Maybe I'm afraid that if I feel too deeply for everyone else, I'll implode with their suffering.

useful in my job as a journalist, when I need to get people to open up. It also helps me interact more compassionately with friends and family and soften up grim-faced salesclerks.

Ted lived there until he died, at 17, and I suspect that my hair-trigger ability to feel others' pain is one of the uneasy legacies bequeathed to me by his illness.

served as cautionary tales about the dangers of abandoning traditional values.

offered ways to process and interpret the rapid pace of change.

1960s were defined by cultural revolution and rocked by dramatic and often violent news events: Cuba, political assassinations, the Civil Rights struggle, the Cold War, Vietnam. Sexual revolution happened too, as new medical technology freed women from their reproductive chains.

used the new medium of TV advertising to reach suburban and teenage audiences, and stunts involving giant dinosaurs and ants to reach the newspaper front pages.

As the scientists search the lagoon, the Gill Man becomes enamored of one of the expedition members, Kay Lawrence

Jack Arnold directed several dynamic sci-fi monster pics for Universal-International in the 1950s: It Came from Outer Space (1953), Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Tarantula (1955), and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957).

only fault was being in the wrong place at the wrong time

No man in a monster suit with a fixed-expression rubber mask was ever able to replicate quite this level of character nuance. A

based on a Ray Bradbury short story (The Foghorn) and centers on the accidental awakening (by atomic testing) of a long-dormant carnivorous dinosaur (a rhedosaurus) that has been frozen for millennia in the Arctic.

box office success of Harryhausen’s next project, The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms is credited for inspiring the slew of Creature Features that followed – including Gojira in Japan. 

Ray Harryhausen was the star practitioner of stop-motion and animated effects of this era.

the Baby Boomers – the postwar generation who formed the main audience for these movies – didn’t take much notice of the dire warnings about messing with the environment that many of these movies contained.

special effects and trick photography became more sophisticated, filmmakers became much bolder about the monsters they wanted to show onscreen.

1952 Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson Supreme Court ruling, films were recategorized as free speech under the First Amendment.

 The Blob (1958), a couple of small towns are destroyed by the goo from inside a newly-arrived meteorite; Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959) pits human-sized bloodsuckers against the local Everglades townsfolk.

first recorded sighting of a flying saucer occurred June 24, 1947, followed almost immediately by the crash of a supposed weather balloon in Roswell, New Mexico, that fueled rumors about a captive alien ship (and an autopsied alien) for decades.

first thing these triumphant scientists did was start another conflict, the Cold War, a technological race toward mutually assured destruction – and guaranteed work and funding for scientists of every stripe, including the former Nazis poached by the USSR and USA

horror films of the 1950s are usually situated in the present day and many of them riff on contemporary technology run riot

The name “Lon Chaney, Jr.”, “Bela Lugosi” or “Boris Karloff”

generally believed to be responsible for the Golden Era of Hollywood in general: for the next thirty or so years Hollywood was forced to find ever more inventive, subtle and symbolic ways of telling stories, of depicting the dark side of human nature through shadow and allusion, and of hinting at extra-marital sex, drug use and violent death in terms of metaphors that went flying over the heads of any children in the theatre. L

by 1934, all studio-produced movies had to abide by the Code or risk a total ban.

but

moral guardians of the nation — led by the Catholic Church — were outraged,

had the freedom to run amok, flirt (even with the same sex), consume all manner of illicit potions, use violence to get their way, kill and — most blasphemously — create new life

1933, the year Hitler came to power, saw a peak in mad scientist movies; it seems the genre was horribly prescient of the scientific insanity to come in the Nazi-run concentration camps.

U.S. Public Health Service felt there was nothing wrong in conducting the now-infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment (which ran from 1932-1972) on 399 unsuspecting black Americans — 128 died, 40 wives were infected and 19 children born with congenital syphilis.

reflected the ongoing cultural fascination with eugenics, the idea that the only way to prevent a future catastrophe for the human race was by selective breeding of the genetically superior and the forced sterilization of those with undesirable genetic traits.

mad scientists pop up frequently in this decade’s horror films.

Karloff and Whale followed Frankenstein with The Old Dark House (1932) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). In between, Whale directed Claude Rains in The Invisible Man (1933) while Karloff depicted another lumbering creature in The Mummy (1932) and a Hungarian Satanist in The Black Cat (1934).

Tod Browning for Dracula — Browning had been making spook tales and lurid thrillers since the late 1910s and was known for his collaborations with Lon Chaney 

By 1936 he had bankrupted the studio by financing a series of wildly expensive flops.

events far removed from the everyday realities of the Great Depression and political turmoil in Europe and Asia

Tod Browning

offered some much-needed escapism to audiences tiring of their Great Depression reality:

The technology for recording sound onto film strips was developed in the early 1920s, but it wasn’t until 1927, when Warner Brothers made Al Jolson sing in The Jazz Singer that the “talkies” looked like they might be here to stay.

First World War was the also the first to be documented, comprehensively, as moving pictures recorded on the camera that never lies.

Some of us have better cognitive function; some of us might have intellectual disabilities; some take medication; most, if not all, have sensory issues.

look at me with pity instead of trying to get to know me, listen to my ideas.

People often forget that the aim should be for them to become happy autistic adults, not to try to ‘fix’ them.

people assume that autistics who do not communicate via speech all have an intellectual disability.

National Autistic Society show that just 16% of autistic adults are in full-time employment, and only 32% are in any type of paid work

In 2020, Planning Across the Spectrum wrote that functioning labels may harm people with disabilities. Writing that:  People who are deemed low-functioning tend to be heavily stigmatized, infantilized, and dismissed due to their inability to communicate verbally[

does not capture the complexity and nuances of functioning with a disability. Others feel that the phrases are patronizing because they imply that a person’s functioning is limited by their disability.

Low-functioning and high-functioning are terms that describe how well a person with a disability can function in daily life activities and general participation in society.

generalizations and stereotypes form, such as: people that are high functioning can graduate, have jobs and live a “normal” life; and low functioning people cannot take care of themselves, have difficulty with communication, will never have a job and engage in maladaptive behaviors.