The audience, mainly female—go figure—responded with the obedient clinking, and subsequent sinking, of glasses that reverberated through Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater. And vagina was indeed the theme of the evening at These Girls, Glamour’s night of monologues by young ladies they’ve deemed the new generation of female voices.

It quickly became apparent that for all involved (Olivia Wilde, Leandra Medine, Rashida Jones, Zosia Mamet, Aubrey Plaza and Lauren Miller), this was a chance to have a real heart-to-heart—you know, girl talk—so far from their usual introverted selves.

“Tonight, these girls can be who they uniquely are fan-fucking-tastic,” exclaimed Gloria Steinem.

It was refreshing, we suppose, though The Observer did feel a tinge of sympathy for the few men in the audience. 

“I’ve had my fair share of interesting menstrual cycles,” read Ari Graynor, whose reading of Leandra Medine’s monologue was largely, and explicitly, preoccupied with periods (of the menstrual kind, we figure the grammar was spot on).

One in particular, nearly cost Ms Medine her place at college. The fact that Ms Medine did not perform the monologue herself suggested just how appropriate the title, Over Sharing is Underrated, was.

The guys shuffled awkwardly in their seats.

“Guys are raging against the independent woman machine,” read actress and Harvard graduate Rashida Jones, the next act to grab the men by the balls. Cue the high pitched whooping from the females in the audience.

There were more gender-neutral monologues, however. Actress and comedienne Aubrey Plaza recalled how she had spent her life running in front of the great wave of the establishment in A Million Life Opportunities, Zero Job Opportunities. She spoke about her inability to hold down a job when she was younger due to her only applying to the ones that sounded “funny,” like being the judge of a dog contest. She’d never owned a dog in her life.

Lauren Miller, wife of Seth Rogen, recalled entries from her teenage diary—a diary of self-loathing—in Don’t Talk Down to Me, I’m on My Way Up.

“I’m fat and ugly and have pimples—I will never be happy,” she read, before an entry admitting she wanted to move to L.A. and marry a movie star. Success!

We are a little less hopeful for Olivia Wilde, who, in “The Fabulous Olivialand,” proclaimed that everyone will stay married for only seven happy years, at which time his or her children will be ferried off to boarding school. After Ms Wilde briefly touched on her marriage, and recent divorce, from Tao Ruspoli (they married at the tender age of nineteen on a school bus), we began to understand her logic that love is better kept short and sweet.

But such is life and Ms. Wilde gushed over her new beau, funnyman Jason Sudeikis, who was in the audience.

“Seven years is too short,” Ms. Wilde decided.

Garfunkel and Oates, the mismatched duo, entertained us between monologues with their hysterical take on dating, before Alexa Chung appeared on the decks as Amy Poehler shouted “Vagina, vagina, vagina, vagina!” and the audience downed their drinks once and for all.

"How presumptuous! I never disclose who my songs are about," Ms. Swift remarked to Glamour in an interview promoting her new album, which features a single rumored to be about another ex, actor Jake Gyllenhaal. Asked how she deals with criticism, Ms. Swift remarked, "I just kind of live a life, and I let all the gossip live somewhere else."

"Somewhere else" can be purchased at record stores near you, or on iTunes!

Here are our picks for the very most of this month’s Elle, Lucky, Glamour, InStyle, Harper’s Bazaar and Marie Claire. (Vogue, as usual, will arrive fashionably late.)

Best Cover: A purple-hair-era Katy Perry on Elle takes the prize, if only for the very au courant nail art. (She still manages to squeeze her “Jesus” tattoo into the shot, though.) Given that the culture at large spends September shaking sand out of its beach tote, very few of this month’s cover stars—Jennifer Lopez, InStyle? Still?—have an imminent project to promote. (And Victoria Beckham, in a bubble bath on Glamour, isn’t even wearing clothes.)

