From time to time it's good to check in on James Franco, the entertainment world's enigmatic (or faux enigmatic!) renaissance man, to see what he's up to. Today he's doing lots of things for Esquire magazine.

Christina Hendricks won Esquire's "best-looking woman in America" poll, thereby landing on May's cover. But now Esquire's editor says Scarlett Johansson "completely screwed" the mag by refusing that cover. Did the arbiter of female attractiveness lie about America's loveliest lady?

[Paris Hilton on how she pulled herself up by the bootstraps, to Esquire. Image via X-17 Agency.]

[Gawker alum Joshua David Stein has compiled this insanely complex and astutely accurate Venn Diagram for Esquire that charts just about every program on the air right now. This made us want to watch even more TV, if that's possible.]

Christina Hendricks won Esquire's "best-looking woman" contest. But she's still stuck in bracket battles for Sexiest Woman Alive, and doesn't even have a rank in Women We Love. Why can't they be more straightforward? Need to know how to judge.

You know James Franco is an actor. Maybe you know he is a subversive performance artist. But did you know he is a published fiction writer? Now he is! He just had his first short story published in Esquire.

Remember freshman year when the girls had to talk to the school nurse about menstruation? Well, Esquire Editor-in-Chief David Granger is doing that but for Hearst's male employees. It's called "Your Pump, Your Plumbing, and a Cocktail." Gross!

If no one's badgered you into reading Roger Ebert's interview in Esquire, let us be the first: It's really quite good. It's not easy reading about the film critic's struggle with thyroid cancer or his jaw surgery. But it's worthwhile.

The disgraced ex-governor of Illinois apparently failed to take his Elvis Presley pointer-finger dance into account in assessing his relative level of whiteness in a new interview with Esquire.

Esquire decided to SAVE MAGAZINES this month by putting another weird little "hold it up to your webcam" hologram augmented-reality gizmo on the cover, but alas: the magical doohickey is obscured by the address label. Curse you, ignoble media irony.

In your meritocratic Monday media column: Reporters suffer injustices unseen since Pol Pot's darkest days, The Week guarantees goodness, Esquire has a gizmo thingamajig that will save magazines, and Conde Nast gives up on America, finally.

• Time Inc. is expected to announce plans to slash $100 million in costs next week; naturally, lots of layoffs will be involved in making that happen. [NYT]
• The Wall Street Journal is closing its Boston bureau. Also in Beantown: The Boston Globe's publisher has announced he's stepping down. [BW, NYT]
• The war between the White House and Fox News is over. For now. [DF]
• Esquire's latest bid for relevance: Its December issue will be tricked out with "an emerging technology called augmented reality." Sounds hot. [WSJ]
• Lou Dobbs says someone fired a shot at his New Jersey home/horse farm. He's yet to blame the population of Mexico. But just give it time. [CNN]

When you think "Esquire's Greatest Achievements in Its 70+ Years of Design Innovation," you think "Hidden ads on the cover" and "That other weird flashing electronic cover gadget." Until this new doohickey!

The theory that teen girls are suddenly all about vampires because they want to have sex with gay men is interesting. Also, total crap.

We knew that newsstands have been treating GQ's July cover, featuring a nude-but-not-all-hanging-out Sacha Baron Cohen is like porn. But a tipster at a Hudson News in Manhattan has noticed the decision has lead to some interesting juxtapositions.

So: Bret Easton Ellis is on the cover of expensive Amsterdam-based magazine Fantastic Man, drinking a Diet Coke. In it, he calls the soul-sucking experience that is The Hills "the greatest show that I have ever seen in my life."

Early this morning, at about 5AM, we were browsing through today's edition of the New York Times when we ran across David Carr's media column. Something about it struck us viscerally, so much so that we were unable to process it at the time and write anything about it.

• Photos of Sacha Baron Cohen (as Brüno) and Alessandra Ambrosio from the new issue of British Marie Claire are now online, if you're interested. Or, if you prefer, you can take a gander at a nude Bar Refaeli on the cover of Esquire. [Marie Claire, Esquire]
• After many months of hemming and hawing, it looks like Roberto Cavalli has finally decided to sell a stake in his company. [WSJ]
• Vogue's André Leon Talley reports Anna Wintour was "thrilled" with how her "fabulous" 60 Minutes profile turned out a couple of weeks ago, you'll ubdoubtedly be pleased to hear. [FBNY]
• It's been a year since Barneys started looking for a CEO, which may be one reason why the company has had so many trouble as of late. [WSJ]

• Esquire, The New Yorker, Backpacker, and Wired were all big winners at last night's National Magazine Awards, although the mood was much more subdued this year, not surprisingly. [ NYT, WWD, NYP]
• Portfolio's Joanne Lipman reflects on what went wrong. [Newsweek]
• Hollywood might be on track for its best year ever at the box office. [WSJ]
• A roundup of the winners at the Tribeca Film Festival. [NYT, THR]
• White House Social Secretary Desirée Rogers appears on the cover of the new issue of WSJ. The idea of having her pose in an Oscar de la Renta gown in the First Lady's garden was vetoed by the powers-that-be, wisely. [WWD]