IBS

In politics, every serious candidate for the White House has a health care plan. So too in business, where the two leading candidates for Web supremacy, Google and Microsoft, are working up their plans to improve the nation’s health care.

By combining better Internet search tools, the vast resources of the Web and online personal health records, both companies are betting they can enable people to make smarter choices about their health habits and medical care.

“What’s behind this is the mass consumerization of health information,” said Dr. David J. Brailer, the former health information technology coordinator in the Bush administration, who now heads a firm that invests in health ventures.

It is too soon to know whether either Google or Microsoft will make real headway. Health care, experts note, is a field where policy, regulation and entrenched interests tend to slow the pace of change, and technology companies have a history of losing patience.

And for most people, typing an ailment into a Web search engine is very different from entrusting a corporate titan with personal information about their health.

Google and Microsoft recognize the obstacles, and they concede that changing health care will take time. But the companies see the potential in attracting a large audience for health-related advertising and services. And both companies bring formidable advantages to the consumer market for such technology.

Microsoft’s software animates more than 90 percent of all personal computers, while Google is the default starting point for most health searches. And people are increasingly turning to their computers and the Web for health information and advice. A Harris poll, published last month, found that 52 percent of adults sometimes or frequently go to the Web for health information, up from 29 percent in 2001.

If the efforts of the two big companies gain momentum over time, that promises to accelerate a shift in power to consumers in health care, just as Internet technology has done in other industries.

Today, about 20 percent of the nation’s patient population have computerized records — rather than paper ones — and the Bush administration has pushed the health care industry to speed up the switch to electronic formats. But these records still tend to be controlled by doctors, hospitals or insurers. A patient moves to another state, for example, but the record usually stays.

The Google and Microsoft initiatives would give much more control to individuals, a trend many health experts see as inevitable. “Patients will ultimately be the stewards of their own information,” said John D. Halamka, a doctor and the chief information officer of the Harvard Medical School.

Already the Web is allowing people to take a more activist approach to health. According to the Harris survey, 58 percent of people who look online for health information discussed what they found with their doctors in the last year.

It is common these days, Dr. Halamka said, for a patient to come in carrying a pile of Web page printouts. “The doctor is becoming a knowledge navigator,” he said. “In the future, health care will be a much more collaborative process between patients and doctors.”

Microsoft and Google are hoping this will lead people to seek more control over their own health records, using tools the companies will provide. Neither company will discuss their plans in detail. But Microsoft’s consumer-oriented effort is scheduled to be announced this fall, while Google’s has been delayed and will probably not be introduced until next year, according to people who have been briefed on the companies’ plans.

A prototype of Google Health, which the company has shown to health professionals and advisers, makes the consumer focus clear. The welcome page reads, “At Google, we feel patients should be in charge of their health information, and they should be able to grant their health care providers, family members, or whomever they choose, access to this information. Google Health was developed to meet this need.”

A presentation of screen images from the prototype — which two people who received it showed to a reporter — then has 17 other Web pages including a “health profile” for medications, conditions and allergies; a personalized “health guide” for suggested treatments, drug interactions and diet and exercise regimens; pages for receiving reminder messages to get prescription refills or visit a doctor; and directories of nearby doctors.

Google executives would not comment on the prototype, other than to say the company plans to experiment and see what people want. “We’ll make mistakes and it will be a long-range march,” said Adam Bosworth, a vice president of engineering and leader of the health team. “But it’s also true that some of what we’re doing is expensive, and for Google it’s not.”

At Microsoft, the long-term goal is similarly ambitious. “It will take grand scale to solve these problems like the data storage, software and networking needed to handle vast amounts of personal health and medical information,” said Steve Shihadeh, general manager of Microsoft’s health solutions group. “So there are not many companies that can do this.”

This year, Microsoft bought a start-up, Medstory, whose search software is tailored for health information, and last year bought a company that makes software for retrieving and displaying patient information in hospitals. Microsoft software is already used in hospitals, clinical laboratories and doctors’ offices, and, Mr. Shihadeh noted, the three most popular health record systems in doctors’ offices are built with Microsoft software and programming tools.

Microsoft will not disclose its product plans, but according to people working with the company the consumer effort will include online offerings as well as software to find, retrieve and store personal health information on personal computers, cellphones and other kinds of digital devices — perhaps even a wristwatch with wireless Internet links some day.

Mr. Shihadeh declined to discuss specifics, but said, “We’re building a broad consumer health platform, and we view this challenge as far bigger than a personal health record, which is just scratching the surface.”

Yet personal health records promise to be a thorny challenge for practical and privacy reasons. To be most useful, a consumer-controlled record would include medical and treatment records from doctors, hospitals, insurers and laboratories. Under federal law, people can request and receive their personal health data within 90 days. But the process is complicated, and the replies typically come on paper, as photocopies or faxes.

The efficient way would be for that data to be sent over the Internet into a person’s digital health record. But that would require partnerships and trust between health care providers and insurers and the digital record-keepers.

Privacy concerns are another big obstacle, as both companies acknowledge. Most likely, they say, trust will build slowly, and the online records will include as much or as little personal information as users are comfortable divulging.

A person might start, for example, by typing in age, gender and a condition, like diabetes, as a way to find more personalized health information. If a person creates a personal health record and later has second thoughts, a simple mouse click should erase it. The promise, the companies say, will be complete consumer control.

There are plenty of competitors these days in online health records and information from start-ups like Revolution Health, headed by AOL’s founder, Stephen M. Case, and thriving profit-makers led by WebMD.

Potential rivals are not underestimating the two technology giants. But the smaller companies have the advantage of being focused entirely on health, and some have been around for years. WebMD, for example, traces its lineage to Healtheon, a fallen star of the dot-com era, founded by the Netscape billionaire Jim Clark.

Google and Microsoft are great companies, said Wayne T. Gattinella, WebMD’s chief executive, but “that doesn’t mean they will be expert in a specific area like health.”

Specialized health search engines — notably Healthline — are gaining ground and adding partners. AOL recently began using Healthline for searches on its health pages, even though Google is a close partner.

