Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2021 i Vanity Fair

Since the fall of 2017, Vanity Fair has been checking in once a year with Billie Eilish, in a video series that has become a fixture on her fans’ calendars and our own. There’s no set of metrics that can fully explain the rise of a pop star, but these annual videos—in which we ask Billie the same questions, year over year, about her dreams, her accomplishments, her tattoos or lack thereof—chart the path of a preternaturally talented young artist from homegrown musical phenom to instantly recognizable icon. It’s like a hyper-focused version of Michael Apted’s Up series, accelerated for the new millennium. What’s striking about the latest video, which we released in November, is how much has changed in Billie’s world in the course of 12 months, and also…

Few parts have reached the same heights in television’s pantheon as James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano. The Sopranos was appointment TV at the dawn of cable, and 13 years after the series ended, The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel film, will land on HBO Max this fall, with Michael Gandolfini succeeding his father as a young Tony. As the buzz begins, Gandolfini, who also stars opposite Tom Holland in the Russo brothers’ adaptation of Nico Walker’s Cherry, out this month, opens up about stepping into Tony’s shoes. EARLY MEMORIES OF The Sopranos are few. “My dad didn’t want me to see Tony Soprano—the violence, the angry, the mean. Of course I was on set and would visit him in his trailer, but I had never watched the show…. I never knew…

Martin Luther King Jr. probably had too much faith in the decency of America. In director Sam Pollard’s new documentary MLK/FBI, close friends and family of the murdered civil rights leader say he dismissed concerns that government authorities, under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, were tracking his every move. The truth arrived in the form of a threatening letter and embarrassing recordings from bugged hotel rooms, sent to King in an effort to demoralize and silence him. A half century later, it’s the FBI that’s wracked with shame over its conduct—in the documentary (distributed by IFC and executive produced by, among others, Vanity Fair’s David Friend), former director James Comey says this represented the bureau’s “darkest” period. “I’ve done lots of documentaries about the African American experience and the…

BEFORE I EVER meet Billie Eilish, I feel like I know her. I have already watched her ride a pinto across a New Zealand beach, get her sprained ankle wrapped, grind on a bag of bagels, blow a slobbery raspberry into her brother Finneas’s face, mimic her mother, expound on the seriousness of the coronavirus, shoot water out one nostril while using a neti pot, and fit much of an Oscar Schmidt Aloha ukulele headstock into her mouth. I know what a Billie Eilish burp sounds like, and also a sneeze. Here, in the trailer for a forthcoming documentary about her life, is blond-haired toddler Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O’Connell perched on a piano bench. Here she is a few years later, singing at a talent show. I have listened…

Jeff WISE “DOWN IN THE VALLEY,” P. 68 Wise received his pilot’s license in Los Angeles in 2002, training in the city’s skies 18 years before Kobe Bryant’s fatal flight. “I had firsthand experience dealing with the intricacies of the airspace in the San Fernando Valley,” says Wise. Abigail SANTAMARIA “DEAR MRS. L’ENGLE,” P. 100 Biographer Santamaria first read former Black Panther Ahmad Rahman and writer Madeleine L’Engle’s prison correspondence in the spring of 2019. Their wildly disparate worlds could be disorienting, even devastating. “But ultimately,” Santamaria says, “their friendship filled me with hope.” Quil LEMONS “CHARMING BILLIE,” P. 56 At 23, Lemons is the youngest photographer to shoot the cover of Vanity Fair. His goal was to find a sense of intimacy with Billie Eilish. “She’s one of the…

1. BRIDGE MAGAZINES “You have to try to communicate with your partner”— for Gates, this is often Warren Buffett— “using nothing but your bids. It’s fascinating.” 2. HIS NEW BOOK, HOW TO AVOID A CLIMATE DISASTER “Dealing with climate change requires solving some easy problems and some hard ones, and we can’t just deal with the easy ones.” 3. PRESIDENTIAL MEDAL OF FREEDOM “For Melinda and for me, what it really recognized was the work of all the health care workers and teachers whom we’re fortunate to be able to support.” 4. HOLOLENS 2 MIXED REALITY HEADSET “The uses go way beyond gaming and entertainment, such as training people by simulating the use of new products.” 5. DESK CHAIR AND WORD CLOCK “I don’t know that I have a design…

MADELEINE L’ENGLE’S MAIL arrived in prodigious batches by the summer of 1976, 14 years after the publication of A Wrinkle in Time. From her study in Manhattan’s Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, where she served as librarian, the 57-year-old author attended to editorial correspondence, fan art, manila envelopes stuffed with middle-school-reader responses, royalty statements, and speaking requests from around the world. Amid the usual haul, one correspondent stood out: Ron Irwin, inmate #130539 at the State Prison of Southern Michigan, a 25-year-old former member of the Black Panther Party. Irwin, who later converted to Islam and adopted the name Ahmad Rahman, had just received an honorable mention in the nonfiction category of the 1976 PEN America Writing Award for Prisoners. PEN had recently launched a correspondence program pairing…

Style DAILY UNIFORM: My uniform tends to be pants and jumpsuits first and foremost, because comfort allows me to focus on the task at hand. GO-TO SHOE: The interesting shapes from Merrell and Crocs (14) are so much fun to style with different silhouettes. JEWELRY: When I turned 50 I did a total cleanse of all of my possessions, including my Hollywood film jewelry from the ’20s–’50s. However, I do have dog tags from Walmart engraved for each anniversary year my partner and I have been together (1). Health & Beauty DAILY MAKEUP: Dark brown mascara (9) and a cherry lip stain by Hurraw! (7). HAIR CARE: Rosemary oil on my roots and ends. BRUSH: I use a few big wooden paddle hairbrushes (3). VITAMINS/SUPPLEMENTS: Vit D3, Counter Attack by…

Over the past months, to the complete surprise of every roommate I’ve ever had, I acquired a green thumb. It’s hard to ignore the needs of houseplants when you are similarly planted at home. The succulent hanging in the kitchen window hit yardstick length at the same time my braid began tucking into my waistband. I snipped off the occasional shriveled leaf with the same attention that I gave my split ends. Meditative pruning gave me the feeling of a bonsai master, which made my hair something of a bonsai itself: steadfast and deserving of preservation, like an old-growth forest in miniature. As my focus shrank to the scope of my Brooklyn apartment—sustaining life with regular waterings and conditioning hair masks—my household input-output highlighted a far-reaching concern. Delivery boxes piled…

JUST AS YOU half-imagined there would be, there’s music seeping from the entryway to Troy Andrews’s Buckjump Studio, just off St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans’s Lower Garden District. Big, lush, 10-fingered piano chords swell out under the heavy metal door and onto the sidewalk, a sonic cloud you can almost picture following Andrews, better known as Trombone Shorty since he was a four-year-old prodigy lugging his oversize namesake instrument through the streets of the Crescent City. When the tones subside, Andrews answers the door apologetically, wearing a navy blue Nike tracksuit and a white T-shirt. He is lean and muscular and, even at rest, maintains something of the pugilist’s bearing he assumes when playing his horn onstage. The snatch of piano, he explains, was something that came to him…