Nostradam‎us Michaelis de Nostredame

Who was this person Michaelis de Nostredame? Interest in Nostradamus has not died out through the ages was he real where his predictions actually made? His name reached many young people through the song of the Scottish balladeer Al Stewart that was released in 1973. So what is the meaning of the name "Nostradamus," the name chosen by ‎the famous astrologer? Could it have some special hidden meaning? Was he as a secret Jew? Had he been a descendant of the Israelite tribe of Issachar and a follower of the Zohar and Kabbalah taught to him by his grandfather Jean de St. Rémy?

It is recorded that Jaume's father, the Jewish apothecary Guy Gassonet, had converted to Catholicism around 1455 (?), taking the Christian name "Pierre" and the surname "Nostredame" comprised of two parts; the Latin word; Nostrum -which means in part ‎‎"a medicine whose ingredients are kept secret", and the French words N‎otre Dame or "Our Lady", a reference to Mary the "virgin mother ‎of Jesus".

This fact is interesting since many "New Christians" converted to ‎Catholicism during this bleak period of European history before the Spanish Inquisition in 1492. Many ‎of these Medieval European Jews continued to remain “secret Jews” or “Marranous." They were so secretive out of fear so as to prevent their discovery otherwise they would be tortured and burned to death at the stake for heresy. Nostradamus's family may have been one of those Jewish families that ‎‎feared the "Inquisitor" and hid their Judaism. The hint of this can be found in the story surrounding his maternal great-grandfather Jean de St. Rémy since there is a persistent tradition that he was educated by him. However he “suddenly” disappears from the historical records after 1504.

Michel de Nostredame was one of at least nine children of Reynière (or Renée) de Saint-Rémy and Jaume (or Jacques) de Nostredame a grain dealer and notary. Michel's known siblings included Delphine, Jean I (c. 1507–77), Pierre, Hector, Louis, Bertrand, Jean II (born 1522) and Antoine (born 1523).

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Nostradamus father had been a noted astrologer and apothecary - physician. So ‎when Nostradamus was a young boy his father taught him astronomy, ‎astrology and apothecary / medicine. The young Nostradamus was enrolled at the ‎school of Medicine at Montpellier. While still a student at the academy ‎Nostradamus became well known for his knowledge of astronomy. His ‎knowledge almost cost him his life when he advanced the theory that the ‎earth revolves around the sun. To many this was a "heretical" thought ‎because it went against the teachings of the church.

Nostradamus entered the University of Avignon at the age of 15 to study for his baccalaureate. After little more than a year he was forced to leave Avignon when the university closed its doors in the face of an outbreak of the plague. After leaving Avignon, Nostradamus traveled the countryside for eight years from 1521 researching herbal remedies. In 1529, after some years as an apothecary, he entered the University of Montpellier to study for a doctorate in medicine. He was expelled shortly afterwards by the university's procurator, Guillaume Rondelet, when it was discovered that he had been an apothecary, a "manual trade" expressly banned by the university statutes, and had been slandering doctors. The expulsion document still exists in the faculty library.

Because ‎of his knowledge he was hired by the French King Francis I, ‎of Angouleme, the House of Valois to be the personal physician to‎his oldest son the Dauphin Henry (1519-1559) the heir to the ‎French throne.‎ During the years 1535-1545 an epidemic know as the‎‎"Bubonic Plague" reappeared in Europe. As a physician, Nostradamus fame ‎grew with his cures the "rose pill" that supposedly protected against the plague and ‎his prescribed treatment for the "Bubonic Plague" were based on rules of cleanliness ‎and hygiene outlined in the Bible and by the writings of the Mosheh ben Maimon (משה בן מימון), called Moses Maimonides or RAMBAM Hebrew acronym for "Rabbeinu Mosheh Ben Maimon" – English translation: "Our Rabbi/Teacher Moses Son [of] Maimon". Yet despite all of ‎Nostradamus's medical knowledge his first wife Henriette d'Encausse and two daughters became infected ‎by the disease and died of the plague.

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After the death of his wife and daughters, around the year ‎‎1545, he became embittered and lonely. He took to traveling until ‎he decided to remarry in 1548. He isolated himself in a tower of ‎a castle that belonged to King Henry the second in Saint Lo near ‎a village in the south of France. Nostradamus turned to the study ‎of astrology and the "occult"(?). It is here that he has his ‎first visions of future events.‎

Nostradamus published his book of predictions "The Cent‎uries" in 1555. The book was called the centuries because it was ‎divided into ten parts, each of the 100 four line verses, stretching ‎from the date of publication (1555) to an indefinite time in ‎the future. Many first editions exist today, so there is no doubt ‎as to the authenticity of the text.

