Journalist – Historian – Speaker
I have a new piece up at Reproductive Health Reality Check. It continues to explore the themes of how we generate a new rhetoric for people who are pro-choice, pro-information, and anti-eugenics. It takes as its lede a story about a woman who wishes she had aborted her child with Down syndrome, born these 47 …
So here’s the pattern. The family of a person with psychiatric disability decides that they need help. The disabled person isn’t taking their medicine. They are perhaps seeming violent or might become violent. The family calls the police to ask for help getting the person to the hospital. Police arrive. The person with the disability …
I missed last Sunday’s roundup as I was frantically finishing my proofs. Soon (February), you will be able to buy my book! Please buy my book (or at least recommend it to your university libraries). You can’t buy it yet, though. Child Murder I had two published essays last week and associated blog posts. The …
Mark Braude, a Stanford Post-doc, has written a perfectly reasonable essay of how to finish a Humanities dissertation in 6 years. Good job Mark. I’m genuinely glad you’re writing in public and congratulations on finishing so quickly. Higher Ed pubs, in general, publish many of these essays in which the author takes his or her …
After the NEH cancelled overseas summer seminars, I requested two sets of documents via FOIA. You can read all about the context here (article over at the Chronicle), here (collection of comments on how important the program is), and here. My FOIA requests were: All documents (I listed many types) about the cancellation of the summer seminar. …
Medieval art historian Asa Mittman has a new piece in The Conversation on the survival of the Blood Libel myth. He talks about the medieval origins and dissemination of the myth that Jews ritually murder Christian children and use their blood to make their Matzoh (note: they/we don’t. They/we never did). He called it a …
I am a college professor. We have a college savings fund for my daughter, principally funded by parents so far, though we’re beginning to be able to contribute too. We do not have a college savings fund for my son, because he has Down syndrome, and we never thought that college was a reasonable option. We …
I have a new piece up on CNN about media discourse and the murder of children with disabilities. London McCabe was a 6-year-old boy. On November 3, he died when his mother threw him off the Yaquina Bay Bridge in Oregon, according to police. London had autism. Media coverage of his death has widely focused on the …
From Digby, we get this find: The ISIS Hunting Kit (Available vs DoNotLink) This is their “Go Fuck Yourself” Patch So, there’s that.
The physician assisted suicide debate is taking place right now, thanks to Brittany Maynard’s decision to go public with her death plans, on multiple levels. 1. The abstract ethics of the practice (in abstract, I’m for it). 2. The ways in which it’s applied (in practice, the innate ableism of our society encourages certain kinds of …