It's no secret that grown-ups love the Harry Potter series almost as much as kids - maybe even more, based on certain grown-up references that the average 12-year-old can't quite yet appreciate. More to the point, by this time a whole bunch of Harry Potter fans who were once kids, back when the book came out, are now all grown up. Either way, that means a whole lot of us at Mediaite are unashamed, unabashed Harry Potter fans. After its worldwide record-breaking weekend (which a few of us contributed to), 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! Before we knew it, we were shouting out names of media muggles like Hermione answering a pop quiz. After careful (and nerdily meticulous) consideration, we've come up with a few examples for you. (We like to think of the Power Grid as our own little version of the Marauder's Map.) Here below, for your edification and enjoyment, is our own version - let's call it "Harry Potter and the Media Muggles." Mischief managed!

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webcast 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. (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 (more...)

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 was Sarah Palin — and, like with the rest of us, tried to wrap her head around it all. It was a lot — especially when that "rest of us" was women, trying to puzzle out our feelings on Palin and how she turned around notions of power, motherhood, political-sexiness, media engagement, and — yes — fitness for office. As a woman and a Republican (and a Hispanic, and a CEO — check those boxes!) Sanchez found herself intrigued by how the 2008 drama had played out for these particular women, and what that said about women in this country overall, right now, going forward. The result was her new book, You've Come a Long Way, Maybe: Sarah, Michelle, Hillary and the Shaping of the New American Woman. As well, Leslie was also the director of the White House Initiative on Hispanic Education from 2001 to 2003 and is CEO of the Impacto Group, which specializes in market research about women and Hispanics; she is also a friend of mine, and — spoiler alert! — I am quoted in the book (and on the back flap, along with Newt Gingrich. I have arrived!). She has shared an excerpt with us today, and also — in honor of Sarah Palin's return to the headlines! — has agreed to burn a bra or two with us for today's installment of 5QQ - Five Quick Questions. (more...)

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 a bit, either — he comes by his eggheadedness honestly, having made a name for himself long ago with the witty humor that has now crystallized into what the kids are calling "nerd chic." Jon Stewart recognized Hodgman as a comedic goldmine in late 2005 when Hodgman was a guest on the Daily Show to promote The Areas of my Expertise; in January 2006, Hodgman was back on, this time as an expert — and his career as "A Famous Minor Television Personality" was born. Since then he's — well, you have a TV, I know you've seen one of those Mac ads, since by my count there have been a whopping FORTY of them since 2006. He's also voiceover-hosted the Emmys (!), had a bit part in Battlestar Galactica (!!), and gotten President Obama to do a Vulcan Hand Salute (!!!!!!!). He also, as it turns out, is a whiz behind the bar, which I found out while interviewing him for "Have A Drink With" at the Daily Beast (and where I took this rather awesome photo). We've got those videos for you below, but first Hodgman very kindly answered our questions — appropriately wide-ranging as befits an expert of his stature — about Presidential nerdity, his bromance with Justin Long, how Yalies make love and the recently-released paperback edition of his book More Information Than You Require. All this and more in the latest installment of 5QQ - Five Quick Questions. (more...)

Remember when you were in high school and your English teacher made you write a paragraph, then cut it in half, and then cut in half again in an attempt to help tighten your work? Well Bill Simmons stayed up late watching Cheers the night before and skipped class that day. No one likes words more than Simmons, who, as his ESPN colleague Rick Reilly once said, might be the only columnist in history to have his column jump to another page. (more...)

The big news 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. (more...)

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 warriors as heroes who made the ultimate sacrifice for a noble cause. But death by so- called friendly fire, which is an inescapable aspect of armed conflict in the modern era, doesn’t conform to this mythic narrative. It strips away war’s heroic veneer to reveal what lies beneath. It’s an unsettling reminder that barbarism, senseless violence, and random death are commonplace even in the most “just” and “honorable” of wars. Consequently, and unsurprisingly, when soldiers accidentally kill one of their own, there is tremendous reluctance to confront the truth within the ranks of the military. There is an overwhelming inclination to keep the unsavory particulars hidden from public view, to pretend the calamity never occurred. Thus it has always been, and probably always will be. As Aeschylus, the exalted Greek tragedian, noted in the fifth century b.c., “In war, truth is the first casualty.” (more...)

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 this: Her last one, The End of Detroit: How the Big Three Lost Their Grip on the American Car Market, was published in 2003 and got pooh-poohed all over the Motor City. Well, we know how THAT one turned out. (more...)

