MuggleNet Drops Staff, Gets Sued, Disapparates, Reappears Brand New

June 1, 2026 by 3 Comments

MuggleNet.com is, with The Leaky Cauldron and The Harry Potter Lexicon, one of the few Harry Potter fandom websites with an international following and more than a quarter century of reporting, commenting on, and celebrating everything to do with the Wizarding World. These sites were daily stops from Generation Hex during Potter Mania, 1999 – 2012, the years the books and first film film adaptations appeared.

In July 2020 with the advent of the Trans Wars, however, MuggleNet broke with Rowling, Inc., with which entity they had previously served as an unpaid marketing extension, in fidelity to their beliefs that human beings can become the other sex by believing they are. MuggleNet made this move, all but declaring the author of the Harry Potter series ‘She Who Must Not Be Named’ on their site’s posts and podcasts, by linking arms in a brotherly boycott with every other fandom site (except this one and The Rowling Library).

The difference in those closed ranks, though, was that the founder of MuggleNet, Emerson Spartz, had sold his website in 2020 to Topix Media Lab, a magazine and paperback book publisher that had already been printing Potter titles with MNet cooperation for years. The new owners oversaw a reformatting of the site and published a wave of new book titles but for the most part retained its staff of many years, most of which were technically volunteers, and its large archive of posts and podcasts.

In September 2025, though, Topix decided to clean house and start over. They fired everybody and in April 2026 wiped the site clean of its past. As The Leaky Cauldron’s ‘Amanda Kirk’ wrote last week in a piece titled ‘MuggleNet Has Become a Horcrux:’

In 2020, the site changed ownership to a company, Topix Media Lab, that had been in partnership with MN for its print publications. For some years after the sale, operations at the site appeared similar from the outside, albeit with a seemingly bigger push for ad revenue by Topix. In September 2025, Topix emailed MN staff to inform them that their services were no longer required. Staff numbers had fluctuated but some had remained dedicated to MN for nearly 20 years. Unless the owners planned to shut down MN, why abruptly dismiss all that institutional knowledge and devotion? The mystery deepened when Topix posted an ad on LinkedIn looking for a single full-time paid staff member to run the site. Qualifications listed for the position included an MBA.

The staff decided to fight back in court — and watched Topix guard its legal flank in April by dropping all their “volunteer” labor efforts overboard of the site with a new MuggleNet in everything but name: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Beatrice Groves, Hog Pro Notes, MuggleNet Academia

Rowling Tweets Status of ‘Sleep Tight, Evangeline:’ Sixty Percent of First Draft

May 21, 2026 by 4 Comments

Url to Thread

Three quick notes about this news!

  1. If 72 chapters is approximately 60% of Sleep Tight, Evangeline, then we’re looking at another 120 chapter book. At best, those migraines not reflecting a brain tumor or even a chronic condition, Strike 9 won’t be with us until late in 2027. That she is writing and enjoying the process, however, means the intense planning of this entry in a series of intricately structured novels is over and she is in the hard-slog of writing business. Fair winds, etc.
  2. Check out the Rowling tweet on the thread of which the Serious Striker thought it appropriate (and apparently Rowling agreed!) to ask about the fictional work in progress. Maybe her posts about government ineptitude and party politics are the secret passage to ask The Presence questions about her work? Those of you who enjoy life on social media, please ask her about the ten book series structure, the alchemical sequence, or whether the allegory of Cormoran and Robin is Cupid-Psyche mythic template, Jungian archetypal psychology, or Shakespearean romance.
  3. “After a mere seven years, Strike is finally in open pursuit.” One of the speculative ideas about Evangeline has been that Robin will be disappearing from Strike’s life for much of the novel via a kidnapping or a retreat to work with the Cursing Crone Psychologist (a la Psyche’s trip to see Persephone at Venus’ bidding). If Strike is at last “in open pursuit” of winning Robin’s hand in marriage, that suggests that, no, Robin will be center stage in Strike 9. Doesn’t it?

Let me know how you read these migraine inspired bon mots to her followers on Twixter!

Filed Under: Cormoran Strike, Twitter

Warren Farha: Memory Eternal!

May 21, 2026 by Leave a Comment

Warren Farha died last night. If you’ve heard of Warren or had the pleasure to meet him, if you don’t live in Wichita, Kansas, odds are it is because of Eighth Day Books, an independently owned bookstore in a quirky private residence whose every shelf contains at least a month’s worth of challenging reading, fiction and non-fiction, that will provoke and raise up your thinking about what it means to be human.

