August/September 2022

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
Reason6 min read
We Have A Printing Paper Problem
I am a print magazine—the ordinary paper magazine familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write. I, Magazine, simple though I appear to be, merit your wonder and awe. I am seemingly so simple, yet not a single person on the face of
Reason3 min readAmerican Government
Biden Comforts The Comfortable
DURING HIS CAMPAIGN for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, Joe Biden repeatedly insisted that his primary goal as president would be to help the struggling American middle class. “Ordinary middle-class Americans built America,” he declared
Reason2 min readInternational Relations
Rattling Sabers At Russia
ON MAY 4, The New York Times revealed that the U.S. was providing classified Russian asset targeting intelligence to the Ukrainian military. While it’s not surprising that the military would provide an ally with information about Russian troop moveme
Reason2 min readCrime & Violence
Desantis Vs. Disney
RON DESANTIS, FLORIDA’S Republican governor, has declared a regulatory war on one of the state’s biggest employers. But it’s taxpayers who may ultimately pay the price. In March, DeSantis signed into law H.B. 1577, which described itself as “an act r
Reason2 min readCrime & Violence
A Democrat Challenges The Gun Ban For Marijuana Users
NIKKI FRIED, THE only Democrat among Florida’s statewide elected officials, might seem like an unlikely champion of the Second Amendment. But as Florida’s commissioner of agriculture and consumer affairs, Fried oversees medical marijuana and conceale
Reason2 min read
Biden Expands Dubious Subsidies For Manufacturers
FOR NEARLY 90 years, the Export-Import Bank of the United States has subsidized foreign purchases of goods produced by politically connected American businesses. Now it will start loaning money to U.S.companies that do little or no business overseas.
Reason3 min read
Grow Your Own
THE FIRST TOMATO you grow yourself will probably be the most expensive one you ever eat. The same is true of peppers, zucchini, carrots, and any other crops you raise. While costs do go down as you gain expertise and reuse tools and materials, your i
Reason3 min readCrime & Violence
Unenumerated Rights And Roe V. Wade
A LEAKED DRAFT of a majority opinion published in May indicated that the Supreme Court would soon overturn two key precedents securing a woman’s constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson W
Reason2 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
Digital Immortality Or Deathbot?
WOULD YOU WANT your persona to live forever in the metaverse after your physical body shuffles off this mortal coil? That is what the metaverse platform Somnium Space plans to offer its users, starting in the next year or so, with its Live Forever se
Reason2 min read
The Border Legacy Of Title 42 Expulsions
WHEN PRESIDENT JOE Biden announced in April that he would not extend a controversial public health order that allowed U.S. immigration officials to expel migrants, many on the right criticized the move as premature or misguided. But the order has act
Reason2 min readCrime & Violence
A Judge Says Shaken-baby Cases Rely On ‘Junk Science’
AFTER HIS 11-MONTH-OLD son showed signs of neurological damage in 2017, Darryl Nieves was charged with aggravated assault and endangering the welfare of a child. The indictment alleged that Nieves had injured the toddler, who was born prematurely wit
Reason5 min read
After Uvalde, Irrelevant Gun Control Proposals
THE HORRIFYING MAY 24 massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, which killed 19 children and two adults, happened just 10 days after a gunman murdered 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. Both crimes predictably prompted politici
Reason2 min read
Romeo and Juliet
In ninth grade, like high school freshmen all over America, I was assigned Romeo and Juliet to read for my English class. As a longtime lit erature geek even at the age of 14, I was thrilled to be entering the big leagues. We’d read some Charles Dick
Reason5 min read
Who Controls What Books You Can Read?
