Sublime

Nineteen twenty-three was one of Broadway’s brightest years. John Barrymore played Hamlet just a few blocks away from where his sister Ethel was appearing in Romeo and Juliet. Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine and Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author also opened. Most critics cited Galsworthy’s Loyalties as the best play of the season.

In her 2014 book Blockbusters, Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse showed how mega hits have become more important across the whole entertainment industry. “Smart executives bet heavily on a few likely winners. That’s where the big payoffs come from,” she writes.

Harry Potter, in other words, isn’t just a story we enjoy reading. Rather, it’s had a measurable impact on a whole generation’s moral universe. In an age when fewer and fewer people read the Bible, the media properties of fan culture are the closest thing the Remixed have to sacred texts.