Inhaltsverzeichnis für November 2019 in Reason

ONCE UPON A time, privacy was everyone’s default setting. Imagine an era when most letters and ledgers existed only in a single hard copy, when long-distance communication was slow and unreliable, when unpickable locks existed and cameras didn’t. These are the conditions under which America’s founding documents were written. It was far from a golden age, but there were undeniable upsides to a government that had neither the technology nor the resources to know what most people were up to most of the time. Those days are done. Privacy is dead. We have killed it, you and I. It happened slowly and then all at once, much like falling in love. We traded away some of our privacy for convenience, with credit cards and GPS and cloud computing and toll…

THE FBI IS once again aiding vice squad stings across the country and calling it an effort to stop child sex trafficking. Dubbed “Operation Independence Day,” (OID) the monthlong July initiative saw agents going undercover to help arrest people for offenses that local cops can handle on their own. In Mississippi, an FBI-led task force teamed up with two local police agencies and the Mississippi Gaming Commission to make five misdemeanor prostitution arrests. The FBI task force in Shreveport, Louisiana, worked with the state’s Office of Alcohol and Tobacco Control to make 25 arrests for soliciting prostitution, drug possession, and/or illegal possession of a handgun. Despite operating in 161 locations, OID arrested just 67 people on state or federal charges related to child exploitation, coercive prostitution, or “pimping.” Many of…

A DECADE AGO, the iPhone was still a novelty. Apple’s App Store was barely a year old. Online gaming required consoles or computers, Wi-Ficonnections, and power outlets. Your phone could make calls and receive emails, but it would be two years before Facebook even had a mobile app. Today your phone is a portal to entertainment and essential services, from online games to driving directions to health care records, all of which is available to you just about anywhere. Less than a decade from now, an even better wireless internet system might let you play a console-quality game on your phone, then click an app to video chat with a physician who can read your vital signs and prescribe medication—all without leaving your house, or perhaps while zipping around town…

SHORTLY AFTER 5 a.m. on November 5, 2018, two police officers arrived at Gary Willis’ house in Glen Burnie, Maryland. They were there to take away his guns. They ended up killing him instead. According to the Anne Arundel County Police Department, the 61-year-old man, who at that hour presumably had just been awakened by the officers’ knocking, answered the door with a gun in his hand. He put it down when he saw who was there. Upon learning that the two officers had come to serve him with an “extreme risk protective order” (ERPO) that barred him from possessing firearms, police said, Willis became “irate” and picked up the weapon again. As one officer tried to wrestle the gun away from Willis, it went off, whereupon the other officer…

VOLUNTEER DIVER YASUSHI Kato scrubs algae from a line holding a piece of critically endangered staghorn coral at an underwater nursery maintained by the Coral Restoration Foundation (CRF). Vast thickets of staghorn and elkhorn corals used to be found along the Florida Reef Tract, but over the last 40 years, 97 percent of them have died. CRF, with the help of hundreds of volunteers a year, has grown and planted more than 100,000 corals in the past decade to try to restore these ecosystems.…

THE CITY OF Dunedin, Florida, really wants Jim Ficken’s house. Last year, the 69-year-old retiree left town to attend to his dying mother and then to sort out her estate. While he was away, he left a handyman in charge of his property. In a Shakespearean twist, the handyman also died, leaving Ficken’s lawn unmowed and the municipality perturbed. Ficken returned home, learned that he was in violation of Dunedin’s tall grass ordinance, and mowed his lawn two days later. The city then held a hearing at which it decided to retroactively fine Ficken for each day that his grass had exceeded 10 inches in height. Because he had let his grass grow too tall once before, in 2015, Dunedin deemed him a “repeat violator” and doubled his daily fine…

READERS, PLEASE READ this magazine for 20 minutes every night until you have finished the issue. You may read longer, of course, but 20 minutes is the minimum. Use a timer. Record the date and number of pages you read each day and the author of each article. Please also indicate the topic of the article and what genre it is: opinion, news, feature story, etc. If keeping that kind of log sounds like a way to turn a pleasure into a chore, why are we making our kids do it? When I asked parents on Facebook for their feelings about schools requiring reading logs, it was like asking the National Rifle Association about Michael Bloomberg. A typical response: “HATE HATE HATE reading logs! I had an avid reader (but…

