Okay, yes, we admit it -- we're a little late getting to this issue. But come on -- it took us three days just to pull out all the scent strips, subscription cards, and insert ads printed on corrugated cardboard.

Thus purged, however, the slimmer issue turned out to be pretty good. Yes, it's true! As most of you know, we long ago stopped reading and/or caring about Vanity Fair, somewhere around the time the magazine went from evidence of Graydon Carter's editorial acumen to a testament to his encroaching insanity. In any case, we long ago jumped off the SS Vanity Fair. It's still steaming along quite nicely, from what we can tell, with the emphasis on "steaming."

But lo -- what's this? Are we going soft, in the heart or in the brain? Were we melted by the cover photo of that world-famous homunculus, peeking out from the cover with that improbable thatch of hair? (Talk about Suri with the fringe on top! Hello!) Whatever the cause, we thought this issue was...good. Yes, it was good. There were even a couple of things that were kind of...very good. Well, one thing. No, not the photos. We'll get to those in a second.

First we'll plow through the perfume-scented first third of the magazine, with its trademark Vanity Fair ripped-from-the-press-release service journalism. Hey, look! A fall book round-up! E.g., "In Setting the Table, Danny Meyer, restaurateur nonpareil, shares his never-fail recipe for business success." It's ironic that old Spy fake-critic/unrelenting enthusiast Walter Monheit makes a cameo in this issue, because we assumed he's been working at VF all along. Ooof! The sole purpose of the Hot Type page seems to be to allow the Vanity Fair reader with the perfume-scented fingertips to linger for a half-second and think, "Hmmm. Books." Thus enriched, you carry on, and so shall we.

Ah, "My Stuff." Here, a rich person lists their stuff. Why not eliminate the middleman and just list stuff? Why not devote a whole magazine to it? You could call it Stuff. Oh, wait. There is such a magazine, which has cleverly paired stuff with boobs. Stuff! Boobs! We live in a time of giants.

Since we can't read Michael Woolf without putting ourselves at risk of brain hemorrhage, we will, sadly, have to skip "Pox Americana," in which he blows the lid off the whole "Bush is a Sucky President" story.

Ditto Dominick Dunne. Not the "sucky president" part, the "high risk of fatal hemorrhage" part.

"The Battle for Santa Barbara" Our synopsis: when rich people are rich, they sometimes fight and have beautiful houses.

"Hi, we're two kids in the Hickey Freeman ad, and we're both little boys dressed like stockbrokers, and one of us looks like he'd like to rape your daughter, even though we're only, like, eight."

But then -- ha ha! What's this? "Condos of the Living Dead"? We weren't thrilled, we'll admit, to come upon another A.A. Gill hatchet piece -- this one targeting bland glass condo towers in New York. Gill, for those who don't know, is a talented English writer Carter once imported to decimate a restaurant called 66 that supposedly wouldn't seat Carter, or didn't give him the table he wanted, or something. Since then, Gill's been Vanity Fair's resident pit bull, yapping on a chain. He yaps very well, but come on: even a dog who sings opera gets tiresome if all the arias are the same.

But this piece is good. It's very good. It's very good because Gill goes beyond the obvious, Vanity Fair-sanctioned "New York was so much better before when you could smoke everywhere and drink highballs and laugh gaily into the night, not like now when Graydon Carter can't even have an ashtray in his own office -- his own office! -- without getting ratted out to the Gestapo" pieces. He even goes beyond (though doesn't entirely avoid) the "Boo, arrivistes! You may have money but you'll never have taste! Not to wear your hair like a bonsai tree you won't!" story.

Instead, Gill crafts a short, sharp piece of social satire that feels something like Tom Wolfe in his prime. Gill, in short, nails not just a trend but a moment in time, and he does so with such hammer blows as "The basement swimming pool I saw looked so dystopianly depressing that I expected to see an inflatable fund manager floating facedown." We can't remember the last time we read one piece that felt like it, on its own, was worth the $5 we paid for Vanity Fair -- it was probably about forty years ago when they ran that article on Seth "Family Guy"MacFarlane and how the headmaster of his old private school had organized a one-man smear campaign against him. Of course, that was back when Vanity Fair was quite often a potently mixed cocktail of true crime, well-reported story-behind-the-story articles, innovative photographic portraiture, and actually interesting pieces about New York's storied past (e.g. the article on P.M. magazine). Now it's quite often a potently mixed cocktail of celebrity massages, out-of-touch commentary by quasi-delusional octogenarian cranks, lazily presented product endorsements, well-lubricated handjobs for the rich, and winking, post-ironic self-referentiality. But hey! Who's always in the mood for the same cocktail?

