Liz Shayne

Loneliness Not the Same as Being Alone - Research Horizons

"Many [autistic] young people report higher degrees and frequency of loneliness than the general population. However, that does not necessarily mean that people with autism want to be stuck in rooms full of other people."

scienceblog.cincinnatichildrens.org/loneliness-n... #neurodiversity #autism

ברוך מתיר אסורים!

It’s time to let ourselves take a hopeful breath, to recognize that there is power in our movements. It’s time to take stock of where we are, and to begin the work of moving beyond terrifying bloodshed and grief and toward real justice, freedom, and safety for everyone. (6/6)

Sometimes you happen to ask during Hashem’s daily game of fetch with the Leviathan and it takes a while to get back on track.

What middle and upper class cis het white people need to understand is that they only have as many rights as the most vulnerable do. You have only the rights trans people and immigrants do.

High Holidays 5786 Tzedakah Campaign Let’s keep Gaza Soup Kitchen running through the High Holidays

help me reach my goal of raising $1,000 for the gaza soup kitchen

Note to self - exercise is like caramelizing onions. Yes, it takes 2 hours of blocked off time to do a 40 minute workout, No, I don’t know why workout classes don’t have an option to say 30 minute of workout time, 90 minutes from deciding to work out to getting dressed after a shower.

tweet from childish branzino @absflora: timothée chalamet is the new benedict cumberbatch in the sense that you can say ANYTHING and we know who you mean. tiffany chevrolet. timpanogos charlemagne. symphony cabernet. jiminy castaway.

Higgledy piggledy
Timothée Chalamet
Has a name meriting
Endless design

Much like his forerunner
Benedict Cumberbatch:
Hexasyllabically,
Easy to rhyme

Love after Love Derek Walcott The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread, Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

Love after Love. Derek Walcott.

While we've passed the 2nd secular anniversary of October 7th, the Hebrew one— Simchat Torah— is next week. If this report is true, there will truly be reason to rejoice in community on Tuesday night.

Nothing can bring back the dead, but we can work to repair our world for the living.

It's a myth that banning a book increases that book's readership. For most books, banning has the chilling effect the censors want. Your favorite banned books need to you be loud for them!

My personal timeline is full of autistic people trying to explain that there isn't more autism than before, it's just that we're better at detecting it, and there's nothing more autistic than hoping explaining something at length will help matters when nobody is really listening.

In the same way that someone in recovery from an eating disorder is forbidden from fasting, someone recovering from nervous system trauma shouldn’t impact that recovery.
But I think we can hold both the way a practice is valuable and the way it is modified or set aside when it’s not right.

The rabbis are very clear that these rules don’t apply to someone who they would actually harm - the principle they use roughly translates to “the heart knows when it is suffering” and we always trust people when they say “I can’t do this”.

In merit of the comforts that we deny ourselves on Yom Kippur, may we find the opportunity to mend the world by bringing safety and comfort to those continue to suffer to protect the powerful from discomfort.

If we can sit with discomfort on Yom Kippur rather than seeking to escape it, maybe we can sit with the knowledge that we have done wrong and we don’t have the right to pretend that wrong away. We have done this. And, because this is also integral to Yom Kippur, we can change. We can do better.

Our impulse is to make those feelings go away as quickly as possible; to excuse, shift the blame somewhere else, or deny that the harm happened. Perhaps the reason we make ourselves feel bad on Yom Kippur is to practice that much harder kind of feeling bad.

That clench in the stomach, that hot prickling feeling behind the eyes, that feeling of emptiness, that bone-deep exhaustion…there are ways in which the physical symptoms we create on Yom Kippur mimic the sensation of shame and regret that comes along with having done the wrong thing.

The thing that I land on over and over again is the importance of being able to sit with discomfort rather than immediately making it go away. Maybe if we practice sitting in discomfort for 25 hours, we can teach ourselves to sit in the physical discomfort that comes when we acknowledge wrongdoing.

With the obvious but important caveat that not everyone fasts on Yom Kippur, not everyone should fast, and that there is more to this commandment than just refraining from food and drink; I keep thinking about the value of affliction and how hard we work to make ourselves uncomfortable on this day.

