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He had his own world: a place where the funny and the horrific crossed paths.
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Roz Chast
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Roz Chast on Gahan Wilson
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At Dick Cheney’s Funeral, Talk of “Spontaneous Combustion,” Unlikely Democratic Reverence, and No Mention of Iraq
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Dick Cheney was possibly the most disliked vice president of all. He was the co-architect of the Iraq war and an unabashed defender of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques after the attacks of 9/11. Cheney, along with his partner Bush, helped pave the way for the populist revolution of Trump and his MAGA movement. Yet at the time Cheney wore his dismal approval rating like a badge of honor and relished being caricatured as Darth Vader.
But there was another Cheney—a kinder, gentler one, recalled in eulogies by his cardiologist Dr. Jonathan Reiner and notably by George W. Bush. In remarks that never mentioned 9/11, Iraq, or the 2008 financial meltdown, Bush praised Cheney’s judgment, reticence, loyalty, and humor. In a touching tribute, Cheney’s granddaughter Grace Perry spoke movingly of how much Grandpa loved driving her to rodeos across Wyoming in his pickup truck (without using GPS).
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Chris Whipple
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An Exclusive Look Inside Zohran Mamdani and Rama Duwaji’s Viral Clerk’s Office Wedding
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McCurdy first met Mamdani in 2019 at at a party for Tiffany Cabán’s Queens District Attorney race. A few months later, she began volunteering on his 2020 state assembly campaign. When the pandemic hit, the Savannah College of Art and Design grad offered to help craft his visual identity: If people couldn’t meet the candidate, they could at least see him on social media. “At that point, in March of 2020, there was one single photo that we’d been using for everything: for literature, for media, for pressers, anything. A singular photo,” she says, laughing. So she started taking photos for him for his Instagram, where McCurdy estimates he only had only around 2,000 followers at the time. (That number soon went up and up and never stopped: “People love seeing the guy,” she says.)
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Elise Taylor
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The Sorrow of Gaza, One Year After the October 7 Attacks
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When I spoke to right-wing Orthodox Jewish settlers working in Gaza to grow tomatoes in hothouses and swimming in the sea fully clothed, they swore to me that this land was theirs. When I spoke to Arabs who showed deeds to plots of land in the West Bank, now occupied by Israeli settlers, they swore to me that this land was theirs. Who was right? I saw Russian and Ethiopian immigrants who were not born Jewish but who had converted, who, having emigrated to Israel, now had more rights than the Palestinians who still held the keys to the houses from which their ancestors had been evicted in 1947. I saw the Shabab protesting, risking bullets and tear gas, slinging stones like a legion of Davids versus a mighty Goliath. Later, I interviewed the families of Palestinian suicide bombers and the families of their victims. Once, I spent time shuttling between the families of two 17-year-old girls, one Jewish, one Palestinian, who lived several miles away from each other, not far from Bethlehem. Their mothers were united in pain.
My life’s work, in a sense, was honed by those years researching my book on the First Intifada and the Second Intifada, which came a decade later. But what I was struck by was a deep sense of injustice and a violation of laws, which Langer and her colleagues worked on tirelessly. At the time of the First Gulf War, in 1990–91, I flew to Vienna to see Langer accept a major human rights award. But by then she was exhausted from her years filing motions and lawsuits in Israeli military courts, being mocked by judges. She had lost most cases she tried, but she had kept going. Shortly after that, she emigrated to Germany to teach law at Heidelberg University and live a life away from the occupation, which haunted her.
October 7 was a horrendous act of savagery. The sadistic glee with which the perpetrators carried out their carnage—captured on their own cell phones and Go-Pro cameras—was evil personified. But the plot and the execution of the October 7 plan by Hamas—as inexcusable as it was—did not, as the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres famously said, “happen in a vacuum.” Preceding it was not just the 1947 Nakba when Palestinians were expelled from their lands in the wake of the nascent Israeli state, but the First and Second Intifadas. The summer before 10/7, extremist West Bank settlers, seemingly in line with Netanyahu’s radical expansion policies, ran amok in the West Bank, burning Palestinian land, and terrorizing and killing civilians. What would it be like to be born in a land where you knew your people had no rights and were granted no dignity, and where you could not defend yourself? Somewhere where you did not have powerful friends like the United States or Germany or the United Kingdom? Generation after generation of Palestinian kids grew up scarred, bitter, angry, and broken.
