Film adaptations

  The 20 Best Food Scenes in Movies. Ratatouille, Big Night, When Harry Met Sally, Tampopo, etc. What’s missing?

 How to write a LOTR bestseller (short video, with profanity).

The Louvre has the Mona Lisa. Here’s what other institutions consider their Mona Lisas. For instance: the National Portrait Gallery in London has a portrait of William Shakespeare and MoMA has the Gold Marilyn Monroe.

 Film adaptations

       At El País Ianko López considers Insult or adaptation ? Why films still struggle to adapt novels. 
       However, now I am eager to see this adaptation, which I had not heard of:

Spain has also seen notable clashes between writers and filmmakers over adaptations. One of the most famous involved Javier Marías and director Gracia Querejeta after she turned his novel Todas las almas (All Souls) into the film El último viaje de Robert Rylands (Robert Rylands’ Last Journey). Marías dismissed the adaptation as a “soap‑opera melodrama” and wrote that he felt impatient and even embarrassed watching scenes that viewers might mistakenly assume came from his book. He eventually won a court ruling that granted him compensation and ordered his name removed from the credits.

      Jennifer Crewe Q & A

       At the Columbia University Press blog Maritza Herrera-Diaz has a Q & A with the director of the press, in Jennifer Crewe: A Legacy of Leadership at Columbia University Press. 
       Interesting the fairly recent change:

Herrera-Diaz: The Press became formally integrated into the university during your leadership. In what ways did this integration strengthen the Press’s role within the university, and why did you see that as a strategic priority?

Crewe: I had clear goals when I became director, and I was lucky in that the provost had similar goals. From the start, it was important to me that we become formally integrated into the university as a unit. The Press had been created in 1893 as an affiliate of the university and was a separate 501(c)(3) organization. As a result, many at the university didn’t know what we did, or even that we existed. I felt strongly that we should be clearly aligned with the university’s academic mission and priorities, and more visible to faculty and administrators. So I set about making that change.

       [Note that my The Complete Review Guide to Contemporary World Fiction was published by Columbia University Press.]

       Tomas Tranströmer's Nobel Prize medal and diploma

       The heirs of Nobel laureates often flog the winners' gold Nobel medals and diplomas -- Alexander Bitar has a good overview at Collectors Weekly, Nobel Prize Medals: History, Specifics and Auction Records -- and they often get good money for them: apparently eleven have gone for more than half a million dollars, with the best-selling ones raking in considerably more. Oddly, however, literature laureates do not do well: Doris Lessing's, sold at auction for £187,500 in 2017, is only the 26th highest-grossing cash-in and the only literature-laureate to crack the top 32; among the few others that have been put up for sale both Maurice Maeterlinck's medal and diploma (Sotheby's, 2023) and those of William Faulkner (Sotheby's, 2013) were withdrawn when bidding didn't reach the reserve price.
       Admirably, the wife of 2011 Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer didn't put his diploma and medal up for sale, but rather has now donated them to the Nobel Prize Museum; see their official press release. 
       Recent literature-diplomas have come without illustrations and hardly even seem display-worthy, but Tranströmer still got one of the good ones.

