“Even a year ago, I didn’t know there were people drinking diseased water,” exclaimed model and onetime aspiring dentist Jessica Stam, the event’s co-host, resplendent in a vintage, studded Halston frock. “People there drink water from rivers that animals shit in!” lamented another model, Behati Prinsloo.

Also co-hosting was Entourage star Adrian Grenier, wearing a spiffy black suit, red tie, red Converse sneakers and a bit of a scowl. So what are next season’s plot developments? “There’s not going to be a next season!” huffed the HBO heartthrob. “You write to your studio and tell them to give more to the writers and stop hoarding all the money for themselves!” O.K.!

In the crowd: MTV host Damien Fahey, actor Michael Pitt, director Terry George, musician Moby, and cuddly designer Isaac Mizrahi with his boyfriend Arnold Germer, an actor. “Arnold and I are so looking forward to just going to Bridgehampton with our kiddies [dogs] Dino and Harry, and I’m looking to go on an eating binge,” Mr. Mizrahi said of his holiday plans. “Even though I shouldn’t really do that!” Any Christmas wishes? “I won’t even say! I have my heart set on something but it’s too late! I’m not even going to ask because he won’t get it for me!”

I nod my head unconvincingly and try to Google it in my head. How do you spell de Bergerac?

“He was my great inspiration,” said Mr. Temtchine, a Paris-born movie producer and former hairstylist who is going to give a lecture, “How to Seduce Difficult Women,” in New York starting at the end of January. We were at Le Bilboquet, the tiny East 63rd Street bistro favored by Brioni-clad Euro men and their ladies. The frosty reception that had greeted my entrance melted like April snow once it was clear I was there to meet “Reee-charrrd!”

Not particularly tall, Mr. Temtchine has a boxy stature, salt-and-pepper tousled hair that’s long enough to grab in fistfuls, and a face that resembles Mikhail Baryshnikov’s. (The specifics of his age turned out to be a bit murky. “When I need to be childlike—which women adore!—I am 10,” he said. “When I am in love, I am 20; when I am not, I am 20 plus tax, and I pay a lot of taxes!”)

“Like so many men today,” he continued, “Cyrano was trapped in shame, unable to face himself, or love. But me, I love being who I am! If more people loved themselves … they wouldn’t have such a hard time seducing others.”

I surveyed him as I slurped some melted ice from the bottom of my glass and chomped on it, because it was late and I was kind of hungry. The father of two and a Harlem resident, Mr. Temtchine was married just once, at 20. (“I had to get away from my mother.”) One of his children resulted from the marriage; the other from a long-term relationship. He spent 20 years working in New York as a hairstylist, “making beautiful women even more beautiful,” all the while listening to their complaints, their desires, their frustrations with men. Then he turned his attentions to Hollywood, producing films including the Adrien Brody ventriloquist movie, Dummy, in 2002. He’s currently directing a film he wrote, titled, yes, How to Seduce Difficult Women, about a French man in New York who helps the relationship-challenged learn the art of seduction. The film is expected to open in the summer.

His seduction film and lecture arose when he realized his decades as a hairstylist made him one of the few straight men with an all-access pass to the portal of feminine insight. The lectures, the first to be held at Opia on East 57th Street on Jan. 28, will feature Mr. Temtchine along with five “gorgeous and difficult” women whom he chose at random from coffee shops and cafes, using a sixth sense that, he explained, told him they were difficult.

New York is full of difficult women, he reminded me. (It occurred to me: I am one of these difficult New York women.) I asked him for some tips he’ll be giving in his lectures.

If you expect to seduce an interesting women, make sure you are interesting. Remember, like attracts like! Incorporate interesting activities into your routine.

Do not be afraid. Women can smell intimidation and it is not attractive.

Harness your humor. Utilize it wisely. Avoid crass banter.

Above all, he said, know yourself.

“Because in approaching a women, it’s never going to be what you look like or how much money you make,” he said. “It’s going to be who you are, and women being far more instinctive than men, they will find out much faster than you will who you are. They will make a judgement very quickly, and you will have no idea who you are.”

