Inhaltsverzeichnis für November 2017 in Reason

THERE’S A BUILDING in Washington, D.C., that’s mostly empty space. The Pension Building, as it was known when it was commissioned by Congress in 1881, fills an entire city block. Like an M.C. Escher fever dream, columns of every size rise in stacked colonnades around a stupendously massive atrium. By the time the last of the 15 million red bricks had been stacked six years later, there were enough offices ringing the edges of the building to house 1,500 clerks serving 324,968 pensioners, mostly Civil War veterans. The building was grand by design, a memorial to the fallen as well as a place of honor for surviving Union soldiers, their widows, and their orphans. Service pensions were a big deal in Washington in the 1880s; they made up almost one-third…

A PAMPHLET FROM the Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA) argues that jurors have a right and a responsibility to judge the law as well as the facts, which might lead them to acquit a technically guilty defendant in the interest of justice. Although that position is controversial, especially among judges and prosecutors, the pamphlet is indisputably a form of speech protected by the First Amendment—unless you try to distribute it in front of a courthouse. Or so say prosecutors in Mecosta County, Michigan. Last summer they persuaded a jury to convict local activist Keith Wood, who was arrested in 2015 for handing out FIJA flyers near the county courthouse, of a misdemeanor. District Judge Kimberly Booher sentenced him to eight weekends in jail, $545 in fines, 120 hours of community…

MAX WEBER, THE north German economist, proud reserve officer in the Kaiser’s army, literal dueler with academic opponents, and co-founder of modern sociology, sits on every college reading list for his 1905 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. If you didn’t read it in college, it’s time to turn off the TV, Google it, and do so. It’s a stunning performance, one of my top 100 nonfiction books of the 20th century. The book is brilliant, readable, short. (By the way, henceforth you should exhibit your sophistication by pronouncing his name correctly. It’s “VAY-ber,” not like the “WEB-er” hamburger grill you’ve just put away for the year. You get extra points for saying “Max” in echt deutsch: “Maahx,” not like “Mad Max.”) Others of the stunning 100…

AFTER DEPLOYING TO Iraq for a seven-month tour of duty in 2004, Nigel McCourry recalls, “I was engaged in a fight every day, whether it was gunshots or bombs blowing up next to me or land mines. It was the most intense experience of my life.” That experience did not end when McCourry, a U.S. Marine, returned to the United States. “It didn’t matter if it was a year or four years or six years after coming back from Iraq,” he says. “There was no sense of separation of time. The experience was so fresh that I was constantly reliving it. I was alive in it.” Separation was also elusive for Roberto Pickering, another Marine, who arrived in Iraq a year before McCourry and served nine months there. “We saw…

THE FIRST AMENDMENT is quite literally too controversial for the Washington, D.C., subway system. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit in August against the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority on behalf of itself and several other plaintiffs. Why? The transportation agency rejected ads from all the groups— including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), a local abortion provider, and former Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos—for running afoul of its policy against advertisements that are “issues-oriented” or “intended to influence members of the public regarding an issue on which there are varying opinions.” One of the ads was simply the text of the First Amendment. The ACLU says the rules are unconstitutionally overbroad and restrictive. “In its zeal to avoid hosting offensive and hateful speech, the government has…

FOR MORE THAN a decade, members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma were quietly, systematically slaughtered for their oil money. In Killers of the Flower Moon, journalist David Grann describes how Congress made the Osage dependent on whites who could gain from their deaths and how leading Oklahomans conspired to perpetrate and cover up mass murder. He shows how a federal agent struck a blow against the killers, but he also reveals that the murders took place over a longer period of time, and claimed far more victims, than the government investigation suggested. It is, as Grann told one interviewer, a story of how “a system rooted in racism, done under the pretense of enlightenment,” produced a “criminal enterprise that had been sanctioned by the U.S. government.” As Grann’s narrative…

In London, the Tower Hamlets council has given developers the go-ahead for a project that will include offices and luxury apartments, but only if it also includes a gay bar and the bar stays open for at least 12 years. The government must be involved in the decision about who gets to rent the space and will send an inspector to make sure it is sufficiently gay. Officials say they’re concerned LGBT clubs across the city are closing. Adi Astl wanted some stairs on a steep hill in Toronto’s Tom Riley Park, but local officials told him it would cost $65,000–$150,000. So he went ahead and built his own for $550. The city then declared his stairs a hazard and tore them down. Los Angeles County Department of Animal Care…

