Journalist – Historian – Speaker
Today Steven Salaita gave a press conference. I was there. Full video here. Salaita spoke, along with with his constitutional lawyer Maria LaHood, one of his employment lawyers, Robert Warrior (chair of American Indian Studies), and Michael Rothberg from English (who read a statement from the MLA). You can read Salaita’s statement here. I’d like …
Lock In is the newest book by the well-known sci-fi author John Scalzi. In my review at Huffington Post, I wrote: On a certain level, this is a story about “wheelchairs,” or rather assistive mobility devices. That’s unusual. While many science fiction stories depict advanced technological responses to plagues or injuries, such stories usually involve seemingly …
My semester has begun and I’m working on a book proposal. I’ll tell you all about it if it goes anywhere. These things are eating up some of my writing time. Still, it was a pretty lively week on the blog. The story I didn’t tell yet is on Medicare rules for speech devices. The …
Yesterday, in something of a rage, I wrote the story of an African-American boy with Down syndrome who was heading to his first day of school in Syracuse. His parents were with him and, as they entered the school, they paused to take a picture. A white security guard intervened and pushed the boy against …
Sometimes I write about Down syndrome and comedy and why I think it’s so important. I get the pushback – lighten up, it was only a joke, don’t take things so seriously, and so forth. So here’s this story from Syracuse.com (via the Daily Mail, which loves “outrage” reporting on authoritarians in the U.S.). A …
And that no one may wonder that this sex laboured at warfare, I will make a brief digression, in order to give a short account of the estate and character of such women. There were once women among the Danes who dressed themselves to look like men, and devoted almost every instant of their lives …
There’s a story happening with medicare and “speech generating devices,” especially those involving eye tracking (of the sort frequently used by people with ALS). I’m trying to figure out where we stand now. Last Feb,the folks who admin Medicare changed the rules for speech devices (devices in which you push buttons to make words/phrase). 1) …
I asked a faculty member at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign whether they thought there was any chance that the chancellor and board might reverse their decision on Steven Salaita (you can read here for my take on the case). Their answer – If the scientists (i.e. the people with the money) get involved. So far, …
Today’s stories about compliance take a different spin. Thankfully, no one is being shot or tasered by the police in these examples. Two men have, however, been involuntarily committed for what they might do in the future. One is an English professor. His case has not made the news but he was involuntarily committed and …