Diana Rose Newby // Why has COVID-19 killed more men than women? As the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 continues its global spread, infection patterns and fatality rates have prompted this question both among medical experts and in the popular media. As of late April, data confirmed this disparity in multiple regions of the world: in China,…
Tag: media
Technology, Paranoia, and the Therapeutic Encounter
“This isn’t therapy, what we’ve done. We’ve erased things.” — Heidi Bergman, Homecoming (TV version). Roanne Kantor and Anna Mukamal // This fall I had the pleasure of teaching a course on intersections between disability and technology. In putting together the syllabus, I quickly noticed that one of the most potent sites for this question…
Synapsis in Paris: “A Hundred Times More Dangerous than Terrorism”
Rising eco-conciousness in India and some thoughts on comparison Roanne Kantor // In what follows, I want to first extend the few scattered thoughts I presented at the CHCI conference in Paris about the shift in eco-conscious rhetoric that I observed in various sites in North India when I returned there for the first time…
Life Hacks: How Non-Specialist Journalism Fuelled the MMR Scandal
Emily Wheater // Cases of measles worldwide have quadrupled in the past year. For years we have been waiting to see what the consequences of vaccine scepticism would be. Now that they are apparent, they are as unsurprising as they are alarming. The issues around why people do or do not vaccinate themselves and their…
Monstrous Myths of Disability in M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass
Diana Rose Newby // Warning: This piece contains mild spoilers for the film Glass. Difference is the bread and butter of the superhero genre. And to a degree, so is disability. Think X-Men’s paraplegic Professor X; the blindness and depression of Marvel’s Daredevil; the facial scarring that catalyzes Harvey Dent’s murderous mental illness; Iron Man’s super-powered…
Heureusement
Sneha Mantri // In April 2009, France Alzheimer, a national organization created to “soutenir les malades et leur famille” (“support patients and their families”) released an advertisement entitled “Heureusement” (“Fortunately”). The commercial, developed by the advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi Paris, stirred up a minor controversy in France due to its bleak and unrelenting portrayal…
Hints to Mothers, 1837/2018
Livia Arndal Woods // Last month, there was some popular coverage of a recent article in the medical journal Obstetrics and Gynecology. Nathan S. Fox, MD’s “Dos and Don’ts in Pregnancy: Truths and Myths” frames its intervention as evidence-based common-sense pregnancy-best-practices in an “age of the internet” in which women are “bombarded” with more information…
“Peeing on this ad may change your life”
Credit: IKEA Sweden and Åkestam Holst By Livia Arndal Woods The January 13, 2018 episode of NPR’s “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me” just drew my attention to an interesting pop culture tidbit. It turns out that the Swedish women’s magazine Amelia ran an advertisement for a discount on an IKEA crib in which the price is…
Apocalypse, Cyborgs, and Gender (Pt. 1)
Kathryn Cai As a recent New York Times article notes, apocalyptic narratives—in the form of natural disasters and conflict with North Korea, for instance—and survivalist responses to it are on the rise in popular US discourses.[1] This tongue-in-cheek article notes that survivalism is gaining traction in young, affluent culture, “where the bombproof bunker has replaced…
Teaching Invisibilia: Culture and Conceptions of Mind, Mental Illness and Sanity in the United States
Abigail Jane Mack In “The Power of Categories,” an early episode of NPR’s popular podcast, Invisibilia, Lulu Miller and Alix Spiegel spin a web of scientific inquiry and human interest stories to interrogate the role—the power—categories have in shaping our lives. They tell us how early infants learn to discriminate between cat and dog before…