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
The Best Lincoln
The Morning Edition crew sifts through nearly 15,000 biographies of Abraham Lincoln in order to determine the best of the best. Janet Potter, you have your work cut out for you.
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Indigenous Peoples Day
Many people, cities, and states recognized Indigenous Peoples Day instead of Columbus Day on Monday. The New Inquiry takes a look at indigenous history in America. Pair with our review of Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account, which “underscores the notion that history often dismisses crucial voices.”
Personals, for the Bookish
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Vicious Circle
Michele Filgate was so terrified by Dave Eggers’s The Circle that she quit social media for a week and wrote about the experience for Salon. “I don’t want to become like Mae, sacrificing real-life friendships for the allure of the screen. I want to be aware of the world around me. I want to write about that world. I want to feel more alive, even if that means being lonelier in the process.” Pair with: our review of the novel.
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Becoming David Grann
The brilliant New Yorker reporter David Grann discusses his new collection, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes.
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The Art of Not
Seeing as yesterday was Donald Barthelme’s birthday, it’s as good a time as any to remember the short fiction icon. At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova reads Barthelme’s essay “Not-Knowing,” which you can find in the author’s collection of essays and interviews. Sample quote: “Art is not difficult because it wishes to be difficult, but because it wishes to be art.”
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For Whom the Bell Tolls
The word “whom” appears “just 53 times out of every million [spoken] words,” according to the Corpus of Contemporary American English. This does not bode well for members of future generations – some of whom may be fond of formality.
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