I regret to say I have not spent the last year getting into the best shape of my life or launching a new side-hustle or doing any other monumental work some have managed to make happen in the midst of a pandemic. That’s not to say I haven’t picked up a new hobby or two. I’ve certainly cooked at home more than ever, and I’ve upgraded many kitchen gadgets and tools to make that work both easier and more enjoyable. And I also started a program I’ve wanted to prioritize for quite some time: I’ve begun taking French lessons in earnest. Through the Chicago branch of Alliance Français, a cultural…

On a recent episode of the New York Times podcast “The Daily,” the show that focuses on one timely news story each morning, reporters descended on The Villages, the massive, pre-fab retirement community in central Florida. Boasting over 120,000 residents, the community is reliably conservative and, according to some reports, is singlehandedly responsible for keeping Florida red in recent elections. The focus of the episode, however, was the burgeoning liberal voices inside the manicured landscapes of The Villages, revealing a divergent narrative from the one so heavily managed by the community with fake town squares and more special interest clubs than the best-funded high schools. Now comes Some Kind of Heaven,…

For those with a distant relationship to autism—they aren’t raising a child diagnosed with it, they don’t work in a capacity to serve someone with it—the condition can be a mysterious one. So much misinformation has swirled through media and popular culture over the years that it can be confusing to know exactly what it is, where it comes from or how it presents in an individual. The general awareness of the condition typically centralizes around its external, observable factors; we busy ourselves with how to “normalize” someone’s inability to communicate or socialize, how to integrate them into an abled society as smoothly as possible. How often, though, do we…