Over the past few years, the Movoto Real Estate blog has become the internet’s number one destination for appraising the real estate in the Harry Potter universe. First they estimated the value of Hogwart’s Castle to be around $204 million, and now they’ve turned in an estimate of the Weasley family’s Burrow near Ottery St. Catchpole.
Muggles Appraising Wizards
A First for the Odyssey
The New York Times Magazine profiles Emily Wilson, the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English. Her translation is one of our most eagerly anticipated for November. “One way of talking about Wilson’s translation of the “Odyssey” is to say that it makes a sustained campaign against that species of scholarly shortsightedness: finding equivalents in English that allow the terms she is choosing to do the same work as the original words, even if the English words are not, according to a Greek lexicon, ‘correct.'”
Good Ol’ Fashioned Library Feud
Due to some outcry, Robert Darnton comes to the defense of the New York Public Library’s proposed expansion and revamping.
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Notebook on Cities and Words
“We believe in the digital with abandon. So when something of artisanal quality is placed in our hands, or we see something hanging on a wall drawn by an actual hand, we feel a little shock. We remember how to feel something. Maybe not quite an emotion, but the touch of paper does something to us. We use our senses again.” Celebrating fifty years of the French publisher L’école des Loisirs, Gnaomi Siemens reflects on the power of hand-drawn images and the future of the book.
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Death by Bookcase
At the Telegraph, Sir Tom Stoppard briefly explains his desire to be killed by a falling bookcase.
Recommended Reading is Here!
Starting strong out of the gate with a new short story from Ben Marcus, Electric Lit‘s latest project, Recommended Reading is here! There’s also a single sentence animation and a letter from the editor. And best of all, it’s published directly to Tumblr, though you can also read the story on your Kindle or ePub reader.