CONTRIBUTORS

Joseph E. Stiglitz

When Nobel laureate and Columbia professor Joseph E. Stiglitz looked at the Bush administration’s purported expenses for the cost of the war in Iraq, the numbers simply didn’t add up. In “The $3 Trillion War” (page 147)— an excerpt from his new book, written with Harvard budget expert Linda J. Bilmes— Stiglitz and Bilmes uncover the Bush administration’s efforts to conceal the real price. “One of my original motivations was to see what the discrepancy was between the budgetary cost and the societal cost,” Stiglitz says. “But as we got into the research, it became clear that even the budgetary cost for the U.S. was not what the Bush administration was saying.” The Three Trillion Dollar War will be published this month by W. W. Norton.

Ingrid Sischy

Having served as editor in chief of both Artforum and Interview magazines, Vanity Fair contributing editor Ingrid Sischy has been a longtime leader of the New York art and publishing scenes. In this month’s issue, she turns her attention to Calvin Klein. “I always assumed that for him to be as daring as he was, whether in the advertising campaigns or in the way he expanded what was previously thought of as fashion, he must have acted straight from the gut,” Sischy says. “Writing this story reinforced this belief. So many people who worked for Calvin spoke about the way he would make decisions quickly and stand by them. Now, after selling his company, he’s enjoying his freedom.” Speaking of freedom: after 18 years as editor of Interview, the April issue will be Sischy’s last. She resigned her position earlier this winter and looks forward to finally having the time to concentrate on writing.

William Langewiesche

During his reporting trip to Iraq for his National Magazine Award-winning story “Rules of Engagement” (November 2006), International Correspondent William Langewiesche wrote a personal e-mail to his editors that was promptly printed under the title “Baghdad Is Burning” (September 2006). Recently, while in China on assignment, he took a break to write another personal e-mail, published here as “Beijing’s Olympic Makeover.” “These are informal comments to my friends,” he says. “First impressions, but based, I suppose, on long experience traveling the world.” Langewiesche describes a meticulous Beijing that is focused on the upcoming Summer Olympics. “What I saw was, in many ways, admirable—certainly the courage and concentration of the Chinese people themselves. But at the same time I was disturbed by the obvious authoritarianism in China, and the related manipulation of the Olympics for the glorification of the state.”

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Bruce Weber

For nearly three decades, the photographs of Vanity Fair contributing photographer Bruce Weber have defined youthful sexuality through both advertisements for Ralph Lauren and Abercrombie & Fitch and spreads in leading magazines, including GQ, Rolling Stone, Vogue, and V.F. Perhaps Weber’s most notable images, however, are those of the marketing campaigns he created for Calvin Klein over a 14-year span. “After I met Klein, in the early 80s, he continuously gave me freedom of expression by teaching me the way to look at his world,” says Weber, who photographed Klein for Ingrid Sischy’s profile of the designer (page 218). The two are still in contact, about which Weber says, “When you’ve worked with someone so closely and they let you do the thing you love the most, you can’t stop being friends.” Weber is celebrating the opening of his short film “Wine and Cupcakes,” which premiered at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival, and the 20th-anniversary re-release of his movie Let’s Get Lost.

Alessandra Stanley

What was Alessandra Stanley’s reaction to Christopher Hitchens’s January 2007 column, “Why Women Aren’t Funny”? “I laughed,” Stanley says. “This is, after all, the man who argued that Mother Teresa was a mean-spirited social climber.” This month, in her essay “Who Says Women Aren’t Funny?,” which begins on page 182, Stanley argues in support of the distaff side of the species. “It’s interesting to examine what has changed for female comics and comedy writers in the last 30 years—and what hasn’t,” she says. Stanley, who started her career at Time magazine, is the chief television critic for The New York Times.

Brian McNally

Brian McNally hasn’t pursued a typical writing career, to put it mildly. Born in London, McNally relocated to New York in 1976. Soon after, he and his brother, Keith, began the transformation of Manhattan’s downtown nightlife, with restaurants such as Odeon and Indochine. Now, for reasons he describes in “Good Evening, Vietnam!,” his first article for V.F., McNally finds himself very far from Manhattan. “Brian is a natural storyteller,” says his editor, Cullen Murphy. “He began writing letters to friends about his new life. They were candid, atmospheric, and entertaining, and Graydon wondered, Why not enlarge the audience? So Brian’s now our man in Saigon.”

