NYO Writer On Bono's Vanity Fair: "The Editorial Content Bleeds Unapologetically Into The Advertising"

I'd been living in Africa for all of five days when I had my first run-in with a celebrity. It was a good sighting: Bono himself. At the time, I was still living in a hotel, out of a suitcase filled with precautionary measures: pills for the malaria, iodine tablets for the water, tubes of bug repellent for the outdoors, a mosquito net for the indoors, a bottle of Cipro for God knows what other pathogens I might encounter in Uganda. But already, I had an inkling that maybe I'd over-prepared.

On that fifth night, I found myself sitting at the breezy, flower-bedecked outdoor bar of the hilltop Kampala Sheraton, watching the wraparound-shaded rock star share (as I recall it) bowls of chicken curry with the comedian Chris Tucker. The evening was breezy and almost impossibly comfortable, and I thought to myself: Really, this is not how Africa was advertised.

I thought about that night again recently, when I saw Bono's face staring out at me from the cover of the latest Vanity Fair.

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