This letter from Editor-in-Chief Ann Shoket sets the tone for the entire issue (bold-facing hers):

Hi! I have a weird Q for you: If your outfit could talk, what would it say about you? Think about it for a sec. We put so much importance on first impressions. And when you're going back to school, meeting new teachers, checking out cute guys, and seeing your friends again after a long summer, it's especially important - you're making impressions on about 150 people a second. Sure, your energy and vibe go a long way toward telling people who you are and what you're about, but your clothes and makeup are an important part of the package. That's why I'm practically obsessed with helping you get your look just right for the first day of school. So when your fourth-period history teacher sees you in class, or when your secret crush (who, BTW, got the best muscles over the summer) asks where the music room is, you'll be saying all the right things - before you even say a word! How's that for an awesome payoff from a day of shopping?

What impression do you want to make this year?
Tell me everything at ann@seventeen.com
XOXO
-A

I’m never going “back-to-school” again, and yet for some reason I’m now anxious about September. Thanks Ann!

The beauty section explains how to “tell everyone about yourself” by “picking the look that makes the right statement about you.” So, if I wear a subtle shadow with purple liner, will that tell the world “I’m serious about school” but “I don’t take myself too seriously?”
This two-page fold out chart shows how size measurements vary for different styles of jeans. Maybe I’m just feeling vulnerable after measuring my waist to 1/8 of an inch, but I think the real message in the size 15/16 row may be “Sorry! They don’t come in this size, fatty!”
In case you’re a little too flabby for those “perfect fit” jeans, the magazine's health section includes a “get your best butt” exercise plan. It also advises that you shouldn’t eat chicken Caesar salad because the dressing is fattening, but that apple rice cakes “are almost like mini apple pies.” But watch out, because exercising too much or counting calories obsessively could be a sign that your “feelings are bad for your body.” And yet, if we don’t watch ourselves everyone may “see the emotional weight we’re carrying right there on our stomachs, hips or thighs.” I guess everything about me really is wrong!
Maybe it’s not just me – there’s probably something wrong with my friends too. I’d never considered the possibility that boys don’t like me because my friends are annoying!
But think twice about ditching your friends for a guy. In “Sex Lies He Tells you,” we learn that “sometimes he’ll say anything to keep going.”

I remember there being a few non-heinous aspects of being a teenage girl, but after reading Seventeen (motto: "It's fun to be seventeen") I've realized it’s just seven years of public humiliation and ridicule. I wish that when I was growing up I had more positive role models to guide me through these difficult years — like the girls from The Hills! Who better to look to for cues on self-respect and supporting other women than Lauren Conrad?

"What I could find on this specific conversation is basically nothing," reported Jennifer Manlove, a senior research associate at Child Trends, a reliable source of data on children and adolescents.

"I was a friggin' dealer in ninth grade!" this woman remembered incredulously. That year, she recalled, she and a friend would buy a nickel bag of marijuana and smuggle it to her friend's bedroom. Under the bed was a shoebox of candy — also forbidden in her friend's household — and beside that was a second shoebox in which they would store the contraband. "We would roll joints and put them in Sucrets boxes and bring them to school and sell them for a dollar," she said. The point wasn't getting high — she doesn't remember doing that much — or even making money, but the crafts project aspect. "What was really fun was that we got really good at rolling them." She also remembered stealing. She and her friends took some costume jewelry from a department store and sorted through it at a table at Friendly's.

And she would be horrified — horrified! — if her kids did any of these things. She regrets any high school experimentation and doesn't want her children following in her footsteps. This surprised her sister, who doesn't have kids and so doesn't understand the radical change of perspective that comes with parenthood. "She thought I was going to be, like, this really cool parent: When you're ready to try [marijuana], I'll get it for you." Not hardly. It is your children who fully reform you.

The Secret Lives Of Moms [Washington Post]
Maternal Truths: The Online Transcript [Washington Post]

Personally, I was weird, and shy, and ADD, and got good grades. I was the type of kid whose sixth birthday wish was that there would be no gravity. I was a fucking leper until...I got my braces out? Something like that. I've blacked it out, obviously.

It's a weird thing, being that kid who would do anything, anything, to trade places with anyone just one measly rank higher on the social totem pole, or the inconspicuousness pole. Time passes so slowly when you're a kid it's hard to fathom life after childhood; you're so much closer to innocence, to that kinder, more just womb of unconditional parental love that it's almost easier to conceive of the Afterlife than any Life After at that age, and so you cope and hold out and grow up and assume you were bullied so you would understand, so you would have empathy for others, so you would grow into the lovable misanthrope you turned out to be, so you would discover Dinosaur Jr., whatever.

