CONTRIBUTORS

Kurt Andersen

To understand Beijing’s new architectural face-lift, contributing editor Kurt Andersen gained access to places few Western journalists can go: the sprawling, wellguarded construction sites, such as that of Beijing National Stadium, also known as the Bird’s Nest. “It was such a breeze getting into it,” he says. “One of my guides happened to be the daughter of an executive at the state construction enterprise that built it.” In “From Mao to Wow!” Andersen describes how the buildings of Beijing represent China’s much larger goal. “Just as New York—and America—was achieving a critical mass of power and wealth a century ago, so too does China seem to be reaching that we’re-a-world-power tipping point now.” Andersen, a novelist, is also a columnist for New York magazine and host of the award-winning radio program Studio 360.

Gail Sheehy

The author of Hillary’s Choice, a biography of Hillary Clinton, as well as several Vanity Fair articles about the former First Lady, contributing editor Gail Sheehy could be considered a seasoned Hillarologist. This month she offers a postmortem of Clinton’s ill-starred White House run (“Hillaryland at War”). “I was dazzled by the way Clinton grew into a spectacular candidate once she let herself be real,” says Sheehy. “But I was sickened by the sexism that began at the core of her chaotic campaign.

She ran as a ball-breaker and denied her full humanity.”

Bryan Burrough

This month special correspondent Bryan Burrough chronicles the play-by-play that led up to Bear Stearns’s tumultuous implosion and subsequent takeover by J. P. Morgan Chase. “I hadn’t done a hard-core Wall Street story like this in years,” says Burrough. “It was a lot of fun. Some of these people I hadn’t seen in 20 years, since I worked on my first book, Barbarians at the Gate. It reminded me how incredibly exciting and misunderstood Wall Street can be, and how much I love it.”

Burrough is no stranger to reporting on crash-and-bum stories, having written about Anthony Pellicano’s and Michael Ovitz’s falls from grace for the magazine.

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Christopher Hitchens

To get a better understanding of waterboarding for his article “Believe Me, It’s Torture”

(page 70), contributing editor Christopher Hitchens underwent the controversial interrogation technique himself. After the experience, he is more convinced than ever that the U.S. should not be engaging in this method of questioning. “Were not just another country that subscribes to the Geneva Conventions,”

Hitchens says. “We’re a country that has insisted others do so as well, so we have a double responsibility.” As for the “ticking bomb” scenario that torture advocates often use as an argument, Hitchens notes, “There is no classic example of that opportunity ever presenting itself. In the long run, the defeat of Islamic fundamentalism is a certainty, so it’s very important to avoid using panic measures and doing things that will later make us disgusted with ourselves.”

James Wolcott

For Vanity Fair's July 2003 cover story, contributing editor James Wolcott wrote about 28 teen stars who were invading the pop kingdom, including Shia LaBeouf and Lindsay Lohan (“Teen Engines: Riding with the Kid Culture”). This month,

Wolcott catches up with the newest wave of young Hollywood stars (page 92).

“This generation has grown up in an environment where they always know that they could be on-camera at any moment,”

Wolcott says. “There used to be a clean demarcation between your work in movies and entertainment and your personal life,

and that’s all been dissolved.” Does he think any of today’s youngsters have true staying power? “One of the things I learned from the 2003 experience is that it’s really not evident who’s going to keep going and who isn’t. You can think back to some of the people on The OC, and they seemed to be unstoppable at some point.

Now some of them are just floating in the ozone.”

Mark Seal

After detailing the fall of Agnelli scion Lapo Elkann for the February 2006 issue of Vanity Fair (“Driven by Dynasty”), contributing editor Mark Seal revisits the Agnelli clan this month to report on Elkann’s mother, Margherita Agnelli de Pahlen, who is in a bitter dispute over her share of the inheritance from the estate of her late father, Fiat billionaire Gianni Agnelli. Seal traveled to Lake Geneva to hear Agnelli de Pahlen’s side of the story. “What struck me most about Margherita is how real she is,”

Seal says. “Absolutely open, never flinching or refusing to answer anything, no matter how intimate, about her or her family—and I asked everything I could think to ask.”

Seal is currently expanding this article into a full-length book that will be published by Random House in 2009.