Beat to Death: The Ed Piskor "Grooming" Hoax

On Saturday, May 30, 2024, an acquaintance messaged me: “Off topic, but can you believe all that crap going on with Piskor??” I hadn’t heard a word about Ed Piskor—apparently, I was living on the dark side of the moon—even though social media had blown up the Saturday before.

Tri-Wizarding Transphobic Triennial: Three Years of J.K. Rowling, TERF Cult Leader

“J.K. Rowling has become toxic to the [Harry Potter] brand…”—casual reference on NPR’s All Things Considered this afternoon, December 16, 2022 (3:26 into the story on video games).

The Beginning of the End of J.K. Rowling

Warner CEO David Zaslav’s November 3 earnings call with investors has been widely heralded as great news for author J.K. Rowling, with headlines trumpeting “Warner’s Exec Doubles Down on Rowling,” and similar tripe.

This is completely erroneous.

Edie Ledwell Deserves a Better-Led Creator

In her new “Robert Galbraith” Cormoran Strike novel, J.K. Rowling reportedly savages her critics as a “woke Twitter mob” motivated by “cancel culture” and the sheer jealousy of a successful woman.

Fantastic Beasts and Other Unwritten Big, Fat Books

Some thoughts on the eve of one of the most ambivalent, if not pre-hated, movie releases in recent memory. Revised with a couple of elaborating paragraphs inserted on May 3, 2022.

The biggest problem with the Fantastic Beasts film franchise, and it has been the biggest problem from the start, is that the films lack big, fat J.K. Rowling books to precede each film.*

Fans Didn’t Enable Rowling; Success, Ego, and Power Did That.

I watched part of a YouTube video last night in which a longtime Potter fan basically laid out a thesis that fans have progressively enabled Rowling to become a bigot. This is an interest thesis, with some very small, partial truth to it; but it’s naïve—fannishly so, imagining a closer relationship and more influence on the author than fans actually have.

PCAM: 21st C. "Arts" .org Too Ashamed to Mention Drawing, Painting, or Sculpture by Name

If you want another sign of how completely debased the word "art" has become in our twenty-first century civilization (not to mention the intellectually corrosive effects of an MFA in the visual arts), herewith the Friday, February 8, 2019 email announcing a new local arts .org (note the words drawing, painting, and sculpture are completely absent):