October 2021

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 Stephanie Slade (sslade@reason.com), Art Di
Reason5 min read
Let’s Play Horseshoe Theory
THIS SUMMER, AMAZON founder Jeff Bezos went to the edge of space on a ship he built with his own earnings. A bunch of people saw the billionaire blast off and thought: “Screw that guy and his dumb rocket—the government should take his money because I
Reason1 min read
Photo
WHEN HONG KONG passed its controversial national security law in June 2020, opponents warned that it would lead to censorship of voices critical of China’s Communist government, which sought to bring the semi-autonomous city back under its control. T
Reason2 min readCrime & Violence
Britney Is Not The Only One Who Needs Freeing
#FREEBRITNEY HAS BECOME a rallying cry of people who support Britney Spears’ efforts to end a court-appointed conservatorship that had imposed nearly absolute control over the pop singer’s life for 13 years. A court granted Spears’ father control ove
Reason3 min readInternational Relations
Leaving Afghanistan
THIS SUMMER, THE U.S. government finally set an official end date for America’s two-decade military misadventure in Afghanistan. After announcing a drawdown of the U.S. troop presence there in April, President Joe Biden declared at a July 8 press bri
Reason2 min readCrime & Violence
Supreme Court Dodges Another Religious Liberty Fight
THE SUPREME COURT once again sidestepped a conflict between religious freedom and anti-discrimination laws when it ruled in June that Philadelphia officials violated the First Amendment by requiring a Catholic charity to certify same-sex couples as f
Reason2 min read
California Is Clueless About Homelessness
“MORE MONEY, MORE problems” might as well be the slogan for how San Francisco and Los Angeles approach homelessness. Voters in both cities recently approved billions of dollars in new spending for supportive housing and services for homeless resident
Reason2 min readCrime & Violence
DEA Still Insists Marijuana Has No ‘Accepted Medical Use’
THIS SPRING, NEARLY five years after the Obama administration promised to end the federal government’s longstanding, anomalous monopoly on marijuana for medical research, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) tentatively approved applications by
Reason3 min readInternational Relations
Cubans Rose Up. America Should Step Up.
AFTER THOUSANDS OF Cubans poured into the streets in early July to protest the island nation’s Communist government, President Joe Biden said America “stands firmly” with the people of Cuba. The demonstrations were prompted by short-term shortages of
Reason5 min read
Walking The Delicate Line Between Reporter And Activist
I SPENT THE second half of the 1990s hanging out with people who operate unlicensed radio stations. That was partly because I was covering them as a reporter, and it was partly because I was active in a movement to legalize their illicit transmission
Reason3 min read
Biden’s Total Financial Surveillance
IMAGINE LIVING IN a world where every one of your noncash financial transactions—a restaurant meal, a Venmo transfer to a friend, maybe some bitcoin bought on the dips—was automatically reported to a beefed-up, audit-hungry IRS. That dystopia will be
Reason2 min readCrime & Violence
A Good Day For The Fourth Amendment
IN 2019, A California appeals court said a police officer may always enter a suspect’s home without a warrant if the officer is in “hot pursuit” and has probable cause to believe the suspect has committed a misdemeanor. In June, the U.S. Supreme Cour
Reason2 min read
Afghan Helpers Left Behind
THE LONG OVERDUE withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan raises urgent questions about the fate of the Afghan interpreters, engineers, and other contractors who assisted U.S. troops during the last two decades: Will we invite them into the country
Reason24 min readPopular Culture & Media Studies
Self-cancellation, Deplatforming, And Censorship
IN AN AGE of cancel culture, it’s perhaps fitting that the death of a free speech hero would receive little fanfare. So when the poet, publisher, and provocateur Lawrence Ferlinghetti shuffled off this mortal coil in February at the grand old age of
Reason14 min read
Everything Is Infrastructure Now
I TRULY BELIEVE we’re in a moment where history is going to look back on this time as a fundamental choice that had to be made between democracies and autocracies,” President Joe Biden declared during a March 31 speech in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Wh
Reason13 min readCrime & Violence
Cashed OUT
REVOLVING BAIL FUNDS are the closest thing there is in activism to a perpetual motion machine. A bail fund steps in on behalf of a defendant to pay the bail bond set by a court. With bail paid, arrestees can go home, keep their jobs, and resist press
Reason22 min readCrime & Violence
Do We Really Need New Anti-asian Hate Crime Laws?
