Reese Witherspoon has been a hero of my personal canon ever since Election, and I watch and rewatch her work compulsively. If Walk the Line or Legally Blonde is on any screen nearby, I will absolutely park myself in front of it; sorry if you need anything from me for the next two hours. She could have had a tidy, superlative, Tracy Flick career picking up Oscars and such, but instead she expanded into acquiring and producing, and she is responsible for a real shift in the stories we see onscreen and the roles they create for women, from Wild to Big Little Lies to her new Hulu series Little Fires Everywhere, costarring Kerry Washington and based on the best-selling novel by Celeste Ng.

Reese and I are kindred spirits in our love of contemporary fiction, which is why I'm thrilled that Ann Patchett wrote our cover story. (Ann's work similarly hijacks my time on a regular basis; please do not tempt me with Commonwealth or Bel Canto.) Her Nashville bookstore, Parnassus Books, is on my road-trip bucket list, and there is so much to love and mull in the conversation she and Reese had there, amid the novels and the canine personalities. For our cover, Jackie Nickerson photographed Reese in a nursery near her Los Angeles home, a fitting environment for a woman whose mission is growth, not just for herself but for her whole industry, and whose work is as generative as it is performative. She makes it all look easy, whether the "it" at hand is wearing a couture gown or playing a morning-news anchor on The Morning Show, which (as Ann writes) might well be the definitive fictional document of the #MeToo movement—but Reese's success is rooted in ambition, dedication, and intellect.

Beyond our shores, James Reginato tours the circuit of high-flying, high-earning celebrity DJs, by which we mean both DJs who have become celebrities and vice versa. (Example of the former: Marshmello. Example of the latter: Paris Hilton.) Artists themselves, they are rendered into artworks by photographer Hassan Hajjaj, who creates bespoke costumes and sets that channel his subjects' energy and attitude. Elsewhere in the issue, Mark Seal visits London for an exclusive interview with James Stunt, who (true to his surname) infamously facilitated the loan of a number of forged paintings to the House of Windsor. And Jesse Hyde reports from the Amazon, where a massacre of farmers who protested the selling off of land for profit shines a light on the human toll of deforestation and shows how deeply climate change connects to issues of inequality and corruption—all, increasingly, the themes of our era, the scandals hiding in plain sight.

RADHIKA JONES
Editor in Chief