Writing

The Country of the Blind: a Memoir at the End of Sight, my book about the world of blindness — and finding my place in it — is out now from Penguin Press. It was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Memoir. You can find links to purchase a copy here. An excerpt was published as “How to Be Blind” as the New Yorker’s “Weekend Essay” feature. I also wrote a guest essay for New York Times Opinion about blindness and A.I. I assembled some highlights (Marc Maron! Terry Gross!) of the book’s press coverage here.

I wrote about how the Apple Vision Pro is changing the lives of some disabled users (and the history of accessibility at Apple and Silicon Valley) for New York magazine.

I reviewed Ashley Shew’s Against Technoableism for the New York Times Book Review.

I contributed a reported feature on blindness and dining out for a special section of Eater (guest-edited by Alice Wong) called “Low and Slow: Disabled People on Food.”

A roundtable discussion I moderated with four blind and low-vision artists was the cover story of Art in America magazine’s October 2022 Disability Issue.

“DeafBlind Communities May Be Creating a New Language of Touch,” a web feature I wrote for the New Yorker, won the 2023 Journalism Award from the Linguistic Society of America.

I wrote a feature for the New York Times Magazine about the controversy surrounding a TV show that cast a sighted actress in a blind role, and how it lead 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 wrote about Joe Frank and experimental public radio for the New York Review Daily.

I wrote an essay, “The ADA-Compliant Elevator of Literature,” about accessibility and writing, for McSweeney’s 64, and an essay about visual art and blindness, “Self-Portrait in an Open Medicine Cabinet,” for Mcsweeney’s 50.

I started an email newsletter that I have never and possibly will never use to send any emails.

I have written other things, mostly criticism and essays, for a variety of other publications. Links to these occasionally appear amid my punishingly banal observations on Twitter.