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 disagree about matters involving Dick Cheney. Morning Joe's Mika Brzezinski disagrees with him about Dick Cheney, too, and yesterday on Morning Joe when Senor was supposed to come on and talk about his new book instead he wound up being the sole defender of Dick Cheney with regards to Afghanistan. (It seems to me that Dan has the same policy regarding Cheney that he does regarding me: A steadfast and loyal friend, no matter how crazy they are.) (more...)

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, whose book Viral Loop explores social media and crowdsourcing, thinks with some empirical justification that it's the latter. In a Fast Company column, he charts the declining influence of professional book reviewers, a shrinking group who are often agenda-driven. Exhibit A: the New York Times reviewer who dissed his first book. (more...)

"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. It's one I saw again and again in my fortnight in the Holy Land, where my pilgrimages included not only trips to the Western Wall and the Dead Sea but to forward-thinking VC firms, boundary-pushing media/tech startups and industry gatherings of Silicon Valley-type geeks, except they code from right to left. (more...)

Gail Collins' new book When Everything Changed, which we have written about in this space before, was released this week (buy here!) and the New York Times columnist has been making the media rounds this week. 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." (more...)

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 he's put together a little promo video for his upcoming book, Double Take, that is sure to get attention. (more...)

Most everyone knows that Peter Paul Rubens was a great artist, the Old Master who most famously enjoyed painting ladies of ample proportion. (The euphemism "Rubensesque" dates to a 1913 story in the Canadian women's magazine Maclean's — the editors considered his taste "eccentric.") It is often and unfortunately forgotten that Rubens lived a double life as a spy and diplomat, and this is the subject of my forthcoming book, Master of Shadows. In what I consider a rather satisfying bit of parallelism, an essay adapted from that book appears today in the Wall Street Journal on the same day that Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is the paper’s lead story. Rubens was a pragmatic, moderate man whose 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 with Rubens. (more...)

Last summer I randomly picked up NYT columnist Gail Collins' book America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines and immediately became engrossed. Friends (and seat companions) will attest to the fact that I talked about it non-stop for the better part of that summer. Women's roles had become a hot topic again thanks mostly to Hillary Clinton's presidential run, and later Sarah Palin's vice presidential one. Collin's enormously entertaining survey of women's lives over the past 400 years of American life seemed to strangely fit into to what was going on on the national political and cultural stage last year; a sort of primer to how we got from there to here. Here's what I wrote at the time: (more...)

webcast 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. (more...)

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. (more...)

The October issue of Publishers Weekly, the book world's premiere trade magazine for over 130 years, is quite forward-thinking for such an old-time 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. (more...)

Will Sarah Palin be the Barack Obama of book publishing? Last fall Obama's election and inauguration gave newspaper and magazines a much-needed boost. Looks like Palin is set to do the same for book publishng: Apparently the world is actually pretty eager to hear from Sarah Palin, about Sarah Palin. (more...)

Wow, Tina Brown is very smart. The New York Times is reporting that Brown is set to launch a Daily Beast book imprint, Beast Books, in a joint effort with the Perseus Book Group. 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." Also? Perseus is paying her "a five-figure management advance to cover the costs of editing and designing the books." From the article: (more...)

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. Viral Loop lets you quantify the value of your Facebook profile by weighting the traffic on your Facebook page, how many friends you have, and their Facebook activity, in addition to other factors, has begun pitting celebrities against each other in what we can only hope is an expanding feature. (more...)

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. The winner gets Winner gets an iPod touch and a copy of Twitter Wit; three runners-up get a copy of the book and, I guess, the glory. (more...)

Who: E.L. Doctorow in conversation with Anna Quindlen

What: Reading for Homer and Langley

Where: Barnes and Noble Union Square

When September 15, 2009

Thumbs: Up (more...)

In anticipation of his new book Viral Loop about "the interconnectedness of today's socially networked society" and the way things grow online, Adam Penenberg (Fast Company, Wired) has commissioned the design of an eponymous Facebook application to test his thesis. Described as part "infographic, game, and research project" Viral Loop estimates what slice of Facebook's billions are all thanks to you, based on your friends list and site activity. But in a meta twist, the application also functions as an advertisement for Penenberg's upcoming tech book. (more...)