THIS SUMMER, AMERICAN scientists reported successfully editing out a harmful gene from the genomes of human embryos. Researchers led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov— a reproductive biology specialist at the Oregon Health and Science University—used CRISPR gene editing to achieve this result. The process enables biologists to precisely cut out and replace bits of the DNA that make up the genes of microbes, plants, and animals. In this case, the researchers mended a deleterious gene variant that causes enlarged hearts and often results in sudden death early in life. Unlike earlier research in China, the Oregon team reported getting the repaired genes into every cell in 42 out of the 58 embryos they edited. In most of the cases, the process did not create new off-target mutations. Since Congress has banned the…

FINDING A JOB as a 16-year-old can be a challenge. Luckily, Denver is offering a unique employment opportunity geared specifically toward youth. The title of this oncein- a-lifetime resume-building gig? Minor tobacco operative. Though the job title smacks of clandestine doublespeak, the position is pretty straightforward. The ideal candidate conducts “compliance inspections of tobacco retailers” by attempting to illegally purchase cigarettes. As these operatives coax vendors to sell them a pack of smokes (“I totally left my ID in my dorm room”), a law enforcement agent hovers outside. In other words, Denver is hiring teen cigarette narcs. The recent job posting is actually a continuation of a program that started in January 2017. Denver Mayor Michael Hancock announced the rollout of the program by highlighting it in his latest budget.…

WE RECENTLY GOT married. Well, technically, we got married twice. One fine day this spring, we put on nice clothes and publicly performed the rites and rituals recognized by our families and community as a wedding ceremony. As part of the day’s events, we signed a Ketubah, the traditional Jewish wedding contract. Historically, the Ketubah included the groom’s promise to provide “food, clothing, the necessities of life, and conjugal needs” for the bride, along with a statement of the dowry the bride brought to the marriage. Modern versions are often more egalitarian. Ours included a mutual promise to “work for one another,” “live with one another,” and “build together a household of integrity.” Ketubot are typically beautifully calligraphed works of art, and we spent a lot of time choosing the…

IN FEBRUARY 1917, a 30-year-old Bolshevik named Valerian Osinsky wrote to his 22-year-old mistress about a coming revolution that would wipe away czarism and deliver what Christianity couldn’t: the kingdom of heaven on earth. “Only in the world of insatiable utopia,” he wrote, “will the simplest ethical rules become real and free from exceptions and contradictions.” Twenty-one years later, he would be executed as an “enemy of the people” for his blasphemies against the Soviet Union. Stories like that abound in the Berkeley historian Yuri Slezkine’s 1,100-page epic, The House of Government, which chronicles the lives of elite Bolsheviks and their families from their early days of revolutionary awakening through the overthrow of the czar, the building of “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror, and their children’s…

HE CALLED TO say that he’d be murdered if he couldn’t get out. As an interpreter—my interpreter, actually—working for coalition forces in Iraq, Bandar had already lost several friends and colleagues, including his 15- and 10-year-old cousins, to insurgents determined to exact revenge on anyone perceived to be aiding an occupying military force. From 7,000 miles away, he phoned me to ask for help. When he was a teenager, Bandar reconnected with an uncle who had been an opposition leader against Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime. After fleeing the country and spending nearly a decade in the United States as a political asylee, his uncle returned to Iraq.“When my uncle came back in 2003, he told me all about America, and he supported my plan to work with the U.S. military,”…

THEY HELD A town pageant in Arden, Delaware, on September 5, 1910: a medieval procession with performers dressed as knights, troubadours, pages, and squires. One Ardenite, an anarchist shoemaker named George Brown, played a beggar. This annoyed some of the other players, because no such role had actually been written. But Brown decided to add it to the program anyway, so he dressed in rags, caked himself with mud, and invaded the proceedings, taunting the other characters and demanding alms from the audience. Many “onlookers needed assurance,” The Single Tax Review reported, that Brown “was only ‘part of the show.’” This was a pattern: Brown liked to talk, and not everyone liked to listen to him. According to the novelist Upton Sinclair, who lived at the time in a little…

A hundred years ago, financial columnist B.C. Forbes started an eponymous business magazine. In 2017, his grandson, the erstwhile Republican presidential hopeful and Forbes editor in chief, is overseeing the publication’s centenary while celebrating his own 70th birthday. This summer at Freedom Fest in Las Vegas, Reason’s Nick Gillespie sat down with Steve Forbes to discuss the past, present, and future of his family’s financial mag and American politics as a whole. Q: What is the essential role that Forbes magazine plays? A: I think we’re unique from other business publications, and this is one of the reasons entrepreneurs around the world identify with Forbes. We don’t see business as evil. We don’t see them as miscreants having to be sat on lest they wreck the world and kill all…