Journalist – Historian – Speaker
There’s a new hashtag campaign around saying the word “disability.” It is initiated and led by my friend and writing companion Lawrence Carter-Long. I am wildly in favor. I am trying, in my writing this year, to write the sentence: “There are no special needs, only needs” as often as possible. We all have needs. …
The National Center for Disability Journalism at Arizona State University has released a new style guide for writing about disability. Here’s the press release. There’s also a “words not to use” document. As a disability-rights journalist, I like the NCDJ a lot. They do great work and this is an important guide. These tools are …
David Johnson is my main editor at Al Jazeera America, so to the extent you appreciate the pieces I write there, you have him to thank (along with several brilliant assistant editors). All mistakes, of course, are my own! But he’s also a philosopher and what one might call an “alt-academic,” someone who took his …
As I watched the finale of Game of Thrones, I spent a lot of time thinking about sexualized shame. We’re in a kind of ongoing conversation about internet shame lately, with much of the drama focused on white people who feel really uncomfortable being taken to task by historically marginalized groups (people of color). The …
I’ve become increasingly interested in nostalgia, especially when used as political discourse (following the scholarship of my friend Matthew Gabriele (@prof_gabriele), a professor at Virginia Tech). It reminded me of this recent essay from Andrew Potter, the editor of Ottawa Citizen, on the “Rise of Neo-Primitivism.” Potter describes the “neo-primitives” imagined by speculative fiction author William …
Open a new browser window and do an image search for boys. Here’s what I got. All but two images in the first four rows are, in fact, boys (there are two adult male actors in row three). Now do the same thing for the word “girls.” It’s breasts and butts and lace and sexualized …
Austen Heinz is the typical silicon valley disruptor superstar. Edgy. Controversial. Disruptive. He was profiled for his DNA Startup which allows you to “create life.” In Austen Heinz’s vision of the future, customers tinker with the genetic codes of plants and animals and even design new creatures on a computer. Then his startup, Cambrian Genomics, prints …
At Thanksgiving dinner, a friend of my parents, A., was the lone non-family guest, as his wife was out of town. At one point, we were discussing dinner and how we had tried to rein in the feast a little (excess rather than excessive excess), and I said, “We tried to pull back from our …
Yesterday I began following the story of Eden Foods (this is a good place to start), an organic food company whose products are beloved by many friends, especially my vegetarian and vegan friends (they make beans and soy milk, among other products). In 2013, the company and their chairman and sole shareholder, Michael Potter, sued …
Language moves. In the world of disability, phrases enter our lexicon to replace other terms that become pejorative, then they too have to be replaced. This is a normal process and does not mean we cannot work for better language, because representation matters. Representation shapes reality and reality shapes representation. This assertion is a fundamental …