Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2026 i Reason

IN 1988, PENG Peiyun was assigned to China’s State Family Planning Commission. Her job was to implement the relatively new one-child policy. The Communist Party was sure that it knew how many people should be in the Chinese population to prevent famine and overcrowding—so sure, in fact, that it was willing to require abortions and sterilization under threat of violence. It was willing to remove “illegal children” from their homes and deny their families access to work, education, and medical care. After Peng’s recent death, official state media dutifully called her “an outstanding leader” for her work on women and children. But on Chinese social platforms, many people responded with anger: “Those children who were lost, naked, are waiting for you over there” in the afterlife, read one Weibo post…

“WE’RE NOT GOING to give in to terrorism,” Vice President J.D. Vance declared after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent fatally shot Minneapolis protester Renée Good in January. Vance averred that Good was involved in anti-ICE “terrorism,” which he said included not only violent assaults but also provocations by “people trying to antagonize” ICE agents. In viewing speech that pisses off cops as a crime, Vance was following a legal tradition that the U.S. Supreme Court launched in 1942, when it invented a vague First Amendment exception for “fighting words.” Although subsequent decisions cast serious doubt on the viability of that doctrine, its logic remains popular with government officials who think speech that offends them should be illegal. The case that gave birth to this handy excuse for censorship…

THE FICTIONAL STAR Wars universe is full of terrifying and powerful villains, from planetdestroying superweapons to black-cloaked space wizards wielding magic swords. In Andor, that well-trod story of the evil Galactic Empire becomes something even more unsettling: a portrait of how authoritarian systems consolidate power and crush dissent. Over its two-season run, the critically acclaimed Disney+ series explored the formation of the Rebel Alliance that would eventually confront and defeat the Empire, as first seen in the original 1977 Star Wars film and its sequels. Andor offers a gritty view of what it takes to organize a mass uprising against a tyrannical government. Luke Skywalker might be the hero of the Star Wars story, but Andor suggests he’d never have had the opportunity to destroy the Death Star without the…

SOME CONSIDER HENRY Kissinger a master statesman who advanced American interests by deftly navigating complex international affairs. Others argue that his achievements were exaggerated, preferring to highlight his violations of international law and his complicity in war crimes. Tom Wells’ The Kissinger Tapes: Inside His Secretly Recorded Phone Conversations will not resolve this debate, because those who view him as savvy and adept will find ways to construe these transcripts as evidence for their position. Reading them reveals Kissinger’s skills as a power broker who strategically maneuvers his way through the political system to achieve his goals. But there is plenty of ammunition here for those of us who view him as a villain. The book is a collection of selections from more than 15,000 of Kissinger’s secretly recorded telephone…

MANY VENEZUELANS CELEBRATED after U.S. forces captured President Nicolás Maduro on January 3 and flew him to New York to face “narcoterrorism” charges. The arrest raised hopes for the release of nearly 900 political prisoners—activists, journalists, and critics—jailed under his rule, including several U.S. citizens. President Donald Trump said he canceled a “second Wave of Attacks” after the government of acting President Delcy Rodríguez agreed to begin releases. As of early February, only about 300 prisoners have been freed, leaving hundreds still detained despite official promises.…

REGULATIONS HAVE MADE it harder and more expensive to deploy nuclear power in the United States. But in January, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) rolled back more than a dozen regulations, including the “aircraft impact assessment.” The rule, which was finalized in 2009, required developers of new power plants to demonstrate to the NRC that their reactor core would remain intact in the event of an improbable 9/11-style plane crash. The rule did nothing to make nuclear power plants safer, since these facilities are already engineered and regulated to withstand natural disasters such as earthquakes, large fires, floods, and hurricanes. The NRC itself acknowledged this at the time, saying that “compliance” with the rule “is not needed for adequate protection to public health and safety or common defense and security.”…

“I’M PROUD OF the fact,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told Fox News in December, that “President Trump has stopped all refugee resettlement into the country. The only refugee resettlement that is happening are the Afrikaners being persecuted in South Africa.” Oval Office pride vis-à-vis refugees used to flow in the opposition direction. “We lead the world,” Ronald Reagan bragged in his last speech as president, “because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world.….If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.” In October 2025, the Trump administration slammed the door shut to the world’s most miserable, slashing the annual cap of refugee intake by 94 percent, to an…

THE FIRST AMENDMENT states that the government “shall make no law….abridging the freedom of speech.” But one prominent conservative judge, whose name has been mentioned as a potential nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court by President Donald Trump, thinks that protection against government censorship may not apply to noncitizens in the United States. Is the judge right? Writing for himself in the December 2025 case of United States v. Escobar - Temal, Judge Amul Thapar of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit asserted that “neither history nor precedent indicates that the First Amendment definitively applies to aliens.” Yet in Bridges v. Wixon (1945), the Supreme Court unambiguously stated that “freedom of speech and of press is accorded aliens residing in this country.” That case centered on an…

A DECADE INTO his capture of our political attention spans, there is no longer anything new that can be said about President Donald Trump in a big-picture way about his nature as a person or his larger meaning as a political phenomenon. His audacity, so bold at first and so lubricated in his second go-round, can no longer shock or surprise; his crudeness, so initially colorful, just fades into the dark background of his actions; his bottomless sea of toddlerish willfulness and grievance, so curious and compelling in 2015–16, becomes as notable as water to a fish. We all swim in Trump now, surrounded by his turbulent, turbid murk descending to fathomless depths, his surface marking the end of what we can know. After the first full year of his…

