Community Newsmakers

I'm proud to announce that Kirsten Lindsmith, co-host of Autism Talk TV, has become a weekly blogger on Wrong Planet. She will be writing about the female perspective. Here's what she has to say.

I am a 20 year-old aspergian who was just diagnosed early last summer. I didn’t know anything about autism until a few months before my diagnosis. I’d heard of it, of course, but did I know what it was? Not really. I'll admit that I was...

John Elder Robison, author of Look Me in the Eye: My Life with Asperger's, has a new book, Be Different, out this March. John reads the introduction of Be DIfferent in a movie which I've illustrated with photos from his life.

He discusses how Asperger's allowed him to accomplish amazing things in his life, including designing the effects for the band KISS and starting a fine european automobile business in Springfield, MA.

My Autism Talk...

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with economist Tyler Cowen, author of Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World, an economics book that argues that the Internet is making our society more "autistic" and autistic individuals have a leg up in this new digital economy.

Tyler talks to me about Economcis, the way in which autistic individuals approach concepts differently than non-autistics, and how the...

Although (as far as I know) Michael John Carley of GRASP and Alison Tepper Singer of Autism Speaks are not literally in bed together, they have had such a cozy relationship over the past two years that the expression seems quite apropos. Most of us know Singer from her appearance in the Autism Every Day film, in which she attained worldwide infamy (and, if I recall correctly, a visit from child protective services) for saying, in front...

Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Medicine, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure is a well-referenced, historical work that explains the dangerous and unnecessary controversies that have put the lives of autistic children at risk. Offit sets up his book by explaining how he has become a major player in the field of immunology. He then explores the process by which the autism/vaccine controversy has been given so much attention. He...

Autistic Dr. Temple Grandin, a designer of livestock handling facilities and a Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University, is an icon in the Autistic Community. Her life has been a beacon and an inspirational story and after a long negotiation is getting her biography brought to HBO.  Claire Danes is in negotiations to star as Grandin in the film which is currently moving forward after nine years.
 
"I made a commitment...

After the negative publicity Autism Speaks received for threatening to sue a 14 year old autistic girl for her perfectly legal parody website, you would think that the organization learned their lesson. Unfortunately, they're at it again, this time threatening an autistic blogger's t-shirt company with legal action for a shirt that read "'Autism Speaks' can go away. I have Autism. I can speak for myself." The organization claimed the...

Nicholas Gray’s directorial debut, If you Could Say it in Words, is a feature film about Nelson Hodge, a young African American guy with Asperger’s living in Philidelphia. While there have recently been a plethora of films about individuals with Asperger’s, most have been documentaries, and none have featured a protagonist with Asperger’s who falls into a lower-income socioeconomic class.

Read on to listen to an interview with the...

This morning I had a conversation with model and art student Heather Kuzmich, a girl with Asperger's who appeared on America's Next Top Model and won Cover Girl of the Week eight times in a row.

Read on for the interview.

I was interviewed on Monday by Michael Boll of Autism Podcast. He asked me about WrongPlanet.net, autism, and my life as a successful individual with Asperger's Syndrome. The interview is an interesting look into the person behind Wrong Planet (me).

I think we had a great interview and I really enjoyed reminiscing about my early childhood experiences, which many of you will definitely relate to. Also, we touched on what it's like to run a...