Still, 58 percent of people seeking health information online begin with a general search engine, according to a recent Jupiter Research report, and Google dominates the field. “Google is the entry point for most health search, and that is a huge advantage,” said Monique Levy, a Jupiter analyst.

Indeed, it is the market reach and deep pockets that Google and Microsoft can bring to consumer health information that intrigues medical experts, and has lured recruits. Dr. Roni Zeiger, a graduate of Stanford’s School of Medicine, a medical informatics researcher and a former primary care doctor, joined Google last year. The 36-year-old, who still sees patients some evenings and weekends at a nearby clinic, said, “At Google, I can use my expertise and knowledge to potentially help millions of people each day.”

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FOR George Bush, the presidency is becoming a tragic tale of unintended consequences. In foreign policy, the man who sought to transform Iraq, the Middle East and America's reputation has indeed had revolutionary effects, though not the ones he was aiming for. Now something similar seems to be happening in domestic politics. The most conservative president in recent history, a man who sought to turn his victories of 2000 and 2004 into a Republican hegemony, may well end up driving the Western world's most impressive political machine off a cliff.

That machine has put Republicans in the White House in seven of the past ten contests. At times it has seemed as if the Democrats (oddly, given their status as the less Godly party) have had to rely on divine intervention to get elected. Watergate helped Jimmy Carter in 1976, just as the end of the cold war and Ross Perot's disruptive third-party campaign helped Bill Clinton in 1992. Better organised and more intellectually inventive than their “liberal” rivals, American conservatives have controlled the agenda even when they have lost: Mr Clinton is best remembered for balancing the budget and passing welfare reform, both conservative achievements. In a country where one in three people see themselves as conservatives (against one in five as liberals) and where the South and West have grown far more quickly than the liberal north-east, it is easy to see why Mr Bush and his strategist, Karl Rove, dreamed of banishing Democrats from power for a generation.

Now they would settle for a lot less. Having recaptured Congress last year, the Democrats are on course to retake the presidency in 2008. Only one Republican, Rudy Giuliani, looks competitive in the polls, and his campaign is less slick than those of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Voters now favour generic Democratic candidates over Republican ones by wide margins. Democrats are more trusted even on traditional conservative issues, such as national security, and they have opened up a wide gap among the young, among independents and among Latinos (see article).

The easy scapegoat is Mr Bush himself. During his presidency, the words Katrina, Rumsfeld, Abramoff, Guantánamo and Libby have become shorthand for incompetence, cronyism or extremism. Indeed, the failings of Mr Bush's coterie are oddly reassuring for some conservatives: once he has gone, they can regroup, as they did after his father was ousted in 1992.

Yet this President Bush is not a good scapegoat. Rather than betraying the right, he has given it virtually everything it craved, from humongous tax cuts to conservative judges. Many of the worst errors were championed by conservative constituencies. Some of the arrogance in foreign policy stems from the armchair warriors of neoconservatism; the ill-fated attempt to “save” the life of the severely brain-damaged Terri Schiavo was driven by the Christian right. Even Mr Bush's apparently oxymoronic trust in “big-government conservatism” is shared in practice by most Republicans in Congress.

From this perspective, the worrying parallel for the right is not 1992 but the liberal overreach of the 1960s. By embracing leftish causes that were too extreme for the American mainstream—from unfettered abortion to affirmative action—the Democrats cast themselves into the political wilderness. Now the American people seem to be reacting to conservative over-reach by turning left. More want universal health insurance; more distrust force as a way to bring about peace; more like greenery; ever more dislike intolerance on social issues.

So some sort of shift seems to be under way. Would it be a change for the better? The Economist has never made any secret of its preference for the Republican Party's individualistic “western” wing rather than the moralistic “southern” one that Mr Bush has come to typify. It is hard to imagine Ronald Reagan sponsoring a federal amendment banning gay marriage or limiting federal funding for stem-cell research. Yet Mr Bush's departure hardly guarantees a move back to the centre. Social liberals like Mr Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger are in a minority on the right. On the one issue where Mr Bush fought the intolerant wing of his party, immigration, the nativists won—and perhaps lost the Latino vote for a generation.

In terms of foreign policy, America's allies, especially in Europe, would also be unwise to start celebrating, for two reasons. First, some of the changes that would stem from a more Democratic America would be unwelcome. The Democrats are moving to the left not just on health care, but also on trade; and a more protectionist America would soon make the world's poor regret Mr Bush's passing. Similarly, many Europeans may yearn for a less interventionist America; but an isolationist superpower could be much more frightening.

Second, America, even if it shifts to the left, will still be a conservative force on the international stage. Mrs Clinton might be portrayed as a communist on talk radio in Kansas, but set her alongside France's Nicolas Sarkozy, Germany's Angela Merkel, Britain's David Cameron or any other supposed European conservative, and on virtually every significant issue Mrs Clinton is the more right-wing. She also mentions God more often than the average European bishop. As for foreign policy, the main Democratic candidates are equally staunch in their support of Israel; none of them has ruled out attacking Iran; Mr Obama might take a shot at Pakistan; and few of them want to cede power to multilateral organisations.

One finding that stands out in the polls is that most Americans distrust government strongly. Forty years ago they turned against a leftish elite trying to boss them around; now they have had to endure a right-wing version. In democracies political revolutions usually become obvious only in retrospect. In 1968, with America stuck in another bruising war, few liberals saw Richard Nixon's southern strategy as part of a long-term turn to the right. All that was clear then was that most Americans urgently wanted a change of direction. That is also true today.

Bugatti Veyron 16.4

By EZRA DYER

GREENWICH, Conn.

IN terms of sheer speed, power and history-making levels of engineering excess, the Bugatti Veyron is a success. Bugatti’s parent, Volkswagen, set out to build the fastest production car in the world, and it did. There is a photo of the thing right there in the 2007 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records, under the heading, Fastest Production Car. It is said to achieve a top speed of 253 miles an hour, and that’s faster than any production car ever.

But here’s the problem with setting out to conquer a superlative: there’s always someone lurking around the corner, drawing a target on your back. Ask the Petronas Twin Towers (at 1,483 feet, the world’s tallest buildings for six years, until the Taipei 101 tower went to 1,671 feet in 2004). Or Hank Aaron.

