Journalist – Historian – Speaker
A professor of Atmospheric Sciences stepped down (he was 70) at the University of Illinois rather than appropriately address accommodations in his classroom. His emails to the student emerged in the process, including one he BCC’d to the entire class saying disability support (and perhaps Graddy herself – I know nothing about how they identify) …
There’s a lovely and thoughtful op-ed about “Sex at Wesleyan” written by an alumna with whom I must be roughly contemporary (I graduated in ’95). She articulates this: As much as you may read about the angry cries of “social justice warriors” in current news, today’s students discuss sexual assault in a completely new way. …
A little late now, but Catherine Kudlick wrote a great piece on Labor Day without Telethons. Paul Longmore would have had a lot to say today, the first Labor Day without telethons and without Jerry Lewis. His deeply-researched book, Telethons: Spectacle, Disability and the Business of Charity suggests that he’d be thinking big picture. Most …
Miami-Dade County has vowed to forcibly institutionalize all homeless people who don’t get off the streets. The temptation will be to say this is for their own good and to look past it, but disasters do not mean that disabled people lose their rights. Moreover, notice how the article (and others like it) only talk …
Good article at CNN Opinion urging historians to go public. This is great news for the discipline of history, for history teachers, for history professors, and for public historians who interpret the past for visitors at museums, historic sites and other such venues. But let’s not celebrate yet. We have work to do. Historians need …
Nazis love Taylor Swift, at least in part because she never talks politics, so she’s a blank page on which people can project hate. The Middle Ages has a similar problem.
I don’t want your app. I don’t want your ID card. I don’t want your CIT. I want you to STOP SHOOTING PEOPLE. https://t.co/rW3aw49shr — Rebecca Cokley (@RebeccaCokley) September 1, 2017 St. Paul has a new app to help cops. I’ll have more to say this week, but for now let’s just know one thing: …
UPDATE: This article is from 2014. It was circulating through my feeds and I didn’t notice the publication date. Still useful stuff from Ari. Happy Friday! The New York Times has a long feature on “the kids who beat autism.” It is the article you expect it to be. They do talk to Ari Ne’eman, though, …
Last May I went to the annual National Restaurant Association meeting with Bruce Schneier, a well known technologist, and listened to Internet of Things pitches. Here’s what we found: Some of the sales pitches are compelling: Companies offer to harvest customer data so the restaurant can better track its clientele’s needs. They offer to manage …
I wrote a piece for The Nation on the Age of CRISPR. I argue we’re going to need new approaches both to regulation and to our discourse around “normal” as we develop these new tools. I use the ongoing failures to change how we talk about Down syndrome as my example: A few weeks ago, …