A single mother talks about self-insemination
Lisa Zanardo LONDON TIMES
Single middle-aged mum Caroline Oulton on inseminating herself during her lunch break
Ten years ago, I was a 43-year-old single mother and full-time television drama producer and I desperately, irrationally, wanted a third child. I was not in a relationship — nowhere near one, in fact.
A few years earlier my long-term partner and I had been gearing up to have another baby. We had names on standby, we had plans. Or so I thought, but then he left to marry his lover in America. I celebrated my 40th in Cornwall in a hideaway with female friends, somehow a bit of a psychological cut-off on the having more babies front. By the time I was pushing 44, the timing was getting tight, although I was dreaming incessantly of plastic beakers and designer buggies.
What to do? Suddenly I knew. I could, would even, give it a whirl by myself. Once I realised that there was an alternative to becoming bitter and twisted about being robbed of my rightful number of progeny, I didn’t have a single doubt. I knew that I might well fail to get pregnant, but I could at least seize the initiative and propel whatever ropey old eggs I still had into the path of some sperm.
I was reluctant to go through an organisation; I simply called in a favour from someone whom I trusted and had known for a while. He had something I really, really wanted that he was happy to hand over. There was no contract, just trust on both sides and a clear understanding that there would be no financial or emotional strings; immensely simple or immensely complicated, depending on which way you look at it.
The actual tippage I did myself, after a giggly handover of the fresh wherewithal at a restaurant in my lunch hour. Given the demented excitement of my boys whenever I got back from work, I could not envisage getting the peace to do it at home. I still salute the restaurant’s pretty frontage and grin whenever I drive past.
I consulted only two people in advance. My donor, obviously, and my rather cool GP. I didn’t want her thinking that a pregnancy was some kind of inept whoops. I wanted to trumpet in advance that this baby — if I was lucky enough to catch him or her — was properly wanted. My doctor was great. She said she would advise most people to embark on counselling but, knowing me as she did and given my age, she suggested that I just go for it.
I was immensely careful about the timing and I knew almost instantly that I was pregnant. I felt a little star buzzing away in my midriff — something that I hadn’t been aware of in my first two pregnancies — well before the test. I can still remember, though, marvelling at the official confirmation, that electrifyingly blue line on the tester that reduced me to happy tears in the loo at work.
When I was safely three months pregnant I confessed to the world. My sons, then aged 8 and 10, seemed excited by the prospect of a sibling and, thankfully, not particularly bothered about how the baby had got there. I felt that I must address it with them, however, and was helped by their earlier disgust at my description of sex and conception. One had interrupted me, wrinkling his nose in disgust. “It sounds horrible. Couldn’t you just get that stuff out of a bottle?” Now I was in a position to remind him of that.
I loved being pregnant and felt so happy that I fell in love with a screenwriter. We had a fairytale romance either side of the birth that ended — unacrimoniously — 18 months later. We are still great friends.
I never did get around to getting him a T-shirt to wear as we pushed my daughter around Hampstead Heath with the words “It’s not mine”.
I liked the feeling that it was me doing it alone, even though for my first two I had revelled in the coupleish nature of it.
I had felt cocooned and adored; this time I felt Amazonian and empowered.
Right now, I don’t feel agitated about being lover-less, but I am not resigned to being single for the rest of my life either.
There has been the odd bump along the way. To my surprise, some of my close family who seemed scarily relaxed about the unpleasant desertion by my partner have been overtly critical of the way I have handled this episode. I sense tuttage from time to time.
On the plus side, however, my sons’ paternal grandmother treats my daughter — with whom she has no blood link — as her granddaughter, which delights me for a number of reasons, not least because my daughter is low on extended family.
One can, of course, agonise about identity and the crucial importance of two parents in situ until the cows come home but, most of the time, the configuration of my family feels straightforwardly brilliant. We were occasionally wobbly until my daughter came along, an ucertain tripod at times, but now we are a compact flying wedge taking on all comers.
I don’t necessarily think I have handled the tricky situation of my daugher missing half of her identity well; now she’s growing up, the whole issue is becoming more pressing. She knows who her father is, but doesn’t view him as her father because, in the normal sense of the word, he isn’t. I don’t know how things will play out ... what more I can tell her?
She does know, though, that she is cherished by me and her two doting big brothers. My daughter has been the most wonderfully revivifying addition to my life.
I caught this little girl somewhat against the odds and she is just so ridiculously great

Conrad Black and ex-Enron chief Jeff Skilling’s convictions set aside

James Bone TIMES of LONDON
Lord Black of Crossharbour won a symbolic victory in the US Supreme Court today after years of appeals against his conviction for looting his newspaper empire. The former Telegraph chairman, currently serving six-and-a-half years in the Coleman prison in Florida, could take satisfaction from the ruling.
Miguel Estrada, Black’s lawyer, said that he was “obviously pleased” by the Supreme Court decision.
“We are confident that the lower courts will quickly conclude that the errors that the Supreme Court has now conclusively found tainted every aspect of the case,” he said. “We look forward to helping Mr Black regain his freedom.”
Other analysts said that the Supreme Court decision was unlikely to lead to Black’s early release.
“Conrad Black did not get the exoneration he requested but only a technical victory on law,” said his biographer Tom Bower, the author of Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge.
“His fate depends on the Chicago appeal court which has already declared him to be guilty of fraud.” Black was convicted of three counts of fraud and one count of obstruction of justice after a trial in Chicago in 2007.
He was accused of taking cash out of the company in the form of bogus “non-compete” payments, and then covering up his crimes. CCTV footage showed him moving boxes of documents out of his office in Toronto into his car when investigators closed in. The peer, who continues to write newspaper columns from behind bars, has said that prison time has expanded his social circle.
His wife, better known as the columnist Barbara Amiel, continues to spend time at their mansion in Palm Beach so she can be close to her husband. Black appealed to the Supreme Court against the scope of the so-called “honest services” law used to convict him. The 28-word law, passed by Congress in 1988, makes it a crime for public officials and executives to deprive those they work for of their honest services.
During a hearing on Black’s appeal one Supreme Court justice asked if a worker was denying his employer his honest services if he read the Daily Racing Form at work. In a related case involving former Enron chief executive Jeffrey Skilling, the Supreme Court ruled that the honest services law could be used only where there was evidence of bribes or kickbacks.
The justices ordered that the Seventh Circuit appeals court look again at Black’s fraud conviction.
At his Chicago trial the jury was instructed that Black could be convicted of fraud if he either stole money or deprived shareholders of his honest services.
The Supreme Court suggested that his fraud convictions could be set aside if jurors relied on the judge’s over-broad interpretation of the honest services law.
In the Seventh Circuit’s earlier opinion Judge Richard Posner wrote that Black was guilty of plain old-fashioned fraud not just theft of honest services.
“The evidence established a conventional fraud, that is, a theft of money or other property from Hollinger by misrepresentations and misleading omissions amounting to fraud,” Judge Posner wrote.
Even if Black’s fraud convictions were to be thrown out he would still face the same amount of time in prison.
He was sentenced to six-and-a-half years for obstruction of justice and three years for fraud, to run concurrently — and the obstruction charge is unaffected by the Supreme Court decision.
Skilling, who is serving 24 years for his role in the collapse of the Houston-based energy giant Enron, could fare better.
The former Enron boss was convicted of 19 counts including conspiracy, insider trading and lying to auditors.
The Supreme Court strongly suggested that the fraud counts against him should be thrown out by a lower court because they did not violate its more stringent interpretation of the “honest services” law.
“Because Skilling’s misconduct entailed no bribe or kickback he did not conspire to commit honest-services fraud under our confined construction” of the law,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said.

