Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2020 i Vanity Fair

As I sat down to write this letter, a push notification lit up my phone: The global death toll of COVID-19 had passed 1 million people, one fifth of them in the United States. So many of these people did not have to die. Since March, the investigative journalist Katherine Eban has been reporting for Vanity Fair on the U.S. response to COVID, and this month we publish her in-depth story on Jared Kushner’s role in an ongoing lethal disaster for Americans. The closer Joe Biden and Kamala Harris get to the White House, the more clearly I imagine that alternative, sane reality in which a competent executive sits in the Oval Office, and COVID-19 in the United States looks like it does in South Korea, in Germany, in Norway,…

AWARDS SEASON THIS year has turned into Oscars: The Home Game. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the cavalcade of ceremonies, soirees, and screenings in Hollywood have come to a dead stop. Film festivals famous for launching front-runners have either pared back severely or transformed into living room binge watches. Red carpets are glorified Zoom calls. Will there even be an Oscars ceremony this year? The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences promises there will be, albeit two months later, on April 25. And, frankly, it’s hard to imagine a world in which ABC would forgo the broadcast’s ratings and revenue, even if it’s done virtually or with a sparse crowd scattered around the Dolby Theatre. The Academy has extended the eligibility deadline from December 31 to February 28—and temporarily…

SHE SAW SHADOWS. She always had. She was spiritual. Not Christian—she’d left that behind when she’d left Waco, in her early 20s. She got into Wicca, “super witchy,” says a friend. “She was fun, happy, a little wild. Just a normal girl.” I’ll call her Evelyn, because she’s in a sense a hostage now, a captive of her beliefs. There are Evelyns everywhere. This Evelyn was in Austin. She worked when she could, sometimes she danced, stripped. She had a boyfriend who took care of her. She’d never had much luck holding on to a job. She’d bounce back and forth between her family in Waco and her friends in the city, right to left, red to blue. She was bright—a good listener, says one friend, a liberal lawyer whom…

On the evening of Saturday, March 21, a small group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, business executives, and venture capitalists gathered in the White House Situation Room to offer their help to the Trump administration as it confronted a harrowing shortage of lifesaving supplies to battle COVID-19. More than seven weeks after the federal government learned that a new and lethal coronavirus was barreling toward U.S. shores, hospitals were pleading for masks, gloves, and other personal protective equipment to safeguard their medical staff. Intensive care nurses had been photographed wearing garbage bags instead of gowns. More than 19,600 Americans had been diagnosed with the disease, and at least 260 had died. The meeting’s attendees—some present, some dialing in—were a bipartisan collection of heavy hitters. The ad hoc group had spent weeks canvassing…

Carmen Maria MACHADO “NOTES FROM THE ATMOSPHERE,” P. 22 V.F. beauty director Laura Regensdorf first noticed Machado reviewing scents as a quarantine pastime on Instagram. “If I’m being quite honest, my very favorite part was getting a lot of perfume in the mail all at once,” says Machado. “And to create lovely essay-poems about how things smell and feel on my body.” Nancy Jo SALES “A LEAGUE OF HER OWN,” P. 42 Sales says she felt immediately connected to Gal Gadot when they discussed motherhood. Toward the end of one of their Zoom conversations, Sales’s daughter, an aspiring filmmaker, walked in, and Gadot offered some encouraging words: “The sky’s the limit!” Stacey STOWE “THE WANDERER,” P. 52 While reporting on the death of photographer Peter Beard, Stowe interviewed close to…

West Side Story’s Anita has an impressive track record, netting Chita Rivera and Karen Olivo Tonys and making Rita Moreno the first Latina to win an Oscar. “Lots of people have absolutely no problem telling me that they wanted my job,” says the Tony-nominated Afro-Latina actor Ariana DeBose of her coveted role in Steven Spielberg’s forthcoming remake. And with her starring role in Ryan Murphy’s Netflix movie musical The Prom, opposite Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, and Kerry Washington, she’s giving us something to sing about. SHE ENTERED the competitive dance world at age three. “At 18, I auditioned for So You Think You Can Dance.” She was sent home. “I was told that I was a stunning dancer but didn’t have enough passion in my eyes for what I do.…