Most Nostalgic: Harper’s Bazaar, in a cover line, advises readers to “Think Pink!”—a line from Funny Face, the movie based on Diana Vreeland and Richard Avedon’s time at Bazaar. (Cover girl Gwen Stefani, you’re great, but you’re no Audrey Hepburn.) Ms. Vreeland’s time at the magazine is elucidated in a piece that uses the word “Vogue” zero times. (Some anti-Vogue rancor is discernible at Glenda Bailey’s magazine: Another former Voguette, ousted French editrix Carine Roitfeld, gets a glowing profile in Bazaar.)

Best Editor’s Letter, Lede Division: “Naomi Wolf wants you to feel good. Really good,” writes Roberta Myers in Elle. (The feminist firebrand is profiled there and has a piece in Bazaar on dating.)

Best Editor’s Letter, Unintentional Revelations Division: Joanna Coles describes regretfully turning down her dream job as a journalist covering Parliament in the Marie Claire supplement @Work, which features Chelsea Handler on the cover.

Most Unlikely Suggestion: In her capacity as Glamour guest editor, Ms. Beckham writes that she suggested some future cover subjects from the indie-film universe: “Chloe Moretz, Clémence Poésy, Bella Heathcote ...” Maybe if Jessica Simpson falls ill!

Least Fortuitous Timing, Celebrity Division: Kristen Stewart, interviewed pre-cheating-scandal by InStyle. On Cartier’s Juste un Clou bracelet: “It reminds me of the person who gave it to me.” She wanted, and likely still wants, to go on a “very secluded” Mexican vacation.

Least Fortuitous Timing, Cinema Division: Both Elle and InStyle feature sneak peeks at what would have been this winter’s biggest movie, The Great Gatsby. After the magazines went to press, Gatsby was delayed until summer 2013.

Best Logroll: Marie Claire’s nine-page package on Project Runway, a show that features the magazine’s fashion director Nina Garcia. Before suggesting Runway-inflected trips to Parsons and Burger Joint, the author notes, “Sex and the City isn’t the only show that boasts the Big Apple as a main character.” Sure isn’t!

Best Advertising Opportunity: Justin Bieber’s perfume sponsored some of Lucky’s stickers (used to point out must-buy items—like Pinterest, but monthly!), as did uplifting toiletry brand Dove. Thanks to the good folks at Unilever, you can label Eva Longoria’s shorts “brave,” “graceful” or “STRENGTH.” [sic.]

Best Homage to Something Else Popular: Glamour informs us: “Hey, it’s okay ... to own 50 shades of gray ... cashmere sweaters.” Meanwhile, Elle titles its Katy Perry profile “Girl on Fire,” a reference to The Hunger Games, while Miley Cyrus is now getting magazine cover profiles solely in her capacity as Liam Hemsworth’s fiancée, also a nod to The Hunger Games. (Jennifer Lawrence clearly wasn’t available.)

Most Ubiquitous: Who knew Lana Del Rey was such a trendsetter? She gets a full-page spread, “Let’s All Look Like Lana!,” in Glamour (looking like Lana means having long hair) and is cited as a nail-care icon in Elle. Meanwhile, Solange Knowles, noted sister of Beyoncé, gets a photo shoot of her house in Elle and a two-page spread on her style evolution in Glamour.

Biggest Vitamin-Related Exclusive: “I wake up at 7 a.m., I shower, shave, eat breakfast, and have a double espresso, a cigarette, vitamins,” Marc Jacobs tells Marie Claire. “I wake up, have a double espresso and a cigarette, then I shower,” Mr. Jacobs tells Glamour.

Biggest Web-to-Print Leap: Fashion blogger Bryanboy, citing Carly Rae Jepsen in Glamour, a magazine that elsewhere features the “Shit Girls Say” video stars and the “Man Repeller” blogger.

Biggest Print-to-Web Synergy: InStyle has enlisted Katie Couric and Tommy Hilfiger as celebrity “Pinners” for their Pinterest pages; Mr. Hilfiger notes he is inspired by “classic autumnal colors.”

Biggest Print-to-Book-to-Print Leap: Elizabeth Wurtzel, for Harper’s Bazaar: “I want everyone to try as hard as I do to please be gorgeous, because it’s not that hard, girls. Looking great is a matter of feminism.”