Many of Nostradamus's ‎"predictions” have come true and here are but a few examples:

‎"The blood of the just will be demanded of London, burnt through fire in the year three times twenty and six”‎

Indeed in the year 1666 the city of London suffered from a disastrous ‎fire known in English history as the great fire of London.‎"

"The English Parliament will put it's King to death."

Charles I King of England was beheaded by order of Parliament ‎and Cromwell on January 30, 1649.‎

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 ‎"An Emperor of France shall be born on an island near Italy, his rule will cost his Empire dear, Nay Pol Loron will be more of fire than blood"

Napoleon was born on the island of Corsica near Italy.‎

“Hister, the German of the Crooked Cross, The Captain of Greater Germaine, no law does this man observe. Bloody his rise and fall shall be.”

‎There is no doubt that  Nostradamus is alluding to Adolph Hitler.‎

"In the new lands of America, three brothers now shall come to power. Two men are born to rule, but all must die before their hour."

‎This is a reference to Joseph, John and  Robert Kennedy.‎

A great wall that divides a city at this time is cast aside.

Is this the Berlin wall November 1990‎?

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Nostradamus is a reputed seer whose published collection of prophecies have become famous worldwide. He is best known for his book "Les Propheties", the first edition of which appeared in 1555. Since the publication of this book, it has rarely been out of print since his death, Nostradamus quatrains have purportedly predicted many major world events and because of this he has a wide following. He is best known for his book "Les Propheties", the first edition of which appeared in 1555. Since the publication of this book, it has rarely been out of print since his death.

According to the famous English diarist Samuel Pepys, as early as 1667, long before the French Revolution. Pepys records in his celebrated diary s to his prophecies there is a legend that, before his death, Nostradamus made the townsfolk swear that his grave would never be disturbed; but when dug up at the French Revolution, 60 years later a brass plaque was found on his chest correctly stating the date and time when his grave would be opened and cursing the exhumers.

Nostradamus's tombstone, in the Collegiale St-Laurent, at Salon-de-Provence Bouches-du-Rhône, France. As noted on his crypt Nostrad‎amus- Micha Ben Elias or Michaelis de ‎Notredame was born in Saint Reims de ‎la Provence, France on 14th or 21st of December 1503 and died on the 2nd July 1566.‎

The headstone, written in Latin and composed by his wife, reads as follows: "Here lie the bones of the illustrious Michel Nostradamus, alone of all mortals judged worthy to record events of the entire world with his almost divine pen, under the influence of the stars. He lived 62 years, 6 months, and 17 days. He died at Salon in the year 1566. Let not prosperity disturb his rest. Anne Pons Gemelle wishes her husband true happiness."

Whose Radical Jesus? The Story of a Literary Success

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Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, By Reza Aslan                            (Random House, 2013)  

(Image: Random House)A better title for this best seller would be:Jesus Against Empire. If the devil can quote scripture, according to tradition, and if the recovery and analysis of assorted versions of what became Bible text (or did not) have become a scholarly big business, then we can hardly expect any version to be accepted by all. Still, Reza Aslan himself is by now the kind of major media personality who appears on "The Colbert Report" (and what could be more major?) with views on subjects ranging from Iran (where he was born) to the silliness of Fox News on Christmas. Lionsgate has purchased the film rights to his new book,Zealot, The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, and he is reportedly scripting a television series for FX. Conservatives gripe at his Jesus, while senior Biblical scholars seem to be complaining that they never got the earthly attention and rewards now ladled upon him. 

If you want to get Zealot   Just make a minimum contribution by clicking here and receive the fascinating account of the historical Jesus, a radical against the established order.

Zealot strikes me as the most radical version of the Christian story since C. Osborne Ward's massive two-volume The Ancient Lowly appeared in the Gilded Age (1888 to be exact). Older brother to famed sociologist Frank Lester Ward, C. Osborne argued that Christianity was the "slave religion" taken up by those miserable Roman masses who craved a decent funeral and a happier afterlife. Read by every literate radical who could lay hands on a copy (the Charles H. Kerr Company reprinted it in 1907 for a new generation of socialists), the tome showed religion coopted by the rich and, above all, by the servants of empire. In the process, Christianity's original promise got turned inside out.

