I’m very happy for László Krasznahorkai and the Nobel win, but look at this interview bit - did he steal it from Nic Cage’s monologue in Moonstruck? Same vibe.

In Milan, I saw my first Jacquard loom in person, not knowing that the following day, in Bologna, I would see my second, though this one was programmed by an Italian artist to weave a pattern based on his own genetic code.

Had no idea Delany wrote a graphic novel. It’s a bizarre space opera that imagines empire as control over information and Maxwell’s Demon as an actual entity.

Nabbed this at the Cozy Corner in Pittsburgh, the owner’s dad was a rare books dealer and it’s an eccentric collection

Why watch Top Gun tonight when you can Kiss Kiss Bang Bang?!

Oh you’re looking for a film about the urgency of life and the power an individual bureaucrat has to cut through planned obsolescence and effect change for the public good?

Not watching. Just reading some Auerbach today

What is a movie you love from 1992?

The only movie question I’ve ever been 100% certain of

Y’all, Colson Whitehead just reskeeted Richard Jean So’s NYT article in a thread dunking on Joyce Carol Oates. Love this place

@richardjeanso.bsky.social

Where is the meme of this with Drew Barrymore saying ‘cellar door’?!

And here's my favorite to end things: the most best-sellingest translator you've never heard of. Naomi Walford translated all of Mika Waltari's interwar era novels from the original Finnish. They were THE biggest translated bestsellers of the era

Here's the (mostly postwar) French and Greek constellations

Isabel Allende forms a kind of author-centric network in which other Spanish-language authors gather around

This one is less linguistic or generic and really based more on the franchise itself, which was taken up by a second author after Larsson died

Just for fun, here's Márquez next to Murakami

But languages aren't the only way bestsellers link up. This one shows up as more of a generic trend, as Nordic authors, especially of the Noir genre, write across a few diff languages

So what language is the most networked? It turns out to be German. We can get from ETA Hoffman to Thomas Mann to The Neverending Story through a few shared translators

In the spirit of making good things, I'd like to share what's been a couple years of work. Let's say you took all 7,000 novels that have made the NYT bestseller lists and wanted to find all of the works in translation. And let's say you visualized the results as a network of translators . . .

Three weeks ago I gave a talk at my small rural Pennsylvania campus about AI and data privacy. At this moment, Bill Clinton is behind the same podium. Swingstate stuff