In my last piece, I wrote about how we repair. Our bodies, our relationships, our social environments all benefit from developing what I call “repair radar.” Repair often follows from something yielding or breaking, something going wrong with the situations that we are in.

Yet there is a kind of uncertainty that is built into our everyday lives that begs us to not wait until something feels wrong or off. We must prepare for things to yield, break, or go south, at least the smaller things that are in some ways predictable to go wrong. 

In order to repair our bodies and minds by reworking our genetics, we must get critical about our environments. Just think of how many things you do in the span of a single day that require critical thinking. I know I think like this when I’m working at my job and when I’m handling things with my kids. When we feel it’s imperative, we think hard and creatively about the choices we have and are making. 

I suggest we apply this critical thinking to our social-environmental contexts like our lives depend on it. Because they actually do. 

The turn to redefining disability is ongoing thanks to the Disability Rights movement. The movement has helped raise awareness of just how detrimental ranking and comparing people is, and how stacked against them our social and educational systems are.

However, the bad news is that the way we determine disability status is the same way that we came to create the rank-comparison system: by IQ. We still give those scores the authority to decide who is what and how valuable we are.

It’s a joy to be able to celebrate the half birthday of Rethinking Intelligence with you! I can’t believe we’re already halfway around the sun. It has been a rich six months full of some of the most memorable moments of my life. And all thanks to readers like you who are enriching the world with a new way of exploring, experiencing, and enacting intelligence!