The Columbia Daily Spectator was able to raise a record-breaking sum of $95,921 at their annual Blue Pencil dinner, with a little help from media mogul Arianna Huffington and celebrated author Joan Didion.

According to the New York Observer, the dinner was $250 a plate, so the near $100,000 total was aided by some truly generous gifts, including $45,000 in gifts from former White House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum and Navigant manager Ernest Brod, both alums of the college paper.

Publisher of the Columbia Daily Spectator Aditya Mukerjee announced the results in an alumni newsletter, saying that the dinner was a “watershed moment” – it was their first dinner to feature a speaker from new media.

Times are changing! We’re glad to hear Arianna is helping to spread the wealth.

It takes a lot to bring America’s greatest living fiction, non-fiction, and journalism writers into one room, but if one woman could do, it’s Tina Brown. The Daily Beast editor-in-chief hosted the first ever Norman Mailer Colony soiree at Cipriani last night, to celebrate the non-profit in which promising young writers get to live in Norman Mailer’s house in Massachusetts for a week to a month.

Guests included Salman Rushdie, Joan Didion, Richard Goodwin, Michael Cunningham, Jeffrey Eugenides, Annie Leibovitz, New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick and master of ceremonies, Calvin Trillin.

Among the revelers were also editors and writers from The Nation, Budget Travel, The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Week.

A few pictures from the night after the jump.

Earlier: Norman Mailer Writers Colony To Honor Toni Morrison, David Halberstam

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Next week, the Norman Mailer Writers Colony will throw its first gala hosted by New York media bigwigs Tina Brown and New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick.

The gala, emceed by Nation columnist Calvin Trillin, will be held at Cipriani on Tuesday night and will also serve as an awards dinner honoring Toni Morrison with a Lifetime Achievement Award and posthumously bestowing the Distinguished Journalism Prize to David Halberstam. The first Norman Mailer National High School Nonfiction Writing Award and Norman Mailer College Nonfiction Writing Award will also be given out that night.

The writers colony is a nonprofit organization founded earlier this year, located at the home of the late author and Village Voice founder in Provincetown, Mass. It aims to help nurture writers in the spirit of Mailer, who passed away in November 2007 at the age of 84. The organization is billing this year’s gala as the “first annual,” presuming there will be more to come.

The group is also promising that boldfaced names like Joan Didion, Pete Hamill, Jhumpa Lahiri, Salman Rushdie, Gay Talese, designer Diane von Furstenberg and director John Waters will be in attendance, so you know we’ll be there covering the event.

Related: RIP, Norman Mailer

The last place we’d expect to hear the “f” word is the New York Women in Communications Matrix Awards but, thanks to emcee Rosie O’Donnell, the usually inspiring event had some cringe-inducing moments that raised more than a few eyebrows during Monday’s lo-o-ng afternoon at the Waldorf. The View moderator did get some big laughs, though — most notably when she recounted a conversation she’d had with presenter Martha Stewart about her stint in prison. In a pitch-perfect imitation of the domestic diva, O’Donnell recounted an exchange they’d had in which she asked Stewart what she missed most during her days in Alderson, West Virginia. The crowd erupted when O’Donnell deadpanned, “The taste of lemon. That’s no bullshit. You couldn’t write that in an SNL skit. That’s real.” The former “Queen of Nice” also garnered guffaws when she joked that Stewart had confided that she and her mogul-turned-astronaut boyfriend were “doing it on occasion.”

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