Us
This cover, showing a beaming Michelle and Barack Obama emblazoned with the words "Why Barack Loves Her," is perhaps part of the subtle image makeover we referred to earlier. Us seems very concerned with portraying the clearly awesome Michelle as a non-threatening soccer mom, and more importantly, differentiating her from Hillary. Says a friend: "[Michelle] is not the least bit interested in being a co-president or participating in policy decisions…Her first priority as a first lady would be that the girls are OK, and to continue to be the outstanding mother that she is." We always go straight to Us for astute political coverage. In other news, Hollywood wags think Katherine Heigl's career will be fine despite her ankling the Emmys. Pam Anderson and Tommy Lee are back together for the umpteenth time. They're like Bobby and Whitney but with exponentially more body modification. Finally, here's some news for all the hipsters out there: supermodel Helena Christensen has been "cozying up" to Interpol lead singer Paul Banks for over six months!
Grade: C (a timeshare in Cleveland)
In Touch
Rut roh! Angelina and Brad's CRISIS AT HOME in huge pink letters! They have a lot of babies, it's exhausting, it's possibly pulling them apart, and so on, and so forth. The only good part of this four page spread is the sidebar where Dr. Drew gives Angelina the business about her whole Mother Theresa routine. "I've never seen anyone remit heroin completely," Dr. Drew said. "Is she in recovery? If she's in recovery, I don't seen any evidence of it, because people in recovery invest themselves in simple, selfless acts of service, not global self-serving acts." Burn!!! On to matters of life and death: Did Mariah Carey have plastic surgery? Survey says: Probs. Her yo-yo dieting is well known and after her most recent weight loss, she has mysterious, Tara Reid-reminiscent ripples on her tummy. The liposuction of Mimi! Bret Michaels bonded with Sherri Shepherd when he went on The View because they both have diabeetus, but he wants to do it with Elisabeth Hasselbeck. "Barbara Walters was pretty hot," Bret admitted, "but Elisabeth Hasslebeck and me, I'm just telling her, if her husband ever falls out of the picture…" Scariest tabloid news of the week: Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt spent $10,000 on guns because Spencer wants to be "prepared for anything." Can't wait for the Branch Davidianish FBI raid on the Speidi compound…
Grade: C+ (an unheated shack on the coast of Maine)
Star
More Brangelina business. Angie has panic attacks due to the stress of her pregnancy and Shiloh's terrible twos. Apparently she's worried about how she's going to handle "two more needy little ones in an already chaotic household." Uh, probably with the army of nannies she already employs. Miley Cyrus reportedly gets thousands of love letters from prisoners, "who claim they've taped her picture up in their cells." Creepy to the max!! Was Matthew McConaughey macking on strange ladies during a recent trip to Nicaragua while his super-pregs girlfriend Camilla Alves languished at home? If the photos are any indication (see Fig. A below), the answer is yes. An amused onlooker tells Star, "He grabbed the DJ's microphone, crawled onto a table and screamed 'I lost my flip-flops!' in broken Spanish!" Britney and Jamie Lynn are none too pleased about mom Lynne's forthcoming memoir, Through The Storm: A Real Story of Fame and Family in a Tabloid World, which includes such revelations as Britney bit her nails as a kid. Shocking! And lastly, Jen wants boyfriend of thirty seconds John Mayer to marry her, but he's not down. Hmm, sounds dubious.
Grade: D+ (a metal trailer in Death Valley)
Ok!
Jeebus. Even more Angelina news. This time she's not stressed. In fact, she's so into all her babies, Ok! says, she's looking to adopt another boy. She'll get the lucky young tyke from the same Ethiopian orphanage where she found wee Zahara. Ange wants to "balance the races" in her household and since Maddox has Pax, now it's "Z's turn." Speaking of babies, Britney will charter a jet to Kentwood, Louisiana, the second lil' sis Jamie goes into labor. There are rumblings that Prince William and on-again, off-again flame Kate Middleton will be married next summer. Why did Anne Hathaway stay with scuzzy Raffaello Follieri for so long? Because he's a baaaad boy, of course. "[Women] believe that if we are wonderful enough, beautiful enough or sexy enough, we will cure them of their bad ways, and make ourselves all the more beautiful," Dr. Jenn Berman tells Ok!. Ugh. In other douche-dating news, David Spade says "girls date me because I'm normal." Good to know.
Grade: D- (a motel room on Three Mile Island)


