Here's today's fascinating and maybe really unlikely media assertion from the Times: "A $30 million tablet-only news publication… with 100,000 subscribers paying 99 cents a week or $39.99 a year, and 250,000 unique readers each month, The Daily is on target to break even in five years."

Hooray! They made it! Just five short years to breaking even. Well, it… could be.

"News Corp. has spent $30 million on development (which has been 'written off') of The Daily and current costs are less than $500,000 per week," according to Folio, a year ago. Okay, so maybe if you attributed the original $30 million to News Corp. itself [...]

Here is a sort-of handy guide for young lady lawyers interested in joining firms with other hot women. Sort of! Notes a spoilsport: "This is going to sound crazy, but I find it hard to objectify women once they start talking. Once they open their mouths, I care about things like 'what they are saying' and 'whether or not I agree.' Women I agree with, I find attractive." Also the real answer seems to be Cravath.

"A busy day consists of two 'live' hedcuts, drawings that are due to run in the next day's paper….. Each intricate portrait can take up to five hours to complete, with countless little dots. But in an emergency, artists can produce one in as little as two hours, with more lines and fewer specks….

'Because we are essentially tracing the photograph, a lot of people think it's not a big deal,' says [Hai] Knafo. 'But it is.'

'We have our little tricks,' says Noli Novak, who has been with the Journal since 1987. 'A portrait with less dots will take less time.'

'People at the Journal don't even [...]

"Taking another step in its ongoing effort to encourage small business growth, Bank of America today announced it has conducted a series of events with Malcolm Gladwell to deliver quality education and actionable advice to small business owners in various markets throughout the country." —THE HECK???

The talking points out of Washington on murdered British spy Gareth Williams come from NSA expert James Bamford: "There's been a lot of hyped-up coverage in the U.K., but even codebreakers die from unrelated violence occasionally. Hundreds of NSA and GCHQ personnel travel back and forth between agencies every year, and leaving a body in a canvas bag sounds more like a jealous lover or drug deal gone bad than a political assassination." Yes, it's so much more likely that some jealous person stuffed his murdered spy lover into a padlocked sports bag than some member of a spy agency did. That's like a daily thing. You [...]

“Jill always had a swagger. It was as if she were in a romantic comedy. She had the same feeling that Rosalind conveys in 'As You Like It.’ In the last act, everything would work out. She wasn’t like the other girls at Harvard. Most of my crowd were either wonks or tough feminists who would chew your balls off. But Jill was the witty cosmopolitan who gave running commentary that was like a voice-over narration from a Billy Wilder movie." —Fairchild fashion group honcho Peter Kaplan assesses New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson in today's New Yorker.

I'm not sure TMZ quite understands how the gayness works? In an item this morning headlined "Julianne Hough: I Thought Seacrest Was Gay!," they wrote: "There's a reason it took Ryan Seacrest such a long time to score a date with his new girlfriend Julianne Hough–she thought she lacked the proper equipment … genitally speaking." Either I woke up in some forgotten Ursula Le Guin novel about the "third sex" or TMZ's big gay boss isn't properly explaining the birds and the bees and the penises to his young team.