Larry King’s Endgame at CNN

By DAVID CARR NY TIMES
At the beginning of June, CNN’s Larry King celebrated 25 years in the same slot on the same network — a remarkable achievement in a come-and-go business — and was joined over a week by Bill Gates, LeBron James and the leader of the free world to mark the occasion. Not bad for a former color commentator of the Shreveport Steamer of the World Football League.
The most exciting get of the week had to be Lady Gaga, the incandescent pop star and performance artist. During the interview, however, the person in black suspenders and white shirt sought a connection across generations, evincing both earnestness and playfulness, but was forced to communicate with someone imprisoned in a character, offering little more than a performance piece full of aphorisms and nervous laughter.
Maybe you saw this coming, but it was Lady Gaga who wore those trademark suspenders in tribute (she called him “King Larry”). She appeared via a satellite feed from London, but Mr. King may as well have been dialing in from a distant solar system. He blew past several surprising answers without follow-up and ambled on to the next canned question. “Is there any boundary you won’t cross?” he asked portentously, without mentioning any that she had.
In Lady Gaga, Mr. King had a willing, wildly famous subject. If he can no longer hit a hanging curve ball over the middle of the plate, shouldn’t CNN be thinking hard about who is on deck?
As my colleague Brian Stelter reported last month, Mr. King’s audience has been cut in half since the presidential election, to an average of just 725,000 viewers a night, a number that ranked him far behind Sean Hannity on Fox News, Rachel Maddow on MSNBC and even at times behind the relatively new “Joy Behar Show” on HLN, CNN’s sister network.
Mr. King’s contract is up a year from now, and while CNN had no specific comment on succession, a spokeswoman did remind us that Mr. King is still a force, regardless of what the ratings say:
“The world has never seen a better or more influential talk show host than Larry King,” said Christa Robinson, the spokeswoman. “While the media regurgitates speculation about his coveted role, Larry is busy organizing a telethon on Monday night to raise money to help clean up the gulf the way he raised nearly $10 million for Haiti earthquake relief a few months ago. That kind of influence and impact is exceedingly rare.”
It’s nice that the network is supportive of a talent that helped build its identity, but is this really how CNN wants this all to play out? It’s not as if the idea that Mr. King’s reign might end came out of nowhere. He has always been a bit of a cartoon, but a willing one, and he made for good television as he wobbled his way toward greater truths using a regular-guy approach to inordinately famous or newsworthy people. Not any more.
On Thursday night, he took on BP’s Congressional testimony with four highly politicized commentators and failed to tame the lions. Each segment ended in unwatchable cross-talk. Earlier in the week, he stepped up on the gulf story by interviewing Sammy Kershaw, a country singer and candidate for lieutenant governor of Louisiana, but seemed powerless as Mr. Kershaw kidnapped the show by reading a windy infomercial about the glories of gulf seafood from notes scribbled on a piece of paper.
In the same week, his show tacked to the tabloid side of the news, with interviews of the family of the slain Peruvian woman, a death for which Joran van der Sloot has been charged. Mr. Van der Sloot is a suspect in the earlier, much followed disappearance of the Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway in Aruba.
The interview was a weave of long pauses and odd pivots — “How well did you know your sister-in-law?” — that looked and sounded more like cable access than the work of a cable powerhouse.
No one will replace Mr. King. As Robert Thompson, professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University points out, Mr. King is part old-school broadcaster and part vaudeville act, more Ed Sullivan than Edward R. Murrow. But a segue, some kind of plan, seems merited.
“When you tune in and watch Larry King interviewing Lady Gaga and he seems to be the more Dada performance artist, that speaks volumes,” Mr. Thompson said. “Larry King has always been a bit of a punch line, but you don’t want him to become a joke.”
The struggles at “Larry King Live” have less do to with the host’s age — 76 — than the chronic, relentless needs of a daily, one-man show that tries to encompass the whole civic and cultural waterfront. Charlie Rose is 68, but he doesn’t have to fight for ratings and he is not compelled to spend quality time with a former Miss USA contestant, Carrie Prejean, if she is found to have taken her shirt off.
The bigger problem is that CNN has more than one problem. Its 7 p.m. slot with John King has failed to connect, and Campbell Brown is taking it upon herself to step away from the 8 p.m. slot because the ratings aren’t there. While Anderson Cooper has not moved the needle much, he is a core asset, on-brand and on-message, who might do better if he had a better show leading in to his.
There are fixes being considered. Eliot Spitzer, of all people, has the attention of people at both the news network and its corporate ownership, as a potentially tangy, risky choice for the 8 p.m. hour. Piers Morgan, a judge on “America’s Got Talent,” has been mentioned as a potential replacement for Mr. King, as has the “American Idol” host Ryan Seacrest.
Katie Couric’s contract anchoring the “CBS Evening News” will be up at about the same time as Mr. King’s, and the format would nicely frame her gift for interviews. But given the instability of the lineup and the mysteries about lead-in, there is zero chance right now that she would consider sliding into the slot.
There is another choice for CNN. Think of the hand-off from Tom Brokaw to Brian Williams — graceful and profitable, with Mr. Brokaw continuing to show up doing work that interests him and Mr. Williams storming along in the ratings as the anointed heir.
Why not announce a yearlong victory lap for Mr. King? You could probably count on both Obamas, both Clintons, both George Bushes, both Martha and Jon Stewart, with maybe some Tiger, a little Oprah, all stopping by for some much deserved ring-kissing.
The 25th anniversary week proved that Mr. King can still move the ratings with aggressive booking, and meanwhile CNN could negotiate with Mr. King to free up some nights for a kind of bake-off, a rolling audition of hopefuls.
A year of occasional substitutes just might yield a worthy, and viewer-friendly, successor. As it is, Mr. King has been left to dangle, battered by tabloid reports, sliding ratings and his own daily battle to anchor the show five days a week. The more legendary the talent, the more delicate the endgame. Think of Helen Thomas’s exit, which did not end well for anyone.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;
twitter.com/carr2n

