Jane Haddam

I wrote nearly an entire blog post earlier today, and then the computer crashed, and there I was, with everything wiped out. Maybe it was just as well, because that blog post was largely a reaction to Melanie Phillips’s article, and as with a lot of my reactions to things like that, it was pretty…

Yesterday, I was sitting on the love seat not doing much of anything when I came across a little true crime segment on a show called “Dateline on ID”–I presume it was a Dateline segment that the ID channel bought for its own use, or rented, or something. But what is important isn’t that.   And…

An addendum, actual post below. ACK.        Okay–I’m going to try t his one more time.         Mique say– <<<Sowell is not talking about smart people.         I KNOW THAT.        IT DOESN’T MATTER.        Sorry to shout, but I’ve got no idea why so many of you find this distinction so hard to understand.…

Every once in a while, something happens here that really takes me aback, and the responses to yesterday’s blog are the kind of thing that does it. Everybody who wrote in with a comment did the same thing–returned to the conception of the problem in Antigone as one of “good” vs “evil” and “right” vs…

Let me go back for a minute to Sophocles’s Antigone, a play about a sister who buries her brother when the King (her uncle) has forbidden that burial.  That sounds a little dry, put that way, but the play itself isn’t dry.  Over the years it has not only had many productions, but many modern…

Well, first things first. I’m not really talking or thinking or writing about all this stuff because I want to apply it to the contemporary world and construct some kind of universal moral code for all of us to follow. Sometimes I like to think and write about this stuff because I just do–I like…

Spring Break starts on Monday.  That means that, as of Saturday, I have an entire ten days when I do not have to get up at three thirty in the morning even once.  I must be getting old.  I used to do that all the time.  Now, if I don’t get the extra hour, I’m…

Okay, let me tell you how I got here. I did intend to go to an Agatha Christie after I finished the Sowell book, but I ran into a snag. Monday, I had to proctor two midterm exams.  That meant I had to sit in front of a classroom for more than a couple of…

Here’s the thing. When you write a murder mystery, or any kind of fiction, in any kind of medium, your characters have to have plausible motivations for the things they do. That’s a given, I’m sure, for any kind of writing.  Even the absurdist stuff from between the wars tended to give plausible motivations of…

Well, it’s about that time–midterms, I mean–for a little bitching, and so I’m going to bitch. I got a paper this week than included the sentence, “Americans should be taught to know about world wars one, two and three.” This was in a paper about what it means to be “educated,” in which I gave…