Journalist – Historian – Speaker
A good piece on media links between mental illness and violence: Mostly done pretty badly. It’s from last June, but I post this in light of liberals making lots of “mentally ill with guns” comments in the last few days. Here’s a great quote: Dr. Joshua D. Lee, an associate professor in medicine and psychiatry …
On Tuesday, I praised good NYT reporting on CIT training in Portland, a piece that tried to go beyond the usual platitudes. Today, I’d like to criticize their most recent Room for Debate – on mental health facilities. The truth of a vast publication like this is that while there are overarching standards, it’s made …
My home-away-from-home community of Minneapolis-St. Paul just learned that the police officers who killed Jamar Clark will not be charged. This case has become a focal point for Black Lives Matter in the Twin Cities. There’s another case though, that is getting both legislative and media attention: John Birkeland. He was killed during a mental …
Charles Pierce has a piece on the many victims of the Cold War in Latin America. It’s being raised as an issue versus Sanders (and will be used to hammer him in the general, if he gets there, because much of America remains afraid of “socialists” and “Communists”). History in public!
Yesterday the Ruderman Family Foundation published their White Paper on Media Coverage of Law Enforcement Use of Force and Disability. I have been working with Lawrence Carter-Long on this for months, tracking hundreds of newspaper stories. We see disability as a missing piece in so many of the critical conversations about police use-of-force and hope …
#CripTheVote has become an important hashtag, founded by Alice Wong, Andrew Pulrang, and Gregg Beratan, intended to bring disability into the conversation around the 2016 presidential campaign. Like most forms of online activism, its primary function (to my mind) is to thicken networks. We tweet, we use the hashtag, we encounter each other and find …
Yesterday I had a piece published at Al Jazeera that I’m pretty proud of. I found dozens of academic job ads that discriminate against people with disabilities, in many cases illegally, and published on it. It’s as close to straight revealing reporting as I come, taking something boring (boilerplate HR clauses) and demonstrating their social impact. …
The discourse around Zika has included a constant barrage of ableist language in which reproductive rights advocates suggest that a disability like microcephaly naturally means a mother would want to terminate. There clearly is a problem with access to reproductive choice, but I always maintain we can make that argument without implying that disability equals …
I wrote a piece for Pacific Standard that many people seem to have read (it was their most popular story on the site for 5 days or so. I gather that must mean something) on the systematic abuse of disabled children by teachers and other staff in schools and institutions across America. In the piece, …
Back in June, Morgan Wheeler saw a wheelchair user and asked if she could help. He said no. She started pushing him anyway. He asked her to stop. She kept pushing him. He asked her to stop again. She kept pushing him around. 1. This is likely illegal. Battery? Kidnapping? Assault? 2. Morgan decided to …