He said he understands the plight of the New York alpha male.

“City men spend most of their time trying to make money, for the simple reason that this city is so expensive!” he said. “New York men don’t have time to devote to seduction, they become deprived of the ability. … These men need simply to be abilitated!”

(I smile to myself and wonder if this inventive verbiage is a sly seductive tactic, a tiny portal to endearment.)

So why is he the one to abilitate them?

“Well,” he said, “you have some experts that come with say, 10 years of experience, but me, I come with 500 years of French culture and seduction trailing behind me! I’m just reporting it. Molière, Cyrano, Balzac! The great art of seduction comes from all these French novels and novelists…Cyrano de Bergerac is only one of the books you have to read in terms of becoming literate. Literature played a great deal of importance in my upbringing whether I like it or not. In France, you have to read the classics!

“As a child you grow up with an image,” he continued, “this fantasy. Your imagination is stimulated by all the women you can conquer, because you come from these incredible novels. As you get older, you begin looking for all these beautiful women you can conquer. … If you think about the fact that the French have all their senses stimulated by food, wine, smell, aesthetics, fashion—everything that comes from France, coupled with the fact that we have examples in our head, all those incredible examples of the courts with kings, and their mistresses. It was accepted that the kings should have mistresses—well, men derive their example from the highest order! This was all accepted. Moral judgment is absent.

“I’m not trying to seduce just anyone these days,” he added. He’d read my mind, and had scolded me in his delicate way. I’ll admit, I was feeling sheepish now, still munching on my ice and trying to tuck away my chipped nail polish from his eyes. He continued nonchalantly, “It’s because I’m madly in love with someone, she’s wonderful.”

His current romance, he explained, is with an American woman he met in a shoe store some nine months ago in New York. His seduction tactic? After admiring a pair of prospective shoes, he complimented her on her good taste. Then, he took a seat beside her, and quietly explained that his horse and carriage were awaiting him outside, and since the shoe did fit, it was off to the palace for the both of them, where his father the king was waiting and ready to meet her.

They went for an espresso.

Still: The show—hosted by Anderson Cooper and Christiane Amanpour, and designed to honor some 18 "ordinary people" who, the network says, have helped change our world for the better—must go on! Tyra Banks was on the red carpet, in a Pamela Roland gown and vintage jewelry. "I didn't want to be too trendy," she said. "Anderson's here! I thought I had to look White House-ey!" So was Mary J. Blige, sporting a very eco-unfriendly knee-length fur coat; the Reverend Al Sharpton, musing over Don Imus' return to morning radio ("It's not about Forgiveness! It's about Amnesty … No matter how big you are , you can still fall!") and heiress-entrepreneuse Fabiola Beracasa, in a metallic Yves St. Laurent ensemble, pledging that this time she was Spanx-free, and naming Diane Von Furstenberg as her all time hero ("she just does so much for charity!") Meanwhile, Jane Alexander, star of HBO's Tell Me You Love Me, offered advice to the sexually frustrated: "Go to a therapist! Sex isn't such a mystery!" Rosario Dawson in a silver metallic gown, Kyra Sedgwick, Glenn Close, and Harry Connick Jr. also attended.

Wesley Autrey, the subway star who leapt in front of a moving train to save a young man stranded on the tracks earlier this year, was one of the "ordinary people" being honored. Who would play the construction-worker-turned-superhero if the story were turned into a made for TV movie? "Wesley, Denzel, or Samuel L. Jackson! I'm happy with any of those!" gushed Mr. Autrey as he made his way down the red carpet, two young daughters in tow. Mr. Autrey, who was also honored by President Bush during his State of the Union address earlier this year, added that he's so busy working and helping his daughters with homework that he has "no time for a girlfriend! And even if I did, my little girl wouldn’t let me have one!"

As for the event itself: CNN had chosen its heroes—from among 7,000 nominations submitted by viewers from over 80 countries—for their achievements in the areas of health and medicine, child welfare, community and social development, protecting the planet, and global justice.

