill of Mayfair, which recently celebrated its 80th birthday. In this discreetly aristocratic corner of London, next door to Geo. F. Trumper’s Gentlemen’s Barbers and Perfumers (est. 1875), time isn’t so much frozen as slowed down to a congenial, pre-digital pace. “It’s a very nourishing place to spend time,” says Nicky Dunne, Heywood Hill’s 46-year-old full-time chairman. In an age of mega-stores and Kindle and…

Mr. Sorkin’s letter to his ex-wife and daughter made me cry [“Read the Letter Aaron Sorkin Wrote His Daughter After Donald Trump Was Elected President,” VF.com]. I am 63 years old and wish more men understood the pit of despair many women have been catapulted into after the election. When our president is a realitytelevision figure who is an egomaniacal misogynist, it feels as if there is little hope left. America, is this the best we can do? BARBARA HAWORTH Fredericksburg, Texas I want to share a letter composed by my friend upon reading Aaron Sorkin’s reaction to the election results: People would consider me a member of the same Hillary-supporting, Ivy League– educated bi-coastal elite that you are, Mr. Sorkin. But while the small group of white supremacists and…

Never before has half a nation developed posttraumatic stress disorder over the elevator plunge of a single night. It was like a bloodless 9/11, the blue-state edition. The night was November 8, when the returns flooded in from the presidential election and—you know the rest. Less than a week earlier, the Chicago Cubs had won their first World Series since Teddy Roosevelt was president, breaking an ancient mummy curse and splashing the country with champagne foam. Then this. And here we are as the inauguration nears, reckoning with the unreality of an orange Rorschach test occupying the White House for the next four years or until he is impeached (as political historian Allan Lichtman, one of the psychic few to predict a Trump victory, speculates), or perhaps keels over from…

Chris Pratt wanted to cook me lunch—you can tell a lot about a person by the way they cook. And not just any lunch—a lunch made from an animal that Pratt himself had killed, in Texas, where the mesquite blooms and the buzzards turn and the wild boar does not care nor even know that the handsome man sighting the scope of a .25-caliber Winchester is one of the biggest movie stars in the world, best of this new batch—it’s never who you expect—with hits behind (Guardians of the Galaxy, Jurassic World ) and hits ahead (Passengers, Guardians Vol. 2). And Pratt did kill that animal. And dressed it and shipped it back to this beautiful house in the Hollywood Hills, where he lives with his wife, actress Anna Faris,…

The Clinton campaign nicknamed them “the Storm Troopers,” on account of their slickedback hair and their resemblance to the elite World War I German soldiers. Others have referred to them as Uday and Qusay, a nod to Saddam Hussein’s vicious and extravagant sons, who were killed in Mosul in July 2003, after a fierce gunfight with American forces. On the campaign trail the Trump brothers—Donald Trump Jr., 39, and Eric Trump, 33, the oldest sons of our 45th president— actually referred to themselves as “the brutes.” Together with their sister Ivanka, 35, they are slated to take control of their father’s farflung, billiondollar realestate and licensing business, after years of serving as his apprentices, both in real life and on television, in their father’s hit show, The Apprentice. What role…

Gore Vidal once described Peggy Guggenheim “as the last of Henry James’s transatlantic heroines, Daisy Miller with rather more balls.” Guggenheim, who died in 1979 at the age of 81, has also been called everything from “fascinatingly complex” and a “vibrant, accomplished and active woman” to “Daffy Duck dressed in slinky silk” and “glamorous but lightweight and oversexed.” As one critic put it, “Even her sunglasses made news.” For much of the 20th century she was the enfant terrible of the art world and one of its most influential patrons. In 1949, she bought an 18th-century palazzo on the Grand Canal, in Venice, and turned it into an avant-garde salon that was said to have “more than once shocked Venice’s Renaissance soul.” Guests included Tennessee Williams, Somerset Maugham, Igor Stravinsky,…

I. The Tapes On an unseasonably warm Monday, in late December 2015, members of the Hillary Clinton campaign for president gathered at their headquarters, in a nondescript brown-brick high-rise on the border of Brooklyn Heights, to strategize about an increasingly crucial matter. The offices were humming with enthusiastic young employees and volunteers; flinty Christmas decorations adorned cubicles; American flags hung from the walls; big blue beanbags were strewn on the floor. By nine a.m., more than two dozen people, including campaign chairman John Podesta, had piled into a conference room on an upper floor, or called in via Google Hangouts, for the consequential eight-and-a-half-hour meeting dubbed “the Research Summit.” The agenda was focused entirely on one thing: devising the campaign’s strategy against each of Clinton’s potential Republican foes in the…

Standing at the bar atMar-a-Lago, the outrageously ornate Palm Beach, Florida, mansion built by breakfastcereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post in the Roaring 20s and turned into a private club in 1995 by Donald Trump, I awaited the arrival of the 45th president-elect of the United States. He was coming that mid- November weekend, as he had done so often for the past 30 years. But in so many ways he was already there. He was there in the minds of his club’s 500 members, who love the place enough to pay a $100,000 initiation fee, plus $14,000 in annual dues. He was there in the Trump wines we were drinking, from the Virginia vineyards run by his son Eric. And he was there in the adoring eyes of the bartender,…

Hey, let’s put on a musical about 9/11!” seems an unlikely rallying cry for a couple of newcomers to Broadway whose only previously staged musical was My Mother’s Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding. But then you have not met Irene Sankoff and David Hein, the married songwriting team whose combination of heart and humor makes Come from Away one of this season’s most anticipated shows. The musical, which opens in March, takes place in Gander, Newfoundland, where dozens of airliners with thousands of passengers were diverted when the F.A.A. briefly shut down American airspace on September 11, 2001. Sankoff and Hein, both Canadians, who met at York University in 1994, lived in New York then and witnessed the camaraderie that blossomed amid the tragedy, an experience that shaped their approach to…

Iremember early on people would whisper, ‘Don’t tell her anything. She’s Suzy. She writes that column,’ ” said Aileen Mehle, who for more than five dec ades, under the pen name Suzy, chronicled the comings and goings, the weddings and divorces, the charity galas and costume balls of international high society, starting at the Miami Daily News in the early 1950s and finishing at Women’s Wear Daily in 2005. At the height of her career, her daily column ran in some 90 newspapers across the U.S. and Canada and reached an estimated 30 million readers, according to a 1973 profile in Vogue. For Life magazine she was “easily the brightest and most widely read society columnist in the country.” “People didn’t really know me when I started out,” she continued,…