I wrote a manifesto for the great radio-craft website Transom.org.

Calling Transom a website feels off: It’s not a magazine or a blog (though it does publish work that belongs to both media); it’s not a podcast or a radio show, but it releases those, too. The word I keep landing on is resource. When I was 18, I nurtured many obsessions, but the biggest slices of my brain belonged to contemporary fiction, “college music,” and narrative radio – a genre I didn’t have language for; I just knew there was something different, and deeply awesome, about Joe Frank and This American Life and a few other shows I caught at odd hours. I obliquely fantasized that someday I would make work that sounded like this, but didn’t really know how to start. I volunteered at KCRW, where I saw Joe Frank taping his show through a sheet of soundproof glass – the extent of my apprenticeship – before I returned to stuffing envelopes. Around that time I bought the comic book TAL commissioned from Jessica Abel on how to make radio, which I devoured and then mostly ignored in my own shambolic college-radio productions.

Many years later, I got the chance to produce and host a podcast for KCRW, and I discovered Transom, which became the crash-course I needed to bring myself up to speed, covering technical questions about the best mic to buy or craft topics like writing for the ear. After studying at the Transom Traveling Workshop with the dean of American radio professors, the legendary Rob Rosenthal, I’ve since taught radio (“audio storytelling”? I hate the word podcast) at a few universities, and Transom has always been (along with Abel’s book-length expansion of her ‘98 comic) my de facto textbook.

Which is why, when I got a call from a radio station asking for advice on how to teach audio journalism to a blind intern, my first thought was: There must be a Transom manifesto about this! I’d also just met Sophie Crane, Transom’s new director (her awesome, tone-setting manifesto is worth a read). Sophie invited me to write something, and shortly thereafter I saw a hole in the literature! So I wrote it! Please read it and then share it with the person in your life who’s in charge of hiring audio producers.

SUNY on Monday

Speaking of writing for the ear, and listening to literature, in a few days I’ll be on stage in Albany with Adam Colman, where we’ll be continuing a decade-long conversation we’ve been having about the relationship between writing and radio as a part of the New York Writer’s Institute. April 27 at the University at Albany, details here.

Kill It With Fire

I got to talk to one of my all-time favorite tech writers, Paul Ford

Watch on YouTube: Andrew Leland: Hacking Disability with AI | The Aboard Podcast 2026-04-21

After Gideon Lewis-Kraus appeared on Paul Ford and Rich Ziade’s Aboard podcast to talk about his Soul of a New Machine-level epic inquiry into the status of Claude’s “mind”, he mentioned (off-mic) to Ford that I had recently gone down a rabbithole of disability vibe-coding and general accessibility-related high-tech geekery and that Paul might be interested in hearing about my adventures. Paul and Rich ended up inviting me on their show to talk about it, which was a lot of fun, and also felt a little like being interviewed about an article that I’ve yet to write (and I guess that I hope to write soon?). Aboard is a marketing podcast for an AI-driven software agency (I think this means they help companies build things – databases, websites, enterprise digital whatnot – leveraging AI to do it cheaper but using their decades of development experience to avoid the pitfalls of AI-generated code; wow I guess the marketing worked). But (here we go again): branded podcast doesn’t do it justice! This is because Paul Ford isn’t merely a software capitalist as he drily described himself during our conversation. Like Transom, I’ve been reading Ford for most of my professional life – not as a radio producer, but as someone interested in the intersection of culture, literature, and technology. Ftrain was one of the early good blogs, and remains so. Bloomberg once dedicated an entire print issue to his now-classic, novella-length essay, “What Is Code?” He built the original harpers.org! He has written many great essays for magazines!

He’s also a huge Emacs nerd, which in concert with the decades of thinking and writing he’s done has more or less perfectly positioned him as another guide for me as blindness and curiosity drive me deeper into the colossal cave network inside my computer. Those explorations don’t at all require me to use AI – and indeed a vocal portion of the open-source community I’ve been lurking in deplores genAI about as much as the literary communities I inhabit do (including the one I live in: my wife the English professor seems outraged any time she catches wind that I’ve been interacting with Claude, and now our 13-year-old also guilt-trips me when he sees text that I’m not typing generating itself across my screen.)

But AI is also a huge win for accessibility. I have too much residual vision to make much daily use of the multimodal AI stuff, but people in the blind community are enjoying a degree of visual autonomy never before imagined – asking LLMs to describe everything from graphic novels to airport terminals in real time, with conversational followups. My main use case has been vibe coding. Usually if something breaks accessibility on my computer – an app I want to use won’t talk, or invert colors won’t invert right, etc – I have to file a bug and hope for the best. But especially when I’m using open-source tools, these days Claude Code can usually remediate things for me in about as much time as it used to take me to complain about it and maybe file a bug report that would go nowhere. And blind (and other disabled) people are doing this on a pretty impressive scale (see my hypothetical future article about this for details).

The tension here – between the joy disabled people are experiencing using this new tech, and the very real, very rational hatred that many people feel toward the tech – is an old conflict. It brings to mind the debates over plastic straws: environmentalists rightly deplored them as pointless landfill filler, and some people with certain disabilities can’t drink a cup of water without them.

The second episode of PJ Vogt’s superb two-part Search Engine series on self-driving cars captures this conflict neatly. It reports out the battle between Boston labor activists (who argue, compellingly, that Waymo will put thousands of Uber drivers out of work), and the disability community, who are hopping up and down at the prospect of regaining the most basic (and, in most of the country, necessary) freedom of American contemporary life: getting in your car and going somewhere, on your own terms (vs. being denied service because of your guide dog, or because the driver refuses to cross state lines or city limits, or simply that there’s a surge, or no drivers available). Commuting 2-3 times a week from Western Mass to central CT the last two years for my teaching fellowship has been, in a word, enervating. Listening to the Waymo episode of Search Engine solidified a feeling I assumed I had about self-driving cars, but hadn’t really explored or articulated before. Wesleyan (generously) gave me a travel stipend that allowed me to occasionally cover a leg of the commute with an $80-$120 (before tip) Uber. And throughout my fellowship I’ve maintained a light confusion about why this ~75-minute ride, even with the financial burden lifted, and the convenience of door-to-door service, often feels significantly more draining – physically, psychically, spiritually – than when I walk 20 min to the bus stop (or L. drives me), then take a 35-min intercity bus to Springfield Union Station, then wait for an hourlong Hartford Line (or Amtrak) to Berlin or Meriden, then a 20-min Uber the rest of the way (because waiting for a bus for that last leg would push the commute into the 3-4 hour zone and I just can’t.) But even though that chazerai takes more than twice as long as the straight Uber, and still involves at least one Uber to cover the last 20 min, I just feel more human when I do it. And I think this is connected to the Waymo thing: there’s something about being trapped in the back of someone else’s car, watching them scroll through YouTube as they navigate highway traffic with their non-dominant hand, missing my exit, blasting their intense aromas (from weed vapes to VapoRubs). The bus and train have these aromas too, to be sure, but they’re more diffuse (literally and, like, emotionally). I don’t feel as trapped, forced into a conversation, entering someone else’s space, or someone else entering mine (at least my driveway). Ultimately, as with all tech (especially assistive tech), it’s about independence: the autonomy of the car engenders the autonomy of the rider. I’m sure the self-driving car revolution will add a whole menu of new complications and problems to our world, but I’d be lying if I said that when they become commercially available, I won’t be among the first in line to sign up.

Illustration by Aidan Koch via Signal Hill

The Snail on the Hill

The occasion for sending this newsletter is, as always, to point toward something I made that is not this newsletter, which I have festooned and padded with other announcements and warbled greetings because somehow I’ve decided that’s how newsletters are supposed to sound.

I have a story in the second issue of Signal Hill, an awesome new audio magazine (aka podcast) that launched in February 2025 and got a bunch of love from year-end best-of lists (including the New Yorker, the Atlantic, BBC, and a write-up in Columbia Journalism Review). My story is about my experience of getting Long Covid, which I still have, though not as heinously as I did a year ago. Writing this “experimental audio essay” was an interesting editorial experience. A few years ago, when I was still producing the Organist, the arts-and-culture podcast I helped make for KCRW and McSweeney’s, my co-producer, Ross Simonini, was always pushing me to make it weirder, to hold the listener’s hand more loosely, or let it go entirely. In our partnership, I’d ended up more accountable to our institutional bosses, and I often felt myself channeling or projecting their relative conservatism (at least compared to Ross’s more aggressively avant-garde tendencies), pulling us back toward those comfortable hallmarks of national magazine writing (signposts! ledes! kickers! hooks! angles! legibility!). It was a productive tension, and I think if the Organist succeeded, one reason was because Ross made it weirder, and because I modulated Ross’s weirdness. Also, to be sure, I am a fucking weirdo, and KCRW and McSweeney’s aren’t exactly staid journalistic institutions, so this is all deeply relative.

