This issue is like RuPaul's new book - if you didn't pace yourself by putting it down after every chapter/story, you'd have the entire thing read on a Sunday afternoon.
And for that brief space of time, I enjoyed it. But I'm reading through older issues of Vanity Fair at the same time, and you can really feel the difference in the content. Those articles typically had direct contact with whatever - often genuinely iconic - person or situation was being discussed, in a way that wasn't available elsewhere.
With modern Vanity Fair, in the rush to be more anti-establishment, those links to the past have been lost. There is the desire to tell new stories, but there's also a disdain to get their hands dirty by going deep into the true nature of entertainment and politics. Add in the lack of money which affects even the most glossy of magazines, and the issue ends up more like a Readers Digest mix of mildly informative articles designed for your self-improvement.
And that's doing a disservice to some of the pieces where dedicated investigation has happened. But that doesn't register, due to the general lack of gravitas in the magazine, where they're happy to run stories where they travel through a state to jeer at the working class and assorted weird people, accompanied by grotesque photography. Vanity Fair, when you do that, you're not as clever and sophisticated as you think you are.
