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On the tribulations of an expatriate in Europe
Thursday, August 13, 2026
Limitless Forgiveness
Wednesday, August 12, 2026
Fraternal Charity
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Tuesday, August 11, 2026
Divine Logic
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Monday, August 10, 2026
Producing Much Fruit
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Sunday, August 09, 2026
Overcoming Fear with Faith
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Saturday, August 08, 2026
Autism is a far more common developmental condition
It's one of the most beloved films of all time — the story of a brilliant, troubled man with a memory like a computer, and the brother learning to love him.
Almost everyone who saw it walked away believing they'd learned something true about the human mind.
But the movie planted a myth in millions of heads that day — one that scientists and families are still trying to correct, more than thirty years later...
The film, of course, is Rain Man. Released in 1988, it won four Academy Awards, made a fortune, and gave the world one of its most unforgettable characters: Raymond Babbitt, the savant played by Dustin Hoffman who could count spilled toothpicks at a glance and recall a phone book after a single read.
And most people came away from it certain of one simple fact: that this is what an autistic person is like. A hidden genius. A human calculator, locked away behind a wall of quirks.
Here's the trouble. That idea is mostly wrong. And unraveling why takes us into a fascinating true story — one far stranger, and more human, than the movie itself.
Let's start with the man everyone thinks of as the "real Rain Man": Kim Peek.
Kim was a mind unlike any other. Born in 1951 without a corpus callosum — the bundle of nerves that links the two halves of the brain — he grew up to memorize some twelve thousand books, reading two pages at once, one with each eye. It was Kim whom the screenwriter Barry Morrow met in 1984, and it was Kim's astonishing memory that inspired him to write the screenplay that became Rain Man.
But here is the first surprise, and it's a big one. Kim Peek was not autistic.
He wasn't. Kim had a different, rare condition, and doctors called him a "megasavant." The autism that defined the movie's Raymond Babbitt was not Kim's at all. So the man the whole world points to as the face of autism didn't have it at all.
Which raises an obvious question: if Raymond wasn't really Kim, then who was he?
The answer is that Raymond Babbitt was never one person. He was a patchwork — a composite stitched together from several very different real people.
Kim lent Raymond his jaw-dropping memory. But the autism, and much of the character's personality, came from others entirely. Dustin Hoffman spent a year researching the role, and he later said that as much as ninety percent of Raymond's dialogue and mannerisms were drawn from an autistic man named Peter Guthrie, whose brother sent Hoffman tapes of their conversations. Raymond's love of numbers, and even his fondness for certain snacks, came from an autistic mathematical savant named Joseph Sullivan. That famous scene where Raymond instantly counts the toothpicks scattered on the floor? That was based on a pair of real twins, observed by the neurologist Oliver Sacks. And the whole plot — one brother taking another out of an institution — grew out of the screenwriter's own life, when he'd once become the guardian of a disabled friend to keep him from being sent away.
In other words, the "true story" behind Rain Man isn't one story at all. It's half a dozen, blended into a single unforgettable character — part Kim, part Joseph, part Peter, and part pure Hollywood.
And that blending is exactly where the confusion was born.
Because Rain Man fused two completely different things into one person — and most of the audience never realized they were separate. The two things are autism, and something called savant syndrome. And understanding the difference is the whole key to this story.
Savant syndrome is that rare and extraordinary condition in which a person with some form of disability also possesses a spectacular, almost superhuman ability — a flawless memory, say, or the power to name the day of the week for any date in history. It is breathtakingly rare; the most prodigious savants like Raymond can be counted, in the whole world, on not very many hands.
Autism is something else entirely — a far more common developmental condition, a broad spectrum affecting how a person communicates, senses the world, and relates to others. Millions upon millions of people are autistic.
Now, here is the crucial part. Sometimes, the two do overlap — a person can be both autistic and a savant, as Joseph Sullivan is. But most of the time, they do not. In fact, only about one in ten autistic people has any savant ability at all, and the kind of dazzling, one-in-a-million genius the film portrayed is rarer still. The vast, vast majority of autistic people are not secret geniuses with hidden superpowers. They are people — with strengths and struggles like anyone else.
Rain Man, for all its brilliance and all its good intentions, welded these two ideas together in the public imagination. And so a myth was born: that to be autistic is to be a Raymond. That somewhere inside every autistic person is a calculator waiting to astonish you.
It's a myth that autistic people and their families have been gently correcting ever since — the well-meaning stranger who says "so, what's your special talent?", the assumption that a diagnosis comes with a superpower attached.
And yet — and this is important — it would be unfair to paint the film as a villain. Because Rain Man also did an enormous amount of good.
Before it came along, autism was barely spoken of in public at all; most people had never even heard the word. The film changed that overnight. It brought autism into millions of living rooms, sparked a huge surge of awareness and understanding, and sent donations pouring into autism organizations. One of the world's leading experts on savants said that more was learned about savant syndrome in the twenty years after Rain Man than in the entire century that came before it. The movie opened a door that had been shut for a very long time.
So the real legacy of Rain Man is a complicated, very human thing. It was a work of fiction that got some big things wrong — and, in the getting-them-wrong, accidentally did a great deal of right.
