Most of us have heard of the ancient but venerable Joel Test for software development (my current project, hovering around 9/12). Here is my take for us remote devs, to be taken with a grain of salt…because they just delivered your food at the…

A version of this essay appeared in Skeptic Magazine, volume 21, number 2.

I went to the local farmer’s market at the public library today, and I was pretty sure that none of the fragrant, shining offerings were GMOs. In fact, that’s why I went to the…

While traveling last summer, we stopped into this little wood shop on the side of a forest road, a few miles outside of town. It was the kind of place where you could peer past the sales counter into the back room, to see the woodsmiths at work: carving…

Part of the story of the decline of music is narrowing leisure time, and part of the story is exploding media options. Lost in that story is the way that following live music has become a hobby, like football, instead of a primary mass media phenomenon, the way that movies still are.

I get it that we all suddenly love Paris, but let’s remember that ever since our forces “took control” of Baghdad, people have been driving around there shooting and bombing innocents. How come we all haven’t had Iraqi flags on our Facebook statuses? After all, we kinda let that snake out of the…