Editor's Letter

Match Game

Determining which stories to cover each month and which writers are best equipped to handle those stories is an ongoing process that eats into valuable time that might better be spent debating whether or not to retire the three-year-old photograph at right. "Sun Without a Moon," on page 98, a moving, epic tale of Tibet's missing boy Buddha, was written by Alex Shoumatoff, who profiled the Dalai Lama for Vanity Fair in 1991. And, as you will recall, Buddhism was a recurring thread in his January cover profile of Uma Thurman, the daughter of Robert Thurman, one of America's top Tibetan experts. Shoumatoff is forever drawn to far-off lands. The Brazilian rain forest was the setting for his landmark 1989 V.F. report on the murder of environmental activist Chico Mendes. He even lives in a remote spot—in a rustic camp he built largely by himself on the slopes of Big Crow Mountain in the Adirondacks—worlds away from the metropolitan lives of most of the magazine's other contributors.

Similarly, one could not ask for a writer with better credentials than Bob Colacello's to preview Julian Schnabel's movie about the abbreviated, full-throttle life of the 1980s art-world primitive Jean-Michel Basquiat. As a former editor of Interview magazine, a friend of Andy Warhol's, and a regular at Da Silvano and Mr. Chow's, Colacello is versed in every nuance of the SoHo art scene of the last decade.

Jennet Conant's own orbits have provided her with sufficient insights into the world of Sandy Hill Pittman, the amateur climber and extremely social estranged wife of MTV creator Bob Pittman, who almost lost her life on Mount Everest in May. Conant is part of the movable, New York-Hamptons schmoozefest; like Pittman, she is married to a prominent figure in this circle (60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft); and though she denies any great climbing skill, she has scaled a mountain or two in her time.

It takes little inspiration to send photographer Helmut Newton to cover the Cannes film festival—he lives in nearby Monte Carlo and is famous for eliciting the dangerous and the decadent in his photographs. But asking Christopher Hitchens to write a few words about the sensational flamenco dancer Joaquin Cortes would at first appear to be a curious choice. Unless, of course, you've seen Hitchens wobbling atop a pair of Cuban heels as he expertly escorts a cocktail shaker around a dance floor.