Kayla Cornale, 18, of Burlington, Ontario, developed a music system that helps children with autism communicate. Pat Pedraja, 12, of Palm Harbor, Florida, suffers from leukemia, and recently completed a quest to register 5000 bone marrow donors. Among absent honorees were Irania Martinez Garcia, a Cuban who turned a toxic waste site into a flourishing garden after her ten-year-old daughter died of leukemia, and Zach Petkewicz, who saved fellow students’ lives by blocking a classroom door during the Virginia Tech massacre.

From these 18 heroes, six winners were selected by a blue-ribbon panel, a bunch of not-so-ordinary people which included Lance Armstrong, Deepak Chopra, Peter Gabriel, fashion designer Carolina Herrera, Nobel Prize winner and micro-credit pioneer Muhammad Yunas, Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, singer-humanitarian Jewel, and Bishop T.D Jakes. The awards were presented by, among others, Jimmy Smits, Mira Sorvino, and the Duchess of York (who announced that she was adopting young Mr. Pedraja as her godson), with musical interludes by Ms. Blige, Sheryl Crow, Norah Jones and Wyclef Jean.

Ordinary people are all well and good, it seems, but, at the end of the day, it's hard to get by without a few stars—B-list or not.

Laurel Touby, the evening's hostess and the founder of MediaBistro.com, donned a chic Pucci dress, a white feather boa (apparently its been her signature party piece for years) and those quirky-cute glasses. "I just thought we needed to get the girls together to bitch and brag and brawl in the face of ever-increasing stupidity in the marketplace!" she explained. "But really, I know how lonely it can be for people in the industry, how isolating it can be, and I just thought it would be a great chance for us all to get together and mingle with one another,"

"She's Freaking Fabulous!" gushed Pink magazine columnist Jessica Siegel of Touby. "I mean, she's genuinely interested in bringing people together,"

The ladies dined on a three-course meal of lamb barley soup, tuna tartare, grilled salmon and veggies, and crisp farmhouse duck with baked apples. Dessert was butterscotch pudding, bourbon truffles, crème fraiche, and upside down mousse cake. As they sipped Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay, the women mused on their proudest professional achievements, then sat for a panel discussion on "What nobody tells you about being editor in chief." Revealing the secrets of the job were Janice Min of Us Weekly, Glamour's Cindi Leive, Susan Schulz of CosmoGIRL, Real Simple's Kristin Van Ogtrop, and Marie Claire deputy editor Abigail Pesta (who had presumably been clued in on the special knowledge beforehand).

"Touby used to throw parties once a month years ago. The idea then was to meet guys," explained one guest. Changing the subject, Ms. Touby chimed in: "Last year I swore I'd get cats and dawgs at this thing……Meeeeeowwwwww! But I couldn't get my act together! Maybe next year!"

For the third Saturday in a row, locals were awoken by the shouts of protesters outside the E.65th street mansion of Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman. The group, which calls itself the Campaign for Corporate Responsibility in Entertainment, wants to change the way media companies portray black and Latino men and women in music videos , T.V, and movies. It's calling for media companies like Viacom to adopt universal standards prohibiting lyrical or visual content that is degrading, promotes violence, and stereotypes black and Latino men as hoodlums and thugs, and women as promiscuous. Sample slogan: "BET does not reflect me!"

"We're not a censorship group," Pastor De'Quincy M. Hentz of the Shiloh Baptist Church in New Rochelle, a leader of the campaign, told Media Mob. "We're all about free speech, and we believe that there are many people out their that have positive messages about the men and women of our community, and those are the messages that are being censored, by media companies that only allow negative messages about us to get out."

"I'm not a bitch or a whore!," cried one young woman. "And I'm tired of being portrayed as one!"

You can say one thing for all that noise: it sure got our attention.

