Face Time

Electronics retailer Best Buy is calling its workers back into the office, shutting down its experiment with flexible workplace hours a week after Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer put the kibosh on telecommuting at her own company. Best Buy said the roughly 4,000 employees who report to its headquarters in Richfield, Minn., will be asked to do their work at the facility instead of on their own terms. The shift marks the end of an innovative program called Results Only Work Environment, which for the past several years has allowed workers to complete projects out of the office and off the clock.

The comfort of working at home might have serious drawbacks for telecommuters hoping for the big promotion. A new study from the MIT Sloan Management Review suggests the benefits of being seen at work can dramatically improve your chances of advancement. The study describes two types of "passive face time" that it says heavily influence manager's decisions. "Expected face time" is the typical hours when everyone is seen at work, and "extracurricular face time" is everything outside the normal workday.

They're germy, they're squirmy, they can't even vote, and still they get face time -- and kissy-face time -- with presidential wannabes. What is with all the campaign baby-kissing? Politicians find themselves thrust into potentially awkward situations all the time. They are expected to eat all manner of odd-tasting and oddly-shaped food with gusto. They are expected to wear odd headgear:  Michael Dukakis in a helmet was a "fail," but Calvin Coolidge in a Sioux feather bonnet looked almost passable.

Before there was Monica, there was Erik. That's not what we meant. We're just saying Monica wasn't the first to immortalize the idea of presidential hanky-panky. A month before her name hit our lips, Erik Tarloff had started writing his new novel about presidential hanky-panky, "Face Time" (Crown). We swear it was a coincidence, your honor. "This is the first time timing was my friend," Tarloff told pals during a book party Monday at the L.A. aerie of Kathleen Brown and Van Gordon Sauter.

Therapist + patient = drama. The equation has clicked since Sophocles, when the blind seer, Tiresias, correctly diagnosed literature's first Oedipus complex. It worked in "Spellbound" and "The Sixth Sense," "Equus" and "Ordinary People" -- and right up through "The Sopranos." But don't get Bob Clyman started on that. For more than 20 years, Clyman has juggled careers as a playwright and a clinical psychologist.

Amazon.com has launched a mobile version of its MP3 store for the iPhone and iPod Touch, giving users a way to buy songs from the online retailer with their devices. The new store is a Web app, meaning Apple device users can access it using the Safari browser. By building a Web app rather than an app users have to download from the Apple App Store, Amazon doesn't have to give Apple the typical 30% cut developers pay the Cupertino company when someone buys their app or something within their app. Now iPhone and iPod Touch users "can access Amazon's huge catalog of music, features like personalized recommendations, deals like albums for $5, songs for $0.69, and they can buy their music once and use it everywhere,” said Steve Boom, vice president of Amazon Music, in a statement . PHOTOS: Tech we want to see in 2013 The store, at amazon.com/mp3 , has a catalog of 22 million songs, the company says.

If you've seen the television ad for the anti-germ spray MyClyns, you no doubt remember the pivotal scene: A mom and her two kids sit at a dinner table, the little boy coughs on his sister and mom heroically grabs the spray bottle of MyClyns. Against all expectations, she doesn't spray the table or the air. Instead, she sprays her daughter. Directly in the face. MyClyns is intended to kill germs that land on the face before they have a chance to cause illness, kind of like Lysol for the skin.

AT&T this week announced that all iPhone users with tiered or shared data plans can now make cellular FaceTime calls. That's good news for those customers, but AT&T's critics say it should stop withholding the feature from the last group still being excluded: those with grandfathered unlimited data plans. FaceTime is Apple's proprietary video calling feature that launched in 2010 with the iPhone 4. Initially, the feature could only make video calls over Wi-Fi, but Apple added cellular call functionality last September with the launch of iOS 6, the latest version of its mobile operating system.

A hodgepodge crowd gathers here twice a week for handouts just steps from City Hall and an empty kosher deli. Outside the local food pantry snakes a line of Guatemalans wearing court-ordered ankle monitors, imported workers from the Pacific island of Palau and unemployed town natives -- almost all there because of a dramatic raid that has left a deep mark in the way the U.S. views and deals with illegal immigration.