Contributors

Gore Vidal, the world's pre-eminent political essayist, eviscerates a familiar subject in this month's issue: the United States government. Its specious wars on drugs and terrorism, Vidal argues, are swiftly and systematically destroying the Bill of Rights. Vidal has written 23 novels, and in 1993 he won the National Book Award for United States: Essays 1952-1992.

In January, Random House will publish The Essential Vidal: A Gore Vidal Reader, a selection of his best work from the last half-century.

Ken Burns's acclaimed PBS documentaries—Brooklyn Bridge, The Civil War, Baseball, and Thomas Jefferson—have altered the way Americans view history, and that won't change anytime soon. Bums is currently working on film biographies of Susan B. Anthony and Mark Twain, and his next documentary series, Jazz, will be broadcast in the year 2000. Meantime, Bums's documentary on architect Frank Lloyd Wrightunderwritten, in part, by General Motors—will air on PBS this month. "I don't think you can understand the art without the man," says Bums, whose assessment of Wright appears on page 302.

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"John Singer Sargent could execute a portrait in less than an hour," contributing photographer David Seidner says with a degree of awe. Seidner took a bit longer—44 days—to photograph the descendants of some of the painter's most celebrated subjects. During the past 20 years Seidner has contributed to countless magazines and has published seven books. (Three more are on the way.) "My work over the last four years has dealt with a kind of vague territory between photography and painting," he says. "I'm interested in things outside of photography because they give me a more original approach."

"He's a good listener," contributing editor Cathy Horyn says of this month's endlessly photogenic cover subject,

Brad Pitt. Horyn killed six days in Los Angeles waiting to interview Pitt, thanks to the hectic shooting schedule of his new film, Fight Club.

It was worth the wait. "I was struck by the fact that he avoids the subject of his looks," says Horyn. "It allows you to get much closer about other subjects."

As a journalism student at the University of Georgia in the 1980s, contributing editor George Wayne spent many lunch hours in the Bolton Dining Hall "weaving dreams about moving to New York City and meeting Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, and Philip Johnson." Wayne never met Capote, and though he did talk with Warhol on a number of occasions, those were nothing compared with this month's interview with Johnson—an experience Wayne describes as "major," "monumental," and "awesome."

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When special correspondent Bryan Burrough began researching the 1997 Mir space-station mishap, what started out as a V.F. assignment became a 500-page book. "I was drawn in by the inherent human drama," Burrough explains. "I was also interested that the stories of these astronauts had gone largely untold." Burrough spent a year of "nearly constant travel," shuttling between Moscow and NASA headquarters in Houston while working on the book, Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir, which will be published next month by HarperCollins. The exclusive excerpt begins on page 130.

Contributing editor Betsey Osborne has portraiture in her bloodlines. Andy Warhol painted her mother's first cousin, Edie Sedgwick, and John Singer Sargent painted her great-great-aunt Edith Minturn Phelps Stokes, who was married to architect Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes. The latter portrait now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "My mother remembers meeting Aunt Edith and Uncle Newt when she was five or six years old," says Osborne, who in this issue writes about the descendants of Sargent's most memorable portrait subjects. "This personal connection opened up the bigger world of Sargent to me."

"It was Roy Lichtenstein's influence that brought me to astrology,' says Michael Lutin, who has written the V.F. "Planetarium" since 1984. "The power of his images made me think of people as archetypes.

I just made an odd jump." Last year Lutin set up a hot line linked to the column, and the phones haven't stopped ringing. He has also written three books and four "astrological musicals." As a rule, most of his writing is linked to the stars. "Astrology is like a roach motel," he says. "You check in, but you never check out."