culturebox SLATE
"Somewhere a Dog Barked"
Pick up just about any novel and you'll find a throwaway reference to a dog, barking in the distance.
By Rosecrans Baldwin
As a reader of novels and not much else, I keep a running list of authorial whims. Male writers of the Roth/Updike generation, for example, love the word cunt. Also, where novelists once adorned their prose with offhand French bon mots, Spanish now appears. Here's another: Novelists can't resist including a dog barking in the distance. I've seen it happen across the spectrum—Jackie Collins, William Faulkner, and Chuck Palahniuk: "There was no more rain, just an eerie stillness, a deathly silence. Somewhere a dog barked mournfully." (American Star) "She did not answer for a time. The fireflies drifted; somewhere a dog barked, mellow sad, faraway." (Light in August) "This is such a fine neighborhood. I jump the fence to the next backyard and land on my head in somebody's rose bush. Somewhere a dog's barking." (Choke)
Having heard the dog's call, it seemed like I couldn't find a book without one. Not The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Not Shadow Country. Not Ulysses. Not Robert Penn Warren's All The King's Men, or Monica Ali's Alentejo Blue, or Steven King's It or Christine. Not Jodi Picoult's House Rules. If novelists share anything, it's a distant-dog impulse. Picture an author at work: She's exhausted, gazing at her laptop and dreaming about lunch. "[Author typing.] Boyd slammed the car door shut. He stared at his new condominium, with the for-sale sign in the yard. He picked up a pistol and pointed it at his head. [Author thinking, Now what? Gotta buy time.] Somewhere a dog barked. [Author thinking, Hmm, that'll do.] Then Boyd remembered he did qualify for the tax rebate for first-time home buyers, and put down the gun." If a novel is an archeological record of 4.54 billion decisions, then maybe distant barking dogs are its fossils, evidence of the novelist working out an idea.
Trains whistle, breezes blow, dogs bark. You're thinking, "So what if novels are full of barking dogs? The world is full of them, too." But I don't find it curious when actual dogs turn up in novels. Dogs that authors bother to describe, or turn into characters, don't pull me out of my reading trance. The thing is, these so-called dogs are nameless and faceless, and frankly I doubt them; it's the curious incident when one actually does come into view. Really, are there so many out-of-sight, noisy dogs in the world? Listen: My bet is you'll hear a highway, an A/C unit, or another human before a dog starts yelping.
Literary barking dogs come in two breeds. First is the classic, "A dog barks in the distance." Modern, unassuming, lacking airs. Some authors use it well. In Cities of the Red Night, William Burroughs employs it to make sex more comical: "A dog barks in the distance. We take off our shirts and pants and hang them on wooden pegs. He turns towards me, his shorts sticking out at the fly. 'That stuff makes me hot,' he says. 'Shall we camel?' " In Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room, a distant dog offers an opportunity for lyricism: "It was too hot to walk. A dog barked, barked, barked down in the hollow. The liquid shadows went over the plain." And in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, when Dave Eggers' narrator is driven mad while trying to help a friend who may have overdosed on pills, a bit of projection helps amplify his distress: "There is a dog barking outside. The dog is going nuts."
The other common breed is "Somewhere a dog barks." In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, the phrase is terror's church bell. It's also an auditory motif that evolves, as "Somewhere a big dog is barking" gives way to "With the help of fear and echoes and winter silences, that dog had a voice like a big bronze gong." And it works. It works because it's deliberate.
Most authors, however, employ the trope as a narrative rest stop, an innocuous way to fill space and time; since the bark is hollow, a reader can read anything into it, or nothing at all. Charlaine Harris, queen of the vampire authors, in Dead as a Doornail: "The entire parking lot was empty, except for Jan's car. The glare of the security lights made the shadows deeper. I heard a dog bark way off in the distance." The chief of Scandinavian crime writers, Henning Mankell: "She begins to tell him. The curtain in the kitchen window flutters gently, and a dog barks in the distance" (The Eye of the Leopard). And "genre" books aren't the only guilty category. Take 2666, Robert Bolaño's magnum opus: "The window looked out over the garden, which was still lit. A scent of flowers and wet grass drifted into the room. In the distance he heard a dog bark." For all we know, these dogs are off-camera sound machines set to woof.
When confronted with an uninspiring unseen bark, I like to pretend the dog is Lassie's cousin, bearing a message.
Richard Ford, Independence Day: "From the linden tree shade, Kristy hears something in the afternoon breeze—a dog barking somewhere, my son in our car. She turns and looks toward me, puzzled."
Translation: Watch out, the boy is reprogramming your favorite FM stations!
Tobias Wolff, Old School: "During our worst dreams we are assured by a dog barking somewhere, a refrigerator motor kicking on, that we will soon wake to true life."
Translation: No transcendence until you get the fridge fixed!
T.C. Boyle, Riven Rock: "In two days he'd be back on the train to New Jersey. There was a dog barking somewhere. He could smell beef and gravy on her breath."
Translation: That bitch just ate my liver!
These howls are empty and cheap—and I'll float the opinion that publishers should collar them. Imagine if F. Scott Fitzgerald's editor had let slip, "It was dark now, and as we dipped under a little bridge I put my arm around Jordan's golden shoulder and drew her toward me and asked her to dinner. Somewhere a dog barked. Suddenly I wasn't thinking of Daisy and Gatsby any more, but of this clean, hard, limited person. …"
Unless the disembodied barks aren't sloppy mistakes. Unless, in fact, they serve a deeper, more conspiratorial purpose. Martin Amis says, "All writing is a campaign against cliché." Well, what if these dogs aren't just cliché, but something more? What if they're a meme? Perhaps distant dogs are a way for novelists to wink at one another, at their extraordinary luck for being allowed into the publishing club. When an author incorporates a faceless barking dog into his novel, he's like an amateur at Harlem's Apollo Theater rubbing the Tree of Hope—he does it because so many others have done it before him, and it might just bring him some luck. Look at (Pulitzer Prize-winning) To Kill a Mockingbird: "Ripe chinaberries drummed on the roof when the wind stirred, and the darkness was desolate with the barking of distant dogs." Look at (National Book Award winner) Let The Great World Spin: "The street throbbed around me. Nobody's fault but my own. The bark of a dog flew by." Indeed, look at Martin Amis in his latest novel, The Pregnant Widow: "Keith closed his eyes and searched for troubled dreams. The dogs in the valley barked. And the dogs in the village, not to be outdone, barked back."
I saw my friend Nic Brown last week, whose first novel, like mine (You Lost Me There), is being published this summer. (Nic's book, Doubles, is hysterically funny). I asked Nic if he'd joined the grand tradition by including either "A dog barks in the distance" or "Somewhere a dog barks." I explained how, in fact, I'd done so myself—unconsciously, in an early draft—but decided to leave it in, partially to test my theory but mostly because it's contextual to a sex scene involving other canine behavior. Nic looked at me like I was nuts. "Dude, what are you talking about?" He said he doubted it—it sounded awfully cliché. We played tennis, then parted ways. An hour later Nic sent me an e-mail: "You won't believe this. Doubles, Page 108: 'Somewhere a dog barked, and it awakened me to my own physical condition.' But the dog then appears a few lines later, so he does exist." That's all I ask.
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Rosecrans Baldwin's first novel, You Lost Me There, is forthcoming in August. He is a founding editor of TheMorningNews.org.
Copyright 2010 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Accumulating Peripherals
Barack Obama as David Dinkins,

