#wizzard

#wizzard

Last year changed the way many of us thought about software. It certainly changed the way I did. I spent much of 2025 building, probing, and questioning how to build software, and in many more ways what I want to do.

I wish this was a one-off blip in my regimented friendship schedule, but all through 2025 I played the world's slowest game of message tennis. I'd invite a pal for dinner, only for the world to turn, the seasons pass, grey hairs gather at my temples, before a date was finally locked in. This sentiment seems to be common among my circle.

A book about witches casts a spell, and arguments about whether blue-green algae should be called blue-green bacteria, in this week's pick from the Nature archive.

A steam train featuring in the upcoming Harry Potter television series is scheduled to visit the Epping Ongar Railway this spring, including the Easter weekend. The nearly 80-year old steam locomotive 6989 'Wightwick Hall' will star as the Hogwarts Express in the TV series. Repainted into red livery for its television role, the locomotive is expected to operate steam-hauled services along the Epping Ongar Railway throughout April.

Draco Malfoy, one of Harry Potter's most recognisable villains, has become an unlikely lunar new year icon across China, as fans embrace the character for the year of the horse. In Mandarin, Malfoy's name is transliterated as ma er fu. The first character means horse while the final character, fu, means fortune or blessing a powerful symbol found across lunar new year celebrations. Put together, Malfoy's name can be loosely read as horse fortune, making him an unexpectedly auspicious figure for the year ahead.

Abū Nuwās's poetry is sheer joy: it never fails to delight, surprise, and excite. His diwan, his collected poems, encompasses the principal early Abbasid poetic genres: panegyrics ( madīḥ), renunciant poems ( zuhdiyyāt), lampoons ( hijāʾ), hunting poems ( ṭardiyyāt), wine poems ( khamriyyāt), love poems ( ghazaliyyāt) to males ( mudhakkarāt) and females ( muʾannathāt), and transgressive verse ( mujūn).

In this book of moons, I am writing for people for whom the medieval world and its literatures and arts may be unfamiliar. I hope that in telling the stories of medieval moons, I also introduce these readers to the wonderful, mesmerising realm of medieval texts and images. But I also hope that this book may be useful to those with greater familiarity with medieval languages, literatures, and arts.

While working on a graduate school paper on the mystical powers of coral, gemologist Anna Rasche ventured deep into the archives of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum's library. Coral is the most powerful material to ward off the evil eye-a belief Italians have held since ancient times. Romans often gifted newborns coral amulets to prevent sickness and bad luck.

Since opening on Broadway, Harry Potter and the Cursed Childthe stage sequel that extends J.K. Rowling's wizarding saga decades beyond the original books and films, with Harry, Ron, Hermione and Draco now middle-aged parentshas been a moving target: artistically ambitious, commercially resilient, and constantly evolving in response to a changing theater economy. But nothing in the show's long trajectory compares to what happened when Tom Felton joined the cast this season to reprise Draco Malfoy, the role he played across eight blockbuster Harry Potter films.

As a series-length adaptation of Rowling's first novel, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, the first season of the Harry Potter series will have a much larger canvas on which to tell its story. That means the reboot will contain some new additions - and according to Lox Pratt, who plays Potter's arch-rival, Draco Malfoy, in the series, those additions include more backstory for one of the most loathed characters in the Wizarding World.