When I was making the Signal Hill piece, I was reminded of my arguing-with-Ross days, in a good way. My first and perhaps second drafts of that story really wanted to be a kind of shambolic Weekend Edition (NPR) story about the politics of masking: Even though the last 18 months of my life have been pretty, profoundly disrupted by Long Covid, I still found myself doing lots of indoor activities masklessly: dining at restaurants, teaching classes, shopping for overpriced boxes of premium British tea, etc. I wanted to make a story that interrogated that question – basically, if COVID fucked me over, and that happened because of my lax masking practices, why am I still behaving this way, inviting further disregulation and cognitive decline? With a corollary question of: if the answer is that masking feels socially fraught and awkward (it does, still) then what’s the power and promise of a visible group of “cool people” making masking a part of their culture of coolness? Or put another way: why has one stronghold of masking culture in 2025 become, apparently, extremely cool leftist/queer/DIY/noise/punk spaces? I interviewed a bunch of people from that milieu in wmass (where I live): my friend who runs a wonderful mask-required lesbian bookstore and DIY music venue; a chronically ill podcaster who told me they’d had serious talks with their friends about producing porn with actors wearing KN95s to sexifiy/destigmatize masking… I was about to interview Deerhoof, who require masking at their shows when they can (and strongly encourage it when they can’t), but then I got COVID again and had to cancel…

But the Signal Hill editors, who are kind, cool, and smart (a rare combination), were extremely not into this angle. They liked me contemplating my experience of Long Covid; they really didn’t like me wandering around the hipster lesbian landscapes of Western Mass and wading into the debates around the politics of masking. Their argument was, essentially, we know this already. We’ve had these conversations, these arguments; we’ve listened to Death Panel, none of this is new; please just move on. Which I found surprising, because in my life, whenever I brought these questions up, people would be like I know! Why do all the queer/leftist spaces mask more than everyone else! Please do that story, I’m fascinated! or similar. What I ended up deciding was that it was a generational divide. I’m not sure how old the Signal Hill editors are, but I think it’s safe to say that I and most of the people I talk to about my ideas for podcasts are at least ten if not 15-20 years older than they are. And in their (hip, avant-podcaster) milieu, the question of masking is perhaps like the question of pronouns. There was a period (a few years ago) when my wife and I would somehow learn that one of our son’s elementary-school classmates used they/them pronouns, and we were (in retrospect) absurdly delicate in our curiosity, which was met with perhaps the first legitimate pre-teen eye-roll of O’s young life. To us, we were intrigued, performatively sensitive; to him, the question of his friends’ pronouns was like the question of their hair color, or peanut-allergy status. Just a thing. Shut up about it already. Move on.

And I realized that Signal Hill‘s editors understood Signal Hill‘s listeners far better than I did, and probably the way I was excited and out of touch talking about “Queer spaces” and “Chronically ill trans sources” sounded to their ears like “when did your friend start using they/them pronouns” did to our son’s ears in 4th grade. So I followed their advice and jettisoned all my tape of hanging out with recumbent, ill, queer masked activists and instead wrote a suitably weird, personal piece of Bojack Horseman fanfic about my own j.v. experience of chronic illness.

Link to the entire issue, including stories from weird-radio luminaries like Mitra Kaboli and Rachel James, is here.

I’m still on Substack, still planning on leaving, but it’s hard, and that’s the point

A colleague expressed wry shock that I was on Substack. It’s become the same joke people used to make about podcasts, and made about blogs before that: everyone has one; almost all of them are terminally self-indulgent and boring. But mine is different! No, it isn’t. But I have been doing “this” (posting “new media” on the “internet”) for my entire adult life, and parts of my adolescence too. For someone of my vintage (I just turned 45), this was once novel, special; today, when being a YouTuber or otherwise monetizing one’s online presence is a common aspiration for what feels like a majority of contemporary young people (but not O.! At least not yet, not that I know of…), to crow about how long one has been posting self-indulgent bullshit online doesn’t have the same ring to it. But that doesn’t mean I’m about to stop!

I have threatened to ditch Substack for an open-source or at least less-heinous platform in my last few newsletters but didn’t have time to weigh the relative benefits and intricacies of Ghost v. Buttondown v Listmonk, etc. And I still haven’t. So I’m going to stop announcing on this newsletter that I’m leaving Substack until I do. Which might take me a while because the place I am leaving it for (right now I’m thinking listmonk) is aggressively un-user-friendly, at least for a relatively non-technical person like me. Why am I doing this to myself? I am tempted to make a grand, virtue-signalling argument about why I cannot abide by allowing my self-promotional navel-spelunking to take place under the aegis of a company that platforms Nazis, the reality is that if I found Substack’s web form slightly more accessible, I’d probably just keep going – there is a nice, “passive income” feeling that comes from the handful of new subscribers I get every week from the generous recommendations of Jamie Lauren Keiles, Rafael Frumkin, Miranda Mellis, maybe a few others… (to be clear, there is no paid tier to these ramblings – the income is in the form of today’s realm’s true coin: attention…)

Likewise, I haven’t deleted my X or Meta accounts. I find Facebook more accessible than Bluesky, and more of my blind friends post more interesting things there. The deeper I get into the plain-text self-hosted open-source hacker-adjacent world, the more fascinating I find it, and the more I realize that to truly commit to it means floating away from the mainstream conversation. I was interviewing a developer at a corporate-owned open-source company the other day, asking about who used Linux (the open-source operating system) in that office, and they were like, “most of us are on Slack, but the Linux guys have transcended Slack, they don’t even use it, they’re all talking to each other on Matrix or IRC or something.” This cracked me up, it perfectly distilled my experience of this world: you gradually become so fed up with the shitty closed corporate tools that you migrate to the hackery open ones, but as a result you are surrounded only by fellow yak-shavers.

But there’s still real, deep value, I’m finding, in causing myself minor (and sometimes major) inconveniences and isolation in the name of – if not political action, then at least a greater mindfulness about the things I buy, the tools I use. Lately, this has been happening a lot around computers. I’ve been folding Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) tools like emacs, emacspeak, and pandoc into my workflow and the change has been sorta transformational. There’s an odd paradox I’ve been circling the last few years with my tentative entrance into this whole quasihackery UNIX-like ecosystem: at first blush, it’s unbelievably complicated. Programmers tend to talk about “bootstrapping,” which as far as I can tell is a process that happens all the time where a program (like, say, an OS installer) compiles itself into a compiler that then compiles the code needed to run the system, like an ex-nihilo Big Bang that results in a fully formed universe (or program, or whatever). My experience of trying to learn how to use these tools has felt like nothing so much as an extended, intensive experience of bootstrapping: with emacs for instance, it took me several tries to even make it through the very basic tutorial, which ends with a link to emacs’s onboard documentation system, which itselfhas a fairly robust tutorial that teaches you how to use the onboard help system. Not to belabor this, but what I’m saying is: you take a tutorial which prepares you to take a second tutorial which teaches you how to begin to learn how to use the software. But once you make it to the other side of that bootstrapping, a tremendously powerful and pleasurable directness, plainness, and simplicity arises, justifying (I think) the ridiculous complexity it took to get there.

[several additional paragraphs about how I use computers these days deleted from this space because my wife and only reader of this newsletter before publication expressed intense and almost painful levels of boredom in reading them. L’s antipathy to my obsession with this stuff came into greater focus recently when I was hanging out with two blind hackers at a conference (I mean hackers in the original sense of someone who tinkers with computers; not in the more popular sense of an Ed Snowden-esque whistleblower). They both talked about how their wives were more than happy to give them “sighted assistance” for various tasks – driving them to a meeting or train station; identifying something around the house – but this willingness evaporated when that sighted assistance entered the realm of nerdy computer shit (like helping them read the screen on an inaccessible BIOS bootloader). I wondered what the difference was, and I think it’s because a lot of this tinkering, while rewarding and fascinating and important and useful, also deeply resembles playing video games, or alphabetizing one’s collection of craft beer or rare Tropicalia vinyl, or any other middle-aged self-indulgent dad activity whose time, in the eyes of one’s spouse, might better be used doing pretty much anything else, from mowing the lawn to taking the kid to the park. As I continue writing and talking about this stuff, I can feel readers and interlocutors turning into my wife, insofar as they quickly pivot from “ah that’s a cool story about the intersection of open-source and accessibility” to “wow this is basically some guy telling me about the different types of ski poles he’s owned and which he prefers send help quickly I’m dying]

A final note of self-aggrandizement

The Chinese translation of my book (published in Taiwan by Yuan-Liou, and translated by Xie Shukuan) won the 2025 Openbook Award for Best Lifestyle Book in Taiwan. My understanding is that “lifestyle” here refers to a genre that English doesn’t have, precisely… I imagine (with very little information to go on, I’m basically making this up) it’s a genre of nonfiction that excludes argumentative essay and political biography but includes memoir, cultural journalism, and self-help? (If you speak Chinese and feel like offering a better gloss on the word, which is at the link above, I’d be very curious to learn more!)

