Table of contents for Spring 2026 in Vanity Fair

The market encourages and handsomely rewards boldness—“Move fast and break things,” et cetera—but the culture tends to be more conservative. Take the case of Michael Govan and LACMA. The only thing more radical than the design, by Pritzker Prize–winning Peter Zumthor, is Michael’s idea for what is happening inside: the reimagination of what an encyclopedic museum can be, organized by curators’ points of view, untethered to geography or timeline. Govan and Zumthor, who until now has never built a building in the US, inspired years of pearl clutching in Los Angeles over the development—one art critic even earned a Pulitzer Prize for his opprobrium. Nonetheless, this month LACMA will open the doors of the David Geffen Galleries to Angelenos and the world. Michael’s monumental conviction seems to have already won…

Once upon a time, smut was shorthand for tattered copies of Fabio-fronted, horny and corny romances snuck under the covers, secreted into bedside tables by harlequin housewives. But now, the popularity of Heated Rivalry, salacious fairy books, and Only-Fans has revived and redefined the genre. Not unlike the “I know it when I see it” definition of obscenity, smut is the difference between a sex scene that cuts from a kiss to the next morning and a scene that builds to real…climax. The term dates back centuries and originates from the verb smutten, “to soil, smear, or stain with dirt” (a Yiddish word, schmutz, has a similar meaning). Books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover—D.H. Lawrence’s scandalous 1928 novel about a married upper-class woman who has an affair with her estate’s gamekeeper—helped…

On an evening last November, Kylie Jenner was out late at her mother Kris Jenner’s 70th birthday party, held at the Warner Estate in Beverly Hills, which is owned by Jeff Bezos. When she returned with friends to her own house, about a five-minute drive away, Kylie decided to post a reel to her Instagram captioned “sharing is not caring when you’re drunk at 2am after a party.” It’s a pretty straightforward bit of cinema verité. Kylie’s friends were seemingly tipsy and hungry and arguing over a bag of The Good Crisp Company Original Potato Chips, Crinkle Cut. “No! And I said before—you can only have one and I’ve already given you three,” Kylie said, brandishing the chip bag as a shield against her best friend, Anastasia “Stas” Karanikolaou, who…

On a bright Monday afternoon in March 2024, inside the Glock factory in the Austrian village of Ferlach, around 1,000 visitors gathered to mourn. On the exterior of a white-walled building with a curving roof—a production facility where steel parts for the company’s eponymous pistol are manufactured—hung an enormous billboard. The display showed, on the left, the face of a gray-haired man with a resolute expression, his neck vanishing into a white collar and dark suit. On the right was the company’s logo: a giant minimalist G wrapped around “LOCK,” rendered here in white across a sky blue field. Underneath it, in English: HONORING THE BOSS. The occasion was a memorial for the pistol company’s founder, Gaston Glock, who had died a few months before, age 94. The gathering had…

TA-NEHISI COATES “THE HOMELAND,” P. 34 In this issue, Coates writes about The Homeland, a concept that first entered his lexicon when journalist Spencer Ackerman wrote about it in his book Reign of Terror. “Trying to explain what exactly The Homeland is—as opposed to what it is not—was the hardest part of the piece,” says Coates. “The best part was talking to Russ Feingold, who, some 20 years ago, saw the possibility of our current timeline.” JOE HAGAN “DARIO AMODEI HAS A COLD,” P. 92 In pursuit of an interview with Dario Amodei, the founder of Anthropic, VF contributing editor Hagan spent three months reporting on the humans behind artificial intelligence. “I’d been feeling for a while that, as a writer, I needed to contend with AI and all its…

HERSCHEL WALKER The famed NFL running back made his first foray into politics in 2021, when he ran for the Senate in Georgia—narrowly losing in 2022 after his campaign was derailed by his rampant conspiracy theories and an allegation he pressured a woman to have an abortion, which Walker denies. DAN NEWLIN (NOMINEE) If you’ve ever driven through Orlando, you will recognize Newlin’s name plastered across billboards promoting his services as a personal injury lawyer. The former deputy sheriff was, as of recently, a major donor to Democrats—until he went all in on Trump and, voilà, a nomination to serve as ambassador to Colombia. CHARLES KUSHNER Kushner, father of Jared, is yet another diplomat who benefited from clemency: Trump pardoned him for his 2005 conviction for illegal campaign contributions, tax…

It is a sunny 75-degree day in mid-January and Michael Govan, the CEO and director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is walking through a domed underpass at his brand-new building, the 347,500-square-foot David Geffen Galleries. “It’s an awesome responsibility to build a metropolitan-scale museum in the image of the 21st century,” he says. “Maybe in the 22nd century, it’ll be like, ‘Oh, that was kind of 21st century.’ ” Perhaps the future is rosier to think about than the present. It is months before the public will set foot in the place, and the jury is still out on what all the fuss is about. Govan has spent all of his two decades as director trying to build a new structure that can house the biggest art…

“It would be a mistake to think that our customers are mostly repeating tradition,” says Jean-Claude Colban, who, alongside his sister, Anne-Marie Colban, owns Charvet, the 188-year-old French shirtmaker. The storied brand—although they would hate being called that—is something of an anomaly in today’s world. You can get a shirt custom-made in about 6,000 different fabrics or suede kidskin slippers in 128 colors, but they have no e-commerce, no catalog, and almost no retail presence other than their rambling seven-floor building at 28 Place Vendôme in Paris. There aren’t any plans for a second location or online ordering or any other nod to modernity you might expect—they are not celebrating a marketing rollout or a round-number birthday—and yet Charvet has never been more relevant than it is right now. Its…

In the wake of poet and writer Renee Good’s killing, Donald Trump and his collaborators have done all they can to define her as an enemy of “The Homeland.” The administration claims, for instance, that Good was a “domestic terrorist,” a term it applied to Alex Pretti, the ICU nurse whom federal agents killed less than three weeks later. This rhetoric is employed to justify the state taking life by associating the dead with national villainy. But the campaign against Good is different—because The Homeland takes particular and perverse interest in women deemed in-suffciently reverent of hearth and home. Trump propagandists tell us that Good was part of a growing cabal of insolent white ladies turned violent; that she was a “lesbian agitator” in league with “68 IQ Somali scammers”;…

“I don’t think I can do this anymore,” read one of the dozens of Signal messages that a major crypto market maker, who asked to go simply by Bison, received in the first few days of February. The crypto market had just shed another 15 percent—some $400 billion gone in a matter of days. In the previous four months, the total value of cryptocurrencies had plunged nearly 50 percent, dragged down by Bitcoin, with both Ethereum and Solana dropping nearly 60 percent. The crash erased roughly $2 trillion in value and tipped the industry into a bear market known, in crypto slang, as a “winter”—a nerdy subterranean nod to Game of Thrones’ foreboding refrain: “Winter is coming.” Bison recounts stories of top founders scrambling to take companies private, close emergency…

Like many a good Florida tale, this one begins in a watering hole with all the trappings of a Carl Hiaasen novel. The date was May 14, 2023, and Joseph Assad had taken his wife, Michele Rigby Assad, to the Sandbar Sports Grill in Cocoa Beach, a kitschy beachfront dive, to celebrate her 50th birthday. Scattered clouds and a gentle breeze offered pristine conditions for a Hurricane (the rum and triple sec sort) and a late-night rocket liftoff. A dozen miles north, looming along the Atlantic, was Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40. As last call beckoned at the Sandbar, the crowd thinned out. Yet a few stragglers, drinks in hand, watched the horizon, waiting for ignition. When the Falcon 9 finally lit, it tore a bright seam through the…