Stephen Colbert has lined up his next job after finishing up as host of The Late Show in May: writing a new Lord of the Rings film tentatively titled The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past.

Film-maker Peter Jackson, who directed the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Hobbit trilogy, made the surprise announcement in a video on social media on Tuesday. Colbert is an avid, lifelong JRR Tolkien fan and even had a small cameo in Jackson’s 2013 film The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug alongside his wife and children.

Deadline reported the film will be titled The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past and will be written by Colbert, Philippa Boyens and Peter McGee. Set 14 years after the passing of Frodo, the film will follow Sam, Merry, and Pippin as they set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure. Meanwhile Sam’s daughter, Elanor, discovers “a long-buried secret that explains why the War of the Ring was very nearly lost before it even began”.

In a video with Jackson, Colbert said he was inspired to develop a story after rereading The Fellowship of the Ring, and thinking about chapters three to eight, which were not included in Jackson’s film adaptation.

“You know what the books mean to me and what your films mean to me, but the thing I found myself reading over and over again were the six chapters early on in the Fellowship that y’all never developed into the first movie back in the day,” Colbert told Jackson.

“I thought, wait, maybe that could be its own story that could fit into the larger story. Could we make something that was completely faithful to the books while also being completely faithful to the movies?”

Colbert said he then planned an outline for the story with his son, the screenwriter Peter Colbert.

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“It took me a few years to scrape my courage into a pile to give you a call, but about two years ago I did. You liked it enough to talk to me about it … and I could not be happier that [Warner Bros.] loved it,” Colbert told Jackson.

Jackson joked that Colbert would have to find time to adapt the film, in reference to the highly contentious cancellation of CBS’s The Late Show, which Colbert has hosted since 2015. The cancellation was criticised as politically motivated, coming just after Colbert criticised CBS’s parent company, Paramount, for making a $16m settlement with Donald Trump, who has been vocal about his dislike for Colbert.

In response, Colbert said: “It turns out I’m going to be free starting this summer”, to which Jackson replied: “Isn’t that fortunate?”

The film will be produced by Jackson along with the franchise’s longtime producers Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh.

Colbert’s film is the second upcoming film in Tolkien’s universe. Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, which is set to be released 17 December 2027, will be directed by Gollum himself – Andy Serkis – and will follow Aragorn on his quest to capture Gollum during the time period between The Hobbit and Fellowship of the Ring, in order to keep the ring from Sauron.

The six Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies have grossed a combined US$5.9bn.

It may be too late for rural libraries to weather the IMLS storm

May 16 2025

Beth Anderson, director of the Burnsville Public Library in West Virginia, can throw a rock from the library’s front door and just about hit the interstate. While the mountainous region has historically been sparsely settled farm and coal country, Burnsville’s proximity to I-79 ensures that the library is a frequent stop for people just passing through.

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In 2009, the American government loaned almost half a billion dollars to Elon Musk’s Tesla corporation to hasten the development of electric car technology. What did it think it was playing at? Didn’t it remember what Ronald Reagan said? “The most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help,’” the late president told a 1986 press conference.

For Reagan and the brains behind his neoliberal puppet, the role of government is to get out of the way and let the unfettered orgy of self-interested neoliberal economic life express itself as nature intended. Taxation is theft and interventionist industrial policy always a mistake, except when it involves bailing out failing banks in reward for tanking the economy.

Nobel-winning economist and former Bill Clinton aide Joseph Stiglitz demurs. He proposes, instead, what he calls progressive capitalism. We need more government, not less. Stiglitz even writes a sentence that may induce any tooled-up Maga enthusiasts to expectorate into their spittoons and pump their shotguns. “We need environmental regulations, traffic regulations, zoning regulation, financial regulations, we need regulations in all the constituents of our economy,” he writes.

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We need, what’s more, to problematise Margaret Thatcher’s homey analogy between government finance and a housewife’s balanced weekly budgeting. Stiglitz says most companies grow by incurring debts, but no one would just look at the liability side of a firm’s balance sheet. “If we spend the money on infrastructure, education or technology, then we have a more productive economy,” he writes. “When a firm invests well, the value of the assets increases more than the liabilities, and the firm’s net worth is enhanced. The same for countries.” This is basic economics, though not of the kind that I and many others were taught at university in the early 1980s, when laughable myths about individual economic rationality, perfect competition and how the spirit of free enterprise needed to roam unchecked were presented as undeniable facts.

