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☔Drizzly, foggy day, with highs in the 70s. Sunset is at 6:35 p.m.
Jonathan Gardner texted his mother this week:did she take Tylenol while she was pregnant with him? Gardner, who lives in East Bridgewater, is autistic and heard about this week’s press conference in which President Donald Trump and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., told women not to take Tylenol during pregnancy.Research offers no evidence that taking Tylenol during pregnancy causes autism, and Gardner’s mother, Nancy, said she did not take the medication during either of her pregnancies.
“It brings awareness, but it also makes me a little nervous that we should not be looking for something to blame without data and proof,” Gardner told GBH’s Meghan Smith. “I would rather focus on how to make life better for autistic people and make sure we get the services we need.”
Autism is complex, said Maura Sullivan, chief executive of the disability advocacy nonprofit, the Arc of Massachusetts.
“Families, particularly mothers, deserve clear guidance rather than cycles of blame and guilt,” Sullivan said.
Local disability advocateTina Zhu Xi Caruso, whom you might know from the Netflix series “Love on the Spectrum,” said she would like to see people focus more on neurodivergent acceptance.
“So we can experience autistic joy,” Caruso said. “It’s not about curing autism. It’s about how to make an autistic’s life happier and more fulfilled.”You can find Meghan Smith’s full reporting here.
Four Things to Know
1. The Mendon-Upton Regional School District is testing AI in some classrooms, but trying to do it thoughtfully: “You can use any tool inappropriately,” Director of Learning and Innovation Ryan Robidoux said. “This is a problem we’ve had with computers since we started putting them in schools.”
“It is a tool that is a collaborator. It’s a facilitator. It’s a partner in teaching and learning,” he said. “It’s not something that you put in a prompt and it spits something back out and then voila, that’s exactly what I’m going to turn in, or that’s what I’m going to use for my lesson today.”
2. A Somerville city councilor obtained video of immigration agents in the city questioning, handcuffing and detaining a 42-year-old man. In the video, one of the federal agents notes that the man is “lawful.”
Federal immigration agents have detained more than 30 people in Somerville so far this year, and last weekend marked an “acceleration of ICE activity,” city spokeswoman Denise Taylor said. “Overwhelmingly, those apprehended have been of Brazilian origin and have not been convicted of any violent crimes,” Taylor said.
3. Team IMPACT, a local nonprofit that pairs kids with disabilities with college sports teams — giving them opportunities to attend games, meets and practices to build relationships with athletes and boost morale — has now officially worked with 4,000 children.
“We have Team IMPACT matches who’ve won national championships with their teams, but it’s the little moments that make all the difference,” Team IMPACT CEO Krissie Kelleher said. “It’s the high fives. It’s the challenging days that our matches face when their teammates are holding them up. It’s the smiles. It’s getting a text from one of them saying, ‘You got this.’”
4. Fall is a great time for some native plants that can give local pollinators a boost, said Uli Lorimer, the director of horticulture at the Native Plant Trust. In a conversation with GBH’s meteorologist and gardening expert Dave Epstein, he suggested planting asters and goldenrods to help your neighborhood bees, butterflies and ants.
“For sunny areas, I’m going to call out the New England aster, which is just a really wonderful, beautiful plant with large purple to pink flowers, very drought tolerant, and again, a favorite of pollinators, of migratory monarch butterflies,” Lorimer said. For shady areas, try the wreath goldenrod: “It really thrives in dry shade conditions, which is kind of a hard set of conditions for gardeners to deal with. It features yellow flowers that are born in the axils of the leaves.” You can hear their full conversation here.
Local colleges targeted amid growing campus culture wars
Last month we brought you a story about a network of “pink slime” websites — sites that look like local news sites, but are actually created by partisan groups and sometimes funded by hostile governments. Now one of the groups behind these sites is turning its attention to curricula at public colleges.
Metric Media, a Chicago-based company that runs 1,265 websites with names like North Boston News, Bay State News, West Massachusetts News and Bean Town Times, has filed public records requests with Massachusetts public colleges. They’re asking schools including UMass Amherst, Salem State University and Bridgewater State University for course syllabi and information about the number of Chinese students enrolled.
The company’s founder, Brian Timpone, told GBH’s Kirk Carapezza he wants to highlight “anti-American” classes at publicly funded schools.
“These are schools that were land-grant universities that weren’t created to teach queer theory or to teach some of these, let’s call them, obtuse or not academically intellectual topics,” Timpone said. “Some of the names of these courses, they’re almost like The Onion.”
Metric Media sent 651 requests to schools nationwide, 16 of them to schools in Massachusetts. In the 50 days since, Salem State said it could not fulfill a request for every undergraduate and graduate syllabus, citing copyright protections. The University of Massachusetts Amherst responded to a request with a link to its course catalogue and a spreadsheet with data about the enrollment and financial aid for students who hold Chinese citizenship.
“There’s great public interest in what public universities are teaching students,” Timpone said. “We want to see what they’re teaching and why.”
Public records requests are a tool anyone can use to ask for documents or data governments create or collect. But Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern, said he worries that in this case, the requests are “weaponized,” being used not to inform but to intimidate.
“There’s a conservative war against higher education,” Kennedy said. “If right-leaning groups are using public records laws to get these materials, then it seems fairly obvious that they’re looking for signs of liberal bias in the classroom.”
Read Kirk Carapezza’s full reporting here.
Dig deeper:
-Local editors worry ‘pink slime’ journalism poses real danger
-Clark University braces for a harsh new reality as higher ed recession looms
-It’s not just Harvard; Public universities are also hurting from Trump’s cuts to science.
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