East Bay Innovations (EBI) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1994 and located in Alameda County, California, east of San Francisco. It arranges and provides personalized supports that enable people with disabilities to live in their own homes, work in jobs of their choice, and participate fully in their communities. EBI staff are recognized leaders and innovators who have built trusted relationships with diverse partners to create affordable, accessible housing and help people with disabilities...

COVID-19 has had a devastating effect on people

In the middle of the 2nd century BCE, a group of wealthy Phoenicians constructed a monumental villa at Anafa in the rural Upper Galilee. They decorated the walls of their villa with painted and gilded stucco, constructed private baths, and imported Aegean wine, fine tablewares and delicate blown glass to Anafa in huge quantities (Herbert, 1979). The residents of Anafa relied on an intimate trading connection with the coast in order to access the finest...

Millions of Africans have a disability—and compared with people without disabilities, they're more likely to live in poverty, have limited educations, and be in poor health. Because health, education, employment, and transportation services are often inaccessible, people with disabilities are less likely to get the support they need to thrive. To make matters worse, the COVID-19 pandemic, which has made many of these disparities more apparent, poses a new threat to the well-being of people...

Novel Dialogue: where unlikely conversation partners come together to discuss the making of novels and what to make of them. Join Aarthi Vadde, a scholar of contemporary literature and Victorianist John Plotz as they take a four-continent journey (ok, fine a virtual four-continent, Zoomish journey) to talk turkey with novelists and critics the world over. In fact, episode two takes place in Turkey, where Orhan Pamuk , in conversation with Bruce Robbins, reveals a hankering...

In this episode John and Elizabeth sit down with Brandeis string theorist Albion Lawrence to discuss cooperation versus solitary study across disciplines. They sink their teeth into the question, "Why do scientists seem to do collaboration and teamwork better than other kinds of scholars and academics?" The conversation ranges from the merits of collective biography to the influence of place and geographic location in scientific collaboration to mountaineering traditions in the sciences. As a Recallable...

On April 27, David D. Kirkpatrick reported in the N. Y. Times that Oxford's Jenner Center is close to starting human trials on a potential Covid-19 vaccine. According to Kirkpatrick, "ethics rules, as a general principle, forbid seeking to infect human test participants with a serious disease. That means the only way to prove that a vaccine works is to inoculate people in a place where the virus spreading naturally around them." It ain't necessarily...

Kim Stanley Robinson, SF novelist of renown, has three marvelous trilogies: The Three Californias, Science in the Capital and, most celebrated of all, Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars. His honors include many Locus, Hugo and Nebulae awards. Small fact connecting him to RTB-land: he completed a literature PhD directed by Frederic Jameson with a dissertation-turned-book on the novels of Phillip K. Dick. Stan and John start out with Stan's emerging from the Grand...

RTB listeners already know the inimitable Martin Puchner from that fabulous RTB episode about his "deep history" of literature and literacy, The Written World. You may even know he has a family memoir coming out soon, The Language of Thieves. But it took Books in Dark Times to uncover his secret hankering for tales of the British aristocracy, and for off-kilter modernist texts.

Sanjay Krishnan, Boston University English professor and Conrad scholar, has written a marvelous new book about that grumpiest of Nobel laureates, V. S Naipaul's Journeys. Krishnan sees the "Contrarian and unsentimental" Trinidad-born but globe-trotting novelist and essayist as early and brilliant at noticing the unevenness with which the blessings and curses of modernity were distributed in the era of decolonization. Centrally, Naipaul realized and reckoned with the always complex and messy question of the minority...

Peter Godfrey-Smith knows his cephalopods. Once of CUNY and now a professor of history and philosophy of science at University of Sydney, his truly capacious career includes books such as Theory and Reality (2003; 2nd edition in 2020), Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (2009) and most recently Metazoa. RtB--including two Brandeis undergraduates as guest hosts, Izzy Dupré and Miriam Fisch-- loves his astonishing book on the fundamental alterity of octopus intelligence and experience of the...