I'm sure he did, given that he is a man of high morel character.

If you're getting ready for Yom Kippur with the posture of,

"THOSE Jews need to repent!"

you need to get your eyes back on your own blue book.

We ALL have been harmed, we ALL are bystanders to harm, and we ALL cause harm.

Tonight and tomorrow is about your work.

Agitate again later.

My five year old is really sad on my behalf that I didn’t get a small toy from my dentist. I was informed that it’s not fair and that grown ups deserve small treats too.

Does anyone care is almost never the right question. People care. The issue is that people don't know what to do.

Another source at NIH agreed and told me they were "all for a shutdown." That's in spite of the fact that their life would be substantially altered as a result. "A shut down would be very disruptive to my personal work and personal finances but we are so far beyond what is permissible in a functioning society and government," they said.

As a shutdown approaches and Dem leadership does its usual schtick, just re-upping that basically every fed employee I've heard from in recent weeks (anecdotal, yes, but still!) is pro-fight, pro-shutdown-if-necessary. As I wrote a couple weeks ago about NIH:

www.gravityisgone.com/the-walls-ar...

Screenshot text: The machine-learning model looked at keywords in the titles and abstracts of cancelled grants listed on Grant Witness to get an idea of what sorts of grant were targeted (see Supplementary information for methodology). It also considered the size of the grant and how much of the funding period was left. After training and evaluation, we deleted the training data and applied the model to all active NIH grants listed in the Dimensions database at the start of the year, assigning each a predicted risk of cancellation on the basis of these features. It predicted with an overall accuracy of 90%: nine out of ten times, it correctly predicted whether a grant was or wasn’t cancelled. Of those grants that we know were cancelled, it correctly predicted cancellation 70% of the time. According to the model, the phrases and words that were most likely to lead to cancellation included ‘gender-affirming care’, ‘assigned male at birth’, ‘affirming care’, ‘racial justice’, ‘LGBTQ’ and ‘hate speech’.

This demonstrates exactly what you want to see in a machine-learning analysis, btw: getting the model to "explain" itself

Neurodivergence is Not a Moral Defect Mere hours after the Senate confirmed Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services on February 13, the White House released an Executive Order entitled “Establishing the Preside…

Autism announcement: it appears it is time to post this again, with the addendum that taking pain medication is not morally defective, either.

יעלה זכרוננו Essays for the Yamim Noraim Published by Halachic Left, 5786/2025 Contributors: Rana Bickel • Jonathan Boyarin • Rabbi Caleb Brommer • Rabbi Vincent Calabrese • Rabbi Aryeh Cohen • Rabbi William Friedman • Avi Garelick • Rabbi Avigayil Halpern • Lexi Kohanski • Raphael Magarik • Zev Mishell • Ya’aqov Shenkin • Laynie Soloman • Rabbi Leead Staller • Rabbi Lauren Tuchman Edited by Rabbi Lexie Botzum, Max Buchdahl, Caroline Morganti, Eliana Padwa, and Noam Weinreich [Cover image: a watercolor background of clouds in the sky near either sunset or sunrise]

✨ "Ya'aleh Zikhroneinu," our essay collection for the High Holidays, is now live!
Download and print it out to read over the chagim here: bit.ly/hl-reader-5786 ✨

Does painting cows with stripes prevent fly bites? Researchers who studied this win Ig Nobel prize A researcher who studied fingernail growth and a group that explored whether painting zebralike stripes on cows reduced fly bites are among the winners of this year's Ig Nobels.

The 2025 IgNobles are out!!!

Need a bit of joy in your life? A bit of hope in humanity? Try the IgNobles!

(The IgNobles are a series of humorous prizes awarded each year to real research that sounds silly but actually brodens our understanding of the world.)

apnews.com/article/ig-n...

"Republicans are so idiotic and hate trans people so much that they're defunding education for blind and deaf children" would be a slam dunk line for any Democrat to run with if any of them had the courage of a squonk