Read the wikipedia page about Eighth Day Books or the New York Times 2015 profile (unlocked by Rod Dreher) after taking the Sorina Higgins quick guided tour of the store above. Hogwarts Professor is a weblog for Serious Readers; Eighth Day Books is a pilgrimage site for such people. Like few other places I have been and even fewer business establishments, Eighth Day Books reflects a single person with a vision of a possibility that no one else saw and which grew to include an international and local community of other faithful, intelligent people whose lives were changed by it.

I was invited by Eighth Day Books to be the featured speaker at the first Eighth Day Institute symposium sixteen years ago. I met Warren then, met him again when I spoke a few years later at the Orthodox cathedral in Wichita, and once more most recently at a St John’s College graduation in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Each time I was impressed by his quiet solidity and sobriety, a perceptible depth of character beneath kindness and a sense of humor that was much more about thoughtful smiles and the connection of eye contact than guffahs.

The topos of grief is to say, ‘The world is a better place because of Warren Farha; the world will be less a place of joy and fraternal love in his absence.’ This is true, of course, and profoundly so however cliched the sentiment may seem especially to those of us who were blessed to meet him, even incidentally as my meetings were. I trust that the thoughtful people at Eighth Day Books will continue to run the business as Warren did and that readers here, if they have not been there already, will visit the store in person or via its website.

My take-away from Warren’s life and Eighth Day Books, though,  is from the sui generis genesis point of the operation. As he explained it years ago in a talk he gave about vocation: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Hog Pro Notes

Appalachia in the ‘Hunger Games:’ The Real Life Roots of District 12

May 1, 2026 by 2 Comments

I like to think of myself as a Hunger Games fan and a real admirer of Suzanne Collins’s work in general. You can read what I have written about her Panem Trilogy here. You’ll note in that collection of urls that there are a bunch from Elizabeth Baird Hardy, our resident expert on these books and the film adaptations made of them.

Unlike Elizabeth’s other brilliant work at Hogwarts Professor, say, on the Faerie Queene epigraphs in Troubled Blood or about C. S. Lewis (e.g., here and here) when she writes about the Hunger Games she is drawing on more than her years of close reading and skills as a published scholar. District 12 is where she lives.

And she’s written a book about it that you can pre-order today and read next month: Appalachia in the Hunger Games: The Real Life Roots of District 12.

In it, Elizabeth brings together her roles as a literary maven and as a champion of Appalachian heritage. The descendant of some of the earliest settlers in Appalachia, she is a storyteller, historic interpreter, and teacher who has shared her passion for and knowledge of Appalachia and its people for over 30 years. As a writer, she has explored the literary treasures in texts ranging from the Chronicles of Narnia to Harry Potter and has been Deputy Head Mistress here at Hogwarts Professor for over fifteen years. She relies on both those roles to delve deeply into the Hunger Games books and to reveal how these fictional stories feature much that is true.

In 2011, when there were only two Hunger Games books and no films, Elizabeth started teaching the first book in her freshman composition classes in the western mountains of North Carolina. Her students responded so positively that she kept using the book for years. One reason the book worked so well was that her mountain college students understood the culture of District 12 because it was familiar. Suzanne Collins has created a world woven with elements of Appalachian culture and characters whose decisions and voices are often distinctly Appalachian.

This volume has been over a decade in the making. Elizabeth contributed a chapter on Appalachian Culture in the Hunger Games to the 2016 Critical Insights: The Hunger Games Trilogy. She quickly realized that there was enough material for an entire book. Although events like COVID and personal challenges presented obstacles along the way, those delays allowed her to draw upon the two prequels. Sunrise on the Reaping, in particular, has a wealth of connections to Appalachian culture and history. Thanks to an understanding publisher, this book will now be arriving just before the film of Sunrise on the Reaping.

Twelve chapters look at various aspects of Appalachia that directly connect to the novels: Geography and geology; Plant Life; Birds and Animals; Foodways; Stereotyping and Perception by the Larger Culture; Violence and Alcoholism: Self-Sufficiency, Isolation, and Xenophobia; Family and Independence; Faith and Fatalism; Humor and Storytelling; Music; Time: Circles and Cycles. Each chapter draws together Suzanne Collins’s fiction and the actual Appalachia and its people, history and culture. Readers who are unfamiliar with the real Appalachia are sure to learn more about the place they have visited in print, and even those who know Appalachia well will discover more about both the real mountains and the literary ones of District 12.

The book is currently available for pre-order on Amazon and from McFarland.  More information on Elizabeth, her work, and opportunities to hear her speak can be found at AppalachianInkling.com.

Filed Under: Elizabeth Baird Hardy, Hunger Games

What is a Squib, Really? And Where Would Rowling Have Met the Word?

