Journalist – Historian – Speaker
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 …
Long read on mental health and policing in Chicago, with an emphasis on CIT team training. I should have a piece out relatively soon on the need to stop focusing on crisis, and instead look “upstream” of crisis events, to prevent them from happening in the first place.
As I (and many people smarter than me) frequently say – there is no autism epidemic. Rates are increasing largely, perhaps solely, due to changing how we diagnose autism. Now Jessica Wright, for Spectrum (and republished by The Atlantic), has written an enormously important piece on the “missing generation” of autistic individuals. Last year, Scott Hartman moved …
Cincinnati has a new red and white placard that deaf and hard-of-hearing drivers can place in their car to inform police officers of their disability. Here’s an image from a local news tweet. .@CincinnatiPD & students at @uofcincy help design traffic stop safety placards for the deaf & hard of hearing. pic.twitter.com/M6C6fOcGvn — Angela Ingram …
Explosive new report of abuse from the Massachusetts Disability Law Center. UPDATE: You can see the whole report here. 1. The Cult of Compliance (from Boston Globe): The investigation uncovered a school culture in which aggressive discipline of students had become ingrained, Eichner said. Many students suffered injuries, including scratches and bruises, and one student was …
Thomas Madden, one of my mentors, has a new piece in the Washington Post on ISIS and the Crusades. In it, he rehearses the ways in which the memory of the Crusades was carried by Western European people into the colonial era and thus brought the European ideas about the Crusades into the Islamic world. Modern …
Guy Geltner, a medievalist, has written an important piece on why he is leaving Academia.edu, a site that encourages academics to upload their work (skirting copyright laws by calling them “drafts” in some cases), and deploying various algorithms to connect people, encourage discussion, and so forth. I joined and put two papers online. One – …
The National Center for Disability Journalism at Arizona State University has released a new style guide for writing about disability. Here’s the press release. There’s also a “words not to use” document. As a disability-rights journalist, I like the NCDJ a lot. They do great work and this is an important guide. These tools are …
Tough week. I was working mid-week on finishing a major project (almost done!) about disability and violence, when suddenly my twitter feed filled with news about a shooting at a disability services center. I lost my ability to concentrate, then I sat down and started drafting essays (in response to editors contacting me), afraid I …
Donaldson has a disability, uses a wheelchair and is living on limited income. “You have to decide between living day-to-day and rent,” she told me. Finding an accessible home that she can afford is a challenge, and the struggle is compounded by landlords who turn her away because she is in a wheelchair. “When you …