August/September 2019

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
Reason4 min read
We Live In A World Of Reliable Miracles
WHEN I’M HAVING a bad day, I trawl the internet for videos of happy cyborgs. My favorites are clips of hearing-impaired people getting their cochlear implants turned on for the first time. The videos follow a soothingly predictable pattern. Mumbly ba
Reason2 min readGender Studies
Be Who You Are, Love Who You Want
ONE OF THE weirdest things about social progress is that it almost immediately gets so normalized that we forget how awful even the recent past could be. Nowhere is this truer than when it comes to what used to be called the “love that dare not speak
Reason2 min read
The Future Of Retail Is Bigger Than Amazon
AMAZON WILL BE responsible for nearly half of all e-commerce in the United States during 2019. Critics such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) allege that the company “squash[es] small businesses and innovation.” They believe government antitrust act
Reason2 min read
The Podcast Revolution
THERE WAS A time when a radio program required an actual radio station. Podcasting changed that. It is now possible to transmit a talk show, a documentary, or an audio play without dealing with anyone licensed to broadcast on the AM or FM bands. Need
Reason3 min read
Humans Are Building Better Versions Of Themselves
WHEN MY WIFE was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in the late 1990s, at the age of 9, the technology available for giving her body insulin, which her pancreas is supposed to make but can’t, was relatively primitive: Mollie measured her blood sugar with
Reason2 min read
State Legislatures Embrace Licensing Reform
WHETHER THEY’RE LOOKING for a fresh start after a run-in with the law, trying to relocate across state lines, or merely hoping to operate a hairdryer without first getting the government’s permission, the first half of 2019 brought good news for work
Reason2 min read
Meatless Meat Is Better Than Ever
JOSHUA TETRICK WANTS to kill fewer animals, protect the environment, and reduce malnutrition in the developing world. But he knows veganism is a nonstarter for most people. So instead of converting consumers on his ideology, he founded a company that
Reason12 min read
Impending Defeat For The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse
MOST OF YOU think that the world, in general, is getting worse. You are wrong. Citing uncontroversial data on major global trends, I will prove to you that this dark view of humanity’s prospects is, in large part, badly mistaken. First, though: How d
Reason6 min readPersonal Growth
How Work Got Good
STEVE JOBS RECRUITED Pepsi’s John Sculley to Apple by asking him if he wanted to spend his life selling sugared water or if he wanted “a chance to change the world.” Sculley took the chance. In all his enterprises, Jobs offered his employees the same
Reason8 min read
Criminal Justice Reform Is Having A (long Overdue) Moment
LAST MAY, REALITY TV mega-celebrity Kim Kardashian arrived at the White House and successfully lobbied President Donald Trump to grant clemency to Alice Marie Johnson, a grandmother then serving life in federal prison for a nonviolent drug crime. It
Reason6 min read
Bitcoin at 10
AS BITCOIN TURNS 10, a new book aims to chronicle the digital currency’s ideological origins. “The technology alone is not enough,” Finn Brunton writes in Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cr
Reason5 min read
Our Big Brains Are Pre-Wired for Love, Friendship, Cooperation, and Learning
WE FINALLY HAVE an answer to the nature/nurture debate, and it appears to be yes. It took billions of years of biological evolution for bacteria to morph into humanity, but the human ability to learn and to teach each other new tricks means that usef
Reason3 min read
Psychonaut Hamilton Morris on Drugs After Prohibition
What will American drug culture look like once prohibition is finally over and we can start to legally use more substances in more settings? No one is better situated to start that discussion than Hamilton Morris, the 32-year-old host of Hamilton’s P
Reason8 min read
The End Of HIV Is In Sight
RYAN WHITE AND I would be the same age if he were alive today. He’s not. He died in 1990 at the age of 18, right before he was going to graduate from high school, of an AIDS-related respiratory tract infection. For the final few years of White’s life
Reason3 min read
Bouquets
Researchers in Greece have found a naturally occurring microbe that eats polyethylene and polystyrene, the two types of plastics that make up 70 percent of ocean litter. A deep-learning algorithm developed by researchers at Google AI was able, in a t
Reason3 min readCrime & Violence
