Journalist – Historian – Speaker
NEW PIECE at Pacific Standard “As ICE has intensified operations under the regime of President Donald Trump, disability-related cases and causes have routinely gotten public attention. In part, this has to do with the way that disability commands sympathy and can sometimes generate generous media coverage. It’s easier for immigrant rights groups to command national …
Ruth Colker in the Cardozo Law Review argues that evidence for banning laptops, at most, suggests limited internet access during classroom times requiring content acquisition. Colker writes: Those studies [promoting bans] represent a careful presentation of three artificial experiments where students are assigned their note-taking style— longhand or computer—and in which students have little incentive …
It’s my son’s 11th birthday. Read this! My son is 11 today. Here’s the story of how our friends helps us find our bearings. They refused to stop congratulating us. https://t.co/USJpXKNkOj pic.twitter.com/6QH2BcYDSh — David M. Perry (@Lollardfish) January 11, 2018
New piece in Pacific Standard on historical language and victimization claims: As a historian and journalist, the use of these loose metaphors to protect the powerful has concerned me for years. This latest push against serial sexual harassment in media and entertainment, as noted by BuzzFeed journalist (and Pacific Standard contributor) Anne Helen Petersen, has driven …
On NPR, Joe Shapiro has a powerful new series on sexual abuse and intellectual disability. I’ll have more to say about that later in the week. Here’s one reaction though from a fellow parent that’s incredibly important. The author thinks about all the ways that we train folks with Intellectual and developmental disabilities to be …
For Pacific Standard, Robyn Powell writes about the rights of parents with disabilities. Around the country, parents are routinely placed at risk of losing their children due only to the fact that they (the parents) are disabled. She writes: Nearly one in 10 children in the United States are at risk of being removed from …
Yesterday, as news about the Wolff book rolled through the net, I had an accidentally well-timed piece on the complexities of talking about Trump’s age and his brain. I acknowledge that in fact age-related cognitive change might be an issue in a president (or other forms of cognitive change), but continue to believe that outside …
New at The Nation: Anti-choice activists have found what they think is a winning wedge issue: Down syndrome and other “sympathetic” disabilities. The latest attack was in Ohio, where, in late December, GOP Governor John Kasich signed a bill that bans abortions after a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome. Ten states have either passed similar …
New at Pacific Standard: Right before Christmas, Jeff Sessions rolled back key disability rights protections. More is likely coming: What seems to be happening, according to Eve Hill and numerous other disability rights advocates to whom I spoke, is that the Sessions Department of Justice is siding with sheltered workshops. Sessions has a well-known general …
Well, it’s the new year. Here’s a report (excluding disability) on police violence in 2017. Here’s the Washington Post on police killings in 2017 including mental illness. Reading through these cases, I feel we’re making no progress. Still 25% known mental illness, still reasonable estimate of a third to a half involving disabled people in some …