🎶 Take a look, it's in a book 🎶 🥹 After nearly 20 years... Reading Rainbow is returning to motivate, help, and encourage kids to become avid readers with new episodes, new friends, new projects, and of course... new books! Make sure to follow the rainbow 📚🌈 #FollowTheRainbow

The only things we should be gutting right now are pumpkins. 🎃 Happy #ProtectMedicaid Fall 🍁 🍃 🍂

"...atrocities do not begin with action; they begin with imagination, with the suggestion that some lives are worth less, that their removal might even be merciful...we survive by insisting that our lives have value, that our consent matters, and that history will not repeat if we refuse to let it."

the most important thing to remember when you see eugenicists who don’t believe that autistic people should exist rambling about “the autism epidemic” is not that they’re wrong about the “cause” (although they are absolutely wrong about it); it’s that they are eugenicists

Basically, their effort to portray Autism as preventable and curable is part of a larger project to eliminate anyone they see as costing society more than they contribute. And, short of that, to push those costs fully onto families and off of the state.

I study the political sociology of disability. I’m also a former HHS employee. Personally, professionally, & on so many other levels, I’m appalled by today’s press conference. These demagogues do not deserve the time of day. And we can build a better world in spite of them. Mir veln zey iberlebn.

AUTISM ANNOUNCEMENT: I had to leave my home office in the basement today because the deep freezer was making a squealing noise probably nobody else can hear.

"The quality of human life is not dependent on achievement. The quality of our lives is dependent on love.” -Pope Leo XIV

Been a real "why am I so soft in the middle now when the rest of my life is so hard" kind of week

I get that this is a joke, and I'm not criticizing the original poster. It just seems like a perfect snapshot of wanting "community" without any of the uncomfortable or complicating parts of being in community. Community takes commitment.

TIL I still have the capacity to be shocked by the crass and inhumane words of Fox news hosts. I honestly thought that ship had sailed.

Two more weeks until #FatBearWeek2025.

Morning y’all. If you’re into podcasts listen to Buried Truths by Hank Klibanoff and @npr.org Season 5 is about the Reverend Clarence Pickett who was killed by police & spent time in the state psych hospital. Also features yours truly in episode 2 www.wabe.org/podcasts/bur... Buried Truths – WABE

If I made it all the way through the summer without a panicked "I can't stand having hair anymore" undercut, do I reward myself with a tattoo? Is this my midlife crisis?

BREAKING: In a shocking revolt, over 1,000 current and former Health and Human Services employees have released a letter calling for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to resign. trib.al/mXSGNop

I'm gonna need more people to read about the eugenics movement in the United States, and to recognize that "positive" eugenics is still eugenics.

"Satire." thedailytism.com/woman-who-sp...

Saw a strange lump in my kid's sock, it was a pair of foam earplugs stashed there in case things got too loud at school.

An extraordinary warning from nine former CDC directors who served every president from Carter to Trump www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/o...

Find a neurotypical academic challenge

People have embraced authoritarianism in large part because they've been sold individualistic explanations for social problems. If you think people are poor or unhoused because they've made "bad choices," then you'll see appeal in authoritarian leaders who promise to punish those who are "bad."

Ugly laws led to poor, disabled people being institutionalized. It's now part of the strategy Trump plans to use to get rid of unhoused people, in DC and beyond. For @motherjones.com, I spoke to @okaysoldierschweik.bsky.social, who wrote a book about ugly laws. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. ... History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” ―Orwell, 1984

"The conclusion from all of the high-quality studies has been the same for decades: Vaccines do not cause autism."

1) Disabled children also deserve food. 2) disabled children are MORE vulnerable so if one were to rank ethical obligations (a mistake), protecting them matters more. 3) poverty and trauma cause disability. We know why these children are more likely to be disabled.

Sadly, this line of thinking has always worked (see COVID): there are far too many people who are comfortable with the sick/disabled suffering and dying, because they think the sick and disabled SHOULD suffer and die; it is our fate. They only care when able-bodied people suffer and die.

Not to be obnoxious and do the "as a historian" thing but I never honestly thought that my research/teaching on the histories of eugenics would ever be as acutely relevant in understanding the present, and goddess knows, I wish it wasn't the case

Prescription-strength headphones

On Monday, a 15-year-old boy with disabilities was detained by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement outside a Los Angeles Unified School District high school. This is likely just one example of what's to come. Blog from me at @motherjones.com. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Trump’s new executive order uses psychiatry to dismantle social care, expand policing and imprisonment, and exploit public disillusionment. We have seen this before, and we know the consequences. www.aljazeera.com/opinions/202...

Some scattered thoughts on DC: “Cruelty always comes for the most vulnerable first. I suspect that’s why Jesus was so insistent that our theology and practice must start there too.” kevinmnye.substack.com/p/we-knew-th...

Meet the Losers Who Still Want to Read and Think With Their Own Brains

"Pre-exisiting conditions" is a framework put on disabled people to diminish our deaths. That's why some disabled people are very mad about the NYT note, and we were also very mad at the CDC under Biden saying only people with four or more pre-exisiting conditions are dying from Covid.

All of the "senior" events at the library and park district appeal to me and have since I was 20. Ummmmm, I'm *also* interested in hearing an award winning folksinger perform Songs of the Civil Rights Movement?!?

Listen to my colleague T.J. and some other Chicago area disability advocates on the passage of the ADA: www.wbez.org/reset-with-s...

Happy Disability Pride Month! #DisabilityPride @disabilitypridechi.bsky.social

Trump's EO continues a pattern of responding to homelessness by making it easier to put people in civil commitment. Policing disorder and policing disability go hand-in-hand. And it's impacts with be felt acutely by people of color and unsheltered communities.

New banner, who dis? #disabiityinclusion #disabilitylove #DisabilityPrideParade #Chicago #AccesibleChicago #disability #disabled #disabilitypride #disabilityawareness #disabilityacceptance #ada #ada35 #CHIdisabilitypride #CHIdisabilitiesprideparade

I'm tired of living and working in communities where "busy" is a statement of your worth.

"An America without the ’60s, of course, is an America without civil rights, women’s rights, immigrant rights, disability rights and gay rights. It is an America where meritocracy did not and could not exist." -Nikole Hannah-Jones

The budget reconciliation bill passed by Congress threatens children’s health – making sweeping cuts to programs children and families rely on. Learn more from AAP News at publications.aap.org/aapnews/news...

Sometimes even though you knew it was going to happen, it is still a punch in the gut.

"An absolute moral failure." Around one in three disabled people are on Medicaid. I spoke to disability advocates about how devastated they are that the House passed the budget bill that will slash close to a trillion from Medicaid at @motherjones.com. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

My heart is so heavy.

On this first day of disability pride, the senators may vote to strip disabled people off Medicaid and SNAP. www.americanprogress.org/article/fede...

“They blocked traffic outside the U.S. Capitol and prayed until they were arrested.”

July is Disability Pride Month, and I think I say this every year (sigh) but it is starting off like a gut punch. To my disabled siblings - you are worthy and beloved. To our nondisabled allies - please look out for us. It’s rough out here, and the only way out is through. 💖 #DisabilityWrathMonth

Judson Memorial Church (New York), instructing us that “if empathy is a sin, sin boldly.”

Institutional care isn't optional under Medicaid. Home and community based services care is optional. Cutting Medicaid will lead to more people losing HCBS and be forced into nursing homes, as I wrote for @motherjones.com in January. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

Other countries have social safety nets. The US has women. If that wasn't already true, it certainly will be if these Medicaid cuts go through.