Month: March 2014

Ron Suskind’s son, Owen, was diagnosed with “regressive autism” after he stopped speaking at age 3. Years later, Ron used Iago, the parrot from Aladdin, to start a conversation:

I freeze here for a minute, trying to figure out my opening line; four or five sentences dance about, auditioning. Then, a thought: Be Iago. What would Iago say? I push the puppet up from the covers. “So, Owen, how ya doin’?” I say, doing my best Gilbert Gottfried. “I mean, how does it feel to be you?!” I can see him turn toward Iago. It’s as if he is bumping into an old friend. “I’m not happy. I don’t have friends. I can’t understand what people say.”

I have not heard this voice, natural and easy, with the traditional rhythm of common speech, since he was 2. I’m talking to my son for the first time in five years. Or Iago is. Stay in character. “So, Owen, when did yoooou and I become such good friends?”

Owen’s story continues in the must-see video above. And the rest of his dad’s moving essay is here. Meanwhile, Atlantic readers – spurred by Hanna Rosin’s story about her son Jacob – share their own stories about family members with autism spectrum disorder. Here’s Josh from London:

I feel like writing this article is a betrayal.

I feel like I will never truly be able to accurately represent [my brother’s] illness. Even calling it an “illness” is wrenching. He’s a regular person that cannot handle certain situations. The stigma attached to a permanent mental illness that affects sociability is a subtle sort of oppression to the person given it. I see my brother wrestle with his identity a lot. Some days he thinks he’s been over or misdiagnosed; other days he seems to know more than anyone else how much his illness affects him. I can’t even begin to imagine the pain that some interactions must cause him, though I can see it on his face.

“Small kids have small problems; big kids have big problems.” No phrase is truer when talking about a child on the autism scale. The anxieties and inflexibilities of a child are much simpler to deal with than the deep pits of despair and intractable problems of an adult. We are on the borderlands: My brother is just sick enough to be diagnosed, but not sick enough to differentiate himself from anyone else in society. He is always absolutely fine until the moment he’s not. We dragged him through school and university, but will we be able to drag him through the rest of his life?

Much more Dish on autism here.

James Hamblin highlights a doll designed with the body measurements of a typical 19-year-old American woman:

Lammily is the forthcoming plastic doll whose motto is, “Average is beautiful.” Her body shape is based on averages of data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control that is more often used to track the American obesity epidemic. She is not affiliated with Mattel’s Barbie.

Virginia Postrel sees problems:

Before embracing the reassuring claim that “average is beautiful,” consider the CDC statistics behind Lammily’s physique.

Based on a representative sample of 118 people, the agency reports that the average 19-year-old female American stands 5 feet 4 inches tall. She has a 33.6-inch waist and a 14.1-inch upper arm. She weighs 150 pounds, giving her a body mass index of 25.5. That indicates that she is overweight. BMI is, however, a crude and controversial measure. Better are the CDC’s direct body-fat measurements. They confirm the same bad news: The average 19-year-old’s body is about 32 percent fat, just at the threshold for obesity.

If Lammily were true to life, in other words, she’d have rolls of fat, not a firm plastic tummy. Her figure would turn off both beauty-minded girls and health-conscious parents.

Adrian Lee adds:

It doesn’t help, either, that there is only one race (in an increasingly diverse U.S., it’s tough to say instinctively that Caucasian remains the average), which is a bit intentional: Lamm has said that he wants the figure to have that “J. Crew look,” which is more than a little bit WASPy.

Amanda Hess doubts Lammily will solve anything:

The problem with Barbie is not that she’s the only doll on the block. If parents want their girls playing with dolls proportioned like normal humans, they already have the choice to buy Only Hearts Club dolls or Journey Girls. Enough parents buy these dolls that they continue to exist. Some of them are even sold in major toy stores. But way, way, way more parents buy Barbies, and her stranglehold over the doll market is the reason she gets so much flak. …

Barbie’s impossible frame will remain the impossible standard. And as long as it is, daughters of feminist mommies and daddies who hit daycare with a doll who looks exactly like all the other girls’ Barbies—only shorter and fatter—may not end up learning the lesson of beauty-at-any-size that the doll was created to deliver.

The news cycle is so punishing these days you might be forgiven for thinking the Obama era is over. But it isn’t. It’s at its peak in terms of impact, because policies, especially economic ones, take some time to have effect. Five years in, we have enough data – so reading through the Economic Report from the Council of Economic Advisers is therefore a helpful exercise. And it seems to me to be a rather impressive record – and utterly alien from the picture of gloom and dysfunction the Republicans are currently concocting.

I’ll restrict myself to core facts that are not in dispute, rather than the arguments in the report. Take the economy. Despite unprecedented austerity at the state and local government level, it’s now clear that the US has recovered from the Great Recession better than any other economy:

At least we can say with certainty that the stimulus didn’t fail, despite the silly denial in the GOP. The massive debt overhang – always the biggest drag on growth – has also been substantially reduced:

The deficit has come down at a rapid pace, without tipping us back into recession. And a key indicator of future debt – the cost of healthcare – is looking much better than it once did (although the causes for it remain disputed):

Then this amazing chart:

If someone had suggested to me in 2009 that by 2014, after the worst recession since the 1930s and after the huge debt pile-up in the Bush years that the US would be growing steadily, gaining energy independence, and cutting its deficit deeply, I’d have been amazed. We’ve so easily forgotten the extraordinary crisis Obama inherited. We shouldn’t. This presidency was always going to be judged on whether it could return the US to normal governance after the economic calamity of 2007, and after the disastrous wars that were far from over. I fail to see how Obama has failed in any critical respect. Not that it gets him much praise these days. For that we may have to wait for history’s judgment.