A few months ago, sitting on a bunch of advance copies of my new book, The Adderall Diaries, copies that were supposed to go to well placed media outlets, I decided to start The Adderall Diaries Lending Library. My plan was to allow anyone who wanted to read an advance copy of the book the opportunity to do so, provided they forwarded the book within a week to the next reader. I didn't realize it at the time, but what I was doing played right into the new publishing environment, an environment that is still uncharted and mysterious. A brave new democratic book world where everyone is a potential reviewer. Since then a lot of authors (and book publicists) have asked about the program, wondering if it's a good or bad thing to let anyone who wants to read an advance copy of your book for free. Here’s some answers for those interested in planning their own lending library. (more...)

It's surprising to many that the detention center at Guantanamo Bay has a library, but it does -- and an extensive one at that. The U.S. military likes to hold up the library as proof that detainees are treated humanely; while that's open to debate, they sure do have a lot of books to read. According to PRI, the library has thousands of volumes in sixteen languages, "including English, Arabic, Farsi, Pashtu, Urdu and Uzbek," including poetry, history, fiction, comic books, and religious texts. When pan-Arab newspaper Dar Al-Hayat asked the librarian at Guantanamo Bay what the most-requested books were, this is what they found: (more...)

video Here comes the fall book season — which means here come the websites, blog posts, Twitter feeds and viral videos that have become necessary counterparts to the excerpts, readings, interviews and lectures that were once the only way of promoting a new book. These days, having a built-in audience is essential to making not only waves but sales — so authors better be able to tap into that. (more...)

Best-selling pop psychologist/author Malcolm Gladwell has announced plans for his next book, What the Dog Saw, which will be published this fall. But not unlike an early album leak for a recording artist, Gladwell's new book is already available online in its entirety, and The New Yorker, where Gladwell is a staff writer, is to blame. As it turns out, it's not exactly like an album leak, since the book is really just a collection of Gladwell's best writing for the magazine, but a musician metaphor is still apt. Essentially, Gladwell's publisher, Little, Brown and Company, is releasing what amounts to the writer's equivalent of a Greatest Hits album, in a move that stinks a bit of desperation. In a time when book sales are declining -- not unlike all printed matter -- publishers are desperate for the next title from Dan Brown, Nora Roberts or, say, Malcolm Gladwell. That is, authors guaranteed to sell and sell big, with Gladwell's three titles moving millions of copies internationally. (more...)

slideshow Vampires are having a moment. True Blood is a much-needed hit for HBO, with its latest episodes passing the 5-million viewers mark; Twilight is already churning out the third movie of its franchise, Eclipse, with newcomer Bryce Dallas Howard upping the star power of the cast. Kevin Williamson's Vampire Diaries looks like Dawson's Creek with coffins; there's even a tongue-in-cheek how-to book, How To Catch & Keep A Vampire, coming out. Even erstwhile media mess Lindsay Lohan is joining in the fun, baring fangs (and desperation) on Twitpic. Will the fascination ever cease? (more...)

After 26 years and 24 national Emmys, Reading Rainbow's butterfly in the sky will cease its long, illustrious journey as the longest-running children's show on PBS after Mister Rogers and Sesame Street. Hosted by LeVar Burton (also Kunta Kinte and Geordi La Forge), Reading Rainbow featured live-action adventures, book reviews by children and dramatic readings of children's books over panning shots of illustrations (even Ken Burns was a fan). (more...)

The Washington Post's Barton Gellman reports that Dick Cheney won't hold back in his forthcoming $2 million memoir of his years in the Bush administration. DC powerhouse lawyer Robert Barnett, who negotiated Cheney's book contract, told the Post that "'the statute of limitations has expired' on many of secrets." (more...)

No doubt I was not the only person who thrilled to the discovery that this week's New Yorker features a piece by Judith Thurman about Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House series of children's books, which were loosely based on her frontier childhood in the 1870's. Some of you may be more familiar with the 70's television series starring Michael Landon (which sadly does not hold up to adult viewing -- I have tried), which was even more loosely based on the books. (more...)

Historians generally agree that Watergate was a great, shining moment for the press - and for the Washington Post, which published the scoops of that would eventually take down a president. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have made careers out of it; Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman added it to theirs, as have countless authors and scholars. But the July 17th issue of the Economist points to a more unorthodox take: That the Washington Post was selfish, irresponsible, and directly responsible for thwarting the World Peace that Richard Nixon would certainly have won. (more...)

It's not often that some fake character becoming really famous makes me feel old. But the popularity of Harry Potter has consumed me with an overwhelming feeling of being old-fashioned.

You see, I really know next to nothing about Harry Potter. He means nothing at all to me. (more...)