From a reader re the post about Norway’s Prime Minister:

Jonah, you only caught one piece of this absurd story. Ikea is in a no win situation. They have deliberately avoided using female figures because “it feared it might offend the Muslim world.” But, in the process they’ve offended Sweden. All of this because they already switched from actual written instructions to the hieroglyphics (reversing an improvement in human communications made several thousand years ago) because printing them in some language or some number of languages might offend those who speak others and assembly instructions in 100 languages would weigh more than the furniture. I suggest they leave them out all together. That way they’d only tick off…….well………all their customers.