From Damien Walter at The Guardian on The Hugos: A snapshot of today’s sci-fi publishing industry – as opposed to the fandom that ultimately underwrites the industry’s business – does not show a diverse picture. Both bookshelves and cinema screens are currently dominated by the Matt Damon/Andy Weir vehicle The Martian and its archaically old-fashioned (and vastly…
Still blogging. But mostly – I am writing a book: Disability Is Not A Crime I’m home from DC. Amazing time at the NARPA Conference: Beyond CIT Training session I helped run, but mostly honored to meet so many advocates and experts doing the work in the trenches. Special thanks to the folks at Bazelon who co-presented with…
I am flying to DC today for the annual NARPA – National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy – Conference. I’ll be speaking about police violence and disability, along with two people from the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law. They will focus on policy and law. I’m going to tell stories about deaths, discuss…
Thesis: If you genuinely want to increase coverage of an issue, start with your own community and work outward. Anything else is just an attempt to play one group off another. This will be a little rambling, as I’m working through my ideas. That’s why this is on my blog and not formalized and submitted…
This is just news from yesterday. SFPD were filmed abusing a man with a prosthetic leg and crutches. Initially, the claim was that he was “waving sticks around like weapons” outside Twitter’s hq. Since that claim has been debunked (notice a lack of sticks in the video), they are now claiming they were “helping” him…
Yesterday I announced that I am writing a book about the criminalization of disability in American society. Disability is not a crime, but it’s treated like a crime throughout our society. I’m going to talk about policing, but also the way this mentality emerges in other aspects of society. Here’s one: Parenting while disabled. Disabled…
John Williams was deaf and never heard the policeman who was ordering him to stop. He was shot in the back four times. Ethan Saylor had Down syndrome and didn’t obey orders to get out of a movie seat he hadn’t paid for. He died on the floor, asphyxiated. Kajieme Powell was standing alone in…
This is an absolute must-read. It’s a powerful description of the complexities of being a caregiver for an adult with developmental disability. It also demonstrates the cruelty of the austerian (who probably think of themselves as pro-life, for that matter). I wrote an op-ed in Thursday’s Chicago’s Sun Times about the impact of Illinois’s budget crisis…
More on trigger warnings. Here’s a good piece from The New Republic. If you take away the media hysteria surrounding trigger warnings, you’re left with a mode of conversational priming that we all use: “You might want to sit down for this”; “I’m not sure how to say this, but…” It’s hardly anti-intellectual or emotionally…
So the right-wing blog The Daily Caller has published a list of America’s worst professors (here is a donotlink cached version). I’m naturally friends with many of the folks it singles out, but I’m not going to engage with that right now. What’s fascinating about the list is that it’s generated by, basically, twitter and email…