My favorite thing we published this week was Emily Brooks’s GRAND SLAM of an interview with Steve Silberman, author of NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. Read their conversation, like all 4,000+ words of it, and then get yourselves the book and read that too.

oh gosh
I honestly wish that I could
but I
cannot
cross
running water
I thought that was witches
yes
that
I’m that thing
I’m witches, I’m too witches to come, sorry

Kayla Whaley on her relationship with swimming and walking, and dealing with the expectations of others:

Nothing much changed when I did stop walking. Nothing I noticed right away. I’d always used a wheelchair part-time, so now I’d be using it full-time. That’s all. At six years old, I was still tiny enough to be carried up and down stairs, or pushed in a stroller when my chair was inconvenient. I didn’t miss walking, and I was oblivious to the fact that other people thought I should.

That blessed lack of awareness didn’t—couldn’t—last, though. Here, too, there was no one event that triggered it, that taught me walking was better than not. No one said, “Kayla, you’d be a more complete person if you could hop out of that chair,” but they didn’t have to. Sometimes a half-concealed stare, a hastily hushed room, a careless phrase, a subtle implication is more than heavy enough to get the job done.

A lot of you certainly had a great many opinions about your favorite spices and the beacon of light that is the Penzeys Spices catalog! I confess I have acquired something called “Mural of Flavor” from them and am unsure what to do with it, but then my husband does most of the cooking around here.

Hey, our dear friend Sarah Miller unearthed yet another sestina penned by David Brooks, WHAT WERE THE ODDS

Maddie Howard makes me smile.

Do you need some inspiration?

Finally, it’s not a Toast piece, but obviously I have to link to my essay about Kristi Yamaguchi. (The illustrations — GIFS! by Thoka Maer — alone are worth the click; they are just perfect. The NYT has GIFed my childhood!) Kristi meant everything to me when I was growing up, and I definitely teared up when she tweeted my piece yesterday. Her Olympic costume designer also read it and emailed me last night! I mean, WHAT is this life?? Thank you to everyone who’s reached out or said nice things about this essay; it means the world to me.