TO ESCAPE Météore by LOUIS VUITTON Here in the Anthropocene—as many have dubbed this geological era shaped by man-made intervention—we cannot help but imagine our own annihilation, the infinite potential sources for the apocalypse. The asteroid is a tried-and-true option, whose appearance has prompted meteorological panics for all of human history. The ending of Lars von Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia comes to mind, when one sister sees her imminent death by colliding planet and tries to cover her face, while the other simply sits and welcomes it. This fragrance is less about the chunk of rock burning in space than the cold vacuum surrounding it. There’s the acidity of citrus (orange, bergamot), the bite of pepper, and a cool vetiver—the smell of grass in shadow. Soapy, chilly, butch: Météore is…

AUDREY PENCE: SAUL LOEB/GETTY. CAROLINE GIULIANI: LOUIS LANZANO/AP. CLAUDIA CONWAY: DOLLY FAIBYSHEV/REDUX. BUSH TWINS: NATHAN CONGLETON/NBC/NBCU PHOTO BANK VIA GETTY. JESS BOND: FRAZER HARRISON/GETTY. TIFFANY TRUMP: NOAM GALAI/GETTY. DONALD TRUMP: DREW ANGERER/GETTY. GEORGE W. BUSH: WESLEY HITT/GETTY. KELLYANNE CONWAY: ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY. MIKE PENCE: TASOS KATOPODIS/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY. PAUL MANAFORT: MANDEL NGAN/GETTY. RUDY GIULIANI: ROY ROCHLIN/GETTY. VINTAGE CAMERA: CHANG/GETTY. IPHONE: ALEM OMEROVIC/GETTY. LOGO (INSET): COURTESY OF TIKTOK. CARMEN SANDIEGO: 20THCENTFOX/EVERETT COLLECTION. DENTURES: TRAILAK AMTIM/GETTY. GEORGETOWN FLAG: G FIUME/GETTY. KAMALA HARRIS: ERIC BARADAT/GETTY. KAREN SMITH: PARAMOUNT/EVERETT COLLECTION. SCOTTISH TERRIER: CATHERINE LEDNER/GETTY.…

CARA DELEVINGNE, Ashley Benson, and a rubber-gloved Kaia Gerber were spotted on a friend date there in March. In April, Jake Gyllenhaal and Demi Lovato each popped in wearing masks, followed by Hilary Duff in May and Miley Cyrus in June. After reportedly splitting from Delevingne, Benson returned in July with rapper G-Eazy. In August, A$AP Rocky scanned the snackage. *Stefon voice:* The hottest pandemic club in Los Angeles is Erewhon, the all-organic, frequently macrobiotic VIP room of grocery stores where vegan coconut yogurt costs $19, and there’s a naturopathic doctor on staff to recommend calming “reishi” mushrooms. According to Erewhon Twitter, Steven Tyler once whispered “You’re beautiful” to a female shopper, and Ellen may or may not have reamed out the hot-bar staff for running out of scrambled eggs.…

His nickname was “Walkabout,” an apt tag for the irrepressible spirit that was Peter Beard, as comfortable amid wild game in Kenya as he was behind the velvet ropes of a wild club. In 82 years, he beat the odds many times. An elephant attack broke his pelvis in five places, and he blew enough cocaine to impress Keith Richards. So it was puzzling and tragic when his body was found in woods near his Montauk home last spring. There was no sign of foul play—he’d simply, most likely anyway, wandered off. Peter Pan, Lord Byron, Tarzan, Casanova, Saint-Exupéry’s Petit Prince, Ernest Hemingway: All have been invoked to describe Beard. But there is no template for an original like Beard, who possessed an insatiable appetite for drugs and danger. His…