The

The Welcome to the Death Panel.

I'm Beatrice Soutler-Boltan, and today we're interrupting our regular schedule to pay tribute to two dear friends and comrades that we lost this week, Alice Wong and Leslie Lee III.

There are weeks when the world just feels like it spins off its axis a little, when grief piles on grief and the losses don't feel sequential so much as

simultaneous, like one blow that lands twice, three times, four times, again and again, and this is one of

those weeks. Losing Leslie Lee III and Alice Wong within days of each other feels like a rupture,

a tearing in the fabric of

the disability community. These are two people who shaped the way that so many of us think,

feel, create, fight, and dream. People we were lucky enough to collaborate with here at

Death Panel, to joke with, to learn with, and to learn from. People who each in their own way refuse to separate political clarity from tenderness or imagination and creativity from principled struggle.

Their work traveled across continents, timelines, and generations.

Quietly at times, thunderously at others, leaving behind a depth of influence of all us. Losing them

together feels like losing two constellations that have accompanied us for years. A lot of you

have been reaching out, saying you feel gutted, lost, scared, sad. I feel all of that too. We feel all of that too. It's a sharp heaviness at once personal,

political, and collective grief. So we felt it necessary to interrupt our regular programming

just to talk about it and to spend some time honoring and remembering our comrades, Leslie

and Alice. We not only want to name the grief, but we want to honor the worlds that Leslie and Alice built.

Their brilliance, the lessons they left us, and the kind of futurity their work insists that we claim,

a futurity that they never treated as abstract, but as something we build together day after day in relationships,

refusals, and creative, joyful, rageful, persistence.

I want to start by talking about our dear Alice.

Alice Wong altered the landscape of disability politics.

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