Dustin M. Wax

Very interesting story on the near-cult-like inner workings of Ikea — an empire apparently even bigger than Microsoft!

The Mållen clip doesn’t look like much, and yet it represents, in microcosm, a vital Ikea strategy: the way the company decides what you need before you’ve even realised you might need it. The clip, Vinka explains, is for hanging up magazines in your bathroom: you attach a magazine to the metal clip, then hang the rubber ring over a towel hook. “This is one of the articles that is selling most in the Mållen range today,” she says. “You don’t want your magazines on the floor, do you? They’d get dirty and wet.”

It had never occurred to you, presumably, that you might want to hang up magazines in your bathroom. But Ikea had already decided that you would. And the brilliant but scary part is this: once you’ve seen a row of magazines hanging up in one of Ikea’s showroom bathrooms, each neatly suspended at 45 degrees from a Mållen clip, it takes a will of steel not to find the magazines in your own bathroom, now you come to think of it, almost offensively disorganised. And so you think about purchasing the Mållen clip.

I read the article below and got the willies. The main criticism seems to be that Bush is in bed with Big Pharma in this initiative, but that’s hardly news — his daddy is tightly linked with Eli Lilly, the biggest beneficiary of this plan, after all. But what remains un-criticised is the thought of a nationwide mental health screening that would, presumably, produce nationwide records on the mental health status of all Americans, and that can’t possibly be good.

Bush plans to screen whole US population for mental illness

Michael Taussig is what you might call a “gonzo anthropologist” — he writes heavily “novelized” (not necessarily to say “fictionalized”) ethnographies that deal primarily with the intersection between capitalism and terror. His latest book, My Cocaine Museum, posits a Colombian museum that would explore the role of cocaine in Colombian history the way that the already-existing Gold Museum does for mining. An excerpt of the book is available at the University of Chicago’s website.

Speaking of Indians, here’s a familiar figure to greet you, that huge photo you see in the airport as you walk to immigration of a stoic Indian lady seated on the ground in the marketplace with limestone and coca leaves for sale and in front of her, of all things, William Burroughs’s refrigerator from Lawrence, Kansas, with a sign on its door, Just Say No, as an Indian teenager saunters past with a Nike sign on his chest saying Just Do It and a smiling Nancy Reagan floats overhead like the Cheshire cat gazing thoughtfully at an automobile with the trunk open and two corpses stuffed inside it with their hands tied behind their backs and neat bullet holes, one each through the right temple and one each through the crown of the head.