On Your Marks

Editor's Letter/September 2019

It's hard to square how much I look forward to summer with how much I look forward to fall, but the September issue—arriving as it does in August, along with (if we East Coasters are lucky) that first hint of chill in the night air—embodies the paradox. We're still in relax mode, but underneath the sunblock, we're gearing up. My son starts kindergarten and he needs a new backpack. Here come the fall books, here come Fashion Week, U.N. week, the film festivals showing the movies we'll be talking about through Oscar season. And so this issue spills over with artists at the top of their game. Kristen Stewart, that rare actor who shimmers effortlessly between blockbuster and indie film (this fall it's Charlie's Angels and a Jean Seberg biopic). Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose summer included an appearance before members of Congress to testify in support of reparations for chattel slavery, an idea he has almost single-handedly powered to the upper echelons of American discourse since he first wrote about it in 2014 (this fall, he publishes his first novel, and in our pages Jesmyn Ward—herself a two-time National Book Award winner—talks with him about fiction and freedom). There's Miuccia Prada, still a pioneer after four decades at the helm of one of the world's most powerful fashion houses and a behind-the-scenes patron of the cinematic arts. There's Julia Louis-Dreyfus, preparing for her next act after seven seasons as a politician who once upon a more innocent time was the worst imaginable inhabitant of the West Wing (she also stars on our Emmys special issue). There's a whole crew of rising talent crossing the ever more permeable boundaries between the big and small screens, from Yara Shahidi to Zoey Deutch. And as the class of 2023 takes its place at colleges around the country, forget not the scammers of Varsity Blues: Evgenia Peretz reports on continuing fallout from the college admissions scandal in L.A., just in time for a new wave of high school seniors to start their applications, hopefully sans Photoshop.

RADHIKA JONES

Editor in Chief