Table of contents for March 2020 in Reason

“IF YOU WANT better men by any standard, there is every reason to regard ubiquitous pornography as an obstacle,” declared New York Times columnist Ross Douthat in a 2018 column bluntly headlined “Let’s Ban Porn.” In this, as in many things, Douthat was ahead of the conservative intellectual curve by a year or two. And in this, as in many things, he was dangerously wrong. In due course, Douthat has been joined by the folks at the Christian journal First Things, who have taken up the anti-pornography banner as part of their peculiar subvariant of a resurgent interest in nationalism among traditionalist conservatives. In last year’s manifesto, “Against the Dead Consensus,” a clutch of First Things friends and familiars reject “economic libertarianism” and “the soulless society of individual affluence” and…

NEW YORK CITY’S uniquely onerous restrictions on transporting guns were so hard to justify that the city stopped trying. Instead, it rewrote the rules after the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to their constitutionality in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. City of New York. The justices should drop the case, the city said, because it was now moot. Despite the dubiousness of New York’s regulations, the city successfully defended them for five years, obtaining favorable rulings from a federal judge and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. Under New York’s rules, licensed pistol and revolver owners were not allowed to leave home with their handguns, even if they were unloaded and stored in a locked container, unless they were traveling to or…

IN 1971 THE yippie radical Abbie Hoffman wrote a book advocating resistance to government, capitalism, and the “Pig Nation.” Steal This Book advocated shop-lifting, squatting, and other methods of living off other people for free. The title and the contents made the manuscript hard to peddle. But when it finally got a publisher it sold well in bookstores, which was good for Hoffman financially. It turns out that most people want to live off other people not by stealing but by paying a fair price earned by their own labors. Hoffman remarked, “It’s embarrassing when you try to overthrow the government”—and capitalism—“and you wind up on the Best Seller’s List.” I want you to steal what the lawyers self-interestedly call “intellectual property”: Hoffman’s book or my books or E=mc2 or…

THAT PROHIBITIONIST LAWS are always, always, enforced more heavily upon the poor, the disadvantaged, and minorities is not, I think, controversial. One would have to contort one’s brain in a manner worthy of a Cirque du Soleil performance to ignore the facts that cops more heavily patrol poor and minority neighborhoods and actively look for people to arrest; that judges and juries have less sympathy for those they perceive as “others”; and that, because poor people overwhelmingly lack the resources to mount an adequate criminal defense (or even bail), they are far more likely to plead guilty to whatever a prosecutor offers, just so they can get it over with and at least try to get back to their lives. Protectionist laws (including occupational licensing) similarly harm those who are…

WHY IS NOBODY REPLYING TO MY EMAILS? LOOK AT ALL the gibberish people believe. That the earth is a flat disk surrounded by a 200-foot wall of ice. That high-up Democratic operatives run a pedophile ring out of a pizza joint. That former North Korean leader Kim Jong Il could teleport and control the weather. Who could doubt that human beings are gullible, that we accept whatever we read or hear? Yet these beliefs are the exception rather than the rule. By and large, we don’t credulously accept whatever we’re told. We have evolved specialized cognitive mechanisms to deal with both the benefits and the dangers of communication. If anything, we’re too hard rather than too easy to influence. One popular, but wrong, way of thinking about those cognitive mechanisms…

“For people who have lived in Austin, Texas, for more than a few years,” John Langmore’s Fault Lines: Portraits of East Austin starts, “two emotions often compete for dominance: how sweet it remains to call Austin home, and how quickly Austin is changing.” For my neighborhood that is especially true. In 1928, the city government enacted segregationist policies meant to push black and Latino families away from white neighborhoods. In the 1930s, federal government redlining cemented this further. Now East Austin—where the minority population put down roots—is gentrifying. Langmore’s book captures essay and photo vignettes of how things used to be: joyous June-teenth celebrations; a house with a shrine to the Virgin Mary in the yard and a rooster clucking in the driveway; tricked-out slab cars with elbow wheels and…

