I am writing a new piece on airplane travel for wheelchair users. There is a movement underway to design a wheelchair restraint system for airplane cabins. The idea is that the wheelchair user could simply roll onto the airplane and be locked in place safely, rather than being transferred to a chair. There are a…
I have three deadlines now I’m late on thanks to snow days. I have a babysitter coming in today to take care of my darling monsters (seriously – two weeks of vacation, back to school for two days, and now snow days. They need a schedule to re-order themselves. I need them out of the…
The Portland OR police department has been sanctioned by the DoJ for its handling of cases involving people with psychiatric disabilities. There’s been too many deaths, too many tasings, too much violence, too much ignorance. Now, Portland has announced a new policy. The Portland Police Bureau has drafted a much-expanded policy that stresses the need…
I’m ready for our army of Skynet Marshmallow Bumper Bots. The Oatmeal has a lovely piece about Google’s self-driving cars, an innovation that I, too, am wildly ready for. Here’s the bit that’s relevant to this blog (h/t to my friend K for the link) [my emphasis]: 5. I want this technology to succeed, like…
Welcome back (to me! You probably didn’t go anywhere). For the forseeable future, my blog posts will generally be of the shorter variety. I’m trying to get a few tens of thousands of words into my book manuscript. As soon as I have news (like, say, a publisher sale), I will tell you much more…
I have written 283 blog posts this year (so far!). Last December, I went on an official 6-week hiatus in order to finish my book, then came back on 2/12 in order to talk about the consequences of debating truth-claims about abuse in public. In 2013, my highest monthly viewership was about 17,000. In 2014,…
There are two narratives about the police that I’ve been hearing a lot lately. One is that police “all the time” get killed by their own service weapon. That means that “he reached for my gun,” or even worse, “I thought he might be reaching for my gun,” merits instant force. We saw that in…
Picture by @deray on Twitter. Used with permission.“I have a mental illness. Am I next” Today news broke that the Milwaukee Country D.A. will not be charging a police officer who killed Dontre Hamilton. Hamilton was black, unarmed, and had psychiatric disabilities. Hamilton was sleeping in a courtyard/park near a Starbucks, when Officer Christopher Manney came…
Last March, a terrible story made its way through my social media feeds. A woman with Down syndrome had been raped. Her rapist was convicted. Then, a judge vacated the conviction because the woman “didn’t act enough like a victim.” I kept waiting for someone in the mainstream press to write a more nuanced piece…
Yesterday, Ismaaiyl Brinsley made an incendiary Instagram post, shot his girlfriend, traveled to NY area, killed two police officers, and then killed himself. The simple narrative is that this was about Garner and Brown. Melissa McEwan and others would like us to keep all three victims in mind, and perhaps that complicates the narrative. In the meantime,…