Vanity Fair.

Anybody looking for a topical-yet-fun midterm week diversion should be sure to check out a great article called "The Night Sinatra Happened" in this month's Vanity Fair. 

The story is a perfect example not only of Vanity Fair's mastery of long-form journalism but also of some great fact-finding. The piece is a collection of excerpts from James Kaplan's new book "Frank: The Voice," which is to be published in November.

The article has great quotes and details about Sinatra's time with Tommy Dorsey. Kaplan pulls some quotes from Pete Hamill (we've read his book "Why Sinatra Matters" in class), but much of his material comes from other figures who interacted with Sinatra during the early period of his career.

 Kaplan has found some incredible archived photographs of Sinatra from the early 1940s when he was first breaking on to the pop music scene. Kaplan unearthed a picture of Sinatra singing at his first gig at the Rustic Cabin nightclub in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey; of course, Sinatra's mother Dolly supposedly pulled some mob strings to get her baby boy his first job singing. Additionally, Kaplan uses photographs of Sinatra and Bing Crosby together and of Sinatra wearing a sailor hat and smoking a pipe while recording to draw parallels between the singers and to emphasize Crosby's dominance at the time Frank was becoming popular.

Many of the photographs in the print version of the article are not available online, but the text of the article can be found here.