Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2017 i Vanity Fair

On January 11, Donald Trump held his !rst press conference since his electoral win to address the subject of his business interests and conflicts, which had become—along with the questions about Russian involvement in the election—a primary controversy for Trump. The briefing was held in the lobby of Manhattan’s Trump Tower. Royalblue drapes covered the marble wall behind the podium, the presidential hue forming a striking backdrop for a row of gold-tasseled American flags. Trump, wearing a navy wool suit, crisp white shirt, and red silk tie, with an American "ag pinned to his lapel, stood to one side of the podium, flanked by his three oldest children, Donald junior, 39, Ivanka, 35, and Eric, 33. At the podium, Sheri Dillon, a tax attorney, explained the changes that would be…

In the early summer of 2013—what seems like a lifetime ago—James “Jim” Co mey was nominated by President Barack Obama to serve a 10-year term as the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the nation’s prime federal law-enforcement agency. Even in a time of _erce political divides, there was little divide about Comey, who at the time was a Republican. (He has since changed his party registration but not said to what.) He was con- _rmed by a vote of 93 to 1. “Jim is a natural leader of unquestioned integrity,” said Obama. And he was. Chris Gair, a former prosecutor who was a student with Co mey at the University of Chicago Law School, class of 1985, has called Co mey “a giant of a man who has…

The Survivor Andy Lack, the chairman of NBC News, is seen by many of his peers as an old-school newsman in the mold of the late Roone Arledge, the famed ABC News president. Arledge played a major role in establishing ABC News as one of the leading evening newscasts in the 1980s and 90s. He did so in part by hiring big names and high-pro!le talent—for instance, wooing Diane Sawyer away from CBS News, even though ABC already employed the very visible Barbara Walters. Lack is currently on his second tour at NBC. He joined NBC News in 1993, rose to the top of the news division, then left in 2003 to head up Sony Music. He returned in 2015 in the wake of the scandal involving news anchor Brian…

What to go see: PERSONAL SHOPPER What to tune in to: PLANET EARTH II What to stream: HILAH COOKING WHO’S IN IT Kristen Stewart, confirming her newfound cred as one of the darlings of international indie cinema. A snow leopard, a tiny tree frog, a very cute spider monkey, and many others. Hilah Johnson, a Texas-bred actress turned chef turned self-made Internet star. WILL REMIND YOU OF Very little you’ve seen before, which is a good thing. The first Planet Earth, only even more high-def. Rachael Ray with millennial topspin. WHY NOW Olivier Assayas’s spooky, sad, and strange ghost story is his second fruitful outing with Stewart. One of the best films to come out of Cannes in years. The BBC’s gorgeous nature series returns with a new set of…

Internet clickbait promotes mental tooth decay, squirting synthetic controversy out of a can of Reddi-wip, but an article by Eileen Jones on January 9 went out of its way to swirl it on extra thick. Headlined AGAINST MERYL STREEP, the indictment declared, “Meryl Streep’s speechifying at the Golden Globes was the worst thing to happen since Trump’s election.” Hoo-kay. If Donald Trump speaks Jerkish, according to retired novelist Philip Roth, Jones’s broadside was written in Snarkish: “That I should live to see the day when Meryl Streep’s speechifying at a Hollywood awards show is admired as solemnly and discussed as fervently as Lincoln’s second inaugural address is a personal nightmare. Lectured by Streep! And about how her and all her Hollywood pals, decked out in everything that costs the earth…

One of the realities of our new, vertically integrated, fully disrupted, post-everything economy is that the very notions of movie moguls and tech billionaires and even media kingpins now seem rather quaint and anachronistic. These days, our business leaders transcend industries and categorizations— Amazon makes movies; Apple makes TV shows; and it’s possible we’ll be watching it all one day on a Snapchat channel streamed into an Uber driverless car. This reality was plain for all to see at Vanity Fair’s third annual New Establishment Summit, at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in San Francisco, last fall. Barry Diller, the former chairman of Paramount Pictures and latter-day Internet eminence, in conversation with V.F. editor Graydon Carter, presaged the demise of the !lm business. Amazon’s Je" Bezos, who has…

This month, New York City’s Public Art Fund celebrates its 40th anniversary with Open House, an installation by sculptor Liz Glynn. The work will transform the southeast corner of Central Park—Doris C. Freedman Plaza, named for the fund’s founder— into an open-air, trompe l’oeil, Gilded Age ballroom. Three years in the making, Open House features 26 cast-concrete pieces, including arches, sofas, and chairs rendered in intentionally heightened, sometimes messy detail. Her goal for Open House was to create an installation that reimagines ideas of entitlement and access, public and private space. The work, Glynn says, “raises questions: who has access to public space and whom are these spaces for?” It was inspired by the ballroom in the Stanford White–transformed William Whitney mansion, completed at the start of the 20th century,…

