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February 20 - March 6, 2022
Pulp devotees did not invent the word fan (derived from the Latin fanaticus, “possessed by divine madness”), but they established the first fandom in the modern sense, with its own elaborate customs, art forms, specialized jargon, conventions, and absurdly bombastic internecine warfare.
Traits typically viewed as pathological or pathetic in the mainstream (like obsessing over trivia while accumulating vast hoards of treasured ephemera) were rewarded in the community as signs of “trufan” commitment.
TV—which made its public debut in 1928, in an experimental broadcast hosted by Gernsback’s radio station WRNY—was
But McCarthy was ready for a change in the early 1960s; when Stanford offered him a full professorship, he took it. He sold his house in Cambridge to two young Harvard professors promoting a tool for hacking the operating system of the human brain: LSD. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert turned the alcove of McCarthy’s old library (which contained equal parts of “science, fiction, and science fiction”) into a rabbit hole that went down to a trip room lined with pillows, black lights, and psychedelic art.
Go, print out a document in Elvish (he wrote an unpublished sequel to The Lord of the Rings that was sympathetic to the orcs),
Was McCarthy on the spectrum? He certainly displayed many of the classic features of Asperger’s syndrome: his brusqueness, his single-minded focus to the point of seeming rude, his physical clumsiness, and his habit of coaching himself aloud when under stress. He also had many clearly positive traits that Asperger associated with autism: a fascination with logic and complex machines, a gift for puns and aphorisms, an uncompromising personal ethic, and the ability to solve problems from angles that his more socially oriented colleagues missed. But McCarthy would have had no need to seek out a
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His grandfather, William T. Price, made a fortune by shrinking the design of diesel engines so they could fit into trains and trucks.
Soon Whole Earth Catalog impresario Stewart Brand would unleash this subculture on the unsuspecting inhabitants of Greater Mundania with the ultimate endorsement in Rolling Stone: “Computers are coming to the people. That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics.”
Inevitably, the first public social network also gave birth to the first online troll: a wag who called himself “Dr. Benway” (the name of a drug-addicted surgeon in the novels of William Burroughs) who peppered the ongoing dialogues with Grateful Dead references and droll non sequiturs like “sensuous keystrokes forbidden” and “personal attendance required: send no replica.” The identity of this mysterious pioneer of online snark was never uncovered.
Price’s daughter, Caroline, never graduated from college but became one of the leading experts on bookbinding and restoration in New York City.
Gloria remembered reading in college about some exotic disorder that made kids compulsively repeat nursery rhymes. Luckily, her old textbooks were stashed out in the garage. Bernie and Gloria tore open a cardboard box and finally had a name for their son’s condition: early infantile autism. Now at least they knew what they were dealing with.
Editors willing to take a chance on a book about a rare psychiatric disorder by a nonexpert were few and far between.
He needn’t have been so modest. After decades of confusion, Rimland’s book finally put the science of autism back on the right track by arguing persuasively that it was an inborn “perceptual disability” rather than a form of psychosis caused by childhood trauma.
Clues that Rimland may have been on to something have been popping up ever since. In 2003, Kathrin Hippler at the University of Vienna undertook a study of the case records of patients diagnosed by Asperger after the war; she found a significantly higher number of fathers working in the technical professions—particularly electrical engineering—than the fathers of a control group. Researchers at the University of Edinburgh discovered in 2015 that genes associated with autism are also associated with higher levels of cognitive ability—particularly problem-solving tasks requiring nonverbal,
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For parents who couldn’t afford to undertake this kind of doctor shopping, it was undoubtedly even harder, which is reflected in the continuing underdiagnosis of autism in minority communities to the present day.
Lovaas used to say that the most important thing to establish at the outset of discrete-trial training is “You are the boss.” To make clear that his tough-minded approach was not about being pleasing and supportive, he added, “People whose voices are very tender, who have difficulty asserting themselves, or who are obsessive about right and wrong, just don’t make good teachers of developmentally disabled children.” He described the ideal ABA therapist as “assertive, confident, and outgoing”—all
Humphry Osmond at a mental hospital in Saskatchewan. Osmond was no stranger to controversial research: he coined the word psychedelic in 1957 after giving Aldous Huxley the dose of mescaline that inspired him to write The Doors of Perception.
