Tag: from the magazine

Several years ago, the Pakistani journalist Taha Siddiqui believed his greatest risk was being killed by his country’s military. Things have changed. “Now the threat is just a drunk person,” he says lightly, “which is easier to manage.”

It’s a Friday evening in July in Paris, and Siddiqui’s bar, The Dissident Club, is about to open. Siddiqui cracks jokes as he cleans up dirty glasses from the previous night.

Siddiqui, 41, sports long sideburns and a goatee, a smirk, and a fedora. The hat has become something of a uniform for Siddiqui, who says he started wearing them when he opened the bar in 2020. “It’s sort of a personality thing for a bartender,” he says. “And they don’t say ‘Assalamu alaikum,’ ” he adds, referring to the Arabic greeting commonly exchanged between Muslims.

In 2006, Siddiqui started his career in domestic media, quickly moving on to report for international outlets, including France 24 and The New York Times. In 2014 he won France’s prestigious Albert Londres Prize, named for one of the pioneers of investigative journalism. Much of Siddiqui’s coverage focused on Pakistan’s powerful military. “And the military did not like that,” he explains simply.

In 2018, while Siddiqui was en route to the Islamabad airport, a group of men stopped his taxi, beat him, and tried to abduct him. He managed to escape the car, run into oncoming traffic, and jump into another taxi, then hid in ditches along the highway until he made it to a service road, where he took another taxi to a police station. Soon after, Siddiqui, his wife, and their son fled Pakistan for France, where they have lived as refugees ever since. “There is my life before exile and my life after exile,” Siddiqui says.

For Siddiqui, everything leads back to that attack, which he believes was orchestrated by the military. (The government has denied any involvement.) “In the back of my head, it’s always there,” he says. “The bar itself is a reminder.”

The moment I arrive at Ned’s, the glitzy new private club in Washington, DC, that’s become a hotspot for the MAGA crowd, I’m handed a dark green sticker by the concierge and instructed to place it over my phone camera. Still in a daze from the heat, I walk into the elevator and fan myself with my book before the doors open and I’m softly launched into a decadent living room.

Soon, I’m sipping a spicy tequila drink while a State Department official laughs off the agency recently firing more than 1,300 employees, suggesting it should’ve been twice as many. Later, a senior administration official, dressed down in a teal golf shirt and sitting in a velvet armchair, introduces himself as the man “protecting the nukes,” before dipping back into his chat with a young man about weapons of war. An acoustic rendition of “Just the Two of Us” plays across the dimly lit bar.

Cabinet secretaries, like Howard Lutnick at Commerce and Scott Bessent at Treasury, are known to swing by Ned’s. Jared Kushner has been spotted here too. On Sundays, members enjoying sundowners on the club’s rooftop bar have watched Donald Trump returning from Mar–a-Lago on Air Force One. One young Republican member, CJ Pearson, suggests that Ned’s “isn’t a partisan club,” but is “definitely the place to be in DC these days.”

“On any given day, you can find yourself next to a cabinet official in the Trump Administration or an anchor for MSNBC,” Pearson tells VF. “You never know who you’ll run into, which I think is a part of the appeal.”

He’s right that Ned’s member list also includes Democrats, like Symone Sanders-Townsend, the former Kamala Harris adviser and current MSNBC host, as well as journalists, such as CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and The Wall Street Journal’s Josh Dawsey. It’s also been the location for extravagant soirees since launching in January, from The Washington Post’s reported million-dollar brunch following the White House Correspondents’ Dinner to a recent invite-only AI event, where the tech elite, like OpenAI’s COO Brad Lightcap, hung out with Washington policymakers.

Yet, on this night, the vibe feels decidedly Trumpy, which surely speaks to a cultural shift in the capital these past six months. It feels rare now to be at a club, restaurant or social occasion that is truly non-partisan. My friends tell me that even sports bars and Mexican restaurants in D.C. have been weaponized politically – after-work havens for the young, ever-ambitious MAGA set.

I’m not the only one who senses it with Ned’s. “When I’ve been there, it’s been packed with Republicans,” Sally Quinn tells VF.

Quinn, a trailblazing journalist, author, and Washington society fixture, isn’t a member of Ned’s, but has visited the club, including for a recent crypto party. She says some younger journalist friends have joined because there will be “someone from the administration they can hit up about a story they’re doing,” making it valuable from a reporting perspective. Meridith McGraw, a White House reporter at The Wall Street Journal, suggests you can sense how the city’s social scene changes with who’s in power.