MATT STEINGLASS
I think I ought to at least explain what I’m thinking about with this comparison. It’s driven more by a subjective political sensation than by any grounded analysis, and it may actually be an utterly worthless comparison. I don’t know enough about Dinkins’s mayoralty to write a well-rounded post on this subject, even though I was living in New York City for its last two years, and voted for Ruth Messinger against Giuliani at the end of Dinkins’s term. But rather than do a quick shoddy job of web-surfing to try and pass myself off as knowing something about NYC politics during those years, I’d rather just describe the very sketchy shape of the comparison I was thinking about, and see whether those who do know a lot about NYC political history can set me straight.
David Dinkins was a universally respected politician widely seen as smart, competent and a good conciliator, if somewhat uninspiring. (There’s the first point of sharp dissimilarity with Obama.) He was congenial to white liberals, and brought along the black and hispanic votes largely out of solidarity. The simple prospect of having New York’s first black mayor generated a fair amount of voter enthusiasm.
However, that enthusiasm was not attached to a strong agenda, and once in office, like any Democrat in New York City (or anywhere else), Dinkins found himself tied down like Gulliver to a million tiny cross-cutting interest groups and points of ideological dogma, not to mention Democrats’ habitual enthusiasm for circular firing squads. In an overwhelmingly Democratic city, a Democrat in Gracie Mansion was immobilized. He couldn’t cross the teachers. He couldn’t cross the school boards. He couldn’t cross the sanitation workers’ or transit workers’ unions. He couldn’t override the delicate sensibilities of neighborhood historical preservation boards and other NIMBY-enforcing associations. He tried to bring the city a grudging racial peace, after the years of Bernard Goetz and Howard Beach and “wilding” (which may or may not ever have taken place). But he proved unable to tame the tensions that flared during the Crown Heights riots. And he had the bad luck to preside over a vicious recession that gave the city an air of defeat.
Meanwhile, Dinkins never really got the benefit of the doubt from the conservative white neighborhoods of Queens and Staten Island, who had become accustomed to a white, ethnic image of New York under Ed Koch. They treated his mayoralty as though they were living under enemy occupation, as a betrayal of their image of what New York-ness was. New York, to them, was not Spike Lee or Run-DMC. New York was Woody Allen and Frank Sinatra. They heard Dinkins’s “gorgeous mosaic” speech as a repudiation of the melting-pot ethic that underpinned their own narratives of immigrant Americanization.
So the first chance they got, they put somebody into office who brought back Ed Koch’s accent, but with a more punitive attitude. And while much of what Rudy Giulani accomplished was due to luck (the strong economy, the continuation of the fall in violent crime that began under Dinkins), the overwhelming sensation was that a Republican with the backing of the police, Wall Street, and the yuppie elite could generate momentum in overwhelmingly Democratic New York that no Democrat ever could. This political sensation has continued under Bloomberg.
In many ways, this comparison reveals how little Dinkins has in common with Obama. The racial politics of 2008-10 are very different from those of the early ’90s. Identity politics is dead. Sister Souljah has no army. Barack Obama himself personifies an easy grace with mixed racial identity that renders the mosaic-vs-melting-pot debates of 1990 antique. 2008 in America, unlike 1989 in New York, was a moment of remarkably low racial tension. New York elected a black mayor in 1989 in part because it needed a racial peacemaker; America was able to elect a black president in 2008 in large measure because racial conflict was not on the immediate agenda.
Then, of course, there’s Obama himself. He is inspirational. He has a style all his own. He is a personality, a celebrity. He can be electrifying on television. He’s an analytical thinker and a manager with a professorial gift for expressing complex processes in clear, conversational terms. Dinkins was none of these.
The similarity lies in the sense that Obama was swept into office on a wave of personal enthusiasm insufficiently attached to an agenda, and that he’s now bogging down in a characteristically Democratic muck of dissension and squabbling. My anxiety is that Obama, like Dinkins, is a cool, friendly conciliator who was elected by a deeply divided community in the hope that he could bring it together. But both of them have been smacked with insurmountable economic problems that have denied them the resources they need to make reconciliation work. And as the community relapses into vicious squabbling, it blames the conciliator for its own failures. That’s the mess I’m afraid Obama may get stuck in.
Add: I realize I’ve failed to communicate here that Barack Obama has in fact accomplished an immense amount in his first year and a half in office. Passing national health-care…is enough for a president to retire on. Financial reform, once passed, will be a major accomplishment; we’ll have to see how good the bill is. And, of course, we have an economy that’s in some kind of recovery, due in no small part to the ARRA, and whatever else you want to say about Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, at no time in the past 2 years have I gone to an ATM machine and found that I can’t withdraw money because the global financial system has ceased to exist. This was not a foregone conclusion. Obama has had, objectively, a very accomplished 18 months. But we’re running into a sense of the doldrums this summer, and that’s what prompted the comparison. Again, it may well be a very bad analogy.

Aiming at Rivals, Starbucks Will Offer Free Wi-Fi

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER
Many coffee shops try to discourage people from buying a cup of coffee and then lingering for hours to use the free Internet access. Starbucks will soon encourage them to stay as long as they want.
The company said on Monday that as of July 1, its stores in the United States would offer free Wi-Fi, via AT&T, that anyone can reach with a single click. In case customers run out of distractions on the Web, Starbucks is giving them even more reason to sit and browse, offering free online articles, music, videos and local information through a partnership with Yahoo.
Starbucks has been squeezed lately by competition from both independent specialty coffee shops, which have long offered free Wi-Fi, and big chains like McDonald’s, which added it this year.
“Starbucks hit back,” said Chris Brogan, president of New Marketing Labs, a social media marketing agency, who blogs about working on the go. “They said, ‘Not only do we have free Wi-Fi, but we’re going to offer this huge raft of digital products you can get while you’re here, and you like our coffee better anyway.’ ”
Howard Schultz, chief executive of Starbucks, who made the announcement at a conference in New York, described it as a way to bridge the online world and real-world coffee outlets.
Of course, people have been bridging those worlds for years, using coffee shops as pseudo-offices by bringing their laptops and borrowing free Internet connections. But Starbucks has never offered unlimited free Internet access.
Customers who bought and registered a Starbucks card and used it in the last month have been able to use the Web for two hours, after a somewhat complicated log-in process. Cardholders who wanted to use the Web for more than two hours paid $3.99 for another two-hour session, and customers without cards who wanted to go online faced the same charge for an initial two-hour session.
Starbucks is making the change as many coffeehouses experiment with ways to cut off squatters who browse and do not spend. Some post signs asking people to continue buying food and drinks if they stay, while the more aggressive ones cover their power outlets with tape so people cannot charge their laptops.
Other coffeehouse owners say Wi-Fi detracts from the atmosphere they are trying to foster.
Four Barrel Coffee in San Francisco has no Wi-Fi or power outlets for customer use. “We all have had experiences of working at cafes where the laptops just took over, and it started to feel more like a library,” said Jodi Geren, head of operations for Four Barrel. “We just really feel like it’s important for people to talk to each other.”
Those who bring laptops to Starbucks now average an hour of Wi-Fi use, and the company does not expect that the free access and content will make people linger longer, said Stephen Gillett, chief information officer at Starbucks and general manager of a unit called Digital Ventures, which will oversee the new offerings. He said that Starbucks purposely kept video and music clips short.
The coffee chain is catering in part to people who are out of work and need a place to perfect their résumés or do freelance jobs. In January, the company announced that same-store sales increased 4 percent after months of steady declines. Starbucks attributes the improvement, which came before consumer spending rebounded as a whole, in part to its role as an office for the unemployed.
The new partnership with Yahoo, which is called the Starbucks Digital Network, will include an online section on business and careers that will include tools for people searching for jobs or writing résumés, Mr. Gillett said.
“We expect this to be a very versatile tool for people who are using Starbucks for what we call the third place, between home and work,” he said.
Customers will also get free access to paid Web sites, like those of The Wall Street Journal and Zagat, free iTunes downloads and previews of not-yet-released movies and albums. They will see local content based on the coffee shop’s location, like news from Patch, AOL’s local news site, check-ins on Foursquare and neighborhood photos on Flickr.
For publishers and Web sites, the free content will serve as a marketing tool, Mr. Gillett said, letting customers sample things they might be willing to pay for later.
The digital network could also serve as a virtual storefront, Mr. Brogan said. He imagines Starbucks using it to sell songs and virtual goods, or to offer loyalty points for online shopping.
“If you have eight people sitting in a store for four hours on one cup of coffee, that’s not moving revenue,” he said. “However, if that same group is there for four hours on one cup of coffee and buys 14 songs, that’s sales.”
Starbucks is not disclosing the terms of its agreements with the content providers, including whether they are paying Starbucks or sharing revenue if customers make purchases, said Tamra Strentz, a spokeswoman.
Many coffeehouses, including Grounded in the West Village, a storefront one block from a Starbucks, offer free Wi-Fi to differentiate themselves from Starbucks.
“It’s definitely been an attraction,” said David Litman, the manager of Grounded. Still, he said he doubted that Wi-Fi at Starbucks would be a threat. “This is a very neighborhood place — there is a Starbucks on the next avenue, but people like to support us.”

Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price

By MATT RICHTEL NY TIMES
SAN FRANCISCO — When one of the most important e-mail messages of his life landed in his in-box a few years ago, Kord Campbell overlooked it.
Not just for a day or two, but 12 days. He finally saw it while sifting through old messages: a big company wanted to buy his Internet start-up.
“I stood up from my desk and said, ‘Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,’ ” Mr. Campbell said. “It’s kind of hard to miss an e-mail like that, but I did.”
The message had slipped by him amid an electronic flood: two computer screens alive with e-mail, instant messages, online chats, a Web browser and the computer code he was writing. (View an interactive panoramic photograph of Mr. Campbell's workstation.)
While he managed to salvage the $1.3 million deal after apologizing to his suitor, Mr. Campbell continues to struggle with the effects of the deluge of data. Even after he unplugs, he craves the stimulation he gets from his electronic gadgets. He forgets things like dinner plans, and he has trouble focusing on his family.
His wife, Brenda, complains, “It seems like he can no longer be fully in the moment.”
This is your brain on computers.
Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.
These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored.
The resulting distractions can have deadly consequences, as when cellphone-wielding drivers and train engineers cause wrecks. And for millions of people like Mr. Campbell, these urges can inflict nicks and cuts on creativity and deep thought, interrupting work and family life.
While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.
And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers.
“The technology is rewiring our brains,” said Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse and one of the world’s leading brain scientists. She and other researchers compare the lure of digital stimulation less to that of drugs and alcohol than to food and sex, which are essential but counterproductive in excess.
Technology use can benefit the brain in some ways, researchers say. Imaging studies show the brains of Internet users become more efficient at finding information. And players of some video games develop better visual acuity.
More broadly, cellphones and computers have transformed life. They let people escape their cubicles and work anywhere. They shrink distances and handle countless mundane tasks, freeing up time for more exciting pursuits.
For better or worse, the consumption of media, as varied as e-mail and TV, has exploded. In 2008, people consumed three times as much information each day as they did in 1960. And they are constantly shifting their attention. Computer users at work change windows or check e-mail or other programs nearly 37 times an hour, new research shows.
The nonstop interactivity is one of the most significant shifts ever in the human environment, said Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco.
“We are exposing our brains to an environment and asking them to do things we weren’t necessarily evolved to do,” he said. “We know already there are consequences.”
Mr. Campbell, 43, came of age with the personal computer, and he is a heavier user of technology than most. But researchers say the habits and struggles of Mr. Campbell and his family typify what many experience — and what many more will, if trends continue.
For him, the tensions feel increasingly acute, and the effects harder to shake.
The Campbells recently moved to California from Oklahoma to start a software venture. Mr. Campbell’s life revolves around computers. (View a slide show on how the Campbells interact with technology.)
He goes to sleep with a laptop or iPhone on his chest, and when he wakes, he goes online. He and Mrs. Campbell, 39, head to the tidy kitchen in their four-bedroom hillside rental in Orinda, an affluent suburb of San Francisco, where she makes breakfast and watches a TV news feed in the corner of the computer screen while he uses the rest of the monitor to check his e-mail.
Major spats have arisen because Mr. Campbell escapes into video games during tough emotional stretches. On family vacations, he has trouble putting down his devices. When he rides the subway to San Francisco, he knows he will be offline 221 seconds as the train goes through a tunnel.
Their 16-year-old son, Connor, tall and polite like his father, recently received his first C’s, which his family blames on distraction from his gadgets. Their 8-year-old daughter, Lily, like her mother, playfully tells her father that he favors technology over family.
“I would love for him to totally unplug, to be totally engaged,” says Mrs. Campbell, who adds that he becomes “crotchety until he gets his fix.” But she would not try to force a change.
“He loves it. Technology is part of the fabric of who he is,” she says. “If I hated technology, I’d be hating him, and a part of who my son is too.”
Always On
Mr. Campbell, whose given name is Thomas, had an early start with technology in Oklahoma City. When he was in third grade, his parents bought him Pong, a video game. Then came a string of game consoles and PCs, which he learned to program.
In high school, he balanced computers, basketball and a romance with Brenda, a cheerleader with a gorgeous singing voice. He studied too, with focus, uninterrupted by e-mail. “I did my homework because I needed to get it done,” he said. “I didn’t have anything else to do.”
He left college to help with a family business, then set up a lawn mowing service. At night he would read, play video games, hang out with Brenda and, as she remembers it, “talk a lot more.”
In 1996, he started a successful Internet provider. Then he built the start-up that he sold for $1.3 million in 2003 to LookSmart, a search engine.
Mr. Campbell loves the rush of modern life and keeping up with the latest information. “I want to be the first to hear when the aliens land,” he said, laughing. But other times, he fantasizes about living in pioneer days when things moved more slowly: “I can’t keep everything in my head.”
No wonder. As he came of age, so did a new era of data and communication.
At home, people consume 12 hours of media a day on average, when an hour spent with, say, the Internet and TV simultaneously counts as two hours. That compares with five hours in 1960, say researchers at the University of California, San Diego. Computer users visit an average of 40 Web sites a day, according to research by RescueTime, which offers time-management tools.
As computers have changed, so has the understanding of the human brain. Until 15 years ago, scientists thought the brain stopped developing after childhood. Now they understand that its neural networks continue to develop, influenced by things like learning skills.
So not long after Eyal Ophir arrived at Stanford in 2004, he wondered whether heavy multitasking might be leading to changes in a characteristic of the brain long thought immutable: that humans can process only a single stream of information at a time.
Going back a half-century, tests had shown that the brain could barely process two streams, and could not simultaneously make decisions about them. But Mr. Ophir, a student-turned-researcher, thought multitaskers might be rewiring themselves to handle the load.
His passion was personal. He had spent seven years in Israeli intelligence after being weeded out of the air force — partly, he felt, because he was not a good multitasker. Could his brain be retrained?
Mr. Ophir, like others around the country studying how technology bent the brain, was startled by what he discovered.
The Myth of Multitasking
The test subjects were divided into two groups: those classified as heavy multitaskers based on their answers to questions about how they used technology, and those who were not.
In a test created by Mr. Ophir and his colleagues, subjects at a computer were briefly shown an image of red rectangles. Then they saw a similar image and were asked whether any of the rectangles had moved. It was a simple task until the addition of a twist: blue rectangles were added, and the subjects were told to ignore them. (Play a game testing how well you filter out distractions.)
The multitaskers then did a significantly worse job than the non-multitaskers at recognizing whether red rectangles had changed position. In other words, they had trouble filtering out the blue ones — the irrelevant information.
So, too, the multitaskers took longer than non-multitaskers to switch among tasks, like differentiating vowels from consonants and then odd from even numbers. The multitaskers were shown to be less efficient at juggling problems. (Play a game testing how well you switch between tasks.)
Other tests at Stanford, an important center for research in this fast-growing field, showed multitaskers tended to search for new information rather than accept a reward for putting older, more valuable information to work.
Researchers say these findings point to an interesting dynamic: multitaskers seem more sensitive than non-multitaskers to incoming information.
The results also illustrate an age-old conflict in the brain, one that technology may be intensifying. A portion of the brain acts as a control tower, helping a person focus and set priorities. More primitive parts of the brain, like those that process sight and sound, demand that it pay attention to new information, bombarding the control tower when they are stimulated.
Researchers say there is an evolutionary rationale for the pressure this barrage puts on the brain. The lower-brain functions alert humans to danger, like a nearby lion, overriding goals like building a hut. In the modern world, the chime of incoming e-mail can override the goal of writing a business plan or playing catch with the children.
“Throughout evolutionary history, a big surprise would get everyone’s brain thinking,” said Clifford Nass, a communications professor at Stanford. “But we’ve got a large and growing group of people who think the slightest hint that something interesting might be going on is like catnip. They can’t ignore it.”
Mr. Nass says the Stanford studies are important because they show multitasking’s lingering effects: “The scary part for guys like Kord is, they can’t shut off their multitasking tendencies when they’re not multitasking.”
Melina Uncapher, a neurobiologist on the Stanford team, said she and other researchers were unsure whether the muddied multitaskers were simply prone to distraction and would have had trouble focusing in any era. But she added that the idea that information overload causes distraction was supported by more and more research.