Ward's interpretation could not easily withstand evidence that some of the very rich adopted Christianity along with the very poor, from the get-go. Still, could there be a hidden truth in the argument? For more than 2,000 years, a whole lot of people have thought so, in part because the texts can be read against empire (and slavery as degradation and exploitation, its leading function) so effectively. Sci-Fi giant Philip K. Dick, more mystic than radical, nailed it this way in his super-weird, late-life novelValis (1981): "The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one." He goes on to say, still more gloomily, that "whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies," making them part of itself. If this sounds like the saga of decolonization turned into neocolonialism, with South Africa the most dramatic of many painful examples, then Dick (who claimed to receive this wisdom through an intergalactic message of some kind) could not be far wrong.

Why Aslan, and better, why now? Best sellers have their own history, and Billy Graham - now apparently about to receive his Reward one way or another - was rarely far off the charts with his soporific literary sermons. In an era of dechurched masses looking for substitutes (angels, anyone?) and those still in church urgently looking for ways to bring back the crowds; in an era when the most reactionary pope since the era of fascist collaboration is replaced by possibly the most progressive pope ever; that is to say, in these days, a radical revisiting of the Greatest Story Ever Told can hardly be a surprise.

Aslan himself is a fascinating fellow. A boyhood convert to Christianity, a PhD from that notable New Age center, Santa Barbara, he has a marvelous gift for popularizing ideas. But he is also a serious reader, following up scholarly leads near and far. The Notes and Bibliography take up more than 60 pages of Zealot, citing all kinds of older and newer information and interpretation. He wants us to believe him, but he is clearly engaged in a dialogue without the usual special pleading.

The subject has been studied and trolled with increasing intensity for 20 years or so. Aslan does not have anything spectacularly new to say. But he has found a new  audience, and the great value of the work, for this reviewer anyway, is the placement of real-life Jesus in backwoods Nazareth (this makes the birth in a Bethlehem stable one of the many useful myths necessary for the arrival of a much-expected Messiah). The "windswept hamlet" in the "rough and tumble Galilaen countryside" was not even the kind of place where enough wood existed to train a carpenter. Crude structures of mud and brick required a different set of building skills. But here's the bigger and main story: It was a hearty walk from an imperial city in the making, Sepphoris, with polished-slab streets, luxurious public baths (made possible by aqueducts), two-story homes adorned with sexy mosaics and a Roman theater seating 4,500! Why didn't I hear about this in Sunday School? You might well ask.

So the boys in JC's family and their dad, too, until his early demise, came in town to work, answering the demand for labor. They were miserably exploited, of course, and if this doesn't sound like the source of many a peasant revolt supported by segments of a proto-working class, then modern - as well as ancient - history must be littered with sheer accidents. The district had seen continuous waves of mini-revolts and blood-curdling repression, messiahs, self-proclaimed now and then, martyred as soon as the Romans could get their hands on the victim. Sometimes the revolutionaries actually overwhelmed the guards of the royal armory and took the weapons, burning and/or robbing the homes of the wealthy and taking revenge on the Jewish theocratic aristocracy, cursed as collaborators with Rome. For those outrages in 4 BC, the Romans burned the captured city to the ground, murdering the men and selling off the women and children as slaves. Actually, it was the rebuilding of Sepphoris that brought the Jesus family to work, and if young J (not yet JC) didn't live through or take part in the revolt, he doubtless heard plenty about it.

The details of Roman rulers, some bad, others worse, take up a lot of space in Zealot. The siege around the Jewish fortress-city Masada, not far from Jerusalem, is of particular note because Emperor Vespasian determined to put an end to Jewish rebelliousness once and for all. The population was starved by a blockade, and then the Romans put something like an ancient A-Bomb (actually, a huge battering ram to break down the walls) into practice. Everyone still alive inside was murdered with the exception of the failed (and captured) Messiah, dragged off to Rome. All the religious documents and treasures were burned or carried away, offering proof that the Jews' very god had been destroyed by the more powerful Roman gods. The stage had thus been set for something yet more dramatic.

