fitness, in the modern economy, is the ability to engage in any given task, for as little or as long as one is conscripted, without asking what the project contributes to; propelled onward by a belief that the designers of the project have our collective interests in mind; that the project is always becoming more…
Our friend Tammy Zo (Pollard) needs our support. She is homeless, and in grave danger of losing her belongings, many of which are cultural archives and work that she has created herself. The fact that she needs our support is a consequence of our culture’s failure to maintain mutual support networks independent of institutional channels,…
continue reading call to action: mutual support for Tammy Zo
the etymology of the term ‘autism’ derives from an idea that a person with autistic traits is somehow isolated in a world of their own, that others can’t reach. i would offer that this is exactly wrong, and a projection by an observer with a mindset built from a variety of assumptions that prevents them…
The adaptation-to-pathology pipeline, pt 1
This series explores human traits and behaviors that are pathologized in the modern Western office-industrial complex, with the intent to spark cross-cultural discussion, and reassessment of what it means to be divergent. Two gait strategies, same anatomy, different verdicts—depending on what the ground is asking of the foot, and who’s asking the questions. Toe-walking—prioritizing the…
Many traditional cultures around the world—what I would call emplaced cultures—have sustained populations for millennia, within different watersheds, meeting different needs with different answers. Care distributed through community and across generations, calibrated to the place the community inhabits. Western medicine arrives with its own language—what is right and observable in every case across place and…
I’m a bi-gender person—masc and femme together in parallel unison. Like a Tootsie Roll, a Twinkie, a Ho-Ho, or a KitKat, I have a more brittle, masc outer layer; and a creamy, femme inner core. The femme part of me has been surprised when I have proposed activities to femme friends that I think of…
all of the reasons to hate ai and to love ai are valid, to a point. it does things for us that are helpful to have done for us. it does things to us that are harmful to have done to us. the main thing we should focus on is what it requires of us.…
There’s a mindset I keep seeing—in Buddhist sanghas, autism advocacy, establishment political discourse. I call it ‘cognitive centrism’—inhabiting a kind of middle ground, not because one felt their way there, but because they computed it. Like cognitive empathy: decode, then perform the answer. Here’s what it looks like: Someone defending an argument gets confronted with…
How Making Sense of My Child's Cannabis Use Helped Me Understand The Beauty of Human Adaptation
Does Domestication of the Human Species Really Represent Our Shared Future on the Planet? My almost-adult child is a gifted and challenged person, navigating the transition to adulthood in post-industrial American society. They’re a systems thinker, who aces every test, and who also can’t sit still or conform to the demands of a quiet workplace…
In part one, I explored my mother’s life and work, relative to the social conditions she experienced as a low-income, self-directed woman navigating the public health and housing systems, and asked whether, viewing her life through the arc of 76 years of continuous productivity in the fiber arts, different decisions could have been made resulting…