There are celebrities-and then there are celebrities." That's the first line of J.K. Rowling's latest Harry Potter short story, published this morning on her own website, Pottermore. Rowling, who has always had a strained relationship with her own fame, might as well be talking about herself. (She published her second pseudonymous detective novel last month, to solid reviews.) There are celebrity writers, and then there are celebrity writers-the kind who can post a 1500-word piece of writing on their personal website and immediately make international headlines.

If, like me, you woke up this morning excited by the headlines and tweets declaring that Rowling has written a new Harry Potter story, you may be disappointed. Almost seven years after publishing the final Harry Potter book, Rowling has returned to the wizarding world for the first time, but the results are flimsy. What's being billed as Rowling's first post-Deathly Hallows short story set in the "Harry Potter" universe is just a brief fictional dispatch from Rita Skeeter, the wizarding world's nastiest gossip columnist. If you aren't already a member of Pottermore, Rowling's official fansite, you'll have to sign up for an account. When I finally read the story, after surrendering my name, email address, and birth date, I felt a little conned. This wasn't a short story-this was a digital marketing campaign.



Rita Skeeter is writing from the Quidditch World Cup championship fifteen years after the events of the final book, providing a "Where Are They Now" game that's sort of fun. Harry is nearly 34, his hair is beginning to gray. Poor Ron is already losing his hair. (As someone who was the same age as Harry when the first books were published, this premature aging is tough to read about.) Hermione is balancing motherhood with a demanding career. ("Does Hermione Granger prove that a witch really can have it all?" Skeeter asks.) We get updates on Ginny Weasley, Neville Longbottom, Luna Lovegood, and even Viktor Krum. Like the reunion special of a TV soap, the next generation-Bill Weasley's daughter and Remus Lupin's son, now teenagers-are romantically involved.

All this information comes from an unreliable source, of course. Rita Skeeter, with her poison pen and claw-like nails, was one of the minor villains of the Harry Potter series, spreading catty, made-up gossip about our heroes and showing no moral qualms. She's also an avatar for Rowling's aggrieved relationship with the media. "It really was like being under siege or like a hostage," Rowling told the Leveson Inquiry when testifying a few years ago about the British press. In that light, the new story reads like a barely veiled attack on the entitlement and moral bankruptcy of British tabloid culture. "One always hesitates to invade the privacy of young people," Rowling, in the voice of Skeeter, writes. "But the fact is that anyone closely connected with Harry Potter reaps the benefits and must pay the penalty of public interest."

Unlike the series' ill-advised epilogue, the new story doesn't wrap everything up in a bow. We're left wondering where the cut on Harry's face came from and how much of the column is vicious rumor. But like that epilogue, it's a symptom of Rowling's reluctance to cede control of her creations. Since ending the series, she's revealed that Dumbledore was gay, that Harry and his cousin Dudley reconciled, and that Harry and Voldemort were related by blood. You don't have to be a Barthesian grad student to chafe at Rowling's impulse to clarify the words on the page. When writers adopt the paratextual world of fanfic as their own, they both diminish their books' literary authority and interfere with the freewheeling spirit of fan writing.

So if you're really jonesing for a Harry Potter fix, you're probably better off re-reading the originals or turning to some of the fantasy writers who influenced or were influenced by Rowling-Diana Wynne Jones, Susan Cooper, Suzanne Collins. And don't forget: harrypotterfanfiction.com has 82,406 stories, and counting.

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Jerome Booth, a British economist, investor, and entrepreneur, has written a refreshing book. Emerging Markets in an Upside Down World: Challenging Perceptions in Asset Allocation and Investment (Wiley, 2014) is not the usual whirlwind trip around the emerging market world-"if it's Tuesday it must be sub-Saharan Africa." Rather, Booth looks at some generally accepted notions that both inform and misinform emerging market investors and tries to set the record straight. The book is, to labor the travel metaphor, a tour of ideas conducted by a knowledgeable, articulate guide.

The Unholy Alliance between Presidents and Bankers

 

 

Calling a book a “tour de force” is a cliché, but every once in a while this overused phrase fits, and that is the case with All the Presidents’ Bankers by Nomi Prins. Consider what Prins has pulled off in this meticulously researched yet readable work (her fourth book about the U.S. financial system): nothing less than tracking the often unholy alliance between American presidents and bankers across a century of American history, two world wars, the Cold War, market booms, busts and panics, and bailouts funded courtesy of American taxpayers.

From Teddy Roosevelt to Barack Obama, J.P. Morgan and Charles Mitchell to John Reed and Jamie Dimon, presidents and bankers have depended on one another to open foreign markets, finance wars, and ensure the U.S. dollar became and remained the world’s dominant currency. As Prins notes, “No other country on the planet is driven by such a critical symbiotic and costly relationship.”

The titans of Wall Street and the occupant of the White House — regardless of political party — have been joined at the hip for decades, though, as in all marriages, there have been periodic spats. Teddy Roosevelt railed against the trusts and the concentration of wealth, but when the Panic of 1907 struck, TR tempered his attacks and stepped into line behind the bankers. During the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt sounded a populist chord by castigating the power and privilege of the titans of finance and industry, but much of that ire was only for show. The key financiers of the time were FDR’s people — fellow bluebloods educated at the same universities, members in good standing of the same exclusive clubs and social circles and often related by marriage.

Eric Holder, the incumbent Attorney General, has admitted that today — more than five years after the financial meltdown of 2008 — a coterie of American banks are simply too big, powerful, and interconnected to fail or jail. The irony is that the federal government was complicit in allowing banks to become behemoth in the first place. This fact may account for the haughtiness JPMorgan Chase chairman Jamie Dimon displays when he testifies before Congress, but Dimon’s demeanor is hardly different than J.P. Morgan’s was when he testified before the Pujo Committee in 1912. Too big now, too big then.

And that is Prins’s central point. American bankers are prone to crash the economy every few decades, either through excessive risk taking, outright fraud, or prosaic greed, and they know, from a century of experience, that when push comes to shove, the taxpayers will pick up the tab. After all, the bankers have friends in very high places. Prins sums it up this way: “Our choice is simple: Either we break the alliances, or they will break us.”

 

 

Article source: Independent