“It might be a polarizing era of American politics, but Democrat or Republican, MAGA or not, everyone wants to try the trendy new restaurant or go to a fun party to meet people,” she says. McGraw adds that in addition to Ned’s, a newer restaurant near the White House called The Occidental is another spot where you’re highly likely to run into someone from the administration.

Members’ clubs aren’t a new phenomenon in DC, where they’ve long functioned as havens for those with power and influence to socialize discreetly. The Metropolitan Club, for one, lists at least a half dozen former presidents as members, while Cosmos Club, founded in 1878, has had its share of presidents and Supreme Court justices hobnobbing beneath its Renaissance–style ceiling paintings. I’m told, though, they’ve become more popular in DC under the new administration—where hot spots have shifted, and even the places that were popular under Trump’s first term have gone out of fashion.

Tekedra Mawakana won’t take the bait, no matter how many times I try. The co-CEO of Waymo, which operates the biggest fleet of driverless cars in the country, is rolling through the streets of downtown San Francisco with me in a modified Jaguar I-Pace. Elon Musk has claimed he’s coming to take down Waymo and its more than 1,500 robotaxis with competing Teslas that can operate in “Full Self-Driving” mode—beginning with a 20-vehicle invite-only autonomous taxi service that’s started testing in parts of Austin. In 2019 Musk pledged to have a million Tesla robotaxis in service by 2020. So far, the Austin experiment hasn’t exactly been flawless. Can you believe he’s trying this again? I pepper Mawakana in the back of the Jag. When his “self-driving” cars need a human in the seat to keep from crashing? “I don’t know,” she half-whispers, looking out the window. She lets out a quiet challenge to Musk, even as she makes it a point not to say his name. “There’s zero evidence of anything. And there’s so much talk about it. We have a whole service across many cities, right? It’s not a play to have fanboys. It’s a play to, like, actually change people’s lives.”

Waymo and Tesla are in the same game, at least from this angle. Mawakana’s company has built an autonomous driver, made of a suite of sensors and software, that can be used in vehicles from multiple car companies; Musk has said that if his cars can’t drive themselves, Tesla is “worth basically zero.” Each is using robotaxis as proof of concept. The similarities end there.

Mawakana, like the business she helps lead, is deliberate, strategic, focused, cautious. Waymo is her one and only company, and she shares the leadership duties. Musk is Musk. Mawakana is a safety obsessive, as is Waymo. Musk is emblematic of the move-fast-and-break-things ideology. While Full Self-Driving Teslas have killed multiple people, Waymo vehicles have not killed a single person. Musk is apparently convinced that all Teslas need to drive themselves are advanced cameras and the right amount of AI. His cars start at $42,000; hers, outfitted with 29 of those cameras plus advanced radar, laser range finders, and acoustic sensors, can cost seven times as much. She’s a lawyer by training and spent much of her career at the nexus of government and technology. Musk, in fairness, also spent time at the nexus of government and technology—130 rocky days. She’s one of a handful of Black female (or Black, or female) chief executives in Silicon Valley; he goes on his social media platform to whine about how “teachers in California spend their time indoctrinating kids in DEI racism & sexism & communism.” It’s hard to imagine Musk on skates (though he appears to be making good on his promise to build a “roller skates & rock restaurant” in Los Angeles). Mawakana says, “I can be found with roller skates and a beach tent in my trunk at all times.”

It sounds like a cute study in contrast. Except the future of the global automotive industry—and how we move through cities—could be at stake, depending on which CEO’s vision wins out. Tesla is by far the bigger company, with annual revenue of almost $98 billion and about $7 billion in earnings, compared to an estimated $75 million in revenue and an estimated $1.12 billion in losses last year for Waymo. Mawakana doesn’t have great answers for how many jobs her autonomous vehicles might eventually cost (opponents say it could be millions), or how many people it currently takes to supervise her self-driving fleet (her deputies will only talk about the “minutes of human time” needed for each hour on the road), or the resilience of that fleet when protesters start lighting her robocars on fire (in Los Angeles last June). But when it comes to autonomy, Mawakana is ahead. Waymo is logging at least 250,000 driverless paid rides per week in Austin, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Silicon Valley, more than 10 million such rides overall. Waymo had expanded its operations to Atlanta on the day Mawakana and I rolled through San Francisco together. Miami and DC are next, and Waymo has begun preparation for New York City.

“She believes the technology should speak for itself, in customers’ hands, as opposed to telling customers what to believe about the future,” says Alex Roy, a general partner at New Industry Venture Capital and a former executive at Argo, the Ford-backed autonomy company. “That’s why I call her the un-Elon.”