In any case, I like the idea of The Country of the Blind as a “lifestyle” book – my memoir’s unofficial motto is indisputably Jorge Luis Borges’s line, “Blindness has not been for me a total misfortune; it should not be seen in a pathetic way. It should be seen as a way of life: one of the styles of living.” So if blindness could be a lifestyle for Borges, then I’m more than happy to learn I’ve written a Lifestyle Book!

Christine Sun Kim, America’s Debt to Deaf People, 2022. Charcoal on paper, 44 × 44 inches. © Christine Sun Kim. Courtesy François Ghebaly Gallery and WHITE SPACE. Photo: Stefan Korte.. Via Brooklyn Rail.

I have an essay in this month’s Baffler magazine about new deaf writing and art. The issue’s theme is “After Words,” and all the essays circle around the idea that we’re living in a “post-literate” moment, surfing wave after wave of toxic digital slop. I’m glad to get a story about disability in there – the deaf thinkers I write about are conceiving of the issue’s themes of literacy and orality and technology in ways that hearing people tend to forget or ignore. The whole issue looks great, and if print’s your bag, I highly recommend subscribing. (Also whoever built their website did an unusually good job with accessibility.)

The Baffler was the first independent magazine I ever read (at least if you don’t count, like, Mountain Bike; was Highlights independent?) — it shaped my taste as a reader, and when I got a job as an editor at the Believer it was those 1990s issues of the Baffler that were in my head (and on my shelf) as I figured out how to do that job. So it’s a total treat to see my name in there.

My smart good editors on this piece really pushed me to Make An Argument; I find myself doing the same thing with my students now, but wow has anyone else noticed how annoying it is to Make an Argument? I’d much rather just write free-range sentences all day (what’s up, unedited email newsletters!), but free-range sentences won’t pay the bills or earn the clicks or “move the needle” or do anything else beyond amusing myself to death, so I tried to make an argument. I’m not sure how successful I was.

We ended up calling the piece “Manual Labor,” but for most of the time I was writing it I wanted to borrow a title from Christine Sun Kim’s drawing (reproduced above) “America’s Debt to Deaf People.” It’s an idea I’ve been thinking a lot about recently, for obvious reasons: What do we owe to deaf people? To disabled people? To poor people? The question hangs like a title over much of the Trump 2.0 horror show unrolling across the country, from the deletion of Special Education to the present SNAP fiasco. The philosophical directness of CSK’s title reminds me of Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, which is on my mind because I saw Heti in conversation with Merve Emre at Wesleyan University last week at a live taping of Merve’s new podcast season on The Art of the Interview. Afterward Sheila asked what I was working on and I told her about this vague soup of ideas I’m currently trying to work through — accommodations, accessibility, technology, disability. Is it a novel? Sheila asked. I was surprised by this question, since none of what I’d said had struck me as particularly novelistic. Like, maybe I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d said, “I’m writing about a blind guy who hacks his computer in order to finally make a successful argument for the first time in his life,” but instead I’d just given her a word cloud of Important Ideas In Contemporary Disability Studies. But Heti is famous for writing novels that don’t sound especially novelistic when you describe them, which is of course part of the genius of her oeuvre. In the days since, I’ve wondered — what if it was a novel? Why do I have to limit myself to narrative nonfiction? Just because I am currently a “fellow in journalism” at a university, or because nonfiction is more or less all I’ve ever written? To be clear, I don’t really have any immediate desire to write fiction, but something about Sheila’s penetrating coolness made me want to entertain the idea. It’s an entertaining idea!

Staying late in Middletown for the Heti event made me miss the last train back to wmass, so I took an expensive Uber home. My driver was in his early 20s, and had been driving Uber for about a week. He seemed very eager to chat, and soon it became clear why: He was, in addition to an aspiring professional (independent-league) baseball player, an evangelical Christian, and seemed to think of his place in the driver’s seat as an opportunity to convert the professoriat of Middlesex Cty. Early in our conversation he told me that he thought the death of Charlie Kirk was leading many new people to Christ, and he was obviously hoping to steer me in that direction.

The ride felt like being trapped inside a podcast – he was constantly citing the various Christian and right-wing shows he listened to (the political ones were a “guilty pleasure,” he told me; he was mostly interested in understanding Orthodox Christianity and was thus listening to lots of YouTube podcasts hosted by “actual friars”) . When he wasn’t directly invoking these podcasts, he was ventriloquizing them. He lectured and sermonized me for sixty miles. I was slightly drunk and very tired and mostly blind and didn’t want to aggravate him as we drove through the night but I did push back a little. What I offered him was my own podcast ventriloquism – warmed-over Ezra Klein cut with watered-down Death Panel, or something.

He had standard Charlie Kirk-issue views on women, and Christianity, but surprised me when a little carefully, and with pride, he offered the word ableism – he had ADHD, he said, and understood the way that society mistreated disabled people. But as we talked about food insecurity among disabled people, and the dismantling of DoE and Special Ed, he returned to the rightwing talking points about how government handouts are chronically abused by “criminals and thieves.”

Then (a few days later) it was Halloween. On the What Next podcast I’d heard something interesting from Mary Harris (who, talking of podcasts, is I think highly underrated, I never hear people talking about her but it’s a great daily news show with a different, appealingly personal and rigorous personality— (and Hey doesn’t the nomenclature landscape of mainstream daily news pods suggest an Abbott and Costello/”Who’s On First?” joke I’m not sure how to make? Up First: What Next? The Daily. Up First? What Next??! The Daily!!? Anyway, I could use an editor, and an argument, this is all here just to promote clicks on my Baffler essay? Wow.) So What Next alerted me to the United Way recommendation that we distribute real food alongside Halloween candy since this year with SNAP paused people will really need it. I Instacarted an Uber-from-Middletownsworth of items they recommended — non perishable, non candy stuff kids like: instant ramen, protein bars, microwaveable mac n cheese, pretzels. L. wondered about the class awkwardness of offering food, and thought it might be weird for people to take food alongside candy. Halloween is a funny time where everyone participates in a kind of chill charity, but this United Way suggestion I’d impulsively followed complicated the candy: suddenly it wasn’t just a fun thing, it was a politicized charity thing. Kit Kats weren’t magnanimous offerings, but the Easy Mac was.

As we waited for trick or treaters to arrive, L. wondered if people who didn’t need the food would take it. Republicans are against handouts because they think that people — criminals and freeloaders— are gonna take advantage, I said, as though our marriage were a podcast, recalling my own vehicular podcast dialogue with the minor-league friar-lover. “But that mindset ends up masking a racist, ableist politics of cruelty,” I went on, less worried about being left on the side of the freeway. “The only solution is to just let everyone have the accommodations and assistance they need.” I thought about a lunch I’d had the day before with a friend who told me he was thinking about writing about student disability accommodations on campus— his theory was that there were far too many, and that students from upper-class families (which is to say, the majority of students at Wesleyan) with diagnoses of ADHD from expensive doctors have far more access to accommodations than working-class students, who are subsequently further disadvantaged . My gut response was to suggest that this, too, adopts a kind of Republican anti-welfare attitude toward accommodation: the fear of the explosion of students with ADHD diagnoses is maybe akin to Reagan-era anti-government assistance “welfare queen” arguments . If some students who need accommodations aren’t getting them, the answer isn’t to crack down on “unnecessary” accommodations (I think??), it’s to give the people who need them – those low-income students who didn’t know about them – access to the accommodations! I really don’t want to see it as a zero sum game. I want to be an accommodation socialist. To paraphrase Bernadette Mayer: “Give Everybody Everything.” The more we accommodate students (and citizens), the better off everyone is. This is easy for me to say because I have always had everything I need and I don’t teach chemistry (where considerations like grades and tests and time seem more important than in my classes, which are basically untaped podcasts with thirteen guests per episode). Still, after all of these conversations, my partially examined feeling about accommodations in the classroom, as with any government benefit, from healthcare to SNAP, is that in an ideal system, we’d offer it universally, and we’d all find equilibrium.

