Jane Haddam

I suppose it was inevitable, but yesterday I got to the point in Barber’s book where he talks about writers and writing and selling books, and it said exactly what I should have expected it to say. I suppose that is not exactly fair to Barber.  He said what almost everybody says these days no…

If I really wanted to kvetch, I could go on and on about the tech situation where I teach–we’ve lost two classes to downed computers, and no matter how many times they tell us they’re going to fix them, they don’t. But let me get to Benjamin Barber, because he finally got to the point…

It’s some ridiculous hour on Sunday morning, and I have Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier playing behind my head and tea right here next to me, but I’ve had so little sleep that I’m annoyed, and the chocolate–did I mention that the chocolate came?–well, I’m old enough so that I can’t eat that for breakfast. Although…

It’s Friday, and there’s something I need to admit up front. This close to the end of the term, I’m a sucker for arguments about how the population of the United States is becoming infantilized. For what it’s worth, I also happen to think it’s largely true.  And that means that I’m a good target…

I meant to go on to Benjamin Barber’s Consumed today, but I overslept, and I’m still wandering around with tea at ten o’clock in the morning. Okay, I didn’t quite oversleep.  Rather, I got up at one, couldn’t get back to sleep, finally did get back to sleep around four, got woken by the alarm…

So, here’s the thing, I should be clearer about what I mean by “stupid,” and what I mean by “genius.”  I’m not, in either case, talking about actual IQ. To get back to the books I noted yesterday, the “stupid” involved in sometimes the craziness of runaway conspiracy theories, or “alternative” medicine, or that kind…

Okay, now to the books I’m reading, which are a little confusing here, because there are three of them.  I’ve noted before that I tend to get sent things, and one of the things I always get sent are the latest volumes on how bone-headedly stupid the average American really is.  This has given me…

Iwas thinking that I probably sounded, yesterday, as if I spent my time reading political magazines for their comments about pron, so I thought I’d redeem myself today. This month’s Free Inquiry has an article by John Dewey–that is, by Dewey himself, and not just about him–that he published in the 1930s, I think, for…

Okay–that was sort of bemusing.  I asked why I keep running into readers who tell me they don’t read first person, or prologues. I got a couple of rants about publishing companies.  So let me see if I can do it again. I used to buy a lot of magazines–actually, I used to subscribe to…

Okay, I’ve had virtually no sleep, which is doing just what you’d expect it to do to me.  I’m way too old for  this. But–something came up at the writer’s conference that I haven’t run into in a couple of years, and I still do not know what to make of it. There are a…