Reasonの October 2025 の目次

THINGS DIDN’T GO well the first time Rebecca Torbruegge took a turn at the go-kart track. She ended up with a burn on her leg that refused to heal and eventually—skip the next bit if you’re squeamish—“started bubbling.” Doctors in Sydney quickly determined she’d need a graft. But instead of following the usual procedure of scraping a patch from the 22-year-old’s backside, slapping it over the wound, and hoping for the best, researchers wondered if she’d like to try something new: custom-printed skin, laid down layer by layer by a machine, built from her own cells. Asked about her decision to become the first human recipient of bedside 3D bioprinting in May, Torbruegge offered this delightfully Australian understatement to a local news station: “I thought about it for a bit,…

IN HIS SECOND term, President Donald Trump has tried to fire numerous federal officials, with varying degrees of success. Courts have occasionally intervened, raising questions about the extent of the president’s power to terminate employees without cause and which agencies he can and cannot touch. But Supreme Court justices seem unanimous in their belief that the Federal Reserve is its own creature. In January, Trump fired Gwynne Wilcox, chair of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). This was the first time a member was removed since the board was established in the 1930s. Wilcox sued, saying her firing violated a federal law that NLRB members “may be removed by the President….for neglect of duty or malfeasance in office, but for no other cause.” She also cited Humphrey’s Executor v. United…

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) into law on July 4. One measure buried deep in the 870-page law imposes a 1 percent tax on remittances—the money that people send to friends and relatives in their home countries. The 1 percent tax applies to all remittance senders in the United States, though not to transfers sent from bank accounts and U.S.-issued debit or credit cards. The Center for Global Development (CGD), an economic research think tank, suggests that remittances could drop by 1.6 percent “if the new tax raises costs by 1 percent.” Analyzing the potential impact on remittances sent by migrants in the U.S., the CGD finds that Central American countries will “suffer the greatest loss relative to their gross national income (GNI).” El…

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP sure picked a curious venue to start calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a “dictator.” It was February 19, halfway through a remarkable two-week run in which America reversed its approach to both the Russia-Ukraine war and possibly the entire 76-year-old Washington-led trans-Atlantic military alliance. Trump was speaking in Miami Beach’s Faena Hotel and Forum at a bland-sounding “Priority Summit” hosted by the innocuously named Future Investment Initiative Institute, which in turn is owned by the nondescript Public Investment Fund (PIF). But to the global financial elite, that latter entity is far from obscure. At an estimated $941 billion, the PIF is the sixth-largest sovereign wealth fund on the planet, owned by one of the world’s most authoritarian dictatorships, Saudi Arabia. The institute’s international confabs have not been…

ACROSS 1. Suddenly snatch 5. Agency that proposed a de facto cigarette ban in 2025: abbr. 8. Playwright Coward 12. Group with qualified immunity, in slang 13. Where South Korea’s National Assembly meets 15. Reed instrument with a haunting sound 16. Feature of about 90 percent of U.S. homes, but only about 20 percent of European homes 19. Letter after phi 20. Pipe-declogging brand 21. Rate that was 6.3 percent for the euro area and 4.2 percent for the U.S. in May 2025 25. Vietnamese noodle soup 26. Marketing strategy being upended by AI: abbr. 27. Leaving the premises 30. Type of pear 32. Unfriendly food bacteria 36. NO ___ XING (road sign) 37. Stadium replaced by Citi Field 38. Country with a higher proportion of billionaires per capita than…

THANKS TO INNOVATIONS in food science and agriculture, the world is producing more food than ever before. While this has significantly reduced global hunger since the 1970s, it has impacted the environment; in 2023, food production generated about 26 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to Our World in Data. Now scientists at the Finnish startup Solar Foods are turning air and electricity into food. The result? A mustard-colored protein powder made from naturally occurring microbes that could reshape how the world is fed. Inside a bioreactor, a single microbe plucked from the Finnish dirt is fed a cocktail of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, and potassium. Renewable electricity powers the process, which the company says is “20 times more efficient than photosynthesis,” and accelerates the growth of the…

NOT ALL OF James Bond’s gadgets were fictional. In the 1969 movie On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Bond uses a strange-looking metal square to photograph supervillain Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s secret plans. The same metal square appears in the 2013 season of the Cold War–themed show The Americans, when an FBI asset is sent to copy documents in the Soviet Embassy. The device is called a Minox subminiature camera—and it’s surprisingly easy to find. Although its products were commonly associated with spies, Minox produced hundreds of thousands of film cameras for civilian customers during the 20th century. They go for between $100 and $200 on the secondhand market today. The catch is finding and processing the bespoke 8 mm by 11 mm format film the camera uses. These recent photos were…