Visitors walk around portraits of people who were taken hostage or killed in the Hamas attack on the Supernova music festival on October 7, at the site of the festival near Kibbutz Reim in southern Israel on May 13, 2024.By Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images.
In 2021–22, Vanity Fair gave me an unusual assignment to go to Gaza and not focus on the misery and deprivation, but to talk to millennials and members of Generation Z who were succeeding and thriving despite a blockade on both sides of the Gaza Strip by both Israel and Egypt. This is not to say their conditions were not miserable—they were. Daily electricity cuts; inability to leave Gaza for studies or workshops; even getting an Apple computer sent in was impossible. But I still met extraordinary—and extraordinarily resourceful—young people I believed were the key to Gaza’s future: a future beyond Hamas. I was awed by their talent, tenacity, and drive, despite the limits being placed on them at every turn.
The terrible events of October 7 traumatized Israeli society. They also destroyed any thread of hope that people like my young friends had for peace, or for living a life beyond the conflict. These were the people I was counting on for peace. Many are now dead. The Gaza Sky Geek was a computer coding academy whose cheerful headquarters, bearing signs from places the coders would never get to go—New York, Berlin, London—was a venue where I loved to hang out. But many of those young coders are dead or displaced. The music store and studio where I went to listen to my favorite rock band, Osprey V, is gone. These young people held the promise of the Palestine of tomorrow, one in which Israelis and Palestinians might coexist peacefully. But since the wanton destruction of Gaza—and the continuing hail of missiles and rockets that have been exchanged between Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Israel—that is simply not possible. It will not happen in the foreseeable future.
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Janine di Giovanni
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Yoko Ono’s Mind Games—And Her Lasting Legacy
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The question of Yoko Ono’s marriage to John Lennon sits like a water buffalo at the center of any conversation about her eight decades of work as an artist. It is oversized, hairy, imposing, impossible to ignore, tricky to get around. Do you tiptoe past it, slink away from it, or approach it head-on?
As anyone who has given Ono’s fascinating career consideration since the late 1960s—when she and Lennon became pop culture’s Heloise and Abelard—can tell you, the conversation tends to run along a squeaky axis that begs extreme opposite conclusions: Did Ono’s marriage to the world’s biggest rock star make her career or ruin it? Did that relationship afford her a level of fame almost unimaginable in the art world or bury her efforts under an avalanche of celebrity, gossip, and entertainment-world triviality?
Ono and John Lennon hold their marriage certificate.Bettmann/Getty Images.
You try to wish such conjecture away, but then comes a swarm of pesky subconcerns, such as: Had Ono not become the world’s foremost widow in 1980, after Lennon’s murder (she has been known to compare herself to Coretta Scott King and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis), would the general public care about her work? Does Ono deserve to be considered, as she often is, a footnote in postwar art, a minor figure cited in catalog essays about Fluxus or conceptualism or performance art? Or a brief mention in the context of avant-garde music, a secondary player in the exalted milieu of John Cage and La Monte Young? Or a passing reference in conversations about 1960s art films, which inevitably focus on Andy Warhol and Bruce Conner?
If we can imagine an alternative art history in which Ono did not become the iconic, reclusive queen in her Dakota tower, perhaps we can imagine her as a semi-obscure artist surfacing in oral testimonies about the New York art scene in the early 1960s—a reliably great, insightful interview. And maybe, in time, this boundary-pushing woman artist from an unabashedly patriarchal era—the creator of such performance works as Cut Piece and Bag Piece, and the conceptual films Fly, Bottoms, and Rape—would finally be getting her due, in the manner of the formerly undersung Judy Chicago and Niki de Saint Phalle.
