A few weeks ago I wrote a blog that was pretty widely read and shared (compared to my other posts) on the “Pencil Test” for disability. It focused around a man flung to the ground by Florida police, to see if he was really disabled or just faking it. There’s actually a lot of discourse…
Get it? It’s a roundup! Today is Sunday. I am not watching the NFL. For me, being a football fan was a major part of my identity, one that intensified with the advent of Fantasy Football. As the concussion scandal intensified, I began to scale back my engagement with the game. First quitting fantasy, then…
As surely all of you know by now, the hiring then unhiring of Steven Salaita at the University of Illinois has highlighted many important issues for higher education. Much of the discussion has, correctly, focused on how we may and may not discuss Israel and fundamental questions about academic freedom and faculty governance. As the…
As indicated by the header of my blog, I focus on language, power, and privilege. One principle that I have consistently applied, whether talking about gender, race, academic life, whatever, is that when you have privilege and power, your speech is more constrained than if you do not. I wrote about this kind of issue…
I have a pledge. I hope you’ll join me and take it too. I will not contribute to any GoFundMe campaigns started after 9/9/14 until they treat abortion the same way they treat all other personal medical procedures. I have contributed to many campaigns in the past, including just last week (funeral expenses for an…
Today Steven Salaita gave a press conference. I was there. Full video here. Salaita spoke, along with with his constitutional lawyer Maria LaHood, one of his employment lawyers, Robert Warrior (chair of American Indian Studies), and Michael Rothberg from English (who read a statement from the MLA). You can read Salaita’s statement here. I’d like…
Lock In is the newest book by the well-known sci-fi author John Scalzi. In my review at Huffington Post, I wrote: On a certain level, this is a story about “wheelchairs,” or rather assistive mobility devices. That’s unusual. While many science fiction stories depict advanced technological responses to plagues or injuries, such stories usually involve seemingly…
My semester has begun and I’m working on a book proposal. I’ll tell you all about it if it goes anywhere. These things are eating up some of my writing time. Still, it was a pretty lively week on the blog. The story I didn’t tell yet is on Medicare rules for speech devices. The…
Yesterday, in something of a rage, I wrote the story of an African-American boy with Down syndrome who was heading to his first day of school in Syracuse. His parents were with him and, as they entered the school, they paused to take a picture. A white security guard intervened and pushed the boy against…
Sometimes I write about Down syndrome and comedy and why I think it’s so important. I get the pushback – lighten up, it was only a joke, don’t take things so seriously, and so forth. So here’s this story from Syracuse.com (via the Daily Mail, which loves “outrage” reporting on authoritarians in the U.S.). A…