Monthly Archives: March 2017

Link Roundup

This Week in Neurodiversity

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Each Friday at NOSmag, I’m going to post some links relevant to neurodiversity news and culture criticism around the web. This is what I’ve been reading and that I think you should be reading too. Feel free to add links of your own in the comments and email suggestions for future link roundups to nos.editorial@gmail.com or Tweet us @NOSeditorial.
Popular Culture

Chiron, James Baldwin, and Autistic Experience

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Two days after an Academy Awards where Moonlight won ‘Best Picture’, a line of over 1,000 people wrapped three city blocks awaiting to see its showing at the palatial Castro Theatre in San Francisco. As the first winner to feature a queer storyline as well as an entirely black cast, that enthusiastic turnout was understandable - especially among populations that saw themselves reflected for the first time in a Best Picture winner. Great art, and Moonlight is certainly great art, has the ability to not only offer a cultural critique but to pull out from the viewer an intimate connection to the work presented before them. Great art can draw that connection even if the viewer’s own life and story only passively relate to the subject they are engaging with (plenty of people have seemed to passionately connect with the themes of the hit Broadway musical ‘Hamilton’ despite never having lived … Continue Reading ››
Viewpoint

In Defense of Effective Altruism

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When I saw the recent protests by disability rights advocates of Peter Singer’s talk at an effective altruism club, I cringed. I support disability rights because I am a disabled person and I do, in fact, have a sense of self-interest. I support effective altruism because I was aware of all the suffering there was in the world and I felt powerless to actually do anything about it. Through evidence and reason, effective altruists try to figure out how ordinary people can best improve the world. We ask questions like “if you want people in the developing world to be better off economically, is it better to pay for deworming treatments because children without worms grow up to earn more money, or just to give them cash?” And “if you’re trying to do good, is it better to get a high-earning job so you can donate lots of … Continue Reading ››
Link Roundup

This Week in Neurodiversity

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Each Friday at NOSmag, I’m going to post some links relevant to neurodiversity news and culture criticism around the web. This is what I’ve been reading and that I think you should be reading too. Feel free to add links of your own in the comments and email suggestions for future link roundups to nos.editorial@gmail.com or Tweet us @NOSeditorial.
No Modern Asylums

Farms for Disabled People aren’t a New Idea

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Every few weeks, or at least with mind-boggling rapidity, a publication decides it has hit upon a great new idea to solve housing support issues for disabled adults, including those with mental health disabilities. They run a piece about nature-based farmstead “communities” of disabled people and staff who support them, and the “therapeutic” values of said farmsteads. They describe them often as a positive alternative to institutions, but these settings fail to qualify as alternatives to institutions. They are institutions. The idea that nature-based, isolated settings benefit mental health is popular today. For context, I define nature-based care  as “sending disabled people off to rural areas to be in the quiet aura of the country so that their mental health and/or other disabilities heal,” also historically known as “institutionalization,” regardless of whether the people wanted to go there.The articles and their authors fail to mention that these farmsteads are institutions that segregate … Continue Reading ››