Innholdsfortegnelse for Holiday 2018/2019 i Vanity Fair

EVENT STARZ Honor America to Me Vanity Fair & STARZ collaborated for a celebration honoring the STARZ Original series America to Me, ahead of a special screening at the LA Film Festival which was part of Participant Media’s 10-city social impact campaign rollout. Guests included series subjects, industry notables, along with students and teachers from the Los Angeles Unified School District. The poignant series follows students, teachers and administrators in suburban Chicago’s Oak Park and River Forest High School, one of the country’s most exemplary and diverse public schools, over the course of a year as they grapple with decades-long racial and educational inequities. Following the screening, Vanity Fair’s West Coast Editor Krista Smith moderated a compelling Q&A between Director Steve James, series subjects Jess Stovall and Ke’Shawn Kumsa, LAUSD…

“It was a blonde,” Raymond Chandler wrote in Farewell, My Lovely. “A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.” Stormy Daniels (real name Stephanie Gregory Clifford)—the face that launched a thousand memes (“Yeti pubes,” “Mario Kart mushroom dick”)—may bring down the whole building. Trump’s fixer, Michael “I’d take a bullet for him” Cohen, may go to jail, in part, because he never got his client to sign the damned non-disclosure form, making that $130,000 the loudest “hush money” in American history. (SAD!) The Donald allegedly promised to make her a star on The Apprentice, but didn’t. (BAD!) She became the star of her own reality show; the only stripper to open her act with a clip from 60 Minutes. Say what you will, but…

In Russia, he became the youngest Frenchman to ever score a goal in a World Cup. A few days later, when he scored two goals against Argentina, he became only the second teenager—after Pelé—to score two goals in one Cup match. Playing against Croatia in the final, Kylian Mbappé blasted a comet from 25 yards out, helping France win the whole thing. Mbappé was still 19 when, a few weeks after being fêted by Macron and Putin amid a sudden Russian rain, he signed a contract with Paris Saint-Germain worth about $210 million, making him the most expensive teenager in the world. All this, and his game is still developing. He’s a very good passer but often doesn’t see the wide-open man. He’s a phenomenal ball handler but often makes…

Bob Woodward has long impressed me: calm, unruffled, dogged, and determined to get at the facts. I’ve followed his journalism career since 1972, as he and Carl Bernstein investigated the Nixon administration. I went on to portray him in the film All the President’s Men, which chronicled the Watergate scandal. I’ve been alarmed and deeply concerned about similar presidential corruption today, which is why of all Bob’s books I’ve read, his latest, Fear: Trump in the White House, might be the most urgent—revealing an executive branch ruled by greed, feuds, viciousness of spirit, and open warfare against a free press. Once again, Woodward delivers a deeply sourced and rigorously researched account, producing, as he has called journalism itself, “the best obtainable version of the truth.” Sometimes it’s ugly, and often…

The two women are wearing black, which is rare for them. They’re typically dressed in sunny colors, ushering their clients into Miami’s multi-million-dollar mansions of glory. Their vibrant wardrobes and mile-wide smiles befit the No. 1 team in Miami real estate, brokers who have sold a staggering $3.4 billion worth of homes since 2005, making them the most successful residential agents in the national Coldwell Banker network: Jill Hertzberg and Jill Eber, better known to friends and foes alike as the Jills. Today, though, they wear severe teacher’s spectacles and expressions as dark as their attire as they stand in a dreary Miami courtroom and attempt to persuade a judge to send a rival broker, Kevin Tomlinson, to prison for extortion. Tomlinson “had the evidence on the Jills,” as he…

At the outset of making his new documentary, Apollo 11, Todd Douglas Miller had a pro forma conversation with his contact at the National Archives and Records Administration, Dan Rooney, about what he was working on. Rooney is the supervisory archivist in nara’s Motion Picture, Sound, and Video branch, in College Park, Maryland, which is the final repository for, among other things, any extant films whose production was underwritten by the U.S. government. As its working title indicates, Apollo 11, which will be released next year in a 90-minute cut for movie theaters (there will also be a 40-minute version for museums), is about the most famous and celebrated of all the missions carried out by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—the one that made Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin…

