Last night, the D.C.-based Atlantic magazine celebrated 150 years of thought at the Kimmel Center Loading Dock at N.Y.U. In a striking display of awful judgment, the VIPs (Arianna Huffington, Moby, the Mayor) were allowed (forced) to mingle on stage. The poors sat in chairs in the auditorium and watched. Jared Kushner was either wryly funny or a dick. Porn queen Robyn Bird went unrecognized by Robert DeNiro and Boykin Curry claimed he doesn't rent his island paradise to whores. God, 'Ad Age' even turned against local goddess Patti Smith. Richard Blakeley was there to tell us what social apartheid looks like. That's satirist P.J. O'Rourke trashing the party from the stage, by the way. Welcome to the social disaster of the season!

Fishbowl watch: Simon Dumenco at AdAge slams Arianna Huffington's Huffington Post a second time for not paying their bloggers. But for most of Huffington Post's celebrity contributors, a blogger's paycheck wouldn't be worth the time it would take to cash it. HuffPo seems to be doing all right, which means the real compensation for a post there is the kind of in-crowd recognition that can't be bought.

The new editor at TechCrunch, Erick Schonfeld, has gotten a little IPO-crazy in these heady days of Bubble 2.0. The best guess we've seen on a Huffington Post valuation is $60 million which, for a media company, is a drop in the bucket. We can't remember a tech or media company going public with a valuation anything like that. Huffington Post is the most unlikely IPO candidate since Wired in 1996 — and Wired had substantially more revenues and a real magazine business. Maybe we were onto something with the whole cheese thing. More likely? An acquisition.

At PaidContent, Rafat Ali picked up this interesting fact from a perfunctory USA Today profile of Arianna Huffington: Her company, The Huffington Post, has raised another $5 million in financing. With blogging companies in vogue with big media, though, that strikes me as small change. Huffington doesn't even pay most of her celebrity bloggers, so it's not clear what she would need the money for. But one wonders why she didn't take more money off the table. Could it be that, despite all the buzz, the Post's blog-for-free business model isn't all that hot?

If the idea of a musical featuring a duet between Nick Denton and Arianna Huffington doesn't appeal to you, you're obviously not Simon Dumenco's editor. Hey, Simon, don't quit your seven million other day jobs. [AdAge]

So you're reading Rush & Molloy this morning and you come across this:

"I want to apologize to all the black tech bloggers. It could have been any ethnic group. It could have been gay guys, could have been Jews, could have been micks, skinnies, chinks, any of them...It was just your guys' bad luck that it went down that way...I'm a fucking idiot comedian and I did this." When PodTech promised to sign on more "professional producers," did it mean a white guy putting on a blackface minstrel show? Because that's what PodTech talent Loren Feldman has been up to, as part of a freakish little "opera" this videoblogger has engineered over the past week. Here's the story as told in videos, from "TechNigga" to Loren screaming, "No balls on any of you, you're just fucking sheep."

"We're trying to be a news organization — we're fair," [Salon CEO Joan Walsh] said, leaving the inference clear that Huffington Post is more slanted toward opinions. Walsh also insists that Salon plays its politics down the middle, although anyone who reads it — of either political stripe — would beg to differ.

Arianna Huffington, personality and political blogger, continues to embrace all things new and Web 2.0 by introducing Digg-like functionality to her self-named web property, The Huffington Post, or Huffpo for short. Dubbed, unsurprisingly, HuffIt, the beta service apes Kevin Rose's voting and news aggregating service Digg. Although not a direct threat, the introduction does shed light on the challenges facing Digg.

Self-made force of nature Arianna Huffington was in Toronto on Monday night... publicizing her latest book, On Becoming Fearless. She is best known for her online news and opinion site, the Huffington Post. Co-hosts of the fest were Dominion Institute's Rudyard Griffiths; National Post gossip extraordinaire Shinan Govani; Rachel Sklar, a Huffington Post editor and friend of Ms. Huffington's... The Greek-born, Cambridge-educated, power-vibing Ms. Huffington gave a little speech in which she lamented the fact she was not carrying a handbag and had received so many business cards from people that she had been forced to stuff them into her bra. Noting her friend Ms. Sklar is a D-cup, Ms. Huffington then expressed the hope that the business cards had turned her into a D-cup from a B. Not your usual speech at a soirée, but clearly fearless.

