| NATALIE KORACH,
MEDIA REPORTER |
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The annual Allen & Company media summit is underway this week in Sun Valley, Idaho, where I’m on the ground to take stock of the state of affairs among the CEO class. In recent years, journalists hoping to rub shoulders with the industry’s elite have seen their access curtailed. Panel sessions are off the record. The few journalists, such as Bret Baier and Andrew Ross Sorkin, who are high profile enough to be invited as guests and panelists, are sworn to secrecy. Reporters once mingled freely with conference attendees in the evenings at the bar inside the Sun Valley Lodge, but media is no longer permitted inside the building at all, relegated to snapping photos from a dedicated area.
But you can’t entirely close down all the reportage. Just before 7 a.m. this morning, Mike Bloomberg walked into Konditorei, a coffee shop and café on resort property, and asked for a table for four. Former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg and her husband, Tom Bernthal, came in hand in hand minutes later and she exclaimed, “This is why I come to Sun Valley!” I’ll have much more in my full report tomorrow.
Elsewhere today, Superman mostly nails the assignment, our critic Richard Lawson writes, and David Canfield tells the strange story of an allegedly Hunter Biden–inspired mystery film. |
These days, the entire Bachelor enterprise is having an identity crisis. A franchise that was revolutionary in the early aughts has become a relic in the reality TV dating landscape. Worse, previous efforts to reinvent The Bachelor and its spin-offs have proven futile. The shows have changed showrunners twice since 2023. ABC paused The Bachelorette, and until very recently, it had not officially renewed The Bachelor. |
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Debuting in the shadow of Love Island and before Netflix’s Perfect Match, this year’s Bachelor in Paradise is in a make-or-break moment. VF’s Savannah Walsh speaks to reality TV alums and experts about the declining franchise. |
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Yes, Trump believes he should have been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize many times over, and it keeps him up at night that in his 79 years on earth, he’s never taken one home. |
Director James Gunn’s fresh take on an old character gets it (mostly) right. VF’s chief critic chimes in on DC’s latest blockbuster. |
Sean Duffy will have to multitask running NASA while also keeping the trains moving at the Department of Transportation—meanwhile Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’s Blue Origin jockey for intergalactic dominance. |
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The plot summary of The Prince sounds a lot like a barely fictionalized biography of Hunter Biden. And that reading isn’t exactly a secret: A little more than a year ago, Deadline broke the news of the movie’s development by labeling it a “Hunter Biden–inspired addiction pic.”
The film’s writer, David Mamet, a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and two-time Oscar nominee, has long been a provocateur. More recently, he’s made comments in support of President Trump. Was The Prince designed as an anti-Biden spectacle, a salacious portrait of the infamous second son’s downfall primed for a Trump White House screening? Speaking for the first time, its filmmakers talk to Vanity Fair. |
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