We're good little WASPs. Summers in Rangoon, luge lessons, the New Yorker and gin on the Block Island beach. Which is why we were shocked to hear that the venerable institution on which we base the entire foundation of our airplane intellectualism (the magazine fits nicely around our preferred Star) has just sold an entire issue out to none other than ultra-un-WASPy Target. Say what you will, but much as we generally love inexpensive housewares (our entire apartment was outfitted at Astor Place K-Mart) we've had our issues with the store. But throw a million dollars at a magazine and it's hard to say no. Michael Bierut, quickly becoming an Unbeige fixture, dissects the not-so-subliminal marketing the New Yorker just rocked, and has a couple bones to pick. We said bones.

The all-Target New Yorker is the product of more nakedly mercenary world where advertisers no longer need conceal their aims. There's nothing subliminal about it: I counted over 200 Target logos in the first 19 pages alone, and there were still eleven ads left to go when I gave up. The illustrators acquit themselves well: Robert Risko turns in a funny image of a substantial construction worker perched on a typically un-ergonomic modern cafe stool with a single logo on his back-pocket handkerchief; Yoko Shimizu turns in a spirited biker chick crossing the Brooklyn Bridge with the logo rising before her. Best of all is Me Company's vertiginous computer-generated cityscape, the last ad inside the magazine, which surely pushes the logo count well into four figures, if not five.

OK, so, that's fine. Ads are ads are ads. At least the content has integrity. Or does it?

Every non-Target illustration in the issue looks a little...funny. Indeed, when I saw the large woodcut that Milton Glaser's former partner Seymour Chwast produced to illustrate Gina Ochsner's short story "Thicker Than Water" (two blackbirds with round eyes that sort of reminded me of...never mind), my first thought was: didn't Seymour get the memo? No, and he no doubt didn't get the paycheck, either. Even the cover drawing by Ian Falconer gives one pause: two boys, playing with a beach ball, a round beach ball, a round red and white beach ball...

Bitches.