April 27, 2026 by 1 Comment

There are few English words-about-words as fun as the Greek derived ‘onomatopoeic,’ ‘name-making’ literally, ‘word that sounds like its meaning’ in common use. ‘Buzz’ and ‘Hiss’ come immediately to mind. ‘chuckle,’ ‘grunt,’ and ‘snore’ are personal favorites (see this site for a list of 150 others). It’s a shame that onomatopoeic does not sound like its meaning but, in being something of a tongue twister and spelling-bee challenge-round item, at least it has an exotic feel appropriate to its subject. According to traditional lore, the names given to things in the Garden of Eden by Adam, primordial Man as Image of God, all reflected the beings named in their sound.

I confess that I assumed the word for barely magical witches and wizards born into magical families in J. K. Rowling’s Wizarding World, the folk she calls ‘Squibs,’ were given that name because of its onomatopoeic source in fireworks; per the Harry Potter Lexicon invaluable online resource, a squib is English idiom for “a dud firework that will not ignite properly.” It sounds like its meaning (as does “dud”) and a reader can feel in it the disappointment of magical parents when their child turns out not to have the gift that will make them full members of their community.

I learned this morning, however, that a squib is not a dud firework, or wasn’t originally though it may have that meaning today, and that it is mentioned more than once in one of Rowling’s known literary influences.

I subscribe to Dimitra Fimi’s ‘A Kind of Elvish Craft’ Substack site because I am a big fan of her work. She is a first tier scholar, as in ‘Professor of Fantasy and Children’s Literature at the University of Glasgow,’ generous to a fault in answering questions from all quarters, and she is blessed with a delightful sense of humor. Professor Fimi is best known as a leading figure in Tolkien Studies and all things fantasy and mythology but she is also a Serious Striker and Rowling fan. Check out Reading Rowling as Myth Maker and Myth Re-Writer: A Conversation with Dr Dimitra Fimi and ‘Sleep Tight, Evangeline,’ Miniature Psalters, and the Head of Persephone: A Conversation with Dimitra Fimi to discover what a treasure-chest she is for all who want to understand Rowling’s artistry and meaning better.

She has recently embarked on a series of posts about The Lord of the Rings that she calls ‘The Slow LotR Re-Read.’ As she explained in the first post of the series on ‘Tolkien Reading Day:’

This year, I am engaged in a slow (really slow!) re-read of The Lord of the Rings, taking copious notes and ruminating on tiny details. I have, naturally, read The Lord of the Rings numerous times (I used to keep a tally, but I’ve now lost count!). First, for pleasure, then as part of my PhD research, later for teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate level, and to suppport supervision of PhD projects, and again and again as I have worked on various publications (from writing my first Tolkien book, to composing numerous articles and essays over the years, and to offering comments/suggestions to strengthen other scholars’ work during various editorial projects).

So, what makes this read different? Two things. First, it is regular, almost daily. But, secondly, and most importantly, it is very slow. I am reading no more than a page each time, sometimes lingering on one or two paragraphs only. This is, of course, both a luxury and a challenge. The natural instinct of most readers is to read on, to find out what will happen next, to follow the adventures of the protagonist(s) as they unfold over many pages and chapters. Slowing down is difficult. Taking the time to savour every word, sentence, and paragraph, before even getting to the level of pages or chapters, is counter-intuitive. We do it naturally as readers, of course, when we hit a particularly striking sentence, or a memorable turn of phrase, or a “quotable” couple of lines. Then we stop and ponder.

What I am trying to experiment with, though, is doing this stopping and thinking for every word, sentence, and paragraph in The Lord of the Rings. Each time I am pondering Tolkien’s choice of lexis, diction and syntax. I am also ruminating on his craft: his use of dialogue vs. narration, his construction of the narrator’s voice, his gradual fashioning of setting, his deliberate choice of imagery, his devising of characterization, his handling of story vs. plot. And, at the same time, I am stopping to consider details that I have missed before. I am still discovering new things in a text I’ve read so many times, by paying attention to elements of description, or spoken utterances, or tone of voice.

As I begin my slow-re-read of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone for a book whose chapters will be posted at the Hogwarts Professor Substack page, I confess to being simultaneously excited and intimidated by Professor Fimi’s project. But I’m reading every entry in this series closely, though only a Tolkien casual reader and admirer, because there is gold in each slow-reading she does. And the occasional delightful find for a Rowling Re-Reader!

This morning it was in Dr Fimi’s reflections on The Fireworks of Gandalf. It turns out that a ‘Squib’ is not a dud firework or wasn’t originally: [Read more…]

Filed Under: Uncategorized