If Ono’s marriage to Lennon is the water buffalo, then these other nagging questions are a swarm of gnats that is awfully hard to wave away. To walk through the new career-spanning retrospective Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind, at London’s Tate Modern (on view until September 1), is to feel them nipping at you until they are practically an element of the art itself. As inconvenient as they are, they are an inescapable reality of Ono’s complicated, rich, many-chaptered life and career, and her enduring influence. (She has inspired generations of artists and musicians, from Pipilotti Rist to Sonic Youth to Lady Gaga to, well, John Lennon.) You may begin to feel that they make the experience of Ono’s work that much more complex—vexed, layered, frustrating, surprising. Until some distant, Ozymandian future, this is simply the fate of the woman Lennon himself described as “the world’s most famous unknown artist.”
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Mark Rozzo
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The Most Read Vanity Fair Stories of 2023
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Each year at about this time, there’s a good bit of cultural excavation to be had in the Vanity Fair newsroom. What could our readers not get enough of this year? And what might those stories say about our times?
There was a lot to parse in our 10 most read articles of the year ending December 31, 2023. There were examinations of the behind-the-scenes conditions at two long-running television institutions; an aging billionaire whose succession battle could have been its own prestige-TV series; a reexamination of a long-simmering A-list divorce; a world-conquering fashion model opening up about her own recently ended marriage; the shocking origins of downtown Manhattan’s playboy of the moment; and much more.
It’s a varied list to be sure. But spend some time with the tens of thousands of words in the stories below, and one commonality quickly emerges. They are frequently comprised of up-close reporting on the human dramas on which big cultural narratives turn. In our experience that’s a rather timeless element of a must read story. By all means click around below and judge for yourself. We’ll be back in 2024 with so much more.
OceanGate’s Titan submersible prior to its final dive on a mission to see the Titanic wreckage.OceanGate Expeditions/Handout via Xinhua News Agency.
To many in the tight-knit deep-sea exploration community, OceanGate’s submersible dives were reckless and often dangerous, writes best-selling author Susan Casey.
“It actually tells you what’s wrong and how to fix it,” Stephanie Tisone (right) would tell a friend of Anthony William’s work.Leon Bennett/Getty Images. Courtesy Tony Tisone.
When Stephanie Tisone met Anthony William, a cult-famous, self-billed clairvoyant, she felt an instant connection. Her belief in his abilities was unwavering. Her life would never be the same.
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Matthew Lynch
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Bryan Johnson’s Antiaging Quest Has Made Headlines. But There’s More to His Story
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On December 11, Johnson finally released his public statement, a 16-minute video to YouTube entitled “My Ex-Fiancée Sued Me for $9,000,000” in which he cast himself as a victim of a #MeToo extortion scheme. (The $9 million referred to a letter that Southern’s earlier lawyers, working on contingency, sent to Johnson in April 2021, seeking a settlement to avoid a public legal battle.) “Their strategy was to inflict maximum pain and suffering on me so that I would pay up privately,” he said. “They miscalculated my tenaciousness and resolve, and their strategy backfired, inflicting collateral damage upon themselves.” He noted that he plans to put the money that Southern is paying for his legal fees into a trust that she can access exclusively for her future medical needs.
But people close to Southern view the case and its outcome differently. Anna-Marie Wascher, one of her closest friends, feels Johnson’s recent posts about the case’s resolution are “outlandish.” She told Vanity Fair, “This is not a he said/she said story. It’s one of control, power, and the idolization of false personas powered by money and/or social media—not by authenticity, compassion, or a positive contribution to society.”
Before the lawsuit, before the cancer, before crossing paths with Johnson, before anyone knew what a digital creator was, Taryn Southern was one. In the aughts, she became known for her YouTube music video parodies in the style of “Weird Al” Yankovic and two channels with half a million subscribers. Charismatic, pretty, and blessed with a strong singing voice—powerful enough to propel her to the American Idol semifinals when she was a teen—Southern moved to Los Angeles after attending the University of Miami on an academic scholarship, graduating magna cum laude with a double BA in anthropology and mixed media journalism. As her videos went viral, her reputation as a millennial marketing whiz at the nexus of entertainment and technology grew. She set up a one-woman consulting company, Happy Cat Media, and was hired by companies ranging from Ford to Marriott that wanted to reach a young and very online audience. She was invited to speak at prestigious tech conferences, hosted the red carpet at the Golden Globes, and even dabbled in acting, with guest roles on popular shows like New Girl. There were segments she produced for Today, a late-night talk show on the Discovery Channel where she worked as a correspondent, and a mention in a 2016 Vanity Fair article about rising YouTube and Vine stars.
