At a recent Princeton Public Schools’ Board of Education meeting, Teddy, a fourth-grader from one of the district’s schools, got up and delivered a speech about the many reasons that PPS should teach about autism and other disabilities, including “so we don’t have people like RFK Jr in the future”. Here are Teddy’s full remarks:

Recently, the U.S. Secretary of Health, RFK Jr, made false comments about autism like people with autism are broken, that autism is caused by vaccines, and that people with autism will never have jobs or families. But that’s not true. I have autism and I’m not broken, and I hope that nobody in Princeton Public Schools believes RFK Jr’s lies.

Autism and all disabilities should be taught in the Princeton Public Schools curriculum at all grade levels because it will raise awareness, increase acceptance, and improve the quality of life for kids with disabilities.

But first, here is a quote from a Changing Perspectives article called Disability Inclusion in Education: “A truly inclusive environment does not value one marginalized group over another; instead, it recognizes the unique backgrounds of all members of the community, including but not limited to cultural heritage, religion, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, gender, disability, or any other differences.”

Princeton Public Schools already recognizes Autism Awareness Month, but not much. There are posters in the cafeteria that say to be kind and inclusive. Students wear blue on April 2nd. But we are never taught about the spectrum of autism. Kids need to be taught more about the different kinds of autism, that autism is a natural variation in the genes that you are born with, not caused by vaccines, and about successful people with autism. The lessons should also be extended to other disabilities like ADHD, cerebral palsy, blindness, deafness, dyslexia, apraxia, and more.

This is important because it will teach kids how to accept people with disabilities. Accepting someone means really understanding someone for who they are and not minding their differences. I want everyone to know that people with autism and other disabilities are not tragedies, but just different, like all people. If everyone understood more about autistic people, and about people with other disabilities, they would know more about how to treat them, what their lives are like, and that they don’t need to be fixed or cured. This will help kids with disabilities have a better life.

When people are aware of disabilities and are accepting them, they will have friends and less bullying. Also, the teachers might be more aware because they learned about the disabilities also. Kids and teachers should know more about disabilities so they do not believe RFK Jr is right about autism, and they choose to treat them in a nice way that is good for the kid. By knowing more about it, kids and teachers will be nicer to the kids with disabilities.

This is important to me and Princeton Public Schools because I have a disability, and I noticed that disabilities are not being taught, only a few people mentioning autism. When teaching about culture, we teach many different cultures to accept them better — because that’s what disabilities are like, a culture, a culture of differences. Princeton Public Schools must add this to the curriculum of all grades and students, so we don’t have people like RFK Jr in the future.

I want to end with the district mission statement: “Our mission is to prepare all of our students to lead lives of joy and purpose as knowledgeable, creative, and compassionate citizens of a global society.” Adding disabilities to kids’ education will make them knowledgeable and compassionate, and help kids with disabilities to lead lives of joy and purpose.

Come on, challenging the district to uphold their own mission statement? That’s an S-tier move right there.

Tags: autism · politics · Robert F. Kennedy Jr · video

Polygon, The Verge’s sister site dedicated to gaming and entertainment, has been sold by Vox Media to Valnet, a company that owns brands like ScreenRant, GameRant, and Android Police. Some Polygon staffers will continue with the publication under its new owner, while others have been laid off, according to posts online and an internal message sent to Vox Media employees.

Valnet owns more than 27 different brands that cover areas like entertainment, gaming, sports, and travel. A recent report from TheWrap includes one former contributor to a site under Valnet’s purview describing conditions as “almost sweatshop-level.”

“Perfectly aligned with Valnet’s long-term growth strategy, Polygon will now integrate Valnet’s Gaming Portfolio, which includes industry-leading publications such as Game Rant, TheGamer, Fextralife, OpenCritic, DualShockers, and HardcoreGamer,” the company said in a press release. “This addition follows Valnet’s recent acquisition of FextraLife earlier this year, further strengthening its position in the gaming media landscape. With Valnet’s proven operational excellence, Polygon is poised to reach new editorial heights through focused investment and innovation.”

Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff said in a statement that “this transaction will enable us to focus our energies and investment resources in other priority areas of growth across our portfolio of iconic digital publications and audio / video programming, while enabling Valnet to grow their leadership and authority in the gaming information category.” In his message to staff, Bankoff also cited the current “uncertain economic outlook” and broader changes in the gaming industry as contributing reasons to the sale.

