Neurodiversity and social change
Bill Wallauer is a videographer, a colleague of Jane Goodall. Click here to read Bill’s observations of chimpanzees behaving in ways that are fascinating to consider. Bill observes males displaying at waterfalls and in thunderstorms as individuals and groups transition into the sexual-display mode of communication. Jane Goodall wrote a famous passage describing these events. “All at once Evered charged forward, leapt up to seize one of the hanging vines, and swung out over the stream in the spray-drenched wind. A moment later Freud joined him. The two leapt from one liana to the next, swinging into space, until it seemed the slender stems must snap or be torn from their lofty moorings. Frodo charged along the edge of the stream, hurling rock after rock now ahead, now to the side, his coat glistening with spray. For ten minutes the three performed their wild displays while Fifi and her younger offspring watched from one of the tall fig trees by the stream...[Read More]
Andrew Lehman on 03/10/10 | No Comments | Read More
Sometimes I ask for feedback on pieces I’ve written before I post them, and sometimes I’m lucky enough to get a reply that’s in itself more compelling than what I’d intended to post in the fir...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 03/5/10 | 2 Comments | Read More
Fellow contributor Clay is happily bemused this week over at Comet’s Corner, reflecting on his recent release from some of the lifelong difficulties that finally led to his late-life diagnosis of au...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 02/26/10 | 5 Comments | Read More
Covert Ops in Autistic Self-Advocacy
Pandemic autism that’s hidden in plain sight, an autistic spectrum populated overwhelmingly by undiagnosed fellow travelers and autistics-in-hiding—if this is an accurate description of autism’s...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 02/19/10 | 4 Comments | Read More
[caption id="attachment_1325" align="alignleft" width="315" caption=""Note," she said, "that the Rolling Pin is on top.""][/caption] I’ve never been able to take in the big pi...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 02/12/10 | 1 Comment | Read More
Open Letter to Joel Johnson (Gizmodo)
Hi Joel – I’ve waited twelve years now to see the word “autistic” begin to come out of the closet in the tech world, but your otherwise dead-on post the other day about “iPad Snivelers”...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 02/6/10 | No Comments | Read More
Rich Shull: HBO Temple Grandin Special
Rich Shull writes with an intensity that befits a man struggling to whittle a rapid-fire slide show of thousand-word pictures down to a sentence or two at a time. Mr. Shull is part of a longstanding o...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 02/5/10 | 3 Comments | Read More
Mashup: Time, Death, and Ballastexistenz
There have been two significant deaths to me recently. My grandfather died just before Christmas. And Judi Chamberlin … died this weekend. And yet again I am coming up against my instinctive re...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 01/29/10 | 2 Comments | Read More
Autism and the Hacker Manifesto
Late last year I posted an entry which included a quick list of people and ideas my wife and I found heartening or helpful back before we fell out of active involvement with autism as a topic of publi...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 01/22/10 | 2 Comments | Read More
“Good manners applied without regard for differences are in fact bad manners.” Those words, wherever it was I found them maybe two decades ago, struck me as so apt, so applicable to what I had l...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 01/15/10 | 1 Comment | Read More
An Autistic Ethos: It’s All About Respect
I have been privy to conversation among sexually active librarians in which catalogers, above all other sub-specialties of librarianship, were identified—with good humor but still in earnest—as be...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 01/8/10 | No Comments | Read More
The idea that autism is humankind's oldest and largest secret society is one I've suggested on this site more than once; here I'd like to explicitly make the case for that idea. Members of secret soc...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 01/1/10 | 1 Comment | Read More
Geeks and Nerds: Autism’s Proxy Warriors
[caption id="attachment_956" align="alignleft" width="315" caption="High School Reunion (Satire)"][/caption] Two articles from the New York Times and one from Wired.com this week have been taking...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 12/25/09 | 1 Comment | Read More
“He’s Canadian, you know,” yields 30,800 hits when entered in a Google search, while about half that many are returned for “She’s Canadian, you know.” The phrase is a sort of running in-...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 12/18/09 | 2 Comments | Read More
“Start Understanding Your Website Traffic In Ways You Never Imagined” is the pitch offered by VisitorVille, a service which provides website owners with a Sims-like representation of visitors to e...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 12/11/09 | No Comments | Read More
Given the stereotype of the mute, “unreachable” autistic child that comes most easily to many people’s minds whenever autism is discussed, I’m well aware of what a sharp departure from that im...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 12/4/09 | 2 Comments | Read More
[caption id="attachment_818" align="alignleft" width="315" caption="The Author as Van Winkle, circa 1990"][/caption] For all that I’m still learning something new every week about what’s been h...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 11/27/09 | 1 Comment | Read More
Autistic Genius: Real or Imaginary?
