Newsweek

Say it ain't so: Robin Givhan has been let go from her position as the special correspondent for style and culture at Newsweek and The Daily Beast. She'll leave the company at the end of the year.

Daily Intel reports that Givhan is among the employees of The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company laid off on the second day of its ongoing staff reductions. The layoffs come after Newsweek announced that it would stop printing and merge with the Beast's online platform.

"I plan to work on my book about the 1973 Versailles fashion show and look for a new job," Givhan said.

She joined Newsweek at the end of 2010 and had previously been the fashion editor of The Washington Post. In 2006, Givhan became the first and only fashion journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize "for her witty, closely observed essays that transform fashion criticism into cultural criticism."

Photo via Givhan's Facebook page.

George Clooney is featured in the current edition of Newsweek magazine to chat about his work in Sudan. The actor's philanthropic work has taken him to Africa on multiple occasions, even landing him a face-to-face meeting with President Obama. George has become increasingly vocal about his humanitarian efforts when he's not on the red carpet or enjoying the luxurious perks of his movie star status. He opened up about his take on celebrity, got honest about his past drug use and womanizing ways, and admitted to feeling "unclean" after Oscar campaigning. Here's more:

• On using celebrity to help: "Celebrity can help focus news media where they have abdicated their responsibility. We can't make policy, but we can 'encourage' politicians more than ever before. There is more attention on celebrity than ever before — and there is a use for that besides selling products."
• On being followed by cameras: "If they're going to follow me anyway, I want them to follow me here."
• On getting involved in Darfur: "I had just come out of Oscar season — I had two movies up — and you really do campaign, like kissing babies. So by the time it's over, you sort of feel unclean. You want to do something that makes you feel better."
• On why he won't run for office: "I didn't live my life in the right way for politics, you know. I f*cked too many chicks and did too many drugs, and that's the truth. That's gonna be my campaign slogan: 'I drank the bong water.'?"
• On relief workers: "These guys have a day job that pays them nothing and is dangerous. My day job pays very well, and the worst thing that happens is you get some bad food from craft service."

>> Robin Givhan, a 15-year Washington Post veteran and fashion editor who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2006, is leaving the paper to join Tina Brown's Newsweek and The Daily Beast as a special correspondent for style and culture. She will continue to be based in DC and begins her new position on Jan. 10.

"I obviously didn't make the decision to leave quickly or without a lot of soul-searching," Givhan told WWD. "I've been a sniffling, blubbering wreck for the last few days. The Post has been an unbelievable place to work. But I think it was time for me to have a new adventure, and Tina's vision of what Newsweek can be is incredibly enticing and, I think, spot-on."

If you're fascinated by how beauty affects society, go bookmark Newsweek's special report on the subject. The series of articles examines the politics of beauty — because, whether it's fair or not, our culture is overwhelmingly lookist.

The stories are all worth reading, particularly these poll results about beauty in the workplace. (Depressingly, hiring managers admitted that on average, they ranked a person's appearance more important than her education.) And this essay highlighting the double standards of beauty for men and women feels like a modern version of Gloria Steinem's famous If Men Could Menstruate essay. Not everything is as strong — we're unconvinced that all makeup artists are conniving tricksters out to get your money — but all of the stories provide plenty to think about. Definitely worth a read.

A family may eat, sleep, and exercise, but that doesn't mean they have a handle on their health! It's what mom and dad are serving up at the table, the length of their slumber, and the amount of exercise the parents and kiddos get that matters. Newsweek's Healthy Living For Every Age is an easy-to-navigate guide with sections on everything from the truth about infant vaccines to fighting childhood obesity and health insurance to mammograms. Since the text is broken down by age, a family can pinpoint which areas it needs to focus on. Then take the optimum health quiz and see how you fare.

"One decides to veil, the other decides to flaunt. But both have internalized the idea of being sex objects as central to their identity."

—Stanford educated Shiite Amal Ghandour tells Newsweek that Muslim women like the new Miss USA don't differ that much from those who decide to wear the veil. She reasons that many women who wear the full-covering veil see themselves as prizes for the men they hope to attract. I never really thought of it that way.

• After a Newsweek article said gay actors can't act straight, Glee creator calls for boycott — Entertainment Weekly
• College friends say Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is not gay — Politico
• Comedy Central cancels Sarah Silverman Program — Huffington Post
• Did the Daily Show ask Aasif Mandvi to stop talking about Muslims? — Gawker
• Facebook pushing for Betty White to host the Oscars . . . and Emmys — People
• Psychic says he predicted Barbara Walters's heart surgery — New York Post
• Wanted: Jewish-American princesses for Jersey Shore-ish show — Radar

For Generation X feminism was an eye roll-inducing word, but for Gen Y it's just a word. It's not worthy of anger or praise; it's a word for a war that's over. Newsweek, though, has set out to prove a generation wrong, and it's using itself as the example.

In 1970, 46 women employees of Newsweek filed a gender-discrimination case because women were not allowed to write. Producer, director, and (let's not forget) writer Nora Ephron's first job was at Newsweek in 1962. She described the magazine's ethos best in "My First New York," this week's New York magazine article featuring the famous and nonfamous remembering their arrival in the Big Apple.

I said I hoped to become a writer, and the man who interviewed me assured me that women weren’t writers at Newsweek. It would never have crossed my mind to object or to say, “You’re going to turn out to be wrong about me.” It was a given in those days that if you were a woman and you wanted to do certain things, you were going to have to be the exception to the rule. I was hired as a mail girl, for $55 a week.

This story is so foreign it's almost quaint. After all Ephron did prove him wrong. But somewhere between it not occurring to her to speak up in 1962 and 2010, feminism became loud, insufferable, embarrassing, and finally silent. It's not the idea young women reject (feminism only means gender equality), but its usefulness in a world where women outnumber men in college and a recession that hit men so hard it has its own name. When you consider the prefix "post" was attached to feminism as early as 1919, it's no wonder women grew weary of it long ago. But to find out why total gender equality is still a myth, read more