It's the rumor that's been burning up the internet for the last few days: in an upcoming issue of Esquire, actress Anne Hathaway will open up about her love of anal sex. After describing it as one of the most sensual things she's ever done and something that makes her feel "feminine in a very special way," the actress supposedly says, "Every woman should try it, otherwise they miss out on something amazing." While Hathaway has played her fair share of sexually provocative roles in films like Havoc and Brokeback Mountain, we were skeptical of her newfound candor; nevertheless, the rumor has only built up steam over the last few days (it was spread by Gawker, LA Rag Mag, and thousands of other sites). Emboldened by our investigation into Megan Fox's own magazine confessions, we knew we had to find out: are these Hathaway quotes for real, and if not, where did they come from?Our first instinct was to disbelieve the story; after all, virtually every profile we've ever read of Hathaway mentions how carefully and professionally she answers questions, concerned that her quotes will be taken out of context. Had Hathaway been emboldened after her split with boyfriend Raffaello Follieri, or was someone putting naughty words in her mouth? Turns out, it's the latter. We contacted Esquire for comment, and spokesperson Rhett Usry was shocked by the rumor. "Absolutely not true," he told us. "There is no interview with Anne Hathaway at all in the upcoming issue of Esquire." So where did the story originate? All signs point to this September 12 posting on Celeb.Dump, a photo-laden blog promising "Sexy Celebrity Pictures With Little To No Bullshit" (and headlines like "Stacy Keibler is so very hot" and "Jessica Simpson touching herself"). "Thanks to Miss M. from Esquire for letting me know" about the rumor, said the poster (who declined our repeated requests to comment on his tip). As for how this obscure bit of gossip hit the big time, we're betting it's due to a potent mix of wishful thinking, Hathaway's Rachel Getting Married press tour, and lingering conflation of the actress with Brokeback Mountain. Either that, or Follieri's got an axe to grind. Memo to Celeb.Dump: if your "source" claims to be Esquire's liaison to the Vatican, it may be time to place some calls. [Photo Credit: AP]

If you're even remotely curious about oft-vilified media mogul Rupert Murdoch or his News Corporation empire, there are plenty of gems to pluck from Esquire's lengthy interview with the mogul. There is, for example, Murdoch's baldfaced assertion that Fox News Channel is "very, very fair;" his wild accusation that Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger tried to bar the hiring of white males for five years; and the mild rebuke that Fox host Bill O'Reilly "shouldn't be so sensitive" to Keith Olbermann's attacks. The biggest takeaway, though, is that Murdoch is softening in his old age, despite a punishing work regimen. The quotes in the Esquire piece reinforce the idea, floated by Michael Wolff in Vanity Fair earlier this month, of this change in Murdoch toward the "magnanimous" and "further nuanced:"

The custom battery design that cost hundreds of thousands in Chinese R&D. The refrigerated trucks used to haul the magazines from Mexico to Kentucky. The fallback to finding a sponsor to defray costs — in return for an animated ad. If the managers at Esquire publisher Hearst Magazines want to spend time and money on a project that Wired probably already rejected as not worth it, that's their business decision. But the mag's blinky 75th anniversary cover is a massive letdown. Instead of a new slogan for the ages, the million-dollar signage simply says, "The 21st Century starts now :)." Yes, they put a freaking smiley on it. Party like it's 1999. (Update: Reader Keymaster corrects us that the icon some of us mistook for a smiley emoticon is actually an arrow done in reverse foreground/background from the letters.)

• The sixth season of Project Runway has been pushed back and will not debut on Lifetime until January 2009. [EW]

Dying of anticipation wondering what Esquire's unwieldy new flashing E-ink magazine cover of the future will look like? Anticipate no more! Here's a video of its hypnotic, nonsensical flashing slogan: "The 21st Century Begins Now." Calendar not included.

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]

Oh joy: another 'homage' cover from a magazine industry that appears to be running as thin on new ideas as it is ad pages! We will be sure to save this one in the hyperbaric chamber in which Gawker Media stores valuable artifacts of the dying days of print media alongside last month's Esquire's Stephen Colbert cover homage to Esquire's 1968 Mohammad Ali cover and that New York Marilyn Monroe homage cover featuring Lindsay Lohan and Esquire's homage to that disturbing (if your mom ever told you shaving your face would make you grow hair there anyway) 1965 Virna Lisi cover featuring Jessica Simpson and also Esquire's February homage cover ripping off that 1967 Angie (yes that one!) Dickinson photo to which they already paid homage to back in 2003 when Britney Spears could sell magazines not named OK!…are we missing any? Most certainly!It's not as if mid-century was such a golden age for magazine circulations. Esquire got up around a million during its heyday, sure, and now it's probably about 25% off that, but Sports Illustrated is actually significantly more widely read than it was in the seventies. But editors back them were at least a little less the prisoners of cover-testing and circulation departments. So it's no wonder that their more conservative descendents hark back to an earlier era when every tired cover gimmick was still new—and when Mark Spitz somehow convinced the International Olympic Committee to give him his medals on gold chains (check the photo) and the world was cooler then.

