Reason

THE FIRST YEAR of Joe Biden’s presidency has been precisely the kind of mushy nothingburger that he campaigned on. Many people voted knowingly for such an approach, which sounded restful and predictable after four years of Donald Trump’s high-varianc

HAS AMERICA BECOME a nation of quitters? It might seem so. As the COVID-19 pandemic progressed, workers abandoned their jobs in record numbers. In 2020, as the virus tore through the economy, the labor force participation rate saw its largest drop ev

IN DECEMBER, OVER 1,000 crypto investors who together comprise FreeRossDAO pooled their money to buy Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht’s first-ever non-fungible token (NFT) for 1,446 ether, worth $6.3 million at the time of sale. NFTs are digital asset

IN 2008, THE U.S. Supreme Court told President George W. Bush that fighting a global war on terrorism did not entitle him to evade constitutional limits on his authority. That decision, Boumediene v. Bush, would go down in the books as one of the mos

CAN’T WE GET back to some version of normal? That’s a fair question now that every American who wants a COVID-19 vaccine has had the opportunity to get one. But we still get breathless coverage of every variant and new rounds of travel restrictions,

ON JANUARY 31, 2020, when there were six confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States, then-President Donald Trump imposed a travel ban on noncitizens who had recently visited China. A few hours later, Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden

INSIDE THE VAST apparatus of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), there’s a bureaucrat who is tasked with investigating the tenets of psychedelic churches. That improbable job figures in the legal troubles encountered by Arizona’s Vine

BEFORE CALIFORNIANS APPROVED Proposition 12 in 2018, the measure’s opponents warned that it would effectively ban the sale of bacon in the Golden State. That was a bit of a stretch. Prop. 12, which was supported by 63 percent of voters, outlawed the

SINCE 2014, STATE and local governments have filed thousands of lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies they blame for causing the “opioid crisis” by exaggerating the benefits and minimizing the risks of prescription pain medication. The theory und

ON DECEMBER 6, 2021, in his last major act as mayor of New York City, Democrat Bill de Blasio announced that, to stop the spread of the omicron variant of COVID-19, all 184,000 private businesses in the city would henceforth be commanded to enforce v

UNITED NATIONS SECRETARY-GENERAL António Guterres hailed the Joint Glasgow Declaration on Enhancing Climate Action in the 2020s, which the U.S. and China issued at the U.N.’s 26th climate conference (COP26) in November, as “an important step in the r

ON NOVEMBER 30, English soccer teams Newcastle United and Norwich City played to a 1–1 draw in a Premier League matchup. The teams were last and second-to-last in the league at the time, so even most diehard soccer fans didn’t care much about the res

THE $1.2 TRILLION Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which President Joe Biden signed into law in November, shifts federal highway policy further away from the free market model of “user pays, user benefits” by requiring taxpayers to cough up mo

THE CLEARANCE OF the thriving, legendary African-American neighborhood in Detroit known as Black Bottom, circa 1950, was not caused by natural disaster, gentrifying developers, or a destructive riot by its residents. The slowly gathering public polic

IN THE MID-1950S, rock’n’ roll music was widely condemned as a public nuisance and threat to public safety, and the junk science of the day claimed that teens were “addicted” to the music. Police officials across the country—in Connecticut, New Jerse

IN HIS BESTSELLING new book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America (Portfolio), New York Times columnist and Columbia University linguist John McWhorter argues that the ideas of Robin DiAngelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and the Times’ 1619

DEACCESSION IS A classic euphemism. When I first heard it, I assumed it was a parody of bureaucracy-speak or a flimsy attempt at linguistic camouflage, like getting a breakup note that says, “I’m not leaving you, honey; I’m just failing to dis-exit t

MARK LAWRENCE SCHRAD thinks Carrie Nation, the hatchet-wielding vigilante who rampaged through saloons at the beginning of the 20th century, gets a bum rap. While Nation was “easy to mock as a Bible-thumping ‘crank,’ ‘a freak,’ ‘a lunatic,’ or a ‘pur

I walked into the heart of surveillance capitalism and left with a pre-packaged sandwich for lunch. That about sums up my experience at the Amazon Fresh grocery store in downtown Washington, D.C. The company made famous for bringing goods to your doo

EVEN BEFORE WOODY Holton’s Liberty Is Sweet was released, it ignited controversy. Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The New York Times’ 1619 Project, touted it as evidence that a British threat to slavery provoked the American Revolution. Then Holton,

ALL RESPIRATORY PANDEMICS follow a script, one that’s as much social and political as it is medical or epidemiological, says Yale sociologist and medical doctor Nicholas Christakis, who has just released a new paperback edition of his authoritative b

Norma Garcia-Lopez resigned as the co-chair of the Racial Equity Committee at Fort Worth Independent School District in Texas after media reported she doxxed several parents who challenged the school system’s COVID-19 mask mandate and who spoke out a

March 2007 “For all the crowing over the benefits of altruism, no one has suggested that surgeons are tainted by the market that pays them so well; no one seems upset that biotech companies sell rather than donate their treatments. Patients and docto

The Netflix animated series Arcane stars characters from and is set in the world of popular video game League of Legends, but nonplayers needn’t care: Almost nothing about the show attempts to mimic the game. That’s its genius. Rather than just gamer