Jane Haddam

I wanted to get back to the idea that the only way to increase the sales of novels would be to increase the number of people who love to read, preferably by changing something we do in schools so that more people would develop a passion for it. And I still think this is wrongheaded–not…

I suppose I ought to start by saying that although an individual can make up his mind about what is moral or immoral on the basis of anything at all, I still maintain–and have maintained–that you can’t base a moral code on the Great Tradition. And studying the Great Tradition won’t make you more moral…

Sometimes I feel like I’m speaking German in a room full of people who only understand  Cantonese. First, I NEVER SAID that it was possible to bse morality on the Great  Tradition. Second, I NEVER SAID  that studying the Great Tradition could tell us how to be moral, or help us to be moral, or…

Towards the end of every term, after months of getting squishy essays about “my opinion” of right and wrong, I set a free writing exercise for my students on a famous German case. The case went as follows: A German man who had “always wanted” to cook and eat another human being placed an advertisement…

Carbonated is what I call what I feel like on days like today, when all my muscles seem to have bubbles in them and I find it hard to sit still and concentrate.  When this happens when I’m trying to work, work becomes impossible.  Today I got lucky, and work went fine.  I didn’t start…

Okay, before I start in on th is for real, I’d like to recommend this link http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i33/33b00601.htm which goes to an article at the Chronicle of Higher Education about the study of literature in schools and colleges.  In a way, it constitutes one possible answer to the first part of the e-mail from  Robert that…

Somewhere around the year 300 BC, the Greeks sent a diplomatic mission, headed by a man named Megasthenes, to the court of Chandragupta Maurya in India.  Everything we know about this mission is at secondhand.  Megasthenes wrote a book about his travels, but all manuscripts of it have been lost.  We know what he said…

Before I get really started here, I’d like to pint out  a few things. Phyiscs is a liberal arts subject. Chemistry is a liberal arts subject. Biology is a liberal arts subject. Mathematics is a liberal arts subject. The liberal arts come in three divisions:  natural sciences, social scienes, and humanities. I’m pretty sure that…

I talked about this thing I do a few months ago–the Literacy Quiz, one hundred items in multiple choice format just to see if my kids can understand their textbook.  All the items are referenced in their textbook by writers who simply assume they’ll know what the reference is about. Which brings me to an…

Robert wrote me a long e-mail about the state of publishing, and although I don’t want to reproduce the whole thing here, I do want to address some of the points, which happen to be points that keep coming up. First, as to the old saw that there are only about 200 people who write…