Another of the charms of Aslan's book is the sidelight upon the popular culture of the cities in what we can now call New Testament Days. Throughout the Jewish settlement, the ancient version of snake-oil salesmen worked the crowds, frequently performing sleights-of-hand in the manner of damaged limbs suddenly working again, the blind made to see, and very occasionally (because it must have seemed so awfully suspicious), the dead brought back to life. This was real street-fare entertainment, familiar to modern life until the radio and films gave urban visitors, shoppers and idlers something to do. Back in 1910, socialist and wobbly soap-boxers attracted crowds with rhetoric (and competed with hucksters), mixing curses and jokes, not so far from the more political-minded public orators of Jesus' day.

Why be surprised that Jesus ranged and rambled from the time he found his first disciples among fisherman at Galilee through his entrance to the holy city on a donkey, to his capture, persecution and crucifixion? Aslan tells us that the "outlaws" of the day were just as likely to be political revolutionaries, and so many were crucified that some Roman authorities sent to clean up the empire's dirty work became appalled at the omnipresence of the barbaric practice. Without Jesus coming back to life, there would be no Christianity. But up to that point, his life could be merged fairly easily with those of other leading rebels.

The very title of Zealot is an homage to the strength of the existing Jewish tradition, also to an unrelated (but how could anything be unrelated?) band of zealots who rose up and were drowned in their own blood. Jesus was a rabbi-of-sorts, a challenger of the official priesthood, whose doings in the temple were worse than the practices of the money-changers. He saw everything that he did and hoped to do in that light. Jesus' extended family might have run the whole religion from Nazareth and surrounding regions, as they seemed to manage at first, but Paul, happily for himself banished to Rome, pulled the most astounding trick in world-religious history. Persuading enough upper and lower classes to follow the new faith, he set things up for the empire to swallow up Christianity. In the process, Jesus became "Christ" or "the Christ," a Romansh sort of god-designation unfamiliar to the Jews. If this is not quite fair, and Paul actually had in mind a subtler spiritual attack on empire, it seems to have been lost on his disciples, who made their deal with Rome, while actually penning most of what passes as his chunk of the Bible.

We are, in a sense, back to C. Osborne Ward and the Ancient Lowly, after all. What began as rebellion finally became an ideology of non materialism, life after death (the critics have been calling it a Death Cult ever since, making a good argument about the practice of it by the powerful) and so on. That it could not remain such a gospel is a testament to the usefulness of the texts and traditions in so many other times and places. The omnipresence of theology students at so many urban settings of Occupy (also, Wisconsin's own uprising against Governor Scott Walker, our Herod) should tell us something if we are listening carefully.

6 People Who Were Literally Erased From History

KCNA via BBC

Jang Song-thaek disappears in the photo on the right

After news of the execution of Jang Song-thaek, Kim Jong-un's uncle and close advisor, broke in December, North Korean state media has been erasing the man from history entirely, deleting him from online archives and photographs.

This extreme measure makes it "the largest deletion ever carried out by the official KCNA news agency and the Rodong Sinmun newspaper," according to the Guardian.

But it wouldn't be the first time a political leader has attempted to wipe a person clean out of history — here are five other people who were erased from existence:

Nikolai Yezhov, Joseph Stalin's head of secret police

YouTube/ITN

Stalin (center) with Nikolai Yezhov to his left. After Yezhov's execution, he was airbrushed out of the photo.

Yezhov earned the nickname "The Vanishing Commissar" among art historians for his disappearance from photographs after his execution in 1940.

Yezhov, a loyal Stalinist, was head of the secret police during Stalin's Great Purge, overseeing mass arrests and executions of those deemed disloyal to the Soviet regime before ironically being arrested, tortured, tried, and executed himself for disloyalty.

Stalin was known for eliminating all traces of those who fell out of his good side, or whom he no longer had use for, Yezhov included.

Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler's propaganda minister

YouTube/ITN

Goebbels (second from right) appears with Adolf Hitler and others at the home of film maker Leni Riefenstahl in 1937. In later images, he is missing.

Goebbels was immensely valued by Hitler for his enthusiasm, brilliant ideas, and vehement anti-semitism. Hitler made Goebbels his chief of propaganda, and sent him all over Germany to establish a Nazi presence and boost morale during the war. Goebbels was one of just a few people in Hitler's inner-circle, even trusted with helping burn Hitler's body after he committed suicide.

Like Stalin, Hitler was known for "erasing" people who fell out of his favor, though it remains unknown what Goebbels did that led to his being deleted from this famous 1937 photo taken at the home of German film maker Leni Riefenstahl.