Once the bar is moved, you’re a historical footnote. That might be why, despite a total run of only 300 cars, half of the Bugatti Veyrons scheduled for production are still unsold.

Oh, sure, the price might be a factor, too. The Veyron is rather expensive — about $1.4 million, although sometimes the price is quoted at $1.3 million or $1.5 million, depending on the exchange rate. (At this level, the price should be quoted in terms of a larger monetary unit anyway, like Ferrari F430s or Christie Brinkley divorce settlements.)

As bad as this may make you feel about your own financial situation, the world has plenty of big-money car nuts with $1 million-plus to spend on a Veyron. But so far, despite fawning reports in the media, buyers have given it a lukewarm reception. The problem, from my point of view, is that the world’s most expensive car comes from the people’s car company, and I suspect that the Veyron is ultimately the VW Phaeton of the supercar stage: Its engineering is beyond reproach, but its origins don’t satisfy the brand snobs who have the money to buy one.

If you own a VW Passat with the W8 motor, then you own half of a Veyron engine, minus the turbos. That’s a fantastic bragging right for the Passat owner, but not so great for the person who just spent the equivalent of seven Ferrari F430s to buy a Veyron.

Certainly, Bugatti is one of the most esteemed European marques ever. But count me among the people who fail to understand the trend of reviving long-dead prestige brands. You’ve got to earn a reputation, not dust one off. There is no authenticity without continuity.

Yet Bugatti, along with Maybach and Spyker, seem to believe that there’s no statute of limitations on the brand appeal of pre-World War II automakers. Hoping that buyers will embrace a supercar because it wears a once-glorious badge is like hoping people will assume your son’s a great baseball player because you named him Honus Wagner.

One wonders why, since VW already owns Bentley, the Veyron doesn’t simply wear the Flying B. What would be so wrong if the world’s fastest car were a Bentley — and might it have sold better that way?

I suppose time, and some distant Pebble Beach lawn event, will tell whether the Bugatti Veyron is as successful with collectors as it is at decimating speed records. What is undebatable right now is that the select few who own (or lease) a Veyron hold the keys to the world’s greatest automotive thrill ride.

Depending on your prior exposure to big-horsepower cars, the initial second of acceleration might not seem out of the ordinary — even with all-wheel-drive, a car has only so much traction off the line, and a Porsche 911 Turbo can spin all four tires out of the gate, too.

But quickly, almost too quickly for your brain to process, the Veyron speeds straight out of your frame of reference. Once the Veyron’s hooked up and putting its 1,001 horsepower to the ground, there’s no comparison I can invoke that will help you understand it, unless you’re a Navy fighter pilot or a circus clown with extensive cannon experience.

When you floor the throttle of the Veyron on the highway, the sensation is as if every other driver slammed on the brakes. Except they didn’t. They’re still doing 70 miles an hour, but you’re blurring the space between the guardrails like an antiproton in a particle collider.

In most cars, you expect a reduction in acceleration as you move up through the gears — longer gear ratios and aerodynamic drag eventually trump horsepower. But the Veyron is different. First gear is quick and violent. Second gear takes slightly longer but seems equally violent. By third gear, you’re worried about your driver’s license and your life, and the thrust shows no sign of relenting. (Did I mention the violence?)

Mission control, something is wrong. The booster rockets don’t seem to be dropping off.

So you hit the brakes and discover that they’re excellent, but they’re of the realm of mortal cars, unlike the motor. Thanks to active aerodynamics and the wonders of downforce, at higher speeds the Veyron’s stopping and cornering power begin to approach the standard set by its go-power.

But by higher speeds, I definitely mean faster than I cared to drive in suburban Connecticut. For example, if you hit the brakes and look in the rearview mirror to see the spoiler extended high and angled down in air-brake mode, you’d better hope there are no constables nearby, because that trick doesn’t come out of the bag unless you’re going at least 130 m.p.h.

I was informed of this by none other than Pierre-Henri Raphanel, a Bugatti test driver, who was riding shotgun at the time and probably had little desire to see the air brake in action on the Merritt Parkway.

Mr. Raphanel, a former racecar driver, knows as much about this car as just about anyone; he also knows what a monumental headache it was to make the Veyron a reality.

The Michelin tires had to be developed specifically for this car. Engineers faced endless setbacks in dissipating the volcanic heat of the motor, which sits naked behind the passenger compartment, a W16 al fresco. The optics of the windshield require such perfection that for every 100 windshields produced, only 5 are usable. The rest, I suppose, go to Crazy Al’s Slightly Irregular Windshield Warehouse.

The gist of Mr. Raphanel’s spiel is that cranking out 1,001 horsepower is just the first of many challenges in building a 253 m.p.h. automobile. In fact, even attempting such a thing is ambitious bordering on crazy.

“Ferrari would never build a car like this,” he said. “They simply don’t need to. They could give a car 700 horsepower and sell out a production run of 400. So why bother going to all the trouble to make it 1,000 horsepower?

“Nobody else will ever make a car like this again. This will be the high point for cars powered by an internal combustion engine.”

I hear you, Pierre, but you know that at some car company, somewhere, there’s a chalkboard emblazoned with a new target: 254 m.p.h.

Already, you can walk into Exotic Cars at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas and put your money down on a Koenigsegg CCX, which has a claimed top speed of “245-plus miles per hour.”

Bugatti has sold 150 Veyrons because the car holds the record for the world’s fastest production automobile. And they haven’t sold the other 150 because records are made to be broken.

INSIDE TRACK: The ultimate car — so far.

Népszabadság • Horváth Gábor   • 2007. augusztus 6.