SUGURU ONDA WAS one year away from finishing his Ph.D. at Brigham Young University (BYU) when he received potentially life-altering news. His name had appeared in a criminal records check and his visa had been revoked. He would need to return to his native Japan right away or else face deportation. Onda had accrued a few speeding tickets during his six years of study in the United States, but that seemed an implausible reason for losing his visa. The only other explanation, his lawyer Adam Crayk told Deseret News, was a 2019 fishing offense in which members of his church group harvested more fish than his license permitted. The charge was dismissed and Onda continued his research on computer vision and machine learning. When Donald Trump retook the presidency in…

THE FORMULA IS simple: Combine the best-loved traits of J.R.R. Tolkien’s high fantasy and of modern romance novels, make the characters’ sex lives explicit and very detailed, and include a lot of descriptions of beautiful gowns and luxurious bathtubs. Put a lushly illustrated cover on the front. Back it up with authors who have very active social media presences, and get the ever-growing world of fans on BookTok (the book-focused corner of TikTok) and Goodreads to read and review. Call it romantasy or faerie smut—the new genre is everywhere. Of course, it’s not really a new genre. I say that not because romantasy combines strands of several previously existing genres—romance, fantasy, and (often) horror. A new kind of pastiche still counts as something new. But literature that combines fantasy and…

PEOPLE ASSOCIATE THE words prison labor with coercion and exploitation, with inmates paid peanuts to do menial work for the government or its contractors. If you hear that phrase, you probably don’t think of people working for themselves on their own terms. Yet for nearly two decades, some Puerto Rican prisons permitted a very different sort of prison labor, with incarcerated workers running their own enterprises behind bars. It was a tremendous success until COVID-19 put it on ice. And it might soon return. At the beginning of the century, prisoners at an art program in the Guayama Correctional Complex started thinking about ways they might make money from their creations. Someone suggested launching a business. Someone else proposed that they make it a cooperative, so everyone could have a…

DRIVE ABOUT 40 minutes from the Giza Pyramids to the ancient step pyramid of Saqqara and you’ll pass rows of half-built apartment blocks, skeletal overpasses, and roads that seem permanently under construction. Leave central Cairo and you’ll see more of the same: neighborhoods where concrete beams poke out of rooftops, brick walls are left raw and unpainted, and windows are missing entirely from apartments. At first, Cairo looks as if someone pressed pause on the city mid-construction. But the phenomenon is actually the result of legal loopholes, economic improvisation, and a culture that builds for the future. It began in 1954, when a property tax law levied hefty taxes—up to 46 percent—on completed buildings, yet entirely exempted those still under construction. So Egyptians got creative: Leave off the roof, skip…

ROSEMARY WOODRUFF LEARY is remembered—if she’s remembered at all—as a muse, fugitive, and heavily indicted coconspirator in Timothy Leary’s psychedelic revolution of the 1960s and ’70s. But her story is far more complex than that. A true believer in the mind-expanding potential of LSD, a master of the elusive art of “set and setting,” and a woman determined to live a remarkable life, Rosemary was a countercultural icon in her own right. Susannah Cahalan is the author, most recently, of The Acid Queen: The Psychedelic Life and Countercultural Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary. In June, Cahalan joined The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie to discuss Woodruff—what drove her to begin experimenting with psychedelics, what she saw in the tumult of postwar America, and why her legacy deserves more than a…

IT’S NOT HARD to see why Europeans often feel a sense of superiority over Americans. No European city has an area as dangerous or decrepit as San Francisco’s Tenderloin district. Some Americans obsess about Europe’s supposedly no-go areas, but no European city has crime on par with places like Memphis, Tennessee, or St. Louis, Missouri. In 2023, more people were murdered in Chicago (population: 2.7 million) than in all of Italy (population: 59 million). When you ride New York’s subways, it’s best not to wear nice shoes in case you step in a pool of vomit. Our cities are not just vastly safer than America’s: They’re more beautiful, more vibrant with history and art and food. Europe has the Tuscan countryside, the Swiss Alps, Barcelona, Provence, the French Riviera, and…