IN MARCH, A man opened fire at Young’s Asian Massage, just north of Atlanta. Later, he shot up two more Atlanta-area Asian spas. All told, eight people were killed. Six of them were Asian women. Was this a hate crime? Clearly, it targeted a certain s
Reason5 min read
Stealthily Wielding Caesar’s Sword
MANY A BOOK has touted the importance of tradition in the pursuit of the good life. To my mind, the measure of such a work’s success is the likelihood that it will persuade someone who comes in unconvinced. The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom
Reason1 min readCrime & Violence
From Death Row to Freedom
It’s often deliberately misleading behavior by officials or witnesses that puts innocent people on death row. 68% of exonerations involved perjury or false accusations 69% of exonerations involved official misconduct Eddie Lee Howard was the first de
Reason6 min readAmerican Government
The Terror War Era
HISTORIANS WOULD LABOR to explain the 1920s without reference to World War I, even if that era’s Americans preferred to forget it. Same with the 1980s and Vietnam: Ronald Reagan’s partisans somehow simultaneously disowned, denied, and defended Nixone
Reason6 min readCrime & Violence
A Clear and Present Lack of Danger
TODD BENSMAN’S AMERICA’S Covert Border War faces several challenges right out of the gate. First, it’s a work of speculative nonfiction about how terrorists plotting to kill Americans could cross the U.S.-Mexico border, even though none are known to
Reason2 min read
Undoing Drugs
After the concept of “harm reduction” spread from European pioneers to American activists in the 1980s and ’90s, journalist Maia Szalavitz notes in her new history of the movement, it “terrified drug warriors.” With good reason: “If the drug war was
Reason1 min read
Bo Burnham: Inside
It’s technically a Netflix comedy special. But Inside is far more unsettling than any true crime show. Bo Burnham’s latest foray into millennial musical comedy chronicles his crack-up over the course of a COVID year alone via punishingly catchy earwo
Reason2 min read
In The Heights
In the Heights, a movie musical based on the hit Broadway production by Hamilton mastermind Lin-Manuel Miranda, is set in the heavily Dominican New York City neighborhood of Washington Heights. At heart, it’s the story of an immigrant community comin
Reason1 min read
Exit Scam
In 2018, a young Canadian cryptocurrency entrepreneur named Gerald Cotton died of complications from Crohn’s disease while on his honeymoon in India. Or did he? Questions and rumors have long swirled around Cotton’s death, fueled by revelations of a
Reason1 min read
Summer Of Soul (…or, When The Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
Over six searing Sundays in the summer of 1969, nearly 300,000 people flocked to Mount Morris Park to attend the Harlem Cultural Festival, a concert series that featured the likes of Nina Simone, B.B. King, and Stevie Wonder. It was a triumphant, jub
Reason1 min read
Project Hail Mary
Anyone still eager for world ending drama after the past 18 months of doom, gloom, and death might want to pick up Project Hail Mary. The latest novel from The Martian author Andy Weir (famous for turning a self-published novel into a huge hit, then
Reason1 min read
Pandemic Legacy
Working at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) probably isn’t much fun, but the board game Pandemic found success letting gamers indulge in a little epidemiological roleplay. A cooperative game where participants win or lose together
Reason3 min read
From The Archives
“The regulations are so onerous that principals rarely even try to fire a teacher. Most just put the bad ones in pretend-work jobs, or sucker another school into taking them. (They call that the ‘dance of the lemons.’) The city payrolls include hundr
Reason3 min read
Author Steven Johnson On The Good News Of The Century
“IT TOOK US four years just to identify the virus that caused AIDS in the ’80s,” says author Steven Johnson. “Imagine COVID where it’s four years before we even know what is causing the outbreak. That’s what would have happened if we just shifted 20
Reason3 min readCrime & Violence
Brickbats
The Pennsylvania Court of Judicial Discipline has found Philadelphia Common Pleas Court Judge Lyris Younge guilty of “repeated, clearly improper conduct” and added that her misconduct while presiding over family court was “blatant and inexcusable.” T
Reason10 min read
Cynthia Lummis, Crypto Queen Of The U.s. Senate
SEN. CYNTHIA LUMMIS (R–Wyo.) might not seem like your typical cryptocurrency owner. She’s 66 and doesn’t have a tech background, but she’s “in it for the distance.” Bitcoin emerged just a dozen years ago, when a pseudonymous hacker (or group of hacke
Reason10 min read
When The ‘Native Son’ Became ‘The Man Who Lived Underground’
ON DECEMBER 12, 1941, the literary agent Paul Reynolds contacted Edward Asner, one of the top editors at the publishing house Harper & Brothers, with what should have come as welcome news. “Here,” Reynolds announced, “is the new novel by Richard Wrig
Reason2 min read
America On The Dole
AFTER CONGRESS PASSED the American Recovery Plan, Joe Biden’s $2 trillion economic relief legislation, the president proposed roughly $4 trillion in further spending. The American Jobs Plan, also known as the president’s infrastructure proposal, acco

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