But can governments be trusted to deliver socially desirable goals such as electric cars? Consider the HS2 high-speed railway debacle or, if you can bear to, Michelle Mone’s impact on public trust in government. Or consider, Stiglitz suggests, the errors that the US government made in drawing up its contract with Tesla. “It made a mistake. It failed to insist on a share of the upside potential … by insisting on receiving shares, for instance. If it had, the government (and American taxpayers) would have more than made up for the losses incurred in other technology and investments.”

To put it another way, governments aren’t very good at business. “Mistakes will be made,” says Stiglitz. “But the discovery of a mistake is no … reason to abandon a policy.” He notes that the US has embraced interventionist industrial policies as never before to provide correctives to badly functioning markets, especially since the 2008 banking disaster – hence the development of Covid vaccines and recognition of excessive dependence on foreign-made microchips. The US government, that is to say, is already doing more governing than neoliberal orthodoxy allows.

The case for minimal government was made by the nemeses of Stiglitz’s book, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. The former, a Viennese economist whose 1944 book The Road to Serfdom was so prized by Thatcher she handed out copies at cabinet meetings, insisted that tyranny would result from government control of economic planning. The latter economist’s scorn for big government was typified by his remark: “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

Stiglitz, who has had beef with Friedman ever since the pair clashed at the University of Chicago in the 1960s, thinks Thatcher’s favourite monetarist thinker is responsible for a desertification of human hope thanks to his quasi-religious faith in shareholder capitalism, in which the only goal for managers of companies is to maximise shareholder value. Friedman, Stiglitz insists, unleashed a generation of Gordon Gekkos to slime their way to economic power with their “greed is good” philosophy. Worse, the pursuit of shareholder greed encouraged company managers to ignore what economists call externalities – such as water organisations filling British rivers with excrement, drug companies killing Americans by addicting them to opioids or the rape of the Earth for private gain.

Much heavy lifting for Stiglitz’s case is done by the American political philosopher John Rawls, whose 1971 book A Theory of Justice proposed a still resonant thought experiment. Imagine that each of us is temporarily behind a veil of ignorance knowing nothing of our talents, income and wealth, or indeed core values. In this “original position”, what principles of justice would we devise to ensure the society we lived in was a good one? Not, suggests Stiglitz, those that prevail today in countries such as the US and UK. Instead, he thinks it would yield the principles of progressive capitalism he spends the book defending – involving more government intervention and reforming neoliberalism’s excesses captured in the bracing truth of Isaiah Berlin’s remark “Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.”

I’m not so sure. His vision of progressive capitalism seems too little, too late – too little to create egalitarian societies after decades of neoliberalism; too late to stave off climate disaster. I wish Stiglitz had drawn – as the British philosopher Daniel Chandler did last year in a book similarly aimed at loosening neoliberalism’s chokehold – on another element of Rawls’s thinking. His principle asserts that any inequality in society can be justified only to the extent that it benefits the worst off. But that, I suspect, smacks too much of socialism for the Nobel laureate. Stiglitz’s conviction – ardently expressed, mostly unconvincing – is that capitalism got us into this mess and can get us out of it too.

About the author

“A brilliant tour de force. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a detailed, revisionist understanding of the beginnings of the modern refugee regime.”

—Dawn Chatty, University of Oxford

“Magnificent and magisterial. Empire of Refugees not only reveals the emergence of a new template for refugee flows in the modern world, but it also captures the human experiences of the refugees themselves: their sorrows, hopes, failures, and successes. A prodigious achievement.”

—Michael A. Reynolds, Princeton University

“Empire of Refugees is a meticulously researched and imaginatively conceived history of mass migration that represents a genuinely fresh contribution to both late Ottoman history and global refugee studies.”

—Laura Robson, Pennsylvania State University

The term “quarterlife” was coined more than two decades ago by Abby Wilner, co-author (with Alexandra Robbins) of Quarterlife Crisis: The Unique Challenges of Life in Your Twenties. Although psychotherapist Satya Doyle Byock’s Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood credits Wilner with the neologism, it also often gives the impression that the struggle and quest for purpose in early adulthood is something its author has discovered; a therapeutic specialism of her own creation, rather than, say, a juncture of individual human uncertainty you can read about in the Bible.