A study at the University of California, Irvine, found that people interrupted by e-mail reported significantly increased stress compared with those left to focus. Stress hormones have been shown to reduce short-term memory, said Gary Small, a psychiatrist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Preliminary research shows some people can more easily juggle multiple information streams. These “supertaskers” represent less than 3 percent of the population, according to scientists at the University of Utah.
Other research shows computer use has neurological advantages. In imaging studies, Dr. Small observed that Internet users showed greater brain activity than nonusers, suggesting they were growing their neural circuitry.
At the University of Rochester, researchers found that players of some fast-paced video games can track the movement of a third more objects on a screen than nonplayers. They say the games can improve reaction and the ability to pick out details amid clutter.
“In a sense, those games have a very strong both rehabilitative and educational power,” said the lead researcher, Daphne Bavelier, who is working with others in the field to channel these changes into real-world benefits like safer driving.
There is a vibrant debate among scientists over whether technology’s influence on behavior and the brain is good or bad, and how significant it is.
“The bottom line is, the brain is wired to adapt,” said Steven Yantis, a professor of brain sciences at Johns Hopkins University. “There’s no question that rewiring goes on all the time,” he added. But he said it was too early to say whether the changes caused by technology were materially different from others in the past.
Mr. Ophir is loath to call the cognitive changes bad or good, though the impact on analysis and creativity worries him.
He is not just worried about other people. Shortly after he came to Stanford, a professor thanked him for being the one student in class paying full attention and not using a computer or phone. But he recently began using an iPhone and noticed a change; he felt its pull, even when playing with his daughter.
“The media is changing me,” he said. “I hear this internal ping that says: check e-mail and voice mail.”
“I have to work to suppress it.”
Kord Campbell does not bother to suppress it, or no longer can.
Interrupted by a Corpse
It is a Wednesday in April, and in 10 minutes, Mr. Campbell has an online conference call that could determine the fate of his new venture, called Loggly. It makes software that helps companies understand the clicking and buying patterns of their online customers.
Mr. Campbell and his colleagues, each working from a home office, are frantically trying to set up a program that will let them share images with executives at their prospective partner.
But at the moment when Mr. Campbell most needs to focus on that urgent task, something else competes for his attention: “Man Found Dead Inside His Business.”
That is the tweet that appears on the left-most of Mr. Campbell’s array of monitors, which he has expanded to three screens, at times adding a laptop and an iPad.
On the left screen, Mr. Campbell follows the tweets of 1,100 people, along with instant messages and group chats. The middle monitor displays a dark field filled with computer code, along with Skype, a service that allows Mr. Campbell to talk to his colleagues, sometimes using video. The monitor on the right keeps e-mail, a calendar, a Web browser and a music player.
Even with the meeting fast approaching, Mr. Campbell cannot resist the tweet about the corpse. He clicks on the link in it, glances at the article and dismisses it. “It’s some article about something somewhere,” he says, annoyed by the ads for jeans popping up.
The program gets fixed, and the meeting turns out to be fruitful: the partners are ready to do business. A colleague says via instant message: “YES.”
Other times, Mr. Campbell’s information juggling has taken a more serious toll. A few weeks earlier, he once again overlooked an e-mail message from a prospective investor. Another time, Mr. Campbell signed the company up for the wrong type of business account on Amazon.com, costing $300 a month for six months before he got around to correcting it. He has burned hamburgers on the grill, forgotten to pick up the children and lingered in the bathroom playing video games on an iPhone.
Mr. Campbell can be unaware of his own habits. In a two-and-a-half hour stretch one recent morning, he switched rapidly between e-mail and several other programs, according to data from RescueTime, which monitored his computer use with his permission. But when asked later what he was doing in that period, Mr. Campbell said he had been on a long Skype call, and “may have pulled up an e-mail or two.”
The kind of disconnection Mr. Campbell experiences is not an entirely new problem, of course. As they did in earlier eras, people can become so lost in work, hobbies or TV that they fail to pay attention to family.
Mr. Campbell concedes that, even without technology, he may work or play obsessively, just as his father immersed himself in crossword puzzles. But he says this era is different because he can multitask anyplace, anytime.
“It’s a mixed blessing,” he said. “If you’re not careful, your marriage can fall apart or your kids can be ready to play and you’ll get distracted.”
The Toll on Children
Father and son sit in armchairs. Controllers in hand, they engage in a fierce video game battle, displayed on the nearby flat-panel TV, as Lily watches.
They are playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl, a cartoonish animated fight between characters that battle using anvils, explosives and other weapons.
“Kill him, Dad,” Lily screams. To no avail. Connor regularly beats his father, prompting expletives and, once, a thrown pillow. But there is bonding and mutual respect.
“He’s a lot more tactical,” says Connor. “But I’m really good at quick reflexes.”
Screens big and small are central to the Campbell family’s leisure time. Connor and his mother relax while watching TV shows like “Heroes.” Lily has an iPod Touch, a portable DVD player and her own laptop, which she uses to watch videos, listen to music and play games.
Lily, a second-grader, is allowed only an hour a day of unstructured time, which she often spends with her devices. The laptop can consume her.
“When she’s on it, you can holler her name all day and she won’t hear,” Mrs. Campbell said.
Researchers worry that constant digital stimulation like this creates attention problems for children with brains that are still developing, who already struggle to set priorities and resist impulses.
Connor’s troubles started late last year. He could not focus on homework. No wonder, perhaps. On his bedroom desk sit two monitors, one with his music collection, one with Facebook and Reddit, a social site with news links that he and his father love. His iPhone availed him to relentless texting with his girlfriend.
When he studied, “a little voice would be saying, ‘Look up’ at the computer, and I’d look up,” Connor said. “Normally, I’d say I want to only read for a few minutes, but I’d search every corner of Reddit and then check Facebook.”
His Web browsing informs him. “He’s a fact hound,” Mr. Campbell brags. “Connor is, other than programming, extremely technical. He’s 100 percent Internet savvy.”
But the parents worry too. “Connor is obsessed,” his mother said. “Kord says we have to teach him balance.”
So in January, they held a family meeting. Study time now takes place in a group setting at the dinner table after everyone has finished eating. It feels, Mr. Campbell says, like togetherness.
No Vacations
For spring break, the family rented a cottage in Carmel, Calif. Mrs. Campbell hoped everyone would unplug.
But the day before they left, the iPad from Apple came out, and Mr. Campbell snapped one up. The next night, their first on vacation, “We didn’t go out to dinner,” Mrs. Campbell mourned. “We just sat there on our devices.”
She rallied the troops the next day to the aquarium. Her husband joined them for a bit but then begged out to do e-mail on his phone.
Later she found him playing video games.
The trip came as Mr. Campbell was trying to raise several million dollars for his new venture, a goal that he achieved. Brenda said she understood that his pursuit required intensity but was less understanding of the accompanying surge in video game.
His behavior brought about a discussion between them. Mrs. Campbell said he told her that he was capable of logging off, citing a trip to Hawaii several years ago that they called their second honeymoon.
“What trip are you thinking about?” she said she asked him. She recalled that he had spent two hours a day online in the hotel’s business center.
On Thursday, their fourth day in Carmel, Mr. Campbell spent the day at the beach with his family. They flew a kite and played whiffle ball.
Connor unplugged too. “It changes the mood of everything when everybody is present,” Mrs. Campbell said.
The next day, the family drove home, and Mr. Campbell disappeared into his office.
Technology use is growing for Mrs. Campbell as well. She divides her time between keeping the books of her husband’s company, homemaking and working at the school library. She checks e-mail 25 times a day, sends texts and uses Facebook.
Recently, she was baking peanut butter cookies for Teacher Appreciation Day when her phone chimed in the living room. She answered a text, then became lost in Facebook, forgot about the cookies and burned them. She started a new batch, but heard the phone again, got lost in messaging, and burned those too. Out of ingredients and shamed, she bought cookies at the store.
She feels less focused and has trouble completing projects. Some days, she promises herself she will ignore her device. “It’s like a diet — you have good intentions in the morning and then you’re like, ‘There went that,’ ” she said.
Mr. Nass at Stanford thinks the ultimate risk of heavy technology use is that it diminishes empathy by limiting how much people engage with one another, even in the same room.
“The way we become more human is by paying attention to each other,” he said. “It shows how much you care.”
That empathy, Mr. Nass said, is essential to the human condition. “We are at an inflection point,” he said. “A significant fraction of people’s experiences are now fragmented.”

