Last night at Capitale, The Moth celebrated ten years of storytelling. Media polymath Kurt Andersen, Jewy comedian Andy Borowitz, Irish actor Gabriel Byrne, potter Jonathan Adler and Lili Taylor all sat at one table in the front. Harper's figurehead Lewis Lapham didn't show. The main event: The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik would engage in heated storytelling duel with co-worker Malcolm Gladwell. Real estate mini-mogul Adam Gordon sat at the same table as Garrison Keillor, who was there to receive the first-ever Moth Award Honoring the Art of the Raconteur. Keillor looks like Dwight Schrute from "The Office" and is much funnier in person than on his overly precious show. Also he spat chevre on my hands and I haven't washed them since. Nikola Tamindzic was there, drawn like a shutterbug to an event.

Spy co-founder Kurt Andersen—whose jobs currently include 1. novelist, 2. New York mag monthly columnist, 3. "Studio 360" radio host, 4. IAC's "Very Short List" founder-consultant, 5. sometime blogger, 6. Random House editor at large—has "just inked a one-year deal to write two big articles for [fellow Spy cofounder] Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair estimated to be valued in the mid-five figures." [NY Post]

The Times examines the agreement between Rupert Murdoch and the Dow Jones board to protect the editorial independence of the Wall Street Journal: News Corp. would need the committee's approval to hire or fire editors. News Corp. and Dow Jones will jointly select the board's founding members, who would in turn choose future members.

The David Carr-Kurt Andersen Mutual Admiration Society survives competition for minor awards amongst its members. [WWD]

Kurt Andersen, whose name continues to be very difficult for the Times to spell, will finally have something to fill his days besides writing his column for New York magazine, finishing the two books he just sold, and hosting 'Studio 360.' He'll join his publisher Random House as Editor At Large, in which capacity he'll try to "find them two or three books that they publish a year." Sweet gig! But it's a less-happy day in career news for Daniel Menaker, Random House Publishing Group executive editor in chief, who will step down at the end of the month based on a decision he calls "mutual." "I cannot emphasize to you how fine I am about this," he says. Oh rly? Times bookladies Julie Bosman and Motoko Rich have an alternate theory: they think Menaker got Kunkeled.

152 days ago, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell gave up blogging. Five weeks and three days ago, Spy founder Kurt Andersen gave up blogging. But former Page Sixer and current Clinton litigant Jared Paul Stern is back on the horse! He wins blog thunderdome! A round of applause, everyone.

"So who says that book people don't know how to throw a great party!" crowed Nancy Bass Wyden, the glamorous blonde lady who, improbably, is the third-generation owner of New York's most beloved and endearingly crappy used book store. 'Everyone,' said the crowd with their eyes and wan applause. No offense to Nancy or the Strand! But by the time (8:00ish on Saturday night) she made her dramatic declaration, the book people were nearing the end of their annual spate of book people parties, and the Strand's valiant but sweltering contribution to the glut wasn't making much of an impact. There were cold cuts, though, and pickles, and photos by Nikola Tamnindzic and Ed Koch's reliable wackiness, and little Adam Gopnik!

The significance of holding last night's party to celebrate the New York Observer and its new website at the Four Seasons restaurant was intentional, obvious, and not at all lost on anyone. Despite its recent Frank Bruni demotion to two New York Times stars, the restaurant remains the symbolic and probably actual center of New York old-guard media power. After so many years of playing gadfly to the media, politics, and real estate elite of this city, the Observer and its boy-owner and his advisers chose to make a very specific sort of statement.

So Heyday, the new historical yarn from Kurt Andersen (the craggy-faced Tom Edison of satire!) took a bit of a pasting from the Times' Janet Maslin. It fared considerably better in that paper's ass-kissy Book Review. But how's it playing elsewhere? After the jump, an abundant yet random selection of recent reviews.

The powers that be are, earlier than usual, taking away an hour from the reality-based community tonight. We don't know why they're doing this, or how, but then again, most of the 'gosphere is still on the Julian calendar. In any case, losing the 2-3 AM hour shouldn't be too traumatic, except that the 47-hour weekend leaves us literary dilettantes who dawdled all week with an awful Sophie's choice: do we go back and read the Times review of Kurt Andersen's historical epic Heyday or the Times Book Review review of Kurt Andersen's historical epic Heyday?

