It’s easy to hate Harry Potter Adults here in 2026, when they’ve had nearly twenty years of opportunity to read another book since the last volume in the series was published. Joanne “Just Kidding” Rowling’s wizarding world is a mediocre and deeply derivative pile of corporate intellectual property that offers thin imaginative gruel even to the children it was meant for, let alone a whole-ass grown-up who could be reading literally anything else. And of course every penny of profit made by the Harry Potter Industrial Complex goes directly into the coffers of the most malignant force in modern culture: Rowling’s campaign against the existence of transgender people. So, as I said, it may be easy to hate Harry Potter Adults here in 2026 but it’s also morally correct. Which is probably why neither Andy Gourlay and Paul Pigott at the BBC nor Helena Horton at the Guardian nor Claire Moses at the New York Times checked very carefully when they reported that, as the Guardian’s headline put it: “Harry Potter fans force relocation of £430m undersea cable to avoid Dobby’s ‘grave’.”
According to infrastructure guy Simon Ludlam on a recent podcast, the U.K.’s Greenlink Interconnector was rerouted after “hundreds of calls, I mean, hundreds of calls” from Harry Potter Adults who were angry that the power cable would allegedly disturb the fictional location of the fictional grave of Dobby, the fictional formerly enslaved elf who was offhandedly freed by the fantasy series’ dimwitted but wealthy protagonist as a sort of prank on his private school enemy’s family, and who subsequently suffered both the social rejection of his still-enslaved fellow elves and the continued indifference bordering on contempt of his human idol, Harry Potter, before ultimately being killed while heroically rescuing Potter and several of his fellow human slave owners. In the book, Dobby’s death serves mainly to provide motivation to other characters and ultimately helps move the interminable series to its long foregone conclusion, which is that Harry Potter defeats his lower-class abused orphan antagonist and achieves his lifelong goal of becoming a magic cop. In the film version, Dobby’s death and burial take place on Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire, Wales, and people who refuse to read another book have heaped up painted rocks and other trash on the spot, despite being asked not to by the National Trust.
The Harry Potter Adults Memorial Trash Pile, on an otherwise pristine Welsh beach where no elf is buried. (photo via BBC)
It took a random Reddit poster in this week’s r/ukpolitics “weekly Rumours, Speculation, Questions, and Reaction megathread” to fact check a story that the British and American press and me and you and everyone we know deeply wanted to believe was true:
First of all, this happened years ago. The consultation was in 2018, the cable was laid starting in 2022, it was tested at the end of 2024, and it's been in use since the start of 2025.
The cable wasn't dug into the top of the beach, it was drilled horizontally underground (point 7 here). This has evidently been the case since at least October 2018, and from what I can tell the route under the beach did not change between then and October 2021 when it was finalised.
Today Dan Davies also wrote about the story which he initially viewed as a “chortle,” his term for the genre of planning anecdote where some picayune and ridiculous objection serves to delay Important Infrastructure Development by Serious People. “But as I say,” wrote Davies, “it’s actually something weirder…”
As far as I can tell, the company responsible for this cable did everything absolutely properly and professionally, and didn’t ever plan to do anything which would disturb the beach at all. There were reasonable concerns about the fact that it’s a beautiful beach and tourist asset which shouldn’t be messed around with, but these were all taken into account at a very early stage in the planning because they were so obvious. Harry Potter fans didn’t cause anything to be changed. The project got permission really quite quickly and has been in operation for a while now.
…The reason that this worries me is that this isn’t really what I’d call a “planning chortle”. It’s the creation of a chortle where there was no actual planning problem to exaggerate or mischaracterise. And I think this is potentially pointing to a real cultural problem in the infrastructure industry (and potentially the construction industry more widely) – the idea that public consultation is intrinsically frivolous and illegitimate, and that getting the permission of people affected by what you’re building is basically girly swot stuff that Real Men O’ Engineering shouldn’t have to be troubled by.
So to tally the final scores:
Harry Potter Adults: still the worst, and the only group involved here who are materially harming Freshwater West beach.
This green energy project: quite well planned and competently managed.
Infrastructure Guy on podcast: ok, you did choose the right group to pick on and you almost got away with it, but was any of this really necessary?
