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Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER GOOD-BYE TO ALL THAT All good things-certainly in my case this month-eventually come to an end. This is my final issue of VANITY FAIR. I won't bore [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER HARD TO SWALLOW If you think your mind is going to explode, what with all the irrational madness of the moment, you're not alone. A low-grade depression [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER STOCKHOLM SYNDROME A few months ago a loopy meme that careened around the dark regions of the Internet speculated that a photograph taken on the South Lawn [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE TRULY, MEANINGFULLY DANGEROUS* *BUT IN REVERSE ORDER There are two distinct approaches to the opportunities and pitfalls provided by modern-day fame. [...] more...

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER THE RECKONING As we tiptoe up to the one-year anniversary of the election that left more than half the country-and much of the rest of the world-reeling [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER 'NATIONAL LAMPOON''S PRESIDENTIAL VACATION Given the world's problems, from income inequality to terrorism to climate change, our timing in bringing a man like Donald Trump into the [...] more...

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER HIGH RISK, LOW ENERGY Picture the classic American retiree. He could be your uncle. Or your father. He takes his meals in front of the TV set. [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN 2.0 'W hat about those of us who knew better, we who knew the words were lies and worse than lies? Why did [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER A FARCE TO BE RECKONED WITH The media, the opposition, the resistance, and indeed the rest of the Free World are playing by outmoded rules of engagement [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER TRUMP FAMILY VALUES It hasn't been a particularly good month for the grandiose hothead in the Oval Office. Just as the chaos within the West Wing was [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER A JOKE CERTAINLY, but NO LAUGHING MATTER It can reasonably be said that our dear leader is now the most ridiculed man on the planet. In fact, [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER THE GANG That COULDN'T SHOOT STRAIGHT We aren't even a third of the way through the administration's 100-day honeymoon period and let's face it: we're plumb exhausted. [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER A PILLAR of IGNORANCE and CERTITUDE Donald Trump, our 45th president, sold the electorate an America First bill of goods, when what he really had in mind [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER WELCOME TO TRUMPISTAN Apreening and vindictive strongman at the top, living in gilded opulence, and surrounded by generals and business cronies. Is this what a junta looks [...] more...

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER THE DECIDERS AND THE DAMNED At this point, I suspect that Donald Trump is deeply regretting his rash decision to run for the presidency. It's difficult to [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER THE UGLY AMERICAN (With apologies to William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick) In 1987, Michael Kelly, later a celebrated editor but at the time a reporter for [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER GIANTS AND JESTERS Most of us just take it for granted that prominent people present one person to the public and then, when they're off duty, revert [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER THE NEVER-ENDING STORY A decade after his death, the novelist William Styron, a native Virginian, remains something of a legend in the two haunts where he and [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER EYES WIDE SHUT Six months before the last presidential election, in 2012, the Berlin-based financial investigator Nicholas Shaxson wrote a hugely influential VANITY FAIR article, 'Where the [...] more...

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER GODS AND MONSTERS She has sat on the throne for an unprecedented 64 years. She is Britain's longest-reigning monarch. And she just celebrated her 90th birthday. Who [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER SISTER ACTS Why don't we take a break from Donald Trump and the dismaying hamster wheel of American presidential politics for one month? How about a special [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER EDITOR'S LETTER 'LOOK UPON MY SHORT FINGERS, YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR!' The now commonly accepted fact that Republican strongman Donald Trump is 'short-fingered' began as nothing more [...] more...

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE SHORT-FINGERED An obsession with inexplicably large television ratings or poll numbers will almost certainly do you in over the long run. [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER FAMILY AFFAIRS Back in the day, long before C.G.I. took over so much of the film business, movie props were actually made by hand. For John Huston's [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY (Not in That Order) It's interesting that Donald Trump's 'Silent Majority'-the adherents to his vision of the American future-have put [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER HUMAN BONDAGE and SPIRITS OF FREEDOM Like tuberculosis and landlines, slavery seems very much a throwback to another century. But as William Langewiesche reports in his stirring [...] more...

