Plutocrats Gone Wild
By FELIX SALMON
At high-minded conferences like the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the parties seem to be usurping the panels. But is that a bad thing?
T’s latest issue explores some of the most unique travel destinations around the world. We begin with an anomaly: an ancient farming community in northwest India where locals and leopards have lived in peaceful harmony for hundreds of years. The novelist Hari Kunzru sets up camp to experience the potentially precarious phenomenon firsthand. In Joshua Tree, we visit a far-out house, designed by the visionary architect Kendrick Bangs Kellogg, that is nearly as awe-inspiring as the landscape itself. We also stop by one of the world’s great inns — La Colombe d’Or in Provence — where a century’s worth of famous artists toting their own works have helped create an environment that is as much a world-class gallery as it is a hotel. And because summer is coming, we sent the photographer Karim Sadli to Hawaii, where he shot the model Julia Bergshoeff in the season’s best bikini bottoms and lightweight knits. Elsewhere, female artists in their 80s and 90s get their long-awaited due; the finance journalist Felix Salmon shines a light on conferences like the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where the parties are usurping the panels for all-important networking (and Spring Break-style fun); Jody Rosen cracks the spine on street lit, the hard-boiled, sexed-up book genre whose greatest practitioners may just be the most successful literary couple in America; and tattoos, which have grown increasingly idiosyncratic in recent years, leave their mark on the minds (and bodies) of the creative world’s most stylish. See all stories from this issue >>
At high-minded conferences like the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the parties seem to be usurping the panels. But is that a bad thing?
Urban fiction, or street lit, has been snubbed by the publishing industry and scorned by black intellectuals. Yet these authors may just be the most successful literary couple in America.
Full-color illustration has given way to a playfully personal twist on ink.
Deep in the desolate heart of Joshua Tree hides a house as otherworldly as the landscape itself.
Created by the French-born, New York-based designer James Taffin de Givenchy, the piece was designed to resemble an abstract exclamation point.
The romantic spirit of early Joni Mitchell — peasant dresses, poet blouses and textured coats — is toughened up when paired with a simple Chelsea boot.
Mark Bibbins and Rachel Feinstein find meaning in the tragic death of the Warhol beauty Candy Darling.
Languid days of sea and sun — and very little else.
A very small sampling of the female artists now in their 80s and 90s we should have known about decades ago.
The artist Rob Pruitt has documented the presidency in a way that no one else has.
In rural France, the sculptor of whimsical objects finds a home for her urbane sensibilities.
Diplo and Roseanne Barr chew over anti-hangover pills, Frida Kahlo paintings and a doll that looks like a Sicilian widow.
And the cheapest one costs $2.9 million. Here, a closer look at the industry’s fastest growing sector.
Performance art might be a thrill, but the new frontier in ultra-exclusive ephemeral happenings transports the viewer — quite literally.