Kenneth Koch Ten Films       1. Because Scene 1. Ted and Sally on a porch overlooking the water in Nice or some other resort. The scene is all yellow and green. Scene 2. City, street scene. All purple. SUBTITLES: So they moved. In the place where they moved, everything was purple. And they were happy. Scene 3. Yellow scene. A nursery. Everyone is happy. There are children. Smoking orange and blue SUBTITLE comes on and says “END.”        2. The Color Game The blank screen changes from one solid color to another in the following order: WHITE, GREEN, VIOLET, RED, GREEN, BLUE. This sequence is kept up as long as desired. Spoken words accompany the colors some of the time: on every fifth occurrence of WHITE, the words “The box of Wheaties” are heard; on every second occurrence of GREEN, there is laughter; on every third occurrence of BLUE, one hears the words, “Don’t take me off this boat at Corfu—No!”        3. Mountains and Electricity Panorama of mountains. A voice tells the story of electricity. At the end everything becomes dark red.        4. Sheep Harbour The scene is a harbour, filled with sheep (not in the water, but occupying all the land area). The end.        5. Oval Gold The scene shows a huge golden oval. A man reads aloud the menu for the day. The oval sways slightly as things it likes are mentioned. End.        6. Moby Dick Against a beautiful deep blue background which serves as a fairly narrow frame around it are exposed one by one selected pages of Melville’s Moby Dick. There should be music (soft), and the book should sway just the tiniest bit, as if blown by a light and gentle spring breeze. Background changes to orange and yellow. End.        7. L’Ecole normale  Various architectural aspects of an ugly école normale are surveyed by the camera while a violin plays something fairly raucous and weeping (perhaps something Russian?). The color of everything is yellow.        8. The Cemetery The camera plays on tombs, graves, trees, etc. A voice says: This is the cemetery. Then there are jangling sounds of something going wrong with the projector. The film ends. Inside the theater it should start snowing.        9. The Scotty Dog Various scenes of the life of my Scotty, Andrew, are shown: he runs about, puts his rubber mouse in his food dish, etc. Meanwhile a text is read, about the construction of the buildings on the Acropolis in Athens. The text should be dramatic and should be accompanied by an appropriately rising and dramatic music. End.        10. The Apple The camera follows an APPLE as it rolls along the floor of a room, falls down a grating, and ends up rolling along in the snow outside. A SONG accompanies the action enthusiastically. This song, for example:              Here’s the apple as it rolls along              The floor⁠—it seems to sing a song.              What’s more              It’s in danger, the apple is in trouble.              Just a bubble              Of doubt must cross its mind⁠—              Are apples blind?              In any case              As it proceeds to roll along              Over the floor.              Look⁠—it may hit the chair legs, hut no more.              We need not fear that, it evades them and goes on⁠—              To hit the table? No!⁠—goes on              Across the slightly not level floor.              But here, alas!              Apple green and white and red              Your head              You may injure⁠—              Oh beware, watch out⁠—              Yes⁠—no⁠—oh, yes⁠—              The apple has fallen in the grate⁠—              Good-bye! But no, it continues to go along.              And now we see it’s fallen outside⁠—              Aren’t you cold, apple?              In the snow.              And it continues.              Our green and red and white, to go              ROLLING ALONG!              (End.)

 

Texting a Random Stranger Better for Loneliness Than Talking to a Chatbot

Ruo-Ning Li, Dunigan Folk, Abhay Singh, Lyle Ungar, Elizabeth Dunn, Is a random human peer better than a highly supportive chatbot in reducing loneliness over time?, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 125, 2026, 104911, ISSN 0022-1031, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2026.104911. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103126000417)

Abstract: AI chatbots are increasingly embedded in social life, offering accessible companionship. While brief interactions have been shown to provide immediate benefits, it is unclear whether repeated, daily engagement with chatbots reduces loneliness. In this pre-registered study, we tested the effectiveness of a chatbot versus a human peer in reducing loneliness among 296 students in their first semester of university.

 For two weeks, participants either interacted with a chatbot or a human peer, or simply wrote a brief journal entry (control condition). Although our chatbot “Sam” was designed to offer consistent support rooted in principles from relationship science, interacting with this chatbot did not yield the same psychological benefits as interacting with a randomly selected first-year university student. The present study provides initial evidence that texting daily with a random human peer may be more effective in alleviating loneliness than texting with a highly supportive chatbot.

Vintage Rasputin

 Nothing worth having comes without a fight. You've got to kick at the darkness til it bleeds daylight.

How God Got So Great New Yorker

Social media is more of a habit than an addiction

Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity. “You can’t write a compelling narrative about the thing you didn’t build. Nobody gets promoted for the complexity they avoided.”

       Rasputin Prize

       They've announced the winner of this year's Rasputin Prize -- a Russian literary prize named for writer Valentin Rasputin, not the better-known one ... --, and it is Груманланы, by Vladimir Lichutin; see, for example, the report at Российский книжный союз. 
       See also the Вече publicity page for Груманланы.

I'm only 21 years old and I know that there's been too many wars ... You people over 21, you're older and smarter

Jason’s vintage sofa can cost up to $7,000. He found it in a pile of rubbish

As a child, Jason Mumford, now 30, would spend weekends with his mother trawling through junk piles and op-shops for treasures to decorate their home. “Growing up not so wealthy, we definitely could never afford expensive furniture, so my mum was very good at being resourceful,” Mumford says.

“I remember people coming around, probably judging its tired facade, and then they’d walk in and be shocked because the interiors were full of personality, and very curated with some really lovely, unique pieces.”

