In Our Feeds: New Harry Potter illustrations, inspirational quotes, reading on the subway & more

Brittany Sullivan  //  Jan 16, 2015

In Our Feeds: New Harry Potter illustrations, inspirational quotes, reading on the subway & more

Every Friday, we share a handful of links that we found funny, provocative or just plain cool. We call it In Our Feeds. Have a great weekend!

In case you missed it, this week we had some big Harry Potter news… On October 6, 2015, we will publish a new fully-illustrated hardcover edition of J.K. Rowling’s bestselling Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone! If you’re like us and counting down the days until October 6, don’t worry, we have a sneak peek at the beautiful new illustrations featuring Rubeus Hagrid, Hermione Granger, Draco Malfoy and Ron Weasley.

Here’s a fun fact for Harry Potter fans: Did you know that J.K. Rowling was 33 years old when Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was published? Both Gina and Deimosa spotted this great “By the Book” list of notable authors’ ages when they published their most famous works. And speaking of Harry Potter fans, Megan found this wonderful infographic of inspirational quotes from children’s books, including the Harry Potter quote, “Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, when one only remembers to turn on the light.”

Hogwarts and horcruxes aside, Nadia read an interesting article this week about Dutch photographer Reinier Gerritsen. While visiting New York City, Gerritsen took a photo every time he saw someone reading a book on the subway as a way to document the demise of print books. You can see his work here. So now the real question is, do you still read print or have you switched to a digital reader?

Also in the news this past week, a Fortune analysis in collaboration with S&P Capital IQ revealed that 23 Fortune 500 companies currently have zero female directors. Scholastic CFO Maureen O’Connell shared her thoughts with Fortune magazine, stating, “It is not okay for a company to have a board that does not represent the views of their customers, and women are influential decision-makers, if not the key decision-makers, in many buying decisions.”

Lastly, have you ever wondered what teens actually think of social media? Deimosa recently shared this Medium article, written by a teen, which gives an insider’s view on all things Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and more. And way before social media was even invented and terms like “LOL” or “TTYL” were part of our everyday communication, language played an integral role in human evolution. Check out this animated history of the English language, which was found by that our resident Word Nerd here at Scholastic, Lia.

Looking for some more fun reads? Here’s what else our team read this week:

Have a great weekend everyone!

Image via GalleyCat