Life & Style
Just when you thought she was getting better, L&S dredges up some old dirt: Britney tried to off herself twice, says a new book. Ian Halperin, an investigative journalist who is writing a bio of Brit tells L&S, "I can't divulge too much, but I will say the suicide attempts are true. I know all the details of both of them>" The book is also about how "sleazy and destructive" her handlers were, and how Britney is obsessed with Marilyn Monroe's tragic fate. The formerly self-destructive Nicole Richie is "back to her old ways" and is losing weight. She and Joel madden are fighting a lot and she's stressed out by baby Harlow. Unlike Nicole Richie, another Nicole (Kidman) is trying to gain weight. She thinks her baby bump is too small and wishes it were bigger. She also wishes that her jugs were bigger. Are Mariah and Nick already on the rocks? "I give the marriage six months, tops," says an insider.
Grade: D- (a teepee in Chernobyl)
Fig. A:

• Jessica Alba is pregnant! The father is boyfriend Cash Warren. Congrats? It's kind of worrying that they're on-again-off-again, sigh. Good luck, kids. [People]
  
• Geri "Ginger Spice" Halliwell supposedly pointed to Victoria" Posh Spice" Beckham's tummy during a show and allegedly said, "She's pregnant." Hahahahahaha, wait, what? [News.com.au]
  
• Madonna to New York City yoga class: "I want you all to leave." And they did! [Page Six]
  
• Speaking of her Madgesty, she was seen sporting two black eyes. Surgical procedure, perhaps? [Daily Mail]
  
• Custody battle news: Britney Spears will finally have her deposition taken under oath — today at 10 a.m. OMG. [TMZ]
  
• A French producer wants Britney Spears to play the Virgin Mary in a new film. But it's satire, see? [Page Six]

• Kiefer Sutherland has been getting "a ton" of fan mail while in prison, says an officer. "Easily more than 100 letters a day." Jack Bauer would have busted out by now, though. [People]
• Howard Stern is pissed Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck moved to his block on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, since the paparazzi now hang out there. Dude, they're not interested in you, srsly. [Page Six]
• Christina Aguilera ordered a set of photo enlargements from her Marie Claire pregnant belly photo shoot. Perfect to hang over the couch! [Page Six]
• Did Ethan Hawke bang the nanny while he was still married to Uma Thurman? [Gatecrasher]
• Chris Martin and Gwyneth Paltrow may have been on the rocks over the summer but they are totes happy now, so rest easy. [Gatecrasher]
• Blind item! "Which perfectly lovely young star has an ugly assistant who is ruining her reputation in celebrity circles with her rude behavior and love of freebies?" [Gatecrasher]
• This extremely old quote (originally from the January issue of Elle) where Angelina Jolie calls Shiloh Jolie-Pitt a "blob" and a likely "outcast" keeps getting recycled and taken out of context, and frankly we're sick of it. [MSNBC]
• Nicole Kidman may take a break from acting: She says, "A lot of my wish to work was about wanting to get lost, not wanting to be in the world." But now, "I have a reason to be in the world now and that reason is Keith." Aw, romantic. Now do something about his hair. [Telegraph]
• It was announced that Lily Allen will be a judge on the panel of the Orange Broadband Prize For Fiction, the prestigious literary award for female authors (past winners include Zadie Smith and Lionel Shriver). Literary Lil, sounds good. [Independent]
• Hulk Hogan is having a rough year: his wife Linda has filed for divorce and his son Nick is facing charges of reckless driving. "I just pray that things get better for my family," Hogan says. "I love my family and I love my wife to death and I just don't know what tomorrow's going to bring." [ABC News]
• Some idiot tried to rip Naomi Campbell's VIP pass from her neck at the Led Zeppelin show. Dude, you're begging to get pistol-whipped by a cell phone! [Daily Mail]

Welcome to Midweek Madness, our weekly binge on the sort of celebrity content we usually try so fastidiously to avoid every other day of the week. In which we "read" the Wednesday tabs. So you don't "have" to.

