Table of contents for June 2021 in Reason

THE BOY IN the video is crying. He is 10 years old, and he has been walking alone on a rural road outside of La Grulla, Texas, for a long time. He was traveling with a group, he says to the Border Patrol agent who has found him, and got left behind. “I came here looking for help,” he sniffs. “I’m afraid.” He doesn’t know what will happen to him, or why the adults around him are behaving so unpredictably. There’s no doubt that this boy was in mortal peril. Hundreds of bodies have been found at the Texas border in the last year alone. But whose fault is it? Commentators have blamed everyone from his parents in Nicaragua to President Joe Biden, but the real problem—not just at the…

CONJURED INTO EXISTENCE decades ago by the Supreme Court, qualified immunity shields government employees from federal civil rights claims unless their alleged misconduct has been ruled unconstitutional in a previous case. Last June, House Democrats appeared to side with activists who argued the doctrine needed to go when they voted unanimously for the Justice in Policing Act, which would have abolished qualified immunity for law enforcement officials. Now that they’re in charge, some of those same Democrats are waffling. “This issue is far too important to just have a messaging bill,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D–N.J.) told Politico in February. “We need this to get to the president’s desk.” There is some merit to Gottheimer’s argument. With the GOP in control of the Senate, his vote last summer didn’t matter. Now…

FACING A RECALL election sparked partly by his heavy-handed pandemic restrictions on what Californians can do in their beloved outdoors, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in March chose a symbolically appropriate if politically tone-deaf venue for his annual State of the State address: an empty Dodger Stadium. Like the beaches Newsom ordered closed the previous Fourth of July—months after researchers had become confident that outdoor settings were contributing little to the spread of COVID-19—the place Angelenos call Chavez Ravine looked unnatural without the hum of humanity. The plasticine preening from an ostensibly humbled governor didn’t help either. “Instead of fans in stands, we see nurses in [personal protective equipment], saving lives one injection at a time,” Newsom said, bragging about the “most robust vaccination program in America,” which nonetheless ranked in…

MODERN MONETARY THEORY (MMT) tells us that governments should finance public spending by creating money. To prevent inflation, MMT advocates say, the government should use taxes to siphon off excess purchasing power, which supposedly would enable the public sector to greatly expand its activities, eliminating the scourge of underemployment. At a time of skyrocketing national debt and mild inflation, what was once a fringe school of thought with few adherents has captured the public imagination. Rebutting MMT’s claims requires a little history, which shows there is nothing “modern” about its prescriptions. MMT promoters, who are mostly journalists and public intellectuals rather than professional economists, start with a couple of obvious truths: Governments can’t default if their debts are denominated in their own currency, and they can create a demand for…

TWO DAYS BEFORE the 2020 election, Kamala Harris could have picked from any number of campaign themes. The number of COVID-19 cases had doubled over the previous month. At home, violent crime was up; abroad, negotiations with the Taliban over U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan had bogged down. And ominously, Harris’ opponent, Vice President Mike Pence, was refusing to state clearly whether Donald Trump would accept the results of the election. Instead of any of those closing arguments, Harris and her campaign team chose to emphasize, in a tweet, speech, and animated video, a single portentous word that in a remarkably short time has escaped the laboratory of academe, spread through newsrooms and human resources departments, and now lodged itself firmly inside the White House: equity. “There’s a big difference between…

CULTS ARE IN style again. Or at least it’s trendy to call things cults—everything from QAnon to SoulCycle has gotten the tag. It’s pretty easy to throw the word around loosely, since we’ve never come to a consensus about what exactly a cult is. The line between “cult” and “religion” is famously hazy, and the biggest practical distinction between the two is whether a faith has been here long enough that you feel comfortable having it around. If you’re especially apprehensive about rival sects, even longevity might not be enough to get a group off the hook. “The difference between a religion and a cult,” The Globe and Mail cracked in 1979, “is that you belong to a religion and everyone else belongs to a cult.” Some scholars dismiss the…

