Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2018 i Vanity Fair

LISA ROBINSON For this month’s cover story on Kendrick Lamar (“Kendrick Ascendant,” page 42), Contributing Editor Lisa Robinson, who met with Lamar over a series of days in New York, says, “I was incredibly impressed with Kendrick’s obsessive commitment to his music. He’s a perfectionist, and he feels he hasn’t done his best work yet.” Robinson adds, “He takes responsibility as a leader, not only for his hometown of Compton, but for the world of hip-hop in general.” Also in this issue, Robinson, who is writing a book about women in music, talks to Tank of Tank and the Bangas. ERIC KONIGSBERG “I find art-fraud stories inherently interesting,” says writer Eric Konigsberg, who spoke to the man responsible for the furniture-forgery operation that conned Versailles as well as to the…

CLOTHING Favorite article of clothing Red flannel button-down hoodie I bought at Rite Aid for $14.99. Most recent purchase A shit ton of Gucci (10). Silk or terry-cloth robe Terry-cloth, like from a hotel. Favorite pajamas I sleep naked. Most sentimental item Gold “Faith” pendant necklace my grandmother gave me. The piece you love but never wear Pink Manolo Blahnik heels (4). Vintage piece A blue dress that Sporty Spice wore. Fashion trend The jersey dress. Heels or flats Both. Pair of shoes Balenciaga Triple S sneakers (2). Diamonds or pearls Diamonds. Pieces of jewelry Turquoise bracelet and anklet. Go to outfit Any kind of vintage tee and pants. Favorite brand Anything from my stylist Dianne Garcia. BEAUTY “Passed down from Mom” beauty routine Drink water and moisturize. “Can’t live without” MAC…

The winds of change swept the Hollywood Hills last month at an intimate garden party that brought emerging talent and venerable vets to the Chateau Marmont hotel. Just weeks after 82 female actresses, directors, producers, and cinematographers marched the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival in support of gender equality, Vanity Fair joined with Italian fashion house Max Mara and the Women in Film organization to support female representation in Hollywood and toast this year’s Face of the Future recipient, actress Alexandra Shipp. “I can’t believe it,” beamed Shipp, the first African-American woman to receive the award. “Two years ago, I came to the same party early and didn’t know anyone.” The actress—who starred in X-Men: Apocalypse and Love, Simon and will soon lead the Shaft reboot with Samuel…

1971 The world’s first computer worm, “the Creeper,” is created. 1981 Ian Murphy becomes the first American convicted of a cyber-crime after hacking into AT&T’s system to give customers discounted calling rates. 1982–83 A teenage cyber-gang, who refer to themselves as “the 414s,” hack into the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. 1996 Hackers break into Web sites for the United States Department of Justice, the C.I.A., and the U.S. Air Force. 2001 President Bush signs an order initiating the N.S.A.’s domestic-spying program. 2006 As part of its News Feed launch, Facebook posts personal details of users. 2009 In a speech, Berners-Lee warns that the power of online information “is so great that the commercial incentive for companies or individuals to misuse it will be huge.”…

Eliza Scanlen AGE: 19. PROVENANCE: Sydney, Australia. THE BUG: “When I was seven, my mom took my twin sister and me to a play,” Scanlen recalls. “I remember being fascinated about life onstage.” THE AMBITION: “When I got a bit older, I put on my own plays and forced my friends to perform.” In high school, she landed a role on Home and Away, the Australian soap and Hollywood launchpad for stars like Naomi Watts and the Hemsworth brothers. THE GET: This month, Scanlen makes her American TV debut, in HBO’s Sharp Objects, directed by Jean-Marc Vallée (Big Little Lies) and based on the best-seller by Gillian Flynn. “I was a fan of [Flynn’s] Gone Girl, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up. I put myself on tape…

At the turn of the 21st century, New York literati would often shut down attempts to discuss the latest television shows with the sniffy refrain “I don’t even own a TV.” I remember one particular book party at which a cluster of hot young novelists collectively agreed that they wouldn’t mind having their books optioned for the small screen—as long as no one ever got around to making them. TV in those days was still scorned as a distraction factory churning out bland entertainment in standardized 30- or 60-minute chunks punctuated by Pavlovian laugh lines and pre-commercial-break cliff-hangers. That snobbery gradually turned inside out as the medium evolved from delivering conventional network fare aimed at the broadest possible audience into a vehicle for the much hyped new golden age. Prestige…

A decade ago, when he was still somewhat spry, Sumner Redstone had an existential crisis. The shocking collapse of Lehman Brothers was still reverberating through the capital markets, and the Redstone family’s holding company, National Amusements, Inc., which owned nearly 80 percent of the voting stock in both CBS and Viacom, was larded up with some $1.6 billion in unsecured debt. Covenants in the debt had been breached. To satisfy the banks, Redstone unexpectedly sold $233 million worth of National Amusements non-voting stock in CBS and Viacom. But he still wasn’t out of financial trouble. Over the years, he had also bought, on margin, hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of shares in WMS Industries, a slot-machine maker, and Midway Games, which had been spun off from WMS. Redstone was…

