Introducing Media Tower: A Listening Library for Neurodivergent Learning, History, and Rest

Not every resource needs to be something you sit down and read.

Sometimes you need to listen.

That is the idea behind Media Tower, a new listening library inside the Neurodivergent News Media Library.

Media Tower collects audiobooks, spoken-word resources, and long-form listening selected for neurodivergent community learning, lived experience, history, and rest.

Why build a listening library?

Reading is not always the easiest access point.

Attention shifts.

Visual fatigue is real.

Sometimes the best way to learn is while you are driving, cleaning, pacing, resting, drawing, working with your hands, or simply trying to get through the day with less friction.

Audio gives information another doorway in.

Media Tower is built around that doorway.

What is inside the tower?

The first version of Media Tower includes 100 titles, with the overwhelming majority available as free open-listening resources.

The collection currently spans:

• Black history and Black intellectual history
• disability history
• psychiatric and psychology history
• social work and community systems
• women, labor, and social systems
• education and learning
• cognition, attention, habit, motivation, and philosophy
• public-domain literature with mental-health or institutional relevance
• selected contemporary neurodivergence audiobooks
• low-demand and rest-oriented listening

Some titles are there because they are directly about neurodivergence.

Others are there because they help us understand the systems around neurodivergent life: education, disability, institutionalization, race, labor, caregiving, psychology, social work, and the long history of how people have tried to explain the mind.

Free access matters here too

I did not want Media Tower to become another list of things people need to buy.

So the library prioritizes free and public-domain listening wherever possible.

That means you will find a large collection of open audiobooks alongside a smaller number of paid contemporary titles where the material is especially relevant to the Neurodivergent News community.

You can filter the tower by access type and search by title, author, narrator, or topic.

A few of the voices you will find

The open collection includes work by and about figures such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, W. E. B. Du Bois, Helen Keller, Jane Addams, John Dewey, William James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and others.

The contemporary shelf includes selected audiobooks on autism, AuDHD, ADHD, masking, identity, and adult neurodivergent life.

The point is not to force all of these works into one category.

The point is to build a listening environment broad enough to reflect how neurodivergent people actually learn: through history, memoir, systems, practical guidance, first-person accounts, philosophy, culture, and sometimes simply by hearing another human voice tell a story.

Built for low-friction exploration

Media Tower is designed to work more like a browsing room than a traditional reading list.

You can search.

You can filter.

You can open a title and decide whether it is something you want to hear.

You do not need to finish anything.

You do not need to listen in order.

You do not need to turn it into homework.

Use it however your brain uses audio best.

Media Tower is now part of the Media Library

Media Tower lives inside the Neurodivergent News Media Library alongside the other interactive community resources.

Like the rest of the library, it is meant to keep growing.

More free listening will be added as relevant public-domain recordings are identified, and contemporary titles can be added when they materially strengthen the collection.

The tower already has plenty to explore.

Bring headphones.

Explore Media Tower →