Us Weekly ("100% Paris Free!")
•Cover story: "Hollywood Baby Album!" Us clearly put a Herculean effort into coming up with Paris substitutes this week, starting with this eleven-page spread on Hollywood babies — the very definition of "filler topic"! A semi-creepy "My Life So Far!" sidebar on baby Suri (page 45) is written in Suri's imagined first-person voice.
•Although week's "hot story" for all of the magazines was Jessica Biel and Justin Timberlake's romantic Scandinavian getaway (pages 30-31). Us isn't as dick-sucky towards Timberlake as the rest of the tabs — early to the backlash, wethinks? — noting that he "turns women into Debbie Downers" and that he threw a tantrum in Sweden when some fans asked him to pose for pictures with them.
•Us also sports a preview of an upcoming interview with Nicole Richie in Nylon (page 56), which is a more refined twist on the "exclusive about an exclusive" feature. Nylon — unlike Atlanta Peach and Genre two magazines whose "exclusives" are reported "exclusively" this week by Page Six — is a magazine we have actually heard of.
•More filler! "Us Investigates" probes deep into the minds of 100 women at Rockefeller Center as to whether they would "rather date Prince Harry or Prince William" (66% said William!); "Have Michael Lohan or Joe Simpson as your dad?" (78% said Simpson, because making inappropriate comments about his daughter's tits is a lot classier than securities fraud!); and "Share custody with David Hasselhoff or K-Fed?" (63% said K-Fed). (Pages 58-61.)
•In more substantive content (not!) Us brings in the big guns of Hulk Hogan to declare "winners" in celebrity feuds (pages 62-63). [SPOILER ALERT: Tom Cruise beats Germany, Samantha Ronson beats Candy Spelling and Elizabeth Hasselbeck beats Rosie on grounds of "Rosie isn't a true friend."] A "bonus section" features LeAnn Rimes' "Hot-Weather Hairstyles" (pages 64-65), which, in our opinion, beats Paris news any fucking day of the week!

Star
•Cover Story: "Hollywood Baby Secrets!" (pages 48-55). More baby filler stories, which include the following huge secrets: Britney might not be the most mature mom (page 50) and Angelina lets Shiloh suck on a diamond-encrusted pacifier (page 52), because nothing says "I Am Africa" like a pacifier mined by child slaves!
•Meanwhile, on page 47, Star reports on more details of Timberlake's tantrum in Sweden, which involved the tossing of water bottles ping-pong balls and spitting on fans who had gathered below his hotel room. Jessica Biel reportedly "watched in horror" but she's still gonna stick with the asshole because this is pretty much the only thing her career is riding on right now.
•In its strangest story Star reports on an AIDS-related, health-coverage scandal in Florida we'd never heard about (page 38). It is, according to an "insider" at the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, "the kind of stuff that has Hollywood up in arms." Too bad it, uh, doesn't! The story quotes nary a celebrity, celebrity representative, celebrity flak or Hollywood "insider" professing "outrage" over the scandal, which basically amounts to Florida Governor Charlie Crist awarding a health care contract to a for-profit health care firm.

In Touch
•Cover Story: "World Exclusive! Inside Tom and Kate's Marriage!" (pages 36-39). Could Kate [That's better -Ed.] and Tom actually be living normal and happy lives together? Could Suri's cuteness factor be the reason that the celeb weeklies have decided to flip their opinion on the couple? Or did the editors at In Touch decide to suck it up already and try Scientology? Also, what's up with Katie's [Here we go again. -Ed.] new haircut? It's pretty, right? But isn't it weird when ladies get their hair cut suddenly after having babies?
•Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie's rivalry is back because they're both promoting products at the same time! This could only mean that they are still at each other's throats about Brad Pitt! (Pages 40-43.)
•Shar Jackson gives In Touch an exclusive denying her pregnancy rumors (pages 26-27). Can someone explain to us how this can be "exclusive" when Shar already filed a lawsuit against Star denying the selfsame pregnancy, and lawsuits are public documents, so it's like "exclusively" between her and ALL OF AMERICA? Must be that video of Shar "taking the test" at intouchweekly.com! Wow. It's really hard to make Britney Spears seem classy, but Shar really excels at it.
•Speaking of classy, In Touch documents stars' boobs from smallest to largest (pages 72-73) by guesstimating their sizes with the aid of some dude from The Swan and a random gynecologist. Bonus! Includes the famously creepy quote from Joe Simpson on his daughter's massive sweater puppies!

