The Atlantic

I am a contributing editor at Scientific American and write the Brain Waves blog for Psychology Today (you can find those posts here). My work has also appeared in The Atlantic, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Time, Vogue and many other publications. Earlier in my career, I was on staff at Newsweek, and People, among other places and I’ve included a few of my old favorites from those days.

What Happens When Kids Don’t See Their Peers for Months

Socializing is a crucial part of growing up. The pandemic brought it to a halt.

Had the spring of 2020 gone as planned, a day in the life of an average child would have meant actual classrooms, baseball games, middle-school plays, and birthday parties where kids ate too much cake instead of waving from the back seat as a parent drove them past their friend’s…

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How Exactly does Autism Muddy Communication?

The root of the problem could be social or linguistic.

The quirks in Ramsey Brewer’s conversation are subtle. The 17-year-old repeats himself from time to time and makes small mistakes in the words he uses. For instance, he says he and his best friend look scaringly, not scarily, similar. He also pauses at odd spots, and for a beat or…

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The Enemy Within

The possibility that autism is caused by a maternal immune system gone awry is no longer a fringe idea – but proposals to identify or fix these glitches are controversial.

ILLUSTRATION BY JULIA YELLOW Read the original story here.  Judy Van de Water got into autism research precisely because she wasn’t an expert in autism. She is an immunologist, studying the strategies our bodies employ to defend us against pathogens, and the ways those strategies sometimes misbehave or overreact. But about…

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