Reaching My Autistic Son Through Disney

Then both of them turn to Owen. “You can do it, Owie,” Walt whispers. “I know you can.” Owen looks evenly at his brother and Merlin, and then steps to the anvil and lifts the sword true. Did he understand what Walt was saying? Did he just imitate what he saw his brother do? What the hell difference did it make? Today, in the sunlight, he’s the hero of his imagination.

→ The New York Times

Is It Immoral to Watch the Super Bowl ?

The boy’s coaches, and later his parents, ran onto the field. Smelling salts wouldn’t revive him. Eventually, an ambulance appeared. Sean was convinced that he’d killed the boy. He began to cry. But what Sean remembers most vividly was the way, right after the tackle, his teammates kept slapping his helmet, as if he’d just done the most heroic thing ever, which, in a purely football sense, he had.

→ The New York Times

The Prophet

To his listeners, Ramsey holds out the promise that they can simply choose to be different—that it’s within their power to not take part in recessions and the economic problems facing American families. “Debt is normal,” a Ramsey bumper sticker says. “Be weird.”

→ Pacific Standard

My Time at Lehman

I remember taking the subway home each night asking myself “What have I done today? What have I created?” And it meant that I couldn’t sleep well, I was embarrassed to tell people what I did, and I felt as though I personally owed every single person that I mucked over in the markets each day. The experience reminded me of one as a child when I unfairly sold some worthless items to neighbors at a stoop sale in front of our house in Brooklyn. When my parents found out that night, they made me go from home to home on our block returning the money.

→ Nick Chirls