Leon Trotsky, Russian revolutionary

Wikimedia Commons

Formerly close comrades, Trotsky appears in the image on the left at one of Lenin's speeches; the same image, altered after the two split, shows Trotsky deleted.

An influential voice in the early days of the Soviet Union, Trotsky was initially a leader in the Bolshevik revolution, but references to Trotsky were eliminated after he switched his allegiance to the Mensheviks, splitting from comrade and fellow revolutionary Vladimir Lenin.

Lenin later denounced Trotsky as a "scoundrel" in 1917 (though Trotsky eventually rejoined the Bolsheviks), and after Lenin's death Trotsky was eliminated from photos by Stalin. Trotsky was eventually exiled from the Soviet Union completely.

Bo Gu, senior leader of the Chinese Communist Party

Flickr/Kim Scarborough

Bo Gu, far left, appears in the photo with Mao Zedong and comrades; in the later photo, he is missing.

Qin Bangxian, better known as Bo Gu, was the "person with overall responsibility of the CCP," and so had tremendous responsibility under leader Mao Zedong.

However, as a result of some miscommunication on tactical military defense at the Zunyi Conference during the Long March, Bo Gu was criticized for "serious partial political mistakes" and replaced in command by Zhang Wentian in 1935.

The exact miscommunication differs in most historical accounts, but it could be what led to Bo Gu's fallout with Mao Zedong, and therefore could have been the reason for his elimination from this photo.

Grigoriy Nelyubov, Soviet cosmonaut

YouTube/Christiaan008

A founding member of the "Sochi Six," Nelyubov is eliminated in the later photograph.

Hand-picked for the first cosmonaut detachment in 1960, Nelyubov was a star choice for space flight for being "a remarkable person, an excellent pilot, a sportsman..."

A founding member of the top space team known as the Sochi Six, Nelyubov was likely the third or fourth person in space (though some say the first) before being expelled from the Soviet space program for alcohol-related misconduct, leading to his being removed from program records.

Nelyubov was ultimately struck by a train and killed; his death was ruled a suicide.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/people-who-were-erased-from-history-2013-12#ixzz2sUqZ0Djp

Irena Sendler: The Woman That Did Not Stand By

Experience teaches that you can't expect to achieve much without becoming active for your cause. It's always possible to expect the "other guy" to do something but when we're prepared to take on the responsibility of going out into the trenches and getting involved, we can expect to see results.

One episode that brings that lesson home involves the recent identification of a Righteous Gentile who had been all but forgotten by her own country as well as by the Jewish community. She lived in anonymity until a group of non-Jewish schoolgirls tenaciously researched her story and brought it to light.

In 1999, for a school assignment, four Uniontown Kansas high school students decided to Life in a Jar, which was turned into a website, a book and a performance which continues to inspire audiences and readers throughout the world. It also led the establishment of the Lowell Milken Center that promotes projects about other unknown heroes.

investigate the story of Irena Sendler. According to a rumor that the girls had heard, Sendler saved over 2500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto. The girls were able to shed light on the story and ensure that Sendler, who was still alive at the time, would be properly honored. The girls' research turned into a project, called

Irena Sendler was a young Polish social worker when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. She joined the Zagota underground resistance group and assisted numerous Jews who were fleeing the Germans by providing them with false papers and hiding places. Due to her position as an employee of the Warsaw Social Services she was able to obtain a travel pass that allowed her to pass into the Warsaw ghetto where almost half a million Jews were trapped without sufficient food or other necessities.

Sendler envisioned her job as one of smuggling food and medicines into the ghetto but she quickly realized that this was only a drop in the bucket, compared to the needs of the desperate people. Together with her Zagota comrades she devised a plan that would enable her to smuggle children out of the ghetto -- sedating the youngest children and hiding them under garbage on garbage carts, inside toolboxes and luggage and under tram seats and guiding older children out through underground tunnels and through sewers.

At the beginning she brought out street children but as time went by she began to go door to door to try and convince parents to allow her to smuggle their children out of the ghetto. These meetings were traumatic, both for Sendler, who was taking responsibility for someone else's children, and for the parents who were forced to decide whether their children would have a better chance at life if they were taken out of the ghetto without their families.

When the Kansas schoolgirls started their project in 1999 Sendler was still alive and during interviews she described how difficult her mission had been. "I talked the parents out of their children" she remembered. “Those scenes over whether to give a child away were heart-rending. Sometimes, they wouldn’t give me the child. Their first question was, ‘What guarantee is there that the child will live?’ I said, ‘None. I don’t even know if I will get out of the ghetto alive today.”

