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kottke.org posts about Steve Silberman

“The Tombstone of Democracy”

Yesterday, there was yet another school shooting on a college campus, this time at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A UNC graduate student walked into a classroom building and murdered a science professor with a gun. The campus was on lockdown for hours. The front page of The Daily Tar Heel today consists of text messages sent to and from students during the lockdown:

the front page of The Daily Tar Heel listing text messages sent to and from students during a school shooter lockdown

An incredible and powerful design โ€” on Mastodon, Steve Silberman called it “the tombstone of democracy, courtesy of the NRA”. As a nation, we’ve spent more than 20 years and trillions of dollars fighting the “War on Terror” but won’t do a damn thing about the self-imposed terrorism of gun violence. The people sending and receiving those texts โ€” they are TERRIFIED. And this happens regularly in the US, in pre-schools and on college campuses alike. We are a sick nation.


NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity

Neurotribes

Added to the series of things I thought I posted about but never did is Steve Silberman’s new book, NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, out next week.

What is autism? A lifelong disability, or a naturally occurring form of cognitive difference akin to certain forms of genius? In truth, it is all of these things and more-and the future of our society depends on our understanding it. WIRED reporter Steve Silberman unearths the secret history of autism, long suppressed by the same clinicians who became famous for discovering it, and finds surprising answers to the crucial question of why the number of diagnoses has soared in recent years.

Jennifer Senior wrote a largely positive review for the NY Times.

“NeuroTribes” is beautifully told, humanizing, important. It has earned its enthusiastic foreword from Oliver Sacks; it has found its place on the shelf next to “Far From the Tree,” Andrew Solomon’s landmark appreciation of neurological differences. At its heart is a plea for the world to make accommodations for those with autism, not the other way around, and for researchers and the public alike to focus on getting them the services they need. They are, to use Temple Grandin’s words, “different, not less.” Better yet, indispensable: inseparably tied to innovation, showing us there are other ways to think and work and live.

Update: NeuroTribes has won the prestigious 2015 Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction. The Guardian’s Stephen Moss interviewed Silberman about the prize and book.

Silberman was born in New York, the son of two teachers who were communists and anti-war activists. “I was raised to be sensitive to the plight of the oppressed. One of the things I do is frame autism not purely in a clinical or self-help context, but in a social justice context. I came to it thinking I was going to study a disorder. But what I ended up finding was a civil-rights movement being born.”

He says the fact he is gay also conditioned his approach. “My very being was defined as a form of mental illness in the diagnostic manual of disorders until 1974. I am not equating homosexuality and autism โ€” autism is inherently disabling in ways that homosexuality is not โ€” but I think that’s why I was sensitive to the feelings of a group of people who were systematically bullied, tortured and thrown into asylums.”


Susan Kare’s sketchbook

Steve Silberman has a nice piece on Susan Kare, the woman who designed the original icons for the Macintosh, including a never-before-seen look at her initial sketches for some of them.

Inspired by the collaborative intelligence of her fellow software designers, Kare stayed on at Apple to craft the navigational elements for Mac’s GUI. Because an application for designing icons on screen hadn’t been coded yet, she went to the University Art supply store in Palo Alto and picked up a $2.50 sketchbook so she could begin playing around with forms and ideas. In the pages of this sketchbook, which hardly anyone but Kare has seen before now*, she created the casual prototypes of a new, radically user-friendly face of computing - each square of graph paper representing a pixel on the screen.


How to write books

Before embarking on writing his new book, Steve Silberman asked a bunch of authors (like Cory Doctorow, Jonah Lehrer, and Carl Zimmer) for their best advice about writing books.

A few things became clear as soon as their replies came in. First of all, I’ll have to throttle back my use of Twitter and Facebook to get this writing done (and I may never rev up my idle Quora account after all.) Secondly, scheduling intervals of regular exercise and renewal amid the hours of writing will be essential.