The following was submitted as a letter to the paper.

Over the weekend, author and alleged researcher Emerett Picardy celebrated his 50th birthday. On such a milestone, it seems only appropriate to recount for the public a list of his accomplishments to date.

Picardy enjoyed a brief and uneventful career as an auror before joining the Werewolf Capture Unit, which is what he apparently uses as the basis for his 'research;' his own misconceptions and assumptions which he made while actively hunting down and harming those afflicted with lycanthropy. Of course, as any two-bit brawler will know, fighting with someone does give one an innate understanding of their fundamental being and allows one to make deductions about their motives and behavior for the rest of time, without bothering to take into account any further evidence whatsoever. He also, notably, managed to deprive a colleague of his freedom less than a month after he had been bitten during the course of duty, without even giving him the chance to follow the regulations and add himself to the registry in due course. While this may seem reprehensible to some, it makes perfect sense if you prescribe to Picardy's very peculiar and unique logic that once someone has been bitten by a werewolf they lose all sense of self and become an entirely different person, entirely devoid of morals and perhaps even of reason.

After leaving the Werewolf Capture Unit, Picardy set out to spread his irrational ideas far and wide under the guise of scientific research — though every paper he has published since is really more of a literature review than anything else, relying on the sources of other scholars or even of Muggles since he is unwilling to interface directly with the population he is studying. One might even suggest that he is afraid — not of being harmed, certainly, but of being proven wrong, since his ideas hold so little water to anyone who has so much as had a conversation with someone afflicted with lycanthropy.

Many who know Picardy assert that he truly went beyond the range of reason when he drove his wife to suicide — she had, quite tragically, been bitten by a werewolf and of course Picardy had filled her head with such vile nonsense for years that she (so the story goes) refused treatment and bled out, very painfully, while he watched. This seems unlikely, however, since so many of his vitriolic and entirely baseless papers were published well before his wife's unfortunate demise. These include: a conspiracy theory involving the goblins of Gringotts who are apparently attempting to overthrow mankind; an assertion that hags ought to be banished from wizarding society; disparaging commentary on the physical characteristics of those with mixed parentage (human and non-human); and, of course, a whole litany of anti-werewolf 'research.'

After disappearing for some time doing, it appears, not much of anything, Picardy began self-publishing books in 1886. One can only assume they were self-published because no respectable publisher would touch this content with a ten-foot pole, much less a publisher of academic or scholarly work. His scientific failings are many, but as a brief review for those uninitiated in proper research protocols: Picardy chooses the data which supports his preconceived conclusions, and ignores all the rest; as stated above, he declines to even consider the primary source for such research and instead relies on assumptions and second-, third-, or fourth-hand accounts; and finally, the internal logic in his books isn't even entirely consistent (a fault which might have been caught and addressed if any publisher cared to be involved with him).

Perhaps the second half of his life will be better spent than the first, but it seems unlikely; the most one can say of Picardy at present is skip purchasing his books for the foreseeable future and hope that no one in the academic community learns from his lackluster example.