While Judith Miller has shown she's on board with breaking the Harry Potter embargo, one other saucy brunette is piping up to say she's not down.

It's Rachel Sklar, shrine to all that is good in media, and she's giving the New York Times (and not the Baltimore Sun because, well, they're the Baltimore Sun) flack for snagging an illicitly purchased copy of the book and – egads! – reviewing it.

And spilling plot lines!

But just because you can does not mean you should — even in the news biz, where information wants to be free and everybody wants to be the one who printed it first. Is the Harry Potter plot and ending, which ostensibly no one knows about (shut UP, Bitorrent, I'm ignoring you!), legitimately news? Of course it is — and the NYT books section, which oughta be an authority on Harry by now, could well have written about the phenomenon of embargo-busting and Harry-spoiling (as it wrote about Scholastic going apoplectic at the idiots over at DeepDiscount.com). But was it necessary to write a review? With who knows what spoilers? That's not rhetorical; I don't know what spoilers because there WAS NO SPOILER WARNING EITHER WAY. So I didn't read it (though in scrolling to the end to see if there was a "with" involved — a sure tip-off to the identity of the book-buyer — I did see the words "Ginny Weasley" and my heart flared with fear, and hope, because Ginny Weasley is AWESOME). But honestly, embargoes are in place for a reason, and entreaties from the author (or the Crying Game director, for that matter) are there specifically for the benefit of the public — the very same public the NYT is purporting to serve with their rushed-to-print review (that's the other thing: How fast did Kakutani have to read — and write — in order to dash that thing off? It's sort of, you know, a long book).

Actually, we're quite proud of the Times. Were they to have gone Sklar's preferred route – reporting on the embargoing and the leaked copy, instead of actually breaking the embargo – we would've had fodder for yet another "NYT gets in on the scandal by merely reporting the scandal," much they way the Grey Lady executes its celebrity coverage. But this time around, the Times treated us to both options. Bravo.