The Museum of the American Indian is mostly known among Washingtonians for its cafeteria; it’s the best place to eat on the National Mall. But the permanent exhibit “Americans” is an underrated Smithsonian asset. Built from hundreds of common references to Native Americans—from the woman kneeling on every box of Land O’Lakes butter to a video loop of Cher in a feathered headdress to models of Apache helicopters—the central hall fills visitors with a warm sense of familiarity before shunting them off into smaller installations that correct misconceptions about everything from Pochahontas (yes, there’s a plaque about Elizabeth Warren) to the Battle of Little Big-horn and the first Thanksgiving. Visitors are left with a sense of how deeply Native American imagery and identity are embedded in mainstream American life, how…

THE FARM BILL Congress passed in 2018 brought an end to the federal prohibition of hemp, a variety of cannabis that contains almost no tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the compound in marijuana that gets you high. At the time, many would-be hemp farmers anticipated a bright future of legally growing the plant for use in paper products, rope, construction materials, clothing, and nutritional supplements. Jason Amatucci, founder of the Virginia Industrial Hemp Coalition, predicted to Reason that the farm bill would “help to clarify any legal gray areas that federal and state agencies have towards hemp and their end consumer products.” A year later, the hemp industry is withering on the vine for want of clarity. After the farm bill was signed into law, Montana-based Big Sky Scientific LLC was transporting a…

THE U.S. TOTAL fertility rate has dropped to below 1.73 births per woman, according to a new report from the National Center for Health Statistics. This record low edges out the previous U.S. fertility nadir of 1.74 births per woman back in 1976. U.S. rates appear to be following the downward trend seen in other developed countries. The overall total fertility rate for the 28 members of the European Union is just under 1.6 births per woman; Japan is at 1.4, and Canada is 1.5. In a 2010 study, University of Connecticut anthropologists Nicola Bulled and Richard Sosis found that fertility drops as female life expectancy increases. As global average life expectancy rose from 52.6 years in 1960 to 72.4 years today, the global total fertility rate fell by more…

KEHINDE WILEY’S PORTRAIT of Barack Obama is in various respects quite different from the procession of presidential countenances in the National Portrait Gallery that you must traverse to get to it. For one thing, it’s more popular with museum-goers. For another, it’s the only one that’s a picture of, and the only one that’s a picture by, a black person. And it feels very much of its moment—post-postmodern, we might say. Wiley’s complex repertoire of techniques and meanings—figurative, collage like, unrelentingly concerned with identity politics, stylistically eclectic but also coherent—is a pretty good summary of where art is now. Despite the nowness, however, the Obama portrait also serves the same function as Gilbert Stuart’s full-length George Washington: rendering a person into a symbol of state power. WILEY’S PRE-PRESIDENTIAL WORKS criticized…

In the final pages of the original Watchmen, antagonist Adrian “Ozymandias” Veidt asks whether his insane but well intentioned mass casualty attack on New York City was worth it “in the end.” Dr. Manhattan—a glowing blue demigod and the only true superhero of the 1987 graphic novel—responds, “nothing ever ends.” More than 30 years later, Dr. Manhattan’s prediction has come true for Watchmen itself with HBO’s new nine-episode television sequel to the original comic, helmed by Damon Lindelof (Lost, The Leftovers). Lindelof’s version is as thematically linked to his own TV history as it is to the source material: Hardcore Lost fans will recall his use of constant flashbacks and time jumps with fondness (and perhaps a touch of PTSD). The latest to don the mask of a costumed hero…

