We hear that New York Times Business honcho Larry Ingrassia is trying to lure fired Portfolio deputy editor Jim Impoco (whose bio is still on Portfolio's website) back to his old Times home in Biz. That would be an interesting, if not entirely unpredictable, turn of events. (Where is there to work, anyway?) And they have something in common. When Ingrassia left the Wall Street Journal for the Times, one of the great benefits for him was getting away from Lipman.

It couldn't have thrilled him that Impoco left the Times to go to Portfolio in the first place; Impoco's firing would only cement his opinion of Lipman. (We're going with "controlling bitch.")

Earlier, we noted that there seem to be two prevailing impressions of what went wrong between Impoco and Lipman. But we'd like to propose the not-so-radical idea that these two impressions (Impoco is "pugnacious," says Lipman's camp; Lipman "thinks she is 100 percent right, 100 percent of the time," says an Impoco defender), are not mutually exclusive. (Crazy, right?) Two very opinionated, and not very tactful, people coming into conflict. When one of them is the boss, and regards being the boss as being the Imperial Lord, things are going to get ugly.

Still, this is a man who, when he was at the Times, was known to call people's ideas "fucking stupid" in meetings, a source tells us. Sigh. Our fragile egos could never take such abuse! But we hear they do things differently over in the "old media."