Somewhere you forget kids are still getting bullied, that you boiled over with a rage you didn't know you still had when you saw that girl who mocked you every day in religion class — fucking religion class!? — at the reunion, and she's got a baby now, maybe they'll be bullies too; you should have gone and told her off but for the fact that she was posing for MySpace photos, admirably maintained backside turned toward the camera, with all those people she still hangs out with...and anyway you learned long ago to turn the other cheek as a life philosophy, not a weakness. That from alienation could come...if not exactly triumph, a pretty easy "A" on the big Kafka paper sophomore year. Etc. etc. etc. Etc. etc. etc. it's not about you, really. Have you learned nothing from the bullying? You still haven't answered any questions for your people.

Why do kids bully? And what of those precious kids who, for whatever reason, don't participate in the bullying? Who befriend the meek and the bullied from a place of social dominance? What are those kids smoking? Because the world needs more of that.

A Boy The Bullies Love To Beat Up, Repeatedly [NY Times]

The New York Times:

Most of the episodes follow two subjects and end with their forced, pat self-appraisals. ("My name is Suzy and mine is a story of a girl who started freshman year confused and unsure of herself and four years later really found out who she was.") And while High School Confidential has its flaws — it is choppily edited and far too spare in its depictions of the girls living rather than talking — it does us a service by portraying teenagers beyond the media's typical parameters of exceptionalism.

Chronicled from 2002 through 2006, they grapple with what their parents did a generation ago: Should I go to college? Should I have sex? They also wrestle with other issues: Drugs and alcohol are readily available, after-school activities and sports consume much of their lives, and some people have sex as easily as people once changed dance partners.The teens profiled went to Northwest High School in Overland Park, Kan., and though one lives on a farm, the others are daughters of suburbia and could easily be anywhere.

Somehow, even after following these girls from ninth through 12th grade, Confidential manages to make their stories boring. Watching it is like sitting next to your great-aunt as she flips through the family photo album. Individual pictures might grab you, but on the whole, you'd rather be cruising the mall. One wants to like these girls. They're forthright, articulate and darn cute with their straight long hair and braces that by junior year have disappeared, revealing perfect pearly whites. But they don't engage us, and that's not their fault. Their stories don't move us largely because of how they were shot and edited.

The premiere episode revolves around Lauren and Cappie. Lauren, the apple of her parents' eyes, is diagnosed with a brain tumor during her sophomore year. Cappie, the rebellious product of a broken family, veers off into a life of partying but has a change of heart.The series, from Liese's Herizon Prods. and New Line Television, is remarkable for the way it compresses time and hones in on pivotal moments. Even so, it might have been even stronger if Liese could have delved more deeply into these young lives so that we not only see the changes but also better understand, particularly in Cappie's case, how they came about.

Though the interview segments are sometimes compelling, High School Confidential tends to rely a little too much on talking-head footage of the girls and their parents.The show is often more interesting when it just shows the girls living their lives.

The trappings and small touches (such as the musical score) are, admittedly, a trifle soapy. Still, by choosing a heartland state and letting the girls and their parents speak naturally about what's transpiring, Liese and her collaborators convey the universal challenges of growing up — rites of passage that include concerns about sex, drugs and family issues, especially with divorce rates taking a toll on the traditional nuclear family. Given the ongoing culture wars, it's a timely reminder that such dilemmas are hardly confined to the big city.

High School Confidential [WE TV]

The site run by Bliss also has an "Airbrush Me" section which will give your photos "a celebrity makeover" — taking out red eye and zits.

Another site, run by Mizz magazine, asks readers to rate "lush lads" — pictures of shirtless boys. Maybe turnabout is fair play, but the message — that only the surface matters — is what sticks. The report states that in a study of 3,000 young women, more than half of 16- to 25-year-olds said that the media makes them feel that "being pretty and thin" is the most important thing.

Fiona Bawdon, the author of the WIJ report, says, "The message that you get in the editorial sections (of magazines), if a girl was to write in saying her nose was too big, is that you are fine as you are." But the websites do not have that editorial voice of assurance. "Should a teen magazine really be encouraging young girls to think in terms of 'hating' their still developing bodies?" And we're wondering — is there anyone out there who still thinks the next generation is going to turn out okay?

Girls' Websites Criticised For 'Lad Mag' Tactics [Telegraph]
Websites Aimed At Teenage Girls Using Lads' Mag Tactics [Guardian]
Earlier: Feeling Sexually-Objectified? It Could Be Your Own Damn Fault
Sexploits