“I’m no longer with Polygon,” says former editor-in-chief Chris Plante. “If you’re hiring, please consider the many talented writers and editors now on the market. Every one of them deserves a spot on your staff. I won’t be talking more about the sale because I wasn’t involved.”

We’ve collected additional posts from some affected staffers below.

Update, May 1st: Added posts from more Polygon staffers.

U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids, D-Kansas, characterized a House transportation committee budget bill as both cruel and reckless. She urged colleagues to work on bipartisan legislation that tackled wasteful spending without placing tax breaks for billionaires ahead of children, seniors and veterans. (Kansas Reflector screen capture from U.S. House YouTube channel)

TOPEKA — Democratic U.S. Rep. Sharice Davids of Kansas denounced Wednesday as reckless the budget proposal offered by Republicans on the House transportation and infrastructure committee.

Davids, who serves on the committee along with GOP U.S. Rep. Tracey Mann of Kansas, said the blueprint went beyond the goal of identifying wasteful government spending and amounted to a “direct attack on the people that we are here to serve.”

“I have always said I will work with anyone — Republican or Democrat — when it’s good for Kansans,” Davids said. “And, while it might seem difficult right now, I know and I believe that there is still room for common ground. But this partisan budget plan that we’re talking about today? It’s not just reckless. It is cruel.”

“We can improve government efficiency. We can reduce waste, fraud and abuse. But what we shouldn’t do is rush through chaotic policies that will raise costs for hard-working Kansans,” she said.

Davids, the lone Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation, said President Donald Trump and his allies in Congress were “pushing massive tax giveaways for billionaires instead of offering real help to the folks who need it most.”

The president seeks extension of 2017 federal tax cuts that would increase federal deficits by approximately $4 trillion during the coming decade.

“In recent months,” Davids said, “we have all seen the chaos, and simply put, we’re exhausted. This is not how the federal government should work. The dysfunction isn’t just noise — it’s hitting people where it hurts. What we’ve seen from the administration and in this budget is not strategic. It’s reckless.”

In a statement, Mann said the objective of the transportation and infrastructure committee was to add detail to a House budget package that bolstered Trump’s border and national security agenda, shelved energy policies advanced by President Joe Biden and addressed wasteful spending. This slice of the budget should also allow for investment in modernizing the nation’s air traffic control system, he said.

“Later this week, the House will vote to repeal more Biden-era rules and regulations that harm American consumers,” Mann said. “America needs an all-of-the-above energy strategy — not a one-size-fits-California mandate.”

During the House committee’s deliberations Wednesday, GOP leadership’s recommendation to set a federal vehicle registration tax was amended in wake of bipartisan opposition. Originally, the legislation required U.S. owners of an electric vehicle to pay $200 annually, owners of a hybrid vehicle to pay $100 annually and owners of other vehicles to pay $20 annually to support federal highway programs.

It was amended by the committee to set the tax on electric vehicles at $250 per year, leave the hybrid vehicle assessment at $100 annually and eliminate the proposed fee on other vehicles.

The federal gasoline tax of 18.4 cents per gallon has generated insufficient revenue for the highway trust fund as engines became more efficient and battery-powered vehicle sales escalated. The federal gas tax hasn’t been adjusted for inflation since the mid-1990s.

Google is developing a tried and true reputation for buying products people like, making them worse, then pulling the rug out from under users’ feet. That’s been a particular problem with Google’s purchase of FitBit, which has generally resulted in less useful hardware, more paywalls, more annoying nickel-and-diming efforts, and just a more miserable user experience overall.

It’s also been a pain in the ass for folks who bought into the Nest smart-home ecosystem. Google has consistently pared back on features and restricted openness for the platform, ensuring Nest doesn’t play as well with other systems. Now Google says it’s pulling software support for the first two generation of Nest thermostats (which made the brand popular in the first place), restricting a bunch of functionality:

“We made the difficult decision that starting October 25, 2025, Nest Learning Thermostat (1st gen, 2011), Nest Learning Thermostat (2nd gen, 2012), and Nest Learning Thermostat (2nd gen, Europe version, 2014) will no longer receive software updates. You will no longer be able to control them remotely from your phone or with Google Assistant, but can still adjust the temperature and modify schedules directly on the thermostat.”

