My Kindle finally arrived. The blogosphere is awash in reviews, so I'll keep it short: the device itself is a 4 out of 10 for industrial design. It's clunky to hold, inelegant to use, and ugly to look at.

Nonetheless, I love this thing. So it's not the industrial design accomplishment that an iPod is, but that almost doesn't matter. What drove the iPod's success isn't the device itself, but iTunes: a cheap, fast, always-on distribution system for content. And that's what Amazon is doing with the Kindle.

Here are two visions of a better future with the Kindle:

Futurevision 1: The Endless Book
With its pre-paid EVDO connection, the Kindle gives a book infinite extensibility via hyperlinking. In the middle of muddling through a book on string theory, you might realize, as I did, that your grasp of quantum mechanics isn't so hot either, so you'll want to stop and read a quick "Heisenberg for Dummies" guide before you move on. That's an opportunity for the publisher of the Dummies guide to make, say, two bucks. And for Amazon to keep squeezing revenue out of you, after your initial book purchase. With that kind of financial incentive, I can see the future Kindle editions of many books being laden with hyperlinked cross-sell opportunities. And we ain't even talkin' advertising, yet.

Futurevision 2: The Infinite Army of Librarians
Another unexpected nugget of coolness is the Ask NowNow feature, which must be the first consumer application of Amazon's great crowdsourcing experiment, the Mechanical Turk. You can submit any question and expect 3 well-researched answers from  human beings, within 10 minutes. It's the portabilization of the Sunday/Mahalo trend: humans are still the best search engines. The Ask NowNow "staff" is currently composed of the Mechanical Turkers –– people scattered all over the internet, making 5 cents per answer. (I'm one of them, but I've been derelict in my Turking responsibilities.) In spite of the fact that these "research librarians" are an untrained bunch, their sheer numbers mean that statistically speaking, you'll get at least one solid answer. If Amazon can sustain this model and find a good way to monetize it, it would be an amazing proof of the power of crowdsourcing.

On the whole, the Kindle is amply worth the $400 price tag – not because of the device, but because of the content services and where they're headed. But that same price tag might be a barrier to the proliferation it needs, in order to become the paradigm-shifting force that the iPod has been. Amazon needs to realize one thing: the device itself needs to feel like it justifies the price tag. If they manage to create a device that's as smart and elegant as their content system, this thing will change the face publishing – and make books sexy again to the Xbox generation.

I'm a digital media geek who likes to say things like "Print is dead." But Penguin's new "Great Ideas" series forces me to eat my words. These little paperback gems are printings of a small catalog of landmark works of philosophy  – I picked up Kirkegaard, Machiavelli, Marcus Aurelius, Rousseau, and Plato – and each one is designed with a loving meticulousness that is rarely lavished on the humble paperback. The cover designs, which mostly rely on elegant  typography (none of the usual crappy stock images of marble busts), are letterpressed – letterpressed! – into a wonderful ivory coverstock with a cold-press texture like watercolor paper.

Academic publishing has long been a godforsaken bastion of terrible graphic design – poor typography, stock images dating back four decades, all printed onto cheap, smudge-prone paper. Being both a philosophy major and a graphic designer, I've often been pained that the books dearest to my heart are so offensive to my eye. I'm glad to see that a publisher is finally giving these great thinkers the handsome faces they deserve.

A marine stationed in Iraq, usernamed Dreamcrusher, got bored and started posting some photos on this YayHooray thread.  In spite of shitty software (he's resizing in MS Paint) and long upload times, he's continued to post at regular intervals.

The photos, while not professional in quality, are striking in their earnest and unstudied depiction of everyday Iraq – more so, in fact, because they aren't editorialized by the polish and poise of a professional's work.  Equally interesting are Dreamcrusher's accompanying notes, delivered in spare, unpunctuated prose:

In other posts, he relates how difficult it is to maneuver a camera while wearing a flakjacket, rifle and helmet;  how nice the locals are, except that they keep asking him for weird things like soccer balls and gloves;  how he's learned to "sleep through a small firefight in my humvee."  He signs off with lines like, "well i am going to head off and eat my haliburton dinner."

Dreamcrusher has formed a little fanbase of YayHooray users who await his next upload with bated breath, and who genuinely seem to be concerned for his welfare and safety.  On one occasion, he promises to upload his next batch of photos straight away, then goes silent. Worried YayHoorayers post, "That was 5 hours ago... you think he's okay?"  (He turns back up in a few hours, having taken a break for food.)

In his own way, Dreamcrusher is doing what mass media and the Washington PR machine are failing to do: provide a thoroughly honest, matter-of-fact view of the war, and a sympathetic portrait of the people fighting it.

Years of writer's workshops have led me to develop an allergy to narrative structure. It's the only aspect of the craft that can be abstracted into a useful formula, so that formula tends to get applied to death. The result is that much of the fiction out there is a threadbare tapestry of ill-defined characters, uncertain voice, and platitudinous insight –  draped over a swaggering, self-assured structure.

The Hours is a contrivance of not one, but three structures. The novel weaves together the stories of three women, each plotline following a classic Freytag triangle. The women live in different periods of history; the action takes place in a single day of each woman's life;  the stories ultimately unite under a dramatic event which brings a common significance to all three  –  all these grad-school structural devices ought to have produced an unwieldy and mind-blowingly boring book. (Not to mention: one of Michael Cunningham's three protagonists is Virginia Woolf herself.  Yeah, this is a writer with BIG balls.)