Following each child's removal from the ghetto the Zagota members would work feverishly to find a place where the child could be hidden. Some children were hidden in convents or orphanages while others were secured with sympathetic Polish families. In many of the cases the children needed false documents and Zagota supplied these papers.

Sendler recorded the names and hiding places of each child on a strip of tissue paper. She placed these pieces of paper in glass jars and buried the jars in her garden, hoping that, after the war, the children could be reunited with family members.

In October 1943, shortly after the Nazis liquidated the ghetto, the Germans arrested Sendler. They brought her to the Piawiak prison and tortured her but Sendler didn't reveal any information about the children, their whereabouts or her Zagota comrades. The Germans sentenced Sendler to death but Zagota was able to bribe a German guard and secure her release. Sendler lived out the remainder of the war in hiding.

What J.K. Rowling’s Ron And Hermione Bombshell Tells Us About True Love And ‘Harry Potter’

"What J.K. Rowling’s Ron And Hermione Bombshell Tells Us About True Love And ‘Harry Potter’"

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CREDIT: WARNER BROTHERS

It’s frustrating, but probably inevitable in this age of voracious fandom, to see authors attempts to tweak, or litigate, or modify their work via interview long after the pages have gone to the printers and the work has wandered out into the world to be read and loved. I, too, have been guilty of enjoying these revelations, though they often raise as many questions as they answer. Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling’s declaration that of course Albus Dumbledore is gay is very nice in retrospect, but I wish she’d had the courage to make her subtext text in the darn novels, given that no one would have said her nay, and it would have made Dumbledore one of the most high-profile gay heroes in the whole canon of fantasy literature. And now Rowling’s done it again: in a leaked interview with Wonderland, she apparently declares that she got one of the central romantic relationships of her series wrong.

“I wrote the Hermione/Ron relationship as a form of wish fulfillment,” she reportedly says. “That’s how it was conceived, really. For reasons that have very little to do with literature and far more to do with me clinging to the plot as I first imagined it, Hermione ended up with Ron.”

Cue the tsuris.

I don’t particularly have an OTP in this fight, though it is interesting to me that Rowling apparently regrets what I see as some of the most sensitively written and emotionally well-realized passages in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows as an error of judgement. Rather, I’m struck by the whole debate in relationship to an idea that occurred to me as I was rereading Rowling’s series the weekend before Christmas*. For a series of young adult novels, the most childish idea in the series is that everyone ends up with their first love, or ends up alone.

In the former camp fall both Harry’s birth parents, Lily and James, and his surrogate parents, Arthur and Molly Weasley. Rowling doesn’t spend much time on Harry’s aunt and uncle, Vernon and Petunia Dursley, but they’re introduced to us as utterly complimentary, and in filling in Petunia’s backstory, Rowling never tells us of any other romance.

The couples who get together once Harry is old enough to be aware of them follow a similar pattern, and Rowling is careful to delineate their prior relationships as crushes distinct from the flowerings of mature love that will become permanent. Bill Weasley is attractive to many witches but attached to none prior to his romance with Fleur Delacour, who eventually becomes his wife. Hermione Granger may attend the Yule Ball with Viktor Krum, but they settle into a friendship and correspondence that’s more placid than sensual. Ron Weasley’s relationship with Lavender Brown is effectively an act of social positioning and a way to take a dig at Hermione rather than a genuine attraction. And however long Harry yearns for Cho Chang, his crush on her begins to wane almost as soon as they actually attempt a date: he can’t connect or relate to her inner person, finding her grief for her ex-boyfriend confounding, and their fleeting physical intimacies seem wan in contrast to the passion Harry eventually feels for Ginny Weasley. Ginny, of course, dates a string of other boys at Hogwarts, but these other relationships don’t affect the pure flame of Ginny’s youthful love for Harry, housed in a separate place in her heart and in the novel’s hierarchy of relationships.

Parental love and the love required to sacrifice for someone else are deeply entwined in Rowling’s magical schema. But first romantic loves seem, at times, to exert a similar potent authority over witches and wizards. We learn that true love can reshape a wizard or witch’s patronus when Tonks’ love for Remus Lupin transforms her magical protector into a wolf. Later, the revelation that Severus Snape’s patronus had retained its shape as a reflection of his enduring love for Lily Potter provided one of the tenderest moments in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. And while not all loves go requited, the fact of loving someone sometimes seems like it is a spell in and of itself. Lupin’s behavior in the early months of his marriage to Tonks is less that of a man bewitched into love than a man compelled to give Tonks what she wants (though in keeping with Rowling’s veneration of parenthood, becoming a father restores him to happiness).