For Mumford, a designer who lives in Randwick, his upbringing spurred a lifelong obsession with interiors, and specifically, pieces that sit at the intersection of striking design and accessibility; items others might discard without realising their potential value.

Jason Mumford at this vintage furniture store, Two Hands Collect, at Mitchell Road Antiques, with a number of his vintage IKEA finds, such as the Storvik Rattan armchair by Carl Öjerstam.JESSICA HROMAS

Which is how he found himself preoccupied with vintage IKEA furniture. “It all started with the Niklas shelves, modular shelves I just became really obsessed with. They’re from the ’80s, but they were made up until the late ’90s,” says Mumford.

Mumford found the original IKEA catalogues from his and his partner’s birth years, as well as one from 2000.JESSICA HROMAS

“They were in the background in Seinfeld episodes and there’s an episode on Friends where they’re literally building the shelves. So they were a bit familiar, and they’re also super practical for apartment living because they’re very adaptable. They’re a bit of a lifetime piece.”

The typical Niklas shelving system will have three “ladders” you then hang shelves on. Mumford estimates since he started collecting vintage IKEA six years ago, he’s amassed as many as 30 ladders. “I probably have the largest collection in Sydney.”

Mumford has since accumulated a number of vintage IKEA finds, even catalogues from his and his partner’s birth years. He’s not the only collector who’s realised the worth of vintage IKEA.

Today, it’s not uncommon to see the Niklas shelves listed for upwards of $2000 (though if you’re lucky, you can find them for free through unsuspecting sellers on Facebook Marketplace).

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For the past two decades, mid-century modern furniture has enjoyed a revival, and among valuable pieces designed by Europe’s most recognised designers, vintage IKEA has become highly sought-after.

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“For a long time, IKEA was synonymous with poor quality, and when the history of Scandinavian design was discussed, IKEA’s products were simply left out,” explains Andreas Siesing, a Swedish design historian and IKEA expert. “When the enthusiasm for retro and vintage furniture from the 1950s and ’60s grew rapidly in the early 2000s, IKEA’s models followed suit.”

IKEA was founded in 1943 by Ingvar Kamprad, with an ethos of democratising design. In 1948, he launched a furniture range, wanting to make functional, stylish pieces available for everyone.

In the first half-century of IKEA’s existence, the quality and design was impressive. “There was likely greater scope to make purchasing decisions based on pure instinct – Ingvar Kamprad’s own – so the range is more eclectic and, for better and worse, less considered,” Siesing says. As the company grew, except for one-off collaborations with certain designers, the style became simpler and quality waned as pieces were made for the mass market.

Collectors have realised those early items are worth the hunt.

In 2021, a world record was set when the Cavelli armchairfrom the late 1950s was sold at the Stadsauktion Sundsvall auction for 151,000 SEK ($22,828), making it the most expensive piece of IKEA furniture ever. It’s one of the rarest collector’s items because they were made in very limited numbers, but also due to the chair being constructed with teak (the most popular wood in Scandinavia at the time) and its Italian-style design.

Matthew Sullivan with some of his vintage IKEA pieces, including the Anne Nilsson-designed glassware, IKEA PS 2014 On the Move side table designed by T. Richardson, C. Brill & A. Williams, Ola Wihlborg Postmodern PS Series Bowl (yellow) and easychair Vågö, designed by Thomas Sandell. WOLTER PEETERS

Matthew Sullivan, 53, has been collecting furniture for more than 25 years and runs his own business through Silverfox Vintage in the Blue Mountains. “A few years ago I saw something on Facebook Marketplace and I thought, ‘shit, that’s really interesting’. I looked at it and I realised it was IKEA,’” says Sullivan, who buys and sells mostly ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s IKEA.

Sullivan notes that many people who come to him looking for vintage IKEA are younger generations wanting the pieces they had in their bedrooms as kids, such as the IKEA Skojig Cloud Lamp from the ’90s. “They see and recognise those items from their childhood, so there are all sorts of different eras and layers to it.”

Northcote health worker Con Skordilis, 55, has been collecting vintage IKEA furniture for the past decade and similarly noticed an uptick in interest. “It’s becoming a bit more mainstream now,” says Skordilis, who prefers post-modern pieces of vintage IKEA. “People are realising how important it is and prices have gone up. It’s more difficult to find these days, whereas in the past people just used to throw things out.”

