I'd like to open by sharing a bit of writing from a writer that I've grown fond of lately.

I'm mostly forgotten writer who peaked in the 30s as an editor for Vanity Fair, her name is Helen Lawrenceson, and I feel like her writing is quite good, and I feel like she's someone who ought to have a reputation comparable to Dorothy Parker or Fran Leibowitz nowadays, that kind of reputation.

I think there are two reasons possibly why she doesn't have that reputation. One is just because magazine writers in general.

It's an ephemeral status to have, not many endure, and the other one is because her most famous article has a fairly racist title, I'm sorry to say.

I guess it went the 1935 version of Viral. It was called Why The Latins Are Lousy Lovers. I'm sorry to have to tell you folks that, and in fact it was so famous that in the 60s when she published a compilation of her essays, the title of it was called Latins Are Still Lousy Lovers.

So I'm just saying, if there's a New York Review of Books editor out there who wants to commission a new collection of her work in one of those handsome little paperbacks with an introduction by some great contemporary writer, get me to do the introduction, and then we'll give it a title that's not racist, and we maybe won't include that once famous essay, and I'm sure we'll sell a bunch of copies.

Anyway, there's an article in this book that she wrote in the 1960s reflecting on her time as an editor at Vanity Fair. It's called A Fair Well to Yesterday.

And I want to read it because I just think it's funny. I'm not necessarily building up to a particular point, but it's a funny time capsule into what the media was like then.

It opens with, back in the 30s, the word sophistication was often applied to people who always drank champagne with dinner, never went to the theater except on opening nights.

We're invited to Condé Nast's parties. New all the Harlem After Hours spots were dressed to the teeth from 8 p.m. on, and we're on first name terms with A to Lula Bankhead or B Noelle Coward.

Naturally, this all took place in New York. People who lived outside New York simply weren't sophisticated, unless of course they lived in London or Paris. Later on in the essay, she goes on to write.

Vanity Fair, undeniably was beautiful and amusing, or bane and unique. Its editors and their friends were, in certain areas, not so sophisticated as they thought they were, and the magazine itself did not entirely live up to Cleveland Ameri's present day description of it as capturing the very essence of the 20s and 30s.

The historical perspective shows us that what were the good old days for a few were often the bad old days for the many. We on Vanity Fair represented the few, and we were pretty insulated from the realities of the world around us.

There wasn't there in the 20s, those good old 20s when people went blind from drinking, bum, bootleg, booze, and gangsters shot each other in the streets. But in the time I did spend on Vanity Fair, from January 1932 to January 1936, you would never have guessed, either from reading the magazine or from knowing the editors, that the country was in the throes of the worst depression it had ever known.

As a result of which there were 12 million unemployed, many of whom were starving and homeless. Nor would you have found any indication that, with riots all over the land, we were perhaps the nearest to revolution we had been since 1776.

Or that, on the international scene, Mussolini and fascism were rampant in Italy, Hitler and Nazism were taking over Germany. It may have been due in part to this curious obtuseness to life around us that the magazine folded.

It is difficult to imagine any magazine today as ignorant of and as impervious and indifferent to the major events in our own country and in the world at large.

Editors now may not know what Laos is, but at least they've heard of it. And even the present fashion magazines for women show more cognizance of world affairs than Vanity Fair did, and then I'll just read one little bit more from this.

We also made occasional lighthearted sport of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and Brain Trust, or his measures to save the economy, and even of the forgotten man, his famous phrase for the hungry unemployed.

When, in its last year, the magazine belatedly developed a mild interest in politics, owing to condemnass sprouting, we published a series of handsome photographs of politicians, with accompanying captions which are always superficial and often misinformed.

She crescendos to saying, you won't find this kind of abysmally frivolous ignorance in publishing circles today, even people who are against progress, at least know about it.

So, I don't know a huge amount about sophisticated magazines of the 1930s, but I thought it was very funny to read because she's talking about this very insulated, very privileged culture.

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