Journalist – Historian – Speaker
Donald Trump called Jeff Sessions “mentally retarded.” Does it matter? Maybe. Kinda. Yeah. “Bad words are the least of the problems for disabled Americans, their families, and their communities, coming out of Washington under Trump. People with disabilities who engage in policy and politics remain angry and worried about many aims of the Trump administration, …
Students pick majors based on what they think will get them jobs. They’re usually wrong. A strong piece from @benmschmidt at @TheAtlantic – https://t.co/9LbqsmuZiU — David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) August 23, 2018 From the article: This may seem like a roundabout way to present the conventional wisdom that stem majors are the only safe bet …
Read this: SPEAKING OF STRAWS, my magnum opus is finally up on @BitchMedia https://t.co/t6jKJFIRV1 — s.e. smith (@sesmith) July 10, 2018
A statement from Seeta Chaganti on #kzoo2018 and #kzoo2019 and the future of medieval studies. On the Medievalists of Color blog – A few thoughts: While I do not for see a future in which I go back to this conference for many reasons, I remain deeply concerned with the future of my field. Over …
Every descent into the medical system for disabled folks, for everyone really but not equally, risks dehumanization. I wrote a story for Pacific Standard about one such case. When @HennyKtweets went to the hospital, instead of getting help, she was mis-diagnosed with an intellectual disability then systematically dehumanized. I am grateful to her for sharing her …
Last week, as many of you know, a group of extraordinary people in the disability community wrote an extensive critique of a 2016 media study that I co-wrote, making it clear that they were calling me out not only for the failings of the study itself, but also my conduct since then. Here’s the critique. …
At the end of last week, I started thinking hard about how I was spending my time. I would log into social media first thing in the morning and stay logged in all day, tweeting constantly in particular. Everything else that I was doing was happening between tweets, basically, and many of those tweets were …
Dear friends, Last week I got rattled by death threats and decided to take some time away from social media to try and think more deeply and do some good writing. You can see more about the threats from the end of this article, as the author screenshotted some (but deleted my name) towards the …
Last week I received a series of death threat tweets. They weren’t credible death threats in which there’s reason to fear action, but they have been weighing heavily on me and pushed me to think about the ways that toxic – and even not-toxic – social media drags me away from other kinds of writing. …
Yes, I promise, we’ve heard of paper straws. They don’t hold up. As I wrote for Pacific Standard last year, straws provide a simple, accessible means for many disabled people to drink. My son, who has Down syndrome, is one of them. His mastery of drinking through ubiquitous plastic straws makes every restaurant and gas …