[caption id="attachment_740" align="alignleft" width="315" caption="Genius (right), Italy, 320 B.C"][/caption] I’ve run across a couple of other writers recently who’ve made efforts to debunk t...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 11/20/09 | No Comments | Read More
Time for this Elephant to Leave this Circus
Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and Limbo. Those were the four big places to go. The weirdest of all was Limbo. Limbo was where they sent unbaptized babies. The reasoning was, “It wasn’t their f...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 11/13/09 | 3 Comments | Read More
There is a short story I read years ago that I’ve always remembered as a tiny masterpiece of irony. It was set among what are sometimes called First Nations people, but viewed with a slightly diff...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 11/6/09 | 2 Comments | Read More
While the notion of Everyday Autism Everywhere is still in the air around here (welcome, William Stillman readers), I’d like to further expand some of the ideas Mr. Stillman and I have been floating...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 10/30/09 | No Comments | Read More
There was a cascade of insights and epiphanies that was set off for me from coming to the knowledge, at the age of 36, that both myself and a 7-year-old girl who later became my stepdaughter occupied ...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 10/23/09 | No Comments | Read More
Grandma, They’re Not Santa Claus!
There’s a comic on XM Radio’s Canadian Comedy Channel who’s gotten good mileage out of his grandmother having told him that she does not believe in gay people. He recounts going around and aro...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 10/16/09 | No Comments | Read More
NightStorm is a 23-year-old Asperger-diagnosed autist, a watercolor artist and writer of original and fan fiction, a blogger and a lover of storytelling and role play. Like so very many others then, ...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 10/13/09 | No Comments | Read More
I THINK IN PICTURES. Words are like a second language to me. I translate both spoken and written words into full-color movies, complete with sound, which run like a VCR tape in my head. When som...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 10/9/09 | No Comments | Read More
“Stick to the image” is perhaps the most concise advice one can come away with from James Hillman’s archetypal psychology. When trying to see through to what is happening in a dream, or in an ...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 10/2/09 | No Comments | Read More
The Internet and the Iceberg Whole
Item: Ensign James “Peewee” Cobb, at 5’6”, 124 pounds, and 23 years old—in Pat Frank’s 1959 Cold War thriller Alas, Babylon—distinguishes himself as the only pilot in Fighting Forty-Fo...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 09/25/09 | No Comments | Read More
As a white boy in the Chicago suburbs who devoured every jazz biography I could get my hands on, my first encounter with the idea of “calling the children home” was a snippet from Nat Shapiro and ...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 09/15/09 | No Comments | Read More
They Call Me Quiet, But I’m A Riot
Ebulliently defiant on your car radio, Katie White—no matter what friendly guess or nickname she’s offered—is all sass and holding her ground: that’s not her name. Performing live, thoug...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 08/28/09 | No Comments | Read More
Neurodiversity: A Pre-emptive Reply
Hello, there. I’ve been expecting you. While the focus here at Shift may be a good bit more broad than that found at, say, Ballastexistenz, aspie rhetor, Whose Planet Is It Anyway?, or Asperge...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 08/28/09 | No Comments | Read More
I. Intelligence Intelligence, as most everyone will cheerfully agree, is distributed unevenly; some people have more of it, some have less. Rare, though, are those who will identify themselves as...[Read More]
Mark Stairwalt on 08/28/09 | No Comments | Read More
Left Brain / Right Brain Neurodiversity.com Ballastexistenz Asperger Square 8 Aspie Rhetor Whose Planet Is It Anyway? Action for Autism Autism Science Foundation Aspie Family Prism*Song Natural Variation Cat in a Dog’s World Aspitude! Comet’s Corner NTs Are Weird Existence is Wonderful Incorrect Pleasures Neurodiversity – The Book