To Cheat and Lie in 2019

[View in your browser]( | [Update your preferences](newsletter=vf) [Vanity Fair]( To Cheat and Lie in 2019 Good morning, dear reader! The holidays are a season of magic, of mystery, of dazzling lights, of secrets wrapped up and revealed. Things (who actually ate those cookies left out for Santa? Could he really fit down the chimney? And what are the space-time considerations of that reindeer trip, anyway?) often aren’t as they seem, especially in the cold light of a couple of days after Xmas. In that spirit, we’ve collected a few of Vanity Fair’s most memorable tales of captivating fabulists, grifters, and con people, who gift-wrapped their stories so artfully that people couldn’t help but believe them, even after the emptiness was exposed. From Elizabeth Holmes, who convinced an all-star array of financiers and techies that she’d made a radical advance in the blood-testing business, to Stephen Glass, a young journalist whose stories were populated with marvelous characters saying marvelous things, to Anna Delvey, who conjured a frictionless, glamorous velvet-rope vision of Manhattan for anyone inclined to believe it, these magicians understood that people have a hunger to believe. What child wants to think that Mom and Dad ate the cookies left for Santa? [Image may contain: Human, Person, and Face]( [*The Mandalorian* Season Finale: What Is the Darksaber?]( By [Anthony Breznican]( [The legendary dark lightsaber has a long history in Star Wars storytelling]( [Image]( [The Hive 1]( [The Talented Ms. Holmes]( By [Nick Bilton]( [From the moment Elizabeth Holmes arrived on the tech scene as a 19-year-old Stanford dropout with a world-changing idea, her rise was meteoric. By last October, her revolutionary blood-testing start-up, Theranos, was valued at some $9 billion, and she had been anointed the world's youngest self-made female billionaire. Then a Wall Street Journal reporter began looking at the science.]( [Read More]( [The Hive 2]( [American Hustle]( By [Rachel Deloache Williams]( [A magical heiress, in Gucci sandals and Celine glasses, walked into my life and showed me a glamorous, frictionless world of hotel living, Le Coucou dinners, and Moroccan vacations. Then she made my $62,000 disappear.]( [Read More]( [The Hive 3]( [To Cheat and Lie In L.A.]( By [Evgenia Peretz]( [The Varsity Blues college admissions scandal has ensnared some of Southern California’s richest students at its ritziest high schools. Vanity Fair reports on the scheme, the continuing fallout, and the crookedest education money can buy.]( [Read More]( [The Hive 4]( [Shattered Glass]( By [Buzz Bissinger]( [At 25, Stephen Glass was the most sought-after young reporter in the nation’s capital, producing knockout articles for magazines ranging from the New Republic to Rolling Stone. Trouble was, he made things up—sources, quotes, whole stories—in a breathtaking web of deception that emerged as the most sustained fraud in modern journalism.]( [Read More]( [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [Instagram]( [LinkedIn]( This e-mail was sent to you by The Hive. To ensure delivery to your inbox (not bulk or junk folders), please add our e-mail address, vanityfair@newsletter.vf.com, to your address book. View our [Privacy Policy]( [Unsubscribe]( Sent from Condé Nast, 1 World Trade Center, New York, NY 10007 Copyright © 2019 Condé Nast