You're a busy person. So busy, you don't even have time to read the new issue of Vanity Fair. But you're in luck! Most of the next issue has been pre-read for your convenience. Who needs to slog through all those perfume-stinking pages of glossy fabulosity when others can read them for you?

· "Even a gossip columnist can hide something. For the past two decades, as one of Gotham's snarky celebrity journalists, MSNBC.com's Jeanette Walls has been silent on her wrenching, poverty-stricken childhood in West Virginia, where she lived in a tumbledown shack with no heat and ate out of garbage cans to relieve constant hunger. 'Kids threw rocks at her. Not once or twice, but frequently,' writes Jim Windolf in the upcoming Vanity Fair, which spotlights Walls' revealing new autobiography, 'The Glass Castle.'" [Lowdown]

· "[Robert Novak,] The 74-year-old columnist and CNN commentator remains mum on a great mystery of the moment: his legal status in the Valerie Plame leak case. 'While two other reporters, Matthew Cooper of Time and Judith Miller of the New York Times, face jail time for refusing to divulge their sources in the case,' writes VF contributing editor David Margolick, 'he man who broke the story apparently doesn't.'" [WaPo]

· "Only a very brave woman should flirt with Russell Simmons. The hip-hop mogul's wife, 6-foot former model Kimora Lee Simmons, repeats over and over again in a profile in next month's Vanity Fair: 'I will beat a bitch's ass.' Kimora adds: 'I don't play that disrespectful ho [bleep]. I have very little respect for those kinds of women. And if I catch you with my man, disrespecting, I will beat your ass.'" [NYP]

Hmmm... Maybe Vanity Fair's publicist should let some stories lay fallow the same way farmers rotate their crops.

Vanity Fair