Obama Knew the Spill Was Hopeless
by Richard Wolffe DAILY BEAST
As the president visits the Gulf anew, Richard Wolffe reports that he was first briefed in April on how bad the spill would be. Plus: the real reason the White House is so mad at Carville—and why Obama would rather talk about the economy.
Critics have bashed President Obama for being slow to seize the political initiative in combating the BP oil spill in the Gulf Coast, now widely believed to be the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. The White House has battled back, releasing a timeline of events showing that Obama was briefed—and deploying the Coast Guard—within 24 hours of the Deepwater Horizon blowout.
What has not been previously disclosed: The president was not only briefed on the real-time events of the spill, but also on just how bad it would be—and how hard it would be to plug the hole.
Carol Browner, director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy, told Obama at one of the earliest briefings in late April that the blowout would likely lead to an unprecedented environmental disaster, senior White House aides told The Daily Beast. Browner warned that capping a well at such depths had never been done before, and that they ought to expect an oil spill that would continue until a relief well was drilled in August, the aide said.
That early briefing on the scope of the spill—and enormous technical challenges involved in fixing it—might help explain the sense of fatalism that has infused Obama's team from the start.
Little that has happened since has changed their mind-set. Now six weeks later, the president’s top advisers expect the oil spill—and the negative stories—to continue through August.
The fact that Team Obama was warned of the extent of the disaster so early on suggests that White House officials were aware of the environmental challenge long before they decided to demonstrate concern via presidential visits to the Gulf.
When asked about the prospects for the new cap fitted over the leaking well earlier this week, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs voiced little optimism. “I’m long out of the prediction business on this,” he told reporters on Air Force One on Friday. “Everyone is hopeful that this works.” His comments were echoed by Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen, the national incident commander for the BP spill—who warned reporters against “over-optimism.”
Given the lack of technical capabilities on the sea floor, there’s not much the White House can do to plug the hole. And there are limited options for effectively preventing the oil from reaching large stretches of coastline. Instead, Obama’s team is focusing on the options at their immediate disposal—methods of news management and presidential communication.
Obama’s aides have grown increasingly frustrated with the public criticism that the president has failed to express sufficient anger. As Gibbs put it at a recent briefing, “If jumping up and down and screaming were to fix a hole in the ocean, we’d have done that five or six weeks ago. We’d have done that the first night.”
That frustration has boiled over in dealing with some of their most high-profile critics—especially the ones on the Democratic side.
Case in point: James Carville, the Democratic strategist, whose TV eruptions have helped focus attention on the president’s response.
Carville recently chanced upon Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen eating dinner with BP CEO Tony Hayward at a New Orleans restaurant, the senior White House aide says. Allen had called Carville after his first TV outburst to talk about the administration’s response, but Carville failed to return the call. When Allen asked why, Carville said he had been busy, the aide says (Carville did not reply to requests for comment). That does not sit well with administration officials who suggest that Carville’s readiness to go public with his criticism is not matched by his private willingness to offer concrete suggestions about what they could do differently.
Amid the frustration, the White House has taken steps to make their response more visible in recent weeks. In addition to daily briefings by Allen, the White House has staged two presidential visits to the Gulf over the last week.
As they plot course, Obama’s team is determined to avoid two scenarios. They’re mindful of BP’s habit of scheduling rounds of TV interviews to tout a new development—only to discover that the news was more disappointing than expected. And they want to avoid the perception that the president is focused exclusively on the oil spill, at a time when both public and private polling shows Americans have greater concerns—and care far more about the economy at this stage than they do about the oil spill.
That, of course, could change as shocking pictures of oil-covered animals begin to surface on TV. But for now, the latest CBS News poll—released Friday—shows that approval and disapproval ratings of Obama’s performance on the oil spill are more evenly split than expected, given the news coverage and the scale of the disaster. The poll showed 44 percent disapproval and 38 percent approval, a marginal improvement from a week earlier, when the numbers were 45 percent disapproval and 35 percent approval.
When asked about priorities in a recent Economist/YouGov poll, respondents ranked the environment in eighth position of “very important” issues, after the economy, health care, social security, the budget deficit, taxes, terrorism and education. The environment ranked “very important” with 50 percent of respondents, compared to 82 percent saying the economy.

Richard Wolffe is Daily Beast columnist and an award-winning journalist.