SOMEONE GAVE MARGARET Atwood a flamethrower. The gray-haired author has become a patron saint for a certain kind of dystopian apocalypticism. No protest is complete these days without at least a few women in the red robes and white bonnets of The Han
Reason7 min read
The Dangerous Lesson of Book Bans in Public School Libraries
A SMALL GROUP OF parents attends a conference where they’re educated about the threats to American morality embedded in modern education. There they obtain a list of books believed to present a clear and present danger to young people. They bring tha
Reason2 min read
Leviathan
The Index Librorum Prohibitorum was a running list of books deemed heretical, blasphemous, or otherwise morally dangerous by the Roman Catholic Church. First published in the 16th century, the Index was ostensibly a response to the Reformation, but i
Reason2 min readCrime & Violence
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
The English novelist D.H. Lawrence published Lady Chatterley’s Lover privately in 1928. The book was declared obscene in the United States in 1929, and agents from the Post Office and the U.S. Customs Service began seizing any copies they encountered
Reason2 min read
And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street
And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937) wasn’t just the first book Theodor Geisel published as Dr. Seuss. It was among the six titles his literary estate ceased publishing and licensing last year because they “portray people in ways that
Reason8 min read
Why Ryan Reynolds Can Use Winnie-the-Pooh To Sell You a Phone Plan
ON JANUARY 1, 2022, the original Winnie-the-Pooh book fell into the public domain. That means any individual or corporation can now use the bear in new books or movies without paying a licensing fee to Disney, which has controlled the copyright to th
Reason2 min read
Fahrenheit 451
Who needs books when you have mass media to dull your brain, and mob passions to keep you enraged? Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is famously a novel about a world where books are banned and burned as a method of social control. The story follo
Reason2 min readCrime & Violence
Howl and Other Poems
When Allen Ginsberg first presented his poem “Howl” at an October 1955 reading in San Francisco, Beat poet Michael McClure said that “a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America.” Ginsberg’s poem—112 lines describing drug
Reason2 min read
To Kill a Mockingbird
People have been trying to ban Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird since the 1960s. And since the 1960s, they have largely failed. In one early instance, the school board of Virginia’s Hanover County unanimously voted in 1966 to remove the book after
Reason2 min readWorld
The Master and Margarita
The devil went down to Moscow not long after the Bolshevik takeover, along with a valet, a vampire, an assassin, and a gunslinging mansized cat called Behemoth. That’s the setup for Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a scathingly satiric ta
Reason6 min read
Little Libraries, Free at Last?
IN OCTOBER 2020, Tina Musich erected a small wooden box with a slanted roof on a post in her front yard in Oradell, New Jersey. The box’s glass-faced door revealed a pile of books that people were free to take, return, and trade. Her Little Free Libr
Reason2 min read
Slaughterhouse-Five
Like Billy Pilgrim, the unstuck-in-time protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children’s Crusade, it can sometimes feel like we’re all witnessing the same censorship fights again and again. Since it was published in 1969, Slaugh
Reason2 min read
Maus
This year the school board in McMinn County, Tennessee, voted unanimously to remove cartoonist Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir Maus from the school curriculum. The book had been assigned in an eighth-grade module covering the Holocaust
Reason2 min readCrime & Violence
Wiseguy
My nonfiction book about a mother throwing her young children from a bridge occasionally prompts comments such as: “If you don’t give every penny in sales to the surviving children, you’re a monster.” While I appreciate that people find the idea of m
Reason2 min read
Beloved
Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 1987 novel, Beloved, is a ghost story that forces readers to confront America’s legacy of slavery— of racism, subjugation, and murder—and consider how it still haunts us today. One Virginia mother’s quixotic bid
Reason10 min read
Rise Of The Sensitivity Reader
ALBERTO GULLABA JR. was the type of author that publishers dream of having in their catalogs. A first-generation college grad, a child of working-class immigrants, and the recent recipient of a Master of Fine Arts degree from the prestigious Universi
Reason2 min read
The Satanic Verses
