Is Everyone on the Autism Spectrum?

Interesting story by Benjamine Wallace of New York Magazine.

"Is every man in America somewhere on it?” Nora Ephron wondered about the autism spectrum in an e-mail to a friend a few months before her death. “Is every producer on it? Is every 8-year-old boy who is obsessed with statistics on it? Sometimes, when we say someone is on the spectrum, do we just mean he’s a prick? Or a pathological narcissist? I notice that at least three times a week I am told (or I tell someone) that some man or other is on the spectrum.”
Ephron was hardly alone. In August, after a string of campaign-trail bloopers by Mitt Romney (e.g., at a New Hampshire parade, he described his lemonade as “lemon … wet … good”), noted ­diagnostician David Shuster, a television personality at Current TV, floated the idea that Romney might be on the spectrum. Shuster cited “an uncle who specializes in the field of Asperger’s”—a mild variant of autism—who had “suggested that perhaps Mitt Romney has some sort of form of Asperger’s because he’s so socially inept in terms of being able to connect with people. What he thinks is funny is really sort of not so funny. I sort of wonder if there’s some sort of tic or something that he has that’s related to that.”

Your Child's Autism Cures You From Trying to Please Everyone

Fron Huffington Post's Dafna Maor.

It was one of those things that anyone who works in the digital age comes across from time to time. Sometimes you send an email to the wrong person and then there is hell to pay. Oh, the shame. Sometimes, it's a Word document that gets deleted the second you finish writing a terrific proposal for a new project, the one which will catapult you to stardom at work. And sometimes, it's just a little misunderstanding of nuance when you use your instant messenger or Facebook chat to discuss work with a colleague.
Working in a media outlet doesn't necessarily guarantee that you are surrounded by people with high communication skills and knowledge of the human psyche. When egos and dispositions are involved, things tend to heat up.
It was a nice morning, and a colleague of mine was consulting with me, via messenger, about an idea for a feature for the supplement she was editing. In a matter of a few short minutes, that 'talk' turned very unpleasant. She wanted something and I suggested her idea was not very appealing. She asked for other ideas and I didn't have any, so I said maybe later. She asked why I was so hostile, and when I said she's reading something into my words that wasn't really there, she blew up. She walked over to my desk -- she was sitting just a few feet away, in a niche behind a wall. She demanded I come to the conference room and clear it up.
When this colleague, who is also a good friend, started ranting about hostility and uncooperativeness, I stopped her short.
It was a few months after my son had been diagnosed with autism.