Tourists and teenagers outside the Time Warner Center last night clutched digital cameras, all hoping to get their very own photograph of John Mayer or America Ferrara as they arrived to celebrate the Time 100—the Most Influential People in the World! (One assumed that crowd was less interested in arrivals such as Dr. Henry Kissinger.) Inside, the scene was more of the same: dozens of professional photographers jockeying for position, a crowd of onlookers. It seemed appropriate that the Time Warner Center is just a big mall. The scene could have been one that gets played out in Tallahassee and Des Moines and Houston every time Miss USA comes to town. We took tourist-photos too, with Nikola Tamindzic, who has even more.

Left: Paul Wolfowitz and Arianna Huffington yuk it up in D.C. over the weekend. Right: New York Observer media reporter Michael Calderone flanked by Corynne Steindler and Bill Hoffman of Page Six, last week. [Photos: Julia Allison & ETP.]

Perhaps no one was more eager to leave the dinner than David Geffen and Arianna Huffington: Geffen and Huffington bolted super early and were already in his jet before the dinner had ended. One person who approached Arianna to chat as she was leaving the dinner got the cold shoulder. "Darling, I would love to talk, but I'm getting a ride back with David on his plane." (Oh, and Huffington's efforts to hide her black right eye with bangs didn't fool everyone. She earned the bruise recently when she passed out and hit her head on a desk.)

It was March 29, 2006, that Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers launched Dealbreaker, the first of her grown-up internet ventures. Just a few weeks more than a year later, that new media party is over. From her email, just sent: "My partners and I have an insurmountable difference of opinion regarding long-term strategy for the company and we've come to point where I would like to do some projects that are materially riskier and more experimental than Dead Horse's existing properties, and they would prefer to pull back and focus solely on the sites we have." We always thought the safe, happy years for talent came when you stopped working for the millionaire and went out in partnership. Guess not. (Who were we kidding? Oh right, ourselves.) So how long until Ken Lerer turns on Arianna Huffington? How long until Michael Jackson and Barry Diller turn on Kurt Andersen? Heck, how long until Barry Diller tries to spit-roast the College Humor boys? Jon Fine has more.

• Welcome back to CBS Radio, CEO Dan Mason. There are a couple of items in your inbox. Start with that Imus folder. [NYP]
  

• Drew Barrymore didn't even have to win Top Model to get a contract with Cover Girl! "'How do I honor the tradition of Cover Girl and still bring myself?' Barrymore said she asked herself before doing the print campaign. 'It is a tone and a feeling.'"[WWD]

We recently received a solicitation from video chat site Paltalk to see if we'd like to join in an interview with Amanda Congdon. Talk about a short memory. A few months back, Paltalk got in touch with Gawker for a chat with Congdon and Arianna Huffington. We cooperated, on the condition that we'd get to run a highlight clip on Gawker. Unfortunately (for us), things did not go as planned.First, we asked for reader queries, and received the expected raft of obscenity and foolishness. There were a few gems, which we dutifully compiled for use. However, we'd have to settle for just Arianna, as Amanda, now on West Coast time, wouldn't be interviewed until the New York staff was well into the second half of happy hour. So fine, Huffington solo.

Paltalk prez Joel Smernoff showed up at Gawker HQ to set up the video feed, and our own Intern Heather (now Editorial Assistant Heather) asked the questions. By all accounts, Huffington handled even the coarsest questions with characteristic aplomb, and all present were dutifully amused. You'll never know though, because after a day of silence, Smernoff finally responded to our "where's the damn clip" emails:

Familiar with Paltalk? Of course you are! It's

Snow-locked actor Ted Danson may have escaped blogging duties on the Huffington Post, but that doesn't mean he eludes Arianna's grasp. Somehow and somewhy, A-Huff has a cameo on Danson's new sitcom, Help Me Help You. In her scene, Huffington is supposed to talk up a friend that Danson is dating. HuffPo readers are asked to pick the best one-liner for Huffington to utter; all four variations were filmed for reader review, and with each one, Danson does a more extreme "wh- wh- wh- whatty what?" goofy reaction. Whichever choice proves the most popular will supposedly go on the show. Our money's on the Hurricane Katrina joke. Don't even get us started about "nibble and quibble."

Wynn-Picasso leak update: After favorite suspect Jacob Bernstein came forward to say it was actually his poker- and punk-playing brother Max (pictured) that their mother Nora Ephron had told about Steve Wynn poking his Picasso, we added Max to the suspect poll. This cleverly spread out the Bernstein suspicion among the two brothers, leading to Barbara Walters taking the lead. Now Max writes in to defend himself as well, and he brings a new character into the scenario — Arianna Huffington: