The other evening, our building’s doorman announced that someone had dropped off the dehumidifying case for my hearing aids. This post is an attempt to explain why a normally unmemorable act was poignant. In the 1990s, I resisted an
Empathy
An Anthology That Leaves the Best for Last
For Artificial Divide, (2021) Robert Kingett and Randy Lacey collected sixteen stories by visually impaired and blind authors. As I lament in my essay “Twilight of a Stockbroker” (2017), there is almost no fiction created by blind authors in which
Can We Talk, Please?
The only way we will stop being a nation torn apart is to find humility in ourselves. That word, “humility,” jumped out at me last Wednesday evening during a Zoom discussion held by my Amherst college classmates and Professor Austin Sarat. The topic
Fairness in Love and Death
On April 12, the Washington Post published a questionnaire designed to show readers if they hold ableist assumptions. However, the questions reveal their authors’ own prejudices about matters of love and death. Throughout, for reasons explained in
Sunlight at Amherst?
I finally have the basic answer to the question I posed to my alma mater, Amherst College, nearly two years ago. Subscribers to this website may recall that, after being excluded from a Zoom presentation in 2021 due to the College’s reliance on an
Big Eyes
I resist the notion of “ableism” because it suggests that all nondisabled people (whoever they may be) discriminate against disabled people, which isn’t true. However, a visually impaired friend of mine, his sighted wife and sighted six-year-old