Dobby: Dead for the sake of J.K. Rowling’s society of wizard slavers.
Also Easy to Hate: Mark Zuckerberg, whose luxury yacht probably didn’t have any obligation to assist “a 21-foot skiff that ran out of fuel between Petersburg and Juneau” in Alaska last week, and who wasn’t even onboard at the time. There are far better reasons to hate Zuck, like the way his company’s pervert glasses enable creeps and harassers to film people without their knowledge or consent. Or the 6,500 word essay he posted yesterday about “superintelligence” and the exciting prospect that one day soon A.I. will be able to live all the good parts of your life for you. Even if you grant the wildly implausible claims his post makes about future A.I. capabilities, argued Liz Lopatto in The Verge:
Is the point of life merely to stockpile accomplishments? If that is what Silicon Valley believes, no wonder all the billionaires seem so unhappy all the time! They have traded experience for accomplishment, and cheated themselves out of their own lives in the process. They keep chasing more money and more power, because they think that will finally be enough — but as long as they do not experience things themselves, nothing will ever be enough…
If AI can do all the things we are promised it will do — hardly a given, but stick with me — then we are left with a question: What does using it accomplish? If you do not have to pay attention or do work to meet your goal, does your goal mean anything at all? In some ways, that throws us back to some of the oldest and most profound questions our species has encountered: What does it mean to live a good life? How do we love others? What does it mean to love ourselves?
Meanwhile, a journalist who can’t write turns to A.I. for help reading. Mark Twain roasted James Fenimore Cooper so hard he died a second time way back in 1895 and I’m supposed to think a chatbot saying "Cooper's sentences are long and his diction is archaic" is anything at all? Gtfoh.
And now a brief word from my other newsletter:
Obviously I survived my trip to Greenland. Thank you again for your patience and your support for me going off on an expedition with a 20% chance of killing me and a 20% chance of making me see or do horrors. I am working on my cryptic journal, but yesterday I posted, by way of a preview, a partial list of:
Things I Saw and Did in Greenland:
Saw a lot of bones. Seriously, there are bones everywhere. What’s a normal amount of bones for a place to have? I don’t know any more.
Ate reindeer, more reindeer, fresh baby musk ox, and lots of ramen, but very little whale.
Did not see (let alone have to shoot) any polar bears, much to everyone’s relief.
Which is not to say nothing got shot. So content warning for a little of that, I guess. Nothing got shot while I was present… wait, no that’s not strictly true either. You’ll just have to read about it.
Saw a lot of dogs, some pretty happy and some very unhappy.
Traveled 165 miles, much of it north of any human habitation, in a 19 foot outboard equipped with several harpoons, zero life jackets, a running diesel drip heater in its homebuilt forward cabin, and five 70 liter plastic gasoline tanks in the stern.
Did I mention the bones? There were really a lot of bones. What happens to all the bones here? On the other hand we have a lot of trees, and there are no trees in Greenland. No trees: lots of bones. Many trees: very few bones. Trees == tall bones??? More research is needed.
Kayaked about 37 miles, which was much less than I expected to.
Never saw a sunset—the sky was permanently stuck on “mid-afternoon.” I found myself in total darkness once, by accident, about halfway through the trip and I almost had a panic attack.
Pooped in a plastic bag enough times that it started to seem normal.
Saw probably half a million dovekies. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. That’s my genuine best guess at how many dovekies I saw.
Visited the thousand-plus year old longest known Dorset longhouse in Greenland.
Bones.
The whole story should start arriving in your inbox in September, if you subscribe to Today on Trail. If you don’t, it will start arriving in other people’s inboxes but not yours.
Two ruined cabins at New Etah, at the head of Foulke Fjord.
This has been Today in Tabs, a hemiweekly review of amusing and infuriating cultural ephemera which the New York Times once called “an enduring hit among media insiders” and on which the American Society of Magazine Editors very nearly bestowed a National Magazine Award. Posts are rarely paywalled but if you enjoyed this newsletter I encourage you to become a paid subscriber. If you didn’t enjoy this newsletter, I encourage you to wait and read some future ones, which may be more to your taste. Who can say? Thank you for reading this one, anyway.