As for Kim Peek — the gentle, non-autistic megasavant whose memory started it all — he spent his final years traveling the world, meeting anyone who wanted to sit with him, and offering people a simple truth that cuts right through all the confusion. "You don't have to be handicapped to be different," he liked to say. "Everybody's different."
Which may, in the end, be the one lesson the movie was really trying to teach us all along.
Did you know the "Rain Man" was really several different people — and that the real Kim Peek wasn't autistic? Tell us below. And here's one for today: what's a "fact" from a famous movie that you believed for years, before you found out the real story?
People assumed it was simple frugality, the thrift of a generation that had lived through hard time
For decades, the elderly couple ate the very same way. One modest takeaway meal, split carefully between the two of them, then divided again to stretch across lunch and dinner. The whole thing cost about seventeen yuan — a little over two and a half dollars.
Everyone who knew them assumed they were poor, or perhaps just terribly careful with money.
Nobody had the faintest idea what they were really doing with it...
Their names were Du Yingrong and Lu Suying, and they lived in Shanghai, China.
He had been a teacher of foreign languages. She had been a doctor, the physician at the clinic of the very same college where he taught. They had married, they had never had children, and by the time this story takes place, they were both long retired and quite elderly.
To everyone around them, they were a puzzle. They lived in the same small apartment — barely fifty square metres — that they'd had for decades, and never once renovated it. When something broke, they repaired it rather than replacing it. Du's eyeglasses were so old that the lenses were held into the frame with tape. They even wrote their notes on the backs of already-used scraps of paper, unwilling to waste a fresh notebook. Colleagues described a couple who never seemed to want for anything — and who never seemed to spend a yuan on themselves, either.
People assumed it was simple frugality, the thrift of a generation that had lived through hard times.
They were wrong. Because behind that worn little apartment and that two-dollar lunch, Du and Lu were holding on to a small fortune — and they had a plan for it.
This, it turned out, was a couple who had been giving in secret for years. Over the decades they had sent money, again and again, to families struck by China's earthquakes and disasters — never seeking a word of credit for any of it. Their frugality was never really about the money at all. It was about saving it up for something, and someone, they believed mattered far more than their own comfort.
In early 2018, Du was walking past the Shanghai Yoda Cardiothoracic Hospital when something stopped him in his tracks. It was a poster — an appeal to the public. It told of children born with congenital heart defects, little ones who needed surgery to survive, and of families who could not possibly afford to pay for it.
Du went home and talked it over with his wife.
And then this couple, who split a single lunch to save a few coins, walked in and donated five hundred thousand yuan — enough to pay for heart operations for ten children.
But they didn't stop there. They waited, and they watched, and once they had seen with their own eyes that the money really was saving these children's lives, they made a decision. They gave again — another four and a half million yuan.
All told, this frugal, childless couple gave away five million yuan of their life savings, roughly seven hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars. And that money has, to date, paid for lifesaving heart surgery for four hundred and fifty-five children.
Four hundred and fifty-five little hearts, mended. By two people who denied themselves nearly everything.
And here is the detail that says everything about who they were. At one point, a social worker from the hospital's charity came to visit the couple at home. And when this person saw how they really lived — the tiny flat, the taped-together glasses, the mended belongings — they were troubled. Please, the social worker urged them, keep some of this money for yourselves. Set something aside for your old age. You've given so much already.
Du's gentle reply has stayed with everyone who heard it. "Neither of us has much time left," he said. "We receive our pensions, and we still have some savings. We don't need much money."
And to make certain their wish would outlive them both, they arranged their affairs carefully and legally, entrusting their gift to a charitable foundation, so that not a single yuan could ever be diverted from the children it was meant for.
They didn't want thanks. They didn't want recognition, or their names in the paper, or a plaque on a wall. In fact, they told almost no one at all what they had done. For years, the hundreds of families whose children they had saved had no idea who their guardian angels even were.
Du Yingrong died in 2018, at the age of eighty-one, the same year their great gift began. His wife, Lu Suying, lived on in that same little apartment, in that same simple way, for seven more years, until she passed away in 2025 at the age of ninety-two. And even in death, the two of them were not finished giving: they left their remaining savings, and even their modest apartment itself, to the cause as well — so that still more children might one day be helped.
Du's old eyeglasses, the lenses still taped to the frame, reportedly remained on the bedroom desk right where he'd left them, untouched, through all seven years his widow lived on without him.
The whole story only came to light a short time ago, at a charity exhibition held in Shanghai in the couple's memory. For most people, it was the very first time they had ever heard the names Du Yingrong and Lu Suying — the first time anyone learned who had been behind all those mended hearts.
Somewhere out there today, four hundred and fifty-five children are living, laughing, growing up, with hearts that beat strong and steady. Some of them may never know the names of the two people who gave them that chance.
Two people who, so that those children could live, went without — and shared, between them, a lunch that cost about two dollars and fifty cents.
What do you think of Du and Lu's extraordinary gift? Tell us below. And here's one for today: what is the most selfless act of generosity you have ever personally witnessed?
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