James Wolcott, Vanity Fair contributing editor

The Cold War is the comeback geezer of dramatic genres, the original, minatory “Winter Is Coming.” The genre that gave us doomsday nail-biters (Fail Safe), let-it-rip satire (Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb), cold-sweat fever dreams (The Manchurian Candidate), and penitential studies ...

James Wolcott's review in the London Review of Books was the longest and nastiest. It began with a quote from ... What was Edwin Frank, the editor of New York Review Books, thinking when he decided to reprint Making It? Had he seen virtues in the book that the fog of schadenfreude had obscured in 1967? Would a new ...

In the quarter-century since Vanity Fair launched the Hollywood Issue, show business has changed in fundamental ways, as have magazines. .... Top: V.F. features editor Jane Sarkin and Annie Leibovitz review wardrobe options with Jessica Diehl; Bottom: Annie with the photo team and Michael Shannon ...

How do you solve a problem like Lena? It may not be the most pressing musical question before the nation, yet it must be addressed, otherwise Lena Dunham—writer, director, actor, essayist, memoirist, and varsity-league exhibitionist—will persist in being an irksome source of distraction, like a moth flapping against a bare ...

Subscribe to Vanity Fair today. ... disgraced men, a human laptop compared with beanbags of complication such as Weinstein, Toback, Spacey, CK, and Leon Wieseltier, the former New Republic literary editor fired from his new post after numerous women recounted their run-ins with his lechery during his previous tenure.

It is my dearly beloved hope (yours too, I trust) that it won't take another presidential election to expel the Desecrator in Chief from the premises, to liberate us from the otiose spectacle of Donald Trump tramping over the Constitution in his golf spikes and exercising his tweeting thumbs at the expense of decency, democracy, ...

If nothing else (and there's plenty else), The Deuce, premiering Sunday on HBO, gets midtown crudball New York in the 70s dead right. It specifically nails the early 70s, when the corruption and cynicism of the Nixon Watergate scandal infiltrated every pore. Other recent 70s-set series—Vinyl, the ...

I've always found the attraction of sadomasochism a bit of a puzzler. I understand its theatrical appeal—the Catwoman dominatrix outfit, the dripping dungeon, the nifty props (whips, candles, cat-o'-nine-tails)—but, from the perspective of the submissive, all that kneeling, groveling, and ee-owing under the booted heels of ...

This is strictly, sketchily anecdotal, so don't strap me to the wall and drill for data, but listening to fellow liberal neurotic Democrats over the last year, I detect a sense of abandonment. Of Obandonment, to be more precise. Obama, Obama, where art thou? The Bat Signal scours the city night in vain for thee. Think of it ...