➻ It’s been a big week in book-selling, what with Border’s filing bankruptcy and and announcing that it will be closing 200 locations (including all Milwaukee locations), so maybe you missed Barnes & Noble’s open letter to Amazon affiliates:

We understand that Amazon.com has threatened to terminate its affiliate program in certain states that may enact e-fairness legislation that requires Amazon to collect sales tax due on purchases by residents in those states.

Barnes & Noble is disappointed to hear that Amazon would threaten small businesses’ livelihood rather than comply with state law. Here at Barnes & Noble, we value the 13,000+ members of our affiliate program worldwide. They are an important part of our overall business success and strategy. Barnes & Noble collects and remits sales tax due from its sales, including from BN.com, our e-commerce business.

We would like you to buy all of your books from us, so we obviously don’t have a dog in this fight (there has to be a better way to say that) but I do agree that Amazon’s threat seems a little bullying. Also, with the condition of state budgets across the country, maybe this isn’t the time for Amazon to bring attention to the fact that it doesn’t collect state taxes?

➻ And as Andy Kessler noted in the Wall Street Journal piece yesterday, “Amazon is displacing thousands of retail workers.” He did not pose that as a negative, however, but as the progression of how “Technology is eating jobs.” In an article that asks Is Your Job an Endangered Species?, he writes about how layoffs trim nonessential jobs and make room for new ones.

Forget blue-collar and white- collar. There are two types of workers in our economy: creators and servers. Creators are the ones driving productivity—writing code, designing chips, creating drugs, running search engines. Servers, on the other hand, service these creators (and other servers) by building homes, providing food, offering legal advice, and working at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Many servers will be replaced by machines, by computers and by changes in how business operates. It’s no coincidence that Google announced it plans to hire 6,000 workers in 2011.

In a week that that saw the IBM computer “Watson” win on Jeopardy, the argument is most certainly not trivial. Kessler’s book, Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs, was released earlier this month by Portfolio.

➻ As David Brooks points out, there are some important things a computer can’t do, like imagine it was manufactured on a star:

For several months when he was four, Harold insisted that he was a tiger who had been born on the sun. His parents tried to get him to concede that he was a little boy born in a hospital, but he would become grave and refuse. This formulation, “I’m a tiger,” may seem like an easy thing, but no computer could blend the complicated concept “I” with the complicated concept “tiger” into a single entity. As Harold grew, he was able to use his imagination to blend disparate ideas, in the same sort of way that Picasso, at the height of his creative powers, could combine the concept “Western portraiture” with the concept “African masks.”

Brooks has a new book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, coming out in March with Random House. And if you just can’t wait for a taste, The New Yorker has your back. In their “Annals of Psychology,” they ran an excerpt about from the book about How the new sciences of human nature can help make sense of a life. The quote above is from that excerpt. The one below will tell you what in the world he’s actually talking about:

We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few decades, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and others have made great strides in understanding the inner working of the human mind. Far from being dryly materialistic, their work illuminates the rich underwater world where character is formed and wisdom grows. They are giving us a better grasp of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, predispositions, character traits, and social bonding, precisely those things about which our culture has least to say. Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.

A core finding of this work is that we are not primarily the products of our conscious thinking. The conscious mind gives us one way of making sense of our environment. But the unconscious mind gives us other, more supple ways. The cognitive revolution of the past thirty years provides a different perspective on our lives, one that emphasizes the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, moral intuition over abstract logic, perceptiveness over I.Q. It allows us to tell a different sort of success story, an inner story to go along with the conventional surface one.

He discussed some of this, among other topics, last September with Charlie Rose (who recently did his own 12-part Brain Series that’s well worth checking out).

➻ Hugh MacLeod’s new book Evil Plans went on sale this week, and he has some heavies in his corner talking about it. Running excerpts, Dan Pink asked Are you ready for world domination?, while Jonathan Fields stated that Success Is More Complex Than Failure. Pam Slim calls it required reading for doing good, and had this to say in her review:

When I read the series How to be Creative (which later turned into Hugh’s first bestselling book, Ignore Everybody), I felt my heart leap. I was no longer alone—there were people out there who also felt fierce joy in the creative process, and self-righteous indignation against “The System.” And who had every faith that talented, opinionated, quirky freaks could and should change the world.

I was in love.

Before going any further, I would suggest checking out the Evil Plans slide show at Fast Company. (Hat tip to the Portfolio Javelin for the links.)

➻ And, finally, speaking of evil plans, Parag Khanna was on PBS’s Need to Know discussing How to Run the World and why he says We’re living in a modern version of the Middle Ages. (And just to be clear, Khanna’s book is actually really good, not evil.)

➻ Quicksilver girl … and she’s free