Blog Love!

So, I got this blog award from Shiva, and now I need to pass it on to seven other blogs.

This is kind of a tough decision, since I would ideally pick less-widely-read blogs than my own to help clue new people into them. Unfortunately, I don't know that many Cool Little New Blogs that more people should be reading, so my list will be a mix of Cool Little New Blogs, older blogs that still aren't as widely read as they should be, and blogs that are fairly well-known but still awesome.

Here goes:

Sarah of Cat in a Dog's World certainly qualifies as a new blogger, and I really like what she has to say. She mostly blogs about autistic self-advocacy, and has recently critiqued both presidential candidates from an autistic-rights perspective.

Another autistic-rights blogger who writes insightful, informative posts about politics is ABFH from Whose Planet Is It Anyway? Most of you probably already read her, but she's awesome and I'm going to nominate her anyway.

The third autism blogger I want to recognize is Ettina from Abnormaldiversity, whose blog is sort of a mix of personal reflections and critiques of autism research and autism in the media.

No blog-love list of mine would be complete without Arthur Silber, whose blog Once Upon a Time is hard to explain briefly. It's a political blog in the sense that all social life is political; he writes about subjects as diverse as American exceptionalism, Wilsonian Progressivism and its relation to American imperialism, racism, misogyny, torture, authoritarianism and the psychology of Alice Miller, and manages to tie them all together in a cohesive picture of American mass psychology. I don't think his work is of interest only to Americans, either, so don't let that stop you from going over there. Also, while he doesn't seem to allow comments, he does read, and answer, reader emails.

Another blog you should all be reading, if you aren't already, is Junkfood Science. Sandy Szwarc is a nurse, and does a great job debunking hysterical news articles (and, sadly, equally hysterical journal articles) about the grave dangers of being fat.

There's also Body Impolitic, which deals mostly with feminism, body image and disability, although it touches on a lot of other ways in which human bodies can fall outside the standards and categories people try to shoehorn them into.

Finally, there's Hell On Hairy Legs, an Australian radical-feminist blogger who's still in high school. She blogs mostly about gender, sexuality and race, and is unusually smart, perceptive and funny. (I'd say she is smart and perceptive for her age, but that's patronizing and, really, she's smart and perceptive period.) Anyway, I direct you to her, not only for that reason, but because I think that, as a high-school student, she probably experiences a lot of sexism, heterosexism, and other bigotry in her daily life and would likely appreciate all the friendly, non-bigoted readers she can get.