Women with intellectual and developmental disabilities experience significant reproductive health disparities compared to their counterparts without IDD, including pregnancy complications and adverse birth outcomes like pre-eclampsia, hemorrhages, and Cesarean sections. This brief summarizes research on hospital utilization among women with IDD, maternal health, and outcomes among newborn children of mothers with IDD.

People with disabilities are deciding to be parents at increasing rates, and researchers are starting to pay attention.

Women with disabilities are increasingly likely to become pregnant and have children. As more disabled women become mothers, the need for providers to understand the health and healthcare needs of these women becomes more apparent. Studies have shown that the infants of women with chronic illnesses and physical, psychiatric, and intellectual disabilities have a higher likelihood of being preterm, being small for their gestational age (their age since conception, rather than birth), or having a...

COVID-19 has had a devastating effect on people

Learn how medical practitioners learned how to work with pregnant women with disabilities in this research summary.

Book Industry Month continues with a memory-lane voyage back to a beloved early RtB episode. This conversation with Martin Puchner about the very origins of writing struck us as perfect companion to Mark McGurl's wonderful insights (in RtB 67, published earlier this month) about the publishing industry's in 2021, or as Mark tells it, the era of "adult diaper baby love." Aside from being a fabulous conversation about Martin's wonderful history of book production through...

On March 20th, John talked to Stephen McCauley, author of such brilliant comic novels as Object of My Affection (also a Jennifer Aniston movie) and most recently My Ex-Life. Steve brings light to dark corners in this the second installment of Books in Dark Times. He sings the praises of Charles Dickens, of Anthony Trollope (Elizabeth, offstage, chuckles delightedly) and the world-escaping delights of both Waugh's Brideshead Revisited and the Mapp and Lucia novels of...

John's favorite avocation is editing a Public Books column called B-Side Books, where writers resurrect beloved but neglected books. Now comes a book that collects 40 of these columns (the Washington Post review was a big thumbs-up, and John talked about the B-side concept on Five Books). This week's B-Sider is celebrated American novelist Caleb Crain (Necessary Errors and Overthrow). When not photographing cowbirds and orioles for his brilliantly titled Steamboats are Ruining Everything, Caleb...

This study uses a meaningful case study sample to investigate the self-esteem of pre-adolescent girls and the contributing factors. I studied three pre-adolescent girls in rural Hawaii who all participated in the same homeschooling community. In this paper, I offer a socioecological model of the perceived support of self-esteem of the girls. This model addresses the following questions: How do the three girls in the study demonstrate confidence? Are they perceived as confident by themselves,...

These briefs present evidence that states should be targeting participants in Medicaid Home and Community-Based Services (HCBS) programs as high priority vaccine recipients.

Many people with disabilities who get paid help with daily activities also need help with health maintenance tasks, such as ostomy care, ventilator management, bowel and bladder care, tube feeding, insulin injections, and management of other medications. In many states, laws prohibit paid workers without nursing or other medical licenses from performing such tasks. In others, nurses are permitted to delegate such tasks to these workers. In some instances, such workers can perform health maintenance...

Policymakers shaping responses to COVID-19 have thus far overlooked the needs of high-risk populations, including disabled people and older adults living in the community who rely on the assistance of Personal Care Attendants (PCAs), Direct Support Professionals (DSPs), and other direct care workers. To help protect high-risk populations who rely on direct care workers to live in the community, we must draw on our existing strengths and resources. Specifically, we must ensure that a) people...

This report is part of an evaluation of Cal MediConnect, California's demonstration project to integrate care for people covered under both Medicare and Medicaid. The evaluation is being conducted by the Community Living Policy Center at UCSF and the Health Research for Action Center at UC Berkeley, and is funded by The SCAN Foundation and NIDILRR. This report presents findings from a survey of Cal MediConnect beneficiaries and comparison samples conducted over the telephone in...