Mawakana lives a low-key life, at least by Silicon Valley mogul standards. She wasn’t invited to the Gilded Age Bezos wedding in Venice. She doesn’t bowhunt with Zuck, and she’s not joining Sam Altman in his doomsday structures. She lives in the same Bay Area home she bought when she was briefly a VP at eBay, in 2016 and 2017. Her art collection is modest, largely centered around Black and female artists, and is a “celebration of goddess energy.” She spends a chunk of her weekends going to her son’s basketball games; sometimes she’ll take him to Coachella or Rolling Loud. Vacations often involve a group of girlfriends sailing in the Caribbean or going to EDM festivals. Her big splurge last year was a quick trip to Paris for Vogue World.

“I’ve been, for a long while, toiling away at this and pretty under the radar,” she says. “I genuinely have come to this through a very different path than most people and have arrived in it in a different capacity. And so, like, you know, it looks different” from the tech-CEO cliché.

Before Mains would tell Berkeley Police that he’d solved their case, there was one more thing Mains wanted Noguera to do. He printed out a couple of photos of Connes, a freckle-faced young woman with dark blond hair parted in the middle and a small scar on her lower lip, and sent them to Noguera, asking him to “observe [Naso’s] reaction” to seeing them.

By that time Noguera’s job in the Medically Restricted Yard had ended, so he wasn’t in contact with Naso as much as he had been before. He was awaiting transfer to another prison, which could happen any day without warning. But the day after the Las Vegas Raiders defeated the Jacksonville Jaguars in an NFL Hall of Fame game in August 2022, he knew Naso would be in the yard wanting to recap the game—he was a huge sports fanatic. Noguera kept the photos of Connes on him and wasn’t surprised when he was called over from the adjacent yard by Naso, asking what he thought about the game. Noguera slipped the pictures of Connes through the fence without saying a word and noticed how Naso began to excitedly stroke one of the photographs, asking how on earth Noguera managed to find her. Noguera repeated his refrain: “You know, Joe, I got a lot of friends in low places as well as high places.”

“She’s one of my special ones,” Naso said, according to Noguera, “the Girl from Berkeley.”

As Noguera tells me now, “Everything in that one moment felt like it was all completely worth it.”

The last time Celeste Connes heard her daughter Lynn’s voice was on Mother’s Day in 1976. Had she known that Lynn was going to model nude for an unknown photographer, “I would have come all the way to California from N.C. to stop you,” she wrote in an open letter that was published in a local newspaper the following year. Celeste died in 1988. Lynn’s gravestone, located right below her mother’s in the Thomasville City Cemetery outside of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, still says “Missing.”

Lynn’s younger brother, Lee Connes, 64, who oversees maintenance for the cemetery where those gravestones lie, met with Mains in May. After Mains showed him the letter Naso wrote about the “Girl from Berkeley,” Lee told Vanity Fair he’s “99.9 percent sure” that Naso was responsible for Lynn’s death. “It’s a lot to process,” he said. “It’s amazing that after so long there was anybody that had an interest in trying to solve it. We are lucky that [Noguera] tried to get the ball rolling and was concerned enough to find out what happened.”

He is now considering updating his sister’s memorial to reflect that she’s no longer missing. “We were very close,” he said. “It’s been so hard to ever say she was deceased. It takes a bit to settle in.”

In 2023 Noguera was loaded onto a bus and driven 250 miles south of San Quentin to Corcoran State Prison, carsick the entire way because he hadn’t been in a vehicle in more than 30 years. The Ninth Circuit had reversed the overturning of Noguera’s conviction and resentenced him to life with no possibility of parole. This was not what Noguera had hoped for, but it was a “crack in the armor that allowed us to stick our foot in,” says his lawyer, Andrew Nechaev. He asked the court to invoke California’s penal code 1385, which gives judges the authority to dismiss punishments deemed frivolous. In his brief, Nechaev described how much criminal law has evolved in the past 40 years and urged the court to consider that the brain of an 18-year-old—the age at which Noguera committed murder—is now understood to be undeveloped. He also wanted the court to consider the trauma of his client’s upbringing, the poor legal representation he received at his trial, and the fact that the testimony backing the claims of “special circumstances”—that the motive for the murder was financial gain—was shown to have been coerced. “This case was so botched,” Nechaev told me. “Having reviewed the appellate history, it’s just astounding, the level of incompetence.”

