Reason的April 2023目录

“I DON’T KNOW that there’s any law that can stop that evil that we saw,” said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R–Ohio) on NBC’s Meet the Press, shortly after video was released of five Memphis police officers brutally beating Tyre Nichols during a traffic stop. Jordan took a lot of abuse for his remark, which was generally interpreted as boobish and nihilistic. But while Jordan has said many boobish things over many years, he is very nearly correct about this one. Congressmen know better than most that the mere act of passing a law guarantees nothing, and that making something illegal is not the same thing as eliminating it. Three years after the death of George Floyd—and two years after the death of the George Floyd Justice in Policing…

EARLY IN THE COVID-19 pandemic, prescriptions for Adderall, the stimulant medication used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), sky rocketed. There were two main reasons. Due to social distancing, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) allowed physicians to prescribe Schedule II controlled substances via telehealth appointments. And second, parents noticed that their children, suddenly relegated to Zoom schooling, were struggling to pay attention. But easier access and more users were not the only culprits in the Adderall shortage that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officially recognized in October 2022. While the FDA blamed “manufacturing delays” at Teva Pharmaceuticals (the main source for both branded and generic versions of the drug), federal and state officials also played a major role. Each year, the DEA sets production limits for the…

DECADES OF RISING tuition and fees may finally be catching up with America’s higher education system. According to data released in October by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSC), total undergraduate and graduate enrollment in the U.S. has declined by 3.2 percent since 2020. “After two straight years of historically large losses, it is particularly troubling that numbers are still falling, especially among freshmen,” NSC Research Center Executive Director Doug Shapiro said in a statement. “There are 4 million fewer students in college now than there were 10 years ago,” The Hechinger Report’s Jon Marcus noted in August. While provosts may be panicking, future students could soon find themselves in a buyer’s market. As one consultant working on college tuition decreases told The New York Times in December, “colleges are…

“PREDICTION: 2023 WILL make 2022 look like a sleepy year for AI advancement & adoption,” Greg Brockman, president and co-founder of OpenAI, tweeted on December 31. That’s a bold claim given what happened when Brockman’s artificial intelligence (A.I.) company allowed the public to preview ChatGPT and DALL-E 2. The former is its generative pre-trained transformer (GPT), a large language model optimized through deep learning to simulate human writing. The latter is its text-to-image A.I. art deep learning model that generates digital images from natural language descriptions. ChatGPT can create everything from novel dad jokes to fairly well-written computer code. At my prompting, it wrote a serviceable sonnet describing Gilgamesh’s failed quest for immortality. In just five days after ChatGPT’s public launch, 1 million people had signed up to give it…

Former Sen. Pat Toomey’s time in Congress, which began in 1999 after he won a House seat in eastern Pennsylvania, officially ended on January 3 when the new Senate session began. Toomey was described in a 2004 New Yorker profile as “a conservative Republican of rigorous doctrinal purity: anti-abortion, anti-taxes, anti-spending (except for defense); a fiscal hawk, appalled by big deficits, a crusader for school choice, tort reform, Social Security privatization, and a smaller federal government.” He’s still that guy, but the Republican Party has changed—so Toomey declined to run for re-election this year. Toomey was one of a handful of senators to take an informed interest in the issues around cryptocurrency. As he prepared to exit office in December, Toomey sat down with Reason’s Eric Boehm to discuss the…

BASED ON MOUNTING evidence that minors are especially susceptible to false confessions, criminal justice reformers in several states are demanding tighter rules for juvenile interrogations. The latest such push is happening in New York, where reformers hope to pass legislation requiring that minors have access to legal counsel prior to police interviews. Maryland and Washington state already enforce such a rule. And in 2021, Illinois and Oregon became the first two states to ban police from lying to minors during interrogations. Wrongful convictions have shown that teenagers are less likely than adults to understand their Miranda rights and more likely to focus on immediate rewards rather than long-term consequences. According to the Innocence Project, nearly 30 percent of DNA exonerations involved false confessions, and roughly a third of defendants in…