Google is also stating that it has no plans to release additional Nest thermostats in Europe because it found adapting to European build requirements too much of a hassle. Google also just announced it was discontinuing the Nest Protect smoke and carbon monoxide alarm and Nest x Yale Lock.

You can argue that a decade is a reasonable expected lifespan for a product to have its support phased out, but many thermostats are historically used for decades. And Google is making absolutely no effort to open source the hardware to allow owners to explore extending the lifespan. Ultimately it’s both environmentally harmful and injures consumer relationships built over decades across brands.

Nest users in the Ars Technica and Verge forums are understandably annoyed:

“NEST is intentionally crippling a product that works well. How can I trust that they won’t do it again with other of their products?”

There’s no short term money in quality control and protecting your brand and existing relationships with consumers. So Google, chasing the impossible allure of unstoppable quarterly growth and the AI hype cycle, routinely has been cutting corners on product quality and longevity — increasingly notable in everything from its lagging interest in its own smart home line to sagging Google Search quality.

In the earlier aughts, Google was an interesting, innovative, and occasionally even ethical company. The fall off has been anything but subtle.

Roughly two weeks ago, in a post about how America was risking losing its elimination status for measles as the current outbreak is exploding thanks to the inaction from RFK Jr. and his Health and Human Services department, I wrote the following paragraph:

At the start of April, we were at 483 confirmed reported measles cases. Roughly two weeks later, we sit at 712. That’s something like a 50% increase in cases over the course of two weeks. Doubling cases ever month would cause us to easily eclipse 2019’s measles cases, the year in which we had the most cases since 2000, totaling 1,249 cases. Unless HHS and the CDC do something drastic, we could reach that number in a month or two.

Since then, the infection rate has basically kept up the pace. The country now sits with more than 900 confirmed cases of measles at least, pending any delayed reports of additional cases and putting aside the fact that the case number is almost certainly underreported. That drastic action I and health officials throughout the country called for has not happened. There has been no alteration of language or messaging coming from HHS or Kennedy. No vaccination campaigns. Hell, Kennedy’s vaunted “healers” are strolling into healthcare facilities knowing they’re infected with measles and treating patients anyway.

The end result is that we’re going to blow right past not only the record case numbers of 2019, which were largely driven by a localized outbreak among religious groups in New York, but also the next highest year in the 90s, which was before the disease achieved elimination status in America.

The cases and deaths are breaking records. In the past 30 years, the only year with more measles cases than the current tally was 2019, which saw 1,274 cases. Most of those cases were linked to large, extended outbreaks in New York City that took 11 months to quell. The US was just weeks away from losing its elimination status, an achievement earned in 2000 when the country first went 12 months without continuous transmission.

In 2019, amid the record annual case tally, cases had only reached a total of 704 by April 26. With this year’s tally already over 900, the country is on track to record a new high. Before 2019, the next highest case total for measles was in 1994. That year, the country saw 899 cases, which 2025 has already surpassed.

This is actually worse than these numbers might make it seem for two reasons. First, while the overall infection numbers might feel low to us because we just came off another pandemic that had infection numbers in the millions, it’s important to remember that we’re still in the something like the bottom of the 1st inning here if no real action is taken. The problem of infectious diseases, particularly a disease as infectious as measles, is an exponential problem. Measles cases are currently nearly doubling on a monthly basis. 900 cases today is likely to become 1,500 cases by the end of May. Then 3,000 June, or more, if the exponentiality of the increase continues.

There’s also the problem of our continuing falling vaccination rates for the MMR vaccine. So while 2019 wasn’t that long ago, thanks to vaccine skeptics (at best) like RFK Jr. and his elevation to the highest healthcare office in the land, we’re actually more vulnerable in 2025 than we were in 2019.

If current vaccination levels are maintained, the model estimated that the US will see around 850,000 measles cases over the next 25 years, with about 170,000 hospitalizations and 2,500 deaths. If vaccination levels fall by 10 percent, estimated cases in the next 25 years would rise to 11 million.

In a measles update published Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, agency researchers also warned that the US is heading backward to an era where measles is constantly present and spreading in the US.

Perhaps this whole Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA movement, needs to be renamed MAMA. Make America Measles-y Again.