Innholdsfortegnelse for Oct-15 i Vanity Fair

It was typically busy at Facebook’s headquarters, in Menlo Park, California, but on the day of the V.F. shoot for this issue an especially joyful mood filled the air. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s co-founder and C.E.O., had just announced—on Facebook, naturally— that he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, were expecting their first child. That meant everyone was feeling quite chipper—including Vanity Fair’s team, which consisted of Annie Leibovitz, contributing editor Betsy Kenny Lack, and senior photography producer Kathryn MacLeod. Leibovitz was there to photograph Zuckerberg for the cover, and also to shoot him with Palmer Luckey for Max Chafkin’s story on Oculus VR, the virtual-reality company that Facebook had acquired for more than $2 billion from Luckey and his partners in March 2014. Initially, only the photos for the Oculus…

Paul Newman was a brilliant actor and racecar driver, an innovative philanthropist, and my brother of 83 years. It saddened me to be reminded by Mark Seal of the changes made in the last months of my brother’s life. From the time Paul was diagnosed with leukemia, in February 2008, his health deteriorated. He was on heavy chemo and massive amounts of pain meds, and he was hospitalized numerous times. It was a very difficult time for all of us. I knew my brother longer than anybody quoted in the article and can attest that he was always loyal and dedicated to his family members, friends, co-workers, and staff. It was common for him to help friends in need with employment or support with business ventures. He was most inclusive…

1 TexMaxico’s new AdNausea Computer Goggles utilize microchips, radar, a 4,000-megabyte computer, and cloud mega-storage to augment your dreams with ads. AdNausea actually interfaces with your dreams: If you’re falling, for example, you’re treated to a 30-second ad for life insurance. If you’re getting it on with a Kardashian, it’s Viagra. If you’re dreaming about being chased by a giant spider, a pair of Zonkz are the ideal runaway shoe. You can use the 4-D goggles provided or have a micro-size ad-generating nodule surgically implanted in your hippocampus. 2 The In-Me 6 SuperSelfie Instant Body Scanner improves on the current version with a now 100 percent squeezable parallelogram screen that converts to popular rhomboidal format in a jiff, quelling a long-standing user gripe. The In-Me 6 turns your entire body…

American odyssey: Set in a drought-ravaged Southern California trolled by scavengers, Claire Vaye Watkin’s Gold Fame Citrus (Riverhead) burns with a dizzying, scorching genius. Despina Stratigakos’s Hitler at Home (Yale) outs the Führer as a home-reno junkie. Jeanette Winterson’s The Gap of Time (Hogarth) covers Shakespeare. Douglas Brinkley and Luke Nichter reel through The Nixon Tapes: 1973 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Women show their roots in Me, My Hair, and I (Algonquin), edited by Elizabeth Benedict. David Rieff’s The Reproach of Hunger (Simon & Schuster) is a gut punch. Terence Brown reports on The Irish Times: 150 Years of Influence (Bloomsbury). The Complete Works of Primo Levi (Liveright) is a heavy hitter. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic (Riverhead) makes fear disappear. Paul Theroux surveys the Deep South (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Valeria Luiselli’s…

Back in the Industrial Revolution, the original age of disruption—when the spinning jenny inspired the same kind of wonderment as Google does today, and the self-winding clock held the promise of SpaceX—a little-known English translator named C. R. Prinsep encountered a problem germane to his time. He had been commissioned to work on a hot book about modern markets by Jean-Baptiste Say, a French economist who had achieved Thomas Piketty–like fame amid the Napoleonic age. But as Prinsep dutifully plowed through the manuscript, he found himself unable to pinpoint a suitable English word to describe the new type of worker at the heart of his subject’s thesis— the do-it-all visionary of the day, the one with the temerity to guide an idea from conception to success; the plucky upstart attempting…

The first time Mark Zuckerberg put on the awkward headset he knew. This is ready, he thought. This is the future. On the outside, the Oculus Rift didn’t look like much: a matteblack box, roughly the size of a brick, that hung from his face like giant ski goggles, a tangle of cords running from the back of his head to the back of a small desktop computer. It looked futuristic, but not pretty—the kind of thing a teenager might create to approximate his vision of the future, which, in fact, is exactly how this particular device had come into being. The Rift’s creator, Palmer Luckey, was a 17-yearold sci-fi geek when he started building the prototype in his parents’ garage, in Long Beach, California. He took it to the…

