An anonymous report from last night's conversation between columnist/talk show host Tina Brown and New Yorker writer Ken Auletta at the 92nd Street Y:

1. Really, really sparse house, less than half full. I don't know what kind of box office these events typically do, but this can't be particularly impressive, given that both interviewee and interviewer are big names that should be big draws.
2. The crowd was (surprise!) nearly all old lefties. (Wait, small audience, almost all old? It's the entire viewership of Topic [A], all in one room!)
3. Tina was—how to put this gently?—not good. This woman's job description is now theoretically talk-show host, right? She fumbled her way through her intro and then proceeded to simply go down her list of fawning questions for Ken, never actually having a conversation. ("What makes you such a fearless reporter?" actually wasn't one of the questions, I don't think, but they were all in that vein.) Her performance was about what you'd expect from a high-school kid playing "newscaster" on the local public-access channel, complete with the cache of 5-by-7 cards in her lap that she reshuffled from time to time.
4. Ken clearly sensed this, and after about 40 minutes he managed to usurp Tina's role as the questioner. "Well, I have something I want to ask you, Tina," he said, and, frankly, the whole thing got much more interesting at that point. "So what do you think about the Tony Blair condemning the media in Commons today?" led to a much more interesting thing to watch than "What made you want to be a journalist, Ken?"
5. Next on CNBC: Topic [A+] with Ken Auletta?
6. The Y people said the would last an hour and a half or maybe an hour and 45 minutes. Tina had had enough by about an hour in and shut things down.
7. Ken signed books after. Tina stood around looking confused for a bit. Suddenly the famous Wolff characterization of her—I don't remember it exactly, but something about her looking like a bag lady, asking how to get to Madison Avenue, which she was in fact standing on—made, with a little critical interpretation, a lot more sense.