And miraculously, he succeeds. The structure is such a big presence that it should have its own name in the credits, yet somehow it manages never to interfere with Cunningham's elegant, intelligent storytelling.

I managed to avoid this landmark work of revisionist American history for a few years, trying to spare myself the anxiety I knew it would cause, but I finally gave in and read it.  As expected, the book is aggressively populist, and anti-capitalist nearly to the point of hysteria --- but nevertheless, it's a well-researched alternative account.  Zinn's narrative of the brutal suppression of the Philippine independence, which is left out of mainstream American history books, is chillingly congruent with the accounts that I read, growing up in Philippine schools.  That and other missing pieces of the story of American imperialism (often benevolent in intent, but cruel in execution) add up to a gaping hole in recorded American history.  Those missing pieces are what leave us baffled in the face of foreign hostility and terrorism -- and this book begins to fill in the gaps in our understanding.  In an era where we seem in danger of backsliding into McCarthyism, and dissenting opinion is the lifeblood of the intellectual community, this book emerges as newly important. Read it with a grain of salt, and a fistful of Valium -- but read it.

"Explore Ibsen" brings the Norweigan playwright's work to life, allowing the user to navigate through a beautiful cityscape (collaged together from photos of Oslo). Each city scene reveals a video of an actor delivering a monologue from one of Ibsen's most famous plays, including Peer Gynt and The Lady from the Sea.  The actors are crap, but the lush, dark visuals are the perfect backdrop for Ibsen's grim portraits of the human condition.  From a production standpoint, the site is extremely well-made: the use of layered photos (panning at varying speeds in order to simulate depth), with the overlay of greenscreen-shot video, cuts down on K size while maintaining a very rich experience.

Many books published in the aftermath of Sept. 11 investigated the political and historical moments that led up to the formation of Al Qaeda and the greatest attack on American soil. Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism sheds light instead on the ideological foundations of modern Pan-Islamism. Underneath, he finds an orientalized reincarnation of Western totalitarianism, equating Al Qaeda to aspects of Nazism and Italian Fascism.

Berman, himself a liberal, launches a scathing critique of Western liberals, notably Noam Chomsky, who rationalize terrorism as the natural response of a small, embattled society against the oppression of a larger, more advanced foe. Berman calls bullshit on this simplistic interpretation. Instead he tells it like it is: a cataclysmic clash of cultures, one committed to individual liberty and the separation of church and state, the other viciously opposed to those principles.

Berman's scholarly approach unearths the philosopher behind Al Qaeda, Sayyid Qutb, who in the 1940's and 50's constructed the ideological foundations for modern Pan-Islamism. Qutb's analysis of the West was based on what he interpreted to be a "hideous schizophrenia" -- Christianity's fatal division of the physical existence from the spiritual, which results in a society alienated from itself. This rational and intelligent observation becomes perverted over the decades into the dark, irrational cult of violence that Pan-Islamism has become. (See this article on the same subject, also by Berman.)

It's not cosy bedtime reading, but anyone that remembers Sept. 11, 2001,  cannot afford to ignore this book.

To marginalize Shakespeare's greatest tragic hero is no mean feat, but John Updike has balls the size of Hamlet's Oedipus complex. In Gertrude and Claudius, a brilliant retelling of the Hamlet tale, Updike reduces the moody prince to a sophomoric bit player, shining the spotlight instead on his mother, the Queen.

Seen through Shakespeare, Gertrude is a vague and unpalatable character: at best, a morally unstable woman with questionable motives; at worst, an hysterical ditz. But Updike releases her from 500 years of bad PR, and reveals an intelligent, strong-willed woman, who fights to make the best of her poor relationships with a boorish husband and a self-centered son.

Updike's ability to get inside the feminine mind is pretty astounding, and his depiction is at once objective and sympathetic, and always riveting.

"What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a crumpled glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from its twisted finger, hers indisputably?"

i've read to the lighthouse about once a year, for several years running, and every year it has something different to say to me about who i am. when i read it years ago, as a philosophy student, the book  helped to remind me about the dangers of abstraction, the treacherous vanity of the intellect. when i read it in art school, it helped me to remember that good art finds its best expression not in an effusive explosion, but in the quiet arrangement of the world into a meaningful order. now that i'm reading it simply as a person making her way through life, the book reminds me that it is not through epic achievements or grand gestures, but rather through those minute nuances we call trivialities – the twisted finger of a crumpled glove – that we imprint ourselves on the world.

the unbearable lightness of being
by milan kundera

this will come across as sacrilege to many, but upon a second reading, i found this book disappointing. seven years ago, when i first read it, it left me heady with its lyrical lushness and its unabashedly grandiose vistas. those things still take my breath away, and kundera's epic pronouncements on the human condition still mostly ring true. but at base, it turns out, this is still a novel about a man who can't keep his pants on around women who aren't his wife, and about a woman whose spirit is utterly wrecked by her husband's infidelities. kundera manages to weave the narrative of this commonplace scenario into a great historical moment, the fall of prague. he also manages gracefully to wrap a metaphor of symphonic composition and musical motifs around the subject of marital infidelity. but these abstractions only dull the edge of a potentially poignant subject; the intellectualization of an intensely human theme, such as betrayal, only serves to flatten it. most importantly, he fails to create compelling characters – tomas and tereza are symbols of humanity, but not convincingly human themselves. all in all, this is a book of ravishing prose, but lacking in substance – in a word, light.