Fair Vanity

When Bono took the helm of Vanity Fair to guest-edit last month's special issue on Africa, he challenged VF's editor, Graydon Carter, to change the title of the magazine to "Fair Vanity" for one issue. Carter refused, but the rest of the magazine has come alive with that same spirit of ingenuiety. The masthead, for example, is annotated with haplogroups, genetic markers of the staff's DNA that show their ancestral link to Africa. There are 20 different covers, photographed by Annie Leibovitz in twenty different locations over six weeks, including one shot taken on a cruise ship docked in Kobe. The issue is filled with stories from contemporary Africa-- before and after photos of HIV/AIDS patients after anti-retroviral therapy, Bill Clinton on Nelson Mandela, a story on African music, a profile of Jeffrey Sachs, and VF's classic photo profiles, which included a group of African filmmakers-- not your standard poverty-stricken images of the continent. A couple of us were drooling over the issue at work on Friday. The art director subscribes to VF, and said she would keep the issue in her office, but I went out and bought my own copy so I could savor it over the weekend. I asked the sales clerk at Page One to get down the cover I wanted-- it was a tough call between Maya Angelou/Chris Rock and Muhammad Ali/Barack Obama. But I knew I didn't want the cover with George Bush. The focus on celebrities doing good in African was a bit much, but that is really my only complaint. The issue was, in the end, a fair use of vanity. The entire magazine is online.