Most Horrifying, Unsurprising Revelation: Lucky’s oral history of Guess reveals that Paris Hilton keeps a blow-up of her early-2000s jeans ad next to her bed.

Most Compelling Subhed: “Guest editor Victoria Beckham’s dear friend and go-to hair guy, Ken Paves, is on a mission to help at-risk women. Love that.”

Best Use of Profile-Speak: Miley Cyrus, per Marie Claire, is “a 19-year-old firecracker with washboard abs, a smoky laugh, and a filthy mouth.” Elsewhere her voice is described as “tangy and redolent of her native Nashville.”

Most Disconnected From Readers’ Reality: “Everyone I know with taste gets plates from Heath Ceramics,” says Jessica de Ruiter, stylist, in Lucky. “They use them at Axe.” (It’s pronounced “a-shay.”)

Biggest Indications Fashion Magazine Readers Aren’t In It For the Fashion: When asked, an Elle reader notes her biggest wish is not the Bottega Veneta dress Ms. Perry wears on the cover but “my mother’s love and my father’s approval”; a Glamour reader poll yields favorite designers including “anything Jennifer Aniston wears” and Old Navy.

Ms. Lo (Image via Patrick McMullan)

Glamour senior online fashion and beauty editor Danica Lo has been named executive editor of Stylebistro.com.

Starting June 1, she will oversee daily operations of Stylebistro.com, a style blog from the same parent company as celebrity photo cache Zimbio.com. And it sounds like they're expanding. According to a press release, Ms. Lo's duties include "building a Manhattan-based team of editors, honing the site’s voice and scope of coverage, creating new features, columns, and sections as well as representing the site on broadcast and special events."

Prior to Glamour, Ms. Lo was the national editor of Racked.com and a fashion columnist at the New York Post.

Renovating architects left the front of the house unchanged to blend in with the block, according to Brownstoner. (http://www.brownstoner.com/blog/2011/10/the-insider-radical-reno-in-red-hook/)

Lucky editor Brandon Holley has a personal essay in Glamour magazine this month, describing a home invasion she experienced last March. An open window on the ground floor of her Brooklyn house was broken into in the middle of the night by a man who stood over the bed where she, her husband, and her two-year-old son slept, demanded their money and threatened to kill them.

The scene is chillingly rendered, but it's almost more interesting to hear the former Jane editor describe the hazards of gentrification. It's rare that an article about Ms. Holley fails to mention that she lives in Red Hook; the remote industrial neighborhood serves as shorthand for her many cool aspects (opened Max Fish, worked for Sassy, married a musician). After Jane folded, Ms. Holley ran Yahoo! women's site Shine from her home, sometimes in her pajamas.

New York visited the wood-frame house built in 1899 for a 2007 article on the de-gentrification of the neighborhood, when she was hosting a fundraiser for the Red Hook Initiative, the poverty-fighting nonprofit at which she volunteers (and to which she donated the writer's fee for the Glamour piece).

Adam Sternbergh wrote:

Holley’s house, which she bought with her husband in late 2004, then gut-renovated for a year, sits on a typical Red Hook block, by which I mean a dark, unremarkable stretch of three-story, vinyl-sided rowhouses along a cracked and wobbly street. When I first arrived, I have to admit I thought I’d written down the wrong address. But walking through her open door, I entered a totally different world: an artfully reimagined loftlike space with a sunken central room, concrete floors, and a large manicured backyard. Inside, the assembled guests enjoyed a "Taste of Red Hook," displayed on long tables with white tablecloths: gumbo from the Good Fork, sweets from Baked, and greasy, delicious huaraches from one of the vendors who work weekends at the Red Hook ball fields.

Five years later, Ms. Holley is back to getting dressed up and taking a car to 4 Times Square every day, but according to the essay, she's still something of an outsider in a neighborhood stalled in transition.