After moving to Huntington, West Virginia, she founded state and local NSAC chapters and launched the society’s Information and Referral Service out of her house, offering a wide range of services and resources to parents and professionals.
Never be embarrassed about taking them places. When Judy Garland was playing in New York, we decided to get a box seat and take Bill to see her in person because he loved her records. God bless Judy, she was wonderful. Bill was directly over her head and acting up as I expected he would and she looked up and said, “What’s the matter, darling?” That little bit of recognition from her made all the difference. He calmed down and enjoyed the rest of the show.
In 1974, West Virginia became the first state in the Union to specifically include autism in its mandatory public education laws, opening the doors of classrooms to hundreds of kids for the first time.
“Jonathan Swift had thrown Gulliver’s Travels into the fire, and his friend Alexander Pope pulled it out,” he says, wincing at the memory. “But I didn’t have a Pope.”
But both projects were based on the same fundamental view: that it’s easier to change a child’s behavior than it is to destigmatize that behavior in society—whether
At the root of the placebo effect is the fact that the attention of medical professionals, in an environment of care, produces beneficial changes in the mind and body of the patient even in the absence of an active drug. Researchers like Ted Kaptchuk at Harvard and Fabrizio Benedetti at the University of Milan have discovered that the mere act of swallowing a pill triggers cascades of hormones and neurotransmitters that can reduce pain and inflammation, enhance motor coordination, boost brain activity, lift mood, and improve digestion. These effects are pervasive, as if the body contains a
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WHEN THE GROUP HAD raised enough money to convert an old railway hostel in Ealing into the Sybil Elgar School, even the Beatles got into the act. Though the band members promised to drop in for just an hour, they spent the entire afternoon there gleefully rolling on the floor with the children. John Lennon became one of the school’s first major donors and attracted other celebrities to the cause.
In a scene calculated to thrill mainstream audiences, Morrow had Charlie exploit his brother’s savant abilities by bringing him to a casino in Vegas, where Raymond beat the blackjack dealer by counting cards. (Ironically, when the screenwriter brought Peek to Reno to see if this was truly plausible, he declined to go along with the scheme, saying, “This is not fair, Barry Morrow.”)
Ruth Sullivan talked Hoffman into giving Rain Man a sneak preview in Huntington as a benefit for the Autism Services Center (ASC) there two nights before its official New York premiere. This gala event took place in a grand old vaudeville showcase called the Keith-Albee Theater, and tickets sold out far in advance, enabling the ASC to buy its first piece of property—Pelican House, the group home where her son still resides.
“At least eight of the following sixteen items are present, these to include at least two items from A, one from B, and one from C.” This ensured that fewer children would slip through the diagnostic net because they failed to exhibit one behavior or another on evaluation day. The descriptions of these behaviors were also made less absolute. In the A list, for example, Kanner’s “pervasive lack of responsiveness to other people” became Wing’s “qualitative impairment in reciprocal social interaction.” It was left to the clinician to decide whether the degree of impairment was sufficient to make
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Diagnosing autism was no longer the exclusive domain of a small, elite network of specialists. At the historical moment that autism was poised to enter mainstream awareness, reliable tools to screen for it—and to distinguish it from other forms of disability—were made available on a mass scale. The demand for diagnoses and the clinical means of meeting that demand were perfectly calibrated.
IF THE DSM-III TURNED Spitzer and his data geeks into “rock stars” (as his wife, Janet Williams, put it), the fourth edition was Michael Jackson’s Thriller
For epidemiologists gauging the DSM-IV’s impact in the crucial period that would go down in history as the years a mysterious “autism epidemic” took hold, it was a statistical nightmare.
Lorna added that if a “dash of autism” is essential for success in science and art, as Asperger suggested, perhaps the advent of the Internet has accelerated “an evolutionary tendency in that direction.”