Az amerikai elnök pénteken aláírta azt a biztonságitörvény-csomagot, amelynek része a vízummentesség új kritériumainak meghatározása. A szöveg tükrözi a külföldiek beutazásával kapcsolatos amerikai aggodalmakat, és a téma szakértői úgy látják, továbbra sem egyértelmű, mely országokra és mikortól fog kiterjedni a vízummentesség. A Magyar Amerikai Koalíció (HAC) szerint a törvény nem elég rugalmas, és nem terjeszti ki a vízummentességet új államokra. Az erőteljesen lobbizó szervezet élén álló Maximilian Teleki szerint a törvény ezzel együtt előrelépés: immár nem az a kérdés, hogy Magyarország bekerül-e a kedvezményezettek közé, hanem az, hogy mikor. Washingtonban egyébként az a hír járja, hogy Magyarország az elmúlt hónapokban már teljesíti a vízumkérelmek visszautasításának új, háromról tízszázalékosra emelt kritériumát. Ha ez a szeptember végén záruló egész 2007-es amerikai pénzügyi évre igaz, akkor hazánk az elsők között csatlakozhat a vízummentességi programhoz, ami kétségtelenül jelentős külpolitikai sikernek számítana. Szerencsés esetben nem kizárt, hogy a vízummentesség a magyar állampolgárok számára már 2008 elején vagy közepén életbe lép.

Az viszont nemcsak a magyar, de a lengyel kormánynak is kudarc lenne, ha térségünkből elsőként csupán a már 2006-ban is a tízszázalékos küszöb alatt maradt csehek és észtek kapnának vízummentességet. (Megint más kérdés, hogy a 2006-ban 9,4 százalékon lévő csehek technikai okokból 2007-re akár a limit fölé is kerülhetnek.) Jaroslaw Kaczynski lengyel kormányfő a hét végén honfitársait okolta a nehézségekért: - A lengyelek még mindig nem jönnek időben vissza az Egyesült Államokból, és most ezért fizetünk - mondta. A csehek sem elégedettek, mert - mint a prágai külügyminisztérium szóvivője említette - a pályázó országok közvetlenül nem tudják befolyásolni a vízumkérelmek amerikai viszszautasítási arányát.

Az alkudozásnak még nincs vége. A törvény aláírásakor Bush elnök is arra utalt, hogy nem tartja elég rugalmasnak a szabályozást, és folytatni kívánja az egyeztetéseket az USA legszorosabb szövetségeseinek a programba való bevonása érdekében. A színfalak mögött már a Képviselőház Tom Lantos vezette külügyi bizottsága a törvény módosításán dolgozik. A HAC is addig folytatja kampányát, amíg Magyarország ténylegesen nem csatlakozik a programhoz.

Ugyanakkor a törvényhozásban néhányan az egész vízummentességi programot el akarják törölni. Arra hivatkoznak, hogy az Európában vagy másutt élő muzulmánok között terroristák is lehetnek. A törvény a biztonsági aggodalmakat az Ausztráliában már működőhöz hasonló, internetes adatszolgáltatás bevezetésével igyekszik kezelni. Az Amerikába belépni szándékozóknak két nappal az utazás előtt kell majd megadniuk adataikat, s ezeket egybevetik a terrorizmussal gyanúsítottak adatbázisával. Egyes jelekből, például abból, hogy az amerikaiak kíváncsiak a repülőgépen disznóhúsmentes vagy vegetáriánus menüt választókra, arra lehet következtetni, hogy az FBI a konkrét gyanúsítottakon túl a terroristákra felállított profil alapján próbálja meg szűrni az utazókat: a legnagyobb kockázatot azok a fiatal mohamedánok jelentik, akik radikális hitszónokok ellenőrzése alá tartozó mecseteket látogatnak. Vagyis Amerika a vízummentességet egészen másként képzeli, mint a schengeni egyezmény révén egyre inkább "határok nélküliséget" élvező Európa.

Az Egyesült Államokba a tengerentúlról beutazó külföldiek aránya 2001-et követően 17 százalékkal csökkent, miközben a világ más részein 20 százalékkal nőtt a határátlépések száma. A vízummentességért jelenleg mintegy húsz ország áll sorba, köztük Dél-Korea, Izrael, Törökország, Brazília vagy az eredeti programból a korábbi, háromszázalékos elutasítási ráta fölé kerülésért kizárt Argentína és Uruguay. Az is biztosra vehető, hogy a program bővítése másoknak is meghozza a kedvét. Az amerikaiak problémája tehát nem az, hogy a magyarok vagy a lengyelek vízummentességet szeretnének, hanem az, hogy a fél világ.

Christopher SharBy ANDREW ADAM NEWMAN

JANICE RASPEN, a librarian at an elementary school in Fredericksburg, Va., came clean with her book club a couple years ago. They were discussing “A Fine Balance,” a novel set in India in the 1970s by Rohinton Mistry and an Oprah’s Book Club pick, when she told the group — all fellow teachers — that rather than read the book, she had listened to an audio version.

“My statement was met with stunned silence,” said Ms. Raspen, 38.

Finally Catherine Altman, an art teacher, spoke up.

“I said that I felt like listening to a book was a copout,” Ms. Altman said. “I’m not like a hardcore book group person — a lot of times I don’t even finish the book. But my point was that she is a librarian and I thought it was pretty ridiculous. I’m a painter and it would be like me painting by numbers.”

The perennial disagreement in book groups has been over authors, with the single-malt drinkers arguing for F. Scott Fitzgerald and the chardonnay drinkers for Anita Shreve. But the latest schism in the living room lit-fests is not over whom they read, but if they read.

Is it acceptable, they debate within and among themselves, to listen to that month’s book rather than read it? Or is that cheating, like watching the movie instead of reading the book?

Because audio enthusiasts generally listen aloud in a private space like their cars or with headphones, they are spared having to publicly defend the format. When they join reading groups, however, they enter what can be enemy territory, where dyed-in-the-wool bibliophiles want to hear nothing of a book but the crack of its spine.

Dain Frisby-Dart, 40, an avid audio book listener from Trempealeau, Wis., told her book group a few years ago that she was listening to the current selection. One of the members, a man in his 70s, reacted as if she had been reading CliffsNotes.

“He said, ‘It doesn’t count if you listened to it. That’s cheating,’ ” Ms. Frisby-Dart said. “I was so floored by the comment that I just kind of laughed it off.”

But Ms. Frisby-Dart was not laughing when she thought about it later, and she decided against audio for the group’s next selection, and the one after that.