"In the 1960s Esquire was perhaps the nation’s most vibrant magazine — sexy, mischievous, irreverent and hip — and Mr. Hills’s idea of fiction, as well as of the literary life, fit into the ethos of the magazine perfectly." [Times]

Esquire seems very earnestly convinced that their flashing e-Ink cover this October will revolutionize the print industry with awesome shifting pixels. There are only a few things holding back the revolutionary technology: it's thick as hell, it's not entirely flexible, the color on the e-paper is so bad that the magazine had to overlay a tinted sheet of plastic on the cover, and the magazine has to be delivered on refrigerated trucks. After these minor glitches are worked out, here comes the future! And while magazine readers might not like it, at least the new Esquire will be tailor-made for tech nerds:

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:

Esquire's September cover will have a flashing digital display made by E Ink, the company that hopes to replace print with its digital paper technology. Iif you put it on the cover of a print magazine, doesn't that defeat the purpose? [NYT]

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:

Bill Clinton—subject of a hostile profile in Vanity Fair—claimed Esquire's David Granger told him the piece was sleazy. Except it wasn't Granger who emailed, but one of his junior editors; and the recipient wasn't Clinton, but one of the former president's staffers. (Details have never been Clinton's strong point: after all, he claimed he'd never had sexual relations with that woman.) [Politico]

Audio emerged tonight of former President Bill Clinton calling Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum a "sleazy... dishonest... slimy... scumbag." Former Times reporter Purdum, of course, is the guy who wrote the just-released article about how Clinton is running around the world on private jets, including one called "Air Fuck One," with billionaire scuzzballs like Ron Burkle, Steve Bing and Jeffrey Epstein. Clinton told a Huffington Post reporter Purdum was awful, and that the Vanity Fair piece has "five or six blatant lies," but then added he had never read it. But that didn't stop him from continuing to trash it, nor did the fact that Purdum is married to Clinton's former press secretary Dee Dee Myers. Audio after the jump, along with a text summary.

What's on iconoclastic writer Gore Vidal's mind these days? Oh just everything! Like: "You hear all this whining going on, 'Where are our great writers?' The thing I might feel doleful about is: Where are the readers?" And: "Everything's wrong on Wikipedia." Plus: "I've developed a total loathing for McCain, conceited little asshole. And he thinks he's wonderful. I mean, you can just tell, this little simper of self-love that he does all the time. You just want to kick him." More of Vidal's idle musings from this month's Esquire after the jump.

That Barack Obama picture-on the cover of this month's issue of the men's magazine-looked familiar. Slightly less of Obama's hands are visible; the Democratic candidate's shoulders are weirdly hunched; and the picture's rendered in black and white. But it's obviously from the same Platon shoot as the one that illustrated Time's December cover story. Embarrassing, though it's hard to condemn Esquire: determined insurgent politicians have a limited range of body language; the photo editors can safely assume readers have short memories; and the likely Democratic nominee needs the support of Scots-Irish racists in Appalachia more than he does the goodwill of Esquire's photo department or metropolitan readers.

The outline on the model at left is not a bathing suit; that would be a tan line. The woman is completely naked. The ad for Cabana Cachaça was accepted not only at Playboy but also at Details, Men's Vogue, Esquire and GQ. Yes, this says something about eroding publication standards and the financial desperation of magazines amid the current advertising downturn. But more critically, it says that Cabana Cachaça is probably some really, really crappy liquor. Larger shot of the ad, marginally NSFW, after the jump.

Our interviews with celebrities usually go something like this...

As proven by Lindsay Lohan, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a contemporary actress attempting to recreate the magic of an iconic 60s photo shoot. But while the just-rehabbed Lohan chose to recreate an infamous shoot featuring soft-core nudity, Jessica Simpson chose to ... shave her face? Don't get us wrong, we loves us some Verna Lisi, but this just doesn't have the same Wow Factor.

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.