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Cornering Slim Shady in the Round Barn: On “Pinning Down” Neurodiversity
Neurodiversity. In contrast to the proprietor of Autism & Oughtisms [A&O] who reports first hearing the word less than a year ago, it’s been a little over a decade for me. It merited one...
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Response to A&O’s reply re: “Cornering Slim Shady in the Round Barn” and the...
Thank you for the kind words, A&O, and the thorough, thoughtful, and gracious reply. It’s a pleasure disagreeing with you. My view is that neurodiversity is polycentered, that it legitimately has...
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Autism In The Mirror
Comedian Glen Wool, musing on the sacking of the middle classes and treasuries of the United States and other nations by the looting class, has suggested that newspapers be divided into just two...
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How Extensive Is Autism’s Penumbra?
My fascination with autism from the start has had to do with what might be termed autism’s penumbra. In Autism & Oughtism’s post on avoiding the confusions engendered by this concept she explains,...
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Welcome, Crow’s Eye Readers
We’ve been getting a significant traffic bump from the recent comments thread and/or the blogroll (thanks, Jack) over at political blog The Crow’s Eye, and since it may not be readily apparent what the...
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Thoreau’s Visit from a Canadian Woodcutter — Description (pt. 1)
Rather than trying to spark a debate over postmortem diagnoses, the primary intent here is to showcase and encourage an appreciation for Thoreau’s fascination with and delight in his neighbor who was...
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Thoreau’s Visit from a Canadian Woodcutter — Conversations (pt. 2)
He was so genuine and unsophisticated that no introduction would serve to introduce him, more than if you introduced a woodchuck to your neighbor. He had got to find him out as you did. He would not...
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What Is Psychopathy’s Place In Neurodiversity?
Psychopaths loom large in the autistic anxiety closet. Our single-day traffic record at Shift Journal belongs to Scott Shea’s Spotting Psychopaths in the Workplace, which garnered nearly 1800 hits on...
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Thinking In Binary: Recently at Reddit
This conversation (below) along with a parallel comment on another thread caused me to dig up a Douglas Rushkoff quote that keeps coming back to me: “The digital realm is biased toward choice, because...
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Why Shouldn’t It Be Easy For Everyone? Why Shouldn’t It Be Easy For Autistics?
Just a quick companion piece here for Zygmunt’s account of his grappling with the social justice system of extroverts — a group that if not provably neurologically distinct, certainly seems to have its...
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Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra
The following is a mashup of two blog posts from two very different spheres of experience, presented without comment save for this: One is a brief, humorous account of the television-viewing habits...
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Still Half Drunk with Delight
Bee Swarms Mimic Human Brain Neurons to Make Decisions Swarms of bees and brain neurons make decisions using strikingly similar mechanisms, reports a new study in the Dec. 9 issue of Science. In...
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Pieces of Suicide
There’s a little back-and-forth echo that’s popped up between this site and Julia Bascom’s. This entry aims to amplify that little echo. Here’s Julia yesterday at her blog Just Stimming, after having...
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LA Times Scooped by Shift Journal (seven times)
Directly in the title of the fourth and final installment of a series on autism which has been by turns both predictably biased and reasonably informative, the LA Times last Friday ventured to print...
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Introducing The Loud Hands Project
Julia Bascom, author of “Quiet Hands” and “The Obsessive Joy Of Autism,” is launching a new project, pursuing ends that parallel and surpass some of the goals pursued at Shift Journal over the past...
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The Internet and the Iceberg Whole
Item: Ensign James “Peewee” Cobb, at 5’6”, 124 pounds, and 23 years old—in Pat Frank’s 1959 Cold War thriller Alas, Babylon—distinguishes himself as the only pilot in Fighting Forty-Four who never...
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Why Serpents, Dragons, and Shift (part 1)
You may know Shift Journal as the home from which Julia Bascom’s essay The Obsessive Joy of Autism went viral late last year, to the tune now of over 40,000 pageviews. If you’ve been paying attention...
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Why Serpents, Dragons, and Shift (part 2)
As I move back toward discussing Shift Journal, it bears mentioning that Andrew Lehman is a man who continues to have an extraordinary and privileged relationship with his unconscious. He had shared...
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Brief Hibernation
Apologies for the light posting as we gear up for an ambitious year. Encouragingly enough traffic remains strong, however the winter break anticipated late last year seems to have finally arrived....
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Hard Work, Highway Safety, and the Road Ahead
The smart money never would have bet that Shift Journal would come as far as it has. This was the case for a number of reasons, only one of which I want to talk about below. And for as far as we’ve...
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