Now she listens to only about 10 percent of her book group’s titles. “Perhaps I should stick up for audio books a little bit more,” she said, “but I do feel like there’s a bit of a stigma listening to them.”

Plenty of book club members listen unabashedly. But others cringe at the thought of facing the hairy eyeball from those with whom they share sofas. After all, the settings ideally should be relaxed, courteous and erudite, even when the selection is a James Patterson thriller. Some don’t even admit that they listen.

But listen they do, though the stigma persists that listening to books is Reading Lite. People are pressed for time, and so growth in the audio book industry has been brisk, with overall sales (downloads, CDs and cassettes) at $871 million in 2006, up 5 percent over the previous year.

Tara Volpe, 28, a pharmaceutical sales representative, is an enthusiast. Because she spends a lot of time in her car, she listens while driving to far-flung appointments — even when the books are the assignment for the book group she runs in Sayville, N.Y., made up of women in their 20s and 30s. (One recent pick: “He’s Just Not That Into You.”)

Yet her listening pleasure is tinged with guilt.

“I know it only matters that I got the content of the book and its ideas,” she said. “But I still feel like I’m trying to cover up an affair.”

Donald Katz had worked as a journalist and author for 20 years when, in 1995, he started Audible.com, which features audio books for download through its Web site and through iTunes.

“When I started Audible, I was generally greeted with a level of derision,” Mr. Katz said by phone from Audible’s headquarters in Newark. “Not only did I get flak from my publishing industry friends, but my wife’s book group in Montclair let it be known that they considered listening to books to be cheating.” Today, though, several members of his wife’s group listen, too.

Book groups are by all estimates on the rise, thanks in no small part to Oprah Winfrey, whose 11-year-old Oprah’s Book Club not only spurs sales of her selections but inspires viewers to form gaggles to discuss them. About 20 million Americans are members of book groups, double the number just eight years ago, said Diana Loevy, the author of “The Book Club Companion.”

As for audio books’ place in reading groups, Ms. Loevy said the percentage of people who listen instead of read is low but climbing. For them, her book suggests titles and frequently notes exemplary audio versions, like Joe Morton narrating “Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison or Toni Morrison reading her own “Beloved.”

John Alexander, the vice president of consumer sales and marketing at Recorded Books, an audio book publisher with a rent-by-mail division, said many of his customers are book club members. “Individuals will call us to say they’re ordering a book,” he said, “and they say, ‘I need it by this date because it is due for book club.’ ”

Mr. Alexander said there are some cases where reading actually is verboten, when the entire group listens instead of reads, but those are rare.

Do you really get as much out of a book if you listen instead of read?

“If the goal is to appreciate the aesthetic of the writing and understand the story,” said Daniel T. Willingham, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Virginia, then there won’t be much difference between listening and reading. “The basic architecture of how we understand language is much more similar between reading and listening than it is different.”

Julie Stephens, an investigations assistant with the Canada Revenue Agency, finds that listening to books on headphones sharpens her focus at work. It not only muffles “a lot of noise and chatter and gossip that I’d rather not listen to,” she said, but keeps her up to speed for a book group she runs.

Ms. Stephens, of Ottawa, Ontario, works part time at a bookstore and talks up audio books to customers. Nevertheless, she does not always tell her book group that she listened to a title, which she does about 40 percent of the time.

“I try not to tell them all that much — I don’t want them to think that I’ve only listened to the book,” said Ms. Stephens, who often chooses audio to reacquaint herself with books she’s read.

Zella Ondrey, who lives in Hazleton, Pa., is open about her listening experiences. Ms. Ondrey, 44, who moderates a book group at a Barnes & Noble, listens while traveling for her job as a vice president at the Haworth Press, a publisher of academic and professional-development books (none of which are available in an audio format).

She recently listened to an abridgement — the only audio version available — of “Ahab’s Wife: Or, the Star-Gazer” and admitted as much to her group.

The book, like “Moby-Dick,” to which it alludes, is heavy on description. “Apparently some of the detail it went through — like 15 pages describing a lighthouse — was rather boring,” said Ms. Ondrey, adding that while others in the group were not riveted they seemed to consider themselves more virtuous for having waded through it the old-fashioned way.

“I was frowned upon because I didn’t go through the same machinations,” she said.

But that scorn was nothing compared to what she gets on a regular basis from her husband.

“My husband makes fun of me all the time,” Ms. Ondrey said. Nevertheless she recommends that he read titles she enjoyed hearing. “He’ll have a book in his hand that he’s reading and I’ll say, ‘How about if I tell you the ending, and we’ll see if it’s the same?’ ”

AFP

DRIVING around the lush suburbs of Washington, DC, there is little sign of trouble in the American economy. The housing market may have slumped but rental rates are strengthening as the young and ambitious keep pouring into the nation’s capital. The proliferation of restaurants, home-improvement centres and electronics retailers seem to testify to a healthy economy.

So too do the GDP figures released last week. Lacklustre growth in the first quarter had spurred glum talk about possible recession among some economists. But the second-quarter estimates seem to refute this notion decisively. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), America’s economy grew at an annualised pace of 3.4%, a heartening echo of a few years ago. Then economists regarded America as the “engine” of global economic growth, and fretted about what the world might do if it broke down.

America’s economy is still dangerously dependent on its financially overstretched consumers. And those consumers—the real engine—may to be running out of fuel. Personal-consumption expenditures tend to fall in the second quarter as holiday spending winds down. But the drop this year was especially sharp; the rate of growth fell by 2.4 percentage points to 1.3%.

The GDP figures were saved by a substantial boost to fixed investment in non-residential structures, and equipment and software. Other figures support the conclusion that financially strapped consumers may finally be cutting back. On Tuesday July 31st the BEA released data on personal income and expenditures showing that consumer spending had increased just 0.1% in June, the slowest pace of growth in nine months.

A weak job market may be behind this malaise. Though America’s headline unemployment figure looks impressively low—4.5% in June—this is misleading. Other indicators, such as labour-force participation and real-wage growth, paint a picture of a job market where labour demand is less than robust. According to Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute, participation in the labour market has fallen most sharply among disadvantaged groups, usually the first to drop out of the jobs race when labour demand slackens.

