Search Results for: Vanity Fair

Nieman Storyboard’s “Why’s This So Good” explores what makes classic narrative nonfiction stories worth reading.

This week: Deborah Blum examine’s Buzz Bissinger’s “Shattered Glass,” which was originally published in Vanity Fair in Sept. 1998:

You might think that devious and uncooperative Glass would end up simply the evil counterpoint to the dauntless Lane. But Bissinger doesn’t cheapen the tale. One of the things that elevates this above a standard retelling of a sordid story is that the writer shows such a serious, almost nonjudgmental effort to understand what he comes to see as a very troubled child.

Bissinger does indeed end up on a street in Highland Park, pondering the influence of neighborhood and upbringing. He looks at old yearbooks, college newspapers, the history of Glass’s professional career. He talks to friends and former colleagues, (a few actually go on the record). And he puzzles with all of them over the destructive habits of “the sweet and nice boy, the hardworking boy who could never be what he wanted to be, the boy who couldn’t live up to the expectations he had inherited.”

“Why’s This So Good?” No. 34: Buzz Bissinger Trails A Fabulist

A look into the lives of female war correspondents Christiane Amanpour, Marie Colvin, Janine di Giovanni, Maggie O’Kane, and Jacky Rowland:

Amanpour and her colleagues are reporters, they insist, not women reporters, as rugged as any man, and they’ve got the war stories to prove it. Take Afghanistan alone. Amanpour discovered what she believes were “mini– training camps” and a trove of documents about how to make chemical and nuclear weapons. The BBC’s newest sensation, a confident and exuberant 37-year-old Brit, Jacky Rowland, completed her mission of being one of the first Western correspondents into that country after September 11. “We left CNN and their equipment on the tarmac [in Tajikistan], which was a sheer delight,” says Rowland. During the first few days of the U.S. bombing, The Guardian’s Maggie O’Kane—a disheveled human tornado from Ireland who now lives in Edinburgh—endured a weeklong trek from Pakistan into Afghanistan, traversing “Horse Killer Pass.” Janine di Giovanni, an Italian-American with Jessica Rabbit looks, who writes for the London Times (and is a contributing editor at this magazine), vigorously dodged al-Qaeda fire while in Tora Bora. The only member of the group not to have recently visited Afghanistan is the toughest of them all, Marie Colvin, an American who writes for The Sunday Times of London. Instead, she was relearning to negotiate stairs after losing sight in one eye to shrapnel. She now wears a black pirate’s patch. She also has a beaded, sparkly one that was given to her by her friend Helen Fielding, who wrote Bridget Jones’s Diary. “It’s my party patch,” says Colvin as she brings her shaky match to her Silk Cut cigarette. “I never thought in my life I’d be the woman with the patch. But there you are, life changes.”

“The Girls at the Front.” — Evgenia Peretz, Vanity Fair, June 2002

See also: “4 Times Journalists Held Captive in Libya Faced Days of Brutality.” — Anthony Shadid, Lynsey Addario, Stephen Farrell and Tyler Hicks, The New York Times, March 22, 2011

Nick Roses is a 22-year-old Hollywood agent who specializes in working with child actors. But former clients say he’s scamming families with promises of Disney stardom:

Howard Meltzer, a longtime casting director, calls Roses “Bernie Brillstein in a 20-year-old’s body.” Many others in Hollywood deem him either a gimlet-eyed child prodigy prone to the occasional youthful indiscretion or a shark-eyed huckster with the face of a Mouseketeer. Or both.

Roses’s status as a communal lightning rod began in April, when the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office charged him with seven counts of, in essence, criminal Hollywood skulduggery. Parents of children that Roses represented complained that he, among other things, baited them into moving to Los Angeles and becoming clients at a poorly run management company which bilked them out of money. In July, the case was settled when he pleaded no contest to violating a new law prohibiting managers from charging fees to clients for the promise of work or auditions. Such fees are deemed red flags by the Hollywood Establishment; mainstream talent managers work on a commission basis—they don’t make a penny until the client does.