Indeed, a key argument of the author, who practises in Portland, Oregon, is that quarterlife is “overlooked” and underexplored. The marketing blurb describes her focus as an area that has been “virtually ignored by popular culture and psychology”. This fails immediately when you consider that some of the most critically acclaimed cultural successes of the recent past (Lena Dunham’s Girls, Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag, Christopher Storer’s The Bear) explore this territory. Then there’s the “adulting” memes that abound, or how Taylor Swift’s astute observations on growing up have made her a global superstar. There was even an NBC sitcom based on twentysomethings called… Quarterlife.

It’s a gnawing incongruence: the big pitch that Doyle Byock has alighted on a brand new phase of development psychology, then mentioning a Bildungsroman or quoting a thinker that proves the opposite. Where her book does differ, however, from much traditional professional discourse – and, most refreshingly, from an attitude in certain modern quarters that has given rise to the word “snowflake” as an insult – is that she is absolutely on the quarterlifers’ side (they are defined here as “roughly” ages 16 to 36, although in an interview she gave to NPR, it was 20 to 40).

Her kindness, warmth and empathy frequently come across. She’s bang on about how woefully underprepared many young people are for life admin, and the spiral of shame to which this can lead. And, at 40 – an upper-end millennial – she gets it, and that’s a validating thing for readers who have become accustomed to brickbats from their elders.

Quarterlifers, according to Doyle Byock, come in two different flavours: “meaning” types and “stability” types. The former tend to be more adventurous, creative, spiritual. They are “likely to be artists” and travellers, but struggle with mundane tasks and are not particularly grounded. The latter are more likely to have a good job and relationship locked down, but perhaps wonder, as Peggy Lee put it: is that all there is?

If that binary sounds simplistic, that’s because it is. But it doesn’t follow that it is wholly devoid of truth or use. The work that the author does with her clients – and encourages readers to undertake – is to identify which of the two types feels most accurate, and to then improve balance between them in a bid for a more coherent, happier whole.

This process includes going through, in whichever order, “four pillars of growth”: Separate (from, for example, oppressive parents or a romantic partner); listen (to one’s own needs); build (making life plans and working towards goals); and integrate (put this all into practice to “manifest something new”).

An expository narrative is structured around four fictionalised, composite case studies. There’s Conner, the Adderall-abusing college dropout; Grace, the lesbian runaway in a co-dependent relationship; Mira, the married and successful but unfulfilled lawyer; and Danny, the stifled writer with a porn addiction. Yes, I know, this all sounds rather like a YA novel.

The book, then, sits somewhere between self-help and academic treatise. There is potential disappointment for readers keen on the former, because of a lack of a workbook element with explicit exercises (although there are descriptions of techniques that Doyle Byock uses in-session). And Quarterlife cannot succeed as the latter, given its limited historical, economic and societal context, despite the fact the author mentions more than once – correctly – that people and their problems do not exist in a vacuum.

The extraordinary lack of wider detail seems to be down to Doyle Byock’s desire to impress that the quarterlife phase is not limited to a particular era, and because her parameters are so nebulous. While the “teenager” may have been ushered into being by postwar advertisers, decades after G Stanley Hall’s maturation theory (neither of which are looked at here), people between the ages of 20 and 40 have always existed.

It doesn’t make sense for Doyle Byock to acknowledge, for instance, the high cost of living, or the rapid pace of technological change, or issues of race and gender, which affect present-day quarterlifers… and then not examine any of it properly.

Why not, instead of a throwaway line on quarterlifers’ “constant relationship to digital devices” right at the end of the book, delve into – off the top of my head – the algorithmic experiments of corporations such as Meta to manipulate users’ emotions, or the ways in which these products are designed to encourage dependency in young people?

Why not actually broach the late-00s global recession, a massive, defining influence on the economic circumstances that have so screwed the exact target audience of this book, rather than just vaguely mentioning that wages are low and adults are leaving home later?

Similarly, if you’re going to write that “crippling anxiety and depression are effectively the norm” on the first page, you need to point to some research that provides a convincing case and, furthermore, at least try to work out and explain why and how that is. (And, ideally, attempt to unpick the difference between poor mental health and mental illness.)

There isn’t a single statistic or clinical study; there’s zero science. While mainstream publishers are no doubt cognisant of what I’ll call the Stephen Hawking rule (each equation included halves sales), at times I felt like a maths teacher writing “show your working out” in the margins.

Perhaps most frustrating is that the concluding chapter reads like a draft for a much better book, broad brushing as it does all of the issues the author has left out. There’s a first and singular reference to neurodivergence. An allusion to climate anxiety. It’s a sort of literary “here’s what you could have won!” Unfortunately, it’s too late.