disability
-
No Way Out at the Welfare Office
How can it be that the system—the one you paid into for twenty-plus years— doesn’t have remedies for people like you—normally highly employable, but momentarily in need of assistance?
-
How to Make More Room
Nowadays I am amazed by my former self’s blend of optimism and delusion. I wonder how I got the idea that kindergarten was some magical threshold where children and parents smoothly separate.
-
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: All Bodies Count
Personal representation weighs heavily on the disabled because we don’t often see each other out in the world.
-
Weekly Geekery
Standing for reason. Touching everyone all the time always. Twitter: not a great contribution to the historical record. Will technology put an end to disability? A discussion with Slate. How the Internet’s libertarian experiment went rogue.
-
Something’s Wrong with Me
To help make the world I want more possible I have to write, I have to talk. Language is my medium.
-
Pain Is Not the Only Truth
Medical museums tend to be short on art and long on the preserved remains of bodies with diseases or deformities. Riva Lehrer, an artist with spina bifida, wants to change that. As she explained in a recent talk titled “Jarred:…
-
The Second Art Form
One summer day in 1985, a doctor calls my mother and tells her that there is empty space where parts of my brain should be. “I don’t understand it,” he says. “There should be muscle, and there’s nothing.” More tests,…
-
The Puzzle Factory
But their eyes, reasonably, come back to me for their startling brilliance, even on drugs, and for their alertness and their knowing.
-
Last Meal
They wanted to speak with me. They wanted to speak with my husband and me. They wanted to talk to us about our daughter.
-
All the Longing Left in the Body
“Sorry,” she said as she passed me in the entrance to the women’s room. “That’s my husband in the other stall. Don’t mind him.” She was going back to her car.