Monthly Archives: February 2015

A funny thing has happened to Latin@s on their way to full representation in Congress, other political offices, and the media. They’ve come to embody everything that is quintessentially American in a way that Cesar Chavez could only have dreamed about. When Chavez died in 1993, the most recent U.S. Census, the one from 1990, distinguished between Whites and Hispanic/Latinos as races. These days, “Hispanic origins are not races” and have their own checkmarking category apart from the race questionnaire. […]

We interrupt this blog and its years of amazing articles about autism to bring your attention to another A: Adjunct Awareness. Regular readers know that I pretty much never divert from the subject of raising a kid on the spectrum, so this must be important, right? In fact, this directly relates to just how good a parent I can be. Today, February 25, 2015, is the first-ever National Adjunct Walkout Day (#NAWD). If you’re anything like most of the students […]

People who don’t pay much attention to the Academy Awards might well have heard something about this being the Whitest Oscars since 1998. That meme conveniently defines diversity only in terms of the nominees for acting (not editing, sound, makeup, or what-have-you), and even then, only in terms of skin color – not nationality, not sexuality, not gender, not class circumstances. So the #oscarssowhite hashtag and meme gets discussed on all the “news” programs, joked about by all the late-night […]

Gung Hay Fat Choy! Yesterday, the Year of the Sheep began. As fans of the St. Louis football team cry desperately every year: Go Rams! As a kid, I used to look at the Chinese zodiac and wonder why the Chinese chose those animals. I mean, no one’s quarreling with dragon and tiger, but rat, rooster, rabbit? Just seems that if you could choose the 12 mightiest animals on Earth, you might go with lion, bear, elephant, whale, or some […]

Just got back from a long weekend in Napa. How was it? Vacations with an autistic child are…difficult. Even just the planning phase is full of storm clouds and terrors. Before I had a kid, I looked forward to the day that I’d be able to take him or her to Disneyland. Now I dread the thought. But if we don’t travel, we feel trapped. Besides, vacations have proven to have a salubrious effect on Dar…sometimes. Other times, we wonder […]

  Which one of this year’s eight Best Picture nominees can expect to finish the week covered in glory? Will the brass ring belong to Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, considering it just became the first Best Picture nominee since Return of the King (2003) to earn more domestic dollars than the other nominees combined? (This is harder with more than five nominees; even the #1 film of all time, Avatar, couldn’t pull it off.) You might think that the country […]

  As I write this, on February 12, 2015, today is the day that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln would have both turned 206. They were born on the same day, in different hemispheres, in 1809. Adam Gopnik’s excellent book Ages or Angels is probably the best, most extensive consideration of this historical coincidence. As Gopnik suggests that we ask, do we know any other single day to have served as point of origin to any other multiple of figures […]

We ought not to have gone skiing before we knew wifey was pregnant. We ought not to have ridden that roller coaster before we knew wifey was pregnant. We ought not to have drunk wine that one night before we knew wifey was pregnant. We ought to have known the moment he was born, and it took ten seconds for the doctors to make him cry. We ought to have known from the first two weeks of his life, which […]

As we approach the finish line of this year’s Oscar race, we might ask: does anyone ever remember these things? Well, people are still talking about one from 20 years ago; America’s leading podcaster, Bill Simmons, is, according to the L.A. Times, “still worked up about [the] Oscar race that saw The Shawshank Redemption and Pulp Fiction lose the best picture award to Forrest Gump.” Mark Harris recently called the contest the first “Balls Argument” of the Internet era, writing that […]

Right now, liberals and Democrats are apoplectic that Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu, is preparing to address the United States Congress in a few weeks, shortly before his own make-or-break election in Israel. The Dems’ problem is that the speech was arranged by Netanyahu and House Speaker John Boehner, without any consultation with President Obama. Edward-Isaac Dovere at Politico has a pretty good summary of where we are: Dianne Feinstein said any such speech “violates all the protocol that […]