How do we find our authentic sexual selves in a society so devoted to selling narrow visions of romance, beauty, and sexuality? Is it even possible, let alone desirable? These themes run through Want Me: A Sex Writer’s Journey Into the Heart of Desire, a new memoir by the feminist journalist Tracy Clark-Flory. The book takes us from adolescent exposure to AOL chat rooms and HBO’s Real Sex through young-adult encounters with pickup artistry, the porn clip site YouJizz, and Craigslist sex ads. We see the author in and out of long-term relationships and in and out of San Francisco strip clubs; we watch her search for answers in her hippie father’s porn cache and in the Kink.com warehouse. She takes us through her early forays into sexting and BDSM,…

Though Liftoff’s subtitle is Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX, it’s much more about the latter than the former, and thank goodness. Musk is a fascinating character and the “Avengers assemble!” early chapters on the hiring of key employees are rather thrilling, despite being about H.R. management. But if Liftoff has a main character, it’s the Falcon 1 rocket. The improbable object of obsessive desire, various iterations of the Falcon get built, hauled around, battered, burned, exploded, rebuilt, and rebuilt again before finally slipping the surly bonds of Earth. Author Eric Berger, senior space editor at Ars Technica, had just the right amount of access for the book: enough to give a sense of the people and places, but not so much that he turned either…

IN THE NEW Honor Code: A Simple Plan for Raising Our Standards and Restoring Our Good Names (Tiller Press), anthropologist, brand consultant to the stars, and past Reason contributor Grant McCracken explores the history and use of the honor code, arguing for its relevance to our private and public lives today. McCracken has consulted on the intersection of culture and commerce for IKEA, Sesame Street, Nike, Kanye West, Netflix, and the Obama White House. He spoke with Reason’s Nick Gillespie in January. Q: Can you define the Elizabethan ideal of honor? A: Honor was like a storehouse of value. The value wasn’t economic; it was personal. You were judged and understood to be accomplished, or to have failed to accomplish, a personal reputation. Q: So the honor code meant you…

THE RIDICULOUSLY CUTE Elizabeth Ann made her debut in February as the first cloned black-footed ferret. She is the genetic twin of Willa, one of the last 18 wild ferrets captured in the 1980s for a captive breeding program overseen by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). Willa never produced offspring, but after she died in 1988, her cells were cryopreserved at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance’s Frozen Zoo. As a result of the USFWS’s regular breeding program, nearly 300 black-footed ferrets now live in the wild. But all of those ferrets are dangerously inbred, since they are descended from just seven individuals. A genomic study revealed that Willa’s genome possessed three times more unique variations than the wild population. Back in 2013, the USFWS contacted the nonprofit…

IT WAS A full quarter-century ago when President Bill Clinton delivered one of the few quotable State of the Union addresses in American history. “The era of big government is over,” he proclaimed on January 23, 1996. It was more of a political statement than a policy goal—indeed, Clinton proceeded to spend the next hour outlining a long list of things the federal government ought to do. But it wasn’t just a bumper sticker catchphrase. “We know big government does not have all the answers. We know there’s not a program for every problem,” he explained. “And we have to give the American people [a government] that lives within its means.” That succinct conception of limited government likely would, if expressed today, make any Democrat effectively unelectable—at least on the…

AGRUESOME COINCIDENCE HAS made Maurice Chammah’s Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty timely. In the final months of Donald Trump’s presidency, shortly before this book was released, the Justice Department rushed through eight executions after a 17-year pause in use of the federal death penalty. The historic killing spree reignited a well-worn debate about capital punishment. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden campaigned on eliminating the federal death penalty. Criminal justice advocates are now urging the White House to commute the death sentences of those remaining on federal death row. And in March, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) signed legislation to end capital punishment in the state that has carried out more executions than any other in U.S. history. Chammah—a reporter at The Marshall Project,…

Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi journalist formerly favored by the royal family, left his native country in 2017 and moved to the United States. He began writing a Washington Post column that criticized Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a.k.a. MBS, for squelching even the mildest dissent, arbitrarily arresting perceived enemies, and prosecuting a genocidal war in Yemen. A year after Khashoggi launched his column, Saudi intelligence agents lured him to the country’s consulate in Istanbul under false pretenses, killed him, and dismembered his body. The Showtime documentary Kingdom of Silence, which traces the deadly evolution of Khashoggi’s attitude toward the Saudi regime, poses a couple of puzzles. Despite his oppressive and murderous tendencies, MBS successfully passed himself off in some Western circles as an enlight-ened reformer. And despite his history…

