It's just about the godawfullest, basement-level, give-it-to-the-intern job in journalism nowadays--at least from the sound of Tina Brown's latest Washington Post/New York Sun column. What must the unfortunate correspondent on the Upper East Side dinner-party beat actually do? He must, she points out, consume expensively catered food and vintage wine while sitting next to "not just an endless round of U.N. ambassadors, visiting foreign ministers and 57 varieties of dignitaries," but also "their wives." The horror.

And yet she does it anyway! Tina Brown herself slogs through this muck, week in and week out, voluntarily--that's how much she cares about the news, about getting the story. For us, her readers. We are blessed.

We are blessed, for instance, in Brown's same aforementioned column, with an answer to the nagging, mystery question: "How come Kofi Annan hasn't been run out of the United Nations on a rail, already?"

It was only after she had dined with Mr. Annan "for the second time in two weeks"--at a Manhattan gala honoring "the Turkish prime minister"--that the dogged Ms. Brown finally uncovered the truth. It turns out the U.N. secretary general has survived in office despite various unchecked genocides and corruption scandals largely because he is "beloved in the higher reaches of New York City" society, whose members "encircle him protectively with feel-the-glow dinners all over town."