Hello everyone,

I’ve just returned from Manhattan and a darkened hotel ballroom, where this very blog, nominated for a Digital National Magazine Award, had a few moments of national glory. Screen shots of our bucolic visit to Bellwether Farm were posted on a big screen, the very same screen that lit up with a fabulous iPad moving cover from Esquire, a robot dancing with humans from the online tech magazine IEEE, and interactive fashion spreads from Vogue.com with pouty models swiveling their hips right at you.

But we did not win. This photo, for Best Blog, is not of us. It’s of the perfectly deserving winner from Tablet, a daily online magazine of Jewish culture and ideas.

 Alana Newhouse, Tablet‘s Editor-in-Chief, with Larry Hackett, President of the American
Society of Magazine Editors, firmly clutching her Ellie.

It’s hard to be a sore loser to a magazine that not only publishes excellent cultural analysis, but also has a sense of fun:

  Purim in Jerusalem (Marco Longari/AFP/Getty Images; courtesy Tablet)

And plus, to borrow from Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award speech a few weeks ago, as losers we were in some extremely fine company, including The Daily Beast, The New Yorker, and New York magazine. It was a thrill and an honor.