Today's Times offers a sophisticated exegesis of the Suri Cruise Vanity Fair spread. Roving critic Caryn James starts by hitting all the usual notes ("What 5-month-old has a stylist? Or photos taken by Annie Leibovitz?" and "The extravagantly orchestrated photo shoot reveals a media circus masquerading as ordinary life, and speaks to the devil's bargain some celebrities make with the public.") But then things take a turn for the worse, as James criticizes Leibovitz's photography ("not her best," "pretty but ordinary") and exculpates the press ("No one really thought Suri was imaginary or some creature from another planet." Oh really?) and suggests that Tom get former publicist Pat Kingsley back (we're sure he's just been waiting for that advice from the Times.)

This morning (seems like days ago now, doesn't it?), Vanity Fair editor Jane Sarkin, the brave soul who spent five days deep inside the Cruise compound without the benefit of a Graydon Carter-supplied armed detail, talked to infamously glib Tom tormentor Matt Lauer about her experience in getting the coveted puff piece story on the Today Show. We'll spare you a transcription of the proceedings, which you can effortlessly watch in the space above these words, but we'll point out that Sarkin claims to have met 15 (!) members of the Holmes clan during her visit, none of whom made even a token attempt to chew though their bonds and escape into the nearby canyons. If nothing else, baby Suri certainly seems to have brought a new sense of peace to the Cruise household.

Vanity Fair cover model Suri Cruise (center) knows that talent borrows, but fashion genius steals, mercilessly—but fabulously—copping the baby toupee (right) look Ella Bleu Travolta (left) rocked so confidently years ago. Little Suri's inborn sense of style will quickly become the envy of all the other children in the Celebrity Centre's Day Care and Infant Auditing facility.

Since we haven't been able to locate our own copy of Vanity Fair's much-anticipated All-Cruise Issue (what kind of a godless wasteland do we live in, where piping-hot copies of VF aren't immediately available?), we're forced to dine only on the meager morsels doled out by the magazine's website. There seems to be some good news in their twenty-two jam-packed pages of Cruise coverage, as childbirth seems to have at least temporarily cured Katie Holmes of the crippling expressive disorder that once limited her vocabulary to simple words communicating positive feelings about her captivity. Teases VanityFair.com:

You think you've had enough Suri Cruise? We'll tell you when you've had enough Suri Cruise. Until then, you're the Internet's little p t goose getting force-fed Suri cornmeal until we've decided your liver is just succulent enough. Above is this morning's Suriana from the Today show (baby-wig-tip, Cityrag), with Vanity Fair's feetch editor Jane Sarkin glibbing it up with Matt Lauer on the whole photographic extravaganza. Sarkin knows how to bring both the bubbly and the serious, so sit back and watch how the pros do it, Janice Min.

Upon a cursory first glance at Annie Leibovitz's Vanity Fair photos of the Cruise family, we initially believed the couple's puzzling decision to be photographed with both Asian and Causcasian babies was either rooted in Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' inability to resolve a spat about their individual infant-rental preferences, or, at worst, a regrettable continuity error that should have been corrected somewhere in the editing process. But after viewing this image spanning pages 284 and 285 of the new VF issue, we now think we're starting to understand their creative vision: Suri Cruise is not just Tom and Katie's fake baby, she's the entire world's fake baby. She is their long-delayed gift to us all; regardless of our color, creed, or nationality, there is a Suri for everyone.

We highly recommend you go buy your own copy of Vanity Fair; you will surely want to keep and frame the images within. Here at Gawker, however, we've been fortunate enough to obtain an original shot of the Cruise family, one untouched by the photo-editors at VF. Everything seems at once more and less confusing.

"I think she has Tom's eyes. I think she looks like Tom." — Katie Holmes

While we correctly anticipated the inexplicable appearance of an Asian baby in our mock-up of the Vanity Fair photos of The Family Cruise, we clearly missed the mark on which iconic image of a Beatle Annie Leibovitz would reference in her Suri spread. We apologize for this unfortunate blind-spot in our predictive powers.

Here's the cover of tomorrow's Vanity Fair. It features the possible offspring of a major movie star. Are you people happy with yourselves? Because, you know, c'mon.

Apparently, the Cruise family decided to go the Asian route on the casting of this one.

To celebrate Katie Couric's first night on the job at the CBS Evening News, her new bosses arranged for her to present a sneak preview of the long-awaited, heavily guarded first photographs of suspiciously unseen celebrity infant Suri Cruise. The internets, of course, were already hard at work reproducing the images, which won't be officially available until Vanity Fair hits the streets tomorrow, posting stills and video of the pictures shown on the Couric broadcast minutes ahead of CBS's sanctioned stories.

