Innholdsfortegnelse for Holiday 2016 i Vanity Fair

Hot Gifts PUNCH HUT TON Hot Gifts PUNCH HUT TON Hot Gifts PUNCH HUT TON Hot Gifts PUNCH HUT TON Hot Gifts PUNCH HUT TON Hot Gifts PUNCH HUT TON Hot Gifts PUNCH HUT TON Juniper Books produces custom literary collections, bespoke covers, books-by-the-foot, and more. A perfect gift for people of any age. ( juniperbooks.com) Robert Harris’s Dictator (Knopf )—the final volume of his Cicero trilogy—sees Rome toppled by the rapacious ambition of politicians, poisonous selfinterests, and foreign wars. Hmmm, how timely … Geoffrey Cowan shoots a hole in the campaign behind rowdy Teddy Roosevelt’s rallying cry for political primaries—Let the People Rule (Norton). Ethan Michaeli headlines the vital role the legendary black newspaper The Defender (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) plays on the front lines of social justice. With My…

Are we approaching maximum eyeball overload? This August, John Landgraf, C.E.O. of FX, the feisty network that sprang Louie, The Americans, and the now departed motorcycle thrasher, Sons of Anarchy, on the unsuspecting, caused a ripple at the Television Critics Association Summer Press Tour when he projected that in 2016 more than 400 original scripted series will be produced, initiating a tipping point at which “Peak TV” begins to subside and contraction begins. “This is simply too much television,” he told the assembled junketeers. Too much television?! Unthinkable! Practically un-American! Landgraf’s prognostication and pessimistic tone received the requisite amount of reflexive pushback on the Internet, but the woeful lament of “too much television” was a blues number I could relate to, as a former pro. I had it easy. When…

I. On a morning of late spring in 2015, I step ashore from a water taxi onto the Piazzetta San Marco, in Venice, without doubt the most historically celebrated patch of waterfront in the world. Instantly I am in the very heart of La Serenissima, the Most Serene Venetian Republic, and all around me are the magnificent structures that long ago ruled an empire of the sea and are now icons of one of the earth’s top tourist destinations. There they stand, gleaming in the Adriatic sun, campanile and clock tower, pillars and palaces. Endless crowds move about them, boats swarm before them, flags fly, a vast white liner slides by offshore. Café music sounds from somewhere, and the whole scene is alive with passion, pride, and profit—a living essence…

@vf.com For behind-the-scenes photos from ADELE’S music video directed by Dolan, go to VF.COM/HOLIDAY2015/2016. The French-Canadian wunderkind filmmaker Xavier Dolan thinks the reason he’s so bad at interviews is that he likes them so much. “I love confiding my worries, opinions, states of mind—everything.” The New York Times called him “an erratic conversationalist.” In addition to being a talker, he’s a gifted storyteller. His first movie, I Killed My Mother, which was based on an essay he wrote in high school about a complicated mother-son relationship, premiered to a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009. In 2014, his fifth feature, Mommy, about an overwhelmed widow trying to navigate life with a violent son, shared the Jury Prize, at the same festival, with Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye to Language.…

8:05—As Brian Williams describes the gun battle he and the parking valets engaged in upon his arrival, Pope Francis drops in, looks around, says “Who am I to judge?,” and runs out to catch the new Star Wars. 8:27—“It’s gonna be huuuuuuuuge!” says Donald Trump, describing to a skeptical Megyn Kelly the nearly 2,000-mile-long cake he says happy Mexican bakers will deliver when he’s president. 8:53— As Amy Schumer and Caitlyn Jenner discuss the shortcomings of the American male, aspiring African-American Rachel Dolezal shares stories of struggle with Viola Davis, Uzo Aduba, and Regina King. 9:09—Inveterate instigator Bernie Sanders arrives looking for a party to crash, but after he is denied admission by Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis, he heads for Hillary Clinton’s never-ending Evite-only bash. 9:45—Having seen enough, David…

Max Chafkin’s article [“It’s All in the Eyes,” October] states that Mark Zuckerberg and Palmer Luckey dream of Neal Stephenson’s “metaverse,” “a nearly limitless virtual world [with] billions of plugged-in people. They will exchange ideas, buy and sell goods, such as virtual real estate … and have incredibly realistic cybersex.” Chafkin’s piece, documenting the techno-pagan elite’s creation of a virtual-reality headset to take us into the spiritual realm, describes what is to me reminiscent of Timothy Leary’s 1960s LSD aspirations. KENNETH C. MOSIER II Pensacola, Florida When driving to my house on a lake, I was taken by the changing leaves in all their color and glory. Earlier I had read an article in V.F. on virtual reality, and a line stuck in my mind: “What would be a better…

JOHNNY DEPP AND THE HOLLYWOOD VAMPIRES FLIP THE SCRIPT IN RIO When it comes to rock music and hearing loss, the relationship has always been crystal clear: overexposure to one leads to the other. While that’s still true, one band has turned this truth on its ear, bringing the gift of hearing to more than 200 children and adults in Rio de Janeiro and offering many of them their very first opportunity to experience music of any kind. This past September, the supergroup Hollywood Vampires, featuring Alice Cooper, Johnny Depp, Joe Perry, Duff McKagan, Matt Sorum, Bruce Witkin and Tommy Henriksen, led a group of other enthusiastic celebrities and musicians (including Amber Heard, Sergio Mendes, Zak Starkey and Queens of the Stone Age) in Starkey Hearing Foundation’s mission to fit…