The case was an immediate sensation. How could it not have been? It was Lysistrata as performed by an especially raucous set of guests on the Jerry Springer show. Or maybe you saw it in more prosaic terms, a run-of-the-mill marital spat with a Grand Guignol twist. Either way, its cultural influence is pervasive, abiding, undeniable. You can find allusions to it in Philip Roth’s misanthropic masterpiece Sabbath’s Theater (1995), in David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), also a misanthropic masterpiece, and in the Eminem song “Evil Twin” (2013), among other unlikely places, including a field guide to marine invertebrates. (It has a namesake worm, one that attacks prey with jaws that resemble scissors.) And soon it will be the subject of a four-part docuseries on Amazon, executive-produced by Academy Award…

We used to drive. Drive for hours. Till we ran out of gas and had to fill up again. All the while, the car never traveled more than a mile outside the bounds of Oakland, California. My friends and I repeated our route as often as we could, as slow as we could, playing music out of car speakers as loud as we could. Never taking freeways because all the stuff that freeways tried to avoid were the things we wanted to run into, get lost in: other cars with people in them; red lights that might have you stop on a corner where everybody was gathered, allowing you to run into friends you hadn’t seen since the last time you passed, pulling over to get the latest news about…

What is your idea of perfect happiness? Living in peace. What is your greatest fear? Poverty. Which historical figure do you most identify with? Sojourner Truth. Which living person do you most admire? Barack Obama. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Insecurity. What is the trait you most deplore in others? Self-centeredness. What is your greatest extravagance? Travel. What is your favorite journey? The journey to falling in love. What do you consider the most overrated virtue? Beauty. On what occasion do you lie? I really try not to lie, but I will admit to sometimes omitting facts when I think the situation requires it. What do you dislike most about your appearance? My neck. Which words or phrases do you most overuse? “Awesome.” What is your…

I was delighted to read your coverage of the young royals before seeing their wedding ceremony, on May 19. How heartening to learn of a woman from humble beginnings who made a name for herself in an altruistic way. I hope her philanthropic endeavors continue, as is almost a requirement now by someone of her status (such as when Princess Diana worked to promote awareness of the dangers of land mines). Charity is the area where those common causes for the greater good don’t pit any political view against another. Meghan and Harry’s marriage also represents a union of cultural narratives: Stateside and across the pond. My sense is, like Grace Kelly before her, Meghan Markle will bring a renewed splendor to both societies. ROSE PEBLES McLean, Virginia LADY OF THE…

‘It is strange,” Vladimir Nabokov once wrote, “the morbid inclination we have to derive satisfaction from the fact (generally false and always irrelevant) that a work of art is traceable to a ‘true story.’” These words are lifted from his 1944 study of Russian master Nikolai Gogol, but they would not be out of place in Nabokov’s own autobiography, Speak, Memory. The author’s lifelong mission was the pursuit of his art, and those who dared question him about the real-life inspirations and meanings of his fiction soon realized their mistake. Yet in Nabokov’s Lolita—the much-vaunted and still-controversial novel of a European gentleman’s illicit relationship with a 12-year-old American girl, celebrating the 60th anniversary of its American publication this August—one line thrums with the overtones of corporeal inspiration. It’s toward the…

Sex and the City, which debuted 20 years ago this summer, was not simply a TV series. It was a phenomenon—a comedy, a fashion bible, a trend report, a manual to New York, a lifestyle manifesto. Its success, and its cultural footprint, can be attributed to several factors that amounted to a perfect storm: frank and provocative subject matter, ultra-contemporary fad-spotting, and an arch, old-fashioned tone that sometimes laughed with its sexually adventurous characters but more often laughed at them. Sex and the City had no compunctions about being wish fulfillment; if anything, it reveled in the implausibility of its own world, where a practically freelance sex columnist regularly wore $400 shoes and a gallerina intent on nabbing a husband wouldn’t deign to give blow jobs. The stylish and upscale…

Berners-Lee also envisioned that his invention could, in the wrong hands, become a destroyer of worlds. ‘For people who want to make sure the Web serves humanity, we have to concern ourselves with what people are building on top of it,” Tim Berners-Lee told me one morning in downtown Washington, D.C., about a half-mile from the White House. Berners-Lee was speaking about the future of the Internet, as he does often and fervently and with great animation at a remarkable cadence. With an Oxonian wisp of hair framing his chiseled face, Berners-Lee appears the consummate academic—communicating rapidly, in a clipped London accent, occasionally skipping over words and eliding sentences as he stammers to convey a thought. His soliloquy was a mixture of excitement with traces of melancholy. Nearly three decades…

In June 2016, Bill G. B. Pallot and Charles Hooreman, rival antiques dealers in Paris, became the two most famous men in the French art world. That was when Pallot admitted to the police that he had masterminded the forgery of at least four chairs purportedly built in the 18th century for France’s royal household and, in a series of transactions via third parties between 2009 and 2015, sold them to the Palace of Versailles. For decades, Pallot, who ran the furniture division of the Parisian gallery Didier Aaron, had enjoyed a reputation as the world’s leading expert on the works of 18th-century France; indeed, Versailles’s decision to purchase the chairs hinged on Pallot’s blessing. And based on Pallot’s imprimatur, the government classified two of his fake lots as national…