Illustration by Charlie Powell. In March 2009, Golan Levin, the director of Carnegie Mellon University’s interdisciplinary STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, invited an enigmatic and famed computer programmer known to the virtual world only as “Why the Lucky Stiff” or “_why”—no, not a typo—to speak at a…

This piece was originally published on AlterNet. "But the Universe is so perfectly fine-tuned for life. What are the chances that this happened by accident? Doesn't it seem like the Universe had to have been created this way on purpose?" As I've written before: Many arguments for religion and…

Bridgette Dunlap, a Fordham University law student, knew that the school’s health plan had to pay for birth control pills, in keeping with New York state law. What she did not find out until she was in an examining room, “in the paper dress,” was that the student health service — in keeping with…

Every morning, Brittany Geldert stepped off the bus and bolted through the double doors of Fred Moore Middle School, her nerves already on high alert, bracing for the inevitable. "Dyke." Pretending not to hear, Brittany would walk briskly to her locker, past the sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders…

LINDSTROM, Minn. — Ki Gulbranson owns a logo apparel shop, deals in jewelry on the side and referees youth soccer games. He makes about $39,000 a year and wants you to know that he does not need any help from the federal government. He says that too many Americans lean on taxpayers rather than…

I'm a white midwestern suburb kid who started out mowing lawns and hauling rocks for summer funds, got a crummy job out of school and slowly bootstrapped myself to become a reasonably successful software developer and public speaker. From a flat-out personal income standpoint, I stand to benefit…

This piece was originally published on AlterNet. Why did God create atheists? This is a question I always want to ask religious believers. (One of many questions, actually. "What evidence do you have that God is real?" and "Why are religious beliefs so different and so contradictory?" are also high…

February 23, 2012 by Nathan J. Winograd Slaughterhouse: slaugh·ter·house (slôtr-hous): n. A place where animals are butchered. The numbers are in. In 2011, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) impounded 760 dogs. They killed 713 of them. Only 19 were adopted. An additional 36 of them…

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was formed to ensure America’s freedom to travel. Instead, they have made air travel the most difficult means of mass transit in the United States, at the same time failing to make air travel any more secure. TSA has never, (and I invite them to prove…

Lindsey Bieda The Elephant in the Computer Lab The lack of women in the computing fields is something that is surprisingly controversial. I've dug through countless websites and threads following the discussion of this issue and found many arguments, shockingly, against treating this as a problem…

See, the problem with this one is it’s hard to know where to start. Do you call out the fact that it’s pretty damn difficult to deconstruct repressive gender roles whilst invalidating someone else’s gender identity? Do you point out that calling someone statistically more likely to experience…

Update: This is quite a long article. If you’re looking for a quick read, it breaks down a bit like this: Update 2: There are active and interesting discussions of this article on HackerNews and Reddit I have a lot of love for Scrum, the software development process. I have my own little box of…

Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like lately diversity is falling out of fashion as a goal in this industry. I made a tweet seeking sponsors for All-Girl Hack Night’s SXSW event earlier and was surprised by some of the responses. It seems like recent conferences have fewer female speakers, or are…

February 10, 2012 Usefully estimating software projects is difficult, but not impossible. A lack of understanding about why we estimate, what to estimate, and how to estimate leads to a breakdown of trust and communication between developers and managers. Developers end up feeling guilty that…

09:44 am February 8, 2012 by Robert Krulwich He was old, but not ancient, the man next to us at the delicatessen. It was 1973. My then girlfriend (now wife) and I had ordered dinner and this old guy, sitting by himself, seemed lonely, so we got talking and he told us how he had grown up in St.…

In my article "The Theist's Guide to Converting Atheists", I outlined a list of things a theist could present that would be likely to convince an atheist of the truth of their particular religion. Since I am an atheist, it is my view that none of these things actually exist, although I am willing to…

In several years of debating atheism and theism, I have made an observation. Ask any believer what would convince him he was mistaken and persuade him to leave his religion and become an atheist, and if you get a response, it will almost invariably be, "Nothing - I have faith in my god." Although…

Wonder Dogs: 4 Paws for Ability, an agency in Xenia, Ohio, trains service dogs that will live with children who have disabilities. In May 1999, Donnie Kanter Winokur, 43, a writer and multimedia producer, and her husband, Rabbi Harvey Winokur, 49, beheld the son of their dreams, the child…

I want to talk about atheists and anger. This has been a hard piece to write, and it may be a hard one to read. I'm not going to be as polite and good-tempered as I usually am in this blog; this piece is about anger, and for once I'm going to fucking well let myself be angry. But I think it's…

Bill Maher, in relaying his last "New Rule" on the Jan. 27 episode of "Real Time," returned to an argument about the GOP presidential race that he has advanced regularly: (You can watch the clip of the whole "New Rule" here or read the transcript here.) Maher isn't really exaggerating. Contrary to…

Dust speckles shelves up on the third story. Wood floors creak. Walls and cabinets in the cramped office, tucked into a red-brick Baltimore rowhouse, channel a generation’s worth of sloganeering. “We shall overcome Reagan” “Nuclear Free Zone” “Don’t buy war toys” Lawrence Egbert comes here almost…

