autism

Fly Away, opens on Jeanne, a single mother, as she is awoken by her teenage daughter’s cries. "Bad girl! I hate myself!" It might not be a surprising sentiment for a teenager in the throes of an angst-ridden moment, but Mandy is severe on the spectrum of autism, and the middle of the night is one of the times she communicates the clearest. Written and directed by Janet Grillo, Fly Away is a slice of life portrait of a small family at a crossroads and it focuses very much on the everyday details.

Douchebag Decrees around here are often on the tongue-in-cheek side, but every once in a while someone's actions are so heinous that even we can't make puns about them. This is one of those times. According to an independent study published by the British Medical Journal, researcher Andrew Wakefield's 1998 paper linking autism to the MMR vaccine was "an elaborate fraud." That's right; his study on autism, the one that thousands of hopeful parents have taken seriously over the past 12 years in an attempt to help their babies, was apparently a total fake.