Keen to avoid making anyone feel weird, at Lily’s suggestion, I wrote a vague note that said “Help Yourself (candy on the porch),” and set up a folding table in our driveway, nearly out of the sight line of our house, so that someone would casually be able to take a pack of ramen without feeling observed.

You (reader) probably saw this one coming, but around 6:30PM the first wave of trick or treaters was a bunch of high school boys. “Dude, ramen!” Within 20 minutes of its appearance the entire spread of nonperishable noncandy was gone. L. and I had to laugh. Maybe they really needed it! I protested. L. observed that most of them were wearing expensive-looking costumes (including, according to L., Mighty Morphin Power Rangers–didn’t realize those were on Gen Z’s radar). After they left, a family with a tiny daughter dressed as a princess walked up to the table. We heard them read the sign and check inside the now empty box of assorted Hanover minipretzels and Cape Cod chips before moving on and coming to get candy.

As I later watched some kids tentatively take a single Reese’s minicup, and others brazenly grab as many as they could fit in their tiny grubby hands, I wondered if perhaps there was value in controlling the flow of handouts in some systems. On the other hand, the constraints on our household’s annual supply of Halloween candy seem very different from the artificial scarcity being cynically imposed on SNAP, with its $5 billion emergency fund. I have failed, again, to make an argument.

Outro (Link Bucket)

The essay I wrote for The Baffler is my attempt to cram all of the amazing new deaf writing and art that’s emerged in the last few years into a single essay. I didn’t quite succeed — Christine Sun Kim, Alison O’Daniel, and Adèle Rosenfeld only get brief mentions, and Raymond Antrobus and Joseph Grigely aren’t included at all, woof — but I still managed to pack a lot in there, mostly focused on close readings of two wonderful recent books: Rachel Kolb’s exquisite new memoir Articulate and Sara Nović’s excellent 2022 novel True Biz. Both writers are also top-shelf email newsletter-ers, so be sure to subscribe to Switchbacks and Signs + Wonders.

Sara Nović also contributes to the newsletter Disability Rights Watch (I think? Now I’m realizing I’m not sure… sound off in the comments??), which along with reading everything Julia Metraux writes is an excellent one-stop starter pack for staying up to date on the freshest horrors of the latest salvos in the contemporary war on disabled people.

To do: switch away from substack and send my newsletter in plain text from the command line using buttondown or ghost

You are sitting in a swivel chair in the office of the NYU French Department. It’s 1988. Your feet don’t reach the floor. You are seven years old. The screen of the computer in front of you has just told you that you’re in an open field, to the west of a white house with a boarded front door. The game (though it doesn’t feel like a game – more like a story you can talk to) seems to be waiting for you to do something.

> Why is a seven-year-old in the NYU French Department?

Your step-grandfather works there. He’s taking care of you this afternoon, but since the iPad won’t be invented for another twenty years or so, he’s letting this Mac 512K babysit you.

> Go north.

You probably shouldn’t leave the office; you’ll get in big trouble if you disappear.

You find a way to break into the white house, where you discover a trap door that leads down into a sprawling underground network of dungeons and mazes, jokes and monsters. The experience of playing this game that your step-grandfather has set before you (though really it’s you who were set down before it) is as transformative as any art experience you’ll have in your childhood. It offers all the good things that books have given you – the sense of a confusing but nonetheless open window into the carnal, intellectual world of grown-ups, with enough mystery and adventure to make it feel like it’s also for you – but literally electrifiedwith the flickering, buzzing, interactive promise of the video game. You know nothing about the writers your step-grandfather studies and fraternizes with (Beckett, Barthes, Cixous), shelves and piles of their work all around you, but the playful, philosophical, hypertextual vibe of this game feels somehow related.

> Go up

The trap door leading back to the surface has been nailed shut.

You continue playing this game, Zork, at home, on your stepfather’s Amiga, burning the many hours of aimless typing, trial and erroring, it takes to win, though you never win, and while it sounds like a platitude, it’s really not about winning. Most of the pleasure comes from just talking to the computer, typing statements and seeing what surprising and even thrilling things it does with them.

> wait

Time passes…

Your step-grandfather dies in 2022. You can’t attend his memorial because it falls in the middle of the two weeks you spend at a blindness training center in Colorado, learning how to navigate the world – how to cross streets, cook meals, use computers – non-visually.

You have a degenerative retinal disease. By now you’re legally blind, though a more felicitous way to put it is “low vision.” You’ve begun using a screen reader with your computer – it says everything that happens on the screen out loud in a synthetic voice that dates back to the same early PC era of the text-based adventures you played as a kid.

The learning curve is steep. With vision, your eyes effortlessly land on the button or menu item you need, and then: click! With a screen reader, you tab and tab and arrow and arrow through a terrible Futurist poem of the linguistic particleboard that lives underneath the graphical user interface, constantly interrupting itself as you crash around the UI: windows ribbon tab five menu items first menu item fl– cr– set– tab– selection not selection not one item selected tab end of list item not selected.

> find a better way

This is, you discover, pretty much how blind people do it – they get used to navigating the GUI with synthetic speech the same way they get used to navigating an office building without braille signage on the bathrooms (yes, even in the post-ADA world): trial and error, learning routes to the places they want to go.

But one day on the internet you meet a blind hacker with the same eye disease that you have. He has a PhD in English and a full-time job at a tech company specializing in something that, after hearing his explanation and reading several web pages, you still cannot explain (open-source security?). The conversation with the blind hacker has the effect of setting you down in front of another prompt, just like your step-grandfather did back in 1988.

> open Terminal

You were aware of the existence of the terminal on your computer before this, but It always seemed like a tool that was emphatically not for you, a trap door leading down into danger (as the game would put it: It is very dark; you are likely to be eaten by a grue.). Opening it threatened to delete, corrupt, or otherwise destroy your computer and all of its files. But the blind hacker’s encouragement and example felt like a lantern and a sword, which has begun to glow faintly as you descend down through the black rectangle.

> look around

Exploring your computer through the command line feels a lot like questing across the dungeons and starships of the interactive fiction games of your youth. This is not a coincidence: those games were developed in an era before the adoption of the mouse and the graphical user interface–the only way to do things on a personal computer was to talk to it, typing instructions. You begin to learn the syntax of this new dungeon: instead of look around, you type ls, with the same result: a description of the room (directory) you’re currently in. There are puzzles and wormholes everywhere. And as a blind user, the experience is a delight: trying to enlarge the text and invert the colors (the glare of black text on a white screen has become intolerable) usually breaks the GUI in some way, but the terminal is more than happy to offer up giant white letters on a black background. Instead of tabbing and arrowing around, you just tell the computer where you want to go and what you want to do, and it offers an instant reply in its bouncy droll retro robot voice.

Developers constantly fail to label buttons or other elements of their software; using their programs with a screen reader is exhausting at best, and frequently impossible. But on the command line, there is no such thing as an unlabelled button: it’s labels all the way down. As your step-grandfather’s French philosopher friends might say, there is nothing outside the text. For the blind computer user, who consumes images as text, this is a beautiful thing.

> down

The light of the trap door you came in through is long gone, and your lamp is flickering, but you’ve learned to use your sword as a cane, occasionally ringing it against the walls to hear where the openings are. There’s a reason why blind people become hackers–computers offer such tremendous access to information, but sighted developers are constantly building new obstacles at the pace of each system update. Learning the command line – and the logical next step, becoming a programmer yourself – lets you build your own tools and map your own way without always relying on sighted people to do the right thing for you.

As you walk further down the steps, the walls narrow, but the sound of rushing water gets louder. You step through an opening, and the echoes become vast, ricocheting against an impossibly high ceiling.

Your lantern has gone out. You are standing on the shore of a colossal underground ocean.

> onward

David Straithairn as the blind hacker Whistler in Sneakers (1992).

