Work
The Fight to Keep Playboy in Braille
For more than a decade, the federal government published Playboy in braille. Congress defunded it. Blind readers sued, and won.
How the Architecture of Sound Is Transforming Cities
Acoustic cues don’t just make spaces more accessible. They also create opportunities for exploration and delight.
Why (and How) to Hire a Blind Producer
A manifesto for the radio-craft site Transom.
The Snail
A story about Long Covid, in the second issue of the audio magazine Signal Hill.
Manual Labor
An essay about new deaf writing and art, in issue no. 81, "After Words."
Colossal Cave Adventure
How playing interactive fiction games in the 1980s prepared me for becoming a blind computer user
How MAGA Scrambled Disability Politics
The right's crusade against DEI and trans people is threatening disabled Americans — and straining the coalition behind the Americans with Disability Act.
How Blind Travelers Navigate the Globe
A story for the magazine's "Access Issue."
I Know What the Apple Vision Pro Is For
The headset is already changing disabled users’ lives.
‘I Is Someone Else’: A Sidelong Glance at the Disabled Self-Portrait
An essay for the catalog of the Alt Text Selfies project.
Review: Against Technoableism, by Ashley Shew
A review of Ashley Shew's book.
I Have a Choice to Make About My Blindness
An opinion essay about blindness and A.I.
Beyond Dining in the Dark: What It’s Actually Like to Eat Out When You’re Blind
Restaurant menus can present an awkward challenge for blind people. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
How to Be Blind
As a kid, I was told that one day I would lose my sight. Recently, I went to a residential school for the blind, where I learned to live without it.
Blindness Isn’t a Tragic Binary. It’s a Rich Spectrum
When does vision loss become blindness? Writer, audio producer and editor Andrew Leland explains how his gradual loss of vision revealed a paradoxical truth about blindness -- and shows why it might have implications for how all of us see the world.
The Poet John Lee Clark Translates the DeafBlind Experience to the Page
Clark’s new collection is a meditation on language and communication. He reflects on the sensory world of DeafBlind writers, and his reception by hearing and sighted audiences.
Ways of Not Seeing
Four blind and low vision artists—Rodney Evans, Kayla Hamilton, Emilie L. Gossiaux, Bojana Coklyat—discuss their practices.
DeafBlind Communities May Be Creating a New Language of Touch
Protactile began as a movement for autonomy and a system of tactile communication. Now, some linguists argue, it is becoming a language of its own.
The Right Stuff
We’re sending more and more people to space every year. But are we sending the right ones?
The ADA-Compliant Elevator of Literature
An essay about accessibility and writing.
Feeling Seen
A feature about a TV show that cast a sighted actress in a blind role, and how people perform disability.
The Universal Page
An episode about blindness and reading.
The Organist
107 episodes of an arts-and-culture podcast, 2013 to 2019.
The Narrative Line
What happens when the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves turn out to be wrong? And what if the attempt to shape our life stories to fit some formulaic narrative arc fundamentally distorts them?
The Radio Auteur: Joe Frank, Ira Glass, and Narrative Radio
Through his broadcasts over the course of forty years, Joe Frank, who died at seventy-nine this past January, brought the notion of the auteur to American radio.
The Secret Life of Plants
A reported audio feature on Stevie Wonder "truthers."
An Interview with Kate Soper
An interview with the composer Kate Soper.
Self Portrait in an Open Medicine Cabinet
An essay about visual art and blindness.
The Meaning of Various News Photos to David Shields
An audio essay on John Baldessari and David Shields.
A Note to My Students
In The Thing Book: A Monument to the Book as Object.
Art and Entertainment
With Jonn Herschend, for the catalog of the 2014 Whitney Biennial.
Short fiction in the Lifted Brow
Short fiction in issues 8 and 11.
Review: The French Revolution, by Matt Stewart
A book review.
Alien Semicolon
An essay.
Psych
A music review.
Review: Real World, by Natsuo Kirino
A book review.
Fake Azure
An essay in Mythym, edited by Trinie Dalton.
Review: How the Dead Dream, by Lydia Millet
A book review.
Crime in Choir
A music review.
Review: San Francisco Noir, by Nathaniel Rich
A book review.