I’m always very skeptical of the story “boy/girl with special needs allowed to do normal sports thing” stories. And if you don’t know what I mean, you don’t obsessively follow mainstream news about kids with disabilities! This might be a good thing for you. I just feel that often these events become tokens of inclusion,…
About a month ago, I discussed a story about more than reasonable accommodation in Heathrow airport for a young man with autism. The article reads, in part: The 21-year-old has severe autism and obsessive compulsive disorder, but has to negotiate the hectic bustle of Heathrow airport to attend Boston Higashi High School in the US….
Last week the Daily Mail, not my favorite U.K. paper, published a piece called “The History Girls.” Let me say up front that I respect the work of the scholars in question and I understand why they cooperated with the newspaper and its photographers (and hair/makeup artists). But here’s how I see the resulting piece…
Last week I was privileged to be the keynote speaker at two workshops on “Work/Life Challenges – It’s Not Just for Women Anymore.” I spoke for about a half an hour on my experiences, the challenges my wife and I encounter, some of the strategies we use to meet those challenges, and the broader issues…
Over the past few days, quite a number of my friends have shared this now well-traveled link. In it, the artist renders a number of true heroines – Hillary Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Malala, Anne Frank, and others – as if they were Disney princesses. The diverging responses have been remarkable and I have tried…
Later today, I’m going to talk about Disney and what I think functions as a kind of Rorschach test. It’s been fascinating if, admittedly, infuriating, to see people not see the world exactly as I see it! Such moments are usually good moments for introspection. More on that this afternoon. For now, here’s the roundup…
My post is late today because I rose at 6 to drive to Springfield and see a student of mine, David Gayes, be named a “Lincoln Student Laureate.” The student in question, in my class, wrote brilliantly about theology and disability. His essay became a presentation at our research expo, then won our top essay…
The movie Ender’s Game is coming out tomorrow. I won’t be going to see it tomorrow or, I think, at any time. Perhaps on cable or netflix someday. I wrote a piece on it this summer, linking Orson Scott Card’s anti-gay rhetoric to the terrible things happening right now in Russia. Rhetoric is not empty….
I think a lot about the conversations I have with my kids, especially my hyper-verbal daughter, and the way they set up the next conversations. I over-intellectualize, thinking deeply about the lessons I want to impart to my children, and how I might take small steps down the road even at this early age. For…
Yesterday, Soraya Chemaly, one of the feminist writers I read regularly (Rule #3 – It’s about them), tweeted about a memo from a huge international law-firm to its female employees. It’s sexist in entirely predictable ways, demanding women de-gender and de-sexualize themselves so that they can be taken seriously. I genuinely believe that the author…