As the son of Princess Margaret, the younger sister of Queen Elizabeth, and An tony Armstrong-Jones, the "rst Earl of Snowdon and one of England’s most sought-after photographers in the 1960s and 1970s, young David Linley grew up both royal and bohemian. One day he’d be taken to the National Gallery by his mother and grandmother, the Queen Mother, to see a Vermeer—and only a Vermeer. When he’d ask, “What about all these?,” referring to the other works of art in the museum, he was told, “If you want to see those, you can go on your own.’’ Another day, his father, known professionally as Snowdon, would take him along to a meeting with the green-and-pinkhaired punk fashion designer Zandra Rhodes in her studio. The family lived in a sprawling…

Desk Goals In order to be inspired, you must place yourself in inspiring surroundings. This is the cornerstone of Perch, a designfocused office-product-andfurniture start-up revolutionizing the way we approach our personal workspaces. Founded four months ago by Lucy Lyle, the enterprise—already backed by e-commerce giants Birchbox and Trunk Club, among other investors—offers sleek and sophisticated alternatives to predictable office staples. Yet Perch’s philosophy is driven by more than merely aesthetics. Injecting our workstations with a boost of personality ensures positivity and productivity aren’t far behind. Move over, humdrum tape dispenser. (perch.com) As Seen On-Screen Lauren Hutton, the star of American Gigolo, made an evocative return to the runway last fall for Bottega Veneta, carrying the original woven clutch from the 80s _ilm. The fashion house is re-introducing the bag for…

From college with love: Elif Batuman (of the Russophilic essay collection The Possessed) takes us back to the 90s with her masterfully funny debut novel, The Idiot (Penguin Press). Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, is a freshman at Harvard at the height of the Discman and the peacoat. She enrolls in classes with names such as “Constructed Worlds.” But it’s her world that’s being constructed, via a group of magnetic friends and one love-laced friendship. Erudite but never pretentious, The Idiot will make you crave more books by Batuman. Good thing she has about 14 Dostoyevsky titles left to go. Where are we going? Where have we been? P. J. O’Rourke casts his gimlet gaze on the circus of clownspeople foisted on us by the 2016 election—and demands to…

What most endures about Richard Nixon’s 1968 speech to the Republican convention is his rhetoric about “law and order”—rhetoric that, half a century later, we’re hearing once again from a new Republican president. But that was not, to my mind, the speech’s most important theme. Nixon understood that black demands for equality—as cities were torn by riots, with ink on civil-rights legisla tion barely dry—had to be acknowledged and given their rhetorical due. “Let us build bridges, my friends,” Nixon said, “build bridges to human dignity across that gulf that separates black America from white America. Black Americans, no more than white Americans, they do not want more government programs which perpetuate dependency. They don’t want to be a colony in a nation.” A colony in a nation. Nixon meant…

Emma Watson and I are standing on the 23rd Street platform of an uptown-bound E train in New York City and we’re littering. Literally. And literature-ly. The 26-year-old actress is scattering hardcover copies of Maya Angelou’s book Mom & Me & Mom throughout the station—tucking them between pipes, placing them on benches, atop the emergency call box—in hopes that New York commuters will pick them up and put down their smartphones. This display of civil disobedience was conceived by Books on the Underground, a London-based organization that plants books on public transportation for travelers to discover. “We’re being ninjas,” she says with a conspiratorial grin as she digs in a big black rucksack of books. “If there were anyone to be a ninja for, it’d be Maya Angelou.” Watson is…

ERIC UNDERWOOD DANCER, 32 Though he recently became a British citizen, the Washington, D.C.–born Underwood embodies the American Dream. He grew up in a gang-riddled neighborhood, started studying ballet at the age of 14, and worked his way to acclaim at the Dance Theatre of Harlem and American Ballet Theatre before jeté-ing across the pond to join London’s Royal Ballet, where he is a soloist. PERSONAL STYLE: Energetic and chameleon-like. Underwood wears clothing by Giorgio Armani; hair products by Kérastase Paris; grooming products by Lancôme Men. CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE WRITER, 39 Nigerian novelist and MacArthur Fellow Adichie is known for her provocative takes on gender and class. Her TEDx talk “We Should All Be Feminists” has achieved special pop-culture prominence: Beyoncé sampled lines in her 2013 song “Flawless,” and a…

Nineteen sixty-seven: rarely has there been a 12-month period when young American women changed so dramatically. The year before had seen the helmet-haired, Pucci-clad Jacqueline Susann promoting Valley of the Dolls to best-seller status. It saw California beach-blanket movies … and Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball, at New York’s Plaza hotel. Earlier in the year, miniskirted Nancy Sinatra Jr. had turned calf-high leather footwear—the kind that Dame Mary Quant, pioneer of the miniskirt, made famous—into a meme, thanks to her No. 1 single “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” But a radically di!erent look and sensibility were beginning to take root. The long-gowned, straight-haired Judy Collins would soon make a Top 10 hit of “Both Sides Now,” a plaintive, self-examining, gut-honest ballad by an unknown songwriter—the long-gowned, straight-haired Joni…