SHOP Richard Mille Opens NYC Flagship Swiss watch manufacturer Richard Mille opened its largest boutique in the world this fall, in New York City. Located at 46 East 57th Street, the 4,200-square-foot flagship becomes the ninth Richard Mille boutique in the Americas. A two-story oasis of sleek contemporary design, bathed in abundant natural light, the boutique represents a new architectural standard for the luxury brand. The extreme technicity and artistry that defines Richard Mille timepieces is also evident in every element of the boutique, starting with the 30-foot-high glass façade that is illuminated by 156 feet of LED lights—a glowing presence at the foundation of the tallest residential tower in the Western Hemisphere. richardmille.com SHOP Rock Star Treatment Without Leaving Home We’ve long been able to get clothes custom fit…

1 The Pope’s Long Con “The jaw-dropping story of con man Danny Ray Johnson, who ran for state office in Kentucky in 2016 on a campaign of lies about his past—and won. With its tragic, shocking conclusion, this show is a reminder that there will be more Trumps after Trump, and is a bracing example of the impact that honest reporting can have on dishonest subjects.” 2 Decoder Ring “Hosted by Slate’s TV critic, Willa Paskin, this podcast cracks cultural mysteries. Who tries out for reality television? Who picks the paintings that hang in hotel rooms? Where did the laugh track come from and why did it die? Listening to this show is like staring at a Magic Eye image: the stories reveal their profundity gradually, sneakily.” 3 Bodega Boys…

And why not? It’s a material of superlatives—one that, come the holidays, swathes the otherwise discreet in such immoderate adjectives as sumptuous and splendid. The word itself conjures an array of allusions: the sky at dusk, a lounge singer’s husky voice. Amid this season’s inclement weather, excess calories, weekday parties, and gaping political unease—and all the attendant hangovers those things bring—velvet is tangible self-care. The cakes named for it are rich, as are the people who first popularized it: Chinese nobility circa the fifth century b.c.e.; the Italian aristocrats who adopted it as their own. Rulers from the house of Borgia to Henry VIII have bedecked themselves in the material to sit for now famous paintings, and even our favorite new royal, Meghan Markle, was recently snapped sporting a pair…

The radical genius of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther lies not just in its world creation but in its daring specificity of a world where Women are warriors; Women are counselors; Women are scientific savants. Where Children are as wise and respected as the Ancestors. Where the Past is precisely as urgent and immediate as the Future. Coogler’s world is layered with complicated technology that is not simply powered by “Isn’t it cool?” spectacle, but by a profound and constantly oscillating dissonance of philosophy: to help or to hide. Outreach versus Isolation. Community versus Supremacy. The fact that there are no easy answers points to Coogler’s keen intellect behind the storytelling and is part of the reason why Black Panther is now, and forever will be, a superlative of the superhero…

While the comedian Hannah Gadsby has been a national treasure in Australia for more than a decade, she burst into America’s consciousness six months ago with her paradigm shifting and thought-provoking Netflix comedy special, Nanette. It’s a familiar setup: onstage, a stand-up comic makes a joke at her own expense; the audience laughs; and whatever painful truth she reveals through her anecdote—whatever humiliating, embarrassing, or traumatic experience she hides within the husk of humor—is completely forgotten, dismissed and condoned by the waves of laughter. The brilliance of Hannah (and the show) is that she refuses to comply with this model. Partway through her act, she declares she’s done with comedy because she no longer wants to make jokes out of her suffering. She recounts the harrowing personal ordeals that formed…

On March 14 of this year, the English cosmologist Stephen Hawking—who came into this world on the 300th anniversary of Galileo Galilei’s death—transcended our physical plane, at age 76, on the 139th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s birth. One could imagine that Mr. Hawking is among the aforementioned luminaries at some roundtable in the sky. But were he alive, Hawking—who, at age 21, was diagnosed with the incurable neurodegenerative disease A.L.S.—would tell you otherwise. With his dry wit and unvarnished point of view, delivered in its rhythmic and robotic tone via his speech synthesizer, Hawking might instead share his thoughts about the hereafter. As he told The Guardian, in 2011, “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife…

