Monthly Archives: January 2018

The other day, I took the younger child up to Dad’s retirement community. A grandma there saw me and R in the hallway and said, “Hey, you know something?” The funny thing is, yeah, I do know something. I knew exactly what she was going to say. But it would have been rude for me to tell her that. Plus I wanted desperately to be wrong. I wasn’t. “What?” I probably said. “That kid is going to grow up someday, […]

I can almost guarantee that whether you are liberal or conservative, male or female, old or young, you will disagree with the next sentence I write. Here it is: 95% of us got through 95% of the 20th century without saying the word “delete.” Doesn’t seem possible, does it, when we now rarely get through the day without using it? Up until the 1990s, most of us didn’t have home computers. And for the few that did, there was rarely […]

You speak me more than you speak any other sound. And yet you don’t know how to write me. You can’t type me. I’m not on the internet. I am literally unknown to instagram and most other sites. I’m not on urbandictionary.com. Dude, I’m not on dictionary.com. And yet, without me, you couldn’t talk. You would be very literally out of luck. Why is this? It’s partly because I’m so unstressed. Linguists love to talk about how I’m always unstressed. […]

I have not been feeling great about Dar’s progress lately. You may have sensed this. It’s times like these that it helps to remind myself that I can, if only for a brief moment, conjure up the Dar of an alternative timeline who was born without autism, born with the same intelligence level as you or me. If only for a moment, I can live in that alternate timeline. Sometimes Dar isn’t in the mood for tickles. But often, he […]

Why is this Martin Luther King Day unlike other Martin Luther King Days? Because today marks the 50th time that we’re recognizing his birthday without him. A half-century of coming to terms with what we lost, of trying to live by his example. This is also the first MLK Day under the 45th President. It only seems like he’s been President for 50 years. If Dr. King was still with us at the tender age of 88, what would he […]

Yesterday, I noticed the press focus on a new series of tweets by Kumail Nanjiani. Although I follow fewer than a hundred actor-celebrities on Twitter, I’ve been cheerfully following Nanjiani for years. I’m thrilled for his success with the excellent film The Big Sick, especially considering he had to carve that out of a very personal place. Digging deeper into that personal place is what got him some of this week’s headlines. (The cynical Oscar-watcher in me notes the timing, […]

This post appeared at Filmotomy. “The Florida Project” was Walt Disney’s 1960s-era code term for a planned East Coast amusement park, an euphemism justified by Disney’s fear that Orlando property owners would demand that Disney reimburse them at market rates. The secrecy worked, but what Disney couldn’t prevent was the hotel and motel industry’s successive Florida Project, a mini-gold rush that snapped up all the land within miles of the Magic Kingdom’s property. Nor could the Mouse House do much about […]

Al-Jazeera called me from Qatar about 30 minutes before the beginning of the Golden Globes broadcast. They had live-interviewed me twice before, and I suppose I had done well enough to warrant a third invite. Al Jazeera wanted to put me on the air during the broadcast, at about 6:30pm California time. I said yes, although my wife and I were about to use our house to throw a friend a surprise 50th birthday party. That all went fine. He was […]

Have I never dedicated a blog post to this before? Well here it is! Most parents know that dinner rituals matter. Most parents try to get their kids to sit down to eat with them. Most parents expect their children to stop staring at a screen and start staring at their food for at least a few minutes every evening. Most parents don’t have severely autistic children. It’s hard to get our little bundle of neuroses to stay still in […]

Let’s begin the year with a brand-new video that I co-wrote and directed; let’s sing and dance on the way to justice.