A few years ago I had dinner with a new friend who also has RP, the degenerative retinal condition I hold and cherish and monetize through incentivized blog posts like this one. (Just kidding, I am not making any money on your enjoyment of this text. Yet.) We met in a subterranean Peruvian restaurant in Washington, DC. We’d never met in person before. Meeting blind strangers is interesting for me, because while I always project ambiguity about how much I can actually see, blind people have a different attunement; they read a different menu of clues about how much vision I have. Once another new blind friend asked me if I was actually low vision, and not totally blind. When I said yes, and asked why, they replied, “B ecause you’re really using the hell out of that cane!” That was shortly after I started using my white cane full-time, and I guess I was tapping with the aggressive enthusiasm of the semi-blind neophyte. At this DC dinner, my tell was the way I kept turning VoiceOver on and off. I’d turn it on because, well, it helped (still living in paradoxical twilight zone where I am able to read but it’s increasingly stressful and exhausting, so I try to limit unsupported [aka silent, nontactile] visual reading as much as I can). But then I’d hit an inaccessible website— or a site that was accessible but nevertheless cluttered and hard-to-use (like the one for the restaurant we were in), and I’d turn my screen reader off, figuring it was easier to strain my vision than my screen-reader skills to find out more about the ceviche.

“I remember that period,” my new friend said, hearing my phone say “VoiceOver off” for the second or third time, “when I was constantly switching my screen-reader on and off…” She had long since moved past this stage of RP. For her, turning the screen reader off means not being able to use her phone at all.

I’m still in the on-off period, but to be sure, it’s staying on more and more. As a result, I find myself gravitating to more blind-friendly tech spaces. When I’m less willing to turn off my screen reader, I’m likewise less willing to tolerate sites that don’t work so well with screen readers (BlueSky, for instance, may be accessible but I can’t be bothered to invest time in learning its quirks, and the only times I log on are when I’m using my mouse, a sure sign that I’m doing things visually (mice are only useful if you’re visually following a pointer – keyboard control is the blind way).

The social media platform Mastodon is on its face pretty unappealing to most people – I’d call it aggressively nerdy. On BlueSky, I tend to find blood-pressure-spiking news about democracy’s implosion, DOGE antics, protest highlights. On Twitter there’s more of the same, plus updates I didn’t ask for from right-wing trolls, and sexy leftists alternating between genuinely incisive and funny interventions into the culture wars and hot selfies intended to drive traffic to their OnlyFans. Mastodon, by comparison, being algorithmless and fragmented by design, is whatever you manage to cobble together, which in my case means a handful of German media theorists, Japanese newspapers, and lots and lots of blind hackers.

But I go there more than nearly any other platform because using Mastodon with the Mona client is an absolute dream to use with VoiceOver. What, the sighted reader might be wondering, does it mean for an app to be a pleasure to use with a screen reader? The answer is not complicated. Just think of the last time you used an app without troubleshooting it, or otherwise thinking more about the app’s drawbacks than the things the app was designed to let you do. If you want to scroll, it scrolls. If you want to look at something more closely, you stop and engage with that thing. That’s how Mona works, every time, since I first downloaded it, without interruption. (In case it’s not clear: this is rare. The rarity is what makes it so pleasurable.)

The irony is that Mastodon is, in just about every other way, significantly less user friendly than any other social platform. You can’t just go to the Mastodon website, create a login, and start following people. Instead, you have to choose from one of thousands of different “servers,” and it’s not always intuitive, especially at first, how to follow someone who’s not on your server. There’s a reason why my Mastodon timeline is so much more anti-A.I., pro-Open Source, and so much blinder and more hackery than anywhere else— it’s a self-selecting group of people who care about social media free from corporate algorithmic monetization and intervention, and about resistance to LLM integration, but and who also happen to be really willing to put up with some digital abstruseness if it leads to something screen-reader accessible.

This is a tension that I’ve been consciously and unconsciously obsessing over for the past few years: the way that, at least for blind people, but I suspect for others too, the most accessible tools paradoxically demand a pretty inaccessible immersion in technical minutia. It’s a part of the larger dynamic (which I and many others have written about elsewhere) of disabled people as “the original lifehackers.” It’s why David Straithairn’s performance as Whistler, the hacker with an electronic braille display in Sneakers (1992), is in many ways one of the more accurate portrayals of blindness in 20th-century cinema.

It’s also what’s led me down a marriage-straining obsession with plain text and open-source computing (Emacs, Linux, Markdown, etc.). It will be a challenge this week when I’m in conversation with Josh Miele at the New York Public Library not to derail the conversation into these brutally geeky pathways. But not to fear, Josh may be brilliant and accomplished but he’s also extremely chill and funny and we’re going to have a blast. It’s online and in-person, tickets are here. And if you haven’t picked up Connecting Dots, his wonderful memoir about, among other things, how becoming blind at a young age launched him on the journey to becoming the MacArthur “Genius” prize-winning engineer he is today, I highly recommend it!

Offline / Online

I wrote a bit about this relationship between accessibility and technicality— specifically about why I’ve started using the terminal (command line) on my computer, and what it has to do with blindness and interactive fiction (e.g., those old text-based adventures like Zork and Hitchhiker’s Guide), for the third issue of a new art magazine called The Quarterly Report. They don’t put their text online, which means it’s inaccessible to blind people unless they buy a copy and scan it themselves. This is something I’ve noticed in the world of small-press art-world independent publishing: these scrappy operations put all their energy into a print product and tend to drop the ball when it comes to accessibility. There are (to put it mildly) greater injustices in the world, but as a longtime a ficionado of weird small press poetry/art/comics/etc, becoming print-disabled has made me acutely aware of how much easier it is for me to acquire an accessible edition of a commercial/trade (or even academic) book than I can anything accessible-ish from any of the small publishers I love. Another dynamic that changes the more my screen-reader stays on: I’m becoming more of what I really want to call an access bitch: i.e., comfortable agitating and cajoling and generally being unpleasant in order to get the access I want, either for myself or others. (I thought I’d invented this term, but then I found that you can buy a Sky Cubacub– designed mask emblazoned with the phrase, which you can wear while bumping “Access Bitch” by Vogds, feat. Yung Assata.)

In the end, after the Quarterly Report gave up on figuring out a way to put my piece online (because of their commercial web hosting setup that made it impossible to do the very web 1.0 thing of uploading a .TXT file to the internet), I access-bitchily got permission to upload my piece to the internet myself.

But where should I upload it? On Mastodon, Robert Kingett (whose posts on Plain Text Accounting, the Fediverse, and other blind-hackery subjects are useful and fun to read) gave me shit for posting my writing on Substack. So in my long-term FOSS-inflected future perhaps this newsletter will migrate to Ghost or somewhere like that. (This move will be in line with the dynamic described above: the technical leveling-up I’ll have to do to figure all that out will result in a net gain in access frictionlessness, since I’ll at last be able to write and publish my newsletter from within my very own hyperaccessible plain-text markdown ecosystem, without fiddling with the quasi-accessible Substack interface. Plus, as Robin Sloan recently observed on his lovely not-Substack, the (plain) web, even though it lacks all the algorithmic discovery engines (and I’ve surely “enjoyed” the trickle of random subscribers this platform has funneled my way over the last few years), has its own far greater affordances:

the web platform… offers the grain of a medium — book, movie, album — rather than the seduction of a casino. The web platform makes no demands because it offers nothing beyond the opportunity to do good work. Certainly it offers no attention — that, you have to find on your own. Here is your printing press.

But that will take some more reading of the docs. For now, I’m just going to post this, and the aforementioned Quarterly Report piece, here on Substack. In deference to some abstract devotion to the periodical vibe of this platform, I will create a delay of some short interval (24-96 hours?) before I hit send on that one. But it will be the post after this one. See you then!

Justin Dart at the signing of the ADA

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott

I have a new essay on the array of threats that the MAGA movement has aimed at disabled people]. I tried to connect the dots between the rhetoric – the Musk-led pile-on against a blind government watchdog; Trump’s false and damaging scapegoating of “DEI hires with intellectual disabilities” for the DC plane crash – and the more material threats on the horizon, from huge cuts to Medicaid and the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights to a lawsuit that threatens to roll disability rights back to before the Nixon administration. The piece also allowed me to think through the way the conservative movement’s relationship with disability has changed: how did we get from George HW Bush, flanked by two conservative Republicans in wheelchairs, signing the ADA on the White House lawn in 1990, to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, another conservative white dude in a wheelchair, whose policy positions on disability (alongside many of the rest of his MAGA colleagues) explicitly undermine the protections of the ADA?

Hope you’ll give the story a read, it’s at Truthdig here.

Travel + Leisure + The Well-Intentioned Ableism of Parents

Illustration by Vicki Ling via Travel + Leisure.

