Newsweek invited third-generation etiquette expert Lizzie Post to help Holiday get-togetherers and get-togetherees avoid awkward moments with teetotalers at their Christmas parties. Post offered six tips that we loved so much, we repurposed them in a humorous fashion!

There's a feud brewing between Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett and Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff over who broke the story about Rudy Giuliani's ties to terror-financiers in the Middle East. Or so a bunch of catty mainstream publications' blogs would have you think!

Walt Mossberg, surprisingly slow out of the gate, has finally deigned to review Amazon.com's Kindle e-book reader. He was not kind, calling it "mediocre" and "marred by annoying flaws." He also says that Amazon "nailed the electronic-book shopping experience," which is no surprise given the success of Amazon.com, "but it has a lot to learn about designing electronic devices." Harsh words from a top reviewer who can make or break a device. Here's our question: what took him so long?

Oh and also he grew up surrounded by cops and mobsters which is why he's both fascistic and corrupt. His childhood was kinda like Angels With Dirty Faces except he's not as good a dancer as Cagney or as charming as Leo Gorcey.

Growing Up Giuliani [Newsweek]

Pudgy angel-faced devil and former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove left the White House under a cloud of reeking suspicion and ignominy. Amazingly, it took Newsweek only three months to scoop him up. Well done! Rove will have a column in which he muses on the 2008 Presidential elections. [Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham also retained the Daily Kos' Markos Moulitsas as a counterpoint to Rove.] To be fair, the man known as "turdblossom" has been remarkably open with the media in the past. After all, he even told Robert Novak all he knew of ex-CIA agent Valerie Plame!

Rick Smith steps down after 24 years as editor of Newsweek. Says his memo: "Tom Ascheim will become Newsweek's new Chief Executive Officer. Tom comes to us from Viacom, where he established a superb track record of building consumer brands, managing interactive start-ups and delivering strong results in both content and commercial terms....while he doesn't have a traditional magazine resume, he's an immensely talented, broad-gauge executive whose experience in building brands and leveraging traditional media assets on the Web will serve Newsweek extremely well." Mmm, language. [Portfolio]

Troubling out-of-context statistics and worrying isolated anecdotes suggest that members of "Generation Y"—loosely defined as all the people younger and stupider and more annoying than you and your peers—are lazy, unrealistic freeloaders, still living off their poor parents well into adulthood. Employment agency Manpower released a study last year that found that two-thirds of under-30 Americans (and Canadians!) would rather "pursue their dreams" than "make lots of money." What the hell is wrong with those people?

Now, if we've connected the proper dots, we know why they may be insisting on those criminal background checks for what we think are $80K-a-year assistantships over at Newsweek! It seems that the "World Famous Magazine" made a wee hiring error when it brought on Keely Tillona as assistant to Newsweek senior editor Lally Weymouth. Tillona had been released from Riker's Island the month before, where she'd been incarcerated on charges relating to ID fraud. Then the recidivist bilked her boss Weymouth, who is the daughter of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, out of $4,000 over the summer. Chanel, Lord & Taylor and Tory Burch were the beneficiaries of Newsweek's apparent inability to check out references.

A mysterious "World Famous Magazine" is looking for an executive assistant for an unnamed "special correspondent," so sayeth The List of Craig. Candidates should apply through Forrest Solutions, a recruiting firm which has repped the likes of Random House, Time Warner, and—oh! Newsweek! Funny that. This is no Conde Nast job; they're actually putting up a decent salary, to the tune of $80K. Unfortunately, there is a catch: Criminal records will be checked, so all you would-be Peter Braunsteins out there need not apply.

At left, Time's cover from November 2005. At right, Newsweek's cover from this week. Presumably both women are looking at the nineteen other photographers queuing up to take this hackneyed, overused shot.

Realizing that there's no way they can really compete with Time and Newsweek, perennial bronze medalist U.S. News & World Report has decided to go with the gimmick of running one "best of" issue per month. The Post's Keith Kelly reports that the magazine—which can only sell copies with coverlines like "America's Best Colleges," or "America's Best Hospitals"—is hemorrhaging money that owner Mort Zuckerman would rather spend on glossy, embroidered pink slips that he's handing out like candy to Daily News employees. Asked to confirm the changes, U.S. News editor Brian Kelly tells Keith that, yeah, it's true, but offers the wan assurance that the magazine is "still in the news business," and then provides a handy list of the ten best reasons anyone should believe such obvious bullshit. We're actually kind of excited for the change: We hear February will have the long-awaited "America's Hottest Snatches" issue.

Have you forgotten that it's Audit Bureau of Circulation time? Whee! People's sales declined, probably because a steady diet of Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, and Britney Spears grows tiring after a while; we need some hot new celebrities to hit the rehab circuit and, sorry, Amy Winehouse just won't cut it. Over on the serious side of things, Time takes a massive hit, dropping 17.1% in paid and weekly circulation against the same period last year. A Time spokesperson claims that the drop is a result of the magazine's heroic struggle for transparency—shedding copies distributed to doctor's offices and the like—and that the industry will eventually be forced to follow suit, which sort of jibes with our theory that it's all part of new managing editor Rick Stengel's plan to make sure there are only seven people who read Time, but that those seven people absolutely savor every single word. [WWD]

A year late to the party, Newsweek has discovered Second Life with its usual laughably bad timing. Its cultural speedometer fatally tuned to a slower-moving society, the weekly magazine has lavished the 3-D virtual world with gushing praise at the exact same moment that Wired, one of the first to hype Second Life, has abandoned it. In the August issue of Wired, media writer Frank Rose dissects the disastrous failure of corporate advertising in Second Life, as major brands used to measuring audiences in the millions find themselves lucky to count their Second Life audience in the hundreds. More highlights from the Wired piece — and lowlights from the Newsweek article — after the jump.

An operative from deep inside the bowels (sorry) of 1775 Broadway, aka 251 West 57th St., recently received the following email from HR:

Newsweek editor John Meacham thinks online readers are different from print readers. He recently addressed Samir "Mr. Magazine" Husni's journalism students at the University of Mississippi:

April Fools' Day? Tomorrow? No way! That's it, we're out for the weekend to plan some cyber-pranks to do on AOL. But we won't leave you hanging without fin-de-semaine reading material. Thanks to the Observer, we've read the 131-page proposal for Newsweek reporter Michael Hastings's upcoming I Lost My Love in Baghdad, which we're told agent Andrew Wiley has sold to Random House Scribner for a cool north of a cool half-million. Far as we can tell, ILMLIB — which begins with epigraphs from Iraq General George Casey, Prussian icon Carl von Clausewitz, and "Angel of the Morning, 1960's pop song" (!!) — is some sort of experimental memoir about Green Zone romance leading up to the literal (that is, literal literal) January death of Hastings's gf Andi Parhamovich. And, yes, it is called I LOST MY LOVE IN BAGHDAD. Needless to say, this portends the end of Western civilization as such; highlights from the 75,000-word manuscript after the jump.

• The Post has never heard of Whitewater. [NYP]
  

At left, the November 13, 2006, issue of Time. At right, the current issue of Newsweek. We're thinking the cover meeting went: "Eh, stick a skull on it, who's gonna remember?"

The Microsoft chairman gets a little testy with Newsweek:

To be sure, Simpson never explicitly admits to slicing his ex-wife's neck so savagely that he almost decapitated her.