She wrote:

“You don’t fit in here,” Jerry, my busybody neighbor, had told me a few months before. He had been raised in rough-and-tumble Red Hook, Brooklyn, where I’ve lived for the past seven years. Perched happily on my stoop on my quiet block, I just smiled—I was used to his diatribes about yuppies. Our neighborhood has undergone a wave of gentrification, and I’m definitely a part of that. I shop at the little boutiques. I go to the new restaurants. I wear heels to work.

“You aren’t careful!” Jerry continued. “You don’t lock your door, you leave your windows open—you can’t do that around here!” As usual, I argued with him. Even though I grew up on a small farm in Great Falls, Virginia, I’m street-smart, I told him. I’ve never been the victim of a crime.

But I’m also not delusional. Red Hook can be a tough place. Back in the eighties, a cover story in Life magazine proclaimed it the “crack capital of America.” It’s home to the Red Hook Houses, New York City’s second-biggest housing project, and you commonly hear about gangs and crime there. So as much as I liked to spar with Jerry, his criticism unnerved me. Part of me had refused to let go of the easy way of life I grew up with. Until that morning in March.

Maybe this is Glamour's attempt at appealing to a hipper audience, or a more upscale one. And this isn't the first time Opening Ceremony has done a collaboration with an "accessible" brand (as they've done with Levi's, Keds, etc). And it's part of a trend, kind of: more and more media brands are working with retail operations to expand their own reach and revenues.

But still, there's something patently weird about Glamour—not downtown hipster rags like Paper, or even some twee McSweeney's nonsense, but Glamour—teaming up with Opening Ceremony (not, like, The Gap), to sell a $100 sweater.

Or maybe it's just the sweater. Of a cat.

It's a cat:

For the record, I am not alone.

That is all.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

Jake, from Glamour.com

The Greeks had Homer, Enlightenment France had Voltaire and we have Jake: the pseudonymous author of Glamour’s “guy column,” sort of a breezy, unbylined sex and sensibility counterpart to The New Republic’s long-running TRB.

Glamour first introduced Jake to its readers in February 1956, “to bring a man’s point of view into each issue of Glamour.” More than half a century later (and just in time for Valentine’s Day), Jake will publish his first book, Always Hit On the Wingman … and 9 Other Secret Rules for Getting the Love Life You Want (Hyperion).

Access to the mind of the opposite sex has widespread appeal; the form pops up in magazines ranging from Seventeen to O: The Oprah Magazine. Cosmopolitan once had a designated Guy Spy; it now surveys men on the street for Guys Reveal. Even The Hairpin, a blog whose raison d’etre seems to be an antidote to women’s magazines, has adopted the form. Ask a Dude routinely tops the most commented and most read stories lists.

Men also seem to appreciate a native guide when traversing the psychology of the Other. Esquire has long employed the comedienne Stacey Grenrock-Woods, and Men’s Health has two female columnists, The Sex Professor and The Girl Next Door, which might make for a troubling dichotomy, were it not for a third, online-only columnist: The Men’s Health Feminist.

What separates Jake from other gender ambassadors is his secret identity. Over the years, more than a dozen different men have been Jake for four-year terms, give or take. As such, Jake is always contemporary (if not always relevant) and Jake is always candid (if not always compelling). He’s like a 29-year-old stranger, trapped at an airport bar in an eternal layover, a little drunk and looking to spill.

In each issue of Glamour, Jake offers a window into the male mind—or at least the part of it that the women of their day still wondered about after all the long-winded dates and post-coital silences, as channeled by a single man speaking for his fellows.

The first Jake was Bud Palmer, a Princeton jock turned New York Knicks captain credited with inventing the jump shot.

His print persona was a worldly gadabout with an endless supply of single cousins and female friends in his orbit, colliding at confessional lunches, cocktail parties and beach weekends. Much of Jake the First’s advice springs eternal. Be alone once in a while, a group of women intimidates us. Don’t be afraid to be smart, but don’t fake it or condescend. You look ridiculous in that hat.

But not all of his nuggets stand the test of time. Although women were his audience, it was clear that this first incarnation of Jake did not consider them his peers.

