( Fantastic Beasts review )

I know, a provocative title in this community, but we have concrete evidence that reading Harry Potter leads to a small, but significant, increase in antipathy toward Donald Trump and his policies ( Read more... )

So it looks like there's going to be a sequel to Harry Potter, and it's a play. It's going to be mostly about Harry's son ( Read more... )

I recognize that this is several months after the fact, but as a Jew, I can't help but be a bit miffed by the fact that people felt the need to ask Rowling if there were Jewish students at Hogwarts. Surely that's something they could have inferred themselves, if they so chose? Yet, they were so thrilled to learn that Anthony Goldstein was Jewish ( Read more... )

This is something that occurred to me as I was having a conversation with a friend. We were making fun of Harry Potter and he mentioned that he didn't like Dumbledore in the last few books because he was too perfect, too infallible, and absolutely everything went according to his plan. I brought up the potion in the cave as one counterpoint, and he ( Read more... )

While I was perusing Facebook, I found a link to a video which I thought was really cute and totally appropriate to this comm.

It's right here, if you want to watch:

Click to view

I would say it's fairly on-target. The scene of the little kid with the fire extinguisher in particular.

A recent paper published in Journal of Applied Social Psychology found that reader identification with with the main character of Harry Potter (and disidentification with Voldemort) positively correlated with reduced bias toward stigmatized minorities in real life.  Researchers found this Harry Potter effect was significant even after controlling ( Read more... )