I feel like I’m in a movie. Not just any movie, a highly specific kind of movie, one of those trashy-but-sublime Hollywood jobs, a jet-set-y, South-of-France-y bit of chic piffle that’s about international spies or jewel thieves or cat burglars, only is really about glamorous, sexy stars doing glamorous, sexy things in glamorous, sexy locales. Daft yet delectable; not art yet artful—To Catch a Thief or Diamonds Are Forever maybe. And in this highly specific movie, I’m in a highly specific scene: I’m sitting in a restaurant, open-air and umbrella-dotted, all very relaxed and casual in a way that suggests great expense and exclusivity, the patrons suntanned and sunglassed, the backdrop el primo, knockout spectacular, featuring an ocean that sparkles and fizzes like a sapphire, the exact color, by happy…

I. Capitivity Xavier Plassat is a friar of the Dominican order, a Frenchman who has worked for decades in the Brazilian Amazon and is renowned for his fight against slavery as it exists in our time. Modern slavery differs from classic chattel slavery, in which people are held as private property, but to the extent that it treats people as tools to be used and discarded, it is nearly as brutal and degrading. Currently it affects perhaps 20 million people, and probably many more. Relatively few are women tricked into prostitution; a greater number, men and women alike, are manual laborers in forests, fields, and factories, or at sea. It is possible to get caught up in the technicalities of definition. Those who rely on slaves for labor want as…

The whole thing began over a puddle in a driveway. The two men are next-door neighbors in Lyford Cay, a gated community on New Providence, an island in the Bahamas, and for years it had been a peaceful adjacency. Because both of them happen to be billionaires, it is a picturesque driveway, lined by casuarina trees and triple Alexander palms, 200 feet north of a stunning body of water known as Clifton Bay and 100 feet south of an even more stunning vista upon the Atlantic Ocean. It is less a driveway than a road—but also a portion of road that is shared by both neighbors and nobody else, owing to how it cuts right through one man’s property and ends at the other man’s, which occupies the westernmost tip…

In early 2008, I started working on what became my book The Big Short. I’d written one book about Wall Street, Liar’s Poker, and pretty much assumed I’d never write another, as I further assumed that nothing would ever happen on Wall Street that was as interesting to me as what had happened to me—or, if it did, I’d be the last person anyone on Wall Street would want to tell about it. What caught my attention in late 2007 were the weird, amorphous, and ever growing trading losses in the subprime-mortgage bond market suffered by the big Wall Street banks. Citigroup’s losses went from $6 billion to $40 billion to more than $65 billion. Merrill Lynch announced a $4.5 billion hit, then revised it to $19 billion and then…

You hear a lot these days about the coming “new golden age” in American philanthropy. Members of Gen X and Gen Y—some of them billionaires by their own efforts, the rest of them about to inherit $40 trillion from baby-boom parents—are said to be looking for ways to make a mark. Let’s hope so. The bar set by previous golden ages is high. In towns all across America you can pick out an Andrew Carnegie library from half a mile away—he built more than 1,500 of them. Carnegie was a tough-minded industrialist whose maxims have a Sorkin-esque, Silicon Valley ring: “The first man gets the oyster. The second man gets the shell.” His perspective changed when he turned to good works. “As I grow older,” he once said, “I pay…

There is a long tradition of films— ranging from Roman Holiday to The Prince and Me—about royals going incognito as “normal” civilians as they attempt to break free from their sheltered existences and get a taste of “the real world.” A Royal Night Out—which opened in the U.K. in May and makes its U.S. debut this month—takes that trope and applies it to none other than Queen Elizabeth, back when she was a teenage princess. The action takes place on V-E Night, in 1945, as World War II has come to a close and the streets of London are packed with revelers. Princess Elizabeth (played by Dracula Untold’s Sarah Gadon) and her more freewheeling sister, Princess Margaret (The Diary of a Teenage Girl’s Bel Powley), get permission from their parents,…

Some people make films and some people make films happen. While David Fanning started out as a filmmaker, his great skill has been to make films happen. From 1983 through this May, as the executive producer of the PBS series Frontline, he engineered the making of more than 600 films. It’s not just the quantity that’s impressive; it’s the quality: 69 Emmys, 17 Peabody Awards, and 31 duPont–Columbia University Awards, including three rarely awarded Gold Batons. Over time, Fanning has left a contradictory legacy. On the one hand, he has practiced a dispassionate, transparent TV journalism in which complete interviews and primary documents are posted online. On the other, he was never hands-off. Unlike ESPN’s 30-for-30, where disparate styles are encouraged, Fanning has steered many Frontline pieces into a house…

Jessica Alba’s parking spot at the Honest Company, the four-year-old consumer-products start-up that wowed the tech community with a $1.7 billion valuation this summer, shares a building with Yahoo in Santa Monica, California, and has a bright-green sign bearing her name. Before founding Honest, Alba was best known as the actress in roles such as a hip-hop choreographer with a heart of gold in 2003’s Honey and a strong-willed stripper in Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City franchise. I arrive for a tour at 3:32 p.m., and what transpires in the next 26 minutes is either a peek into Alba’s career as one of the tech world’s savviest businesswomen or the greatest performance of her acting career. Alba’s cobalt-steel desk is part of an openplan office that houses some of Honest’s almost…