Inflation of the prices of key commodities, such as petrol, is also cutting deeper into pay-packets, forcing Americans to eliminate discretionary purchases. And the nasty combination of falling housing prices and rising interest rates is forcing many new homeowners with variable-rate mortgages to slash their budgets everywhere else in order to meet their rising house payments. Even so, defaults have climbed precipitously, particularly in the subprime market.

What is the truth? Is America’s economy like a Victorian tuberculosis patient, with blooming cheeks and rotting lungs? Or has it merely caught a slight cold? It is hard to tell. Every time one set of indicators seem to be running one way, another lot points in the other direction. The mildly gloomy government figures on employment and consumption might indicate an economy sliding slowly downhill. But the Conference Board’s latest snapshot shows that American consumers do not agree. Consumer confidence has hit its highest level in six years.

Economists, too, have tempered their gloom. A survey of economic analysts has them estimating that payroll employment increased by 130,000 workers in July, the same robust growth seen in June. They also predict a 3.8% increase in wages from the same period a year ago. If they are right (the reports are due out later this week), this will help assuage labour-market jitters.

One thing economists are not worried about is what will happen to the rest of the world if the engine fails. Growth has picked up in Europe, especially in Germany, the continent’s former “sick man”. And Japan is climbing out of its decade-long doldrums to pick up even more of the slack. But neither place looks poised to become as import-hungry as America. But even America is losing its appetite a little these days. Falling imports were another big contributor to the improvement in America’s rate of GDP growth. So far, the world still seems to be chugging along.

Rupert Murdoch finally won his long-coveted prize yesterday, gaining enough support from the deeply divided Bancroft family to buy Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal and one of the world’s most respected news sources, for $5 billion. Dow Jones said early today that the companies had signed a definitive merger agreement after the boards of both companies voted last night to approve the deal.

For Mr. Murdoch, the verdict represents the pinnacle of his long career building the News Corporation into a $70 billion media empire that already includes more than 100 newspapers worldwide, satellite broadcast operations, the Fox television network, the online social networking site MySpace and many other parts.

Combined with the planned beginning of the Fox business news channel in October, the purchase of Dow Jones makes Mr. Murdoch the most formidable figure in business news coverage in this country, perhaps worldwide.

It also gives a larger voice in national affairs to an owner whose properties often mirror his own conservative politics.

The decision signals the end of an era for Dow Jones and the Bancroft family, an intensely private clan that for generations had allowed The Journal to operate independently and become one of the nation’s most prominent and trusted newspapers, even as its finances deteriorated.

Dow Jones said today that family trusts and family members representing about 37 percent of the total shareholder vote had committed to support the deal.

For four months, some three dozen members of the family had engaged in an intense, sometimes tearful debate about The Journal’s future, at times pitting siblings against one another and children against their parents.

The final decision was in doubt well past the 5 p.m. Monday deadline set for the family. In a twist in already tortured negotiations, some family trustees demanded that the News Corporation pay the fees for the family’s bankers and lawyers — which could reach $40 million — in return for their support. After an exhausting night of conferences calls, the deal was made.

James B. Lee of JPMorgan Chase & Company, who has represented clients in some of the biggest deals in history, said of Mr. Murdoch, “nobody else I have ever banked could have pulled it off.”

For the rest of the industry, the deal, which follows the recent sale of Knight Ridder and the pending sale of the Tribune Company, again raises the question of whether newspapers can exist independently of giant media conglomerates, as advertising dollars migrate to the Web and readers have access to vast new sources of online information.

Mr. Murdoch has talked of pumping money into The Journal, bolstering its coverage of national affairs and its European and Asian editions, which could pose a serious challenge to competitors like The Financial Times and The New York Times. That could mean losing money in the short run, something Mr. Murdoch has always been willing to do to attract readers and gain influence.

Some Dow Jones employees see having such a wealthy, engaged owner as an improvement after years of uncertainty. Still, there was no official announcement at The Journal’s newsrooms, where some reporters mourned the loss of independence.

“It’s sad,” said a veteran reporter at one of the domestic bureaus, who did not want to be named because of concerns over his career. “We held a wake. We stood around a pile of Journals and drank whiskey.”

News reports of the deal initiated an outpouring of comments on The Journal’s own Web site, many critical of the News Corporation, and some regrets from other shareholders.

“It’s a bad thing for Dow Jones and American journalism that the Bancroft family could not resist Rupert Murdoch’s generous offer,” James H. Ottaway Jr., a former Dow Jones executive and a major shareholder, said yesterday. “I hope Rupert Murdoch, and whoever follows him at News Corporation, will keep his promises to protect and invest in the unique quality and integrity of The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s and all the Dow Jones electronic news services.”

It will most likely take three to four months for the transition in ownership to take effect. At the family’s insistence, the News Corporation has agreed to retain the top editors at Dow Jones, including Marcus W. Brauchli, the managing editor of The Journal and Paul Gigot, The Journal’s editorial page editor, and has accepted limits on its ability to remove or replace people in those posts.

The Bancrofts hope the arrangement, which they negotiated before the final deal, will restrict Mr. Murdoch’s ability to influence content, particularly in The Journal, but many media experts have said he has circumvented similar agreements in the past.

Mr. Murdoch first made his offer to Dow Jones’s chief executive, Richard F. Zannino, over breakfast on March 29, and made a formal written bid to the board on April 17, but the news did not surface until May 1.

On May 2, Mr. Zannino made a presentation to the Dow Jones board that made it seem to many of them that the company’s prospects on its own were poor and that he favored a sale. He later insisted that he had not meant to give those impressions, but even so, the presentation had a sobering effect, and most of the board clearly thought that the company should accept Mr. Murdoch’s $60-a-share offer.

That breakfast with Mr. Murdoch set in motion a four-month struggle among the Bancrofts. The family, which has owned Dow Jones since 1902, holds 64 percent of the shareholder vote, with most of the stock held in dozens of trusts with some three dozen beneficiaries. But the bulk of the voting power rests with a handful of the family’s oldest generation, and with longtime family lawyers, who are the primary trustees.

