CONTRIBUTORS

Peter Bergen, CNN’s terrorism analyst and a contributor to such publications as The Daily Telegraph, the London Times, and The New Republic, has been reporting on Osama bin Laden and his network since 1996. The result is Holy War, Inc. (Free Press), out this month and excerpted on page 250. “It was quite an adventure,” says Bergen, who, in the course of reporting, was nearly kidnapped in Yemen, and met with Benazir Bhutto, with a variety of terrorist-group leaders in Kashmir, and, in 1997, with bin Laden himself. Since September 11, however, the project has taken on a graver nature. “Naturally, there’s a huge change of emphasis when the most serious national-security threat we now face is bin Laden and his affiliated groups.”

For contributing editor Laura Jacobs, a piece on etiquette authority Emily Post (at one time almost as famous as Eleanor Roosevelt) is, in the present climate, propitious. “Etiquette really is an extension of ethics,” Jacobs says. “There’s such a moral underpinning to it. It’s all at the service of going through your day and not hurting other people. Doing historical pieces is important more than ever in difficult times, because history is where we learn.” This spring, Jacobs will see the publication of her first novel, Women About Town (Viking).

In the wake of the September 11 attacks, Pulitzer Prize-winning health and science writer Laurie Garrett says, “Our world will never again be the same. Discussions of such unfathomably horrific events as a bioterrorist assault are no longer academic, mere science fiction, or far-fetched nightmares.” Reporting on the threat of biological terrorism for this month’s issue was, she says, “an arduous exercise in the ethics of truth, restraint, balance, and justifiable alarm.” A Newsday staff writer, Garrett is also the author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World out of Balance and Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health.

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On page 266, special correspondent Bryan Burrough traces the final hours of those aboard United Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11. Contacting a victim’s family is ordinarily one of journalism’s most wrenching assignments. Not this time. “People understood I was writing a memorial to their loved ones,” Burrough says. “Sometimes they cried. I know I did.” Fueling Burrough’s reaction was the loss of a friend and neighbor, Thomas Glasser, who worked on the 104th floor of Two World Trade Center. “I thought of Tom the whole time I was doing this story. He was a great guy and a fantastic father.”

“Afghanistan is one of the saddest places I’ve ever been, because people are ground down from 22 years of war,” says Janine di Giovanni, whose account of the first days of the U.S. bombing, which she spent with Northern Alliance forces, begins on page 258. “On one hand they felt devastated that foreigners were bombing their country. On the other, they’re desperate to crush the Taliban.” Di Giovanni has won the National Magazine Award for Reporting for her July 1999 V.F. piece on Kosovo and two awards from Amnesty International; and, after witnessing the fall of Grozny, Chechnya, she was named Britain’s Foreign Correspondent of the Year for 2000. A regular contributor to The Times of London, she is the author of two books; her third, about Kosovo, is due out next year from Knopf.

Contributing editor Peter Biskind believes that films such as Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s 11, starring Brad Pitt, are “exactly the kinds of movies people want to see in today’s climate. You don’t want to watch CNN all day, and Ocean’s 11 is perfect escapism.” The author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, about Hollywood in the 70s, and the former executive editor of Premiere magazine, Biskind has interviewed countless celebrities in his career. Meeting Pitt, he says, was a highlight. “Celebrities, like everybody else, are different from one another,” Biskind says. “There are celebrities who are dickheads and celebrities who are smart and informed and charming and self-deprecating. I would put Pitt in the latter category.”

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Harold Bloom hasn’t just covered the Western canon; he’s part of it. A professor of humanities at Yale and a professor of English at N.YU., he is also the author of more than 20 books, including How to Read and Why, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. On page 282 he discusses a newly discovered portrait allegedly of Shakespeare. “I don’t know if I’m an authority or not,” he says. “But I’m 71 and I’ve been teaching for 47 years, and I’ve been teaching Shakespeare for most of that time.” Bloom’s most recent book is the anthology Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages; his next, Genius, will be out in 2002.

When contributing editor Vicky Ward first visited Washington, D.C., for her story about the lives of Capitol Hill interns, the nation was obsessed with Gary Condit. “Even so,” she says, “I was surprised to find a world in which such an inordinate amount of emphasis is laid on power and sex.” Not even the terrorist attacks could change this. “It wasn’t just the flirting and the drinking, but the level of power people in their 20s wield. In a time of crisis,” says Ward, “it wasn’t exactly reassuring.” A new addition to V.F., Ward previously was the executive editor at Talk and, before that, the features editor for the New York Post. She has contributed to such publications as the Daily Mail, The Independent, The New York Times, and The Daily Telegraph, among others.

According to Herb Ritts, who photographed Brad Pitt on an isolated beach cliff near Los Angeles for this month’s cover story, the actor has no problems letting loose for the camera. “It doesn’t take much encouragement to get Pitt to agree to go into the ocean with his clothes on, or take off his shirt,” says Ritts. “The whole shoot was just a natural progression.” Watching Pitt tear down the coast on the vintage Triumph motorcycle that had been rented for the day reminded Ritts of another laid-back movie star—his childhood neighbor in Brentwood, California, Steve McQueen. “Brad’s got the same relaxed nature, the same cool vibe, and, of course, the same love of motorcycles,” Ritts says.

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FOR DETAILS, SEE CREDITS PAGE

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Since age six, contributing editor Anne McNally has known she was interested in fashion. “I wanted to climb trees, and I realized I couldn’t do it in a dress,” she says. “So I considered other options.” Born and raised in Paris, McNally arrived in New York in the late 1970s and contributed to HG and Vogue.

She joined Vanity Fair six years ago, and now oversees the fashion department while fashion director Elizabeth Saltzman works from London. Given the current mood, McNally believes people will still want to dress up, but may do so in a different spirit. “You’re not going to arrive at a party with the dress entering the room before you do.”

This month, contributing photographer Bruce Weber pays homage to the vision of Italian director Luchino Visconti and his 1963 film, The Leopard, dressing actors from the contemporary Italian cinema in the original costumes, which were designed by Piero Tosi. “Ferdinando Scarfiotti, who worked with Visconti on set design, once told me that the moment you set foot in Sicily you’ll know why Visconti loved to film there,” says Weber, who selected the Palazzo Gangi and the Vila Boscogrande in Palermo as locations. “There still remains a state of grace in Sicily. Visconti, if he were alive today, would still be making movies there.”

London editor Henry Porter arrived in New York City the Tuesday after the terrorist attacks took place and was deeply moved by what he saw. “All the traditional views of Americans being hysterical, self-pitying, and self-conscious were completely confounded by the New York reaction,” says Porter. “Everyone is deeply hurt, but the response to that hurt is heroic.” On page 218, Porter looks at both the good and the evil ways cell phones can be used. Good, as in the final good-byes of the hijacked passengers of September 11. Evil, as in the use of cell phones to detonate bombs remotely. Porter’s first novel, Remembrance Day, dealt with terrorists and cell phones. His next novel, A Spy’s Life, will be published in the spring by Simon & Schuster.

Rich Cohen's primary concern while reporting this month’s story on the Unit, an elite team of Israeli commandos, was “not putting those guys in any kind of danger. By even saying the soldiers have a base in the Negev—will that put them in a dangerous situation?” he wonders. Cohen doesn’t think American Special Forces will have any difficulty recruiting future generations. “People will always want to do those jobs,” he says. A contributing editor at Rolling Stone, Cohen is also the author of Tough Jews, about Jewish gangsters, and The Avengers, about Jewish resistance during World War II. His third book, Lake Effect, a memoir, is due out from Knopf next spring.