Today, I responded to Rod Dreher’s newfound victimhood; and I touted Rand Paul’s exclusive advantage among the GOP primary potentials: his appeal to Millennials. Palin earned a Hathos Red Alert; and we aired the concept of sub-atomic free will from a splendid essay by David Graeber. The window view made me want to visit France. Then two photographs: one pixellated, one GiFed. Check them both out.

The most popular post of the day was Hathos Red Alert; followed by The Christianist Closet?

See you in the morning.

Ted Pillow admires the late critic not just for his movie reviews, but for his often piercing insights into the nature of addiction (in 2009, Ebert revealed that he was a recovering alcoholic). Pillow has assembled “The Unofficial Roger Ebert Reader On Addiction,” pieced together from reviews and blog posts. One snippet:

The story of every drunk or addict is different in the details but similar in the outlines: Their days revolve around finding and using a sufficient supply of their substance of choice to avoid acute mental and physical discomfort. Eventually it gets to the point where everything else—job, family, self-image—is secondary. They all feel the need for something … the natural sources of pleasure have been replaced with higher-octane substitutes, which have burnt out the ability to feel joy. Going through the motions of what once gave them escape, they feel curiously trapped.

Another:

Why do alcoholics begin down the same hazardous road day after day? Any alcoholic knows that life is not all bad, that there comes a moment between the morning’s hangover and the night’s oblivion when things are balanced very nicely, and the sun slants in through the bar windows, and there’s a good song on the jukebox, and the customers might even start dancing. Each day is a window that opens briefly after the hangover and before the blackout, and you can never tell what you’ll see through that window. The alcoholic’s day consists of trying to keep that window open.

More here. Tons of Dish on addiction here.

A reader shares a story similar to the Seattle vice-principal who was fired from his Catholic high school for marrying his husband:

Although I’ve been advocating change in the Catholic Church towards the LGBT community for decades now, the news that Pope Francis seems to be open to civil unions has left me sad. Let me explain why.

In May 2006, two weeks before final exams, I was abruptly fired from my position as an ethics teacher at a major Catholic high school in a Southwestern state for being gay. The termination was performed in a way that was a public shaming before my students and the rest of the faculty. I had been at the institution for six good years – ones in which I distinguished myself by creating numerous new courses and campus organizations while being an active published scholar (I hold a Ph.D) – when the school principal learned I was gay.

Because I had been working without pause of any kind and needed to develop a love life (I was single), my best friend said it was time for me to settle down and take care of myself. He suggested that I create a profile on MySpace (Facebook was then in its infancy), and in a meek, very G-rated way, I mentioned on it that I was interested in having a relationship. Since the principal had recently not only permitted, but endorsed, such teacher infractions of the morality clause such as marrying after having been divorced and pregnancy by means of in vitro fertilization, I naturally felt that having a boyfriend in my own private life would be allowed as well. But as it turned out I was dead wrong.

After calling me into his office with the vice principals in tow, I was immediately discharged. One of the vice-principals and the football coach were instructed to personally escort me as I gathered and carried my classroom materials to my jeep. When I pressed the headmaster as to the reason of my firing, all he would say is, “You know why, you know why.” No amount of pleading could induce him (or any of the school administrators) to speak further on the matter. Moreover I could not appeal this termination to a review board or the bishop. By this time I was openly weeping and stammering “Why?” As all of this was going on, students stood around wondering, some of them crying. The last student who saw me that fateful afternoon asked, “What’s going to happen to you?”

(Incidentally that particular student was one of two or three kids at the school starting to come out of the closet. The following year the principal physically segregated them away from the heterosexual students by making them take them lunch in the campus ministry room.)

There are no words for how shattered I was, and still am. Almost at once I lost my ability to sleep. I was so anxious that I was only got two or hours of sleep a week. No exaggeration. Meanwhile, the students rallied behind me (for which I am deeply grateful), but the attorneys I consulted told me that there was nothing legally I could do. Soon the story made the local, then the national, then the international media. A powerful member of the school’s Board of Directors went out of her way to approach me in order to offer me a job in her large organization. Yet as soon as she found out I couldn’t sue the diocese, she quietly dropped her invitation by keeping herself “unavailable” or “in meetings” whenever I tried to follow up. I continued to endure debilitating chronic insomnia. Then, in time, something worse happened: my immune system broken down.

On Halloween morning 2008, I woke up to what seemed the worst flu of my life. I later discovered it was Epstein-Barr. Just getting out of bed was all I could I do, much less having to go about life. The fatigue was indescribable. That illness, alas, had a domino effect: my previous two-year “fight or flight” condition caused me to have a terrible hormone imbalance, but even that was still nothing. This was because I developed acute burning in my body while simultaneously feeling my skin starting to go numb. I learned a new word: neuropathy. Other mysterious symptoms (such as crippling gastrointestinal pain) lead me first to over 20 doctors and specialists, and afterwards to the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale. Along the way I had 9 MRIs, 2 Cat Scans, and 1 spinal tap. After many years, my diagnosis was finally in: extreme anxiety.

Through it all I have amassed tens of thousands of dollars of medical bills, and will almost certainly declare bankruptcy. As an adjunct professor, I am making only $12 an hour even though I am teaching the maximum load. I’ve long stopped making student loans payments. To get through life I do Mindfulness Meditation, but am also on 3 anti-anxiety/anti-depression medications. And I still have that initial symptom, insomnia. Though I have never once experimented with drugs (not even marijuana), I am contemplating trying ayahausca to see if I am able to put my life back together.

Pope Francis’ musings about permitting gays and lesbians to have a life which includes personal love and shared commitment have, alas, come too late to help me.