At 25, Mr. Cohen is the Bush administration's youngest ever policy planner, and was recently touted by The New Yorker as "Condi's party starter." His extensive travels throughout Africa and the Middle East have put him in some hairy situations, and ultimately led to his being banned from entering Iran. Girlfriend Jill Keller, another uber-enthused government-affairs consultant , joked with a friend, "So I saw Steve Krasner,"--the former director of policy planning for the state dept--"last week, and he was like, 'What are you doing dating this guy? I mean, he's got such a short life expectancy!'"

That hasn't stopped Condi’s new wunderkind from living it up and partying hard. "The message of my book will resonate more with people in New York than anywhere else because New Yorkers are party animals and so are the youth of the Middle East!" Mr. Cohen gushed.

Still, Columbia Law professor Mathew Waxman, who had been Mr. Cohen's boss at State, couldn't resist teasing the man of the hour for the attention he pays to how he looks. "Cohen's got more product in his hair than the rest of the policy staff combined!"

The site, which has been available in beta form since August but launched yesterday with all the bells and whistles, uses high-tech machines to scour the web for news. Human beings, in the form of editors and writers, then comb through these stories to find the ones to highlight. Once top-tier stories are selected, they are fused and re-formatted to be presented in a "smart and entertaining" way. Drudge-like, the site runs the gamut from Turkey's political crisis to Oprah's school girl scandals. One cutesy, and possibly brilliant, feature: an adjustable filter tool, which can be set anywhere between opposite spectrums of "Soft" and "Hard" news, so that readers control whether they get entertainment or more serious journalism.

Newser was born of a collaboration between Mr. Wolff and Patrick Spain, CEO of Encyclopedia.com and HighBeam Research, a subscription-based research site that's a kind of thrifty Lexis-Nexis.

'We're out to combine traditional media with online animation," said Mr. Spain. "The idea is to provide the reader with something they didn't even know they wanted to know!" He beamed.

Jason Rapp, of IAC Mergers and Acquisitions—he's also, formerly, a Clinton aide and the vice president of New York Times Online Development—said that "everyone is interested in news derived from the web only."

Newser's editor in chief Caroline Miller, who used to helm New York magazine, explained that the site's stories are situated within a thread format, so that readers have access not only to the latest news, but to the way a story has developed over time. "We wanted to make something sexy!" she chimed. "We want to make news pleasurable. So to that end, our goal is to identify the very best work in sites and blogs and give you the top line!"

Mr. Wolff was no less enthused. "Somebody's going to reinvent the way people get news," he said. "It's not going to be from TV! It's not going to be from radio! It's going to be online! The opportunity is without limit and is extraordinarily exciting."

Daughter Elizabeth, a reporter for the New York Post, appeared less inspired than her father. "Uh, great party... yada yada yada, I’m outta here."

Some people go to Africa to try to save the world. Others, like Josh Swiller, go to Africa to save themselves.

Josh Swiller lived what a stranger might consider a charmed life. From the cushiony comforts of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, he was born into a well-off, tightly knit Jewish family. He attended Yale University, then graduate school, reading everything he could get his hands on from Nietzsche to Xaviera Hollander. He kissed soft-skinned girls who smelled of powder and draped attentiveness over him like gossamer.

He was also completely deaf by age 4. But strangers who met him might not have known. Deafness, Mr. Swiller writes, “doesn’t announce itself when it enters a room like a spastic limb or a Seeing Eye dog does.” Thanks to a hearing device that amplified sounds up to a thousand times, the hard-earned ability to read lips and only a very slight “deaf” accent, he often could mask the severity of his disability from those whose lips he read but whose faint words he barely heard. He passed through his Yale years disillusioned by lecturing professors whose foreign accents he couldn’t decipher, and whose racing lips his weary eyes couldn’t keep up with.

Raised in a home where self-pity was not an option, where the “we all have our burdens” mantra held strong, sign language was never discussed, and Josh was pushed from a young age to strive for excellence, to eschew any stigma associated with deafness, and to communicate like anyone else in the world. But trying to communicate in this foreign language of the hearing stranded Josh in a world of emotional isolation. By the time he was 23, very few people actually knew who Josh Swiller was. To them, he was a tall guy who said “What?” a lot, and spoke with a bit of a slur.