The Vanity Fair Hall of Fame dates back to the magazine’s original incarnation in the 1910s. It was a monthly feature that shone a spotlight on artists, writers, society figures, and other luminaries whom the editors felt worthy of recognition. The first installment, published in December 1913, included Anna Pavlova (“the greatest dancer of the age”), Rodin (“to see [him] at work in his atelier, is to see not merely art, but life itself, in the making”), and Arnold Henry Savage Landor (“the first European traveler to enter the Forbidden City of Tibet”). We like to think that the news moves more quickly than ever now, but that’s just the hubris of presentism. It would be hard to win that argument with a reader during, say, World War II or…

The first image you see in Mary Poppins Returns is a gas flame dancing in an old-fashioned street lamp, just before dawn. It’s an apt way to start the movie, which, more than half a century later, means to rekindle the spirit of Walt Disney’s 1964 adaptation of the P. L. Travers children’s books. Some would argue (well, I would) that the original Mary Poppins is the greatest of Walt Disney pictures—Disney, the actual man and studio head—so that crafting a sequel is a Herculean and possibly foolish task. Blame or salute director Rob Marshall (Chicago, Into the Woods), screenwriter David Magee (Life of Pi), and songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (Hairspray). But here we are. The second thing you see in Mary Poppins Returns is a close-up of…

“Justice requires action and a voice,” said the Honorable Judge Rosemarie Aquilina to Larry Nassar—the disgraced doctor who molested scores of women and girls during his decades-long tenure at USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University—before sentencing him to 40 to 175 years in prison. Judge Aquilina’s voice is unmistakable: as dynamic, opinionated, and strong as it is empathic, compassionate, and imbued with emotion. Even more remarkable than the power of her voice—“I speak out because I want change,” she says—is the room she made for survivors’ voices during Nassar’s sentencing hearing: 156 victim-impact statements spanning seven gut-wrenching days. Olympic gold medalist Aly Raisman has said, piercingly, “All we needed was one adult to have the integrity to stand between us and Larry Nassar.” Whereas those who could have prevented so…

With all the stress in the country, we can count on the phenomenal power of girls and women. In March, Naomi Wadler, 12, galvanized tens of thousands of listeners at the March for Our Lives rally, in Washington, D.C., with her powerful speech announcing that she was there to represent the African-American girls who are victims of gun violence and too often ignored by the media. One of those captivated by Wadler’s words was feminist pioneer Gloria Steinem, 84, who, in 2016, produced a series of eight documentaries about violence against women around the world. Last spring, Naomi co-chaired her elementary school’s walkout to draw attention to the need for stricter gun controls, joining a national movement; Gloria, meanwhile, co-founded and serves on the boards of the Women’s Media Center,…

Swerving between heartbreakingly sad and wickedly funny as Queen Anne in Yorgos Lanthimos’s whimsical 18-thcentury period drama, The Favourite, Olivia Colman shows her range and deftness. She is “like lightning,” says the filmmaker, who first directed Colman in 2015’s The Lobster. “She can be in a completely different mood, and then her mood and composure and her whole energy changes in a millisecond.” The British actress, who graduated from the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, says, “I feel things very quickly,” explaining that she relies on her acute empathy—inherited from her mother, a nurse, and her father, a surveyor who “will sit and cry at anything on the telly”—to connect with a character. Queen Anne’s tragic personal life informed Colman emotionally. “To have lost 17 children, it’s just too awful…

What is your idea of perfect happiness? The excitement of re-writing the previous day’s work, & continuing on from that point energized & hopeful. For a writer, “happiness” isn’t likely to ever be “perfect”—but it is likely to be bound up with the work in progress. What is your greatest fear? Sometimes, it is the possibility of loneliness. Other times, it is the possibility of never being alone. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Probably, a lack of discipline. (Though people think that I write quickly, & don’t revise, quite the reverse is true.) To myself, I work very slowly & painstakingly, & am often frustrated by accomplishing so little. My friend Margaret Atwood has said that in the late afternoon she is likely to be overcome…