Journalist – Historian – Speaker
Late last week, The Guardian published a piece by the mother of an autistic boy with a clickbait headline that she’s afraid her 14-year-old son will kill her. You can Google the piece if you like. She describes a child who is prone to violence, mourns the lack of respite care, and claims to fear …
I’m going to be writing more about police reform and gun control later today, but first I wanted to understand how police /should/ approach someone when they say, “I’m carrying a concealed weapon and I have a permit.” Obviously, that’s a moment in which a police officer might quickly escalate or even (as seems to …
On Tuesday night, The Department of Justice and the U.S. Attorney’s Office will host a hearing on police violence in Chicago. Advance Youth Leadership Power – a group focused on organizing disabled youth of color – will lead an action before it to focus on the intersection of police violence against people of color and …
On Friday afternoon, one of Playboy’s editors asked me to write about the gun violence and policing we’d seen over the past few days. My piece is here (Warning – it’s Playboy, so while there’s no nudity, there’s plenty of reference to sex on the site): In the piece, I tried to lay out some of …
Throughout the day yesterday, as people on social media mourned the death of Philando Castile and expressed their outrage at his killer, I saw one constant thread: People pointing out the hypocrisy of the NRA. Numerous articles appeared talking about the ways in which the NRA’s call for the broadest view of the 2nd Amendment doesn’t seem to apply …
Here’s an essay courtesy of @amaditalks on Twitter on the ways that, when you’re “sick,” as the author puts it, work compounds on work. Today I met a man named Robert. He stopped by to ask how long a sale price on a can of Folgers was supposed to last, and we ended up chatting for …
Over the weekend and yesterday on the blog, I started collecting experiences with the TSA in the wake of the awful viral story from Memphis. It’s a classic case of the #CultOfCompliance, and I expect to be writing more about this topic in due time. I hope, though, that as we advocate for change, we do …
I’m interested in all the ways the “Cult of Compliance,” my term for the collective way that our society promotes and rewards compliance to authority, protects authority figures who treat compliance as sacred, and criminalizes noncompliance, emerges in our society. Disability, in particular, exposes the manifestations of the cult of compliance, while people with disabilities …
Yesterday, NBC News profiled Alice Wong and the Disability Visibility Project. Go read it! I am genuinely inspired by Alice Wong. With neither budget nor celebrity, she’s created an vibrant, accessible, community of people with disabilities, family members, and allies. She’s told stories and made it possible for others to tell their stories. She works constantly …
From Evan Osnos’ post-Orlando article in the New Yorker on the business of guns, I found this very telling. It’s about the negotiation between the Clinton Administration and Smith & Wesson to make smart guns – whatever that really means – standard. I’m not sure what the 1999 technology was, but today, as I unlock my …