Chicago Sun Times reporter Paige Smoron has written an amusing article addressing the “concerns” of the many critics of Harry Potter.

The Ayn Rand Institute has posted an article about how Harry Potter is quite the welcome figure in this time of terrorist threats.

Chivas Regal is holding an online auction for charity which includes signed Harry Potter books from J.K. Rowling.

This Sunday, Wisconsin Public Radio’s “To the Best of Our Knowledge” (distributed through PRI) will re-air a segment, originally from January 2000, about the Harry Potter “phenomenon”. Webcast is available through www.wpr.org; WPR runs the show from 9 am to 11 am CST.

Cinescape has some news from Daniel Radcliffe about the Chamber of Secrets movie. (Thanks to Eli Seagraves)

Here’s BBC’s coverage of Peter Jackson’s comments. Frankly, I’m very much looking forward to both movies. As I played an IRC version of D&D with friends, we had the Harry Potter soundtrack and snippets from the Lord of the Rings soundtrack going in the background. Just from the trailers and the music you can tell …read more!

Reuters reports: Lord of the Rings movie maker Peter Jackson on Wednesday dismissed talk that the first movie of J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic fantasy trilogy is in head-to-head competition with the first Harry Potter movie. Newspapers have cast the two fantasy movies as rivals in a battle of the box office but Jackson declared himself a …read more!

Sky News: The fifth Harry Potter novel of the seven-book series is nearly finished, according to author JK Rowling. Speaking at a charity screening of the first Potter film in Edinburgh, she said: “It’s still not finished but I am writing very hard, so it shouldn’t be long now.” A summary of what we know …read more!

NBC News will devote an hour of “Dateline” to covering the making of the Warner Bros. movie and related topics, Sunday at 7 pm EST. Katie Couric, who reports the special, visited the London set of “Harry Potter” over the summer. Parts of the program were taped over several months, and include interviews with the …read more!

Online.ie reveals that Richard Harris (Dumbledore in the movie) still hasn’t read JK Rowling’s books. Harris said he needed to do very little preparation for the role because the script was so good. “It’s possibly the easiest role in the entire film because it’s so well written. The only thing I did was to get …read more!