Vanity Fair’s Post

Professor Stephanie Burt taught Harvard’s highly sought-after class on Grammy-award-winning musician Taylor Swift. Students sang along to the hits as they cracked open Easter eggs, studied her rhythms, and compared her lyrics to those of 18th-century poets. Meeting in a concert hall on campus, with a grand piano at center stage, Burt gave engaging lectures, with pauses for questions, and stage props: a melodica, or a cuddly stuffed snake (for the snake motifs on Reputation). What did Burt and her students learn from their findings about the pop superstar? Swift has excelled as a songwriter and as a performer by staying both aspirational and relatable. Like any great writer in any medium, she has a talent for framing common emotions, for crystallizing nostalgia, lust, and regret. If we’ve felt them, she lets us feel them anew. For VF’s July/August issue, the educator shares her takeaways from the course—and whether she’d teach it again: https://trib.al/5w1KDmd https://trib.al/5w1KDmd

Few voices in American life are more recognizable than the one belonging to legendary sports announcer Al Michaels. So when NBC approached him with an idea to recreate his voice using artificial intelligence for its coverage of this summer’s Olympics, Michaels had a few reservations. “What would I sound like?” Michaels tells VF. “Would I sound like a guy who just spews clichés? Would my voice be different?” The announcer was “very skeptical” of the proposal—until he heard the AI for himself. “Frankly, it was astonishing. It was amazing,” he says. “And it was a little bit frightening.” He was left in awe of the nuance—the way it captured his intonations and verbal subtleties. “It was not only close, it was almost 2% off perfect.” His voice—or at least a highly convincing replica of it—will now be lent to a feature on the network’s streaming platform, Peacock, offering users daily recaps from the Summer Games in Paris tailored to their favorite events and narrated by the AI. NBC says it trained the AI to match Michaels’s delivery using his past appearances on the network. Rick Cordella, the president of NBC Sports, says Michaels was the “perfect choice” for the feature. “Al deserves credit for leaning into this technology so enthusiastically.” Read more about the network's AI-centered Olympics coverage: https://trib.al/M5qmxV4

Just nine months after King Charles’s coronation, the monarch and Catherine, Princess of Wales, were both diagnosed with cancer. For once, the palace did not have a game plan. The House of Windsor, which not long ago had the world’s longest-reigning monarch at its helm, suddenly seemed very vulnerable. “Without Catherine, it all seems rather flat. The future of the monarchy is William and Catherine,” Patrick Jephson, the former private secretary to Diana, Princess of Wales, tells VF. “So how fragile is the monarchy? Well, it’s as fragile as Catherine is, and at the moment, we don’t know.” For VF’s July/August issue, Katie Nicholl looks back at the royal family’s challenging year, speaks to sources about how Prince William and Princess Catherine are keeping their marriage and family strong, and assesses the future of the monarchy. Read the full cover story: https://trib.al/sMOVs7z

When the Titan submersible disappeared beneath the Atlantic, mission specialists issued a distress call that initiated an extraordinary multinational search effort, across four days, five nations, and six time zones. The world was transfixed, as the lives of those on board the missing sub seemed to hang in the balance. The incident also trained an unforgiving spotlight on the close-knit world of subsea exploration in an era of high-dollar, high-stakes investment. The details of the search—pieced together from interviews, emails, and call logs—illustrate an urgent need for government responsiveness and rescue protocols for the challenges created by the continued expansion of a niche industry. Read the full investigation: https://trib.al/AnQtFJY

Rachel Maddow is back with another history lesson about the fight against authoritarianism and fascism in the United States. The first season of her ‘Ultra’ podcast, about the little-known Great Sedition Trial of 1944, was a smash hit that Steven Spielberg optioned to make into a feature film. She's now returning to the series with a second installment. Season two tells another little-known story about the American ultraright, taking listeners back to the postwar 1950s, in which, as Maddow put it, “a bunch of totally crazy shit happens.” The story includes “an American fascist who ends up becoming a mole inside the war-crimes trials, working for the Nazis” and “becoming essentially the godfather of American Holocaust denial,” she explains. It also involves two senators—one perpetrating a Nazi propaganda hoax in the Senate, the other trying to stop them—who become mortal enemies. “By the end of it, one of them blackmails the other, and the guy who’s getting blackmailed kills himself, and the other one almost becomes president—and it’s not the good guy,” says Maddow. The MSNBC star speaks to VF about the point of doing historical deep dives, what she’s learned from this work, and what she thinks is the most important factor in the 2024 election. Read the full story: https://trib.al/2pBADOk

Until recently, Novo Nordisk was a sleepy century-old insulin manufacturer. Then, its diabetes treatment Ozempic swept the world. Frenzied demand for the weight-loss miracle drug sparked global shortages—and opened the door to life-threatening fakes. On December 21, 2023, the FDA blasted out an alert: Counterfeit Ozempic had been detected in the legitimate drug supply. Now, VF can confirm that the counterfeiting was on an industrial scale–at least 10,000 to 20,000 units landed in the US drug supply. The agency warned that no one should sell, distribute, or use any Ozempic pens labeled with lot number NAR0074 and serial number 430834149057. But figuring out where lot NAR0074 counterfeits originated required solving a complex puzzle with pieces potentially strewn all over the globe. Through extensive reporting and interviews with pharmacists, doctors, security experts, law enforcement officials, private investigators, and attorneys, VF special correspondent Katherine Eban tracks a major shipment of fake Ozempic—and exposes a globe-spanning pharmaceutical underground. Read the full story: https://trib.al/FJX1iya

In 2004, Donald Trump’s reality show ‘The Apprentice’ debuted, becoming a massive hit for NBC. But when it came time to negotiate with Jeff Zucker for the second season of the hit series, Trump was determined to get a real payday from the studio. And as an outsider to Hollywood, he saw no need to comply with the standard showbiz rituals. Having proven his agent wrong by making ‘The Apprentice’ into a massive hit, he decided to steer the deal making on his own. In an excerpt from his new book, Ramin Setoodeh recalls Donald Trump’s long and tumultuous relationship with Jeff Zucker—the man who, as the chair of NBC during ‘The Apprentice’s’ boom years, helped make Trump a TV star, and who later clashed with him while running CNN—and their “f--king crazy” negotiations over ‘The Apprentice.’ Read the full story: https://trib.al/NqB9siJ