In the 2003-10-13 issue of the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik writes
"LAURA BRAVES WEASEL KISS!" ran the headline.
which is a counter-example to this weblog's speculation about the magazine's anti-inversion policy.
Or was the copy editor for Gopnik's comment asleep at the switch?
[Update 10/14/2003: Hersh does it too! Scanning some older New Yorker articles for sequences like /", said/ yields several examples of quotative inversion, such as this one written by Seymour Hersh:
"With the exception of exchange of fire over the Shebaa Farms"--a disputed area on the Lebanese border--"it's been quiet since the Israeli evacuation in 2000," said Richard W. Murphy, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who served as Ambassador to Syria in the nineteen-seventies.
So I think we need to apologize to the New Yorker's copy editors for suggesting that they were responsible for creating awkwardness. At worst, it seems, they didn't fix it.]
Posted by Mark Liberman at October 12, 2003 10:38 AM