[ABC News via Big Head DC

Mort Zuckerman
Publisher/EIC, New York Daily News. EIC, U.S. News & World Report.
Born: Montreal, Quebec.

Malcolm Gladwell
New Yorker staff writer, pop-nonfic author general media whore.
Born in the UK, raised in Elmira, Ontario. Attended the University of Toronto around the same time as Clive Thompson! And obv BFF w/ fellow frequent New Yorker contributer

Adam Gopnik
Born in Philly, raised in Montreal. Has also perhaps spent time in Paris? Someone look into this.

Graydon Carter
Editor, Vanity Fair
Born: Toronto, Ontario.

Dale Hrabi
Former editorial creative director at Maxim and elsewhere. Radar Editor at Large.
Worked at Canadian fashion mag Flare, just like:

Bonnie Fuller
Tabloid queen. Editorial director, American Media. Terror. Britney leaver-alone.
Born: Toronto.

Not pictured: Lorne Michaels, Rachel Sklar. Probably others! If you know of media-running Canadians we left out, drop us a line.

We sat at the press table (number 24) next to InStyle's Katrina Szish and her WASPily handsome beau Brant Stead. He has a tattoo of a skull and crossbones on his wrist! At table 25 next to us, we spotted Post dating columnist Mandy Stadtmiller. She was dateless. Next to her towering blond head was the towering black coiffure of Atoosa Rubenstein, Alpha Kitty.

Atoosa looks like a cross between Paul Bunyan and Bettie Page.

There was some tension at the table. Someone, Atoosa told us, had tried to be her friend on Facebook but was rejected. "I'm not using Facebook like other people," she said. "For me, it's only a social thing for people I've met and actually like."

Back at our table, two executives from Fairfield, Connecticut's public radio station (WSHU) were poo-pooing the fundraising techniques of WNYC.

Malcolm Gladwell's hair was somewhat less vivaciously upward than normal. He was nervous for the storytelling duel with Gopnik. We asked him about his blog and sometimes lack thereof.

"Well, I've been busy for the past year writing my next book so I haven't had the time, but now the manuscript is finished, so I'll be doing some more," he promised.

Asked by a companion whether it would ever be Livejournaly, Gladwell said, "It wouldn't be very interesting. 'I had a sandwich. I had a sandwich again.'" Fair enough!

So how did Garrison Keillor feel about being the first recipient of the Moth Award? "They want to start low and work up," he said. "It's the principle of show business."

And who did he like in the Gopnik v. Gladwell bout?

"Gopnik. I always go for the short man. It's the American way," he said.

Really? But Gladwell is such a fiesty thinker!

"He's not one of us," said Keillor. We presume he meant his UK-Canadianness. "He sounds like a character out of a Jane Austen novel."

Just at that moment, some goat cheese flew out of his mouth and landed on my hand. I tried to shake hands in a way that transferred the cheese back to its rightful owner but it didn't work out.

On stage, novelist Meg Wolitzer and Gopnick made jokes about Gladwell.

Meg: "They're making a movie of 'Blink.' Exterior Shot. Man blinks. Woman blinks. Both blink furiously as we fade out." Gopnik: "It's a short."

The moment came. Gladwell reprised a story of his about how he and William Booth had competed to work the phrase "perverse and often baffling" into the Washington Post. Gopnik went the Neal Pollack-daddyblogger route, telling a story of text message miscommunications with his son. Gopnik misinterprets LOL to mean "Lots of Love" and thusly uses it liberally during family crises. For example, "I hrd ur dad died. LOL" LOL, also LOL!

Andy Borowitz judged via applause meter, a method as reliable as a Diebold voting machine, and so the duel ended in a draw. Predicting such an outcome, the Moth had preordered two red sashes. "That way," said a Moth functionary later, "it kept us from any awkward situations with two of our favorite writers."

