There's actually significant backlash against them now that Rowling said some unpopular stuff.

I also don't think people who read them now understand what it was like for the original readers who literally grew up with them. They were unique because they transitioned from books for children to books for teens, and they were a cultural phenomenon, with movies coming out well before the book series was finished.

When my child read the series, she was very young and one of the few in her age group to finish it. Young children often get stuck after book four, while teen readers may find the first books pretty childish.

As an adult, I enjoyed reading the series and watching the movies, but I wasn't the primary audience and I don't read them over and over again. The primary audience was really that one generation of children and teens who grew up with them, and it was perfect for them.

Another criticism I see is that they don't make sense, but I think that's unfair. They appeal to kids precisely because the world they describe is so arbitrary. It confirms their suspicions that adults really don't know what they are doing any more than kids do. It's a satire of the way the adult world works.

Quidditch is a perfect example. It's a sport that makes little sense, just the way school and politics and magic make little sense. It's ironic that quidditch has been turned into a real sport.

The cat represents the portion of the Russian upper class, intelligentsia, and bureaucracy that survived the revolution by pretending to support it. She was pampered by the Empire and would prefer to return to the old regime, but she’s an expert at manipulation and deception so she survives in the new regime.

1984 imagines an English form of Stalinism. But Animal Farm is a direct allegory of Stalin’s rise to power in Russia.

Orwell was an anti-Stalinist socialist — essentially a Trotskyist, or at least allied with Trotskyists. He saw what Stalinists were like while fighting Franco in the Spanish Civil War. The Stalinists fought the Trotskyists harder than they fought Franco.

Then Orwell saw millions of Englishmen fall for Stalin after WW2, when times were desperate in England. Orwell was genuinely afraid Stalinists would rise to power in England. And Stalinists did infiltrate the highest levels of government in the U.K. It wasn’t until the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 that public opinion in the U.K. firmly turned against Stalin.

Well, Snowball is based on Leon Trotsky, who was exiled from the U.S.S.R. and later assassinated in Mexico City by a Soviet agent. So no, I don't think he is to blame for anything that happens later. I think he was likely killed off screen.

The trial and execution of animals is based on Moscow show trials instigated by Stalin and directed against "Trotskyists." The defendants were widely thought to have confessed under duress, particularly when one defendant repudiated his confession and then changed his mind the next day after suffering a dislocated shoulder and other physical trauma.

So yes, Napoleon is a liar. He's based on Stalin.

I’m a lawyer so yes. My ability to read has helped a lot.

The Earth takes a few minutes less than 365-1/4 days (365.24219) to go completely around the Sun. Once every four years we add a day to the Gregorian calendar — February 29 — to make up for most of this difference. That’s a leap year.

However, because the difference is a few minutes short of 1/4 day, any year that is evenly divided by 100 would not be a leap year unless it is evenly divided by 400. Thus 1600, 2000, and 2400 are leap years, but 1700, 1800, 1900, 2100, 2200, and 2300 are common years, even though they are all divisible by 4.

The idea behind flopping is to (a) create a foul out of nothing, (b) turn a borderline foul into a called foul, or (c) make sure an actual foul is called. The first should be fined or otherwise penalized, it's cheating. The third is fine with me, sometimes you need to call attention to a foul.

The middle one is difficult to regulate. On the one hand, I wish players would play through more borderline calls. On the other hand, I can see why they try to turn them into fouls, and there's enough there that it's hard to fine or penalize them for it.

Charter schools aren't unionized. They operate like private schools, except that they are publicly funded.

This gives the schools more freedom, but you may get a lot of younger teachers who didn't obtain a union job and will leave as soon as they do obtain a union job. The same is true of private schools, though.

The quality of student at a charter school may be better simply because of the hoops parents and students have to go through to attend a charter school. And the school may have more freedom to expel troublesome students.

As with any school, research the options because the quality can vary a lot.

Malazan did it for me as well. I read it four times in a row.

Since then, the only books that blew my mind as much were non-fiction books: The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory, by Brian Greene and Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber.

The U.S. is the richest country on Earth and was determined to win the space race for political and propaganda purposes. Because they lost the race to put a man in space and to orbit the Earth, they kept moving the goal posts until they won. But it was an enormous expense. Once the Soviet Union decided not to go to the Moon, for a long time there wasn't much reason or money for anyone else to try to be the second country to the Moon.

Even the U.S. soon stopped sending astronauts to the Moon, and there's still a lot of debate about whether they should be going back to the Moon again. Unmanned missions to the Moon or Mars or other objects in space are more practical for scientific purposes. Sending humans to a space station is more practical if you just want to keep learning how to keep humans in space.

One very big reason the U.S. is going back to the Moon now is a renewed space race with China, which recently sent three robotic missions to the Moon and announced intentions to put a base on the Moon by 2030. So although there are various other justifications, arguably it's really about politics and propaganda again.

Also because such bikes are rare.

Specifically that’s a quintuplet bike or a quint, although it’s also a five person tandem. TIL tandem does not mean “two,” but comes from the Latin tandem meaning "at length (of time), at last, so much.” It was first used for a carriage pulled by horses one behind the other rather than side by side, and later applied to long bicycles with two or more seats.

