Search Results for: Vanity Fair

Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Sports Illustrated, Esquire, Narratively, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, fiction from New England Review, and a guest pick from Matthew Herper.

“The Birth of Bond.” — David Kamp, Vanity Fair

More by Kamp

Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Stories from Vanity Fair, The Billfold, The New Yorker, Wired and New York magazine, plus fiction from Electric Literature and a guest pick by Brittany Shoot. 

“Obama’s Way.” — Michael Lewis, Vanity Fair

More by Michael Lewis

An excerpt from Stross’s new book, which goes inside Y Combinator, Paul Graham’s Silicon Valley startup incubator:

The Kalvins are attempting an improbable thing, making a case for a nondigital product: ‘Having a physical product that you flip through and have on your coffee table and show your friends—it’s real­ly valuable! We’ve actually bought photo books for our friends and family. It sucks because you have to spend hours making them, finding the photos.’ Every dorm has to prepare one each year, pay a printer $20 a copy, and buy at least a hundred.

Graham returns to his still-unanswered question: ‘Where does this expand?’

A Kalvin suggests offering a book based on your personal calendar and Foursquare check-ins. Or your tweets for the year.

‘You’re not serious, that people are going to print up tweets from last year?’ asks Trevor Blackwell, who is in his early 40s, about the same age as the other three founding partners. He too has a day job, as the chief executive of Anybots, the robot company that then shared its building with Y.C.

‘Actually, I have a tweet book,’ says one of the Kalvins.

“Who Wants to Be a Billionaire?” — Randall Stross, Vanity Fair

More Vanity Fair

John Fairchild turned his family’s dry fashion trade journal, Women’s Wear Daily into one of today’s most influential fashion publications. The 85-year-old looks back on his controversial career:

Unlike in Paris, where couture designers were revered, Seventh Avenue was then dominated by garmentos while the designers toiled in the back rooms as relative unknowns. Fairchild set out to change that dynamic. ‘John came back from Paris and went to the fashion houses here and said, “I don’t want to talk to the manufacturers—I want to talk to the person who makes the dresses,” ’ says de la Renta, who was working for Elizabeth Arden at the time. ‘For all of us, there’s a great debt to be paid to John Fairchild, because he’s the first one to put American designers on the map.’

WWD began publishing personality profiles of the designers, elevating them to celebrity status, writing about their travels, vacation homes, and, in titillating fashion, love lives. As one veteran WWD staffer puts it, ‘Mr. Fairchild always likes to know, “Who’s doing the boom-boom?” ’ The newspaper covered society in cheeky and irreverent fashion. Rummage through the archives of WWD and W at the company’s Third Avenue offices and, even a half-century later, the ‘Eye’ columns are deliciously entertaining, filled with gossip and photographs of ‘the ladies who lunch’ and ‘Jackie O’—phrases coined by Fairchild. He is widely credited with coming up with such catchy phrases as ‘hot pants,’ ‘walkers,’ the ‘social moth’ (for Jerry Zipkin), and ‘the Cat Pack,’ a takeoff on the Rat Pack. Fair­child and his writers went for the jugular, proclaiming that ‘Jackie O is now Tacky O,’ criticizing her taste in clothes and announcing that her jewelry had become vulgar. Fair­child launched the popular trend of running flattering and unflattering photos of socialites with suggestive captions such as: ‘It is hard to believe that the matronly frump in the white wool dress is the same tightly coiled Gloria Vanderbilt of today. Gloria swears that her metamorphosis has nothing to do with surgery but simply weight loss.’

“Fashion’s Most Angry Fella.” — Meryl Gordon, Vanity Fair

A murder of a young newlywed went unsolved for 23 years, until a cold case homicide unit picked up the file and found a missing clue.

Sherri’s file perplexed Francis. The crime report stated that a swab had been taken from the bite mark on Sherri’s arm, but it was not listed in evidence and was not among the forensic samples that had been signed out by Moritt in 1993. It apparently had been misplaced sometime earlier. Where might it be?

Francis knew well the steps in the evidence chain. Evidence recovered from the victim’s body would be held for a time in the coroner’s freezer, while the case was still active, and at some point would be gathered up and stored under the file number. What if the swab hadn’t made it from the freezer to the file? Francis called the coroner’s office. The swab was not on file, so they searched the freezers by hand.

“A Case So Cold It Was Blue.” — Mark Bowden, Vanity Fair

More from Bowden

This summer marks the 45th anniversary of “the Summer of Love” in San Francisco. A look at the movers and shakers in Haight-Ashbury in 1967:

Joplin’s creative epiphany occurred after a friend of Getz’s gave her acid for the first time—slipping it into her cold duck—and they went to the Fillmore to hear Otis Redding. ‘Janis told me she invented the ‘buh-buh-buh-ba-by … ’ after seeing him,’ says Joe McDonald. ‘She wanted to be Otis Redding.’ Grace Slick salutes her 1967 co-queen (who died of a drug overdose in 1970), her soul sister in prodigious ‘swearing and drinking,’ by saying, ‘She had the balls to do her thing by herself. A white girl from Texas, singing the blues? What gumption, what spirit! I don’t think I had that fearlessness.’ Slick sadly regrets, ‘I was so Episcopalian that when I saw a certain sadness in Janis’s eyes I felt it was none of my business.’ If she could turn back the clock, she says, she would have tried to help her.

Victor Moscoso says that 1966 was ‘when it worked. You’d walk down Haight and nod to another longhair and it meant something.’ Rock Scully adds, ‘We painted our houses bright colors. We swept the streets.’ The Grateful Dead all crammed into a house at 710 Ashbury; so did Carolyn Garcia, with Sunshine, her baby daughter with Kesey. Barely 20, Carolyn cooked every meal for that ‘boisterous, wonderful’ band, and she saw how ‘competitive to a fault’ Jerry was. ‘He would rehearse and rehearse and rehearse, and with these intricate fingerings—always wanting to excel, to be the best’ at the acid-fueled improvisations he now played, which he described as ‘something like ordered chaos.’ (Garcia died of heart failure in 1995.)

“Suddenly That Summer.” — Sheila Weller, Vanity Fair

More from Vanity Fair

Obama famously said he wanted a “team of rivals” in his Cabinet. Why that never happened:

The way Cabinet officers relate personally to the president is—no surprise—often the crucial factor in their success or failure. Colin Powell had a worldwide profile and a higher approval rating than George W. Bush, and partly for those very reasons had trouble building a close rapport with a president who had lots to be modest about. Obama’s energy secretary, Steven Chu, may have a Nobel Prize in physics, but that counted for little when he once tried to make a too elaborate visual presentation to the president. Obama said to him after the third slide, as one witness recalls, ‘O.K., I got it. I’m done, Steve. Turn it off.’

“Team of Mascots.” — Todd S. Purdum, Vanity Fair

More from Purdum

Top 5 Longreads of the Week: Stories from Guernica, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Village Voice, and Mother Jones, plus fiction from Joyland and a guest pick from writer John Fram.