Vinny's was serving free pizza to the line at the velvet rope outside. An Acura SUV had been parked on the street—they were a Festival "partner." Pedicabs with the New Yorker logo emblazoned on their behinds dropped off women in earth-tone shawls and men in blazers. Acura, Citi, Grey Goose, Chevron, Banana Republic, and Samsung were partners as well; The official wine was Yellowtail.

Speaking of whores, a group of women smoking cigarettes and clutching their bright yellow tickets waited outside. One said, "MySpace feels dirty." Another said, "Yeah, the New Yorker festival is the new network." A middle-aged man used his dog Kira to attract a cluster of women.

Inside Hiro, I spotted these things:

• A middle-aged lady with a fancy fannypack dancing to the Zombies' "Time of the Season."
• A posing girl named Britney who had just broken up with Fancy from the band Fannypack.
• A cluster of gay Asian men in deep v-necks dancing dirtily with women with jewelry.
• A cadre of middle-aged women whooping it up like it was their kids' bas mitzvahs, arms waving in abandon, joy written into the creases and furrows of their smiling mystical faces as Britney Spears' "Gimme More" played.
• A pride of elderly who had read about the festival and were curious enough to check it out. Silver haired foxes, women with well-done dyejobs, holding hands, dancing old tymee.
• Brian Thomas Gallagher, formerly of Topic and now fact-checker for Vanity Fair. What was he high on? "Heaven," he said, which sounds like a designer drug from the 80s, but I think meant the music.
• Julie Bloom—formerly of Radar and the deceased Jane and now of the Times with co-worker Amy O'Leary. Bloom is a dance writer but refused to cast judgment on the dancing at the party.
• A guy who looked like a dickwad, whose shirt had the word Angel appliqued to the back, but who turned out just to be foreign. His name was Tice.
• Three couples seriously making out.

  By 1:30 a.m., the room was happily pulsating. Diplo interrupted the music only to say, "New Yorker, y'all." The woman in the fannypack bounced like she was on a pogo stick. A discoball was the blinding Copernican sun around which a thousand points of light danced. The three couples we saw earlier engaged in kissing, grew to four, to five and eventually were too many to count. The dance floor had become a fertile breeding ground.

As anyone who has entered the Strand's recently refurbished but still reassuringly musty digs on Broadway in the summertime knows, it's not so well-ventilated or cooled. Beads of sweat pooled on the necks of the mostly middle-aged revelers who crammed into the Strand's 2nd-floor event space (heat rises!), many of them still wearing their nametag badges from the BEA floor. Others accessorized with plastic party hats. There was also party-style candy available (Swedish fish and Mary Janes). The revelers munched on the candy but mostly avoided the once-cold, now disturbingly warm, cuts while a parade of famous literary New Yorkers took to the podium to sing the Strand's praises.

His Honor the very Honorable Ed Koch introduced each speaker. He even introduced speakers who had promised to speak but who had, for whatever reason, ultimately been unable to attend. "Liz Smith, everyone knows Liz Smith!" he said. "Liz Smith can't make it tonight." Everyone clapped anyway. Other bailouts included Malcolm Gladwell ("in Canada") and Nora Ephron, who was actually only running late. She rushed the stage fifteen minutes after all the other tributes had ended, grabbed the mic, and said, "I'm here! I just wanted to redeem myself." Okay!

Art Spiegelman spoke fondly of the "Strand stupor" that afflicts the store's compulsive browsers, while Frank McCourt pined for the good old days when "lurkers" prowled the aisles, in search of "all the possible deviancies of sex." Fran Lebowitz got off a good line about wishing the Strand was her apartment, and how New York is divided into two groups of people: "people with five thousand books and people with the space for them." Poignant and becoming ever truer! Kurt Andersen, who probably has plenty of room for his books, discussed the strange feeling of mixed joy and sadness that fills an author when he sees his own book for sale there: "Who the fuck sold their review copy to the Strand?"

The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik, all in beige and very small, discussed the Strand's contributions to his own growth as a writer and an intellectual, listing books and authors he'd discovered there whose work had shaped him. He described prowling the stacks in a state of "fervent solitude," "unshaven, with my gym bag slung over my arm." Despite this, the Strand is still an important cultural institution, worthy of being celebrated. Perhaps by its 90th birthday celebration, someone will have figured out how to open the windows.