Con Skordilis’ collected of vintage IKEA includes the PS Nybygge 2012 shelves in his kitchen, the 1970 Mila chair, and the 2002 Jonisk lamp (rear).JUSTIN MCMANUS

One of his greatest finds – the Moment sofa designed by Niels Gammelgaard – was almost garbage.

“I found it on a street bounty group,” Mumford says. “They weren’t even taking a photo of the lounge, they were just taking a photo of the rubbish pile, and I drove an hour and a half to go and get this thing out of the junk.

“It’s super sleek and sexy by this amazing designer, and it’s quite rare. It wasn’t sold for a very long period in Australia, so there’s not a whole lot of them floating around.”

Every collector has their own white whale of vintage IKEA. Sullivan’s is the 1993 Vilbert chair by Verner Panton. Skordilis and Mumford both love the 1970s Impala sofa by Gillis Lundgren.

Siesing says the ’70s-era pieces are particularly noteworthy because IKEA was “small enough to leave plenty of room for experimentation; the furniture on offer was inventive and remarkably varied”.

For budding collectors, the advice is to hold on to items you have, and keep an eye out for designs that could be worth something in years to come. “Prices will continue to rise for the foreseeable future. Interest is growing at what feels like an explosive rate,” says Siesing.

“Fascinatingly, there is still much left to discover. Many vintage models have yet to appear at auction. Vintage IKEA has a bright future ahead of it.”

 “When a mysterious financier named Melmotte arrives in London, society rearranges itself around him & the promise of riches he brings. Some characters’ honesty & moral sense carry them through … while others are brought low by their own greed & dishonesty”

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The Best Guide to the AI Revolution May Be Victorian Fiction

By Martha Gimbel

March 20, 2026 

Novels set during the Industrial Revolution can illuminate what it's like to live through epochal change.

As the debate about our AI future continues to rage, I find myself wondering if we’re all going to become like the main character in my favorite 19th century novel, North and South. The heroine is a young woman during the Industrial Revolution who has to adjust to a whole new way of thinking and living and a host of new societal norms. Sound familiar?

Every day we read about the potentially huge effects AI will have on the labor market, the economy and society. Although many people speak about the future with certainty, we don’t really know what’s to come. People thought the invention of the cotton gin would finally help end slavery. In fact, it massively increased it. On the other hand, weavers on the eve of the Industrial Revolution were right that their livelihood would be decimated by the introduction of “the new machinery.”

It’s too soon to say with any confidence what effect AI will have on the labor market (or the economy or society). Many people claim it’s already leading to job losses, but the best evidence we have suggests that hasn’t started yet. That doesn’t mean we should ignore it or look away — but it does suggest we might be better served examining lessons from the past than merely speculating about the future. As Winston Churchill once said, “The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.”

If you want to feel what living through a massive technological shock and its aftermath looked like, it’s time to take a step back from the large language models and read some of the great novels of the Industrial Revolution.

The White-Collar Weavers

Today’s conversation about the labor markets and AI often proceeds as if we’ve never seen this sort of shift before. In particular, people focus on the effect the AI boom may have on higher-wage workers, rather than the lower- or middle-wage jobs that were most affected by the earlier disruptions of computers and automation. However, that dynamic isn’t new. Technological change has altered “high-quality” jobs before.

During the Industrial Revolution, the invention of steam power, the power loom and other machines made manufacturing more efficient — particularly the manufacture of textiles. These machines absolutely upended the economy and labor markets. In the long run, the transformation was good for workers and economic growth, but it was incredibly painful. (I’m grateful the Industrial Revolution happened: I now get to have a career pontificating about economics. I’m also grateful I didn’t have to live through it.)

At the time, weavers enjoyed a relatively high standard of living. They were certainly not in the 1%, but they were in some ways the white-collar workers of their day, enjoying flexible work hours and relatively high pay and social status. In fact, the Luddites became a political force partly because their high status allowed them to organize and fight back. They ultimately lost, but they had the social capital to mount a resistance.

How big was the shock? We didn’t have a Bureau of Labor Statistics in the 19th century, but real wages for handloom weavers seem to have fallen by half between 1806 and 1820, and it took decades for the workforce to experience broad benefits from all that machine-induced productivity. In 1806 handloom weavers earned about double what factory workers were paid; by 1820 they earned more than 25% less.