Looks like he was a chucker. 257 points in 11 games.

The Harry Potter series starts out as children’s books, then transition into books for teens. They grow increasingly dark.

When originally published this worked for their fans, who grew along with the books. But now young children binge reading the series often get stuck after book 4. My daughter managed to finish reading the series, but many of her classmates did not.

I do believe I went to Pike Lake State Park a few times as a kid in Ohio, so I may have traveled through Sinking Spring, although I don't remember it.

I looked up Puckett's history, he's an interesting character. It looks like he opened for a lot of country music acts over the years.

It started with the Jewish diaspora under the ancient Romans. After a series of Jewish revolts against Roman rule, Jews were not allowed to settle or worship in Jerusalem for 500 years. Only when the Muslims took Jerusalem were Jews invited back, but they were not given political power.

As a result Jews formed communities elsewhere in the Roman Empire. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman and Byzantine empires, it created a tense relationship with Jews. The same was true in the Muslim empire. Throughout the Middle Ages, at times Jews were tolerated, and at other times they were persecuted.

Since they were often not allowed to own land, and their existence in any particular land was always subject to change, many Jews formed international relationships with fellow Jews in other countries, and took advantage of those relationships in trade and finance. This helped them survive and even thrive, but their success often made them even more of a target of discrimination.

They were, in short, a common and easily identified minority in every European and Middle Eastern country, at a time when there were few other minorities. There were some other minorities also subjected to discrimination. In fact, pretty much any outsider was suspicious. But none were more pervasive or visible than Jews. The fact that many were successful in business despite or even because of the discrimination just made the hatred directed at them more intense.

That remained the case in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Furthermore, as aristocrats lost power and capitalists gained power, it was convenient to deflect anger away from other capitalists by pointing the finger at wealthy Jews. That has continued to be the case throughout the West.

Of course, today there’s also the issue of the State of Israel, which has never really been accepted in the Muslim world. And Israel’s response to Muslim aggression has turned them into an occupying force that has been accused of human rights violations. In other words, in the one country run by Jews they treat Muslims as outsiders, and have been accused of unjustified discrimination against them. And since the U.S. backs Israel with massive military and economic aid, the U.S. is often blamed for Israel’s actions.

No, but Fitzgerald felt that even the favorable reviews missed the point of the story.

Actually The Great Gatsby was not really appreciated by critics or the commercial market until after Fitzgerald's death in 1940. During WW2 the book was distributed to soldiers and they liked it. By 1944 critics recognized the revival in interest wasn't a fad, and scholars started to re-examine it. After that it became both a critical and commercial success, and is still both today -- but Fitzgerald never knew about it.

I agree that it's a fantastic novel. But I would say it's only been recognized as such for about 80 years, maybe less.

I wonder why it appealed so much to WW2 soldiers, in particular. It may have had something to do with the waning power of the Eastern elites portrayed in the book. After all, the soldiers were picked from all walks of life. And then when they returned to civilian life they weren't content to go back to their previous roles. They formed the great middle class of the 1950s and 60s, and through the G.I. bill they filled colleges that formerly had been reserved for the rich and privileged.

Now we may have come full circle, with a much greater divide between the rich and the rest of us. But that would make the book more relevant than ever.

Great actor. The part was pure slander, though. What's more, it's based on actual slander during Salieri's lifetime, which contributed to his nervous breakdowns later in life. Despite the rumors, there is absolutely no evidence Mozart was poisoned. The sad fact is that many young people died of disease in that day and age, and Mozart was one of those many.

Interestingly, however, there was a revival in interest in Salieri's compositions because of the play and movie Amadeus. A lot of people realized the play was historically inaccurate, and what's more they realized that Salieri was actually an excellent composer. They started performing his works to prove it.

The real reason for the slander during Salieri's lifetime may have been his Italian ethnicity. At the time the Hapsburg Empire included much of Italy. But over time the German-speaking members of the Hapsburg Empire became more chauvinistic about their taste in music, and did not appreciate an Italian composer directing Italian operas in Vienna. That's true even though Salieri's own compositions were heavily influenced by German composers.

That might be due to the fact that Tony Curtis disappeared from her life after her parents divorced in 1962. Jamie Lee was raised by her mother and her stepfather, stockbroker Robert Brandt.

Sorry, not off hand. I know of this video starring Carl Sagan using the shadow method to prove curvature, but I would have to search for one using the Pole Star.

The Pole Star lies exactly overhead if seen from the North Pole. The farther south you travel, the lower it gets in the sky. It's not visible from the Southern Hemisphere at all, due to bulge in the middle portion of Earth. As Hawking notes, in Ancient Greece this was one of the proofs cited for the curvature of Earth.

Stalin didn’t write his own memoir. He did write some books about politics but they weren’t personal. He didn’t like to advertise his Georgian origins.

The best biographies were written after the Cold War ended and historians had access to government files. The best one I’ve seen is Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, by Simon Sebag Montefiore.