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.
Many people are looking for a lifeline, and joy has become an essential item to buy off the shelf and throw into our go-bags before heading to the bunker. Hollywood happy endings, curated delight on social media—these days, everyone and her mom has written a self-help book for finding joy. The problem is, none of this joy is sticking. 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? 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 an escape from the world's problems, but as a lens to expand how we think and help us build a future we actually want to live in. Hosted by Melissa Banigan, an autistic journalist and author, with sonic design and original music by her life partner, Mark degli Antoni (co-founder of the band, Soul Coughing, and composer for films, including Oscar-nominated Black Box Diaries), the show explores Eight States of Autistic Joy: play, grief, love, rumination, inertia, resilience, burnout, and flow.
Guests include #ActuallyAutistic and autistic-coded academics, scientists, psychologists, and researchers, as well as musicians, athletes, artists, and authors—all exploring a joy that's deeper, more resilient, and more creative. A joy accessible to all neurotypes to help meet this moment.
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 diagnosed as autistic, level 1 in her mid-forties after a life of being told that she was "too much." She is the founder of Neurovation, a systems design consultancy that helps teams and organizations get unstuck by embracing friction and difference to drive innovation and creativity.
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 Joy at the End of the World: The Transformative Power of Autistic Elation and 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 HiveMind Communications, a creative agency that helps organizations tell impactful stories, as well as 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 been a keynote speaker at global leadership and empowerment conferences on social change, innovation, gender, and leadership.
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 led in her youth: a little punk rock, with plenty of music, books, and art thrown into the mix.
Newsletter
Autistic joy for people of all neurotypes.
Joy at the End of the World by Melissa Banigan | Melissa Banigan — 2026
The small print... Melissa Banigan is #ActuallyAutistic, which means she is an authority on what it's like to be autistic—specifically through her own unique lens as an autistic person diagnosed with ASD, Level 1. As a journalist and researcher, she aims to provide evidence-based, peer-reviewed information. However, she is not a psychologist or a medical doctor, and she is not providing health or medical advice. The information on this website is for informational purposes only. Melissa and her guests may have different views.
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