Journalist – Historian – Speaker
I’ll have a piece later today from CNN on the shooting in San Bernardino, CA. I’ve written about gun violence for them before. I’m sitting in a small square room, cluttered with books and papers, at the end of a short dead-end corridor. I’m a history professor at a small university, sitting in my office …
I’m off today to be a panelist at a workshop intended to put advocates in the same room with journalists and PR execs to talk about better reporting on disability. A McCormick Specialized Reporting InstituteThe Poynter Institute, Access Living and ADA 25 Chicago invite reporters from all media to apply for a two-day in-depth workshop …
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 …
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 …
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 …
I met Arthur Chu this summer at a workshop on the problem of misogyny on the internet and we’ve been corresponding via email and social media a lot since then. Our writing interests overlap when it comes to representation issues in media and games. He interviewed me on the problem of claiming “authenticity” as a …
I like TV shows, books, and movies that are imperfect matches for my values. They are produced in societies that are, likewise, imperfect, and few cultural creations can withstand any kind of purity test. That doesn’t mean that you just get to ignore the problem. It also doesn’t necessarily mean you have to stop enjoying …
Last year, a reporter at the Chicago Tribune called me to ask, “Was medieval life really the way it’s Game of Thrones?” I said yes, of course, nearly everyone had a dragon, was a zombie, or carried around ancient swords made of semi-magical iron. Screenshot: A dragon looms over a cowering shepherd. depicted during Ok, I …
Content Note: Child Murder. I wrote a piece for CNN about the murder of children with disabilities. I wrote it because of the media discourse I saw surrounding the death of London McCabe. I wrote it because that framing was not unusual when this kind of murder happens. I wrote it to provide a …