Nut grafs or otherwise relevant excerpts from entries which appeared last year at this time. • • • • • • • • 2009 • Autism, Dance, Performance and Mir...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 11/22/10 | No Comments | Read More
Author Archive
your dreams will be reduced down to breathing, and you will be grateful
The thing about not-being-a-person is: They will say those people and the price of being a person is to nod and agree that yes, those people aren’t people at all. They will have no idea who they are talking to. You yourself will start to forget, too. They will say a million small things that sow the seeds for violence done against you, and you will smile and let them. You will do math, constantly. How much do I want to be a person today? How much do I want this project to succeed? How much honesty can I afford? How much dishonesty will kill me? What is the cost of coming out? Is there a way to delay, soften, transmute? How long can I survive as half a person? Ever since the world ended ... I don't go out as much. People that I once befriended, just don't bother to stay in touch. Things that used to seem so splendid, don't really matter today. It's just as well the world ended -- it wasn't working anyway. Your dreams will be reduced down to breathing. [Read More]
Julia Bascom on 03/5/12 | 2 Comments | Read More
Nut grafs or otherwise relevant excerpts from entries which appeared last year at this time. • • • • • • • • 2009 • Neurodiversity Deep Sea Diving We...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 11/15/10 | No Comments | Read More
Nut grafs or otherwise relevant excerpts from entries which appeared last year at this time. • • • • • • • • 2009 • Neurodiversity and Speech The mal...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 11/8/10 | No Comments | Read More
Nut grafs or otherwise relevant excerpts from entries which appeared last year at this time. • • • • • • • • 2009 • Neurodiversity, Neuropsychology and ...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 11/1/10 | No Comments | Read More
For all its charms, the weblog platform does also bury older content for no better reason than that newer material has come along. While we all like to feel we’re improving, whether you are writ...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 10/25/10 | 1 Comment | Read More
The Intersection of Autism and Politics (not where you think it is)
“If we were a voting block, we could run the country.” That’s the phrase I kept coming back to eleven or twelve years ago now, when the full extent of autism’s unbroken spectrum first came ...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 10/22/10 | 6 Comments | Read More
For all its charms, the weblog platform does also bury older content for no better reason than that newer material has come along. While we all like to feel we’re improving, whether you are writin...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 10/18/10 | No Comments | Read More
Are Autistics More Honest? If So, What Then?
The placement of Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg’s Word of Honor immediately prior to this entry is intentional, as it makes for an opportunity to bring up some related observations about autism and honesty...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 10/15/10 | 2 Comments | Read More
For all its charms, the weblog platform does also bury older content for no better reason than that newer material has come along. While we all like to feel we’re improving, whether you are writin...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 10/11/10 | No Comments | Read More
Ari Ne’eman, Behavior-Modding the Lovaasians
The showbiz maxim “There’s no such thing as bad publicity” is one that was nicely illustrated less than a month ago at MTV’s Video Music Awards, when Taylor Swift gave over her entire spotligh...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 10/8/10 | 4 Comments | Read More
For all its charms, the weblog platform does also bury older content for no better reason than that newer material has come along. While we all like to feel we’re improving, whether you are writin...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 10/4/10 | No Comments | Read More
Versatile Blogger Award (and retrospective nod to Andrew Lehman)
It's hard to imagine anyone I'd rather have Shift Journal be tagged by for the Versatile Blogger Award than the grand old codger of autism blogging, early friend of the site, and man who's seen it all...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 10/3/10 | 3 Comments | Read More
For all its charms, the weblog platform does also bury older content for no better reason than that newer material has come along. While we all like to feel we’re improving, whether you are writin...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 09/27/10 | 2 Comments | Read More
“Autism” the Word, as Glimpsed in the Wild
The autism wars will likely continue, I predict, for some time after the larger culture has rendered its own decision and moved on. Or so has run my thinking, anyway, since I stumbled onto Mom-NOS�...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 09/23/10 | 7 Comments | Read More
For all its charms, the weblog platform does also bury older content for no better reason than that newer material has come along. While we all like to feel we’re improving, whether you are wri...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 09/20/10 | No Comments | Read More
The Unbroken Spectrum: The Shared Closet
Inveterate list maker Lili Marlene has carved out another instructive subset from her still growing referenced list of now “... 174 famous or important people diagnosed with an autism spectrum condi...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 09/17/10 | 1 Comment | Read More
For all its charms, the weblog platform does also bury older content for no better reason than that newer material has come along. While we all like to feel we’re improving, whether you are writi...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 09/13/10 | No Comments | Read More
As those of her generation are able to do, my mother the other day—with just the slightest stern shake of her head—remarked at “How much has changed,” since I was a child, and even more since ...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 09/10/10 | No Comments | Read More
Comments Policy (and Contributor Guidelines)
It is not an easy thing to turn down the burner on a successful alchemical setup, an opus contra naturam which has been known to actually produce gold out of base metals. Shift Journal has contribut...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 09/6/10 | 1 Comment | Read More
Imagine, just as an exercise, that beyond the one percent of the population diagnosable with autism, there is another four percent whose cognitive style is describable under the less rigorous category...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 09/3/10 | 2 Comments | Read More
“Then she led Psyche into a great chamber heaped high with mingled grain, beans, and lintels (the food of her doves), and bade her separate them all and have them ready in seemly fashion by night. �...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 08/20/10 | No Comments | Read More
Over at Welcome to Normal, in a comments guideline that is a gem of brevity Caitlin Wray asks that commenters “Tackle issues, not people.” What I’d like to do here is remind that time has a wa...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 08/13/10 | 5 Comments | Read More
I don’t think any of us would call it a game, but I’ve noticed a number of people who write or comment on autism sites seem to approach the issue of defining autism as a “zero-sum game,” in th...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 07/30/10 | 11 Comments | Read More
One of the struggles autistic people have begun to join over the last decade or so is over who is to be allowed to define autism, and on what terms. Is it to be defined from the outside, by those wh...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 07/23/10 | 8 Comments | Read More
First, obsessions. Dr. Michael Burry, according to the profile of him woven into Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, is a man of serial obsessions. His Aspergers diagnosis was arrived at during the cour...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 07/16/10 | 5 Comments | Read More
Big Trucks and the Work that Needs Doing
Years ago, before the coming of the cell phone, I was the driver of a Freightliner FLD 120, an imposing, long-nosed boat of a semi tractor that crisscrossed the United States and parts of Canada with ...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 07/9/10 | 2 Comments | Read More
The ridiculously named and sublimely informative BoingBoing last Sunday posted an article about the interplay of language and visual perception as it affects how we see and speak about color and space...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 07/2/10 | No Comments | Read More
The Unbroken Spectrum: Stockholm Syndrome
This series of entries on the“unbroken spectrum” began as an effort to outline just a couple mechanisms which work to obscure the demographic where paler shades of the autistic spectrum shade over...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 06/25/10 | 5 Comments | Read More
Children of Lilith (autism contemplated from a silent and considerable height)
“Longevity, like intelligence or good looks, is largely a matter of heredity,” writer Edward Abbey noted, adding, “Choose your parents with care.” Our parents also pass on to us their storie...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 06/18/10 | 4 Comments | Read More
Autism and the Enlightenment: Sleeping Dogs And Sleeping Giants
I don’t expect that Shift Journal is unique in pursuing this line of thought, but it strikes me that three contributors have now seen fit to comment on the relationship of autistics and “belief.�...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 06/11/10 | 4 Comments | Read More