Brickbats
In Johnson County, Kansas, a 5-year-old student hid inside a bookshelf in the Bluejacket-Flint Elementary School library. A teacher named Crystal Smith found the girl, angrily pulled her out, waited for another adult who was present to turn away, and
Reason3 min read
Illinois Is the Canary in the Pension Coal Mine, Says Adam Schuster
Illinois is running out of time to fix its public sector pension problem. A new report from Moody’s Investors Service identified the Prairie State as one of the two most likely to suffer during an economic downturn. Illinois towns and cities are alre
Reason6 min read
What If Man Is a Killer Ape Beset by Original Sin?
TODAY, SELF-HELP BOOKS and relationship gurus invoke evolution to explain everything from marital infidelity to the paleo diet. Our early ancestors’ survival needs echo through our ideas today. But this is not the first time our hominid ancestry’s ro
Reason6 min read
The Horror Of War And The Thrill Of Horror
THE FIRST WORLD War wasn’t just itself a great horror. In Wasteland, W. Scott Poole makes a compelling case that it launched a great age of horror fiction. After the armistice of November 1918, a wave of vivid memoirs, plays, novels, and poems tried
Reason6 min readAmerican Government
America’s Golden Door Is Slamming Shut
THERE HAS OFTEN been a chasm between the lofty rhetoric of U.S. presidents and their actual policies. When it comes to immigration, Donald Trump does not have that problem. His rhetoric and policies are remarkably aligned. He is saying and doing thin
Reason5 min readAmerican Government
Socialism Is Back, And The Kids Are Loving It
FOR DECADES, DEMOCRATIC socialism was an old man’s ideology. Its adherents were aging hippies, old-time union organizers, and folks who fondly remembered the pre-’60s left. As recently as 2013, the average member of the Democratic Socialists of Ameri
Reason10 min read
The End Of The Free Internet Is Near
NOT TOO LONG ago, conventional wisdom held that the internet should enjoy minimal government oversight precisely because it was a technology that enabled open and free speech for everyone. The remedy for hateful and offensive remarks, that 1990s-vint
Reason11 min read
The Terrifying Rise Of Authoritarian Populism
GOVERNMENTS DESCRIBED AS populist are now in power in Poland, Hungary, Mexico, and Turkey. Italy and Greece are governed by multiparty populist coalitions, while populists of the left or right are partners in coalition governments in seven other Euro
Reason3 min read
The Rent Is Too Damn High—and It’s Going To Stay That Way
THE PHRASE MADE famous in 2009 by longshot New York City mayoral candidate Jimmy McMillan is now a reality for millions of tenants across the United States. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, inflation has pushed overall consumer price
Reason5 min readMedical
Health Care Spending Is Out Of Control
HEALTH CARE IN America costs too much because we pay for it the wrong way. And it’s all but certain that we’re going to continue doing so for a very long time. The crux of the problem is third-party payment, or, as most people think of it, insurance.
Reason2 min read
Americans Aren’t Saving Nearly Enough
BY THE TIME today’s 50-year-olds reach retirement age in the mid-2030s, Social Security is projected to be bumping up against insolvency. That will mean automatic 20 percent benefit cuts for everyone. Clearly, it’s never been more important for Ameri
Reason2 min readInternational Relations
Are Free Trade’s Best Days Behind Us?
IF YOU WERE a U.S. trade negotiator in the 1950s or 1960s, you might be a little shocked by the aggressive trade rhetoric thrown around today. China is an existential threat? Our European allies are almost as bad? What exactly went wrong with U.S. le
Reason2 min readWorld
China Exports Its Panopticon
SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS have wondered for years what an all-encompassing surveillance state might look like. China decided to build it. Over the last year, The New York Times has revealed the lengths to which Beijing has gone to identify and control
Reason3 min read
Man-made Disaster In Venezuela
THE WORST HUMANITARIAN crisis in modern Venezuelan history is unfolding against the backdrop of a power struggle between President Nicolás Maduro and opposition leader Juan Guaidó. Because Maduro’s government has refused to publish basic data, it is
Reason5 min readMedical
Bad Ideas Are Spreading Like The Plague
THE DEFEAT OF measles in the United States was one of the great good news stories of the turn of the millennium. Prior to 1963, when a vaccine was developed, the highly contagious virus led each year to 48,000 hospitalizations and 400–500 deaths, mos

Reason

More Issues From Reason