Vogue December 2016

Anyone who saw Michelle Obama wearing a T-shirt and a pair of cropped trousers way back in 2008, when she and Barack Obama were campaigning for his presidency, would have known that we were looking at a very different future First Lady; that she didn’t intend to dress—or behave—as others had in the past. Now, after eight glorious years of her presence, style, conviction, and—there is really no other way to put it—leadership, we all know that our initial instincts were absolutely right. Michelle Obama tore up the rule book on what it means to be the partner of the President of the United States; her notion of a political wife still included the role of wife and mother, for sure, but she expanded it to actively engage in meaningful…

If I let myself be a little corny for once, I’d admit that I have a Christmas fantasy. I would like my nineyear-old son to sit next to my 83-year-old father at midnight Mass this Christmas Eve in New York as my dad theatrically belts out “Adeste Fideles.” My son has made it clear he’s not interested in another sunny Los Angeles celebration with our it’s-all-good neighbors; Christmas casual, you might call it. He wants the East Coast, his rambunctious cousins, massive amounts of snow, holiday airport drama, the works. I want him to experience one of the few family traditions we have left, the solemn and the cheeky, Our Father and my father. And as the two of them sang, my dad and I would start speaking again and…

Novy Mir, meaning “New World,” the leading Soviet literary monthly where Olga Ivinskaya worked, was set up in 1925. Literary journals enjoyed huge influence in the Stalinist period as vehicles for political ideas in a country where debate was harshly censored. The offices in Pushkin Square were situated in a grand former ballroom, painted a rich dark red with gilded cornices, where Pushkin once danced. The magazine’s editor, the poet and author Konstantin Simonov, was a flamboyant figure with a silvery mane of hair who sported chunky signet rings and the latest American loose-fitting suits. He was keen to attract “living classics” to the journal, and counted Boris Pasternak among its contributors. Olga was in charge of the section for new authors. On an icy October day in 1946, just…

It’s early September, and I’m sitting on an oversize cheetah-print sofa in the living room of the Faena Hotel Miami Beach, waiting for Ximena Caminos. Ximena and her husband, Alan Faena, are Miami’s newest power couple. In four years, they have turned this formerly depressed section of Miami Beach (between the ocean and Indian Creek, and from Thirty-second to Thirty-sixth streets) into the Faena District, a mecca for high-end living, populist spectacle, and cutting-edge culture. The Faena Hotel—which used to be the Saxony—opened last December, just in time for Art Basel Miami Beach. Its extravagantly kitsch interiors—acres of red velvet, massive gold columns— were conceived by Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin. A number of other commercial and cultural projects are either open or under way. To celebrate the late-November debut…

My friend Julian found the ad in the back of the Village Voice: a twobedroom, fifth-floor walk-up at the corner of Bleecker and Macdougal. It had cracked wood floors painted black to cover the grime, crumbling window casements, and no sink in the bathroom—but at $800 a month we could just about afford it. We had come to New York after graduating from a Quaker college outside Philadelphia that prided itself on its egalitarian ways. Students were forbidden to have cars, and the administration provided free alcohol for dorm parties, all to make sure that wealthier students wouldn’t have any social advantage. I fit right in, given that displays of wealth had been frowned on throughout my Waspish upbringing outside Boston (that my family happened to have no wealth to…

In early 2015, Sasha Lane was reveling in a quintessentially American spring break in Panama City, Florida, when the English filmmaker Andrea Arnold plucked her off a beach and out of obscurity with a simple question: Did Lane—then a nineteen-year-old freshman at Texas State University with zero acting credentials— want to star in the Oscarwinning director’s fourth feature, American Honey? Sure, why not? The movie opens with Lane’s character, Star, dumpster-diving for her next meal, and in short order we’re following her on a reckless road trip through the heartland. The film is raw and vividly atmospheric—think Harmony Korine’s Kids for the Snapchat generation—and benefits immensely from the honesty of Lane’s inexperience. When American Honey won the Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize this past May, Lane—the Texas-born daughter of a…