Table of contents for August/September 2019 in Reason

WHEN I’M HAVING a bad day, I trawl the internet for videos of happy cyborgs. My favorites are clips of hearing-impaired people getting their cochlear implants turned on for the first time. The videos follow a soothingly predictable pattern. Mumbly background chatter and shaky cam—the cinematography is rarely good—then a pregnant pause, wide eyes, and finally that peculiar kind of sobbing that human beings do when we are overwhelmed. The pattern is the same whether it’s a babe in arms or a full-grown man. If you catch the right algorithmic wave on YouTube or the right hashtag on Instagram, you can surf for hours in this genre: videos of Parkinson’s patients as their tremors are calmed by a new therapy, paraplegics walking with the help of adaptive prosthetics, infants getting…

AS BITCOIN TURNS 10, a new book aims to chronicle the digital currency’s ideological origins. “The technology alone is not enough,” Finn Brunton writes in Digital Cash: The Unknown History of the Anarchists, Utopians, and Technologists Who Created Cryptocurrency. “Even with good math, scientific discoveries, the free circulation of ideas, reliable hardware and running code, you need a desire, a vision, a dissatisfaction, a fantasy, a story.” The source of that story was a movement called the cypherpunks, which started to coalesce in the late 1980s. In turn, the cypherpunks did not appear sui generis but were the culmination of decades—centuries, really—of broadly libertarian thought and activism. Brunton, who teaches in New York University’s media department, first offers an overview of the history of monetary authentication, then traces cryptocurrencies’ roots…

Researchers in Greece have found a naturally occurring microbe that eats polyethylene and polystyrene, the two types of plastics that make up 70 percent of ocean litter. A deep-learning algorithm developed by researchers at Google AI was able, in a test, to identify early signs of lung cancer at least as well as trained radiologists. When the algorithm had access to patients’ historical tomography data, it performed “on par” with a group of six radiologists. When it did not have access to historical X-ray data, the algorithm resulted in 11 percent fewer false positives and 5 percent fewer false negatives compared to the doctors. When Becca Bundy’s daughter began having a seizure and needed medical care in 2016, Bill Cox was the first person to arrive from the Bearville Volunteer…

TODAY, SELF-HELP BOOKS and relationship gurus invoke evolution to explain everything from marital infidelity to the paleo diet. Our early ancestors’ survival needs echo through our ideas today. But this is not the first time our hominid ancestry’s role in our culture and character has played a major role in Western popular culture. Following the nightmare of the Second World War, the idea of a universal humanity had great appeal. The Holocaust and the atom bomb had proven that human beings have not only destructive impulses but a devastating ability to carry them out. But were these impulses something we were born with, or were they created by our culture? Answering this question became a driving focus of popular anthropology. With Creatures of Cain, the Princeton historian Erika Lorraine Milam…

FOR DECADES, DEMOCRATIC socialism was an old man’s ideology. Its adherents were aging hippies, old-time union organizers, and folks who fondly remembered the pre-’60s left. As recently as 2013, the average member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) was 68 years old. Even today, the ideology’s best-known spokesperson, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), is 77. But Sanders is suddenly an outlier. Today, most DSAers are young: The average member is 33. The ideology’s second-best known spokesperson, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), is just 29. And the DSA’s ranks have grown larger as well as younger. Socialist gatherings buzz with youthful energy, and they are taking place all over the country. This movement is flexing its political muscles, having helped elect a number of candidates to office—most famously Ocasio-Cortez, who has quickly…

THE PHRASE MADE famous in 2009 by longshot New York City mayoral candidate Jimmy McMillan is now a reality for millions of tenants across the United States. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, inflation has pushed overall consumer prices up by 154 percent since 1984. During the same period, urban rents increased by 227 percent. The website Apartment List finds that the percentage of renters nationwide who are cost-burdened—meaning more than 30 percent of their income goes to rent—rose from 24 percent in 1960 to 49 percent in 2014. These numbers reflect a regional problem, says Emily Hamilton, a researcher with George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. “It’s not really a nationwide phenomenon,” she explains. Rather, “it’s driven by land use regulations in the most expensive markets that make…

