It’s time for a special edition of Mediaite Office Hours – Book Club is back! We’re live from Livestream.com’s brand new studio, at 3pmET, with authors Katie Rosman, David Sax and Micki Maynard.

After Harry Potter’s worldwide record-breaking weekend, we got to talking about certain parallels between the magical land of Hogwarts and the equally magical land of headlines, bylines, cutlines, chyrons, blog pickup and declining ad pages. Turns out, the two have a lot in common!

On that note, for your edification and enjoyment, we present our own version – let’s call it “Harry Potter and the Media Muggles.”

We’re got a lot to talk about today on a special edition of Mediaite Office Hours, coming to you live from Livestream.com’s studio at 3pmET. James Poniewozik of Time magazine and more.

Who: Wallace Shawn, Tony Kushner, and Walter Mosley, moderated by Gene Seymour. What: The Nation’s “What Will Become of Our Culture?” Where: Symphony Space When November 18, 2009 Thumbs: Up

You may recognize Leslie Sanchez from CNN, since she was one of their A-team pundits during last-years long, crazy march to election day. Like the rest of us, she saw how the campaign of Hillary Clinton unfolded, how Michelle Obama was perceived and characterized, and the wrench thrown into the works late last August that [...]

John Hodgman is an expert. That’s what his books are about, that’s what he does on the Daily Show, that, at least, is what he thinks he is in those ubiquitous Mac vs. PC ads, which if they were a teen comedy would no doubt end up with him scoring the hot girl. It’s not [...]

In Bill Simmons‘ The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy you essentially get a 700 page Simmons column, complete with lists of the 96 greatest players of all time, the ten best teams in history and around 1,500 words on how Kobe Bryant compares to Teen Wolf. Nobody knows more about the history of basketball than Bill Simmons.

to come out of Meet The Press this week has been author Jon Krakauer‘s assertion that General Stanley McChrystal, commander of the U.S. forces in Afghanistan, was implicated in the cover-up about the death of Pat Tillman, the football-star-turned-Army Ranger who was killed in Afghanistan in 2004, ostensibly in an enemy attack but later revealed to have been killed by friendly fire. The Tillman story is tragic enough without the added layer of deception: The Bush Administration knew he’d been killed by friendly fire, yet lionized him as a hero falling to the enemy in a PR blitz. The subsequent discovery of that cover-up was a terrible black eye for the last administration — and, it seems, continues to have echoes in this one.

This excerpt is from the prologue of WHERE MEN WIN GLORY: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman by Jon Krakauer, provided on the book’s Amazon page. ******** Ever since Homo sapiens first coalesced into tribes, war has been part of the human condition. Inevitably, warring societies portray their campaigns as virtuous struggles, and present their fallen [...]

Micheline Maynard — “Micki” to her friends and Twitter followers — is the Detroit-based senior business correspondent for the New York Times covering autos and aviation, and the author of the just-released The Selling of the American Economy: How Foreign Companies are Remaking the American Dream. If you’re wondering if it’s a good book, consider [...]

By now you’ve probably figured out that I’m a fan of the new book Start-Up Nation, which I toted around Israel filled with post-it notes for the past two weeks. It was co-written by my old friend Dan Senor, with whom I generally agree about the joys of summer camp and with whom I generally [...]

Which is more likely to make you buy a book: a glowing writeup from a published book reviewer, or a bunch of four- and five-star Amazon ratings? Adam L. Penenberg thinks with some justification that it’s the latter. Exhibit A: the NYT reviewer who dissed his first book.

“If there is one story that has been largely missed despite the extensive media coverage of Israel, it is that key economic metrics demonstrate that Israel represents the greatest concentration of innovation and entrepreneurship in the world today.” That is the central thesis of Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, out this week.

Gail Collins’ new book When Everything Changed, which we have written about in this space before, was released this week (buy here!). This morning she appeared on a large chunk of Morning Joe to discuss, among other things, the fact that former Vice President Dick Cheney is a “dweeb.”

We’ve mentioned before that merely publishing a book is not enough to sell it — nowadays unless you’re Dan Brown or Sarah Palin, an author needs to push his or her masterpiece hard, with viral videos and constant twittering and inventive distribution ploys and eating many knishes. First-time author Kevin Connolly clearly gets that. And [...]

Peter Paul Rubens was a world-renowned painter of fleshy nudes — and a diplomat, spy and covert operative. His success as a diplomat was predicated on a combination of the high esteem in which he was held internationally and by his own great intelligence. Whatever one thinks about the timing of the Nobel, or of Obama generally, it’s hard to deny he shares these characteristics.

NYT columnist Gail Collins has followed up her best-selling America’s Women with the soon-to-be published When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey Of American Women From 1960 To The Present, an advanced copy of which landed on my desk last week. And I am just as engrossed as I was the last time. Welcome to the latest installment of the Mediaite Book Club.

It’s a Mediaite Book Club edition of Mediaite Office Hours today. Joining us for our show, from Livestream.com’s studio live at 3pmET today, will be authors Gary Vaynerchuk, Duff McDonald, David Sax…and some surprises as well.

Here’s another by-product of the Letterman ratings bump: More attention on Craig Ferguson equals more web-surfing his site for clips equals stumbling into this clip: Neil Patrick Harris Reads Craig’s Book. Insta-click, obvs.

The October issue of Publishers Weekly is quite forward-thinking for such an old world product. One glance at this edition’s cover — an artistic recreation of the magazine’s Twitter page — and it’s clear that this isn’t your great-great-grandfather’s Publishers Weekly. Actually, it’s the Viral Issue and it’s online and on newsstands now — what’s inside might surprise you.

Yesterday news broke that Sarah Palin had completed her memoir “Going Rogue” in just four months and that it would hit bookshelves November 17, far ahead of its original Spring pub date. Today the memoir has gone rogue on both the Barnes & Nobles and Amazon bestseller lists. Dan Brown never saw it coming.

Wow, Tina Brown is very smart. It was reported today that Brown is set to launch a Daily Beast book imprint, Beast Books. The imprint will publish both paperbacks and ebooks on a much faster schedule than traditional publishing keeps. Also? The imprint “will select authors from within The Daily Beast’s cadre of writers, most of whom are paid freelancers, to write books with quick turnarounds.” That’s not all.

How much is your Facebook page worth to Facebook? Probably a few hundred dollars, according to a Facebook app, Viral Loop, that’s collecting data as it is promoting a book of the same name. How much are celebrities’ pages worth? For many, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars.

Nick Douglas‘ Twitter Wit is a compendium of what he bills as “the funniest tweets of all time,” so the top five from those should be hi-larious. Right? Eh, you can decide that for yourself, but the point is, Douglas and publisher Harper Collins picked their five favorite Tweets from the book for a new promotion, which is about as un-Twitter as it gets: Inviting people to make a video based on one of those tweets. The filming! The editing! The uploading! Geesh, 140 characters never sounded so time-consuming.

E.L. Doctorow has been called many things in his lifetime, most notably one of the greatest writers of all-time. At a panel last night, he spoke about his new book Homer and Langley, based on New York City’s Collyer brothers, as well as his fortunate timing, character development and the risk he always takes with his wife.