JEFF GUINN IS a good popular historian. That is not intended as faint praise: He takes interesting topics of real cultural importance—Jonestown, Bonnie and Clyde, Charles Manson—and writes credible and well-researched accounts of them. His new, very readable book on the Waco affair of 1993 is no exception. As we mark the siege’s 30th anniversary, Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and a Legacy of Rage is an essential addition to any collection of books addressing that incident, and it is particularly good on the workings of federal law enforcement. That still leaves room to debate whether Guinn situates the whole affair properly in the context of the time. The basic story is well known, although virtually every word in any summary would be contested by at least some commentators.…

DOCUMENTARY PELOSI IN THE HOUSE JOE LANCASTER Though it was released under the “HBO Documentary Films” banner, Pelosi in the House—which depicts Nancy Pelosi’s two tenures as speaker of the House of Representatives—bills itself as a “home movie.” That’s because the film is directed by her daughter Alexandra Pelosi, using candid hand-held footage of the speaker at home and behind the scenes. The film takes a broad view of Pelosi’s life but devotes much of its run time to the two years her speakership overlapped with Donald Trump’s presidency. As could be expected from a movie made within the family, the film selects the footage most likely to make the speaker look forthright, prescient, and independent. She works the phones to corral votes for key legislation. She refers to Trump…

Quebec business leaders say a new law that requires many companies to use the French language will increase costs and could make it harder to serve clients. Bill 96 requires firms with more than 25 employees to conduct business primarily in French and to make sure other languages are spoken in the workplace as little as possible. The law also mandates that contracts be in French, even if both parties would prefer another language. Firms would have to justify to regulators if they recruit employees who speak a language other than French. Companies that violate the law face fines of up to $30,000 ($22,500 U.S.). Hays, Kansas, Police Chief Don Scheibler says his officers did not “raid” the hospital room of Greg Bretz, 69, who is suffering from inoperable cancer,…

SECTION 230 OF the 1996 Communications Decency Act says “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” Often called the law that made the internet as we know it possible, Section 230 generally shields online platforms, such as social media sites, from civil liability for content posted by users. The U.S. Supreme Court directly addressed that provision’s scope for the first time in February, when it heard oral arguments in Gonzalez v. Google. The case asks whether Section 230 immunizes Google, the owner of YouTube, from lawsuits alleging that the video platform’s algorithms aided terrorists by recommending Islamic State videos to users. The justices are reviewing a 2021 ruling in Google’s favor…

IN THE FINAL weeks of 2022, just days before they broke for Christmas, members of Congress came together at the last moment for a familiar holiday ritual. For one week a year, they kind of, sort of do their job. That job includes authoring, debating, and passing a budget for the astounding amount of discretionary federal spending that Congress is charged with managing each year—in this case, about $1.7 trillion. To avert a partial government shutdown, the spending bill was supposed to be passed by Friday, December 16. But on Thursday, December 15, with just a day left before the dreaded quasi-shutdown, Congress approved a one-week extension. “This is about taking a very simple, exceedingly responsible step to ensure we finish the year without hiccups and with minimal drama,” said…

15 YEARS AGO April 2008 “Would [Ron] Paul have won more votes in New Hampshire, vaulting him to a better position in subsequent states, with a more foreign policy–based libertarian message? Consider that he finished second overall among voters who did not consider terrorism a big problem—19 percent compared to McCain’s 39 percent. Voters who prized their personal liberty more than they feared the threat of a suitcase nuke in Nashua liked what Paul had to say. But the campaign simply wasn’t confident that there were enough of these people to make a real stand. ‘Our voters are conservative Republicans,’ Jared Chicoine, Paul’s state coordinator, said a few days before the primary.”DAVID WEIGEL “Evolution of a rEVOLution” 20 YEARS AGO April 2003 “Given biological realities, it may be impossible to…