Having apparently decided that the same absurd levels of secrecy employed in keeping Suri Cruise unseen by the public during the four months since her alleged birth should be applied to preventing the curious from gazing upon the first photographs of the baby a minute before their planned publication, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter will order security guards to gun down in cold blood any malefactor who would attempt to leak the precious, highly-anticipated, Annie Leibovitz-lensed images. (Our rendering of what the photos might look like is presented here once again for your fresh horror.) Jossip alleges:

Daniel Edwards, the pop-culture-obsession skewering/exploiting artist behind the sculpted representation of a crowning Sean Preston Spears that inflicted emotional wounds that might never fully heal, has unveiled his greatest achievement yet: Beating Tom Cruise's suspiciously delayed, baby-related product to market with a bronzed version of Suri's "first poop" that will be simultaneously auctioned for charity on eBay and displayed under glass in a Brooklyn art gallery, which he claims finally proves both the possibly imaginary offspring's existence and its health. Unfortunately, neither the image nor the press release reveals the dimensions of the petrified diaper-snake, leaving us to wonder if it was constructed to a scale that would properly reflect the waste produced by a mutant, 50-foot-tall infant.

If you're anything like us (and really, we hope for your sake that you're much better adjusted), you've spent the last couple of days wondering what Tom Cruise has been doing to keep himself busy while his various mouthpieces suffer the slings and arrows of outraged fortune-hoarder Sumner Redstone on the star's behalf. This afternoon, at least, it seems that Cruise is looking for his next paycheck over in Santa Monica, confining his job search to the office park where both Yahoo! and HBO are located. Report two operatives on Cruise's very recent whereabouts:

The obsessively covered public row following Sumner Redstone's announcement of perhaps the most sensational contract non-renewal in Hollywood history has, regrettably, shifted attention away from the plight of Tom Cruise war bride Katie Holmes, who must temporarily endure her billion-year imprisonment in obscurity, content to know that her much-scrutinized personal services agreement with the star may have played a crucial part (even if just for purposes of Viacom's PR manipulation) in her partner's troubles. Taking inspiration from Michael Lohan's heartwrenching cartoon depicting the evil forces keeping father from troubled, starlet daughter, Gallery of the Absurd helpfully retrains the spotlight on Holmes' troubles, reminding us that behind every ugly war of words between fading megastar and cost-cutting mogul, there's a helpless woman back at home pretending to take of a fake baby while chained to an immovable object.

Not since May's Good Housekeeping story revealing that Tom Cruise's adopted daughter Isabella masterminded the kidnapping and eventual enslavement of Scientology war bride Katie Holmes have we read Cruise news fraught with such inescapable menace, but here we sit, gape-mouthed with horror over this item on The Scoop hinting at the ruthless way the actor deals with dissent within his family:

People reports that Tom Cruise, having recently earned a certificate as a Level 5 Roadside Assistance Tech after weeks of intensive night school classes at the Celebrity Centre, put his newfound skillset to use this weekend by pulling over to check on the victims of a fender bender on the 101:

Paparazzi agency X17's photographers just so happened to be circling Tom Cruise's compound in a helicopter when their telephoto-lens-equipped cameras began capturing hundreds of pictures of the baby-concealing actor's home, some of which seemed to contain barely discernible images of ghostly, imprisoned fianc e Katie Holmes and suspiciously unseen offspring Suri. Of course, at such a distance it's impossible to tell if the agency photographed Holmes and her daughter or one of the dozens of mother-and-baby decoy sets placed in various windows around the house, where they can easily draw the attention of airborne spies while the real Katie and Suri relax in the comfort of their subterranean nursery-bunker, watching their Baby Scientology Genius videos in peace.

The interminable, months-long SuriWatch saga may soon be coming to an end. Page Six reports that Vanity Fair has won a fierce bidding war with both Celebrity magazine and the Sears Portrait Studio for the rights to take the first images of the suspiciously unseen offspring of Tom Cruise and indentured incubator Katie Holmes, which VF will debut this fall in a spread photographed by legendary celebrity soft-lighter Annie Leibovitz. We hope that Leibovitz will elevate the shoot above the simplistic, new-parents-basking-in- the-miraculous-glow-of-their-loin-fruit concept used for the public introduction of Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, and perhaps even take this opportunity to poignantly reinforce the power of the couple's utterly unbreakable, contractual billion-year partnership by revisiting her iconic work for Rolling Stone.