Wired editor Chris Anderson tonight came face-to-face with the "Long Tail," his oft-cited metaphor for low-grade internet fame, via an encounter after the National Magazine Awards with fameball Julia Allison. Star Editor-At-Large Allison worked Anderson hard, no doubt as part of her relentless effort to take the "proto" out of her protocelebrity — to be more than tail, basically. She reports on her blog that she chatted Anderson up for 20 minutes and ended up "bopping him enthusiastically." Wait, Julia. Didn't you just tell the Times you were going to stop using your "pink-encased loaded weapon" this way?? Anyway, alternate photo captions for the picture above are totally welcome after the jump. Even if you're drunk. Especially if you're drunk. [Julia Allison: 1, 2, 3, 4]

Gawker's Hamilton Nolan is at the National Magazine Awards, and notifies us via his Sidekick that Anderson Cooper is there! Someone else emailed us a photo of the adorable silver-haired CNN anchor (left) earlier tonight, looking pretty casual. Oh, also, on a less important note, some awards were given out to various magazines. Hamilton said something about New York's Gawker story, "Everybody Sucks," losing to Atlanta magazine's "You Have Thousands of Angels Around You." Outrage! Everybody sucks!! Anyway, it looks like the full list of winners is up and the only multiple-award winners were National Geographic (three awards) and Vanity Fair (two). Nominated for 12 awards, the New Yorker took home just one, though it was for general excellence, so that's nice. I mean, err, it sucks! Everybody sucks! [National Magazine Awards]

So, was Esquire's last-minute inclusion as a finalist in the National Magazine Awards a stroke of luck for the languishing Hearst magazine, or merely the result of a fix? As you might have read, David Granger's men's title, which used reliably to feature in several categories in the magazine industry's annual exercise in mutual flattery, only received a solo nomination for its work in the past year. Mixed Media's Jeff Bercovici explained that even that was a fluke: the nomination was to have been New York's, until the judges realized that the magazine, an awards hog, had naughtily entered material it had already submitted in another category. So, a lucky break. Or maybe not.

The women of America were shocked this week when Calvin Trillin's essay about his wife, the one that made all of them cry for a month, or maybe two, was denied a National Magazine Award. It looked like a shoo-in, for sure! We're not accustomed to reading the Georgia Review, which won for Michael Donohue's "William Russell and Mary," about a guy who found an apartment in Park Slope seven years ago and then went through his dead landlady's stuff. (Whatever. Who hasn't?) But now we know why it won: because it totally trounces Calvin Trillin in the turgid overwritten weird elderporn department.

Doree and Nikola put on their fancy clothes last evening for the National Magazine Awards, where editors and publishers swill champagne and pat each other on the back for several hours.

Tomorrow night, the magazine industry will gather at Jazz at Lincoln Center for this year's National Magazine Awards. (Nobody bomb that precious braintrust!) Their theme this year: We are Magazines, Take Us Seriously! Which is why they are having celebrity presenters. Har! Anyway, who's likely to take home the trophies (called Ellies) in the major categories?

So! City Magazine is up for two National Magazine Awards. True, they're for photography, but still. We decided to try and figure out why ASME has such a hard-on for them—they were also been nominated for General Excellence in 2002, and Design in 2004, and they won for Photography in 2004—so we looked at their latest issue, which is about travel to places you can't afford, like Patagonia and a fancy train that takes you from Venice to Paris to London, and Sonoma County in California, where you can drink expensive wine. Just like in Sideways!