And when love’s requirements fail to enlist the object of a witch or wizard’s affection, it’s a force that still compels them–as far as we know, for the rest of their lives. Albus Dumbledore’s affections for Gellert Grindlewald, which Rowling later revealed to be romantic rather than merely friendly or collegial, appear to have been the only such attachment of his adulthood. Rather than falling in love again, Dumbledore appears to have chosen a celibate adulthood dedicated to preserving the integrity of Hogwarts and to advocating for his vision of relations between the wizarding and Muggle worlds. Similarly, Severus Snape, who commits terrible acts in the hope that Lily Potter will eventually love him again, spends the rest of his life after her death doing penance for his role in her murder.

There’s no question that some people do meet the loves of their lives as teenagers. But not everyone does. And Rowling’s refusal to acknowledge that has the effect of freezing a part of all of her characters in their adolescent years, at a moment when their emotions are most intense and their perspective on love is most exalted. That’s a mode of dealing with the world that’s in keeping with epic fantasy, with its absolutist approach to political conflicts. But it also means that there’s something flat at the heart of many of Rowling’s characters, an area in their lives that’s somehow immune from the kind of grand complexities that defines their approach to magic, to technology, to racialized politics, and even to their friendships. Maybe it’s meant to be an act of mercy, a place in the characters’ lives where something is simply a source of joy. But it’s a way of telling love stories that to me, does a small disservice to the characters that Rowling created, who can be selfish, temperamental, close-minded, hysterical, hypocritical, and beautifully silly.

And I suppose that’s why I’ve always liked the idea of Ron and Hermione together: because it didn’t feel inevitable, and because however right they eventually seemed together, I could see the potential for conflicts, the work that was to come. Ron and Hermione don’t even likeeach other when they meet. They squabble about rule-breaking, and later about Hermione’s cat’s apparent predations on Ron’s pet rat Scabbers (who, to be fair, turns out to be a fugitive dark wizard in disguise). At various points in the series, Ron and Hermione patently jealous of each other’s light romances, and handle that jealousy badly.

So one of the reasons Ron and Hermione’s attraction to each other feels durable and real is that we can see how it grows over the course of the series, and how the characters overcome an initial antipathy. Hermione, who enters the stage as a rule-obsessed busy-body, and who becomes rigid in her definitions of justice and fairness in the matters of Crookshanks and Scabbers, comes to learn that there are higher ideals than the regulations governing the conduct of the Hogwarts’ student body, and more important achievements than being the first to answer any given professor’s question. She also develops an actual sense of fun over the course of the series thanks to her affiliations with Harry and Ron, which makes Hermione a vastly more appealing person than the anxious, newly-minted witch we meet at the beginning of the story.

Ron, by contrast, comes to understand that self-gratification and rebellion for rebellion’s sake are not particularly meaningful ends towards which to orient one’s life. Some of these changes are due to the internal dynamics of his own family: Percy’s self-righteousness fractures the Weasleys’ strong sense of loyalty to each other, while Fred and George come to employ their talents for mischief in the causes of Hogwarts’ integrity and the fight against Voldemort. But they’re also due to Hermione’s influence. Ron comes to admire her academic gifts and her intellectual curiosity, and ultimately to share her concerns, working on issues like the appeal to save the life of a hippogriff. It’s no mistake–and entirely in keeping with the series’ idea that political convictions and political work forge remarkably powerful connections between the people who share them–that Ron and Hermione first kiss when Ron, who initially dismissed Hermione’s concerns for the welfare and labor rights of Hogwarts’ house elves, frets about their fate during the Battle of Hogwarts. For both characters, their investment in each other leads them to overcome some of their clearest weaknesses and flaws of character.

And most of all, I’m puzzled by Rowling’s assertion when it seems so clear in her novels that Ron and Hermione share a formative experience that not even Harry can be admitted to: the act of being Harry Potter’s best friends and closest confederates in his fight against Voldemort.