I also have a story in the new issue of Travel + Leisure, the “Access Issue,” with 90s heartthrob (wait can women be ‘heartthrobs’? All the female equivalents of heartthrob sound wrong. ‘sexy screen lady’?) and 2020s disability advocate Selma Blair on the cover. My story is about the new National Geographic documentary Blink, made by the filmmaking team behind the Oscar-winning doc about Navalny, the Russian opposition leader who died in an Arctic prison camp last year. Blink is ostensibly more heartwarming fare, about a family who, when they learn that three of their four children have RP, an incurable retinal disease that leads to blindness, drop everything and travel around the world to “fill their eyes” (the title of their mother’s coffee-table book about the experience) before they go blind. The film manages to end on a note (finally dispensing with the blindness-as-death-sentence vibe and getting the kids actual blindness training) that prevented me from hurling my laptop out the window, but just barely. The Travel + Leisure piece gave me a chance to speak with people I think the documentary – and the family – would have done well to seek out, namely blind people for whom travel remains a vital source of delight and adventure regardless of how much vision they do or don’t have. I’m glad I wrote it because I frequently get DMs from readers of my book with degenerative retinal diseases (reader, I have one too) who say things like “I want to [travel/read/work/whatever] before my vision goes away” and I appreciate the sentiment but always want to say yo you will still be able to enjoy travel after whatever visual apocalypse you’re dreading arrives, don’t take my word for it, check out Mona Minkara et al!

Read the piece in Travel + Leisure here.

Recommendation Corner

In order to make this Substack more than just me sending links to things I’ve written, it’s time for Recommendation Corner, the regular feature that all substacks lazily engage in where the author copy-pastes notes from their media diet into the doc.

Slow Listening: Signal Hill

I used to make a podcast for KCRW and McSweeney’s called the Organist that was self-consciously “experimental.” Making it demanded that I keep up with the world of creative audio, through attending conferences like Third Coast and listening to lots of British productions, like the BBC’s Short Cuts (RIP) or Ross Sutherland’s brilliant Imaginary Advice – the Brits have a much longer and stronger tradition of experimental audio than we Americans do. (Though of course we have our own weird radio-doc lineage, too, from Rumble Strip to Richard’s Famous Food Podcast; back in 2018 I thought about this stuff a lot more.)

After I put the Organist into its cryogenic chamber, I gradually stopped keeping up with weird audio, and my listening diet has slowly become dominated by the intellectual structural-analysis chat-show form: Ezra Klein, Death Panel, et al. Becoming a screen-reader-user over the last few years has increased my tolerance for aural speed-reading by a lot, and I often leave things running at 2x.

When Organist alum Liza Yeager sent me the link to her new audio journal, Signal Hill, I knew that she and her collaborators had put a tremendous amount of care into the audio, and I forced myself to lower the throttle back down to 1x. I’m so glad I did – the collection of documentaries in *Signal Hill’*s first issue require patience and open ears, and reward slow listening. There are wandering, politically engaged, aleatoric documentaries like Hannah Sassoon’s “A Porous Place”, which does the magical documentary thing of building up a sonic context where by the end, the extended vérité tape of sheep bleating as they’re herded feels at once intimately specific (like, we know those sheep, and the people herding them, and their long intertwined histories) and simultaneously suggestive, symbolic (knowing by the end what we do about that Southern French land’s connection to colonialism, resistance, etc). Highly worth a listen – I also especially loved Annie Rosenthal’s “Caterpillar Roadshow,” which felt like a wormhole (caterpillar-hole?) that tore open in an old episode of Radiolab, burrowing away from that show’s conventions toward a strange, beautiful, brilliant new terrain. A very moving and funny and smart doc that elegantly weaves together science, history, and family in genuinely surprising ways. And the Connor Gilles piece on Robin D.G. Kelley’s oral histories of 1930s black communists in the rural South is a twofer: fascinating/enlivening/timely social-justice history lesson and masterclass on the art (and value) of oral history itself.

(A note to screen-reader users: Signal Hill is great but damn its website needs some love on the accessibility front. For now, I recommend listening on the podcatcher of your choice like Overcast or Spotify or whatever.)

Reading: Fredrik deBoer

In my MAGA disability story, I quote (and briefly dispute) Freddie deBoer’s substack on accommodations vs. vibes. To echo the blurbs on his forthcoming novel, I don’t always agree with him, but he is a persistently brilliant and entertaining writer who I often benefit from disagreeing with. In that piece on accommodations, and another recent piece on the R-word, I basically agree with deBoer’s premise – that the left often mistakes vibes and performative identity-based outrage for material systemic change that is where our actual focus needs to be if we want to rebuild a successful/powerful progressive coalition – but (and I think this is where his professional polemicist role takes over) to support that argument, he ends up taking this aggressively snarky “sorry/not sorry” received-wisdom-puncturing stance that loses me. I see his point that “in practice,” the R-word “is a normie word that does not imply a particular political project”: A few months ago, for instance, I was drinking whiskey with a very smart blind dude who casually dropped the word to describe some ableist assholes. He caught himself, and apologized, in a tentative way that I thought expressed an uncertainty about how PC/woke/cancel-hungry I was (it was the first time we’d met). I agree with deBoer that this guy’s use of the R-word doesn’t mean that he’s officially and immediately part of an alt-right vanguard political niche, but instead grew out of an unexamined middle-school tendency he (and, apparently, deBoer) haven’t outgrown.

But I also think deBoer underplays the actual damage the word does; it’s too easy for him to casually dismiss it as a boys-will-be-boys slur that has no analogy with the N-word. I think of Eli Clare’s riff on euphemism in Exile and Pride (2009). “I scoff at handicapped,” Clare writes,

a word I grew up believing my parents had invented specifically to describe me, my parents who were deeply ashamed of my cerebral palsy and desperately wanted to find a cure. I use the word disabled as an adjective to name what this ableist world does to us crips and gimps. Cripple makes me flinch; it too often accompanied the sticks and stones on my grade school playground, but I love crip humor, the audacity of turning cripple into a word of pride. Gimp sings a friendly song, full of irony and understanding. Retard on the other hand draws blood every time, a sharp, sharp knife.

I’d guess that deBoer has never been called that word based on his disability, as Clare and so many others have. (I haven’t, either.) But what does he gain from arguing against the sharpness of that knife, beyond another point to score about progressive identity-politics excess? I think he’s sincere in his claim that he’s not looking for “some crass and clumsy rejection of everything that social justice is about,” but instead wants to foster “a period of frank and at-times uncomfortable conversations that get really specific about how social justice language and norms alienated potential allies and hamstrung Democrats in elections.” I agree that those conversations need to be uncomfortable, and that some liberal pieties will get tread upon in the process. But I also think deBoer is too eager to dunk on liberal pieties, and as a result he underplays the way that what he calls “vibes” or “feelings” – the experience of stigma and harm (a word that surely triggers his aversion to “performative righteousness”) are explicitly connected to the hard-nosed real-world material accommodations and policies he thinks we should be focusing on. Even in a recalibration of the left’s strategy with regard to identity politics, I think we should still be aware of – and, god forbid, sensitive to – the way that discrimination and stigma feels.

Receipts

Thanks to Lainey Feingold, who’s not quoted in my Truthdig piece but whose writings (and our conversations) on this subject are extremely lucid and helpful.

Thanks for reading.

via Bilawal Sidhu on YouTube

I have a new piece out today in New York magazine, with the same subject as this email. A lot of the discourse around the Vision Pro, the mixed-reality headset Apple released in February of this year, revolves around the question (as Kevin Roose put it in the Times on Tuesday):

What is this for? How will it improve my life, or make me more productive than other things I could buy for $3,500? What can I do on it that I can’t do on my laptop, or a big TV?

I share Roose’s skepticism about the AVP, but I also think I found a surprising answer to his question.

Writing this piece – which is at its heart not so much about these cybernetic luxury snowboarding goggles from the 24th century, and more about what “digital accessibility” actually means, and how it works under the hood, and what’s at stake when companies decide to commit to it – also gave me a chance to visit Cupertino, and do the tech-journalist thing of visiting Apple Park, with heavily negotiated interviews with a few engineers and senior comms people, and drink way too much coffee at the visitor center/Apple Store across the street from the entrance. Apple Park – particularly from the outside, peering through the elegant but very serious-looking high-tech fences, and somehow at once wild and hypermanicured flora on the other side–really feels like the visitor center of a Tim Cook-era Jurassic Park, which I briefly thought I was clever for thinking (and was perhaps subliminally suggested to me by the AVP’s flagship demo, the Jon Favreau-produced Encounter Dinosaurs app, screen-shotted above), until I googled it and found that there is an entire actual Jurassic Park movie that is more or less set in Apple Park.

