"The thing to worry about is meanings, not appearances.
-Michael Lesy, Wisconsin Death Trip, 1973
CECIL, WISCONSIN-I went back twice to find out what the coffin meant, but though cars came and went in the driveway, nobody ever answered the door. Halloween in June, or a sign? Kitsch, or a warning? I'd been driving for a week, since the first night of the January 6th hearings, listening to them on the radio as I counted the flags. Not the American ones but the Trump ones. Trump 2024, two years ahead of time; and the red, white, and blue of the Confederacy, the yellow "Don't Tread on Me" Gadsden. There are so many now. There's new folk art too: hand-painted "Fuck Biden" placards, homemade "Let's Go Brandon" billboards, and DIY "Never Forget Benghazi" banners. The cities and towns still ripple with rainbow pride, their numbers are greater, but on many country roads the ugly emblems tick by like mile markers.
What was the coffin though? I was visiting friends in Cecil, Wisconsin, when we drove past it. They let me out to make a picture. "Careful," they said, and, "We'll come back for you," because they didn't want to linger. They sped away, leaving me in the green light. I made my picture. I waited. I read on my phone, on Twitter, that Wisconsin Republicans had blocked an effort to repeal a dormant 1849 law making any abortion-including for rape or incest-a felony. My friends returned, we fled. The next morning, the ruling came down: Dobbs v. Jackson, which overturned Roe v. Wade, and Wisconsin became the only "blue" state in which abortion is now effectively illegal.
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Party Planning - Putin wants Trump to win, of course, and he's got big ideas about a new world order. Think Yalta-on Fiji
I don’t know which moment in US history former president Donald Trump imagines when he says, “Make America great again.” He has never given a definitive answer in any speech or interview. But I know exactly which moment Vladimir Putin imagines in his own vision for Russian greatness. It is February 1945, when Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill divided the world in Crimea.
Boys and Their Toys - Inside the hypermacho, Bible-thumping alt-tech universe trying to take on Silicon Valley-from El Segundo
For more than two years, in the small, unassuming beach town of El Segundo, California, dozens of young men have gathered with a singular mission: to save America. They will do this, they say, by building the next generation of great tech companies. They call what they are building real shit—not like what the software engineers make up north, writing code on shiny MacBooks. Instead, these men have a taste for the tangible: They spend their workdays toiling in labs and manufacturing lines, their nights sleeping on couches and bunk beds. Some are making drones to try to control the weather. Others are building nuclear reactors and military weaponry designed to fight Russia and China.
Vanities - Maisy Stella knows how to think outside the box
Maisy Stella didn’t have a TV as a kid because her musician parents didn’t want her and her older sister, Lennon, tuning in and tuning out. So the girls used their imaginations. “My sister made a cardboardbox TV that I would get in, and she had a fake cardboard remote,” Stella says. “I’d do a baking show, and then she’d be like, ‘Soap opera!’ and I’d be like, ‘You killed my husband!’ We would do that for hours. That was our entertainment.” Only later, when the girls landed roles as Connie Britton’s children on the country music drama Nashville, did their mother and father relent. “We bought a TV the day that me and my sister got on TV.”
Another Country- Searching for James Baldwin in the South of France
Since James Baldwin's death nearly 40 years ago, the literary lion's final home, in the South of France, has drawn a procession of acolytes to the Provençal community of Saint-Paul de Vence, where he spent the last 17 years of his life.The 300-year-old villa in which he resided no longer exists: By 2019 developers had converted the site into a luxury apartment complex. But that hasn't deterred generations of admirers, inflamed and enlightened by Baldwin's prose, from making a pilgrimage. Including me. Seizing the occasion of the writer's centennial year, I paid a visit in April. My first stop was a table at a Baldwin hangout, the Café de la Place on Place du Général de Gaulle, for a croque monsieur and a double espresso.
A House Divided
The Mellon dynasty has long been known for its old money refinement and discretion. But when TIM MELLON became Donald Trump's biggest donor many members of the family were mystified-and not afraid to talk about it
FUNNY BUSINESS
NEARLY 50 YEARS AGO, SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE LAUNCHED A REVOLUTION THAT CHANGED COMEDY, TELEVISION, AND THE MOVIES. NOW DIRECTOR JASON REITMAN HAS RE-CREATED THE CHAOTIC HOURS BEFORE SNL'S FIRST EPISODE. LIVE FROM NEW YORK, IT'S 1975!
BAD FAITH
From exiled actors to academics, influencers to intellectuals, VF gets under the hood of the Catholic right's celebrity conversion industrial complex
THE GE NERAL
How ELIZABETH PRELOGAR, America's low-key, high-powered solicitor general, is holding the Supreme Court's feet to the fire
THE BILLIONAIRE'S SECRET
THE GERMAN INDUSTRIALIST KLAUSMICHAEL KUEHNE, BORN IN 1937, IS ONE OF THE RICHEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD, WITH MORE MONEY THAN KEN GRIFFIN, OR MACKENZIE SCOTT, OR FRANÇOIS PINAULT. WHERE DID HIS FAMILY FORTUNE COME FROM? THE NAZIS KNOW
GIVE AND LET GIVE
MELINDA FRENCH GATES is speaking out for the rights of women and girls, embracing her role as godmother to her fellow philanthropists, and getting political, even when it's a little uncomfortable.
