wow888 Steve Silberman, 66, Dies; Writer Deepened Understanding of Autism
Steve Silberman, a science journalist whose award-winning book about the history of autism helped broaden the public’s understanding of that often-misunderstood condition and those diagnosed with it, died on Aug. 29 at his home in San Francisco. He was 66.
His husband, Keith Karraker, said the cause was most likely a heart attack.
In 2000, Mr. Silberman, who was then a contributing editor at Wired magazine, knew little about autism beyond Dustin Hoffman’s Oscar-winning performance as Raymond Babbitt, a man with the condition, in the 1988 film “Rain Man.”
“At that point, like most of the world, I believed that autism was this extremely rare neurological syndrome,” Mr. Silberman said in a 2015 interview with “The Book Review,” a New York Times podcast.
He was surprised when two different people he was planning to interview at their homes told him, almost as a warning, that they had autistic daughters. He thought the comments were an odd coincidence, but when he recounted them to a friend at a cafe, a woman nearby overheard him. She told Mr. Silberman that she was a special education teacher in Silicon Valley and that there was “an epidemic of autism” in that area.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENT“Something terrible is happening to our children,” she saidwow888.
The ominous tone of these exchanges, not unusual for the time, captured his attention.
“I got a chill,” Mr. Silberman recalled, and “because I’m a reporter, I got the desire to do some reporting.”
In a 2001 Wired article headlined “The Geek Syndrome,” he explored the increase in autism diagnoses in California; the early research into autism by Hans Asperger, a pediatrician in Vienna, and Leo Kanner, a child psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore; and the range of behaviors exhibited by autistic children.
He received a lot of emails from autistic people and parents — and requests from literary agents to expand the article into a book. But he wasn’t ready. It took nearly eight years — and prodding from his friend Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author, among others — for him to begin “NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity,” which was published in 2015.
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Over more than 500 pages, Mr. Silberman presented portraits of historical figures, like the engineer Nikola Tesla, who are believed to have been on the autism spectrum; delved into the divisive debate over whether the MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella, causes autism (it does not); focused on the continuing influence of Dr. Asperger and Dr. Kanner’s research; and presented case studies of autistic children.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTOne of those children was Leo Rosa, who in the book is mostly nonverbal and calms himself with green straws from Starbucks. Mr. Silberman spent significant time with Leo and emerged with a vivid picture of him and his family, which, he wrote, was bound “into a tight circle of love and support around their boy.”
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Learn more about our process.In an interview, Leo’s mother, Shannon Des Roches Rosa, a founder of Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism, a news website, praised Mr. Silberman’s work.
“Steve changed the conversation around autism,” she said. “He really popularized the idea that autistic people aren’t broken and are part of the tapestry of humanity. It’s a unique condition that’s always been here, and we need to do better by autistic people than punishing them for having different brains.”
Ari Ne’eman, a founder and former executive director of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, said by phone that Mr. Silberman “told our story in a way that hasn’t been done in the past by placing autistic people at the center. He spent time with autistic people at conferences and gatherings. He had a real respect for autistic culture.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTHe added that Mr. Silberman’s book helped spread awareness about the neurodiversity movement, which embraces the belief that conditions like autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder represent different ways of thinking and are not caused by faulty brain circuitry.
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“NeuroTribes” won the Samuel Johnson (now the Baillie Gifford) Prize for Nonfiction, a British award, in 2015. The judges called the book a “tour de force of archival, journalistic and scientific research.”
The Times chose “NeuroTribes,” briefly a best seller, as one of 100 notable books of 2015.
Stephen Louis Silberman was born on Dec. 23, 1957, in Ithaca, N.Y., and, as the family moved several times, grew up in Buffalo; Fresh Meadows, Queens; and Edison, N.J. His parents, Donald and Leslie (Hantman) Silberman, were English professors at Jersey City State College (now New Jersey City University), antiwar activists and Communists.
Mr. Silberman studied psychology at Oberlin College and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1979. He later received a master’s degree in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley, and soon started waiting tables in San Francisco while occasionally writing about music and reviewing restaurants for The San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner and other publications. He wrote for HotWired, Wired’s online magazine, and then Wired, from the mid-1990s until 2010.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTBut journalism was just one part of Mr. Silberman’s life. He became obsessed with the Grateful Dead after he saw them for the first time at the Summer Jam rock festival in Watkins Glen, N.Y., in 1973.
And he had a hero in Allen Ginsberg, the Beat poet. After watching Mr. Ginsberg sing and read poetry at Queens College in 1977, Mr. Silberman became his apprentice for that year’s summer program at Naropa Institute (now Naropa University), a Buddhist-inspired school in Boulder, Colo.; a decade later, he was Mr. Ginsberg’s teaching assistant there.
After Mr. Ginsberg was diagnosed with terminal cancer, Mr. Ginsberg called Mr. Silberman in 1997 to say goodbye. “I asked him how he felt, and he replied, ‘Exhilarated,’” Mr. Silberman wrote in The Guardian in 2015. “I can only hope to meet my end with such equanimity.”
Mr. Silberman’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Dead brought him into the band’s inner circle of archivists, leading him to write liner notes for several of its albums, including “So Many Roads 1965-1995” (1999); a boxed set of mostly unreleased material on which he worked as a producer; and “Crimson, White & Indigo: Philadelphia, July 7, 1989” (2010).
He also wrote “Skeleton Key: A Dictionary for Deadheads” (1994) with David Shenk.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTWhen he was interviewed for “Long Strange Trip,” a 2017 documentary about the Dead, Mr. Silberman got the last word. Speaking over the credits, he said, “You know, I think I’ll probably have more in common with a Deadhead 500 years from now than I do with many people who are alive now.” Why? he was asked. “Oh, just because I’ll understand something deep about them.”
He was also a devoted fan of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. With the help of Raymond Foye, a culture writer, Mr. Silberman demonstrated to the band members the depth of his knowledge of their music and their most obscure cuts. He wrote the liner notes for albums like the David Crosby-Graham Nash collaboration “Another Stoney Evening” (1998) and a 50th-anniversary reissue of Mr. Crosby’s 1971 solo album, “If I Could Only Remember My Name.”
He said that Mr. Crosby became his closest friend.
After Mr. Crosby’s death in 2023, Mr. Silberman wrote on the music website Relix that “the ‘David Crosby’ most of the world knew was a blustery cartoon that he enjoyed playing in public.”
“The real David,” he added, “was a shy, sensitive, often lonely guy who overcorrected for never once hearing the words ‘I love you’ from his famous cinematographer father Floyd by armoring himself with a supersized ego.”
In addition to his husband, he is survived by his sister, Hillary Shawaf.
At his death, Mr. Silberman had been working on a book about breakthroughs in the treatment of cystic fibrosis that, under the title “The Taste of Salt,” was to be published in 2026. It was inspired by a friend who had been diagnosed with the disorder in infancy and had come close to death many times but was now much healthier.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTLucia Watson, the vice president and editor in chief of Avery, an imprint of Penguin Random House, said by email that the manuscript was incomplete and that the book would not be published.
The partial manuscript, however, she said, “showcased Steve’s incredible ability to weave together immersive storytelling and fascinating science.”
