Reason的June 2025目录

TARIFFS ARE, AMONG other things, a crime against Manny Klausner’s dinner table. As a man who reveled in the pleasures of a perfect bottle of wine and an impeccably crafted cheese—no matter what distant land they hailed from—he found the protectionist impulse that has taken hold in the current political moment not just economically illiterate but personally offensive. Manny’s libertarianism wasn’t an abstract policy preference. It was rooted in his life: a life lived joyfully, passionately, and without permission. Klausner, co-founder of Reason Foundation and longtime torchbearer for individual liberty, passed away in March at the age of 85. He was many things—a lawyer, an editor, a generous mentor, a tireless advocate for free minds and free markets—but above all, he was a man who fully appreciated the fruits of…

IN ONE OF his first acts after returning to the White House, President Donald Trump ordered the Justice Department to delete a nationwide database tracking misconduct by federal law enforcement. Along with rescinding former President Joe Biden’s executive orders on policing, Trump scrapped the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database (NLEAD), which logged more than 5,200 incidents of misconduct by federal officers and agents across various agencies. In a written statement to The Washington Post, the White House said Biden’s executive order creating the NLEAD database “was full of woke, anti-police concepts that make communities less safe like a call for ‘equitable’ policing and addressing ‘systemic racism in our criminal justice system.’ President Trump rescinded the order creating this database on Day 1 because he is committed to giving our brave…

A LTON BROWN HAS spent years demystifying cooking on his Food Network show Good Eats. Now he’s brought his same wit and insight to the page with Food for Thought, a collection of essays exploring everything from childhood memories to the cultural power of cuisine. As he embarked on a nationwide book tour, Brown joined The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie in February to talk about the forces shaping how, and what, we eat. In this conversation, Brown reflects on growing up in the 1960s, when Saturday morning cartoons and sugary cereals were his first taste of consumer culture. He makes a case for curiosity as the most powerful human trait, laments that food competition shows have made cooking something to be won rather than shared, and discusses government food…

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A GEORGIA MOTHER claims that she lost custody of her newborn daughter due to faulty drug tests from a lab with a documented history of inaccurate results. When a drug court and her OB-GYN ran tests on Kristen Clark-Hassell, her results were clean. But the tests from Georgia’s Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS) came back positive, and so the government took her youngest child. “They literally took her off my breast in the hallway with her screaming after the court hearing,” Clark-Hassell told the Savannah-based outlet The Current. “For her to just be ripped like that just cut a hole in our hearts.” In a 2021 whistleblower complaint, a former lab director for Avertest—the company that processed Clark-Hassell’s drug tests—claimed that as many as 30 percent of the…

ON FEBRUARY 26, new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Andrew Ferguson announced the creation of the Joint Labor Task Force, continuing former Chair Lina Khan’s departure from what is known as the consumer welfare standard. Congress established the FTC in 1914 to prevent unfair competition and deceptive business practices. This has primarily meant “protecting Americans in their role as consumers,” according to Ferguson. The FTC enforces the Clayton Antitrust Act, which outlawed price discrimination between customers, exclusive dealing, interlocking directorates, and mergers or acquisitions that “substantially reduce competition.” But Khan was more interested in Americans’ role as producers than consumers. In 2022 she signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the National Labor Relations Board to “protect workers against unfair methods of competition, unfair or deceptive acts or practices, and…

WHEN THE FOOD and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Byetta (exenatide) in 2005, doctors thought it was just approving the first glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) agonist to treat Type 2 diabetes. But this new drug class had the potential to treat a host of other problems. GLP-1 agonists mimic the body’s intrinsic GLP-1, a hormone that stimulates insulin release, suppresses the hormone glucagon, slows the muscles that move food through the intestinal tract, and decreases appetite. GLP-1s indirectly cause weight loss by slowing the movement of food through the stomach and intestines, extending the feeling of fullness. Researchers soon discovered they also directly act on GLP-1 receptors in the brain to reduce appetite and cravings. During clinical trials and postapproval surveillance, clinicians noticed people on GLP-1s losing weight. Clinicians began prescribing GLP-1s…

