Journalist – Historian – Speaker
Rose Eveleth has become one of my favorite writers on technology. Lately, she’s been focusing specifically on prosthetics. It’s an area that technology is rapidly transforming. It’s great to have deeply thoughtful journalists reporting on both the science and the social implications. In this blog post, she reflects on what she’s learned on her beat …
Peter Singer came to town to talk about altruism for a humanities festival. Local disability activists (sadly not including me), picketed the event, and the Daily Northwestern covered it. In their interview with Singer, he revealed something new to me. Singer’s extreme utilitarian views has led him to argue many things with which I disagree (i.e. …
One of my regular twitter correspondents reached out to me recently to discuss his plans for a low-sensory-input planetarium show. He already had all the good ideas, but we chatted and confirmed that this would work, and I’m thrilled he’s moved forward with the plan. Here’s the announcement. We’re planning to go! We wanted to …
I have a new piece up at Al Jazeera America this morning on Autism Speaks. Autism Speaks is the mega-charity of the autism world. Founded in 2005, it has an annual budget of $60 million, is known for its ubiquitous awareness walks and has a handsome array of celebrity backers. In some quarters of the disability …
Arizona State University hosts the National Center for Disability Journalism, an excellent group doing important work. The NCDJ offers the only annual journalism award for Disability issues – the Katherine Schneider Journalism Award for Excellence in Reporting on Disability – and have announced the 2015 winners. A ProPublica story that uncovered the shocking ways children …
I am still not handling my emotional reaction to the Oregon shooting very well. I’m also troubled by the efforts to focus on everything but the guns. Of course, with every such instance, there’s a rush to stigmatize mental illness and, in this case, developmental disability. It turns out that his mother was – as …
A local story went national yesterday. A mother arrived at school to find her child separated from the other kids and wearing a garbage bag. According to the mother one official defended the practice by saying since there was no rule explicitly against it, it wasn’t actionable. Meanwhile, Chicago Public Schools is cutting vast sums …
Well, my move to Wix was a disaster. I did, however, defeat sunk cost bias and moved back here. I’ll be writing more about the lessons of the disaster in the next week or so. Here’s what I wrote this week, even as I continue to work on my book and other long-term projects. Inspiration …
An act of kindness at a Chicago-area McDonalds has been getting a lot of attention over the last week. A customer, Destiny Carreno, saw an employee decide to close his till and go help a disabled man eat lunch. Carreno took a picture, placed it on Facebook, and went viral. Her Facebook post has nearly …
Yesterday I published a brief post on Flowers v. Gopal, in which some rich California folks are trying to declare a neighboring autistic child a public nuisance. I’ll have more to say about the case, including answering the, “but but he wasn’t a nice kid!” comments I’m getting (short version: If he didn’t have autism …