Clubhouse, a voice-only chatroom app, keeps no permanent record of what is said there. Its rooms range from innocuous to substantive to deliberately inflammatory. At its best, it’s like being at a lively dinner party—the sort that were common in the Before Times. Though its critics say otherwise, it’s wrong to think of Clubhouse as just a contrarian playground for the techadjacent. I’ve used it to understand everything from Beijing’s expulsion of foreign journalists to anti-vaccination attitudes among the French, from the Torah’s views on proselytizing to how to host better actual dinner parties. The intimacy of hearing people’s voices often leads to a culture of civility not found on Twitter. The fact that it all happens in real time makes it raw and unfiltered. And the conversations themselves remain—for…

20 YEARS AGO June 2001 “That’s a glib dismissal of a complex issue. In one couple I know, the father had to drop out of a graduate program in music when he learned that a baby was on the way; he finds his current corporate job boring and exhausting and hates the long hours away from his son. The mother, who quit an office job she never much liked, seems to be enjoying her time at home. Who’s making the sacrifice?” CATHY YOUNG “The Mommy Tax” “But in the interest of brevity (and sanity), let’s pause over only one reason to be dismayed by this 21st-century Beatlemania. The return of the Beatles serves a darker purpose than simply filling the sable-lined pockets of George, Paul, Ringo, and Yoko with a…

GEORGE WINGATE WAS driving in Stafford County, Virginia, in the early morning hours of April 25, 2017, when his car’s engine light came on. A former mechanic, Wingate pulled over, popped the hood, and began checking things out. Stafford County Sheriff’s Deputy Scott Fulford, who happened to be cruising by, noticed the parked vehicle and pulled over to offer his assistance. That’s when things took a turn for the worse. According to the deputy’s account, he became suspicious of Wingate and demanded to see some form of identification. Wingate, who had done nothing wrong, flatly refused. The officer’s microphone captured their exchange. “Have I committed a crime?” Wingate demanded. “No. I didn’t say you did,” the officer replied. “Am I being detained? If I’m not being detained, then I’m free…

IN THE DEPRESSION summer of 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gradually concluded that the country needed a broad-based, government-led program to assure Americans’ economic security. He thus created the Committee on Economic Security, led by such long-forgotten policy mechanics as Frances Perkins, Arthur Altmayer, Edwin Witte, and Wilbur J. Cohen. The Committee begat the Social Security Act of 1935. The legislation’s central feature was billed as “social insurance”: Workers would make contributions throughout their working lifetimes, the government would invest the funds in special Treasury notes, the earnings would accumulate, and at age 65 or upon disability the workers would begin to draw retirement benefits. What could go wrong? Thirty years later, big government had advanced far enough in public esteem for presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson…

Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself is not merely a magic show, though the award-winning magician pulls off a handful of truly amazing tricks during the performance. It’s not simply a one-man play, though DelGaudio’s engaging autobiographical monologues would keep audiences rapt even without the illusions. And it’s not best described as an interactive experience, though DelGaudio’s most impactful maneuvers involve his relationship with the audience. In & Of Itself is all three of these ideas combined in a complicated, compelling, and deeply moving package that is difficult to explain without spoiling. The stage show ran in Los Angeles and off-Broadway for more than 500 performances. Frank Oz directed and co-produced a film of the performance, now out on Hulu. The show fundamentally is about identity, both DelGaudio’s and his…

If you could be a fly on the wall for a private conversation between four historic figures, who would you choose—and what do you imagine they would talk about? Amazon Studios’ One Night in Miami offers a surprisingly riveting answer to that hypothetical. On February 25, 1964, Cassius Clay (Eli Goree) is crowned heavyweight champion of the world. Afterward, he gathers with Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge), and Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) for what is supposed to be a celebration but quickly becomes a meeting of minds, bearing of hearts, and airing of grievances. Virtually all of the drama comes from the fictionalized dialog between these black icons of the 1960s, who spar over what each is doing to advance civil rights. Cooke defends his decision…