Life & Style
•Cover Story: "Angie vs. Brad's Family: It's War!" (Pages 28-31). Uh, in case you glossed over the news reported for the past three weeks in the celeb weeklies, Life & Style is here to spell it out for you: Brad Pitt's mom likes his ex-wife Jennifer Aniston! A lot! They hung out recently! At Jen's house! We'd feel like we'd read this same Angie-is-jealous-of-Jen story fifteen times now save for the new sidebar of, "Meanwhile, Jen's Dating" (page 31).
•Nick Lachey and Vanessa Minnillo were photographed nekkid in a hot tub in Mexico, where they went to escape all the media attention from those Lindsay knifeplay photos. (page 24-27). (Question: Why is "knife play" a phrase that just sort of rolls off our keyboards now? Is this even a real thing?) So we guess this means Nick forgave her, right? We can just sort of see him saying, all cheesy-like and whispery: "Next time some sexy photos of you wind up on the internets, baby, it's going to be pulling MY clothes off, got it?" Ugh. Puke.
•Ashlee Simpson spent a reported eight-hours at a salon (pages 52-53), which is controversial because she shouldn't neglect her very promising career in... whatever the hell it is she does!
•Lastly, it looks like the ombudsman over Life & Style is still upholding the validity of Spencer Pratt as a news subject. Who knows, you know: People made fun of the Washington Post for pursuing that two-bit burglary for so long; maybe The Hills is their Watergate! At any rate, Spencer's silicone-stuffed girlfriend Heidi Montag pops up on page 64 (get it? "pops up"?), while Spencer-nemesis and Teen Vogue cover-girl Lauren Conrad is dissed as a "Style Slipup" (page 81) by the likes of Road Rules "star" Theo Von. Ouch!

Welcome to Midweek Madness — our weekly gagazine fest with Intern Maria, who always wears cute outfits and makes us scared to leave the house looking like we do —in which we "read" the weekly tabloid magazines. So you don't "have" to.

Star
•Cover Story: "Angie's Down to 98 Pounds!" (pages 42-45). Star says that Angelina is still scary-skinny, having hot flashes and collapsing. Why? Because of her mother's death and her "punishing schedule". A cover story? Really? And this qualifies as "news" according to whom? The carrier pigeons who just delivered the Reader's Digest to Star's bureau in Bhutan?
•"Lindsay's Rehab Confessions" (pages 36-37). Star reports that some fellow rehabbers at Promises are spilling info from Lindsay's group-counseling sessions. The secrets: Lindsay has problems with men (no shit!) and uses alcohol as a means of coping with her own "social anxiety". Also: The staff at Promises worry that Lindsay might be bulimic, and Lindsay has told her mom Dina to put the brakes on her reported TV show before she ruins her other kids' lives.
•On page 49, Star runs an "exclusive" on a woman's three-month affair with George Clooney that she described to the U.K.'s Daily Mirror. (Funny how we thought that fact sort of made it the Daily Mirror's exclusive!) Star takes a little liberty in clarifying the woman's story by making sure to add that she is an "exotic dancer": "We kissed and cuddled into the early hours, but he didn't make me feel like a[n exotic] dancer"
•Nicole Richie has popped around 73,000 pills (pages 40-41)! Star editors calculate this number by taking the word of an "insider" that she used to take 50 pills a day starting at age twenty, then multiplying that by six years, then subtracting two of those years because she went to rehab a bunch of times. The story also contains the following pull-quote from an "insider": "Since she was 20, Nicole has taken enough pills for an entire population." An entire population of, um, moderately relaxed people?
•New contender for the Celebrity Couple You Least Want To Imagine Fucking Award: Tommy Lee and Kimberley Stewart (page 19).

US Weekly (Otherwise known as the New Yorker of celeb weeklies!)
•Cover Story: Hollywood's Hot New Diet! (Pages 50-55) Have you heard? Jessica Simpson has slimmed down a bit. Her trainer plugs his new book The 5-Factor Diet. A bunch of other celebs lost weight too! The trick apparently is eating fewer calories and exercising! The story contains the sentence: "(Go to 5factordiet.com for book and delivery service details.)" Wow, US really knows how to put the "service" in "service journalism!"
•Kyra Sedgwick poses the question "What is really the difference between putting makeup on and having stuff shot up your face?" (Page 16). Well, Kyra, besides the needles, and the money, and the fact that you can't steal a little evening Botox from Sephora, we're totally drawing a blank!
•Jessica Biel has officially had enough fake-tan sessions to play Mariane Pearl in the sequel to A Mighty Heart. (Page 37)
•"Us Plays Ask the Shrink!" (Pages 68-71). US asks Dr. Drew Pinsky to analyze celebrity behavior. According to Dr. Drew, Britney and Kelly Clarkson are the craziest, the latter for stating in Elle magazine that she doesn't want to get married. We think Dr. Drew is kind of crazy for thinking anyone who grew up listening to Loveline isn't totally afraid of twentysomething dudes.

