When I was a kid, I used to add "magic wand" to my birthday wish list every year. (I would have settled for a charmed amulet or even a mildly enchanted paperclip.) I routinely checked the back of my closet for the entrance to Narnia. And I was always on the look-out for a stray dragon's egg in the woods behind my house that would hatch a friendly, telepathic, teleporting dragon, because they were oh-so-common in central Massachusetts.

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A group of 12 comfort dogs from Chicago were flown out to Florida to help provide comfort to survivors of the horrific events that took place in Orlando on Sunday.

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We now know we don't have to restrict our magical education to simply Hogwarts--there are several more wizarding schools we could travel to in order to become the witch or wizard we've always wanted to be (including one in the States!). Recently on Pottermore, Rowling released several short writings about the wizarding schools around the world (which you can read for yourself up on the site now).

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Stop what you're doing. You just need to sit here and listen for a bit. What we've got here is Will Smith's greatest hits all played at once.

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Mara Wilson brought up Matilda's total Hogwarts-worthy witch-ness, something that's floated around Reddit and Twitter for years, and gave us a look at Matilda's time at our favorite wizarding school.

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Today in "dreams coming true," the Warner Bros. Studio Tour, which takes Harry Potter fans through the stages and backlots used to make the films, has announced it will be hosting a Christmas dinner this year in Hogwarts' Great Hall.

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J.K. Rowling, ever the day-brightener, tweeted a request for her followers to wish James S Potter the best of luck as he embarks on his first day of school at Hogwarts. Of course, she'd do it herself, but she's in Edinburgh at the moment, and as we all know, that's nowhere near King's Cross' Platform 9 3/4.

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Timelike, an online film, is doing its best to bring found footage back to the fore.

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It's not unusual to see Alfonso Ribeiro and Justin Timberlake bust out The Carlton Dance.

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Internet artist Darius Kazemi, aka @tinysubversions, is the wizard behind the newest Twitter novelty account: The Sorting Hat Bot. The premise is simple. You follow the bot, and you get sorted into a Hogwarts house, complete with a clever, pithy (although sometimes nonsensical) rhyme.

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Redditor Katie's family has forgotten her birthday in the past, so when Katie turned 28 last Tuesday, her best friend made up for less-than-magical celebrations from previous years by transfiguring Katie's home into the world of Harry Potter.

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The Mary Sue has been covering a lot of feel-good Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling news recently, and I was starting to wonder if maybe the series was formative on so many of our readers and editorial team simply because we can remember a time before Harry.

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Lots of people have found hope in the pages of J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, but when you hear 15-year-old Cassidy Stay's story, it's hard not to see how her's parallels the tragic hero. Stay was the sole survivor of a terrible shooting which left her entire family dead, but when she spoke at the memorial service, she quoted Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore: "Happiness can be found even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light."

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A few weeks ago, the Syfy network announced their plans to adapt Lev Grossman's fantasy trilogy, The Magicians, into an hourlong drama series. The small handful of blogs and online news outlets who covered the story labelled the project "Harry Potter for adults," or else slapped it with a somewhat derisive-sounding "Young Adult fantasy" label. On the surface, it's easy to see how people can mistake The Magicians for any number of other "young people discovering they're mystically special" narrative, but it's a description that is, nevertheless, inaccurate. Now I'm not crazy. I know a story about a group of young adults who attend a magic school and then go traipsing around an alternate universe which can be accessed via an interstitial forest sounds a lot like "Harry Potter/Narnia for adults." But what that description betrays is a failure to understand that Grossman's series isn't a rip-off of either story, but is instead something newer and stranger than that. 

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Hey, remember that Loki/Thor cuddle blanket? Here's another thing kinda like that. For sale by IdentityProductions on Etsy. (via Creepbay)

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Do you miss school so much that you'd start taking totally fake classes in made-up magical subjects? God, you're such an effin' Ravenclaw. Also, put down the grad school applications for a second. We've got something better for you: namely, a website called Hogwarts is Here.

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England, I've got a bone to pick with you. As a college student I studied abroad in London for a whole four months and nothing exciting happened at all. Since I left, though, you guys got the Doctor Who Experience, a royal wedding, David Tennant and Catherine Tate doing Shakespeare together, and now a Harry Potter Warner Brothers Studio Tour! Not fair, England! Well, at least now I'll be able to live through the eyes of other tourists vicariously using street view images of the Diagon Alley set that Google Maps just released recently. You guys don't know how good you have it.

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