Millionaire's test rocket reaches orbit on 1st try
By MARCIA DUNN, AP Aerospace Writer
A multimillionaire's test rocket blasted off on its maiden voyage Friday and successfully reached orbit in a dry run for NASA's push to go commercial.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket achieved Earth orbit nine minutes into the flight as planned, drawing praise from NASA, the White House and others eager for the company to start resupplying the International Space Station.
"This has really been a fantastic day," said an exuberant Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder. He said Friday's launch helps vindicate President Barack Obama's plan to give private companies the job of ferrying cargo and ultimately people to the space station, freeing up NASA to aim for true outer space.
"This bodes very well for the Obama plan," said Musk, the co-founder of PayPal. "It shows that even a sort of small new company like SpaceX can make a real difference."
In a telephone news conference, Musk said celebratory margaritas were on his immediate radar. But he's already looking ahead to the next Falcon 9 launch this summer and, hopefully, the first cargo run to the space station next year. Astronauts could follow within three years of the company getting a contract from NASA, he said, and quite possibly average citizens in five to six years.
"This is the dawn of a new era in space exploration, I think a very exciting era and one which I think will lead to the democratization of space, making space accessible to everyone eventually," Musk said. "Yeah, I think this is really a historic moment."
SpaceX's brand new rocket soared off its launch pad into thin clouds at mid-afternoon, carrying a test version of the company's spacecraft, named Dragon. The goal was to put the capsule into a 155-mile-high orbit, which it did. The capsule will remain in orbit for a year before descending and burning up in the atmosphere.
"A near bull's-eye," Musk said.

The first attempt to launch the 158-foot rocket was aborted in the final few seconds earlier in the afternoon because of questionable readings with the engine-ignition system.
NASA hopes to use the Falcon-Dragon combo for hauling supplies and possibly astronauts to the space station, once the shuttles retire later this year or early next.
Hawthorne, Calif.-based SpaceX — or Space Exploration Technologies — is one of several companies vying for NASA's business. It was founded eight years ago by Musk, 38, a South African-born entrepreneur.
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden called Friday's launch "an important milestone in the commercial transportation effort" and said it puts the company a step closer to supplying the space station.
And the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy shot out this tweet: "what a show!"
"My e-mail box has gone bonkers," Musk said, "and my phone has been ringing off the hook."
Along with all the congratulations, there were cautionary words from critics like Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, who noted "this modest success" does not mean commercial companies are ready to step in and replace NASA.
Musk acknowledged Friday's flight to orbit does not mean the commercial space industry can do anything, anytime, but noted it should provide "a huge boost of confidence" for the industry.
The Planetary Society shares his assessment.
"Hats off," the society said in a statement. "Today's flight of Falcon 9 could be the first small step toward relieving NASA launchers of the burden of low-Earth orbit, thus freeing the U.S. space agency to reach new worlds."
Both Musk and the former space shuttle and space station commander in charge of astronaut safety and mission assurance for SpaceX, Kenneth Bowersox, repeatedly told reporters that they would learn from the test flight, no matter what the outcome and that it would help improve future Falcon flights.
The next Falcon 9 launch is targeted for sometime this summer from the same pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, less than five miles from NASA's shuttle launch pads at Kennedy Space Center. That rocket will hoist a true Dragon vessel on a test flight. The Dragon test vehicle launched Friday will remain in orbit for a year before re-entering the atmosphere and burning up.
SpaceX has poured close to $400 million into its two lines of Falcon rockets. The Falcon 1 successfully flew in 2008 after three failed attempts, and again in 2009.
The Falcon takes its name from Han Solo's spaceship in the "Star Wars" film saga, the Millennium Falcon. Musk chose the name Dragon because of how some viewed his unlikely venture, borrowing from Puff the Magic Dragon.

From The London Times
Dr Death’s body shop for that unusual gift
'Plastinated' human body parts will be offered for sale at Dr von Hagens's store in Guben
Roger Boyes, Berlin Stuck for that last minute gift? Fed up with buying after-shave for your husband? Gunther von Hagens, better known as Doctor Death, has just the thing for you. A real human testicle, a snip so to speak, at €360 (£305)? Or, something for the mantlepiece: a blackened smokers lung, going for €3,600. And, a good-luck present perhaps for a medical student about to sit his finals —a sliver of human brain To Go.
Welcome to a new kind of body shop. The 65-year-old German anatomist has converted a huge factory warehouse in Guben, on the German border with Poland, into a treatment laboratory for corpses bought in from around the world.
Sectioned up and “plastinated” — water withdrawn from the cells is replaced with a durable synthetic resin — the specimens form the basis of his Koerperwelten, Body Worlds touring exhibitions.
Typically, the treated human bodies are shaped into life-like tableaux: playing chess, sprinting, riding a bike or sitting at a dining table. They are very malleable and the internal structure of the body is precisely exposed. One exhibit in the darkened room in his Guben display centre shows two corpses copulating.
Clerics have sharply criticised Dr von Hagens but so far he has fought off all legal challenges. “He is making a travelling circus out of dead people,” complained Heilgard Asmus, the Protestant church leader in nearby Cottbus. “It is a sublime form of cannibalism, coupled with macabre voyeurism,” says Canon Rainer Alfs of Essen Cathedral.
The anatomist argues though that he is attempting to revolutionise the way that we look at ourselves.”This is nothing less than the democratisation of the human body,” says Dr von Hagens.
Now comes the latest step: a body supermarket, adjoining his laboratory, that allows you to take a body part home with you for prices ranging from €80 to €11,000.
Technically he is only supposed to sell the chunks of human to doctors, universities, teaching institutions. “We mark those bits with a red spot,” said a sales assistant at the body shop. “And if you buy a bit of elephant or rhino you will have to sign a form. Everything else marked with a green spot can be bought without restrictions.”
In fact, say customers, the controls are lax and you can pile up your shopping basket with most internal organs.
Soon the shop will have an online outlet, saving the journey to Guben in the far east of Germany.
“We demand that the regional government take all legal steps to ban the sale of human segments,” says Bishop Asmus. Local schools have been forbidden from going on guided tours of the Guben complex. But the nearby community has not protested: Dr von Hagens has invested €22 million in the laboratory, 220 jobs have been created and the body parts have become a big tourism draw for a depressed corner of the country. “We rent out the space for special events,” said a spokesman for the Plastinarium, “such as doctors weddings and midnight guided tours.”
What then could be more natural than to open a supermarket ready to sell the world’s most morbid wedding gifts?
Dr von Hagens revels in the publicity — and often operates at the very edge of the law. Metropolitan police officers observed him in London performing a public autopsy, the first in 170 years, in 2002 — but no legal action was taken. The same year, a shipment of 56 corpses from Siberia to Dr von Hagens was stopped by court action. He has been accused of receiving bodies of Kyrgyz and Chinese prisoners but he has always denied knowing the exact origins of the corpses.
Many Germans, concerned about the high cost of burial, have been making over their corpses to Dr von Hagens, aware that bits of their bodies will probably go on show around the world. Altogether over 11,000 people have agreed to make over their bodies to the man dubbed Dr Death.
“You don’t need a complete body in order to mourn a loved one,” says Dr von Hagens. “We have daughters and sons who come here to pay tribute to their dead parents. You don’t need a grave to do that.”
BODY PART PRICES
Some 100 human and animal — including ducks, a giraffe and crocodiles — body parts are available for purchase.
Sliced-through segment of lower human leg: €80
Slice of hand: €185
Human testicle: €360
Cross-section of the human pelvis: €300
Head and brain per slice: €1,500
Charred lung of a smoker: €3,600.
Full cross-section of a body: €11,000.
And for those unhappy about having a dead human hanging around the house, Horse’s hoof: €125.