the average life expectancy for those who would have been considered feebleminded was 66.2 years. During the mid-twentieth century, at the height of the eugenics movement, it was 18.5 years.

I used to believe, and argue, that this shape-shifting is evidence that we can create a new normal that includes more humans and more ways of being essentially making difference … normal.

When you hide, not only do you live in fear, but also in shame.

What kind of world would we build if we awoke from the dream of the same and embraced the reality of difference?

We aspire to it in all its ambiguity—because of its ambiguity.

As you make your life, you need to know this history and the process and systems of normalization that have turned natural differences among humans into abnormalities to be diagnosed, categorized, and then of course, corrected.

Bernoulli challenged and disrupted a deterministic view of the world. He even undermined the Church’s whole thing about divine creation and intervention, and perhaps, most important to him, gave people a way to win at craps.

This act of reclaiming is really an act of self-negation.

Difference became abnormality when the probability theorists, skull counters, and shrinks who brought us normal become coconspirators with the great sorters of the early twentieth century.