In the fall 2001, Conde Nast shuttered the magazine Mademoiselle, the lady's lifestyle magazine helmed by Mandi Norwood. After a 66-year-history, the magazine fell to the wayside thanks to titles like Sassy and Jane (both shaped by Jane Pratt), which ushered in the notion of "transparency," where a magazine's editors talked with you, not at you.

Now, seven years later, the magazine gets the appropriate postmortem, with the book Thin Is the New Happy, from former mastheader Valerie Frankel.

We'd like to think that part of Frankel's book publicity machine makes it required to have the most scandalous tidbits fed in morsels to the press, like this weekend's Page Six item about how staffers competed with each other in the blood sport of starvation. But the book is called Thin Is the New Happy, and you can probably judge this one by its skeletal cover.

CONTINUED »