Christopher Hitchens’s Handwritten Notes in The Great Gatsby
On the heels of Baz Luhrmann’s heady film adaption, see the jottings of a writer who rivaled Fitzgerald himself, as Hitchens prepared for his May 2000 V.F. column “The Road to West Egg.”
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Photograph by Annie Leibovitz
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Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Mom
A Mommy Blog by Arrested Development’s Lucille Bluth:
Dear Lucille,
My son recently stole $5 out of my purse. I was really hurt by his breach of trust. What’s the appropriate way to discipline him without making it seem like money is more important than love?
—One Less Lincoln
Dear One Less Lincoln,
I’ve been told that when a child or animal misbehaves, you’re supposed to sit them down, make eye contact, and say “no.” But I’ve never made eye contact with a waiter, much less a toddler.
—L.B.
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In this excerpt from the VF.com exclusive Alien Nation by Ralph Blumenthal, an “experiencer” describes her encounter with an extraterrestrial:
Also present was Barbara Lamb, a tanned and gold-coiffed psychotherapist and family counselor from Claremont, California, who studies crop circles, the enigmatic patterns left in fields, often in England, and practices regression therapy, treating personality disorders by taking people back to previous lives. She told me what she remembered happened to her about seven years earlier: “I was walking through my home and there was standing this reptilian being. It was three in the afternoon. I was alert and awake. I was startled somebody was there.” Ordinarily, Lamb said, she is repulsed by snakes and lizards, “but he was radiating such a nice feeling. I went right over and had my hand out. He was taller than I, this close to me”—she held her hands a foot apart—“with yellow reptile eyes. Then he was suddenly gone.” She said she had recalled more of the encounter when a colleague put her through hypnotic regression. “He said telepathically, ‘Ha, Barbara, good, good. Now you know that we are actually real. We do exist and have contacts with certain people.’”
From Suri Cruise to the Beckham brood, see who among the discriminating members of the elementary-school set tops our list of best-dressed celebrity kids.
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“Fitzgerald’s work captures the evaporating memory of the American Eden while connecting it to the advent of the New World of smartness and thuggery and corruption. It was his rite of passage; it is our bridge to the time before “dreams” were slogans. He wanted to call it Among the Ashheaps and Millionaires—thank heaven that his editor, Maxwell Perkins, talked him out of it. It was nearly entitled just plain Gatsby. It remains “the great” because it confronts the defeat of youth and beauty and idealism, and finds the defeat unbearable, and then turns to face the defeat unflinchingly. With The Great Gatsby, American letters grew up.”