Southern’s YouTube content attracted the attention of Johnson, who, according to Southern’s friends, slid into her Facebook messages in June 2016 and asked her out. At the time, Johnson was a divorced dad who was embracing his new identity as a wealthy tech prophet after breaking away from Mormonism and emerging from a decade-long bout with depression. “I tried to remake myself as—I don’t want to say from scratch because that’s too far of an overstatement—but I wanted to remake myself as far as I could reach,” he tells Vanity Fair.
Money was scarce in the Johnson household as he was growing up in Springville, Utah. His father, a lawyer who was disbarred in 1992, was an addict and separated from Johnson’s mother, a substitute teacher, when Johnson was three. (In an August interview on the Diary of a CEO podcast, Johnson spoke about how close he and his father have become in adulthood, growing emotional while recounting how random people on the internet made comments about his father after the news of the three-way plasma swap broke.)
Johnson delayed college to be a Mormon missionary in Ecuador for two years. The experience of seeing extreme poverty up close inspired him to want to “make an enormous amount of money by the age of 30 and then figure out a way to uplevel humanity,” he wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, in July.
When he returned from Ecuador, he enrolled in college at Brigham Young University and parlayed a cell phone sales job into his first successful entrepreneurial venture: hiring college students to sell cell phone service for him. Although the company helped cover his tuition, “it was not going to make me enough money to retire by 30, so I had to find something bigger,” he told Tim Ferriss on a 2015 episode of his eponymous podcast. (The episode was called “The Rags-to-Riches Philosopher.”) Johnson’s next move was starting a VoIP company that went out of business, after which he tried his hand in a real estate development venture that also failed. By 2006, he had moved to Chicago to get his executive MBA at the Booth School of Business, where one of his favorite thinkers, Nobel laureate Gary S. Becker, taught. Deeply indebted and with a family to support, he took a job selling credit card processing services to retailers door-to-door. “The requirement was like: If you could fog a mirror, you could work for these guys,” he told Ferriss.
Before long, Johnson was the company’s number one salesperson, and he had a new idea to disrupt the fragmented, opaque credit card processing business. He called it Braintree, after the hometown of one of his heroes, John Adams, and entered it in a business school competition, which he won. Braintree grew via bootstrapping as companies ranging from Github to Airbnb became clients until 2011, when the company, with about 40 employees and a few million dollars in annual revenue, took on a $34 million Series A investment from the prestigious venture firm Accel Partners. Johnson took a multimillion-dollar payout and kept a stake in the business. A few months later, Braintree formally announced that Johnson would be replaced as CEO by Bill Ready, who had been Accel’s executive in residence. (Ready is now the CEO of Pinterest.) In 2013, when the company was sold, Johnson along with his two brothers—one served as Braintree’s CFO and the other was on the sales team—and his sister, an accountant for the company, all exited.
In interviews, Johnson takes credit for the sale of Braintree. And certainly he deserves credit for noticing a gap in the market for transparent payments processing, growing a loyal team, and building up a book of business that made it attractive enough for Accel Partners to invest in. But it was Ready who orchestrated Braintree’s $26.2 million acquisition of Venmo in 2012. At some point, there was a significant business disagreement, according to multiple sources, and in the months before Braintree was acquired by PayPal, Johnson was barred from entering the company’s headquarters. Johnson says “that disagreement” led the CEO to “taking an action that I disagreed with,” but that Johnson “chose not to make a big deal about it because it was in the best interest of the company that we have the discussion with eBay,” which at the time owned PayPal. In 2013, Braintree was sold to PayPal for approximately $800 million in cash, of which Johnson says he netted close to $400 million. Bill Ready and PayPal president David Marcus were photographed at the Nasdaq on the day the deal was announced. Johnson wasn’t mentioned in the press release.