When a girl gets into something big, be it politics or an absorbing job, a great deal of the warmth and sweetness seems to go out of her.

They left that one out of the book.

The next January he suggested women “resolve toward more imaginative cookery,” and, tired of the word “fabulous,” suggested they liven up their vocabulary with new phrases. He offered “cotton picking” for humdrum days in the typing pool and “out of my Chinese mind” for exhaustion.

“If not Chinese then Oriental or Upper Manchurian, at worst.” For the sake of Jake’s legacy, contemporary readers might skip a 1958 column on the pleasures of dating a Mexican woman altogether.

A decade later, a new Jake cared less for his persona. The column became a forum for gender-driven cultural criticism.  Jake teased a Missouri boarding school reader who thanked him for doing his part to stop communist influence on fashion (bikinis, low necklines) and railed at Mary Quant and her ilk for their “reactionary,” “narcissistic” baby doll dresses.

Under the polka dots and the posies there’s an actual woman who is an amiable, thought-provoking person. But the mask tends to become the face.

Sexual Revolution Jake deemed the romantic male “a feudal hangover,” but praised Claude Lelouch movies, where love made couples “stronger than their environment.” “A good thing to be reminded of these days, when Hugh Hefner is recommending … the Playboy philosophy,”
he added.

In the mid-’70s, Jake became a how-to column heavy on meandering self-analysis. Never mind how to get a man back, Jake wrote, first ask yourself why you want to. He sounded a little stoned.

After you’ve thought about it, you’ll realize that the whole situation is an unanswered question that should be cleared up one way or another.

By the end of the ’80s, such watery self-help had its own section at bookstores, and Jake assumed a different role. Although he still occasionally decoded man-speak or identified trends in sex, just as often he offered readers a racy serialized narrative of the life of Jake, single guy in New York City.

For example, one ’90s Jake, Andrew Postman, earned the gig with an audition column that transcribed a man’s inner monologue immediately before, during and after climax. Mr. Postman’s Jake was marked by the addictive saga of his long-distance love, “A.”

In one column, Mr. Postman dared to address the subject of date rape. While running in Prospect Park—where there had recently been a series of assaults on women—Mr. Postman realized that if he were a woman, he would not drink as much or party as recklessly as he does, in order to protect himself from unwanted advances. Though the column aimed to be sympathetic, he received an unprecedented number of letters, many of them irate.

A few years ago, Glamour experimented with abandoning secrecy in favor of publicity campaign, letting readers choose the next Jake. Contestants were scouted by Glamour editors and paid a lump sum in the neighborhood of $5,000 to undertake a series of tests, like blogging about their love lives on Glamour.com and answering questions on CBS’s The Early Show. The proceedings were memorably reported on by Gawker, who had a former intern, Neel Shah, in the ring, although he eventually lost to comedian Michael Somerville.

“Anonymity started to seem a little old,” then-executive editor Jill Herzig explained, at Mr. Somerville’s debut. “We have people blogging about their dating lives, we have reality shows, so it seemed like we could probably bring Jake out of the closet.”

A stand-up comedian whose bread and butter is gender and relationships, Mr. Somerville had a fan base to gain from taking Jake public. But it also put him in a more intimate relationship with his fans than he anticipated. He received one memorable letter from an 18-year-old from Oklahoma.

I’ve been saving myself for marriage, but I met a really nice guy. Should I do it?

“That’s all it said!” he recalled. Fearing how she would interpret silence on his end, he quickly responded with a multiple page letter covering every possible scenario. And those didn’t come at Condé Nast’s $2-a-word rate.

“I was afraid she’d show up at one of my shows with a baby named after me,” he said.

Mr. Somerville didn’t fight to get his two-year contract renewed, and went back to full-time comedy. (His album "Handsomely Disheveled," is released in December.)

“Jake is something different to every woman,” he told The Observer from a courtesy phone in a lounge at Newark airport. (He dropped his cell phone in a hot tub in West Palm Beach over the weekend.)