Back to the often good and in one instance very good magazine.

Oh, good Lord: Niall Ferguson is writing on the inevitable decline of the American Empire. Um, we don't want you to read this. We don't even want you to read a summary of it. We heard the rough outline of this argument once before, around a campfire at a Christian camp where the counselor explained that, by not legally punishing sodomy, America would be heading down the same path as ancient Rome, toward decadence, decay, and doom.

Ferguson builds on this basic structure but goes further, linking the inevitable fall of Western civilization with feminism, NASCAR, credit-card debt, widely available birth control, Muslim emigration, lazy Scottish people on the dole, Grand Theft Auto, the fertile Chinese, America's limp-wristed refusal to institute a draft...hmmm, are we missing anything here? Basically, anything that happened since 1685.

You should also understand that Ferguson equates the dominance of Western civilization with the period during which the West controlled that largest proportion of the world through colonies. So, the short version of his argument: more colonies, more troops in those colonies to control the monkey people, and our lady folk should hand back their Pills and get back to popping out some white tots. Otherwise, the brown-skinned barbarians infiltrate our countries, take over our schools, rape our women, change the lyrics of our favorite drinking songs, and jostle us as they pass with their strange plates of exotically spiced foods, leaving splotches of odd sauces on our old school ties.

Seriously. Niall Ferguson is officially retarded.

And, we'd guess, officially a fan of Kate "Tom calls me 'Kate'" Holmes, who's done her part recently by popping out a very white and genetically impeccable baby.

Of which we will say this: the baby is damned cute. Suri is a very, very cute baby.

We will not speculate further on anything to do with Chris Klein, Scientology, aliens, psychiatry, artificial insemination, brainwashing, chromosomal defects, or illegal cloning in Columbian labs involving the frozen stem cells of Céline Dion's beloved husband, René Angelil. We just won't.

The baby is too damn cute.

We will say this, though. All the photos are perfectly lovely, and charming, and sweet, except one: that overly posed shot on the mountain where Tom and Katie have their eyes closed and Suri looks like a homunculus from a medieval painting. That one just looks weird. If Suri were old enough to talk, we would ask Suri, "Who took your head? And whose head is on your body here? Was it a Chinese baby's? If so, we should call Niall Ferguson. He won't be happy."

Oh, there's also an article about Tom and Kat(i)e to accompany these photos, of which we'll say this: the article is so puffy that you could hold it up like a dandelion, blow on it, and make a wish. It's so puffy that it could coast for awhile on the posthumous catalogue of its dead friend Biggie Smalls. It's so puffy that Billy Joel woke up at noon, drank a vodka, looked in the mirror, put on some Ray-Ban sunglasses, opened Vanity Fair, and said, "Whoa -- now that's puffy."

Other things to like in this issue:

Andrew Hearst's very funny fake fold-over magazine flap to stick on the cover of The Weekly Standard.

The oddly charming "In Character" feature, in which Sam Waterston makes three faces to express three different emotions, one of which is "You are a female cellist with a major city orchestra, sweet but not at all pretty, who shares your home with a Siamese cat. Unexpectedly, you find yourself being flirted with by the orchestra's handsome, married, philandering first violinist."

The fact that Vidal Sassoon is (a) not only still alive, but (b) apparently living in the cloned body of Roddy McDowall.

The indomitable Margaret Atwood on the very last page.

Other things not to like in this issue:

Fucking Edwin John Coaster.

The New Establishment 2006, which is such a tongue-bath it should come with a Wet Nap. We're going to guess that the ratio of people listed here to people who actually give a shit is roughly 1:1.3, the extra people being assistants who have to hear all the whining from the likes of Jacob Rothschild, because their "Year Ahead" arrow was pointing to the side, and not up.

The cartoon linking Kevin Bacon to Lloyd Bacon. The 'Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon' ship sailed long hence, friend. Long hence. ["Also, it takes more like eight degrees even to make the joke. Weak." -- WC]

The totally not funny and irritatingly patronizing "Red-State Appeasement Section," which lists things people in Red States will like, because, you know, they're semi-illiterate, not like Niall Ferguson.

Also: fucking Niall Ferguson.

So, as you can see, it's actually about even. Which these days, for Vanity Fair, counts as a masterpiece.