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER ON A WING AND A HAIR With each passing month, the shelf life of Donald Trump's erratic, if entertaining, presidential sideshow continues to befuddle the smart money [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER STEEL TRAPS AND SHORT FINGERS The myriad vulgarities of Donald Trump-examples of which are retailed daily on Web sites and front pages these days-are not news to [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER THE EVERYTHING BUBBLE When VANITY FAIR launched the New Establishment, 21 years ago, the U.S. economy was in the middle of one of its periodic upheavals. What [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER MEN, WOMEN, and THE GREAT IN-BETWEEN Until quite recently, relationships between young people, intimate or otherwise, were initiated by the application of old-school concepts of courtship. For [...] more...

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER THE DOG DAYS of SUMMER In 2002, VANITY FAIR writer-at-large Marie Brenner set off along the avenues and boulevards of Paris's banlieues -the gritty, working-class suburbs that [...] more...

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER CRIMES and MISDEMEANORS In the spring of 2007, at the height of the bloody 'surge' in Iraq, members of an American platoon drove in convoy to a [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER AGELESS ICONS In May 1977, George Lucas and Twentieth Century Fox released the first Star Wars movie. And from that moment on, you could say, the Force [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER WAR STORIES This month, VANITY FAIR special correspondent Bryan Burrough sifts through the wreckage at NBC News, an assignment he began working on a month before the [...]

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER TRUTHS and CONSEQUENCES The title of special correspondent Bryan Burrough's dispatch this month, 'Trial by Ebola,' says what it's about. But it is the gripping, moment-by-moment detail [...] more...

THE REFRAINMENT DOCTRINE In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray plays an arrogant weatherman who finds himself stuck in a time loop, condemned to repeat a single (and increasingly tumultuous) 24-hour period [...] more...

Byline: -GRAYDON CARTER MORALITY TALES The good people of New Jersey have historically had a soft spot for tough guys. This being the case, Chris Christie, a Republican, would seem [...]

CIVIL RIGHTS and CIVIL FLIGHTS It's a courtroom saga that restores your faith in the American judicial system: two of the country's finest lawyers, epitomizing opposing philosophies-David Boies, the supremely [...] more...

DAYS THAT WILL LIVE IN INFAMY In this month's issue, we try to do justice to two significant turning points in the culture-one seismic and liberating, the other just sort [...]

EDWARD SNOWDEN and the SECURITY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX Could any writer outside of that wicked satirist Tom Sharpe or Lawrence Lasker and Walter Parkes (the two fellows who wrote the 1983 film [...]

IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD Few periods continue to have a hold on our consciousness the way the Roman Empire and the Third Reich do-those two extremes of [...]

THE PALTROW AFFAIR Not to bore you with the details, but the whole VANITY FAIR- Gwyneth Paltrow brouhaha began innocently enough at a routine morning editorial meeting last spring. We [...]

RETURN TO FUN CITY With a six-foot-five-inch liberal mayor and The Tonight Show being broadcast out of Studio 6B at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York will be experiencing something of [...]

AN OLD FRIEND WRITES ... At this time of year it's always a comfort to hear from old friends. I was in a particularly seasonal frame of mind when I [...]

ONE DAY IN DECEMBER GRAYDON CARTER The most wrenching moment in Thornton Wilder's Our Town comes when the young Emily Webb, who has died in childbirth, is allowed to return [...]

GODS AND MONSTERS GRAYDON CARTER A few years back, I read a short article Anjelica Huston had written about growing up in her father's house in Ireland. It couldn't have [...]

100 YEARS OF ATTITUDE GRAYDON CARTER Depending on the circumstances, a major anniversary can put you in any number of moods. Celebratory certainly. Maybe a little wistful. Depressed, if you're [...] more...

THE PARIAH SHORTAGE GRAYDON CARTER As far as the two costliest fiascoes of the last decade gothe Iraq war and the subprime-mortgage crisisit's difficult for many of us to move [...]

TRUE HEROES, TV VILLAINS GRAYDON CARTER Since winning the National Book Award for his exquisite book Max Perkins: Editor of Genius an expanded version of his senior thesis at PrincetonA. [...]

MIDNIGHT IN THE MARAIS GRAYDON CARTER It's not every day that a vocal dispute in a bar in the Marais district of Paris makes headlines around the world. But when [...]