To Noguera’s amazement, a conservative Superior Court judge in Orange County took interest in his case and ultimately agreed with his lawyer that the special circumstances were invalid. Over the summer of 2024, Noguera was resentenced again to 25 years to life, but because he had already served more than 40 years, he was immediately eligible for parole. He didn’t want to get too excited, because even if the parole board decided to release him, the governor had the right to reverse the decision. Nechaev told me that he and Noguera made a “judgment call” early on to stick to the merits of his case when dealing with the parole board and not to mention any of Noguera’s freelance detective work. “We didn’t think it would help,” says Nechaev, adding that securing his own freedom had never been Noguera’s primary motivator in working with Mains to solve cold cases. Indeed, Noguera began working with Mains while he was still on death row, before he knew that parole would ever be a possibility.

While Noguera was waiting for his first parole hearing to be scheduled, he and Mains continued to focus on solving the remaining three murders on the List of 10: “Girl near Heldsburg” (number 1), “Girl on Mt. Tam” (number 4), and “Girl from Miami Near Down Peninsula” (number 5).

They had reason to believe that “Girl on Mt. Tam”—short for Mount Tamalpais, a Marin County landmark—was the one that Naso bragged was incorrectly pinned on the Dating Game Killer, Alcala. In 2011 the Marin County Sheriff’s Office held a press conference to announce they were “confident” that Alcala killed 19-year-old Pamela Jean Lambson 34 years earlier. Alcala was already incarcerated at San Quentin and was never charged with Lambson’s murder. He always denied it, even as he admitted to other murders. Noguera, referring to his “consistency of behavior” thesis, found this interesting.

Also interesting were the circumstances of Lambson’s disappearance. An aspiring singer and actor, Lambson vanished after meeting a photographer who had singled her out at an Oakland A’s game, told her she was beautiful, and offered to help her with her headshots. She later went to meet the photographer at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco and never returned. The police found her battered body posed in front of a trail leading to Mount Tam the next day. Based on what Naso told -Noguera, including how he hunted for victims at A’s games—he went so far as to create fake press credentials and business cards—Mains was convinced that Naso was the real killer. Alcala didn’t pose his victims, nor was he known to be in Oakland at the time of Lambson’s disappearance, according to Mains. Naso was.

The Lambson family had always questioned whether long-haired Alcala really fit the description of Pamela’s killer. Her brother, Michael Lambson, now a 71-year-old plumbing contractor in Englewood, California, says he will never forget what Pamela said before she left to meet the photographer at Fisherman’s Wharf, when Michael expressed concern about who this random man was. “She said, ‘He could be my dad, Mike,’ ” he recalls. At the time of Pamela’s disappearance, Alcala would have only been in his early 30s, a decade younger than Naso, who was approximately the same age as Pamela’s father. Michael told me that he and his brothers are now convinced that Naso is the real murderer.

In 2024 Mains sent all of his notes on the Lambson case to the Marin County Sheriff’s Office but says he didn’t hear back. While reporting this story, I left two messages there. I eventually received a call from Deputy Chief Adam Schermerhorn, the department’s public information officer, who said that, based on new information, Marin County’s cold-case team is currently trying to determine if Naso had “any potential involvement” with Lambson’s murder. Given that the murder was pinned on Alcala, is the sheriff’s office going to make an announcement that the case is being reopened? “We do not have any announcements scheduled at this time,” he told me.

Using facial recognition, Mains says he was also able to match one of the photographs from Naso’s collage that he gave to Noguera to another potential victim who was not on the List of 10: Rebecca Jean Dunn, a Las Vegas sex worker who went missing in 1979. At the time, Naso was spending a lot of time there after separating from his wife. He set up a photography studio near the Strip, where he would hunt for victims, according to Noguera. After receiving Mains’s report about Dunn, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department reopened the case, according to a person close to the matter, though the department’s public information office wrote in an email to Vanity Fair that “[t] here are currently no new leads in this investigation.”

The last time anybody saw Charlotte Cook was January 3, 1974. That afternoon, the college student and community organizer, a young mother and widow, left her home in Oakland to visit her sister in San Francisco, decked out in disco-era style: knee-high boots, a blue sleeveless blouse, and a camel hair coat. When her body was discovered the following day at the bottom of a bluff overlooking Thornton Beach in Daly City, California, a brown belt wrapped around her neck, it was the description of her “expensive camel’s hair coat” in local press reports that led her father to identify her. She was 19.

