Paul Kedrosky:

Quote of the day comes from an article about the revelation that former fugitive financier Marc Rich lost money on the Bernie Madoff scheme:

The idea that Mr. Rich, the onetime fugitive, may now turn to an American court to seek redress struck some lawyers as fraught with problems and unlikely at best.

“Fraught with problems and unlikely at best” should be the name of a new blog.

Upon reading this, I was reminded of this Gladwell story on This American Life:

Act Four. Tough News Room.

Malcolm Gladwell is a best-selling author and famous journalist at the New Yorker magazine. But not always. Witness his story—which was recorded live, on stage at the Moth theater in New York—about his first job in journalism, and how terrifying it was.

As Gladwell explains (starting at around 50:00 minutes into the broadcast):

There's a secret to this business ... it's not what you think.

We started something called Disease of the Week ... and every week we got a little bolder, ... We felt, like, drunk with power ... But it wasn't enough. We'd like to change the very language of American journalism. And that's when The Contest was born.

What we decided was to introduce the phrase "raises new and troubling questions" to American journalism.

As Slate explains:

The object is to determine who can insert the phrase "raises new and troubling questions" in his stories the most often over a month. Gladwell strikes first in the "contest," but it's then "back and forth" like "a horse race" until he leads 10-9. On the last day, his colleague William Booth wins the game with a "twofer," as the phrase appears in both his piece and its headline.

"I feel like I've been kicked in the stomach; it's devastating," Gladwell says.

But the real kicker comes in the next part:

Now, I don't need to tell you how hard it is to get the phrase "perverse and often baffling" into a newspaper.

Perhaps NYT's Alison Leigh Cowan is involved in a Contest? :)

Fraught With Perverse and Often Baffling Problems