Part of Johnson’s self-mythology, which he speaks about often, is how the daily grind of entrepreneurship took its toll on his mental and physical health. “I had been [for] 14 years under the crushing pressure of building multiple companies. I was in a bad relationship. I was trying to leave my born-into religion. I wasn’t sleeping. I was 50 pounds overweight. I had been depressed for 10 years. And so I was not in tip-top shape,” he tells me. When a friend took him to a Brooklyn warehouse party to cheer him up after selling Braintree, he remembers feeling so liberated that he danced for seven hours straight. “When the music stopped in the morning, I was disappointed because I wanted to dance more,” he says, adding that he was not under the influence of any drugs at the time.
He finally was feeling that sense of release that comes with never having to worry about money again. His next step was the “upleveling humanity” phase of his life plan, which began with the allocation of $100 million of his own money in an investment fund, called the OS Fund, with the mission to back ideas that seem impossible: “I want to get a company from ‘crazy’ to ‘viable,’ ” Johnson told Fortune magazine in 2014. His most successful bet, he says, was an early investment in Ginkgo Bioworks, a Boston-based biotech company that was valued at $15 billion when it went public in 2021. “His interest has been getting in at the ground level, seeing things that others don’t see, and being able to absorb risk to help these fundamental technologies evolve,” says Jason Kakoyiannis, a serial biotech founder, adviser to Ginkgo Bioworks, and friend of Johnson’s.
After launching OS, Johnson backed his own passion project, Kernel, which initially planned to develop computer-brain interfaces similar to Elon Musk’s Neuralink but has since pivoted to noninvasive technologies.
Johnson was living in Los Angeles and serving as chief executive of Kernel when he first messaged Southern on Facebook to ask her out. What was supposed to be a quick drink at an LA restaurant turned into hours of deep conversation, during which Johnson told her that he “loved the way her brain worked” and that he felt “an intense desire to take care of her,” according to her lawsuit. “I remember [Taryn] saying she felt like she connected with him in an intellectual way. For someone as sharp as her, that was difficult to come by,” recalls a friend who spoke to Southern right after the date. (Like many people interviewed for this story, she didn’t want to be named because she fears retribution from Johnson.) Within weeks, Johnson introduced Southern to his three children, who were visiting Los Angeles. For Southern’s 30th birthday, less than a month after they met, Johnson took her and three of her friends on his jet to Lake Tahoe, where they rented a house and went waterskiing. “He love-bombed the absolute shit out of her,” recalls Southern’s friend Bella Acton, who was at the birthday event. “I don’t think ‘love-bombing’ even does justice to just how full-on he was: You’d be sitting there talking to Taryn and he’d be like, kissing her face, and you’re thinking, Could you maybe stop doing that?”
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Rachel Dodes
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‘Manhunt’: First Look at the Long-Awaited Show About Hunting Lincoln’s Killer
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In our own age of extreme division and distrust, Beletsky believes this story of an effort to violently unseat the president, and attack members of his war cabinet on the same night, still resonates because it speaks to “the shattering of norms in how we deal with disputes—and just our sense of safety.”
“I think the show has a lot about it that’s very relevant,” she says. “This was a domestic attack that was so unusual. Lincoln used to have the door to the White House unlocked for the duration of the war. So murder of this kind was just not done.”
Although Lincoln’s death is the starting point for the series, the 16th US president still features prominently throughout its episodes, mostly in flashback, as a means of underscoring the stakes, the motivations of the pursuers, and the depth of the loss.
Tobias Menzies, best known for Game of Thrones and Outlander as well as for playing middle-aged Prince Philip on The Crown, stars as Stanton, a leader who had a tendency to micromanage rather than delegate, taking on the full weight of problems that may have benefited from being shared. Beletsky says Menzies delivered that gravity. “He brings a high level of intelligence to a role,” she says. “[Stanton] was one of the top trial lawyers in the country, and Tobias does it so convincingly that you believe this man has been in the Supreme Court, that he has been sitting with Lincoln.”
