This week, actor Wentworth Miller (best known for his roles as Michael Scofield in Prison Break and Captain Cold on The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow) came out publicly as Autistic. The 49-year-old performer, who has been a vocal LGBTQ activist and mental health advocate for years, revealed in an Instagram post that he discovered he was neurodivergent a year ago. In the time since discovering his status as an Autistic person, Miller has clearly been doing a lot of reading and reflecting. He wrote:

Right now my work looks like evolving my understanding. …

I have been Very Online for a very long time, and that’s come with a fair share of social media “successes” and a boatload of failures.

In the 1990s, I was a popular user on AOL’s Antagonist Games Network. Though I was in elementary school at the time, I was given a dedicated spot in the platform’s weekly caption contest and had a handful of fans and imitators. In my teen years, I blogged on Myspace and Livejournal and developed a modest audience, though none of my writing there every really took off. …

That's true if you look at the algorithm that is currently being used -- but to only look at the current algorithm is to ignore the many different iterations of the algorithm that preceded it, and the fact that Youtube deliberately altered their algorithm because developers inside the company noticed that the old one was radicalizing people. It's even an oversimplification for me to talk about an "old" versus "new" algorithm, because they are constantly changing -- so a single study is simply not enough to demonstrate or even to meaningfully test whether Youtube was pushing certain users toward radical alt-right content. We know from developers within the company who have now left and blown the whistle on it that this was, in fact, the case. NYT's Rabbit Hole podcast has some great interviews about this: https://www.nytimes.com/column/rabbit-hole

Initially, I picked up a copy of The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex expecting to read about how nonprofit organizations exploit the passion of their employees and volunteers, and push them to work far harder than is healthy or sustainable for them.

In my own writing, I am obsessed with how organizations feed off our culture’s hatred of “laziness” and manipulate workers’ emotions in order to keep them grinding to the point of exhaustion. And as an academic with a partner who has worked for numerous nonprofits, I know that labor exploitation doesn’t begin or…

“My kid has been asking a lot of questions about gender lately,” someone wrote in an email to me recently. “Do you have any picture book recommendations that would explain transness to them?”

“I’m doing research on the experiences of Autistic girls in elementary school,” wrote a teacher in my Twitter DMs. “Can I pick your brain for my research?”

“Your article about sensory meltdowns helped me empathize with what my daughter is going through,” said someone else. “Can we talk sometime about her?”

I receive a lot of questions from parents of Autistic and transgender children in my comments…

For over ten years I have taught at the Jesuit university from which I also received my Master’s degree and my PhD. I’ve been a student here, a postdoctoral researcher here, a part-time adjunct instructor, and now I’m a full-time professor. My relationship to the school runs deep. So too do my ambivalences, particularly in a month like Pride month, when it’s most clear to me that my existence as a transgender faculty member is contradictory and fraught.

Today I entered the university’s information commons (a computer lab and studying area connected to the library) to find this display celebrating…

On Saturday Night Live this week, Telsa CEO and Grimes’ paramour Elon Musk came out as having Asperger’s syndrome. During his opening monologue, Musk joked that he was the first-ever SNL host to have the disorder — or at least the first to admit to having it openly.

There’s a couple of issues with that remark. The first is that SNL very much had an openly Autistic host in the past, former cast member Dan Aykroyd. For years, Aykroyd has been vocal about being Autistic and has discussed how his own autistic special interest in the paranormal informed the writing…

I am a social psychologist, clinical assistant faculty member at Loyola University Chicago, and the author of the book Laziness Does Not Exist. Over the past few years, I have written extensively about the harm done by the Laziness Lie, an unspoken, yet pervasive cultural belief system that preaches the following:

1. Your worth is determined by your productivity

2. You cannot trust your needs and limitations

2. There is always more that you could be doing.

The Laziness Lie has a deep and troubling history, dating back to chattel slavery and the dawn of European imperialism. To this day, the…