Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2024 i Vanity Fair

At the height of the conspiracy theories about Kate Middleton’s whereabouts after a planned surgery, as rumors swirled about body doubles, deepfakes, and other deceptive tactics of the disinformation age, it struck me that the British monarchy was again—ironically—proving its resilience. Outside of world leaders and Taylor Swift (more on her shortly), who but the future Queen of England could generate such attention, such interest, such unhinged speculation? The truth turned out to be humbling, scary, and all too common. A cancer diagnosis is the great leveler, the kind of thing everybody fears and all the money in the world can’t prevent. In our cover story, Katie Nicholl explores its chilling effect on the House of Windsor, in a season when not one but two of its four core members…

Over the last few years, country music has broken streaming records and minted new stars, giving this summer’s festivals devoted to the genre an added allure. At Under the Big Sky in Whitefish, Montana, perennial crowd-pleaser Miranda Lambert is headlining alongside bluegrass sensation Billy Strings and Americana stalwarts Turnpike Troubadours, but you can also catch the renowned Tanya Tucker and talented up-and-comers Sierra Ferrell and Kaitlin Butts. The Faster Horses Festival gives die-hard fans the chance to camp on the Michigan International Speedway to see radio’s biggest names live. In addition to headliner sets from Yellowstone fan favorite Lainey Wilson and country’s most recent unlikely star, Jelly Roll, come for performances by Hardy and Ernest, two members of Morgan Wallen’s brain trust who throw concerts every bit as fun as…

THE TERM “hotel art” doesn’t typically inspire visions of creative brilliance, instead calling to mind a framed seashell print at a beachside bungalow, sketches of the Eiffel Tower or Statue of Liberty, or oil paintings of horses in snow at grand ski resorts out West. But over the years some hotels, through wealth or by happenstance, have displayed real art—art that should be hanging in a museum, or at the very least a blue-chip gallery. In its heyday, the Ancien Hôtel Baudy in Giverny was host first to Monet, then Pissarro, Renoir, and more Impressionist biggies, with many artists’ work ending up on its walls. A few decades later on the opposite side of France, the owners of La Colombe d’Or in Saint-Paul de Vence struck up a friendship with…

THE NIGHT OF October 5, 2023, found the engineer Shireen Shelleh at a dinner she had dreamed about for years. Inside the boardroom at the headquarters of the Bank of Palestine in Ramallah, she took her seat at a long conference table among 30 others, mostly members of the Palestinian business elite. A few seats away sat her design colleague, an Israeli-born architect. Shelleh and her companions had gathered to discuss a single urgent question: how to revive the Arc? The Arc had been a visionary study conceived in 2005 by the RAND corporation. The proposal had been among the grandest of ideas and ideals: to remake the economy, infrastructure, and transportation system of the West Bank and Gaza. If it had worked, its creators believed, it would have laid…

GRAB A COFFEE at the Golden Pear in Southampton, New York, drive due south almost a mile straight down Main Street, take a left onto Gin Lane. It’s just a five-minute drive. As your GPS will tell you, you’ve arrived. The storied street, one of the most exclusive in the Hamptons, runs parallel to the ocean. It’s filled with grand old shingled homes, some built in the late 1880s, hidden from view behind hedgerows of privet, a hardy shrub first brought to the Hamptons by English settlers in the 1600s. From your turn onto Gin Lane, it’s another 0.7 miles to number 376. Here sits a cedar-shingled house—which you can’t see from the street—built in 1888 on the Rosa rugosa dunes for railroad tycoon Robert Olyphant, the great-great-grandfather of actor…

Dara LIND “CROSSING OVER,” P. 92 “It’s easy to present images of the US-Mexico border as a spectacle,” says Lind, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council and longtime immigration reporter. She was instead grateful for the opportunity to explore the fuller picture. Savannah WALSH “NO NONSENSE,” P. 58 “At 25, she’s a brighter version of herself, ready to embrace her newfound pop stardom because she now knows it’s only just beginning,” says Walsh, who first interviewed Sabrina Carpenter shortly after her 21st birthday. Walsh, a Kansas City, Missouri, native, can be found working late, ’cause she’s a writer. Emma SUMMERTON “NO NONSENSE,” P. 58 Summerton, who photographed idiosyncratic pop star Sabrina Carpenter, has a fondness for detail and a fervor for fashion. In 2023, the Australia-born photographer became just…

LAST FALL I told Harvard’s English Department that I planned to offer a class this spring on Taylor Swift. No one objected; Harvard professors like me get lots of latitude in confecting electives as long as we also offer the bread-and-butter material our majors need. (Most of my work is poetryrelated; I also teach our regular undergrad course about literary form, from Beowulf on.) I’d call my new class Taylor Swift and Her World, as in: We’d read and listen to other artists and authors (part of her world). But also as in: It’s her world; we just live in it. I’ve been living in it ever since. I thought I’d be teaching a quiet seminar: 20-odd Swifties around a big oak table, examining and appreciating her career, from her…

