Steve Silberman

Steve Silberman (December 23, 1957 – August 28, 2024) was an American writer for Wired magazine and has been an editor and contributor there for 14 years. In 2010, Silberman was awarded the AAAS "Kavli Science Journalism Award for Magazine Writing."

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April 10, 2026

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April 10, 2026

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"Two decades after the passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), parents still routinely find themselves having to sue their local school boards to obtain an appropriate classroom placement for their son or daughter. Furthermore, very little of the money raised by advocacy organizations like Autism Speaks addresses the day-to-day needs of autistic people and their families. By focusing primarily on funding searches for potential causes and risk factors, these organizations reinforce the idea that autism is a historical anomaly-a distinctive problem of modern times that could be solved by a discovery that seems perpetually just around the corner. As the mainstream world had a long argument about vaccines, newly diagnosed adults were engaged in a very different conversation about the difficulties of navigating and surviving in a world not built for them. By sharing the stories of their lives, they discovered that many of the challenges they face daily are not "symptoms" of their autism, but hardships imposed by a society that refuses to make basic accommodations for people with cognitive disabilities as it does for people with physical disabilities such as blindness and deafness. A seemingly simple question began to formulate in my mind: After seventy years of research on autism, why do we still seem to know so little about it? To find the answer to that question for this book, I decided to start my reporting at the very beginning, even before Kanner's and Asperger's allegedly independent discoveries of autism in the 1940s. By taking nothing for granted, I learned that the standard time line of autism history-its creation myth, so to speak-is fundamentally flawed in ways that render autistic people in previous generations harder to see. Until these inaccuracies in the time line are corrected, they will continue to hamper our ability to make wise choices about the kinds of research and societal accommodations that would be most beneficial to autistic people and their families. One of the most promising developments since the publication of "The Geek Syndrome" has been the emergence of the concept of neurodiversity: the notion that conditions like autism, dyslexia, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) should be regarded as naturally occurring cognitive variations with distinctive strengths that have contributed to the evolution of technology and culture rather than mere checklists of deficits and dysfunctions. Though the spectrum model of autism and the concept of neurodiversity are widely believed to be products of our postmodern world, they turn out to be very old ideas, proposed by Hans Asperger in his first public lecture on autism in 1938. The idea of neurodiversity has inspired the creation of a rapidly growing civil rights movement based on the simple idea that the most astute interpreters of autistic behavior are autistic people themselves rather than their parents or doctors. (p 15-6)"

- Steve Silberman

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