Cook’s daughter, now 52, says that when she was growing up in her great-grandparents’ home, nobody in their close-knit family, not her great-grandparents, not her aunts or uncles, would ever talk about her mother. Any time the name Charlotte Cook came up, a hush would descend over the room, indicating the topic was off-limits, too painful. “I never knew what to think,” says Freedom Cook, a massage therapist, activist, and preschool teacher in Vallejo, California. “I just thought I had a mom and she was just out in the world somewhere, and I don’t know what happened.” Freedom was 12 when one of her aunts finally informed her that her mother was dead.

Don’t let waning summer days quell your wanderlust. Journey to Renaissance-era Venice, through the halls of the newly renovated Frick Collection, and across Chilean archipelagos.

ITALY: IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF THE GREAT ARTISTS

On the outskirts of Padua, in a 14th-century chapel, a Giotto fresco glimmers with gold stars. Art historian Nick Trend charts a Renaissance and early modern masters course, rife with intrigue and lush in imagery, through Verona, Rome, and more. (Thames & Hudson)

Miguel Flores-Vianna/Courtesy of the publisher.

THE FRICK COLLECTION

Deputy director and chief curator Xavier F. Salomon serves as guide to the history of Henry Clay Frick’s Upper East Side mansion through its newly updated galleries housing masterpieces by Fragonard, Manet, and Vermeer. (Rizzoli Electa)

Jean-Pierre Gabriel/Courtesy of the publisher.

THE CONTEMPORARY GARDEN

An immersive look at all manner of verdant dreamscapes, from New York’s Little Island to private endeavors like designer Dries Van Noten’s Victorian-inspired rose garden. (Phaidon)

Long already serves as an analyst for a pregame show on CBS Sports Network and cohosts a podcast that covers the NFL. But even with his experience, Long thought a few days at the boot camp could do him well because it was an “opportunity to be around the masters” and broaden his repertoire. While his dream job is to be an analyst on The NFL Today, CBS’s flagship Sunday pregame show, Long also attended to get reps calling games from the booth. “I knew I wanted to do studio,” he said, “but you come to this boot camp and you get to try on a couple different pairs of pants.”

The boot camp origin story begins with Vaughn Bryant, a former manager in the NFL’s player development office. Bryant worked to help players find professional opportunities outside of football, a chapter that comes sooner than later for most. The average length of an NFL career spans only about three years, and Bryant’s job was to provide resources to ease the transition to civilian life.

Bryant once made that transition himself. After being drafted by the Detroit Lions in 1994, he bounced around the league for a couple of years before hanging up his cleats. With his playing career over, Bryant landed an internship at CNN, where a producer invited him to sit behind an anchor’s desk and simulate a studio show. Years later, when he started his job in player development, he kept thinking back to that day—and then he got inspired.

“I was like, Wait a minute, we could re-create this at the NFL Network or at NFL Films, and we can bring in all of our network partners, simulate every discipline and do that for our players,” Bryant said. He went to his next meeting with the pitch in his back pocket. “I already had a name for it: the NFL Broadcast Boot Camp,” he recalled. Bryant figured he’d have a year to get the program off the ground. His bosses had other ideas. “They were like, Nah, you gotta do this as soon as possible,” he said.

In June 2007, about half a year after Bryant floated the idea, the inaugural boot camp was held at the headquarters of NFL Films in Mount Laurel, New Jersey. Early interest was minimal: Only about 30 players applied. But players talked, word spread, and by the second year the league received close to 100 applicants. “You do it once and anything that the players have a good experience with, they’re going to tell their teammates,” said Bryant.

The boot camp has evolved with the media landscape, tailoring its curriculum to a world now dominated by podcasts, social media, and smartphones. But the shift is perhaps most evident in the players themselves, with this year’s campers boasting considerably more media experience than their predecessors. Along with Long, the group also included Willson and former wide receiver Stevie Johnson, who work as analysts for the Canadian sports channel TSN. Avant, meanwhile, is a commentator for several local outlets in Philadelphia.

Player-hosted podcasts have come to saturate the medium in recent years, with shows led by NFL stars such as Jason and Travis Kelce and Micah Parsons among the biggest in the genre. That represents another shift—specifically, in what teams permit. Jason McCourty, an analyst for CBS, said that coaches and front-office personnel expected a player’s focus to be entirely on football when he entered the league in 2009. “If you were drafted and you’re talking about starting a podcast or how you’re going to be on a local TV station, teams would look at you crazy,” said McCourty, who attended the boot camp in 2022. Now, he added, “teams are seeing there’s no way to avoid it.”