August-September 2024

Reason

Free Minds and Free Markets.

Reason2 min read
Reason
Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward (kmw@reason.com), Publisher Mike Alissi (malissi@reason.com), Editors at Large Nick Gillespie (gillespie@reason.com), Matt Welch (matt.welch@reason.com), Managing Editor Jason Russell (jason.russell@reason.com), A
Reason3 min read
Numb To The Numbers
THERE’S A WEIRD little bus stop at the corner of 18th and K streets in Washington, D.C. On the inside, a ticker tallies the national debt in real time, the glowing numbers whizzing by too quickly for the naked eye. On the outside, there’s a printed p
Reason3 min read
Plastics Are Better for the Climate
“PLASTICS ARE THE new coal,” declares Beyond Plastics. “Pollution from the plastics industry is a major force behind the heating of the planet,” reports The Hill. The Natural Resources Defense Council says “reducing plastic production is critical to
Reason3 min read
Blaming Dealers for Drug Deaths Misses Another Culprit
AN APRIL 1 federal indictment charged two men, Antonio Venti and Michael Kuilan, with supplying the drugs that killed transgender activist Cecilia Gentili in February. Among other things, Venti and Kuilan are accused of causing Gentili’s death by dis
Reason2 min read
Biden’s Election Year Border Order
IN APRIL, AXIOS reported that President Joe Biden was planning “to issue an executive order to dramatically limit the number of asylum-seekers who can cross the southern border” in an attempt to “stem illegal border crossings.” The Biden administrati
Reason3 min read
Tariffs To The Left Of Me, Tariffs To The Right
A DISTRESSING AMOUNT of deliberate amnesia swirls around American trade policy these days—affecting not only the two men cynically pandering to voters in the presidential race, but also the experts who really ought to know better. “I think that link,
Reason3 min read
New Jersey Wants Your Baby’s Genes
MANDATORY GENOMIC SEQUENCING of all newborns—it sounds like something out of a dystopian sci-fi story. But it could become a reality in New Jersey, where health officials are considering adding this analysis to the state’s mandatory newborn testing r
Reason3 min read
Guernica’s Recovery From Ruin
BEFORE MARIUPOL, BEFORE Gaza, before Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Dresden and the Blitz, there was Guernica. The little Basque town in northern Spain was once the byword for state cruelty following the 1937 bombing of Guernica during Spain’s civil war—
Reason3 min read
Q&A Jay Bhattacharya
JAY BHATTACHARYA IS a professor of health policy and economics at Stanford University and a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which rejected COVID-19 lockdowns in favor of focused protection of older Americans and other high-risk groups.
Reason2 min read
Trump Promises Police ‘Immunity From Prosecution’
IN MAY, FORMER President Donald Trump traveled to Wisconsin, a battle-ground state crucial to his 2016 win and 2020 loss. The stakes are high. He made a few big promises to match. “We’re going to give our police their power back,” he told rallygoers
Reason3 min read
Colleges Should Be Content Neutral on Campus Protest
SINCE HAMAS’ ATTACK on Israel last October and the war in Gaza that followed, college campuses across the nation have been embroiled in a series of pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protests. In the spring, more than 100 of these protests turned into enca
Reason18 min read
THE DEBT LiES WE TELL OURSELVES
WHEN PRESIDENT JOE Biden delivered his 2023 State of the Union address, Washington was drowning in a sea of red ink. The annual budget deficit was in the process of doubling from $1 trillion to $2 trillion in a single year due to some student-debt ca
Reason17 min read
‘I Just Don’t Understand How That’s The System’
IT WASN’T LONG before Jennifer Williams noticed there was something unusual about the two young girls she was fostering. Three-year-old Arya Hernandez was bright, outgoing, and without any of the behavioral issues Williams had become accustomed to ov
Reason15 min read
Congress ‘Can Regulate Virtually Anything’
TWO YEARS AFTER Harvard gave him the boot and three years before Congress banned LSD, Timothy Leary set out on a road trip from Millbrook, New York, in a rented station wagon. The 45-year-old psychologist and psychedelic enthusiast was accompanied by
Reason14 min read
Left In The Graveyard Of Empires
“THERE’S GOING TO be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of an embassy of the United States in Afghanistan,” argued President Joe Biden in July 2021 as he prepared to end America’s 20-year war there. It was “highly unlikely
Reason7 min read
Carrying The Torch Of Freedom
Reason magazine is published with the help of supporters who invest more than the price of a subscription by making contributions to Reason Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. We are grateful for their support of our journalism and publi
Reason11 min read
‘Don’t Be Blinkered’
“ALL YOU NEED, besides the cocaine, is a lighter, water, baking soda, some Q-Tips, high-proof alcohol, a ceramic mug, and a piece of cheesecloth or an old T-shirt,” writes Glenn Loury in his riveting Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservati
Reason1 min read
Will You Make Freedom A Part Of Your Legacy?
We’re grateful for our forward-thinking friends who have planned a special gift to Reason in their will or estate. The Vox Perpetua society was established to honor and recognize these visionaries. Reason magazine and Reason Foundation rely on the ge
Reason6 min read
What Causes Capitalism?
A GALAXY OF brilliant scholars have tried to account for the economic transformation of England in the 18th and early 19th centuries—the period that began the Great Enrichment that created the modern world. What could Geoffrey M. Hodgson’s The Wealth
Reason6 min read
Nuclear Disaster Porn
THE END OF the world takes less than two hours in Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario. It begins one spring day when a nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) erupts from a mobile launcher in North Korea. Before it hits the Pentagon, a
Reason6 min read
When Attacks on Anarchists Accidentally Improved Free Speech Law
THE LAWMAKING AND policing powers of late 19th and early 20th century America did not think anarchist agitators deserved the protective penumbra of our Constitution. After Emma Goldman immigrated to the United States in 1885 from czarist Russia, she
Reason6 min read
Reviews
CHRISTIAN BRITSCHGI Settings and storylines that make for good gameplay rarely lend themselves to compelling plots and filmable universes. So it’s pretty amazing that Amazon’s new Fallout series manages to be faithful to the aesthetics and vibe of th
Reason3 min read
Archives
“Money is flowing toward cultured meat, which is beginning to attract investment from traditional players. Tyson holds a minority stake in Memphis Meats and put $2.2 million into Future Meat Technologies, an Israeli company that wants to cut the pric
Reason2 min read
Federal IOU
1. Wild pig 5. Formed for a specific purpose 10. Sandal fastener 15. Amy Winehouse, vocally 16. Princess played by Elizabeth Debicki on The Crown 17. Slowly destroy, as public trust 18. Period during which America’s national debt was about $75 milli
Reason2 min read
Brickbats
German law requires retail stores to close on Sundays and Christian holidays to give employees days of rest. Supermarket chain Tegut has gotten around this by fully automating its stores, and it gets 25 percent to 30 percent of its sales on Sundays.
Reason15 min read
The Republican Radical Who Helped Launch the Gay Rights Movement
ONE WINTER NIGHT in 1924, a 19-year-old named Dorr Legg snuck away to a “charming park,” where he had his first sexual experience with another man, something he had been desiring—and studying—for several years. Born in a large home overlooking the ca
Reason2 min read
How the Feds Buy Their Way Around the Fourth Amendment
THE FOURTH AMENDMENT guarantees that every person shall be “secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” This means government agents cannot enter your home or rifle through your stuff without a w

Reason

More Issues From Reason