Along with youth, Don Draper’s new wife, Megan, apparently has a sharpened sense of seduction. When picking a siren song to perform for Draper’s 40^th birthday during the season-five premiere of Mad Men, Megan passes over hits by American pop’s reigning songstresses in 1966—Nancy Sinatra, Petula Clark, Dusty Springfield and the like—and instead chooses a flirty French tune written as a teen confection, Zou Bisou Bisou.

Of course, the song also speaks to Matt Weiner’s own powers of seduction, as the popular series’ writer continues to ensure that musical precision remains part of Mad Men’s allure.

But what, exactly, is Megan singing? And what are the song’s origins?

January Jones’ Bra Trick

A former model who turned to acting, Jones says she didn’t want to over prepare for her role as Betty Draper—she only read The Feminine Mystique and Revolutionary Road. In the video below, Jones talks about her first job playing Gwyneth Paltrow in a TV commercial, what she thinks of the Betty Barbie and how the series’ undergarments help prop up her character.

John Slattery: I Was Naked!

Hot on the heels of the release of Newsweek's highly anticipated 'Mad Men' issue, The Daily Beast's Brian Ries will play host to four well-regarded advertising executives—the modern Mad Men—for a live chat during the first hour of the show's Season 5 premiere. The chat will be embedded in the frame below, and readers are invited to take part. We'll kick things off Sunday March 25, at 9 p.m. ET. If you'd like to join the conversation on Twitter—we'll still feature your tweets in the chat—the hashtag is #MadMenChat.

Jeff Rosenblum is drinking tea at Soho House, a private club in lower Manhattan, and explaining to me that most advertising doesn’t work, and that the entire advertising industry is stuck in the past and desperately needs to be blown up and reinvented—not exactly what I’d expected to hear from a guy who runs an advertising agency that counts Suzuki, Universal Theme Parks, Capital One, and General Mills among its clients.

“Advertising hasn’t changed since the 1960s,” says Rosenblum, 40, the cofounder of a 50-person agency called Questus that specializes in digital media and just won an Agency of the Year award from iMedia, a publication that tracks the online marketing industry. “But we’re on the verge of a revolution. People are starting to realize that there are more effective ways to build a brand than through advertising.”

Rosenblum is so passionate about this that he’s even made a documentary film, The Naked Brand, in which he bashes his own industry. “My father looked at it and said, `So what’s your master plan here? Because it looks like you’re going to get hoisted with your own petard,’” Rosenblum says. But the son disagrees: he thinks the revolution is coming whether people like it or not, so he might as well become part of the destruction.

It’s a rainy morning in Los Angeles, and Elisabeth Moss, who plays Peggy in the television series Mad Men, is standing outside the stage door smoking. On the set the actors are restricted to herbal cigarettes, which is why she has ducked out for what she calls “the real thing.” I explain who I am (a reporter from Newsweek) and why I’m there (I started as a secretary), and she exclaims, “I am you!” Moss’s character, Peggy Olson, is a striving Norwegian-American Catholic girl from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn (coincidentally my birthplace, too), who starts her career in 1960 as a secretary “straight out of Miss Something secretarial school,” she says. That was the path then for women, and as Mad Men enters its fifth season on AMC March 25, Peggy has gained recognition for her skills as a writer, rising from Don Draper’s secretary to his trusted No. 2 in the creative department at the fictional ad agency Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. Her success is not without cost, as she puts her personal life on hold. Moss says a woman like Peggy “didn’t want to take men down and cause a ruckus; she loves writing, that’s all, and wanted a chance to do it.”

Women weren’t supposed to be openly ambitious in the ’60s. When I started at Newsweek As a secretary, I was thrilled to be where what I typed was interesting. I was the daughter of immigrants, my father had a deli, and my mother made the potato salad and rice pudding. It didn’t occur to me that I could be a reporter or a writer, but the frustrations that within the decade would produce a women’s movement were taking root at Newsweek.

The two days I spent hanging around the set of Mad Men were like entering a time capsule that took me back to that period in the ’60s, everything from the pencil skirts and stockings with garters to the electric typewriter that was the latest technology. Critics have assailed the way everybody on the show smokes, glorifying a nasty habit that carries significant health risks. But that’s the way it was then. The public high school I attended in Queens even let us out for a smoking break.

Luck Be a Lady: Mad Men accurately reflects the Madison Avenue advertising culture that created the Marlboro Man and had doctors offering testimonials about their favorite brand of cigarette. When Draper, the agency’s creative director and Mad Men’s protagonist, comes up with the tagline “It’s toasted” for Lucky Strike, he’s told that all brands are toasted. Without missing a beat he says, “Everybody else’s tobacco is poisonous. Lucky Strike’s is toasted.” The remark illustrates the central theme of Mad Men, the making and selling of the American Dream by Madison Avenue in the early ’60s—before civil rights, feminism, and antiwar protests forced a great awakening on the ruling class. The actors who play these retro characters are all too young to have experienced the ’60s and think of the era as “the good old days,” but that’s true only if you happen to have been born white and male and heterosexual.

Welcome to Newsweek’s time machine. To celebrate the start of a fifth season of the TV show “Mad Men,” set in a Madison Avenue ad agency in the 1960s, we’ve retrofitted this issue to the restrained design style of those times.

The idea arose from a conversation with the show’s creator, Matt Weiner, who remarked that the buzzing content of the 1960s Newsweek was frequently the subtext of his show. The office psychodramas in “Mad Men” ran parallel with a serial melodrama in the news that Newsweek covered with panache: civil rights, women’s lib, the Kennedy assassinations, Vietnam, man on the moon—even the dominance of that new tech phenomenon the Xerox machine.

We invited the Hill Holliday ad agency in Boston to collaborate on our cover shoot, and its creative director, Lance Jensen, had a brain wave: wouldn’t it be eye-catching for our pages to reflect not just the editorial look of the ’60s but also the advertising idiom of the time? The concept caught fire, and soon creative directors from agencies all over were diving into their vaults to dust off visuals from old accounts like Spam, Tide, Dunkin Donuts, and Hush Puppies. Ad agencies like Brand Cottage, not around in those days, went retro just for kicks. I spent a happy hour before Christmas trawling through ancient footage at the BBDO agency that featured an on-camera office tour conducted by a voice of God. A snippet: “And here we are at the entrance of Madison Avenue’s thriving advertising agency with that requisite of all successful agencies, a very attractive receptionist” (zoom in on winsome blonde).