The 2018 Vanity Fair Hall of Fame
By Christopher Buckley
“It was a blonde,” Raymond Chandler wrote in Farewell, My Lovely. “A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.” Stormy Daniels (real name Stephanie Gregory Clifford)—the face that launched a thousand memes (“Yeti pubes,” “Mario Kart mushroom dick”)—may bring down the whole building. Trump’s fixer, Michael “I’d take a bullet for him” Cohen, may go to jail, in part, because he never got his client to sign the damned non-disclosure form, making that $130,000 the loudest “hush money” in American history. (SAD!) The Donald allegedly promised to make her a star on The Apprentice, but didn’t. (BAD!) She became the star of her own reality show; the only stripper to open her act with a clip from 60 Minutes. Say what you will, but she’s funny: she considered running for the U.S. Senate on the slogan “Stormy Daniels: Screwing People Honestly.” And she’s got taste: every time she sees the leader of the free world on TV, she thinks: I had sex with that . . . Eech.
Kylian Mbappé,
The Field Marshal
By Dave Eggers
In Russia, he became the youngest Frenchman to ever score a goal in a World Cup. A few days later, when he scored two goals against Argentina, he became only the second teenager—after Pelé—to score two goals in one Cup match. Playing against Croatia in the final, Kylian Mbappé blasted a comet from 25 yards out, helping France win the whole thing. Mbappé was still 19 when, a few weeks after being fêted by Macron and Putin amid a sudden Russian rain, he signed a contract with Paris Saint-Germain worth about $210 million, making him the most expensive teenager in the world.
All this, and his game is still developing. He’s a very good passer but often doesn’t see the wide-open man. He’s a phenomenal ball handler but often makes three feints when one will do. But there is that freakish speed. The soccer world will not soon forget the sight of Mbappé in the round of 16, charging down the field with half of the Argentinian side chasing him as he eyed an open goal. With every long stride he seemed to grow faster and taller, and the Argentines, slump-shouldered Messi among them, had to accept the inevitability of a dagger blow—and the arrival of a new king.
By Monica Lewinsky
While the comedian Hannah Gadsby has been a national treasure in Australia for more than a decade, she burst into America’s consciousness six months ago with her paradigm-shifting and thought-provoking Netflix comedy special, Nanette. It’s a familiar setup: onstage, a stand-up comic makes a joke at her own expense; the audience laughs; and whatever painful truth she reveals through her anecdote—whatever humiliating, embarrassing, or traumatic experience she hides within the husk of humor—is completely forgotten, dismissed and condoned by the waves of laughter.
The brilliance of Hannah (and the show) is that she refuses to comply with this model. Partway through her act, she declares she’s done with comedy because she no longer wants to make jokes out of her suffering. She recounts the harrowing personal ordeals that formed the basis of several of her earlier comedy routines. She forces the audience to sit with these experiences and, in doing so, creates a new framework to understand shame and humiliation.
She had us at: “There’s nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.” (That motto, I predict, will be the most popular tattoo of 2019.)
Bob Woodward,Paper TrailBy Robert Redford
Bob Woodward has long impressed me: calm, unruffled, dogged, and determined to get at the facts. I’ve followed his journalism career since 1972, as he and Carl Bernstein investigated the Nixon administration. I went on to portray him in the film All the President’s Men, which chronicled the Watergate scandal. I’ve been alarmed and deeply concerned about similar presidential corruption today, which is why of all Bob’s books I’ve read, his latest, Fear: Trump in the White House, might be the most urgent—revealing an executive branch ruled by greed, feuds, viciousness of spirit, and open warfare against a free press. Once again, Woodward delivers a deeply sourced and rigorously researched account, producing, as he has called journalism itself, “the best obtainable version of the truth.” Sometimes it’s ugly, and often it’s shocking.
When put to our biggest tests, however, our democracy has remained resilient: because of our commitment to a free and independent media, epitomized by books like his. This is one of the most sacred of our principles, secured by the journalistic bravery required to reveal such hidden truths. Many of the journalists working today were first inspired by Woodward and his passion to serve. His country and its citizens depend on him, and he them.
I know Bob doesn’t like this attention; true to form he’d prefer to have his reporting speak for itself. It’s still the strongest and most powerful voice he knows.
By Katherine Johnson
On March 14 of this year, the English cosmologist Stephen Hawking—who came into this world on the 300th anniversary of Galileo Galilei’s death—transcended our physical plane, at age 76, on the 139th anniversary of Albert Einstein’s birth. One could imagine that Mr. Hawking is among the aforementioned luminaries at some roundtable in the sky. But were he alive, Hawking—who, at age 21, was diagnosed with the incurable neurodegenerative disease A.L.S.—would tell you otherwise. With his dry wit and unvarnished point of view, delivered in its rhythmic and robotic tone via his speech synthesizer, Hawking might instead share his thoughts about the hereafter. As he told The Guardian, in 2011, “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers.” For the millions whose eyes he opened to the wonders of the cosmos, math, and physics, however, Mr. Hawking’s afterlife is all around us: in his 13 books about the universe; in his five books of children’s fiction (which he co-wrote with his daughter, Lucy); and in the 2014 film The Theory of Everything, in which Eddie Redmayne portrayed the scientific visionary who once stated: “We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe, and for that, I am extremely grateful.”