In Touch
•Cover Story: "Nicole's Bump Gets Bigger!" (Pages 40-43) InTouch still wants to believe that Nicole Richie is pregnant, saying that she is avoiding alcohol. Yeah, in much the same way we avoid alcohol!
•Heroes star Hayden Panettiere's mom is trying to beat Dina Lohan in the department of Stage Moms Who Try Too Hard. (Page 17.) Seriously, who would mistake a woman wearing pantyhose for someone young enough to be Hayden's sister?
•Larry Birkhead moves into Anna Nicole Smith's house, classing up the joint with a leopard-print chair! (Page 45.)

Life & Style
•Cover Story: Wedding News! (Pages 40-42.) Can Life & Style find an excuse not to mentino The Hills' blondiful Heidi and Spencer? No they cannot! Also, the magazine's editors calm our fears that Jennifer Aniston might be rushing into things with her boyfriend of two-weeks, Paul Sculfor. Cause we were worried!
•Apparently Angelina Jolie wants to get married (pages 32-35) and Brad Pitt says that "his life began" the day he met her, thus creating a whole new barrage of stories for following week about how "Jen is hurt by Brad, again" and "Brad gives Jen the final message: it's over for good!"

Our pick: US! Though we sincerely hope Dr. Marc Siegel was not behind their estimate that John Mayer was once 225 pounds!

We're deadpanning it today, because we're horribly sick and after a few days of obsessing over the makeout session between Scarlett and that guy from Van Wilder who used to be engaged to Alanis Morissette, we think it's asking a lot for the celeb weeklies to expect us to get excited about Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal, Jessica Simpson and John Mayer and fucking Sanjaya. After the jump, our analysis.

Life & Style comes late to the Angelina hate-a-thon with the foursome's most brazen cover line, and the week's only substantive coverage of Brangelina's possibly faltering union.
Brad Asks: Why don't you love Shiloh?

Reese and Jake front InTouch and US Weekly, with US painting an overall more sanguine picture of the alleged affair, suggesting Jake is "finally, a man who'll treat her right" while InTouch passes it off as a "Revenge Romance" meant to bait Ryan Philippe. It is generally agreed that Reese "Little Miss Type A" Witherspoon likes to get what she wants, and what she wants is apparently Jake Gyllenhaal, although the closest anyone has to actual evidence of this is their flirtatious conduct on the set of the movie Rendition.

All four magazines give at least two-page play to photos of a bra-less Jessica Simpson making out with John Mayer in Tallow Beach, Australia, but the four magazines cannot agree on whether the beach stroll was actually a honeymoon or even what the word "honeymoon" means, with Life & Style the only mag with the balls to suggest an actual "wedding" transpired between the two and Star calling the trip a "secret honeymoon" while at the same time suggesting that Mayer actually used the honeymoon to propose to Jessica, which would technically negate the honeymoonery of the trip. US and InTouch, meanwhile, refer to the trip as a "seaside romance" and "true happiness," respectively.

For the second week in a row, Star gets the award for most intriguing cover, namely because the lead story, "Britney's Head-To-Toe Plastic Surgery" takes place primarily in the future tense, asserting that while the extent of Britney Spears' body transformation has thus far been limited to a few injections of LipoDissolve — more on that later! — her surgery plans involve exactly $130,000 worth of nose jobs, tummy tucks, boob lifts, etc. etc. etc. The goal of this hypothetical surgery, according to the magazine, is to win back and/or stoke the jealousy of exes Justin Timberlake and/or Kevin Federline, and an accompanying sidebar suggests that the efforts may not be entirely in vain, at least with the latter, whose ex-wife Shar Jackson's surgery was detailed in last week's tabloid and who this week, according to Star, had unprotected sex with Federline.

US Weekly
Life & Style Weekly
InTouch Weekly
Star Magazine