Oh, What a Week!
The Daily Beast is dedicated to news and commentary, culture, and entertainment. We carefully curate the web’s most essential stories and bring you original must-reads from our talented contributors.
From the wee hours on the Mall to The Daily Beast and Morning Joe brunch, to a jubilant evening in Kenya, the inauguration was a panorama of memorable images from start to finish. A look back at the historic week.
People gather on the National Mall in the early hours for the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States.
Dancing Into History
Laura Bennett was trained as an architect but has since established her career as a fashion designer by becoming a finalist on Season 3 of Bravo's Project Runway. Bennett lives amid complete chaos in New York City with her husband and six children, Cleo, 20, Peik, 13, Truman, 10, Pierson, 6, Larson, 5, and Finn, 2.
Jay McCarroll was the winner of Project Runway’s first season. You can browse his line at JayMcCarroll.com.
The stylish Obamas may have nodded to the Reagans last night, but they still made the evening their own. Project Runway alums Laura Bennett and Jay McCarroll deconstruct the old school glamour, the modern classics-and Mariah Carey's rhinestone microphone. VIEW OUR GALLERY.
The 'Out' Crowd at the Inauguration
Megan Carpentier is a freelance writer and an editor at Jezebel.com whose work has also been seen on Foreign Policy magazine's Madame Secretary blog, Glamour's political blog, on Wonkette, in Radar, and at WashingtonPost.com. Before regaining some semblance of a soul, she was a Very Serious Washington lobbyist who kept her unpaid opinions to herself.
Even as they sipped Obama-tinis and danced to Melissa Etheridge, the revelers at the LGBT ball on Tuesday night questioned whether Obama's soaring rhetoric about equality will be backed up by his policies on gay issues.
A Slow Dance for the First Couple
The Neighborhood Ball was supposed to be last night's event for the regular folks, but it sure looked glamorous to us. Clip above, full segment at ABC News.
Laura: It's definitely the modern version of the John Galanos gown Nancy Reagan wore [in 1981]. But it has that technique with the raw edges on the...
Inaugural Hell
Lyric Wallwork Winik is an award-winning writer and author and the Washington correspondent for Parade magazine. Her next book will be about Magellan’s voyage for Crown, and she is married to the bestselling historian, Jay Winik.
Message to you out-of-towners heading to Washington, D.C., for your first presidential inauguration: You will be miserable.
The Hip Hop Inauguration
Stanley Crouch's culture pieces have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times, Vogue, Downbeat, The New Yorker, and more. He has served as artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center since 1987, and is a founder of Jazz at Lincoln Center. In June 2006 his first major collection of jazz criticism, Considering Genius: Jazz Writings, was published. He is presently completing a book about the Barack Obama presidential campaign.
Russell Simmons, Jay-Z and others are coming to Washington next month to celebrate Barack Obama. Didn't Obama's election make much of hip hop...boring?
Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
Martin Jacques is the cofounder of the UK think tank Demos, writes a regular column for The Guardian, and is a visiting research fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Centre. His new book, When China Rules the World, is available now.
Christopher Buckley's books include Supreme Courtship, The White House Mess, Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, and Florence of Arabia. He was chief speechwriter for Vice President George H.W. Bush, and is editor-at-large of ForbesLife magazine. His new book is Losing Mum and Pup, a memoir. Buckley's Daily Beast column is the winner of an Online Journalism Award in the category of Online Commentary.
The Daily Beast is dedicated to news and commentary, culture, and entertainment. We carefully curate the web’s most essential stories and bring you original must-reads from our talented contributors.
Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is a professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation.
Jeffrey Koterba is an acclaimed syndicated political cartoonist. Since joining the Omaha World-Herald in 1989, he has been a finalist for Editorial Cartoonist of the Year from the National Cartoonists Society and has placed second in the National Headliner Awards. His work is distributed through King Features Syndicate to 400 newspapers nationwide, and has appeared in such publications as the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post, among others.
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