Ron’s anxieties and senses of inadequacy in this regard are the inspiration for some of Rowling’s best writing across the series. Not all of these fears stem from being the rather more ordinary best friend to someone who is Chosen. Ron is ashamed of his family’s financial limitations, which leave him with broken wands, hand-me-down pets, and ragged dress robes, all of which stand up poorly to Harry’s magical tools, his beloved Hedwig, and his sleek party outfit. The moment in Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire when Ron discovers that the gold he used to pay Harry back for the Omniculars Harry purchased for him as a treat at the Quidditch World Cup vanished, and that Harry didn’t notice because he has so much money, is one of the sharpest depictions of the awkwardness of financial inequality in a friendship that I can remember. Their gap in Quidditch skills is another area of friction. And the scene in Deathly Hallows in which Ron, having made tremendous efforts to return to the friends he abandoned, confronts his terror that Harry is more desirable than Ron in every area, whether as a son to Mrs. Weasley or a potential lover to Hermione, is a beautiful illustration of how difficult it is to love someone who constantly eclipses you.

Hermione is less obviously jealous of Harry than Ron is, both because her skills are so evident, and because her goals are so different from Harry’s. But a consistent theme in the novels is the ways in which Hermione’s interests are pushed aside in favor of Harry’s quests, and her priorities are subordinated to their collective mission. Hermione and Ron do much of the research to help Hagrid try to save Buckbeak, while Harry is preoccupied with other concerns. Harry and Ron reluctantly participate in a marginal way in the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare, but Hermione has the sole burden of taking the organization and the cause seriously, persisting even when her friends essentially abandon her work out of embarrassment. And when the trio drop out of Hogwarts to find and destroy Voldemort’s Horcruxes, Rowling doesn’t quite acknowledge the particular sacrifice that Hermione, who loves school, is making in comparison to her less academically-inclined friends. But Hermione does put aside the dream of Hogwarts for her friends, and most specifically, for Harry’s mission. It’s no less significant an act for Rowling’s disinclination to dwell on it. And while the novels may not linger on any frustrations or anxieties Hermione feels, there is something touching about the fact that the greatest witch of her age may have her brilliance reduced to a footnote in her friend’s story.

And to me, this is why it’s so sad that Rowling appears to be treating Ron and Hermione’s relationship as a kind of fan service that she was too weak to resist. Love isn’t always immediate, and it doesn’t always come from a place of strength. Sometimes love is strongest between people who have seen each other at their ugliest and most damaged. Lily Evans knew who James Potter was before he decided that he wanted to be a better person, knew him during the time when his callousness and carelessness did real damage. Fleur Delacour knew that her husband’s greatest beauty wasn’t in his unmarked face, but in his person, just as hers wasn’t her physical perfection, but her persistence. Ron knew Hermione when she was a priggish scold and a coward. Hermione knew Ron when his privilege was exposed and his will broke. That they love each other anyway, and that they help each other become heroes, is a truer illustration of the power of love than the idea that it’s magic.

*I have many posts I want to write inspired by this project. Work travel, and the entertainment news cycle, which has been particularly weighty and heartbreaking recently, have intervened. But the posts are not dead, I promise.

Hillary Clinton Run Hiliary Run

Hillary Clinton Is The Biggest Democratic Presidential Nomination Frontrunner Ever

Win McNamee / Getty

Hillary Clinton is the biggest frontrunner ever for the Democratic presidential nomination.

That's according to a new Washington Post/ABC News poll, which finds former Secretary of State Clinton with a 73-12 lead over Vice President Joe Biden in a hypothetical 2016 Democratic primary race. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) gets 8% of the vote. 

As the WaPo points out, Clinton's 61-point lead is nearly three times as large as it was in 2006, when the conventional wisdom held that she would be the 2008 Democratic nominee. In 2006, she took 39% of the theoretical vote, compared to then-Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and John Edwards (D-N.C.). But this time, her support is well over 50%.

The next-largest lead for a Democratic candidate over his theoretical primary foes was then-Vice President Al Gore's 37-point advantage in March 1999.

Clinton hasn't yet made a decision on whether she'll enter the race, but almost everyone in the world of politics expects her to run. She has said that she will make a decision this year.

According to the new poll, 58% of registered voters have a favorable view of Clinton, compared to 38% who view her unfavorably. That includes a 52-41 favorable-to-unfavorable split among political independents.

The Republican primary field is much more crowded. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the 2012 Republican vice presidential nominee, leads the field with 20% of the vote among leaned Republicans. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (18%), New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (13%), and Sen. Ted Cruz (12%) are next in line.