Conversation Piece, May 14, 2017

A weekly series.

All you other Annes are just imitating. Some have said the CBC’s new Anne of Green Gables reboot emotionally and aesthetically betrays the 1985 original by replacing its sanitized, though luminous sincerity with jarring grit and intensely mean scenes of rural life. For Vanity Fair, eight writers make their case for why Kevin Sullivan’s Anne, played with charm by Megan Follows, is the only Anne they need. Read more, here.

The golden age of rail. Japan’s shinkansen and commuter trains are famously efficient—but comfortable? Less so (employees known as “pushers” notably ensure each car is as packed as possible). So the new Shiki-Shima luxury cruise train certainly stands out as something different—more like a swish, futuristic train hotel on which people can languorously cruise the countryside in the highest of style. Check it out, here.

Photos of mom. The New York Times’s Edan Lepucki muses on the experience of finding vintage photographs of our own mothers. “For daughters, these old photos of our mothers feel like both a chasm and a bridge,” she writes. “The woman in the picture is someone other than the woman we know. She is also exactly the person in the photo—still, right now.” In honour of Mother’s Day, take a moment of reflection, here.

Fun fact. The amount China spends on eating out is equivalent to the entire GDP of Sweden. As Quartz reports, China’s 1.37 billion population spent half a trillion dollars eating out at restaurants in 2016—22 per cent of that going towards the country’s favourite dish: hot pot. The total amount China spent eating out last year is so massive it’s actually greater than the gross domestic product of a number of countries, including developed ones such as Sweden and Norway, according to the most recent figures from the World Bank. See the data, here.