“Shark in the Kiddie Pool.” — Ned Zeman, Vanity Fair

See more #longreads from Vanity Fair

Exploring the social etiquette of Couchsurfing.org—and how its rapid growth is challenging the community’s expectations of safety and mutual respect:

Orange Acres takes all kinds, provided you follow a few simple rules:

• No alcoholics, crackheads, or members of the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, or PETA

• ‘[O]n the subject of hippies and rainbow people,’ please don’t wear patchouli oil: ‘That stuff stinks forever’—and bring your own pillowcase if you have dreadlocks.

• Happy Hour starts at 6:30 p.m.; during that time—and only during that time—you may drink beer or smoke pot. Do not get shitfaced or you will be thrown out of the house. If you drink and try to drive, Jeff will handcuff you to a chair and call the cops. 

• Dogs and children must be on leashes. This is non-negotiable.

“The place really is not a commune; it is a dictatorship,” Halvorson tells me.”

“I Couch-Surfed Across America.” — Tim Murphy, Mother Jones

See also: “A Girls’ Guide to Saudi Arabia.” — Maureen Dowd, Vanity Fair, Aug. 1, 2010

The country’s huge challenges following the U.S. withdrawal, including corruption, new waves of violence and crippled infrastructure:

The end of the U.S. military’s long, bloody adventure in Iraq signals the start of a new, highly uncertain chapter in the country’s development. In the scenario conjured by optimistic U.S. and Iraqi officials, an Iraq free of tyranny, terrorism, and foreign occupation will transform itself into a modern and open economy in the heart of the Arab world. That vision recedes a bit more every day as sectarian tensions reemerge, corruption hinders development, and the country’s political leadership moves against its opponents and flirts with autocracy. Iraqis are reluctant to ask aloud if the most recent attacks represent the deadly half-life of war, or, as Abdel Sadeh and many others I spoke to during four weeks in December and January say they fear, another meltdown.

“Iraq: Under Worse Management.” — Elliott Woods, Bloomberg Businessweek

See also: “Heads in the Sand.” — David Rose, Vanity Fair, May 12, 2009

Featured Longreader: Caitlin Dewey, producer for Kiplinger. See her story picks from Malcolm Gladwell, Vanity Fair, plus more on her #longreads page.

Top 5 #Longreads of the Week: Featuring Sports Illustrated, GQ, Vanity Fair, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Guernica, plus a guest pick from Los Angeles Times staff writer Carolyn Kellogg.

Ten years after the arrival of the first detainees, officials, lawyers, prisoners and soldiers speak out on how it all started—and how difficult it has been to close it:

When I first got down to Guantánamo, I, along pretty much with everybody else in my group, thought that we were going to be dealing with the worst of the worst. That’s what we had been told.

When I started to get a broader view, I realized that a large majority of the population just had no business being at Guantánamo. Maybe they had been picked up on the battlefield, and maybe they were involved in low-level insurgency. That would’ve been the worst of it with a large portion of these characters. The majority of the ones that I saw—really, we just didn’t have anything on them. So it was kind of a shock to the system on the level of the detainees.

“Guantánamo: An Oral History.” — Staff, Vanity Fair

See more #longreads about Guantánamo

Featured Longreader: Lexi Mainland, social media editor for The New York Times. See her story picks from Vanity Fair, New Yorker, The Atlantic and more on her #longreads page.

An investigation of the many scams of Minkow—who goes from prison, to church, and then back to prison:

Minkow was the boy-wonder business phenom of the 1980s. In 1982, at age 16, he started ZZZZ Best, a carpet-cleaning company, from his parents’ garage in Reseda, Calif., in the San Fernando Valley. The business expanded rapidly and went public in 1986, making Minkow, at age 20, worth more than $100 million on paper. But it was a giant Ponzi scheme and collapsed in May 1987. Minkow was convicted of 57 federal felonies, sentenced to 25 years, and ordered to pay $26 million in restitution. …

The story of Minkow’s life is comic, tragic, and psychologically perplexing. Minkow is blessed with intelligence, courage, indomitable drive, rhetorical gifts, an apparent desire to do good, and a record of documented beneficent deeds. Yet he also keeps doing ghastly things. His story is hard to read without pondering the question, Is character destiny? More narrowly, can a con man ever be redeemed?

“Barry Minkow: All-American Con Man.” — Roger Parloff, Fortune

See also: “All the Best Victims.” — Vanity Fair, Aug. 1, 2010