One of the biggest problems with Washington is that it’s rigged for those who’ve already made it, like successful corporations and billionaires, instead of small businesses and the middle class. I’m all for people succeeding and becoming millionaires, but everybody willing to work hard ought to have…

By Richard Marosi, Los Angeles Times January 8, 2012 Reporting from Nogales, Mexico The freight train slowed through downtown and screeched to a stop in front of Luis Luna. He scrambled under a boxcar and climbed onto narrow beams that crisscrossed the undercarriage. He lay on his back, suspended 12…

January 23, 2012 by Andy | 3 Comments In her fantastic book Bossypants, Tina Fey has a sidebar about how improvisational comedy has changed her life, and given her a new worldview. We in open source would do well to adapt these ideas to how we conduct our projects as well. Improv and open source…

By by Michael J. Mooney D Magazine JAN 2012 Before I met Robert Jeffress, I wanted to hate him. Jeffress is the conservative preacher who made national headlines in October, when he called Mormonism a cult. He’s the senior pastor at First Baptist Dallas, the oldest megachurch in America, and I am…

Anyone scanning Disney Hall’s debut calendar in the fall of 2003 would have noticed the size of that first season’s schedule, 128 shows in all. That’s a weighty number for a new hall—one might have assumed it was chosen by venue management wanting the gravitas of a world-class chamber’s arrival or…

SOPA and PIPA are two pieces of proposed legislation designed to "stop" Internet piracy… in the most hamfisted way imaginable. As Mitchell Baker explains: SOPA/PIPA do not aim at the people trying to get to the store, or even the store itself. The solution under the proposed bills is to make it as…

2012 King of the Cosmos (A Profile of Neil deGrasse Tyson) Playboy, January 2012 On a hay-mown crest, dozens of people are crouching in the dark. The Earth has turned away from the sun, and the sky has flowed down a color chart, from light gray to orange to bluish-black. A sliver of a waxing moon…

The door opened and into the room walked the most dangerous person I’ve ever met. He reached towards his belt and slowly pulled out his .45 caliber handgun, raised it and paused to evaluate my expression. “No disrespect, but it’s been pressing into my hip all day.” He placed the gun on the coffee…

Nice, France ON Wednesday, America’s detention camp at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for 10 years. For seven of them, I was held there without explanation or charge. During that time my daughters grew up without me. They were toddlers when I was imprisoned, and were never allowed to visit or…

Over on his blog, my friend Jan Heine has a post where he asks and answers the question: Why Ride an Expensive Bicycle? Jan effectively presents several factors that make a higher end bike well worth their higher price tags and the fact that top builders have long wait lists of folks happy to buy…

"It was eight years before I was able to say the word that describes what happened to me," says Maricella Guzman. "I hadn't even been in the Navy a month. I was so young. I tried to report it. But instead of being taken seriously, I was forced to do push-ups." "I can't sleep without drugs," says…

Editor's note: Larry Alex Taunton is the founder and executive director of the Fixed Point Foundation. This article is adapted from his book “The Grace Effect: How the Power of One Life Can Reverse the Corruption of Unbelief.” By Larry Alex Taunton, Special to CNN (CNN)– I first met Christopher…

Editor's Note: Stephen Prothero, a Boston University religion scholar and author of "God is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World," is a regular CNN Belief Blog contributor. By Stephen Prothero, Special to CNN (CNN)–My love/hate relationship with Christopher Hitchens started when I…

As you stand in endless lines this holiday season, here’s a comforting thought: all those security measures accomplish nothing, at enormous cost. That’s the conclusion of Charles C. Mann, who put the T.S.A. to the test with the help of one of America’s top security experts. By Tim Boyle/Getty…

By Ed Dante Editor's note: Ed Dante is a pseudonym for a writer who lives on the East Coast. Through a literary agent, he approached The Chronicle wanting to tell the story of how he makes a living writing papers for a custom-essay company and to describe the extent of student cheating he has…

PALIN’S PALADINS Erratic behavior and a pattern of lying matter little: “Such falsehoods never damage Palin’s credibility with her admirers, because information and ideology are incidental to this relationship.” Backstage in the arena, a little girl in Mary Janes pushes her brother in a baby…

Where are all those great developers? The first time you try to fill an open position, if you’re like most people, you place some ads, maybe browse around the large online boards, and get a ton of resumes. As you go through them, you think, “hmm, this might work,” or, “no way!” or, “I wonder if this…

What is intelligence, anyway? When I was in the army, I received the kind of aptitude test that all soldiers took and, against a normal of 100, scored 160. No one at the base had ever seen a figure like that, and for two hours they made a big fuss over me. (It didn't mean anything. The next day I…

I'm a white midwestern suburb kid who started out mowing lawns and hauling rocks for summer funds, got a crummy job out of school and slowly bootstrapped myself to become a reasonably successful software developer and public speaker. From a flat-out personal income standpoint, I stand to benefit…