A favorite wordsmith's adage contends that precedents cannot be set, they can only be followed. In the same way, it's all but impossible to know when the good old days are, only when they were.

According to an entirely credible set of arguments in the October Esquire, these are the good old days and they're about to end. If you recall, it was in mid-October 1987 that the Dow Jones took a 500-point dive, back when 500 points was real money. And, of course, the big one came in mid-October 1929.

As we approach another mid-October, writer Walter Russell Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Forign Relations, finds reasons for fear everywhere. What started as a "spot of trouble" with the Thai baht at the beginning of last year has now become an Asian tsunami in which the staggering sum of $2 trillion has been lost, so far. The forecast for Russia is bleak, and storm clouds have gathered over Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico as well. Worse, he says, the "experts" -- at the International Monetary Fund, the US Treasury, and the World Bank -- have been wrong repeatedly, and there is no reason to believe they are learning.

Mead then presents a history lesson, beginning with a revisit to 1928, and he finds parallels to the mid-'90s at every turn. The stock market was setting records, fueled by millions of first-time investors. There was growth, without inflation, and what could be better? Prosperity and political reforms were spreading across Europe; even Russia looked as if it "was on its way back into the family of nations."

Then came the crash, and the war. Afterward, economic leaders devised a new international monetary system that valued stability over all else, and for decades it worked. But by the '60s, Mead says, governments prodded by corporate greed rolled up the safety net and volatility returned, just as they should have expected. But we'd forgotten the past, and now, it seems, we are condemned to repeat it.

Having seen this future, Esquire's editors do what they can: They offer up strategies for protecting all the lucre you've accumulated during the final run-up. (Sample: Invest in cigarette and alcohol producers. "If smokers and drinkers can't kick their habits when times are good, don't expect mass cutbacks when nerves are racked, pay raises scarce, and unemployment lines long.") But then they offer up even more doom.

Y2K, shorthand for when the millennium scrambles most of the computers on earth, will disrupt far more than you think, beginning with your home computer and spreading outward. And because that's not enough, Esquire's next feature offers "Five Other Things to Worry About": mass extinction, meteor havoc (really, on Nov. 17), oil reserves in the most volatile places, chemical castration, and the next ice age.

In the pages immediately following the end of the world as we know it, a sprightly set of illustrations and quotes sketches out the past, present, and future of the man some folks believe to be our next president, George "Dubya" Bush ("Dubya" is Texan for W., the initial distinction between the governor and his dad). Austin journalist Robert Bryce says: "If you do the math, you realize because his name is George Bush, he'll raise tens of millions nationally. He wins all Texas electoral votes. Then he wins the South because he's a moderate Republican. So the numbers are his. It's his race to lose, as far as I can tell."

So let's see. In this scenario, that would make him Herbert Hoover, right?

There isn't enough space to list the better than 20 magazines on the newsstands this week that offer one or more lists of something, from six Amazing Athletic Bodies (Women's Sports and Fitness) to 400 Incredible Dresses (Modern Bride). But there are little things we can learn by looking just at the lists that list people:

1) Oprah has not completed her takeover, but she's gaining. The question isn't why she appears on Vanity Fair's roster of the "New Establishment," 50 leaders of the information age -- she debuts at No. 17 -- or why she makes Essence's list of the 20 wealthiest black American women (duh), but why she didn't make Harper's Bazaar's 25 coolest women on TV, or Mirabella's 25 smartest women in America.

2) Today's smart woman goes into the entertainment business. The likes of Jody Foster, Barbara Walters, and Shawn Colvin (Shawn Colvin?) make up almost 40 percent of Mirabella's list. Not even half as many, Mirabella says, are in academia. This could mean that smart women go where the money is, or that a list of college professors would sell a lot less magazines.

3) Today's smart woman may go into the entertainment business, but she's still a long way from the top. Oprah is only one of three women on Vanity Fair's roster, and one of the others, Sherry Lansing, has to share her perch at No. 38 with Jonathan Dolgen; the two work together at Paramount Pictures. The other woman, venture capitalist Ann Winblad, barely checks in, at No. 50.

Elsewhere in its 350 pages this month, Vanity Fair tries to be Life-like with its photo essay of old astronauts, headlined "The Ripe Stuff." The occasion, of course, is the scheduled return to space Oct. 29 of John Glenn, 77, 36 years after he became the first American to orbit the earth.

After that trip, NASA determined he was more valuable as a space- travel promoter than as a space traveler, and he never got to go up again. Now he's going back, and some of his old flyboy buddies say it's still all about promotion. "John Glenn a payload specialist? That's {expletive}," says Frank Borman, 70, somewhat testily. "It's all PR, a victory lap for John. What's he going to do for an encore? Nuprin ads?" Eugene Cernan, 64, is far more charitable: "I don't care if John just stares out the window. He's earned it."

Life, which in an earlier incarnation was practically NASA's press agency, also offers up a package, and predictably, it is more reverential. (Headline: The Last Heroes.) Where form doesn't hold is in the photographs; Life was once the unquestioned king, but Vanity Fair's are much more stirring and evocative. The subjects, meanwhile, are impressive; these guys may be geezers, but practically all look as if they could still make the grade.