Some argued vociferously that Mr. Murdoch would damage the newspaper’s credibility, while others said that his $60-a-share offer — for a stock that was trading around $36 in April — was too good to pass up at a time when the newspaper industry was struggling.

At the outset, most of the elders opposed a sale, and were bolstered by newsroom employees who wrote letters arguing that Mr. Murdoch would wreck The Journal, and by the advice of longtime associates like Peter R. Kann, the recently retired former chairman and chief executive of the company, and Mr. Ottaway.

But many of their children, less wealthy and less steeped in the notion of Dow Jones as a family legacy, were more open to selling. A family Dow Jones stake that had been valued at about $750 million and generated about $20 million a year in dividends, mostly for the older generation, stands to become more than $1 billion even after taxes and could produce several times as much income.

Late last week, it appeared that the family might reject the deal, but then two pivotal family elders who had argued against the deal, Jane Cox MacElree and her brother, William C. Cox Jr., shifted positions; she relinquished voting control of some shares, and he switched sides and decided to support the sale, people close to the family said. That left things too close to call.

While the weeks after May 2 had been spent arguing over principles, the last few days were spent haggling over money. Before the deal had a clear majority in support, a lawyer for the family, Lynn Hendrix, based in Denver, who controlled trusts with 9 percent of the overall vote, insisted that those trusts would oppose the deal unless the News Corporation agreed to pay a premium for the supervoting shares that are mostly owned by the Bancrofts.

On Sunday night, David F. DeVoe, the News Corporation’s chief financial officer and a board member, called Mr. Hendrix, a partner at the firm Holme, Roberts & Owen, to draw a line in the sand.

Referring to the $60 price, Mr. DeVoe said, “I can six-zero-point-zero-zero,” a person briefed on the conversation said, “not six-zero-point-zero-one.”

When Mr. Hendrix kept pushing for more money, Mr. DeVoe made an unusual offer: the News Corporation would consider paying the fees and expenses of the bankers and lawyers advising the trusts. That amounted to an indirect way of sweetening the offer for the supervoting shares without adding much to the cost of the deal. Dow Jones, after consulting with the News Corporation, had already agreed to cover some of the costs of paying Merrill Lynch, the family’s primary financial advisers.

After a marathon series of conference calls that night that ran through Monday, involving Mr. DeVoe; Mr. Hendrix; Michael B. Elefante, the family’s primary lawyer and trustee; and Richard Beattie, a lawyer advising the Dow Jones board, a deal was brokered that would allow the Denver trust to vote in favor. The News Corporation agreed to pay advisory expenses for all of the family trusts, a figure that people involved in the talks said could reach $40 million, which translates to about an additional $2 a share for the Bancrofts.

The largest share, perhaps as much as $18.5 million, will be paid to Merrill Lynch, people briefed on the matter said. Another payment of as much as $10 million is expected to be paid to Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, a law firm representing the family. Morgan Stanley, which advised the Denver trusts, and a series of law firms are expected to split the rest.

The issue of the News Corporation and Dow Jones paying the family’s advisers has raised questions in some circles — including among some family members, people close to them say — about the advice’s impartiality. Merrill Lynch, in particular, was viewed as an early supporter of the deal and was responsible in large part for making presentations to the family about the current and future health of Dow Jones.

The deal is also a windfall for an army of Mr. Murdoch’s bankers and lawyers. Mr. Murdoch was advised by Mr. Lee, who had helped Mr. Murdoch when he explored a bid for Dow Jones in 2001 and had set up Mr. Murdoch’s first introduction to Mr. Zannino.

Blair Effron, a former banker at UBS who started his own boutique firm, Centerview Partners, spent many nights holed up at Mr. Murdoch’s headquarters, as did Stanley S. Shuman of Allen & Co., the media investment bank.

To the last, people inside and outside Dow Jones who opposed the sale were trying to arrange alternative deals that would allow some Bancroft family members to sell and others to keep control of the company.

Yesterday, Leslie Hill, a family member and trustee who became something of a patron saint within the Journal’s newsroom for her opposition to the deal, resigned from the company’s board.

AFP

Gordon Brown

TO ALL outward appearances Gordon Brown’s visit to meet George Bush looked much like those of his predecessor, Tony Blair. On Sunday July 29th Mr Brown arrived in America for the first time since becoming Britain’s prime minister. He met Mr Bush at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland. The president took him for a ride on a golf cart and they dined together. They had another private meeting on Monday before Mr Brown left for New York. They reportedly talked about trade, the environment and Darfur, while tactfully avoiding much discussion of the catastrophe in Iraq.

The peaceful little visit has been the subject of heated discussion in Britain, as observers wondered whether Mr Brown would seek to put distance between himself and the president. The signals had been somewhat mixed. Before his visit, Mr Brown declared that Britain’s alliance with America is its “single most important bilateral relationship,” and suggested that he planned to work closely with Mr Bush. This was unwelcome news to Britons who think that Mr Blair was entirely too eager to ingratiate himself with the president. Some of them said so. Mark Malloch Brown, a junior minister in the Foreign Office, warned that Britain and America will no longer be “joined together at the hip”.

Speculation has been much less intense in America. In fact, given the popularity that Mr Blair enjoyed with both the public and the press in America, the reaction to Mr Brown’s visit been quite subdued. On the eve of his arrival newspapers were concerned with other important matters, such as what Hillary Clinton is wearing these days. Mr Bush had a routine colonoscopy last week, and even that received more attention than Mr Brown’s pending visit. After all, with the president sedated, Dick Cheney commanded the country for a few hours and that made everyone a bit nervous.

Still, one might have expected Mr Brown’s visit to win a bit more attention. But the “special relationship” between Britain and America is lopsided. The strength of the transatlantic alliance is a concern for Britons; Americans hardly ever think about it. Had Mr Brown obviously kept his distance from Mr Bush, that might have made a few more people take note.