Lincoln himself is portrayed by Hamish Linklater, best known for The Newsroom and Legion and playing the mysteriously charismatic priest from Midnight Mass. “There are only so many actors who are as bright as Hamish and as tall as Hamish,” Beletsky says. “It takes a very brave actor to take on a role like this where everyone thinks they know who this person is. And Hamish was just so open and curious and just everything you want in an actor. I will say his performance is one of the things I’m most proud of.”
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Anthony Breznican
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Danny DeVito Has Never Heard the Term “Short King”
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GQ: What’s your working relationship like with your daughter?
Danny DeVito: The family is very Italian, Jewish. It was this really cool mix, Rhea and me. And so that filtered into Lucy and Gracie and Jake, and we all talk about everything and we have a good time with each other.
One of my favorite moments with Lucy was when she was just a baby. I was directing this movie. I was doing one shot over and over again. It was pushing this woman who had a little monologue on a divan. And I’d say, “Cut!” I did it about six or seven times. The last take, Lucy said, “Cut!” It was the cutest thing. Actually, that’s the take that’s in the movie.
You’re great together onstage, too.
We have a good time. She gives me the business.
Do you relate to Sam at all? Are you a hoarder?
I started being much more conscious about it, because I do collect. I’ve only been here for a couple of weeks and there’s a lot of stuff in this room. My apartment in New York, it’s just full of pictures and knickknacks and stuff that I pick up.
What’s your most prized possession?
Oh, gosh. I have so many. So many nice things, and memories of a shirt that I wore in 1960-something. I always take something—shirts, pants, shoes, a hat from a movie I’ve done.
Do you have any opening night rituals?
No. I’m looking forward to it, though. I always come early. I have a trampoline. I don’t know if you can see it, over there.
Is the trampoline for exercise or fun?
I start every night with it to get myself going. I guess you would call it exercise, but it’s like getting ready to go out.
Do you feel like you’re getting back to your roots by doing theater again?
Yeah. I just love it. I went to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and did all the theater. Even if you’re off-Broadway, the audience is part of the whole mix. You go to California, and it’s quiet on set. You tell a joke, they’re paid to not say anything. I did a couple of movies, like Cuckoo’s Nest. And then I got Taxi in 1978—now, here’s the great thing about that show. First of all, the people, I love them dearly. We’re still friends, all of them. It’s like a family.
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Gabriella Paiella
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The Ultimate GQ Shopping Guide for a Smarter, Sharper Life
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To dub a shoe the “Mother of All Boots” is audacious. To follow that shoe with a new-and-improved silhouette that’s even freakier than its predecessor isn’t merely audacious—it’s a throwing of the gauntlet. The Moab 3 lives up to its name and then some, updating the rugged all-terrain stomper for the next generation of Merrell acolytes.
Just for GQ readers, we scored a slew of discounts on the inaugural Recommends All-Stars class, including Merrell’s hero product. Use code GQMOAB25 for 25% off the Moab 3, from now until midnight on November 30th.
The Best Paste Pomade
Pomade gets a bad rap, but the inaugural product from celebrity hairstylist Kristan Serafino, the scissors wizard behind Ryan Reynolds’ razor-fresh cuts, reimagines the greaser staple with a firm hold and natural shine.
Just for GQ readers, we scored a slew of discounts on the inaugural Recommends All-Stars class, including the Best Paste’s hero product. Use code GQALLSTARS for 15% off the brand’s pomade, from now until midnight on November 2nd. (Excludes the Michael J. Fox Foundation products)
Bathing Culture Cosmic Rainbow Towel
Bathing Culture’s cozy, colorful towel is the fastest way to make your grimy shower feel like an oasis of zen. Come for the plush organic cotton, stay for the psychedelic pattern—good for the planet, great for your self-care routine.
Just for GQ readers, we scored a slew of discounts on the inaugural Recommends All-Stars class, including Bathing Culture’s hero product. Use code GQ20 for 20% off its entire site for a limited time only.
A version of this story originally appeared in the November 2023 issue of GQ with the title “The GQ Recommends All-Stars”
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Yang-Yi Goh, Avidan Grossman
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