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David Rose

In his January 2007 Vanity Fair article, “Neo Culpa,” contributing editor David Rose exposed the deep rift driven into the neoconservative movement by the poorly planned and executed Iraq war. This month, he provides a detailed look at another area of foreign policy disastrously mismanaged by the Bush administration: the rise of Hamas in Palestine. Reporting from Gaza and the West Bank, Rose shows how the administration failed to prevent the radical Islamic party’s ascendancy and then bungled an Iran-contra-esque plot to topple it, resulting in a major setback for the region. “The historical judgment will emerge quite rapidly,” says Rose. “The machinery of the American government is going through a period of serious dysfunction. Avowed goals, such as the wish to see democracy in Palestine, are not translated into policy. I think progress with the Palestinians and Israelis is going to be more difficult to achieve as a result of the Bush administration.”

Charlie LeDuff

A former national correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner at The New York Times, Charlie LeDuff has traveled to Appalachia, the Arctic, and nearly every place in between, making films and searching for stories. But his first story for Vanity Fair found him— literally. Nearly a decade ago LeDufTs friend Edward Keating was out snapping pictures of New Yorkers when he spotted seminal American photographer Robert Frank in his viewfinder. Keating introduced them, and over the years they’ve grown to be close enough friends that LeDuff was able to persuade the notoriously press-shy artist to allow him to document Frank’s recent trip to China with the promise “There will be no entourage—just me and a pencil.” LeDufTs book US Guys will be released in paperback by Penguin in April.

Edward Sorel

Nearly two years ago artist Edward Sorel ran across a photograph of a toy German sidecar motorcycle, and it was so terrific that he hung it on his bulletin board. It’s been there ever since, and served as inspiration for the illustration accompanying this month’s piece by Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, on the $3 trillion war. Of a return to the sort of political drawing he had almost given up on, Sorel, who has been illustrating VF articles for 12 years, says it is “surprising and wonderful to be doing such strong commentary for a magazine like V.FT Sorel is currently writing The Mural at the Waverly Inn, to be published by Pantheon this fall, and illustrating ideologues and historical figures from Pope Urban II to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for the book Certitude, written by Adam Begley.

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Sheila Weller

“Five years of driving around in my car, singing along to some of the best pop music of the last 50 years” was, for Sheila Weller, one of the perks of writing Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon—and the Journey of a Generation, which is excerpted on page 204. “My three subjects all inhabited the same social and musical milieu, but each of them contributed a different strand of meaning to the very 60s idea that a young woman could be an adventurer.” Weller, a senior contributing editor at Glamour who profiled Michelle Phillips in Vanity Fair’s December 2007 issue, also has a familial connection to V.F: her son, Jonathan Kelly, is an executive assistant to editor Graydon Carter.

Bruce McCall

Bruce McCall has been a writer and painter of satire and humor since about age 10. He got his professional start with National Lampoon in its brief golden age; in addition to hundreds of written pieces and more than 30 New Yorker covers, among other illustration projects, he has published three books of humor. Regarding his subject this month he says, “Daffy Duck is a tortured symbol of life lived at the edge in a time of no edges, and was the first wildfowl to speak up about his speech impediment.” McCall continues, “The notes published here are excerpted from the back matter to the forthcoming Daffy as a Duck, the first authoritative biography with pictures.” Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish McCall’s first children’s book, Marveltown, in September.

Tim Hetherington

Last September and October, while on assignment in Afghanistan for Vanity Fair, photographer Tim Hetherington captured a tired American soldier resting at the Restrepo bunker, in the Korengal Valley. The image was named World Press Photo of the Year for 2007 and was part of a group of his photographs that were awarded second prize in the competition’s General News category. “As a visual storyteller, I’m just happy that the work I produced for V.F. is now magnified far beyond anything I could have dreamed,” says Hetherington, who broke his ankle while documenting the military’s struggle with the Taliban. “The prize is helping focus world attention on the war in Afghanistan and the reality of combat facing U.S. troops there. As the guys of Second Platoon used to say to me, ‘Just show people what’s going on here.’ ” Traveling with V.F. contributing editor Sebastian Junger, Hetherington was embedded with the Second Battalion of the 503rd Infantry Regiment (airborne) for the January article “Into the Valley of Death.” His photograph, according to Gary Knight, World Press Photo’s jury chairman, “shows the exhaustion of a man—and the exhaustion of a nation.”