To them, he was not deaf.

Looking for companionship and a sense of meaning, he pursued a master’s degree at a university for the deaf—but even here, where people quipped and cracked jokes in sign language like they were shaking the lulav, he was again out of place. Cursed with the double-edged trappings of his vocal talents, he was deemed by other students “not deaf enough.”

An outsider both in the world of the hearing and in the world of the deaf, he sought out “a place past deafness.” He found it in Africa.

From a remote village in Zambia, Mr. Swiller describes a silent land of bloated bellies and H.I.V., sweeping horizons and mango trees. He writes of a place where people drunk on banana wine “laugh more and worry less,” and where a boy can have his leg cut off for something as trifling as a stolen fish. During his two-year Peace Corps sojourn, a naively enthused Mr. Swiller strove fruitlessly to bring clean water and a new health clinic to his village, eliciting the ire of chiefs and elders, along with the licentious advances of pay-per-love ladies and 20-something spinsters. Along the way, he took a local boy into his home, “ruined” a virgin girl and cheated death a hundred times.

Josh Swiller rewrites the familiar African narrative with a purity that makes the tragic beauty of that devastated continent a stunning novelty for readers. We experience the rich, tangible passions of love, honor and revenge in Africa, amplified a thousandfold in the quiet world of the deaf.

Nicole Dweck is a graduate student at New York University’s School of Global Affairs.

The award, which is seen as just one step shy of knighthood, is considered a major honor for Britons. The half-Iranian half-British Ms. Amanpour joked that the honor was "very nice for my British half."

The guest list read like the seating chart at Michael's, and of them at least Larry King, Arianna Huffington (sans crutches) and CNN president Jonathan Klein were visible in the well-dressed crowd.

The chicken and beef skewers were proof that this was no Earth Day rally; and for the generous forestation of the crowd with model-like six-foot waifs, grilled veggies and spinach tartines did the trick.

David Lauren and girlfriend Lauren Bush were just a few among the green movement's good-looking rear-guard to sip martinis and muse passionately if not altogether scientifically about the dangers of environmental degradation and the magnificence of the planet beyond Central Park.

“They really showed how beautiful our world is,” said the young Mr. Lauren. “It just overshadowed whatever beauty is in this room.”

Girlfriend Lauren Bush smiled and nodded in agreement.

“It’s one of those things we need to look at,” said Dr. Sanjay Gupta, who was looking particularly strapping this evening."People haven’t really taken the time to understand how complex the issue of climate change is … and what’s happening to people all around the world.”

One who has started taking the time: Luigi Tadini, the heartthrob V.P of Tadini Jewelers and a frequent late-night cameo at the fashionable places, explained why he co-founded the Junior Council for Riverkeeper with his good friend, the heiress-model Amanda Hearst. "We knew we needed to get involved in the environment,” he said.

“I had a sense of nostalgia watching all those animals,” said writer-producer Richard Temtchine (Almost Famous , Nothing to Lose.) His latest film (How to Seduce a Difficult Woman) is set to be released in May. “The animals … they reminded me of a woman I used to know … I was in love with a rare breed of turtle!”

But for some guests, attendance at this event—which could just have well been about a Marc Jacobs show as about global warming—was not a sign that serious change was coming.

“Just as yoga has become trendy, being green has become trendy too,” said one guest--who asked not to be named!—as his drink threatened to spill over the lip of his Martini glass. "I mean, you don’t see any ugly shoes or moo-moos around do you?”

The brawny Jeff Corwin, wildlife biologist, admitted as much.

“Do they want to go green because it's in or because the next generation will blame us?" he asked The Observer. Glancing around at a colorful array of vertically endowed urban celebutantes, he added: “Ultimately, every individual must recognize…that they will leave a footprint on this earth … you have so much you can do!”

And if this party were any indication, that footprint is starting to look more and more like a Jimmy Choo than a Birkenstock.