For many disabled and low-income people, the internet is a critical utility that remains unaffordable and largely unregulated — It was in March 2020, during the first few weeks of the shut-downs due to the COVID-19 pandemic, that my internet started to constantly crash. My broadband connection, which had always been decent if not top-notch, began to slow to a crawl. This tended to happen during the most inconvenient…

Nearly a century ago, the renowned British-born economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that technological progress would eventually lead to people only needing to work 15 hours a week. Several decades later, in 1965, the United States Senate subcommittee predicted that its citizens would only be working 14 hours a week…

I was born with a really severe case of clubfoot — the kind of case that required several surgeries as an infant and wearing a cast for the first few years of my life to correct. I still walk with a slight limp at times and even occasionally require a…

Trolls, death threats, and constant harassment — the risky business of being a woman journalist in the social media era — “Feminist cunts should die.” This was the subject of an email I received a year and a half ago. Wary but curious, I opened the message and confirmed that the feminist cunt in question was me. I didn’t delete the message. Instead, I printed it out and brought it to…

While women have made strides in media and publishing, it seems we’re still often subject to the whims of men — A year and a half ago, in the wake of the tragic Las Vegas shootings, I was struck by a single idea: If mental illness is such a prominent culprit in the phenomenon of mass shootings — as so many politicians and media pundits claim it to be — where…

Just because I don’t “look” disabled doesn’t mean I’m not — The doctor I’d emailed earlier that day agreed to a 20-minute phone call with me. He was known for performing a rare procedure I hoped might potentially restore some of the nerve function to my right leg, which had been compromised ever since I suffered severe herniation and cyst formation…

It often begins like this: I run into an issue with an authority figure who is a gatekeeper to a service or safety net I need to survive, or someone of some esteem in my town or an organization I do some sort of business with. It may be that…

Starting this summer when the Trump administration put its “zero tolerance” pilot program regarding immigration to work along the Mexican border— effectively separating parents and legal guardians from minor children by the thousands in the course of only a couple of months in a policy move that can only be…