Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Quotes

‘Living for a Plank and Four Wheels in a Profligate Culture’

My wife, Daphne, got to something I’d been trying to figure out for years when, after reading a particularly asinine article in the February 2003 issue [of Thrasher magazine], she said: “It’s really not OK that these people are using so little of their brains.” “Using so little.” It’s the perfect indictment of everything that’s […]

Posted inNonfiction, Quotes

The Remnants of Maycomb: What Happened to Harper Lee’s Hometown

Maybe it wasn’t just Nelle’s insecurity that held her back from becoming “the Jane Austen of South Alabama,” but also the dismaying decline of the “small-town middle-class” idyll she’d staked her career on documenting. She had, after all, written a historical novel. To Kill a Mockingbird was filmed not in Monroeville but on an L.A. lot. There […]

Posted inUncategorized

The Vanity Fair Gossip Column That Wasn't

“Senior editor Walter Clemons recruited Truman Capote to write a gossip column for the magazine, which created more turbulence at 350 Madison Avenue—Condé Nast headquarters at the time—and more fodder for the press. ‘Capote finally consented and wrote one,’ Lawson recalls. ‘And at one of the meetings everybody except me said, “Oh, we can’t publish […]

Posted inEditor's Pick

How to Write About Tax Havens and the Super-Rich: An Interview with Nicholas Shaxson

Last year Nicholas Shaxson published a Vanity Fair article, “A Tale of Two Londons,” that described the residents of one of London’s most exclusive addresses—One Hyde Park—and the accounting acrobatics they had performed to get there. Shaxson’s piece was one of the best long-form pieces I read last year (I did in fact believe this […]

Posted inEditor's Pick

Mia’s Story (1992)

Following Dylan Farrow’s open letter detailing her sexual abuse allegations against Woody Allen, a look back at Maureen Orth’s original 1992 Vanity Fair report: There was an unwritten rule in Mia Farrow’s house that Woody Allen was never supposed to be left alone with their seven-year-old adopted daughter, Dylan. Over the last two years, sources […]

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