Reduce

I am trying to learn to love and understand my Ipod Shuffle, and to reconcile it's simple existance, in comparison with Stuart's Mini, the amazing green machine. This weblog is helping, and it's also really cool. In book news, Penguins turn 70. Cannot remember for the life of me who or where, but at some point I read this comment by a publisher, "People have got this [insert "insane" here] idea that books should be cheap". To attitudes like that I pass along the Penguins success story. I think that no-frills book design is what the bookselling industry needs, more so than "Ryan-air style publishing". Further, an essay on the state of the American bookselling.

In Asia, I enjoyed this interesting article on double-standards and what China can learn about democracy from the Japanese textbook argument. And as an ardent reductionist, I liked this very matter-of-fact take on East Asian tensions.