In this issue of Reason, we acknowledge members of our Torchbearer Society, a community of people who advanced the cause of “Free Minds and Free Markets” by making a contribution of $1,000 or more in 2025. Larry Abbott ACS Infrastructure Development Chris Adams John Aglialoro & Joan Carter Airbnb Inc. Charles E. Albers Craig Allen Terry Allen Douglas Allred Altria Group Inc. Amazon.com Inc. Dick Anderson Steven Anderson Douglas Anderson & Mary Barnicle Doug Anton Apgar Fdn. Daniel Armstrong Armstrong Fdn. Gregory Arnold Arnold Ventures Charles Atkins The Atlas Society Autoblow George Bachich Neera Badhwar Ronald Bailey Barry & Sue Bakalor Lalita Balasubramanian Ann & Brian Balusek Bret & Melanie Banfield Charles & Melanie Barker Noel Barnard Ted Barnett Roger Barris George Bartell Cornelius Bates John Bayley The Beach Fdn.…

ADAM SMITH, WIDELY considered the first major theorist of capitalism, abhorred the institution of slavery. “Whatever work [a slave] does…can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own,” he wrote in 1776. In an earlier lecture, Smith indicted laws that “strengthen the authority of the masters and reduce the slaves to a more absolute subjection.” The plantation system at the core of this economy was not a competitive market; planters had secured a state-sanctioned “monopoly against all the rest of the world” and “indemnif[ied] themselves by the exorbitancy of their profites for their expensive and thriftless method of cultivation.” Smith singled out the exceptional cruelty found in the British colonies of “Jamaica and Barbadoes, where slaves are numerous and objects of jealousy…

The city council of Carmelby-the-Sea, California, banned pickleball at Forest Hill Park, the only public park in town with pickleball courts, making it a criminal offense punishable by a $1,000 fine to play there. The ban followed repeated noise complaints from a few nearby residents. City officials considered quieter equipment and other compromises but ultimately rejected them, saying the park’s location was incompatible with pickleball. In Louisville, Kentucky, Cuqita Boyd was charged with DUI after a minor crash in January 2022, despite repeatedly asking for a breathalyzer, which the arresting officer did not provide. In a deposition, the officer explained that using breathalyzers “wasn’t my thing.” Boyd later got a breathalyzer test at the jail, which read 0.0, and a blood draw found no detectable alcohol in her system. Boyd…

CHRISTOPHER BUCK IS fermenting a vaccine in his kitchen. You can too. Specifically, Buck brews and quaffs a hazy beer that induces immunity against the BK virus, also known as human polyomavirus. Buck argues that you have the right to home-brew vaccines as a way to get around the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) yearslong vaccine approval process. Buck joins the pantheon of pioneering vaccine self-experimenters. Among them are French physician and Nobel Prize winner Charles Jules Henri Nicolle, who used crushed lice to inoculate himself against typhus; Jonas Salk, who injected himself with his own polio vaccine; and Albert Sabin, who ingested his oral polio vaccine. In 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, a group of researchers associated with Harvard launched the Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative. They…

ANTARCTICA IS THE last terra nullius (no man’s land) on Earth. Under the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, no state can claim sovereignty over the frozen continent. But thousands of people pass through every year as part of research projects or tourist expeditions. And where there are human beings, there is violence. So how do they deal with crime at the South Pole? The boring answer is that Antarctic missions usually fall under the jurisdiction of their home country. For example, the manager of the U.S. Antarctic Program’s McMurdo Station is required to be a special deputy U.S. marshal. But crime and punishment on the frozen continent have still gone in some pretty weird directions. In 2000, Australian astrophysicist Rodney Marks died of methanol poisoning while working at a South Pole telescope…

ONE FRIDAY MORNING in September 2023, my neurologist told me she suspected that I had ALS. I was completely healthy—or so I thought—and in the prime of my life. I had two adult children, a great career, and a wonderful marriage. I was 56, and both of my parents were still alive. My diagnosis was confirmed two months later. I felt as if I had just been told not only that I would die, but that I would be tortured to death and that it would drag out over several years. I was the chief clinical officer at Mount Sinai Health System in New York City, trained as an internist and geriatrician, and I’d cared for many dying patients. Of all the people in the universe, you’d think I would…

5 YEARS AGO April 2021 “[Sen. Josh] Hawley’s vision of government is a vision of vast power, used to forcibly advance a particular kind of life. Yet he also represents a link to the party’s past, following in the long tradition of socially conservative scolds and media panic mongers who have found a home on the American right…. He may well be the GOP’s dark future, bringing the culture war into the social media era and repurposing the Progressive Era’s statist playbook for fauxpopulist ends.” PETER SUDERMAN  “Josh Hawley’s Toxic Populism” “The awful events of January 6 accelerated trends in left-ofcenter circles, particularly within media and technology companies. Shocked at the sight of a violent mob lending street muscle to a lame-duck president’s conspiracy theory, journalists, academics, and social media…