Jane Haddam

I’ve been watching the comments on that last post with increasing fascination.  And the rather casual assumption that if people “need” something–or even need it without the quotation marks–they have the right to force their fellow citizens to provide it against their wills is staggering to me. First, the US abolished slavery in the 19th…

It’s always difficult to know where to start in discussions of these things, and I find I’m about to do an extra, intermediate post in a series I thought was going to be fairly straightforward. Let me start out by saying that I think Lee gave a good example of precisely what I think is…

It was Wolcum Yule, by the way.   The name of the album by Anonymous 4 I was talking about yesterday.  I’ve got it on as I speak. But it occurs to me that this being a religious season, it might make sense to talk about religion some, and I’ve got a number of different ways…

It is very early on Christmas Day morning, so early I’m still thinking of it as Christmas Eve night.  I’m awake and wandering around for reasons both banal and too complicated to go into.  Let’s just say that I’m the kind of person who finds it impossible to go back to sleep once I have…

Years and years ago, one of my good friends from college gave me the single most important piece of investment advice, once you get past that thing about “don’t put all your eggs in one basket.”   “Never,” she told me, “never ever ever ever ever invest in anything if  you don’t understand how the company…

So.   The term is over, and I’m calmer than  I was a couple of weeks ago.   It’s the start of what looks like a long, bad week-end of nasty weather.  I’ve got enough food in the house to not care, and my older son is home for the vacation, which means I’ve got somebody who…

And don’t ask me why that’s the title, because I don’t know. First, I’d like to say that if it was up to me to pick something for the general reader to get a good and accurate picture of the Middle Ages, I’d still go with Norman Cantor’s Civilization of the Middle Ages.  There’s a…

Okay, a couple of things here, on a day that’s sort of crowded for time. First, the reason why what you “know” about the Middle Ages is so completely wrong about the Middle Ages is that what you “know” is actually the myth of “Medieval stagnation and repression” put out first by the Renaissance and…

Okay, I seem a little scattered these days, I know.  I can’t seem to help myself.  I am coming off a very bad year, one of the worst I’ve ever head, and scrambling to fix a piece of writing that ended up being the victim of it.  The only thing I’m happy with right now…

Police forces as we know them are inventons of the nineteenth century.  In the English-speaking world, there were sheriffs and baliffs and officers of the court who took on some police functions, but in thirteenth century England, nobody felt the need for what we would call policing–for having somebody walking around, checking to make sure…