When I was still in elementary school, my dad gave me his old Mac 512K, and if there’s any brand that connects the two of us, it’s Apple – media tech news and general geekery is one of our primary avenues of communication. Writing this piece also gave me a chance to do some extremely fun research into the history of accessibility at Apple, back to the John Sculley era (a name my dad evoked in tones that other fathers might have reserved for a legendary baseball manager or something, I don’t know, I can’t make sports-team metaphors because my dad talked about MacWorld Expo every year instead of the World Series). Only a fraction of that history made it into the final edit, but a little goes a long way, and maybe Substack is a place that I can admit that I wrote this piece of magazine journalism for you, dad!!

* * *

Since I last sent out one of these newsletters, some other writing-related things have happened that I’d like to mention:

The Country of the Blind has been out for nearly a year, and last month it was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Autobiography (I choose Memoir). The Pulitzers announce the winners and the finalists simultaneously, and during the heady week of the announcement, two friends surprised me by expressing their condolences: bittersweet, i.e., sorry you didn’t actually win. This struck me as a remarkable response for a friend to have – you guys, this is only good news!! Anyway the paperback comes out July 23, and is available for pre-order, so if you’ve been holding out for the cheaper, floppier edition, the time is now.

The book also got onto a bunch of year-end best-of lists, including the New Yorker, the Atlantic, NPR, the Washington Post, and others. I did (what felt like) every blindness-specific podcast in the country, and many mainstream pods besides. I made a futile attempt to collect much of this press on my website.

Other things: I reviewed Ashley Shew’s Against Technoableism for the NYTBR. I wrote a guest essay on blindness and AI for NYT Opinion. In the 2024-5 academic year, I’m going to be a Koeppel Fellow in Journalism at Wesleyan University, as a part of the Allbritton Center for the Study of Public Life and the spiffy new Merve Emre-helmed Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. If you’re driving to (or from) Western Mass to Middlesex County, CT, on a Tuesday or Thursday this fall or spring, please give me a ride.

The Country of the Blind is out today! There’s nothing more to say, really, but it’s nonetheless important to announce, formally and with brio:

It’s here! Tour dates below! And: check out these recent press hits!

• An action-packed excerpt in the New Yorker;

• A very warm profile in the New York Times;

• An absolute rave in the UK Guardian;

• An over-the-top hyper-rave in the Millions (“this the best book I’ve read this year and also one of the best books I’ve ever read in my life”)

• More!

If you haven’t already, you can now obtain a copy immediately from your local indie; at bookshop.org; on the Kindle store or at Kobo; at Audible or its wonderful alternative, libro.fm. (Before you cancel me for linking to Amazon, please recall that despite its serious labor problems, Amazon remains an important resource for print-disabled readers to find accessible ebooks and audiobooks.) Also: libraries!

If you’ve bought or borrowed it already: hey seriously thank you so much. Please consider writing a review at whichever online retailer you used, or at Goodreads, or all over your freaking social media. OK that’s it we’re done!

I will be doing seven bookstore events over the next few weeks; please tell your friends and come through! (Note that several of these events require preregistration online; links below.)

THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND U.S. BOOK TOUR

South Hadley, MA

July 25 at 7pm

Odyssey Bookshop

9 College Street, South Hadley, MA 01075

In conversation with Andrea Lawlor

[register]

Boston, MA

July 27 at 7pm

Harvard Book Store

1256 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138

In conversation with Namwali Serpell

[register]

Brooklyn, NY

August 2 at 7pm

Books Are Magic [at the new Brooklyn Heights location]

122 Montague Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201

In conversation with Chloé Cooper Jones

[register]

Los Angeles, CA

August 7 at 7pm

Vroman’s

695 E. Colorado Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91101

In conversation with Rachel Khong

[register]

San Francisco, CA

August 11 at 7pm

Green Apple Books

1231 9th Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94122

In conversation with Ingrid Rojas Contreras

[register]

Rhinebeck, NY

August 13 at 7pm

Upstate Films

6415 Montgomery Street, Rhinebeck NY 12572

In conversation with Ashley Mayne

Manhattan, NY

October 3, time TBD

Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute

New York University

Location TBD

In conversation with Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Housekeeping note: subsequent issues of this newsletter will be infinitely less self-promotional

Hello! I’m reviving this extremely infrequent newsletter to announce that my first book comes out in less than two months. It’s called The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight. It’s now available for pre-order (hardcover, ebook, audiobook, large print!) via Bookshop, Amazon, Audible, et al.

preorder The Country of the Blind!!

Watch on YouTube: The Country of the Blind | Andrew Leland | Meet the author

So far the book has gotten a starred review from Publishers Weekly (“masterful… brilliant… nuanced… Enriched by its sparkling prose, this is an extraordinary and intellectually rigorous account of adapting to change”), a rave from Kirkus (“fascinating… Emotional but never sentimental, this quest for insight delivers for its readers”), inclusion on Lithub’s 25 Nonfiction Books You Need to Read This Summer list (“moving… fascinating… A brilliant investigative memoir written with humor and heart”) and PW’s 2023 Summer Reads Staff Picks (“Leland is… part of a new vanguard of writers… who interrogate disability with refreshing intellectual rigor, and this book-length study of blindness masterfully melds histories both personal and cultural”), and blurbs from Rachel Aviv, Joshua Cohen, Chloé Cooper Jones, Dave Eggers, Temple Grandin, and Georgina Kleege.

The book tells the story of how I became blind, incredibly slowly, over decades—and chronicles the pretty urgent quest I took to figure out how I fit into this strange (and often beautiful) country, where I’m now becoming a permanent resident. I use that experience as an opportunity to spelunk the wider world of blindness and disability, too. Along the way, I encounter:

• hardcore blindness trainers who made me wear vision-occluding sleep shades and then sent me out alone into Denver traffic to find my way home;

• blind Silicon Valley engineers soldering circuit boards by touch and inventing A.I. machine-vision-powered devices that tell them what’s in their refrigerators or what text is printed on the food package they just picked up (turns out it was a can of chili);

• some slimeball leaning against a deli near Penn Station who sneered at me as I passed with my white cane and then accused me of faking my blindness, which hurt because I already felt like I was faking it;

• blind producers in L.A. re-editing the soundtracks to their favorite TV shows so that they and other blind viewers will know who’s hot, who’s not, what race the actors are, and what everybody’s facial expressions are doing;

• blind artists making colorful, visually resplendent drawings of themselves as guide-dogs with many doggie nipples using secret tactile techniques;

• Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett’s blind protege, who told me that her blind pride inadvertently fueled her anti-abortion ideology;

• ableist rabbis, ableist doctors, ableist dads at the grill-out;

• and of course my wife and son, who are figuring out what it means to be blind right alongside me.

A few months ago, when I was proofreading the book’s index, many of the surprising juxtapositions reminded me of just how far afield this journey took me. Sidewalk “Curb cuts” for wheelchairs appeared alongside Curb Your Enthusiasm; or consider this representative indexical litany:

Plutarch

Podcasts

Polio

Politics

Pornhub

poverty

In a sonnet on the subject, John Milton described his experience of blindness as living “in this dark world and wide.” The world of blindness is indeed wide—far vaster than I ever could have guessed when I began this journey more than four years ago. I really hope you’ll come along for the ride—I left everything on the table with this thing, and I am convinced that… it rips!

You may be inclined to wait to get a copy until July 25 when the book is out, but I strongly recommend pre-ordering now. Pre-orders are (as you may have already learned from writers of other new books in emails that suspiciously resemble this one) crucial for a book’s success. They signal to bookstores and black-box e-commerce algorithms that a forthcoming title has momentum, incentivizing them to unlock the support and promotional levers that paradoxically only grant momentum to books with momentum. This is especially true of first-time authors like me, since I haven’t had a chance to prove myself yet (unless you count the years I spent editing the Believer magazine, or hosting the Organist podcast, or writing about blindness and disability for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Radiolab, 99 Percent Invisible, and elsewhere).

But it’s even more important to pre-order, I think, because it’s a book about blindness. When Penguin Press was weighing whether to take the book on, I got the sense that they thought that a lot of blind readers would buy the book. This is a reasonable assumption for any publisher to make. A book about yoga? All those strip-mall yogis will snap it up! Must be the same with blindness, right?