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past. —Thomas Jefferson I. The First Layer Any story about the University of Virginia must begin with its founder, Thomas Jefferson, who is often referred to locally as “Mr. Jefferson”; with an invocation of the Rotunda and the surrounding “academical village”; and with a discussion of the venerable Honor Code and the exclusive secret societies. There must be a reference to the university as a “Public Ivy” or perhaps a “Southern Ivy,” and to the act of being physically on campus as being “on grounds.” There must be a nod to “girls in pearls and guys in ties” attending football games and horse races but paying attention to neither. More recently, there’s another thing that any story…

In October of 1975, New York City went bust. After years of mismanagement and overspending the greatest city in the world needed $477 million that month to meet its debt obligations. But it only had $34 million on hand. Mayor Abe Beame was minutes from declaring the city in default. And Hugh Carey, the governor, cabled President Gerald Ford for immediate assistance. The president’s response? FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD was how the New York Daily News famously put it. The situation was bleak, and it would take New York more than a decade to recover. Yet amid the chaos of insolvency, the town had one thing going for it—Broadway. In 1975, Broadway, after years of dark theaters and cultural irrelevancy, was beginning to stir. A musical called A Chorus…

“I’m 11 years old and I have an opinion.” That subject line grabbed the Mailbag’s attention even more decisively than “congratulations you!—winner of your bank of nigeria rewards!” unfailingly does. “My name is Zein Blanks,” begins the e-mail, and the opinion included (in an essay) is that “guns should be banned in the United States of America.” Thank you, Zein, “an American living in Dubai,” who gives her phone number and adds, “My mom may answer because I might be at school.” “Ahhhhhhhhhh, the age-old classic: the aging, in bad health, slowly-losing-his-mind billionaire and the women half his age who loooooooooooooooooooooooove him and understand him like none before!” writes Sue Highland, from Sacramento, California, regarding William D. Cohan’s “Who Controls Sumner Redstone?” (June). “If it weren’t so sad and pathetic,…

An attempted murder in the darkness of Manhattan’s Central Park as the city rings in the year 1977 sets off an elaborate, time-bending, ensemble-cast investigation in Garth Risk Hallberg’s soaring debut, City on Fire. Interweaving the narratives of an aristocratic uptown family, an underground punk band, a Long Island adolescent, a black gay aspiring writer, and a journalist determined to uncover the obscure connections between them all, the more-than-900-page novel—which drew a $2 million advance from its publisher, Knopf, in a 2013 auction that left the literary world on the edge of its seat until now—casts a panoptic lens on 1970s New York City, exposing its every gritty underside, from financial corruption to the drug epidemic. As the characters crisscross one another within the urban grid over the course of…

Four years ago, Graham Veysey and Marika Shioiri-Clark set out to develop and cultivate their ideal neighborhood. “I wanted to go to a place where I could sink roots down and make an impact,” says 33-year-old Veysey, who owns a video-production company. They bought a former firehouse built in 1854, complete with three poles, and turned one of the old fire-truck bays into their living area. The second floor is now a collection of workspaces, including Veysey’s office and Shioiri-Clark’s design studio. The couple christened their once desolate area of Cleveland Hingetown (it’s the connector of three sections of town: the Warehouse District, the Ohio City Market District, and Gordon Square) and began changing the landscape. They added splashes of public art, flower baskets, and bike racks to the cracked…

One Thursday morning in early June, the ballroom of the Rosewood Sand Hill hotel, in Menlo Park, was closed for a private presentation. The grand banquet hall appeared worthy of the sprawling resort’s five-star designation: ornate chandeliers hung from the ceiling; silk panels with a silver stenciled design covered the walls. Behind a stage in the 2,800-square-foot room, a large sign bore the name of Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s most revered venture-capital firms. As breakfast and coffee were offered, the company’s partners mingled with the men and women who endow their $1.5 billion fund. The investors were dressed invariably in business casual, with the top button of their dress shirts noticeably undone. (A mere handful of men stood out in a suit and tie.) Off in the distance,…

Three successive generations grew up without ever having known a time when, respectively, Johnny Carson, David Letterman, and Jon Stewart were not on late-night television. And when these men stepped down from their jobs, their departures were the cause of grieving and anxiety, a sense of “Who else could possibly see me through the end of my day? How will life go on?” But life does go on, and these transitions have a way of working to everyone’s benefit. As Stewart himself said in February, The Daily Show “doesn’t deserve an even slightly restless host, and neither do you.” And, though hardly anyone remembers this today, Carson, before he announced in 1991 that he would retire the following year—prompting a renewed appreciation of his silvery cool and perfect comic instincts—was…

