Newsbriefs, 7/20: All The News That's Only Maybe Tangentially Related To Harry Potter That's Fit To Print

• Rumor of the Day: We won't know for a few hours if Harry dies, but Mickey Kaus is hearing whispers that the demise of TimesSelect could be imminent. Mark this day on the calendar as the first time ever we read a Kaus item and said, "Oh, please let it be true!"
• Potentially more bad news for Scholastic. Utah Valley State College prof Ron Hammond is going textbook-free. Why? The expense: "I think it's immoral because of the cost of it." If every professor followed Hammond's lead, the savings per student would be $900 a year.
• The Shrinking World of TV critics. Gail Shister says: "It's mind-boggling. In my experience, readers have a virtually insatiable appetite for any news about television. If there's one beat that's sacrosanct, it should be TV."
• No Sense or Sensibility. Jane Austen Festival director David Lassman sent "opening chapters and plot synopses" of Austen novels off to eighteen of Britains biggest publishers and gets a ream of rejection letters. Only one publisher saw through the ruse.
• Well, We Did Our Best. USA Today's Al Neuharth calls the Murdoch/Dow Jones tete-a-tete a "three-month-long farce." Funny, we don't see too many people laughing.
• OOH, SNAP! Charles Pierce offers his take on The Politico: "a brand-new-political fanzine that combines the biting wit of a high school slam book with the nuanced policy analysis of Tiger Beat."