I nodded along, since at that time I still read print (with difficulty), and was just learning about the world of free digital libraries for the print-disabled. Now that I’ve retired from print (something that happened while I was writing and researching the book—not a convenient time to figure out how to use a screen reader, let me tell you), I know that in the US, if you’re blind, you never have to pay for books, even spanking-new mass-market blockbusters, and most blind people I know rarely do. This is because absent public subsidy, it’s absurdly expensive to be a blind reader. At the risk of oversimplifying, imagine if the only way you could read a book was by reading it on a Kindle that cost $3,500 (the current cost of a quality refreshable braille display) and was manufactured by a niche company that hasn’t updated its tech in ten years and offers the same level of customer support as the company that manufactured your $6 digital watch. All that is on top of the cost of the book itself—and still doesn’t spare you from the weird typos and artifacts that result from the text’s journey to a readable format. Understandable, then, that the Library of Congress has a free braille and talking book library, and that Penguin Random House submits all their new titles to nonprofits like Bookshare as fully accessible EPUB files, which any eligible print-disabled person can download the day the book comes out, for free.

But all this also means that I probably won’t be helped too much by blind people in terms of sales. Which I am, make no mistake, utterly OK with. I was recently speaking to a group of blind students at a training center in Colorado, and I think I heavily endeared myself to them when, after someone asked how they could buy my book, I responded, “blind people shouldn’t pay for this book!” The blind unemployment rate is 70 percent (let that number sink in); their money is statistically better spent on food, rent, and technology (like that $3,500 refreshable braille display) that will help them secure access to education and employment.

And so I turn once more to you, the presumably sighted reader of this email, with the link that will allow you to preorder the book. (If you’re blind, and flush with cash, you don’t need me to remind you that the Kindle app is nicely accessible with VoiceOver for iOS, or that you can pre-order the audiobook; please knock yourself out!)

I’m so relieved that this email is almost over. Thank you so much for your support and your time and, if you’ve got the disposable income, for disposing it on a book that I feel confident will entertain and even enlighten you.

If you or someone you know is a book critic, podcast producer, TV news-anchor, or social media influencer, please pass this email along to them; I’m standing by to talk about blindness and A.I. or whatever else you fancy on your program.  And if cash is tight, you can always tweet about it, toot about it, Tik to the Tok, clamor on GoodReads. Take a nap, make a smoothie. Whatever happens, I’m grateful.

Yours, as ever,

Andrew

PS If you reply to this email I will get your email and I’m here for it.

PPS If receiving this email was a deeply unwelcome experience for you, it is extremely easy to unsubscribe; there’s a link at the bottom of this email. And if you’d like to keep up with my future writing, that’s easy, too:

If receiving this is an unwelcome experience, you can unsubscribe by clicking the link at the bottom of this email. I can’t imagine sending more than three of these a year, so please don’t worry about your inbox being clogged with my white-hot bi-weekly dispatches encrusted with links and “takes” about the latest accessibility overlay controversies, if that’s your concern. These are more like semi-annual letters you inexplicably receive from that guy you sort of knew in college who only talked about the radio station, who apparently did too many hallucinogens when he was in middle school.

NYT illustration by Dadu Shin. The alt text for this image is invisible to you unless you’re using a screen reader.

I have a story in this week’s New York Times Magazine about the controversy surrounding a TV show (In the Dark, on the CW) that cast a sighted actress in a blind role, and how it led me to reconsider the ways in which people — blind, sighted, or, like me, somewhere in between — perform disability, and what blindness is supposed to look like. I hope you’ll give it a read. If you prefer to take your reported magazine essays aurally, there is a link to a very chill read of the text by Anthony Rey Perez, who narrates it for Audm, at the top of the page. To my ears, Perez makes the article sound way more like Roberto Bolaño’s Cowboy Graves (which he also narrated for Audible) than it deserves, and I love it.

A note about the caption to the story’s illustration: Most blind people use screen readers to surf the web, and whenever they get to an image, the screen reader will just say, “image” (or, worse, it’ll read out the filename of the image, e.g. “i_hatemy_job4345123451234123412341234.jpeg”), and they’ll know they’re missing something. I made it clear to the hardworking people at the magazine that it was extremely important that they put alt text for this image on my story (and all their stories forever starting now). They told me that the paper is in the middle of overhauling its entire website to improve its accessibility, and in the meantime their CMS is such that they couldn’t just pop an alt tag into the source code like you can on most sites. So the workaround they chose was to just stick the alt text right into the caption. As a result, sighted people ended up seeing the alt text, which is normally hidden in the page’s source code. 

I feel very minorly conflicted about this. On the one hand, sighted people seeing alt text is like hearing people reading closed captions — it normalizes the practice, and publicizes it, and is an important step to making it universal. On the other hand, I saw people who seemed pretty mystified by an illustration whose caption was… just a description of that same illustration. This confusion felt bad to see, and made me feel like my piece had a very mild but still palpable disability pall cast over it. 

One online commenter (appearing amid the many comments that were like, “First you start giving roles to blind actors, then you have to start casting crime shows with real cops and murderers” — which, as my wife pointed out, is also a great idea), said that he was pleased that this story had good alt text but then called out the Times for dropping the ball on most of its other stories. Alt text is an important practice, and I hope they follow through on their promise to improve their accessibility soon, following the lead of publications like Vox, Slate, and HuffPo, which all reliably offer good descriptive alt text for their photos and images.

Was that enough backstory to make this email feel like “content” and not just my nakedly desperate bid to have you click and share the article? According to @NYT_first_said, the story was the first appearance in the history of that newspaper of three words: nondegenerative, semibrutal, and supercrip. I think in a lab with just those three words and a petri dish I could, without visiting nytimes.com, grow a linguistic organism that is an almost exact replica of this magazine piece about performance and blindness. If you are a research scientist with access to a language lab I could use for this purpose, please let me know by replying to this email.

Speaking of alt text, and the creative potential of textual constraint: Shannon Finnegan’s Alt Text as Poetry is a beautiful project that is well worth exploring— the idea is basically that while alt text is supposed to be short and direct and descriptive, it’s also an emerging form rich with interpretive and expressive possibility. [Relatedly: I have an essay about accessibility and literature that draws on this and other projects by Finnegan, whose work I am apparently a huge fan of, for McSweeney’s 64, “the Audio Issue,” which I helped to produce. More information on that project, including pre-order info, is here.]

Blindness seems to be having a moment at the moment. Perhaps it’s part of a crest of interest in disability that’s washing through the culture more broadly. In the NYT story I quote Matthew Shifrin, a blind composer and podcaster who also auditioned for a role on In the Dark. Shifrin has a podcast that I’ve been loving, called Blind Guy Travels, that’s currently halfway through its six-episode run*.* It follows Shifrin as he explores the questions that are most pressing for him as a young congenitally blind guy finding his way in the world. The first episode, about his work with the coach he hired in advance of a TED talk he was giving, so he could learn the gestures and sighted mannerisms that were otherwise totally alien and inaccessible to him as someone who’d grown up without sight, is fascinating (and was instructive for me as I wrote about the challenges of blind people trying to break into the entertainment industry.)

More from the cultural blindness moment: last month, Pantheon published M. Leona Godin’s There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness. It’s a lovely book, really well-researched, and beautifully elaborates on snippets of blind literary history—the Greeks, Milton, Keller, Borges — with surprising details, enlivened by Leona’s anecdotes from her own journey through various stages of blindness. When I interviewed her on Zoom about the book, I felt like I needed another three hours to ask her everything I wanted to know.

I also recommend to you this other book-promotional panel that Leona arranged, with three other excellent blind memoirists: Georgina Kleege, Jim Knipfel, and Stephen Kuusisto. As a friend pointed out, the best part of the panel may have been when Jim (drinking beer the whole time), asked the panel an “impertinent” question (one that, in impertinent moments, I may have also asked myself): “Raise your hand,” he said, “if you think that you’d have gotten a book deal if you weren’t blind.”

I haven’t yet read James Tate Hill’s Blind Man’s Bluff, and might force myself to wait until my book is turned in so that I’m not subliminally influenced (or non-subliminally paralyzed if it’s awesome), so for now I’ll just say that that’s a great title for a memoir about a man who hides his blindness from everyone. I also love that he apparently displayed paperback editions of all the audiobooks he read, as a ruse to convince people his eyes were still working. Out next month from Norton, pre-order here.

As for me: my book cannot be preordered yet. It will likely be called The Country of the Blind, after the H.G. Wells short story. I am handing in a first draft to my editor in September, at which point I should know more about when it will be out. I am very grateful to you for reading all the way to the end of this newsletter. I look forward to emailing you again in six to twelve months. Please do reply to this email if you’d like to recommend a cultural artifact, ask a question, or say hello.