On a sunny afternoon, the views from Joe Biden’s campaign headquarters in downtown Wilmington, Delaware, are so clear that if you squint hard, you can almost see the White House, 100 miles to the southwest. The floor plan is open and the windows run just about floor to ceiling, so all 200 staffers share in the sweeping vista. With the striking exception of probably the most important person on the premises. That Jen O’Malley Dillon sits at the very center of the office is appropriate symbolically: She is a hub of the reelection effort’s leadership infrastructure. It also means that O’Malley Dillon, officially the campaign chair, is the only person on the team who occupies a dimly lit cubicle. Four years ago, J.O.D., as most everyone in Bidenworld knows her,…

THIS IS WHAT ABANDONMENT LOOKS LIKE. First abandoned by the hope of making a life in their home countries, compelling them to flee. Then left behind by smugglers, who could successfully get them to the United States alive, but whose responsibility for their survival ends abruptly in the desert. Finally, waiting to present themselves to federal agents to start (they hope) the next phase of their lives, many newcomers find that processing is at capacity. They’re stranded before being formally apprehended. Photojournalist Go Nakamura witnessed desperation and determination in the border deserts of California and Arizona during reporting trips in November, December, and April, and captured how the US-Mexico border has become one site of an ongoing global crisis. The UN’s refugee agency estimates that nearly 40 million refugees and…

87 HOURS LEFT Inside the operations room of Canada’s Atlantic-focused Joint Rescue Coordination Centre, or JRCC, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, red lights flashed and an alarm sounded as the call came in. The four men on duty—three from Canada’s Coast Guard, the other from the Royal Canadian Air Force—adjusted their headsets, noted the caller’s number, then “figured out where the lat and long was,” essentially identifying the vessel’s precise position through its coordinates. The voice—a male’s, sounding “stressed and shocked”—told JRCC operators that a private submersible called Titan had detached from a modified icebreaker called the Polar Prince early that morning, began to descend beneath the waves some 10 hours prior, and had yet to resurface, contrary to its expected return time and dive protocols. That meant the last visual…

When Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski announced his next project, a Formula 1 movie starring Brad Pitt, everyone in Hollywood auditioned for the young lead. Last summer, a paparazzi shot of Pitt and Snowfall’s Damson Idris wearing racing suits on an F1 track in the UK let the world know who got the part. “That was our first day of filming,” says Idris. “I look to my left, it’s Brad Pitt. I look to my right, it’s Javier Bardem. I look at my hands, they’re shaking. And we shoot all of this epic stuff and all the amazing drivers are there, from Lewis [Hamilton] to [Max] Verstappen to everyone.” From set in Abu Dhabi, Idris dispatches a typical day behind the wheel: “I was in the car for 45…

AS THE DEMOCRATIC National Convention barrels down on Chicago this August, it’s not lost on historians that Grant Park, stretched along the shores of Lake Michigan in the city’s downtown Loop, has been a kind of American omphalos: a venue for celebration, surely, but also a portal to the belly of the American beast. Borne out of the ashes of the Great Fire of 1871, the 312-acre park was established three decades later, and its elegant promenades and groomed lawns soon became a people’s play-ground, the site of both the Art Institute and Field Museum. During World War I, the traveling US Government War Exposition held a highly attended spectacle there, with a display illustrating trench warfare, medical treatments, and new technologies. In my lifetime, two other gatherings in Grant…

WHEN KING CHARLES was crowned just over a year ago, nobody, not even the king himself, could have predicted the first year of his reign would play out as it has. Just nine months after his coronation, watched by some 400 million people around the world, in a coincidence as bizarre as it was unprecedented, the monarch and his beloved daughter-in-law the Princess of Wales were both admitted to the same London hospital within days of one another. And then the one-two punch of why: Despite initial assurances that neither condition was believed to be cancerous, the palace announced that Charles had in fact been diagnosed with cancer, and after several weeks of brutal speculation and online conspiracy theories, Kate had too. The earlier hospitalization announcements, released to the public…

RIDLEY SCOTT IS standing next to a tiger. The big cat is frozen in motion, leaping off its hind legs, broad mitts set to attack. This is the set of Gladiator in Kalkara, Malta. The year is circa 1999, which you might have surmised from the style of the shades worn by the crew members in the shot’s middle ground, framed between Scott, the animatronic tiger, and the back of leading man Russell Crowe’s head. The tiger had its moment, slain by Crowe’s Maximus in a pivotal fight scene. In this photo, though, it’s just a dusty stuffed animal in a fake Colosseum with a middle-aged director prodding its belly in a mock-neck T-shirt and baseball cap. Scott’s outfit here is rigorously basic, the only bit of ornamentation a metal…