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.

Esquire for July boasts a "special issue" about true men and their disasters. At first it seems Esquire has created a regional cover just for New Englanders, in a ploy to increase sales, but it turns out we've just had a corner on tragedy.

Running with Fast Company has always seemed a younger person's game. Its design, typography, and even its ads ooze hiptitude.

So it comes as a surprise that two of the better offerings in another fulfilling issue spring from senior citizens. It's not that the magazine is slowing down, it's that these folks aren't either.

The challenge of every special-interest magazine is illustrated in the May/June Organic Style: How can it reach a broad audience while serving the readers it would expect to get?

It is full of consumer and how-to articles: how to grow roses naturally, how to eat organically while you're on the road, how to enjoy backyard living without chemicals. Good stuff, but what if you don't care about any of that?

Even when magazines are fulfilling their journalistic responsibility to educate and inform, they can still leave readers smacking themselves upside the head, trying to figure out just what the heck is going on.

Take, for example, Brendan I. Koerner's indictment of the Federal Communications Commission in the September/October issue of Mother Jones. It stacks so many pieces of absurd reality upon one another that soon enough, you'll have a headache from all that smacking.

The "when" has always stood solidly among the five W's of journalism, but the death of Princess Diana Saturday night showed how a story's timing can also influence fortunes throughout the publishing world.

Harper's journeyed to South Carolina for its August issue and brought back the corollary of a famous truism: Money corrupts, and gambling money corrupts absolutely.

David Plotz reports that income generated by video poker has enveloped the state's political structure, while not even providing the broad economic spinoffs that, to some, counter gaming's negative aspects. Altogether, there seems to be absolutely nothing redeeming about the South Carolina model, except as a case study in how not to go about it:

All it takes is a little straight talk to notice again how much bald-faced balderdash we are served every day, usually in the service of increased sales. There's a bunch of it on magazine racks right now.

But first, the ounce of clarity, from David Weinberger in the new Darwin, the second edition of the Framingham-based business magazine. From his opening salvo ("Marketing is a hostile act"), he attacks the ugly patina that covers practically all consumer-corporation encounters.

If you believe one magazine, we'll all be sitting around in the dark within a couple of years.

If you believe the other, we're going to have so much power that prices will be kept down and we'll be selling off a bunch to people in dumber states.

I don't know about you, but I think I'll go with the one that doesn't proclaim on its cover that Aerosmith is the "greatest band in America." The middle-aged rockers lead the way for Boston magazine's "Best of Boston" issue, getting it off to a dubious start.

Good news, everyone: Hugh Hefner, the ultimate hepcat, is on the prowl again. He's been quoted endlessly that his marriage to Kimberly Conrad nine years ago -- his first monogamous relationship -- would be the final chapter in his singular life, but now, as we learn in two magazines, comes Hef, "the epilogue."