The
Podcast
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The world is going to hell in a handbasket. Climate collapse. The rise of authoritarianism. Unchecked technology. Nearly 40% of Americans believe humanity is living in the "end times."
Amid it all, joy has become a commodity—something to buy off the shelf and throw into our go-bags as an essential item. Yet this Disneyified joy is looking a lot like snake oil. The 2026 World Happiness Report reveals a fifteen-year global decline in happiness across the United States and other Global North countries. What if we've been peddled the wrong kind of joy? What if it's a lot more hardcore than many of us are accustomed to? And what if it's not something we acquire, but learn to access?
This is Joy at the End of the World, a show about finding joy, specifically autistic joy—not as a way to escape the world's problems, but as a lens to expand our thinking and help us build a future we actually want to live in. Hosted by Melissa Banigan, an autistic journalist, author, and mother—with sonic design and engineering by her life partner, Mark degli Antoni (co-founder of the band, Soul Coughing, and film composer of many films, including Oscar nominated documentaries)—the show deconstructs the history of autism, drawing on #ActuallyAutistic experience and science grounded in the reality that we're all normal, just wired differently. And she argues that we need all of our unique neurotypes—autistic and otherwise—to help meet the moment.
The show explores Eight States of Autistic Joy: play, grief, love, rumination, inertia, resilience, burnout, and flow. Guests include autistic and autistic-coded academics, scientists, psychologists, and researchers, as well as musicians, artists, and authors—all exploring how we might tap into a joy that looks nothing like the softcore emotion we've been sold.
The
Book
The times we live in demand something a hell of a lot more substantial than commercialized joy. Joy at the End of the World: The Transformative Power of Autistic Elation argues for a reframing of joy to meet the moment. Its narrator, journalist Melissa Banigan, diagnosed with autism later in life, shows how autistic joy—a sustained inner state rooted in meaning, purpose, and connection—offers a radical countermodel to commodified joy, enabling people of all neurotypes to unlock creativity, live more fully, and build a better world together.
Autism is often viewed only as a disability to cure or manage, but Banigan posits that traits commonly misunderstood in many autistic people, such as pattern recognition, bottom-up thinking, deep focus, and emotional honesty, may offer precisely the capacities needed to navigate complexity and understand joy more deeply.
Joy at the End of the World both exposes the historical pathologization of autism and explores what Banigan calls the Eight States of Autistic Joy: play, grief, rumination, inertia, regression, love, creativity, and flow. Rather than viewing these states as symptoms to overcome, she argues that recognizing the value of autistic ways of being—and learning to engage with the eight autistic states—offers a roadmap for readers of all neurotypes to think with greater depth, complexity, and imagination, ultimately entering “flow,” a culmination of untethered joy that sustains creativity and opens new possibilities for connection and meaningful action in a world that desperately needs it.
Joy at the End of the World is represented by Stephanie Tade and Amanda Hepp Jackson from The Stephanie Tade Agency.
About
Melissa
Banigan
Melissa Banigan was formally as autistic, level 1 in her mid-forties after a life of being told that she was "too much." An independent journalist, author, and mother, her journalism has appeared in The Washington Post, CNN, and the BBC, among other outlets, and she is the author of three educational books for youth—Developing a Strategy for a Political Campaign, Working with the Community in a Political Campaign, and Coping with Teen Pregnancy (all with The Rosen YA Publishing).
Melissa is also the founder of Advice Project Media, a global nonprofit that provided journalism and leadership training for women and gender-diverse youth from 2013 to 2023. Through the organization, she partnered with global foundations, nonprofits, grassroots groups, and Indigenous peoples’ congresses and communities on international events, workshops and leadership programs, political actions, and campaigns, which continue to have social impact. Her students have gone on to become activists, actors, artists, writers, journalists, and community and business leaders. She has has been a keynote speaker at global leadership and empowerment conferences on social change, innovation, gender, and leadership.
Melissa is also the founder of HiveMind Communications, a full-service creative agency that helps organizations tell impactful stories. She lives with her partner, Mark, and their toddler, on a flower farm in Upstate, New York; she dotes on her eldest kid, now in college, who is living a life not unlike the one Melissa used to lead in her youth: a little punk rock, with plenty of music, books, and art thrown into the mix.
Newsletter
Autistic joy for all people wanting a little more... joy.
Joy at the End of the World by Melissa Banigan | Melissa Banigan — 2026
The small print... I'm #ActuallyAutistic, which means I am an authority on what it's like to be autistic—specifically through my own unique lens as an autistic person diagnosed with ASD, Level 1. And as a journalist and researcher, I aim to provide evidence-based, often peer-reviewed information. However, I am not a psychologist or a medical doctor, and I am not providing health or medical advice. The information on this website is for informational purposes only. Guests may have views different from my own.
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