David Granger is “being pushed out” as editor of Esquire after 19 years. He’ll be replaced by Jay Fielden, current editor of Town & Country.

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?

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!

Free Arts NYC hosted its 10th annual art and photography auction last night. Attendees at the Calvin Klein Collection-sponsored event, which was hosted by Kevin Bacon and Michelle Monaghan, included Calvin Klein's Francisco Costa and Italo Zucchelli, Amy Sacco, Glenda Bailey, Julia Restoin Roitfeld, Hilary Rhoda, Ed Westwick, Lindsay Price, Karolina Kurkova, Yvonne Force Villareal, Zani Gugelmann, Kimberly Guilfoyle and Eric Villency, Thom Browne, Molly Sims, Andrew Saffir, Beth Ostrosky, Erin Fetherston, Mary Alice Stephenson, David Granger, Helen Lee Schifter, Glenn O'Brien, Kate Schelter, Richard Chai, Jeremy Kost, Mickey Boardman, Kathryn Neale, Ross Bleckner, Simon de Pury, and Andrew Fry. [PMc, Wireimage, FWD, SF]

Esquire editor David Granger loves the Amazon Kindle. Sort of. The e-book reader gives him hope that Internet-shortened attention spans will lengthen enough to spark a renaissance in books and magazines. He's utterly delusional.

Ever since Vice plastered an ad on its cover that was only visible in the dark, magazines have been researching better ways to sell out. Now Esquire has made a breakthrough in invisible cover ads!

Nightlife impresario Scott Sartiano turns 34 today. Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni turns 44. Dan Rather is 71. Esquire editor-in-chief David Granger is turning 52. Architect Zaha Hadid is 58. Novelist Kinky Friedman is 64. Jane Pauley is turning 58. Mega hotel developer Ira Drukier turns 63. Actor Dermot Mulroney is 45. Director Peter Jackson turns 47. Rob Schneider is 45. And Robert Van Winkle, better known as Vanilla Ice, is 41.

Hey, Yves Saint Laurent designer Stefano Pilati started a magazine! It's called Manifesto. Hey guy, "Manifesto," really? I mean, didn't Vivienne Westwood take that name already? Anyhow, the story is that PIlati started giving out the magazine in canvas logo tote bags — "as a gesture" — he says, but no one gave a shit about the magazines, all anyone wanted was the fucking logo bags, and now he is "going to have to" start producing the logo bags for stores. Which, when you remember the whole point of Manifesto in the first place was to better display YSL clothes because all anyone cares about these days seems to be the logoed accessories is so poignantly circular…so "Gift of the Magi" you know? But let's be honest Stef: no one ever really looks at the magazines they get in goody bags at parties. This does not mean print is dead.It just means print gets kind of gross after it gets a few complimentary Chambord-sponsored cocktails on it. There are very few magazines I take home from such parties and actually read. Chiefly because I am drunk. But I have, later on, gone back and purchased magazines I got for free at parties. That's just the way it goes. They're on newsstands everywhere. Maybe I would change this policy if you every magazine were $7 on newsstands like Harper's. But I'm with Esquire editor in chief David Granger here, print is not dead, it is just not something tipsy Fashion Week goers who probably already work at magazines and thus get them all for free anyway are going to appreciate when they are busy heaving into the Bryant Park portapotties. [NYT]

Poor David Granger. He wanted to bring flashing lights to the October issue of the septuagenarian Esquire, and he reaped hell for it. Fast Company accused him of an oversized carbon footprint. Media and marketing guru Rex Hammock called the idea the "worst use of technology by a magazine." Marshall McLuhan rose from the dead and declared it a hot-cold mindfuck. Others scoffed and mocked, but Granger is unbowed. He tells FOLIO:

"We're at a fulcrum point in our culture, not just because of the election, but because the world seems to be at a real tipping point right now." [WWD, Previously]

Esquire's David Granger, you'll recall, secured a lone nomination in the National Magazine Awards this year thanks, reportedly, to lobbying by fellow Hearst editor Rosemary Ellis, of Good Housekeeping. No surprise, then, that Granger was all-too-happy to do a solid for another Hearst title, O, The Oprah Magazine, when editors there asked him to answer the question "Men! What Do You Like Most About Us [women]?" Granger's exuberant response (last item) is clearly intended to flatter O's middle-aged lady readers, which is fine, since that's half the point of these things. But the answers are so obviously terrible one almost wonders if it was written as parody. Did Granger hand this one off to a junior assistant or something? The four worst tips:

• Esquire's editor-in-chief David Granger says he never got a call from Bill Clinton, as the former president suggested in his comments last night when he was asked to respond to the incendiary Vanity Fair story by Todd Purdum. Turns out it was a measly staff editor who emailed. [Politico]

So, was Esquire's last-minute inclusion as a finalist in the National Magazine Awards a stroke of luck for the languishing Hearst magazine, or merely the result of a fix? As you might have read, David Granger's men's title, which used reliably to feature in several categories in the magazine industry's annual exercise in mutual flattery, only received a solo nomination for its work in the past year. Mixed Media's Jeff Bercovici explained that even that was a fluke: the nomination was to have been New York's, until the judges realized that the magazine, an awards hog, had naughtily entered material it had already submitted in another category. So, a lucky break. Or maybe not.

Granger has been the editor-in-chief of Esquire, the men's magazine published by Hearst, since 1997.

Yesterday for three barren hours we sat in the back of a dining room at Tavern on the Green and watched media people accept essentially pointless awards from Min magazine. Portfolio won hottest launch. Atoosa Rubenstein shared nuggets of wisdom. Laurel Touby, one of the web's most "intriguing" people (if a poorly spelled sign is to be believed) embarrassed herself. Photographer Laurel Ptak really outdid herself in creating a photo essay of the luncheon. It's like 'Kids,' just more magazine-y!

Don't tell Esquire editor-in-chief David Granger that the concept of "magabrands"—magazines that have "extended" their "brands" to new media, old media and non-media"—is out-of-control bankrupt. Esquire North is the magazine's sprawling Harlem three-level condo on Central Park North; each room and everything in it was decorated by an Esquire advertiser. To have the honor of furnishing arcade seats in eel skin in the gaming room, both Kenneth Cole and Intel had to purchase at least one page (ooh!) of advertising. Last night all these brands threw a party for Riverkeeper. We don't care really about fisheries on the Hudson, but we do care about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is the main litigator for the environmental outfit. He is so boyishly handsome and so charismatic and so, well, Kennedy-like! Semi-socialite Melissa Berkelhammer stood alone near the panini bar as Kennedy gave a speech. And—was she wearing a sad pony mask?

Last night Esquire scribe and gimmick book writer AJ Jacobs celebrated the publication of his latest, The Year of Biblical Living, a memoir about the healing process after his husband died. Oh wait. That's the other Year of Adjective Present Participle book. This one traces Jacobs' efforts to live his life according to the strictures of the Old Testament. Sounds hard, right? According to Jacobs, it was! The book party was heavily attended by Esquire editors and was at an Upper East Side bar called Genesis. Get it? And we didn't have to blow anyone to get tickets.

• There's a lot of backbiting and infighting at the Los Angeles Times, which is completely unusual behavior at a major newspaper. [NYT]
  

• Wal-Mart is really, really sorry that they taped a Times reporter's calls. They don't want you to think they're Hewlett-Packard or anything. [NYT]
  

[M]any editors profess to hate lists, features that are, at their worst, unoriginal and gushy. (A heavy-breathing essay in this year's Time 100 described George Clooney as "a family heirloom" whose serious bearing makes him "almost worth killing for.")