Gallery: Strand 80th

But two of the oh-so-towering figures of early 21st century American intelligentsia were, to this observer's eyes, conspicuously missing: the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik, and Vanity Fair columnist and blogger James Wolcott. Both, it was said, had been invited. Neither, it appeared, had shown up. One could hardly blame Gopnik for not wanting to share a room with Wolcott, who so savaged him in the pages of the New Republic last month. But is Wolcott also wary of sharing room with his nemesis? Is Wolcott, dare we say it, scared? —Doree

Earlier: James Wolcott Finally Does The Adam Gopnik Takedown We've All Been Waiting For

I sometimes wonder if Adam Gopnik was put on this earth to annoy. If so, mission accomplished.

Mind you, he finds himself in fine company in my illustrious literary perp walk. Francine Prose, with her pinched perceptions and humorless hauteur—every time she brings out a new book (she is depressingly diligent), I find myself grumbling, "Her again?" I've never gotten the point of Paul Auster and his swami mystique and probably never shall, unless I move to Brooklyn and achieve phosphorescence. Walter Kirn, what a hustler. But no tactician of letters has shown a greater knack for worming his way into our hearts whether we want him there or not than Adam Gopnik, the art-world observer, former Paris correspondent for The New Yorker (out of whose dispatches was spun the bestselling Paris to the Moon), and the magazine's resident tone-poet of post-9/11 Manhattan, drizzling pixie dust across a cityscape that no longer bears the hearty flavor of "smoked mozzarella," as he notoriously described the downtown death smell. It isn't that Gopnik is ungifted or imperceptive, or a slickster trickster like his colleague Malcolm Gladwell, who markets marketing. He is avidly talented and spongily absorbent, an earnest little eager beaver whose twitchy aura of neediness makes him hard to dislike until the preciosity simply becomes too much.

A careerist with delicate antennae, he wants to be encouraged, petted, praised, promoted, and congratulated. (In Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker, Renata Adler memorably encapsulated his modus operandi: "I had learned over the course of conversations with Mr. Gopnik that his questions were not questions, or even quite soundings. Their purpose was to maneuver you into advising him to do what he would, in any case, walk over corpses to do.") He is forever soliciting the reader's approval with an array of cloying ploys that become gimmicky and self-conscious. If he can be considered guilty of "meaching" (Adler's picturesque word), it must be conceded that he has meached his way to the journalistic top, and an air of attainment cups his latest themed collection, Through the Children's Gate.

It's a wonder Gopnik himself wasn't on stage skimming above the London chimneys, such is his empathetic glomming-on. If it's trying for the wife to have Gopnik leaving a vapor trail around the house when strange exhilaration hits, it can't be easy for the kids having their father always hovering around for material, taking down their latest witticism at the dinner table to work into a future piece, documenting every rite of passage in Rea Irvin typeface. There are times when Gopnik's children seem to be trying to humor him, obliging dad with enough whimsical interludes and reusable anecdotes to get through the winter.

It's Time for The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik to Grow Up [TNR]

Gopnik MC'd the event. He installed his teenage boy in the front row with the finalists. What a thrill it must have been for Andy Borowitz, Ben Karlin, and DJ Javerbaum to meet the NYer's softball ringer. Proceedings were interrupted when Bernard-Henri Levy made a grand entrance, shirt agape, sunglasses on, and an elegant blonde woman at his side. Gopnik announced to the audience, we have honored guests from France. The crowd was annoyed, and didn't seem to recognize BHL, but many recognized the overwhelming smell of the French lady's perfume: Shalimar.

In the end, the crowd was thrilled by Jon Stewart's win. It was generally agreed that he has a great future in book publishing and humor writing.

And a good thing, because we've been thinking it's about time this Stewart fellow gets some validation.

Thurber Prize for American Humor [Thurber House]