Would that, in turn, have caused Americans to examine their relationship with Britain? It is hard to gauge how the average American feels about its best friend in Europe. Although Britons are frequently the subject of surveys on their attitudes towards America, the reverse almost never happens. Clearly some Americans are devoted Anglophiles. They drive Mini Coopers (never mind that the firm is owned by Germany’s BMW these days) and get their news from the BBC.

The data available suggest that most Americans think well of Britain and its leaders. Last year, for example, the Pew Global Attitudes Project found that two-thirds of Americans said they felt confident that Mr Blair would “do the right thing regarding world affairs.” Only half said the same of Mr Bush. And presumably a handful of Americans actively dislike Britain, though the Europhobes save their strongest feelings of enmity for France.

Of course, Mr Brown is not nearly as well known as Mr Blair. And thinking warmly of Britain is not the same as wanting to hear more from the British. Before the 2004 presidential election, the Guardian newspaper encouraged its readers to send letters to swing voters in Ohio asking them to vote for John Kerry. The Ohioans were livid. Mr Kerry probably would have lost the state anyway. Americans resent outside interference in their affairs, no matter what the source.

In part the smooth operation of the “special relationship” as far as Americans are concerned may be explained because Britain, particularly under Mr Blair’s stewardship, has worked so hard at maintaining good ties. America, incurring no difficulty from Britain, has no reason to fret over this uniquely pleasant and rewarding relationship. So far Mr Brown seems not to wish to disturb the balance of power.

Eric Draper/Associated Press

In 2000, the Weekly World News reported its phony space alien’s endorsement for George W. Bush.

In Ed Anger’s America, Vanna White is the perfect role model for Sarah Lee, Mr. Anger’s overweight daughter. Latino immigrants speak “chili-pepperese” and the obese of America simply need to stop eating as much.

“I’m pig-biting mad!” Mr. Anger screams in his column, “My America by Ed Anger,” which has been running in the tabloid Weekly World News for almost three decades. In that time, he has routinely criticized Communists, immigrants, women, overweight children, liberals and pretty much anyone who is not a conservative white American male.

After years of talk radio and cable-news pundits, Ed Anger’s America may feel very familiar, but Ed Anger himself does not. Perhaps that is because he isn’t real.

“I always thought of him as a little buffoonish, myself,” said Rafe Klinger, who created the Ed Anger persona in 1979, during his stint at The News. “The funny thing is, you have people like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and Hannity, and to me, they’re not too far from Ed.”

Unlike his more successful real-life counterparts, however, Ed will no longer be able to complain in print. American Media Inc., which also publishes The National Enquirer, The Star and The Globe, announced that it was closing The News last week.

The Weekly World News had long specialized in the sensational and weird — Elvis sightings, UFO abductions, the continuing adventures of Bat Boy — and in attention-grabbing headlines like “Garden of Eden Found: Original Apple Recovered!” and “Grossed-out Surgeon Throws Up Inside Patient.” But its circulation began to lag as competitors turned to full-color (The News remained defiantly black and white) and to celebrity news.

In a March earnings statement, American Media said that single-copy sales of The News had dropped to 83,000 in 2006, down from 153,000 in 2004. Recently, the parent company has been slashing its staff numbers and cutting publications, while struggling with heavy debt.

Bloggers lamented the paper’s demise. “My lifelong dream of writing for them, shattered,” one woman wrote. “Who’s going to report on spontaneous combustion now?”

And while Bat Boy was The News’s most famous creation — an off-Broadway play “Bat Boy: The Musical” appeared in 1997 — Ed Anger epitomized the paper’s say-anything tabloid spirit.

After revelations of child sexual abuse by priests shook the Catholic Church, he suggested that child molesters should be “butchered like hogs.” He also ranted on the use of politically correct language: “When did rain become a ‘precipitation event?’ ” he once complained.

Mr. Klinger said he based the character — a white, middle-aged veteran of the Korean War who displays a portrait of John Wayne in his den — on the anti-Communist rants of a fundamentalist preacher about whom he had once written a straight news story.

“I thought about doing a column with somebody who was kind of like that, who had these ideas that were almost satirical,” said Mr. Klinger, who now writes for The Globe. “But his bible was the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Even though he was constantly criticizing people, he still believed in freedom of speech.”

Elizabeth Bird, the author of “For Enquiring Minds: A Cultural Study of Supermarket Tabloids,” said that Ed Anger reflected a certain kind of stereotypical xenophobia.

“There was this over-the-top anger, the sort of sense of the beleaguered white male who saw everything going to hell in a handbasket around them — uppity women, foreigners and all that sort of thing,” Ms. Bird said. “That is to some extent like Rush Limbaugh; it’s the same sort of genre.”

Ed Anger stirred up trouble for Mr. Klinger in 1989, when he sued The News for continuing the column after he left the tabloid in 1987. Mr. Klinger claimed that Anger’s persona — and the columns themselves — belonged to him. A federal jury ruled against him in 1994.

After Mr. Klinger left, a number of writers picked up Anger’s pen, including the late Eddie Clontz, who edited The News until 2001 and who was widely revered as the “King of the Supermarket Tabloids.” During Mr. Clontz’s tenure, Anger proposed to pave the rainforests and suggested that Mr. Limbaugh should run for president. (The radio host responded gratefully, saying that “we have the trailer-park crowd all wrapped up.”)

Justin Mitchell, a freelance writer who wrote the “My America” column from 2001 to 2003, said he had difficulty inhabiting the character. “I had to sort of assume an Archie Bunker role in my head to do it, and also rely on some sort of tattered satirical instincts I had,” he said. “There were times I just didn’t have it in me. I couldn’t be outrageous enough.”

Anger’s readership evolved over the years, from those sympathizing with his point of view to a group of mostly male college students who, rather than standing on the supermarket checkout line, laughed at Anger’s columns online.

“In the old days, there were audiences that sort of liked it and believed it,” Ms. Bird said. “But it’s gone to talk radio now, and what’s left is the people reading it and knowing that it’s just a parody.”

American Media said that The News would maintain its Web site (www.weeklyworldnews.com). Anger’s column will appear there, but for Mr. Klinger, it just won’t be the same.

“I guess now, he’s retired as a serious journalist,” Mr. Klinger said. “So the laugh’s on me.”