@vf.com To watch VIDEO with the cast of Scream Queens, go to VF.COM/OCT2015. From Alicia Silverstone’s charismatic Cher Horowitz in Clueless to Winona Ryder’s regulargirl-turned-murderess Veronica in Heathers, to all the Regina Georges and Blair Waldorfs in between, there is an almost regal tradition of Queen Bees on-screen who have provided audiences with some of the most actualized (and most entertaining) representations of what it’s like to be a modern teenager. And whether you love them or love to hate them, there’s a new gang of girls in town, courtesy of prolific show-runner Ryan Murphy and his new series Scream Queens, premiering on Fox this month. The premise has been kept tightly under wraps, but here’s what we know: It’s set at a fictional, picturesque university somewhere in the United…

Julia Wachtel’s pictures are the stuff of serious play—a poetic simulation of everything wonderful and horrible all at once, part pop culture, part formal, abstract construction. Wachtel—who oversaw production of the U.K. edition of Vanity Fair for more than a decade—mounted recent solo exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art and New York’s Elizabeth Dee Gallery, and this fall will be part of “Champagne Life,” a group show opening at London’s Saatchi Gallery. “Julia is whip-smart and funny, exactly like her paintings,” says Chelsea gallerist Elizabeth Dee. “She’s a deep thinker on a political and social level. Her paintings predicted key cultural shifts: the end of television in its 20th-century form, the beginning of reality/confessional pop culture, the emergence and dominance of celebrity culture.” “The biggest challenge is to compete,…

I nspired by the magical hues of Venice, Lucia Pieroni, the creative makeup director at Clé de Peau, has produced a holiday palette that embraces the fabled scenery of the ancient city. “I was always struck by the beautiful colors, how the light and water would reflect on the ornate buildings like the Doge’s Palace and Piazza San Marco,” she says. Launching this October, the Collection Bal Masqué echoes the rich colors of Venetian red earth and the glimmering shades of the green canals in the makeup coffret, while the body powder is evocative of shimmering candlelight at dusk, as are the nail-lacquer trio and le sérum. Each item has been given a name and a special mask motif created by jewelry designer Joji Kojima, who has made one-of-a-kind pieces…

His father was a diplomat, representing the newly independent nation of India, and Sonny Mehta grew up all over the world. When he was six, the family moved to Prague. When he was eight, they lived in New York. When he was nine, it was Nepal. A few years later, Geneva. For a peripatetic child, it would make sense that books became his most constant and reliable companions. “It’s really a cliché, isn’t it?,” Mehta says. After Cambridge, he settled in London, eventually creating two small publishing houses, Paladin, then Picador, both focusing on paperbacks. When Robert Gottlieb, the editor of Knopf, the celebrated American publishing house, was leaving to edit The New Yorker, he recommended that Mehta succeed him. “I was the least likely choice,” Mehta says. “I was…

Fog hovered over Jamaica Bay that morning, November 12, as dozens of grieving families gathered for the memorial service in Rockaway Park, along the water in a far precinct of Queens. They had come to mark the 13th anniversary of the crash of American Airlines Flight 587, a flight headed to the Dominican Republic that instead ended up in flames in Far Rockaway, killing 260 people on board, as well as 5 on the ground. Mayor Bill de Blasio was scheduled to arrive at 9:05, 11 minutes before a uniformed officer was to ring a silver bell noting the exact time of the crash. But at 9:05 there was no sign of the mayor, who was on a police launch en route. For several minutes family members stared in disbelief,…

Two summers ago my friend Agustín, an Argentinean graduate student on pilgrimage in Rome, filed into the papal-audience hall near St. Peter’s Basilica for a group photograph with Pope Francis. The pilgrims, a hundred in all, were put in four rows; those in the front row would meet the Pope. Then Francis strode in, smiling broadly. Scrapping protocol, he insisted on greeting all the pilgrims, one by one, the way Agustín had seen him do back when he was Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires. Finally, Agustín’s turn came. “Buenos días,” Francis said, looking him in the eye, and Agustín explained that he was about to get married. “Congratulations,” said the Pope, “and look, if some dishes fly in your house, don’t worry about it.” “And I said to…

Mike Nichols, who died at home in New York last November 19, 13 days past his 83rd birthday, left a crater-size hole in the cultural landscape and in the life of the city he loved. He was that rare thing—a success in entertainment for six decades, beginning in the late 1950s with the classic comedy albums he made with the brilliant Elaine May (which had first been developed into a Broadway stage show, An Evening with Nichols and May, directed by Arthur Penn), then becoming one of the leading theater and motion-picture directors of the second half of the last century. He directed such landmark films as The Graduate, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Carnal Knowledge, and Silkwood, as well as 22 Broadway plays, including the 2012 revival of Death…