Obviously, we've all fallen into the rut of late semester busyness, and though I've been wanting to say something pithy about Fred Kaplan's article over on Slate titled "Barnes & Noble Goes to Baghdad," for the moment, I'm just going to offer the link and allow all you commenters to uncover your own pith.

(I will say my reaction revolves around this claim: "The problem is that to the rest of the world, we appear to have no ideas at all." So how do we import our ideas? Send in B&N. And what does this reveal our idea to be? Well, capitalism [duh!]. In fact, it's not a matter of literally opening a B&N in Baghdad--this is a metaphor for circulating "our ideas" in the Iraqi "marketplace of ideas." But of course it's a telling metaphor [for whom, of course, we have the great liberal J.S. Mill to thank...] : if you can't distribute your ideas freely, put a price on them; then they'll seem more desirable! [According to Kaplan, "distribution is poor." So what better to improve distribution than a good business model?])

But there's more available here (after all, Jim will pissily accuse me of being a vulgar materialist; but he's just lucky I didn't overtly pun on busyness/business!), so I'll leave it to others to flesh out what all that "more" is.