Having worked both sides of the fence, you either have a good working relationship, or you hate each other and let one another hang.

The bad: Writer turns in bad/self-serving/narcissistic article; editor chooses to let it ride. Writer takes all the public flak. Editor is happy because comments were made, copies were sold, and no one writes to the editor.

The good: Writer turns in bad/self-serving/narcissistic article; editor doesn't let it ride. Editor works hard with writer. Good- to great article is published. Writer takes all the public credit. Editor is happy because comments were made, copies were sold, and no one writes to the editor.

With regard to the photo editor: I'm sorry, but on this article, there were no excuses. They were poorly chosen. (Well done, but poorly chosen.) No one, not Kuczynski, the editor, or the photo editor can escape on that. They were submitted, reviewed, mocked up in the layout, and approved before press. Please! They were awful and only enhanced the overall controversy of the piece.

On a closing note, if TNYT publishes one more elitist, crap-ass, Louboutin-wearing, Manhattan woman sob story, I beg them to give me a job. I'd be happy to take their money in exchange for an interesting, well-written, first person piece about what it's like to to have the child vs. no child challenges, being a modern woman, being earth-shakingly middle-class...and more. (Oh, wait...no one wants to read about that. Silly me.)

As a regular reader of Smith's column, and the sister of a former Air Force navigator and pilot who is also a licensed private pilot, I am never shocked by how often the media does get it wrong: There are two pilots in most commercial aircraft. My brother always rolls his eyes at hearing the continual media gaffes about this.

Second, with regard to general sense of disbelief about landing on water, I don't get it. It's emblematic of the general public's indifference to basic science. Water has surface tension, so it's like skipping stones: if you hit the surface at the right angle, with appropriate force, you won't sink or explode, you'll skip. Furhter, a commercial aircraft is a hollow pressurized tube, in essence, an aluminum balloon. It has a certain amount of built-in bouyancy. (I think the poor plane itself was still heading to Charlotte....it floated a mile downriver and still hadn't sunk.)

Finally, safety briefings differ from craft to craft. The location of the emergency exits in an A320 is not the same as in a 737, and depending on seat configuration, you may be three seats away, or five seats away, from your nearest exit. So paying attention to safety briefings is very important.

Thanks again to Patrick for providing such a sage and clear-eyed assessment of this incident, and for his column in general. I wish he were going to be up front on March 28 when I fly to St. Maarten for vacation!

As a government employee, this comes as no surprise whatsoever. There is such tight access on what you can use, how you log on, what websites are blocked, how a listserv is administered. It's evil. I'm a GS12, a reasonably "high level" public servant, requiring only a basic security clearance, but I have SIX different log-ons and passwords depending on which system I want to use.

This has nothing to do with the transition team, but with the way the federal I/S system is set up.

And to all Obama's iPhone and Mac-using team members: Good luck...you will no longer be able to sync your iPhone, iPod, flash drive, etc., to your work computer. (Unless, of course, they are special enough to override the PC-based domain and get Macs.)

Have fun!

As a U.S. government employee, I posted on this topic when it was originally reported in War Room. I will post again here...OH PLEASE, OBAMA, LET YOUR PEOPLE GO (to the outside world).

As health writer in support of a group of national researchers, there are multitude ways we could leverage Web 2.0 to increase dissemination, bring researchers together, allow for online patient log-ins, etc., etc., etc., the list goes on.

But no. I have, in the course of doing background reading for an article, been blocked from websites like National Geographic and Men's Health. I've been unable to review clinical imagery because the web filters have deemed it porn. If I ask my I/S admin for an exemption, it will take me at least three weeks and it has to go from my Northeast office outpost to Central Web Operations in D.C. for approval.

I just hope that if the Obama White House revamps operating rules for their staff, that they do it for every branch.

We public servants, by and large, are good folks. We work for the people of this country, and we just want to do the best work we can, with tools that function well. Ninety-nine point nine percent of us are not coming to work to use tax dollars to download porn and spend all day on Facebook.