This week’s cover of Life & Style features an odd shout-out to footwear company Skechers (“This minute’s hottest sneakers”) alongside an “Exclusive!” report on Brangelina‘s split.

How did Skechers get to share front cover real estate?

Jossip reports on the anatomy of the Skech-y deal:

Their relationship with L&S took a turn for the nearly-ruined when it ran a spread on Ashlee Simpson — otherwise known as The Face of Skechers — in their April 30 issue about the pop tart’s “new look,” with a caption that read: “Ashlee Simpson went back to basics in a comfy pair of black-and-white Vans.” As you might imagine, the shoe company’s account execs weren’t pleased to see: 1) The face of their line wearing another company’s shoes; and 2) The magazine they spend so much cash with touting it.

So how does a magazine like Life & Style mend that relationship? Voila! Cover!

In Touch made headlines last week for planning to put the Virginia Tech tragedy on its cover, offsetting it’s normal, celeb-u-tard-fused content. Well, they did — very noble of them — but specter of a Brangelina breakup (and, to a lesser extent, John Mayer and Jessica Simpson‘s unlikely love affair) proved too much to leave off the April 30th issue’s cover entirely.

The In Touch cover recalled a similar tragedy bet-hedging move by People, which devoted most of its Hurricane Katrina cover to the tragedy, but curiously included a top-right cover line to its annual “Best and Worst Dressed” list.

Pop culture, it seems, is just too enticing for magazine editors to forget.

The reported Justin Timberlake-Cameron Diaz split — the first big one of 2007 — has celebrity media outlets in a tizzy. You know who else is in a tizzy? E! gossipist Michael Malkin, who appears to’ve been counting down the minutes since Britney dropped K-Fed to write this:

Perhaps Timberlake and Diaz are the latest victims of E!’s Love Ride curse. If Timberlake and Diaz are over, that means three of the eight couples featured in the new series have gone kaput. With Pamela Anderson and Kid Rock along with Britney Spears and Kevin Federline over, who’s left to worry about the curse? Brangelina, TomKat, Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck, Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, and Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick.

Three of eight, huh? That’s not exactly Madden Curse territory.