October 2022

Reason

Free Minds and Free Markets.

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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
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Photo
IN JUNE, A regional Transportation Security Administration spokesperson shared a photo on Twitter of a display of liquid items confiscated over three days by agents at Syracuse Hancock International Airport. Each item in the massive haul, including b
Reason5 min readSocial History
The New Abortion Prohibition Era
AMERICANS DISAGREE ABOUT abortion. This is the understatement of 2022, yet it bears repeating in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the June Supreme Court decision that returned abortion policy to state and federal legislatures
Reason3 min readInternet & Web
Internet Search Is Better Than Ever If You Know How To Use It
IN FEBRUARY, THE software engineer and blogger Dmitri Brereton wrote an essay titled “Google Search Is Dying” for his personal website. His two main arguments are that Google’s advertising is messy and dominates the results page, while the actual sea
Reason2 min readCrime & Violence
Michigan Rolls Back Asset Forfeiture Reform
FROM 2015 TO 2019, in response to complaints that greedy cops were indiscriminately grabbing property they claimed was connected to criminal activity, Michigan legislators repeatedly amended the state’s civil asset forfeiture laws. This year they par
Reason2 min readCrime & Violence
Law
GUN RIGHTS ADVOCATES scored a major victory in June when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6–3 that “the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.” In the 2008 case District of Col
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Paper Vs. Plastic
IN MAY, NEW Jersey became the first state to ban single-use bags made from plastic or paper in large grocery stores. The new ban lumps both types of totes together, but one is actually worse for the environment than the other. Which one? Paper bags.
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Inflation Won’t Whip Itself
REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT GERALD Ford was simultaneously one of the luckiest and unluckiest presidents when he took office in 1974. He was lucky because he got the job without ever being on a ballot outside of Michigan’s 5th Congressional District. He was
Reason3 min read
Workers Are Consumers Too
SINCE TAKING OFFICE, President Joe Biden has sought to position himself as an ally of working Americans. His administration is enacting what it calls a “worker-centric” trade policy, and the president scarcely seems to give a public address without m
Reason2 min readCrime & Violence
Biden Guts Title Ix Due Process
COLLEGE STUDENTS INVESTIGATED for sexual harassment or assault will once again be stripped of due process, thanks to new regulations released by the U.S. Department of Education in June. The new rules, which apply to investigations under Title IX, pa
Reason2 min readAmerican Government
Immigration
REPUBLICAN OFFICIALS IN several states have taken immigration enforcement into their own hands since President Joe Biden took office, arguing that the federal government is not adequately addressing migrant arrivals at the U.S.-Mexico border. These e
Reason2 min readCrime & Violence
San Francisco Mayor Vetoes Poison-pill Housing Bill
IN A SIGN of California’s increasingly prodevelopment tilt, state housing officials are praising San Francisco Mayor London Breed for vetoing an ordinance that would have made homebuilding much more difficult. The vetoed ordinance, passed in a conten
Reason20 min readAmerican Government
The Authoritarian Convergence
SOMETHING IS BROKEN in our politics. Just about everyone knows it, but it can be hard to put your finger on what it is. As the media attempt to grapple with this felt reality, they reach over and over for the same word: polarization. That, we’re told
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Reason22 min readAmerican Government
‘We Were Thinking We Were Going To Change the World’
WHEN AN INTERNAL caucus led a self-styled “takeover” of the Libertarian Party (L.P.) at its biennial national convention this past May, old-timers recognized a recurring conflict that has riven the party since its first national convention a half-cen
Reason20 min readCrime & Violence
It’s (almost) Always The Feds
HERE’S A TIP: If you have some radical political views and an acquaintance reaches out, encourages you to act on your convictions, and maybe offers to introduce you to a guy who can sell you some bomb parts, don’t take him up on it. That guy’s almost
Reason10 min read
The Unscientific Panic Over Solar Geoengineering
LAST YEAR A team of Harvard scientists had an idea involving a large balloon and a small amount of chalk dust. They devised an experiment in which a weather balloon would release less than 2 kilograms of calcium carbonate about 12 miles above a Swedi
Reason12 min readAmerican Government
Goodbye, Globalization?
AT THE DAWN of the 21st century, countries in both the Global South and the former communist bloc were falling over each other to lower their trade barriers, liberalize their capital markets, and encourage their best and brightest to study in the Wes
Reason13 min readPopular Culture & Media Studies
What Wikipedia Can Teach The Rest Of The Internet
WIKIPEDIA, THE 21-YEAR-OLD “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” went from being a weird online experiment to a mainstay of the modern internet with astonishing speed. Even as the rest of the social internet seems hellbent on tearing itself apart
Reason6 min readAmerican Government
How To Pay for a Civil War
WITH WAYS AND Means, Roger Lowenstein, the author of several popular books on finance, has tackled the Civil War. The book’s subtitle—Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War—is misleadingly incomplete, because Lowenstein covers far
Reason6 min readCrime & Violence
Who Controls Criminal Justice Reform?
IN CARCERAL CON, Kay Whitlock and Nancy A. Heitzeg reject “the popular but erroneous notion that the massive harms and injustices of the criminal legal system can be reformed as a standalone project.” Whitlock, an activist, and Heitzeg, a sociologist
Reason6 min readInternational Relations
Are We Past ‘Peak Petrostate’?
IT DOESN’T TAKE a Ph.D. to see that oil drives conflict. Just looking at the recent history of America’s interventions in the Middle East will do. During the Tanker War of the 1980s, the U.S. Navy fought Iran to protect Iraq’s oil. Then, during the f
Reason6 min readCrime & Violence
Reviews
JASON RUSSELL The Peaky Blinders gang looks just as badass in the final season of their British crime drama (Peaky Blinders, available on Netflix in the U.S.) as it did in the first. There’s plenty of smoking, drinking, fighting, shooting, scheming,
Reason3 min read
From The Archives
October 2007 “Government and foundations are more likely to fund earlier stages of drug development, where the risk of failure is higher. Companies jump in to sponsor drug research at later stages of development, when success is more likely. Thus it
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Glenn Greenwald on Corporate Media and Identity Politics
LAWYER-TURNED-JOURNALIST Glenn Greenwald’s work with whistleblower Edward Snowden to reveal illegal government surveillance won a Pulitzer Prize in 2014. That same year he helped launch The Intercept, but he abruptly resigned six years later after a
Reason2 min read
Brickbats
In June, 50 people who happened to be at Calgary’s CORE Shopping Centre around lunchtime got a summons for immediate jury duty. The Canadian practice is called talesman, and it allows officials to grab someone off the street—or in this case the mall—

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