Science fiction that imagines today’s miracles as the predecessors of tomorrow’s night-mares is the norm. Future Tense Fiction is a nuanced collection of speculative fiction stories. Initially published in serial form as part of Future Tense—an editorial collaboration between Slate, the New America Foundation, and the University of Arizona—the stories in Future Tense Fiction yoke strange technologies to daily life. While policy organizations and media outlets both tend to imagine the worst when they look to the future, Future Tense Fiction imagines the worst, the best, and the so-so. “Living with technology is profoundly weird,” the editors write in their introduction. What’s new today is so integral to tomorrow that we can’t help but take it for granted. “A good science fiction story can help re-sensitize us” to the peril…

Reactions to Bombshell, a new movie about the sexual harassment lawsuit that brought down Fox News exec Roger Ailes, offer a rare opportunity to see both political correctness and patriotic correctness—the first term’s right-wing mirror image—at work at the same time. For many progressives, the film’s sympathetic portrayal of former anchors Megyn Kelly and Gretchen Carlson—two outspoken Republicans—is necessarily at odds with the #MeToo movement’s pieties. Many conservatives, meanwhile, appear to view as traitorous anything that casts aspersions on their cable news channel of choice. As a result, the film is likely to get less credit, overall, than it deserves on the merits. In fact, Bombshell is a fun, feel-good flick. The crusade it depicts is self-evidently righteous, the script is snappy, and stars Charlize Theron (as Kelly), Nicole Kidman…

IN TWO DECADES at the nation’s largest cable network, Fox News analyst Andrew Napolitano has provided an unapologetically libertarian critique of state power, regardless of the party holding control in the nation’s capital. In the past several months, he has also emerged as one of President Donald Trump’s harshest critics, claiming in May 2019 that the Mueller Report demonstrated that the president had clearly obstructed justice. Though he has said he thinks recent House hearings provided sufficient grounds for impeachment, the former New Jersey Superior Court judge sees an even bigger problem in how the federal executive continues to arrogate power to itself. “No American president in the post–Woodrow Wilson era has stayed within the confines of the Constitution,” Napolitano says. “And each president has more authority than his predecessors,…

IF DONALD TRUMP could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and get away with it, what brazenness might we expect from his fellow septuagenarian Manhattanite presidential candidate, Michael Bloomberg? The then–mayoral candidate gave us a glimpse back in 2001, when he was dumping his first tranche of $74 million into a late-in-life political career and a reporter asked him whether he had ever smoked marijuana. “You bet I did,” the media mogul enthused, at a time when politicians tended to be much more reticent about such things. “And I enjoyed it.” Talk about do as I say, not as I did. During Bloomberg’s three terms as mayor, the Big Apple became the marijuana arrest capital of the world, thanks to the notorious stop-and-frisk searches conducted largely in neighborhoods…

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who admires what a single-party autocracy such as China’s can accomplish when it is “led by a reasonably enlightened group of people,” praised that country’s “one child” policy in a 2008 book, saying it “probably saved China from a population calamity.” In the Amazon Prime Video documentary One Child Nation, the Chinese-American film-maker Nanfu Wang lays bare the brutal reality of the oppressive regime that was so glibly endorsed by rich Westerners who take their own reproductive freedom for granted. She shows that the one-child policy, in force from 1979 to 2015, routinely relied on extortion, assault, kidnapping, and infanticide. Returning to the farming village in Jiangxi province where she was born and raised, Wang talks to an uncle and an aunt who mournfully…

Donald Trump is mentioned only briefly in Ben Lerner’s novel The Topeka School, but the president, and the world he has come to define, looms over the plot. It’s the story of Trump in sotto voce. Set mostly in the late 1990s amid the hypercompetitive world of high school debate, the book attempts to locate the roots of today’s political moment—including and especially Trump, the alt-right, and the country’s coastal/flyover partisan-geographical divide—in the psychological alienation and dislocated male rage of Clinton-era middle America. Much of the story is quasi-autobiographical, and Lerner is remarkably effective at capturing the oddly specific culture of the pre-9/11 high-school debate circuit. If there’s a flaw, it’s diffusion: The novel struggles to contain its sprawling story and perspectives. Lerner’s personal experience and poetic sensibility imbue The…