“He’s her ex-boyfriend, or her ideal man, or an olive-skinned Mediterranean guy. If you know who he is, all of the sudden it’s just this Irish guy with curly hair.”

Mr. Postman, who left as soon as things got serious with A. agreed. (His now-wife, Alexandra Postman, is the editor of Whole Living Magazine.)

“He’s supposed to be a timeless, ageless figure,” he explained. “You owe it to Jake to inhabit that name for a short period of time and then let some new guy with a new point of view do his shtick.”

Still, a stint as Jake can be a valuable a calling card. Another ’90s Jake, Brian Alexander, authored America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction, and now writes Sexploration, a sex and romance column for MSNBC.com, but never fails to mention Glamour in his bio.

Other Jakes, ready to move on, or desperate to compartmentalize, or simply paranoid their past will be a deal-breaker for prospective dates or editors, uphold the code of silence like Bonesmen.

“I just don’t think I have anything to say,” a purported former Jake told The Observer when we reached him at a top men’s magazine. “Partly because it would be boring, partly because it would serve no purpose, partly because I have never even heard of Jake!”

Ms. Leive and some impressive co-eds.

Each year, Glamour magazine highlights the accomplishments of ten college women, as a reminder to readers that women’s magazines have not yet managed to irrevocably damage all young women.

Last week, the chosen ones were flown to New York, where they toured Glamour’s offices and the U.N., took in a Broadway show and got L’Oreal makeovers.

Their arrival was like a force of nature more powerful than the tremblor, Hurricane Irene, and Fashion Week, said Bill Wackermann, Condé Nast executive vice president and publishing director of Glamour, Details, W and Bon Appetit, as he toasted the young women over breakfast at The Modern on Thursday.

“But Cindi Leive looks ready for Fashion Week,” Mr. Wackermann noted. “What are those shoes?”

Ms. Leive, Glamour’s editor-in-chief, stuck a slender leg out from under her table to reveal a metallic platform pump.

“Copper,” she said. “Killer.”

“Bitchin’!” Mr. Wackermann said. “Speaking of someone who’s not a bitch, but bitching …”

“The 10 of you are a great hope for this country,” Ms. Leive said.

The Glamour Top 10 College Women award, now in its 54th year, was once the Top 10 Best Dressed College Women (Martha Stewart was a winner), but was later changed to recognize more serious achievement.

This year’s class included Allison Schmitt, an Olympic bronze medalist; Isha Jain, a 20-year-old Harvard senior who has co-authored six scientific papers; and Katie Miller, the West Point cadet who dropped out in protest of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and escorted gay rights activist Lady Gaga to the V.M.A.’s.

Of course, college is not the only route to success for women—at least according to auto racer Danica Patrick, who spoke at a Glamour panel on the secrets of success for 20-something women the night before. “I’m probably not the smartest person in the world, but the older I get the more I want to learn, the more I ask questions,” she told the group. “And I’m really lucky, I have a super smart husband.”

Ms. Tracy was most recently publisher of the wildly successful People StyleWatch. She will oversee Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, and report to Time, Inc. chief revenue officer Paul Caine.  She is the first woman to hold the position.

She was previously an associate publisher of InStyle and Lucky, the advertising director of Teen Vogue, and has held sales positions at Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar and Interview.

Conde Nast hung out the help wanted sign in May, according to AdWeek, as Mr. Wackermann, who has overseen Glamour since 2004, took on additional duties at W, Bon Appetit and Details.

2011 has been rocky for Glamour so far. Newsstand sales dropped 17 percent in the first four months, according to WWD, but a thick September issue brought in the magazine's all-time highest revenue. The brand has implemented alternative marketing strategies like snap tags (print advertisements which readers can hover their smart phones over to be taken to Glamour's Facebook page and special deals from advertisers) and the Glamour-flavored donut. 

Prior to working at EW, Mr. Wagenheim worked the management ladder at Conde Nast, as associate publisher of Vanity Fair, executive director of Conde Nast Media Group, an associate publisher of Conde Nast Traveler.