Journalist – Historian – Speaker
New at Pacific Standard: Right before Christmas, Jeff Sessions rolled back key disability rights protections. More is likely coming: What seems to be happening, according to Eve Hill and numerous other disability rights advocates to whom I spoke, is that the Sessions Department of Justice is siding with sheltered workshops. Sessions has a well-known general …
Well, it’s the new year. Here’s a report (excluding disability) on police violence in 2017. Here’s the Washington Post on police killings in 2017 including mental illness. Reading through these cases, I feel we’re making no progress. Still 25% known mental illness, still reasonable estimate of a third to a half involving disabled people in some …
I had 93 essays published in 2017. Whew. I published 55 in 2016, so it’s fair to say that things have escalated dramatically. I am still developing as an essayist, but am grateful to my editors, collaborators, interlocutors, and especially the folks who read me. Thank you. Here are a few pieces of which I …
The stats: 93 published columns. 66 at Pacific Standard 9 at CNN 5 at The Nation 4 at Washington Post 2 at The Ladders 1 at The Guardian 1 at The Atlantic 1 at Newsweek 1 at Eater 1 at The Establishment Writing is very different as a column. I’m grateful to Pacific Standard for bringing …
New interview at Pacific Standard with Will Butler, one of the stars of Arcade Fire. Highlights: What have you found so far? I’m trying to preach to the choir and radicalize them a little bit, not push them farther left, but make them a little harder. Part of it is a community-building exercise. You came to …
Google did a big study to see what teams worked well and which ones didn’t. Turns out, STEM skills (by which they mean Technology and Engineering, not basic science or abstract math) are the LEAST important for success. Here’s the post: In 2013, Google decided to test its hiring hypothesis by crunching every bit and …
Yesterday, a piece on disability and disaster response was published at Pacific Standard. I opened with Angela Wrigglesworth’s story of rescue as the Hurricane Harvey waters rose. By chance, Disability Visibility Podcast, one of my favorite podcasts, also had Wrigglesworth this week, along with Alecia Deon. They shared their stories. Must listen! (Transcript here).
I wrote a long feature for Pacific Standard about disability and disaster response: There are four basic different types of needs related to disability that emerge in the aftermath of disasters: health maintenance (medicine, electricity, medical care), ability to move in and through physical areas, effective communication access, and what the experts call “program access.” …
There’s a new super fancy gene-therapy that can cure a certain kind of blindness. It’s super cool science. It’s also going to cost a million dollars or so. It’s part of what I call “Our GATTACA future,” in which many kinds of disability code even more intensely for poverty and lack of access to modern …
I just heard the sad news that Sr. Clemente Davlin, OP, my friend and former colleague, died today. She was not a young woman and the news is not unexpected, but it’s hitting me hard. I met Clem in 2007 when I started teaching at Dominican. She was technically retired, but so Present in the …