• It's really, really hard to be so beautiful. Now shut up about it already, Michelle Pfeiffer and co. [Glossed Over]
  

• Jenna Bush decides to let the world know how to save the children. [USA Today]
  

At the Times, a bit of the editorial judgment is rendered in advance of a book review based on which critic does the actual reviewing. If Michiko Kakutani takes on your novel, it's a clear signal that it's an Important Literary Effort, worthy of deep analysis and significant enough to merit a serious limning. And sometimes reviews are assigned to Janet Maslin. This was the case for Spy founder and New York mag columnist Kurt Andersen for Heyday, his new historical romp (Stevedores! Daguerreotypists! Fishmongers!). On the plus side, she grades on a much looser curve than Kakutani. So, how'd it do?

"I don't think anyone over 22 has that ambition," Kurt Andersen said last night, when asked if he had been trying to write the Great American Novel. One might be forgiven for thinking he had set out to do so; his new historical novel, Heyday, is 640 pages long! And it's full of Great American Novel-isms: a transcontinental journey, a group of young people (including a virtuous prostitute), the mid-19th century, gold mining, California, New York... yes, it's all there. Last evening dozens of Andersen's close friends and associates came out to Graydon Carter's appropriately 19th-century Waverly Inn to f te him and his book.

It's Renovation Day on the web! Esquire, that bastion of middlebrow entertainment for men who need at least three beers before they'll go queer, has a shiny new site that appears to offer plenty of current content along with archives. Also, you get up-to-the-moment assessment of Britney Spears from noted Spears expert Chuck Klosterman; distressingly, it's actually pretty good. At the other end of the ledger, Kurt Andersen, who once edited something called, hmm, Sly? No wait, Spy, maybe? Anyway, he's blogging!

[David] Carr (whom I employed six years ago at Inside.com) is a quirky, entertaining, singular writer. I was pleasantly surprised when the paper of record hired and then promoted him to media columnist. But I was flabbergasted when they gave him a movie-awards blog (the Carpetbagger) and—the Times!—let him invent a weekly Web-video spot as a goofy man-on-the-street and celebrity-on-the-red-carpet interviewer. He's produced three dozen so far. There's nothing else like them in mainstream media. He is preternaturally perfect for the Web—a friendly, wisecracking 50-year-old character with a Minnesota rasp, the very opposite of self-serious.

We were ever so intrigued by New York's take on the ol' 'increasing popularity of anal sex' trend piece ("[27-year-old 'Jim'] agrees that it seems to be on the rise among his friends but wonders whether it's 'really a cultural shift or just something we ease into semi-contemporaneously as we age, like marriage or buying real estate or listening to jazz rap.'"). Our butts were hungry for more after we finished reading it, so we were excited to see Kurt Andersen picking up the theme in his Imperial City column, entitled "How The Middle Class is Getting Screwed." Then we clicked, and were disappointed.

Anal Sex is Increasingly Popular in the Hetero World [NYMag]

• Plucky Canadian feminist Rachel Sklar (happy birthday, kiddo!) confronts Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter about that Chris Hitchens "Bitches Ain't Funny" column. Carter pal Kurt Andersen defends Carter's right to run a whole bunch of crap in his magazine without reading it first. [Observer]
  

• Ex-Spy editors give freewheeling interview to ... Bergdorf Goodman magazine. [Michael Gross]
  

Above, enjoy one of the more staid events on the Spy revival/anniversary tour — more later this week! — courtesy of videographer Richard Blakeley and Intern Mary. A crowd of 30-something hipsters too young for Bob Dylan but too old for MTV crowded into the New York Public Library (NYPL, or "nipple") to hear former Spy magazine editors chat about everything from Hillary Clinton in bondage gear to the publishing business to pregnant Bruce Willis. "He didn't pose for that," Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter said when the Willis cover was projected. "That was me." Overall, the night was pretty tame, aside from Carter's out-of-control-classical-music-composer hair and the sexual tension between New York Times media columnist David Carr and everyone on stage, from the "powerful" Carter to the "mysterious" Kurt Andersen. George Kalogerakis somehow lurked in the background, as ever, despite being physically present in the foreground.