IN JANUARY, SIX justices of the Colorado Supreme Court unanimously ruled that five elderly African elephants were not people. That may not sound like an issue that needs six justices to resolve, but courts around the country have found themselves handling such questions. The Colorado Supreme Court did not hear from the elephants directly. They heard from the Nonhuman Rights Project, which filed a habeas corpus petition on behalf of the pachyderms, arguing that their confinement in a Colorado Springs zoo violated their right to bodily liberty. Over the past decade, the Nonhuman Rights Project and several other animal rights groups have waged a novel campaign to extend legal “personhood” to animals, which would allow them to be plaintiffs in civil lawsuits. Many of these cases have attempted to free…

IS RACE REAL? In The Raceless Antiracist, a follow-up to her 2022 book Theory of Racelessness, Sheena Michele Mason argues not only that it isn’t, but that trying to stop racism while keeping the concept of race is like fighting “a flood by pouring water on it.” Mason, a literature professor at SUNY Oneonta, suggests that these futile approaches fall into two categories: “anti-racist resistance” and “colorblindness.” While the first reifies race by making it the key to understanding most social phenomena, the second reifies it by treating it as a real thing that ought to be ignored, thus downplaying the reality of the racism that relies on it. The Raceless Antiracist asks us to do something very uncomfortable: to adopt a new mental model, to think in a completely…

According to a federal complaint, New York City bars and nightclubs paid protection money to James Caban, and in return, Caban got police to go easy on them. He did this by impersonating his twin brother—a police commissioner at the time—at the 34th Precinct in Washington Heights to stop raids on those businesses for breaking the law. Two police officers in England waited outside a woman’s house while her husband killed her. The same officers had come to the house the day before and arrested him for assault, but he was let out on bail that night. The next day, when the officers came back to take the woman’s statement, they heard an assault taking place inside but spent 35 minutes talking to their supervisor about whether they could go…

AI IS BRINGING enormous benefits to consumers and businesses. It is also bringing significant strain to the power grid. Some researchers estimate that one ChatGPT query requires the energy equivalent of lighting a lightbulb for 20 minutes and 10 times as much electricity as a single Google search. Goldman Sachs projects that AI will increase data center power demand by 160 percent nationwide through 2030. The Department of Energy also expects data centers’ energy use to balloon. A December 2024 report forecasts that cloud computing will account for as much as 12 percent of the nation’s annual energy use by 2028—up from 4.4 percent in 2023. Virginia, California, and Texas will each serve as a “primary hub” for both small- and large-scale cloud data centers, according to the Energy Department.…

BAD THINGS USUALLY happen when politicians stick their noses into the business of baseball. George W. Bush’s antipathy to steroidinflated sluggers gave us congressional show trials and invasive drug-testing legislation for high school athletes. Joe Biden’s hyperbolic shaming of Georgia’s mild election reform of 2021 needlessly pressured the MLB to move its annual All-Star Game out of Atlanta. Generations of political ribboncutters have squandered billions of taxpayer dollars on private owners’ stadium facilities. But when President Donald Trump in late February announced that “over the next few weeks I will be signing a complete PARDON” of the late all-time hits leader Pete Rose—who served a five-month prison sentence for tax fraud in 1990 and more famously was given a lifetime MLB ban in 1989 for committing the unforgivable sin of…

LONG BEFORE IT became a pejorative to describe claims you don’t like, “fake news” was a comedy genre. Its flagship for years was The Onion, a satirical weekly newspaper founded in 1988 that grew to become a cultural institution. Calling itself “America’s Finest News Source,” The Onion published realistic-looking news reports with facts either skewed or invented for satirical effect. Many of these articles were “stories where people are seemingly talking to reporters where there’s no rationale for a reporter to be there,” as James daSilva, who maintains a Substack newsletter devoted to the publication, put it in 2013. This became The Onion’s signature “area man” template, as in “Area Man Always Nostalgic For Four Years Ago,” “Unattractive Man Just Like A Brother To Area Woman,” or “Area Cockroach Fucking…

AT THE TURN of the 20th century, labor leader Samuel Gompers had many specific demands, including job security and an eight-hour day. But his list of “what labor wants” added up to a single overarching—and open-ended—desire. “We want more,” Gompers said in an 1890 speech. “We do want more. You will find that a man generally wants more.” More was once the essence of progressive politics in America: more pay for factory workers; more roads, schools, parks, dams, and scientific research; more houses and education for returning G.I.s; more financial security for the elderly, poor, and disabled. Left-wing intellectuals might bemoan consumerism and folk singers deride “little boxes made of ticky-tacky,” but Democratic politicians promised tangible goods. The New Deal and the Great Society were about more. In the early…