What It Feels Like to Live Through Technological Change

Without today’s preponderance of hard economic data, it’s hard to adequately quantify the impact of the Industrial Revolution on labor. Fortunately, we can turn to literature. Novels illuminate what people were living through at the time. I have three to point you toward (and a runner-up).

First, Shirley by Charlotte Bronte. Shirley is about a factory owner in the early 1800s who wants to install “the new machinery.” It even begins with a Luddite raid on a delivery of machinery! The mill owner Robert Moore and two young local women, Caroline Helstone and the titular Shirley, are trying to navigate what a changing economic landscape means for them as individuals and members of society. The book talks about both the economic pressure on Moore to compete and how different members of his workforce respond to the shock differently.

It also emphasizes the role the larger economic situation (e.g., the commercial repercussions of the Napoleonic wars) played in the adoption of machinery — an important aspect of this history that’s often overlooked. Technological change doesn’t happen in a vacuum; one thing that made the Industrial Revolution particularly painful was that export restrictions put pressure on the textile industry, increasing the incentive to invest in machinery.

Second on my list is the aforementioned North and South, by Elizabeth Gaskell. This novel takes place a little later, in the 1850s;it features an established factory owner interacting with workers in a “new factory” with machinery. The book explores how capital owners and laborers figured out how to work together in the new equilibrium. But it also emphasizes how the changing economy changed the social structure. Its heroine, Margaret Hale, the daughter of a minister forced to move north, struggles to adapt to the changing economic world even though she isn’t affected economically. Her family’s finances are not altered by the decision to modernize a factory, but modernization profoundly shifts the world around her, changing what is expected of her.

Margaret’s role in society was very clear in the southern agricultural economy, but in a northern town dominated by manufacturing and a society that revolves around who is empowered or disempowered by that technology, she doesn’t know how to respond. What is her relationship with newly empowered workers, such as the union leader Nicholas Higgins and his daughter, who become her friends? What should she make of the factory owner John Thornton, whose understanding of economic and social niceties totally differs from hers and who strikes her as uncaring and uninterested in the welfare of others? (Those of you who’ve read Pride and Prejudice can probably guess where that one is going.) As a “neutral party,” Margaret gets stuck in the middle of the ongoing labor unrest that emerges as capital owners and workers try to negotiate a new equilibrium. And she has to decide what responsibilities citizens have for one another in the new world — and what should be carried over from the old.

Third, A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. Yes, this book is about the Christmas spirit, looking after our fellow man and how we should respond to poverty in our midst, not the Industrial Revolution. It is, famously, about Ebeneezer Scrooge, a miser who hoards funds and doesn’t care about the suffering around him but is then visited by three ghosts on Christmas Eve who show him the error of his ways. But it also contains the scene in English literature that to me best describes what the policy response was to the Industrial Revolution and poverty at the time: “Are there no prisons? … And the Union workhouses? Are they still in operation?” Dickens generally doesn’t focus on the deeper economic conditions that led to the poverty he saw. He doesn’t distinguish between people who are poor because they lost jobs and people who are poor because they never had them. He simply wrote about the economic pain they were suffering.

I would not be a literature nerd if I didn’t sneak in an honorable mention. If you want to keep reading, The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope, published in the 1870s, focuses on greed during the railroad boom (part of what’s dubbed the Second Industrial Revolution). When a mysterious financier named Melmotte arrives in London, society rearranges itself around him and the promise of riches he brings. Some characters’ honesty and moral sense carry them through the resulting storm, while others are brought low by their own greed and dishonesty. It’s a wonderful summation of how people and society can get carried away by even the possibility of profit — and what that looks like during a technological boom time.

We don’t have the data we need to know exactly what disruption looked like during the Industrial Revolution, and we certainly can’t know with confidence what’s going to happen to us over the coming years. But all of these books can help us understand what drove people to invest in technology, what it felt like for workers at the time, how society changed and how it responded (or didn’t) to those who lost out.

We’ve lived through technological shifts before, including changes that came first for skilled, higher-status workers. Then, as now, people were panicked about their jobs, their economic well-being and the shifts in society, and unsure how they should respond. The AI transition may be faster, bigger and more disruptive than the Industrial Revolution. But if we want to have a flourishing economy and society on the other side, learning from what our predecessors went through is even more important this time around. And that’s exactly what literature is there to help us do.

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