FACED WITH A surge in legal asylum claims on the southern border, the Trump administration has done everything it can to push refugees underground. It has closed ports of entry and strong-armed Mexico into keeping asylum seekers from traveling north. On July 15, the Department of Justice issued an interim rule declaring that anyone who shows up at the southern border “after failing to apply for protection in a third country…through which the alien transited en route to the United States is ineligible for asylum.” The rule was targeted at refugees escaping gang violence and political instability in Central America. During the last year, tens of thousands of people have fled north through Mexico to seek the protection of the United States. But a different group is counting on the…

WHEN PEOPLE INTRODUCE Dave Barry, they always say he won a Pulitzer Prize. Which is impressive, of course. But it doesn’t really seem like the most salient fact about him. The funny man is the author of almost 60 books and approximately eleventy billion articles. He is a member of the World Famous Lawn Ranger Precision Lawn Mower Drill Team. Most importantly, the last line on his Wikipedia page is “See also: exploding whale.” For four decades from his home base at the Miami Herald, Barry wrote a syndicated weekly column, for which he earned the aforementioned Pulitzer. He continues to author an annual despairing, hilarious “Year in Review.” A longtime libertarian, he once warned that “as Americans we must always remember that we all have a common enemy, an…

FACED WITH THE prospect of a new apartment complex going up next door and blocking their view of the Empire State Building, a group of wealthy Manhattan condo owners in 2016 did something extraordinary: They decided to negotiate rather than litigate. Together, the building’s residents offered developer Gary Barnett, who was behind the neighboring construction project, $11 million for the air rights over his land. Residents on the upper floors, whose views would be most severely impacted, kicked in up to $1 million to finance the deal. Lower-floor residents paid less, while those on the ground floor paid nothing. Folks that didn’t have the cash right away relied on loans from neighbors. Without a single lawsuit or zoning board hearing, these condo owners got to keep their views, and Barnett…

ETER SEAN BROWN was jailed in Florida last year for a probation violation. Three weeks passed before the charge was dismissed. During that time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) mistakenly thought Brown, who was born in Philadelphia and raised in New Jersey, was a deportable Jamaican. ICE asked the county jail to honor what’s called a “detainer”—a request that Brown be held for ICE pickup. Brown repeatedly told his jailers that he was an American citizen, but they ignored him. After a judge dismissed the probation violation, he was turned over to ICE, which recognized its error in a few hours and released him. Brown is now suing the sheriff who runs the jail for illegally holding him for ICE. You may have heard about that case. You’re less likely…

MOVIE MIDSOMMAR LIZ WOLFE Fictitious movies about cults are often a little bit sexy. There’s a hint of appeal embedded in a commune—a place where all belong. But given the ritual suicide that takes place in the first 30 minutes of Ari Aster’s Midsommar, it’s pretty obvious he is not trying to sell you on commune life. By setting orphaned Dani, her boyfriend, and their friends’ summer escapades in the Swedish commune Harga, Aster flips the association of evil with darkness, letting the film scare viewers in broad daylight. The movie—received better by critics than by audiences—explores moral relativism and collectivism. In one poignant early scene, an elderly couple is pushed to kill themselves. The initially horrified American visitors soon make their peace by speculating that people from other cultures…

Heritage train companies, which run steam engine tours, will have to shell out millions to retrofit passenger cars to comply with new British safety regulations. The rules mandate bars over the windows to keep passengers from leaning out and locking systems that keep doors from being opened until the trains fully stop. The train cars had operated for 70 years without incident until 2016, when a man died after leaning out of a window and striking his head on a signal gantry. In Australia, federal transportation officials, along with those of the various states, have agreed to ban vehicles with sexist, obscene, or offensive slogans and images. The move is specifically aimed at Wicked Campers, a van rental company. The company’s vans have spray-painted designs with pop culture references that…