The fallout from Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) was even more bizarre and terrifying than the novel’s opening sequence, in which a hijacked plane flying from India to Britain explodes over the English Channel and the two protagonists, Gib
Reason2 min read
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
Some millennials are still waiting for their Hogwarts letter more than two decades after Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was released in the United States. The book topped the New York Times bestsellers list, and its sequels were enormously pop
Reason2 min read
The Adventures Of Ook And Gluk: Kung-Fu Cavemen From The Future
Dav Pilkey has been on the New York Times children’s bestsellers list for almost 300 consecutive weeks. Thanks to the power of potty humor, his beloved character Captain Underpants has converted most of the young boys in my life—and a not-insignifica
Reason2 min readGender Studies
I Am Jazz
I Am Jazz is a 32-page children’s book describing the childhood of co-author Jazz Jennings. Jennings, now 21, is trans, and her book, first published in 2014, attempts to explain to a young audience what that means. “I have a girl brain but a boy bod
Reason8 min readCrime & Violence
London Libel Lawsuits Punish Truth Tellers
AS A PRESIDENTIAL candidate in 2016, Donald Trump famously promised to “open up those libel laws” so that aggrieved public figures like him could sue irksome critics and “win money instead of having no chance.” After Trump took office, he downgraded
Reason2 min readGender Studies
When Harry Became Sally
I was worried I wouldn’t be able to stomach When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, Ryan T. Anderson’s 2018 book on gender identity in modern America. Anderson is a Catholic pundit who made a name for himself opposing same-sex
Reason2 min readCrime & Violence
Blood In The Water
Heather Ann Thompson’s 2016 history of the Attica Prison takeover, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, won a Pulitzer Prize in history for its deeply researched account of the deadliest prison incident in U.S. histo
Reason2 min readCrime & Violence
[redacted]
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) doesn’t just regulate the country’s financial institutions: As a censor of books, it has no peer. Take its successful suppression of Bob’s memoir. In the early 2000s, the pseudonymous Bob developed a new f
Reason7 min read
You Can’t Stop Pirate Libraries
SHADOW LIBRARIES EXIST in the space where intellectual property rights collide with the free-flowing exchange of knowledge and ideas. In some cases, these repositories of pirated books and journal articles serve as a blow against censorship, allowing
Reason6 min read
ScamCoin
NEWCOMERS TO BITCOIN sometimes dismiss the cryptocurrency as a pyramid or Ponzi scheme. The OneCoin scam shows what it really looks like when a fake blockchain serves as cover for a multilevel marketing fraud that pays early investors with funds from
Reason6 min read
The Quest for a Libertarian Island Paradise
WHEN MICHAEL OLIVER was a teenager in Lithuania, the Nazis shipped him by train to a series of concentration camps in Poland. He was the only member of his Jewish family not murdered during World War II. It does not take an overly capacious imaginati
Reason5 min readPolitical Ideologies
A New History of the Old Right
UNLIKE MOST ACCOUNTS of the American conservative movement, Matthew Continetti’s The Right begins in the 1920s, when two Republican presidents returned the country to normalcy after World War I. The ideals of that era’s Republicans were not so differ
Reason6 min read
Reviews
ERIC BOEHM Lazy Cakes brownies promised “baked in” relaxation, thanks to a dose of melatonin. But they’d only been on store shelves for a few months in the early 2010s before becoming the subject of a moral panic about sleep-inducing baked goods. “Th
Reason3 min readCrime & Violence
From The Special Books Issue Archives
December 1996 “You can’t understand technology without understanding how people think about technology, and, of course, you need to know the bad ideas as well as the good. That’s why I want to insert a recommendation of just one influentially bad boo
Reason2 min readCrime & Violence
Brickbats
A California law mandating that grocery stores and restaurants donate unused food to food banks took effect in January, and the state has already received more than 500 requests for waivers from rural towns and counties. Food bank representatives in
Reason3 min read
Aella on Sex Work Economics
AN OUTSPOKEN DEFENDER of sex worker rights, Aella is a former factory worker who never graduated college. At one point, she was one of the most successful and best-known creators on the adult subscription site OnlyFans, earning more than $100,000 per

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