THE DEFEAT OF measles in the United States was one of the great good news stories of the turn of the millennium. Prior to 1963, when a vaccine was developed, the highly contagious virus led each year to 48,000 hospitalizations and 400–500 deaths, mostly among small children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But immunization campaigns steadily eroded the disease’s reach, and by 2000 it was declared eliminated from American shores. Today, the U.S. is grappling with the worst measles outbreak in a quarter-century. Some 981 cases were confirmed in 26 states between January 1 and May 31—a 26-fold increase from the total in 2004. The CDC anticipates one or two fatalities per 1,000 cases, so it looks like only a matter of time before the…

AMAZON WILL BE responsible for nearly half of all e-commerce in the United States during 2019. Critics such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) allege that the company “squash[es] small businesses and innovation.” They believe government antitrust action is needed to save retail from being totally subsumed by Prime memberships and brown boxes. Yet their dystopian vision fails to account for the boutique retail renaissance simultaneously happening in cities around the world. Stores selling a single product category, such as butcher shops or model train stores, used to be common, but this pattern of shopping disappeared as first big-box and then e-commerce retailers started offering a vast array of goods at lower prices in a single location. There was much handwringing over the trend away from specialized retail, but as Philip…

WHEN MY WIFE was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in the late 1990s, at the age of 9, the technology available for giving her body insulin, which her pancreas is supposed to make but can’t, was relatively primitive: Mollie measured her blood sugar with a device the size of a TV remote. It took a full minute to process the blood sample she provided, which could be obtained only by pricking her finger once for every reading. Administering the insulin required a syringe, a vial, and the assistance of an adult. The hardest part of jabbing herself throughout the day, she says now, was learning to ignore the child’s natural instinct to avoid pain. It was also frighteningly easy back then to take too much insulin. When she was in…

In Johnson County, Kansas, a 5-year-old student hid inside a bookshelf in the Bluejacket-Flint Elementary School library. A teacher named Crystal Smith found the girl, angrily pulled her out, waited for another adult who was present to turn away, and, video footage shows, kicked the student in the back. Former Iowa Department of Human Services social worker Chelsie Gray has been charged with three counts of felony perjury for giving false testimony while recommending to a judge that he remove four children from their mother and father and terminate the couple’s parental rights. A Ladue, Missouri, police officer has been charged with second-degree assault for shooting an alleged shoplifter who was attempting to flee the scene. An attorney for Officer Julie Crews said she thought she was drawing a Taser,…

THE FIRST WORLD War wasn’t just itself a great horror. In Wasteland, W. Scott Poole makes a compelling case that it launched a great age of horror fiction. After the armistice of November 1918, a wave of vivid memoirs, plays, novels, and poems tried to grapple with the civilization-shaking event that everyone had just experienced. These gradually gave way to more sanitized recollections, as each nation tried to move on from the conflict. Yet that wartime experience didn’t disappear from the culture, Poole argues. It went underground, feeding a resurgent horror genre, especially in the new medium of film. Movies transmuted the effects of poison gas, flamethrowers, machine guns, and massive artillery barrages into creatures that reminded audiences of their all-too-real confrontations with death and dismemberment. While most of Europe…

NOT TOO LONG ago, conventional wisdom held that the internet should enjoy minimal government oversight precisely because it was a technology that enabled open and free speech for everyone. The remedy for hateful and offensive remarks, that 1990s-vintage argument went, was more speech—or logging off. This principle, which can be traced back through the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas and John Stuart Mill, was nicely captured in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1997 decision striking down certain speech-chilling provisions of the Communications Decency Act. “Through the use of chat rooms,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote, “any person with a phone line can become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox. Through the use of Web pages, mail exploders, and newsgroups, the same individual…

BY THE TIME today’s 50-year-olds reach retirement age in the mid-2030s, Social Security is projected to be bumping up against insolvency. That will mean automatic 20 percent benefit cuts for everyone. Clearly, it’s never been more important for Americans to stop trusting the government with their financial planning, and yet far too many of us still do. Studies show that around 35 percent of Americans would run into financial trouble if they missed a single paycheck or were hit with an unexpected expense of $1,000. When it comes to saving up for the big things—like retirement—the data are far worse. A 2018 survey conducted by Northwestern Mutual, a financial services firm, found that one-third of Americans have less than $5,000 in private retirement savings, and the average amount tucked away…

THERE HAS OFTEN been a chasm between the lofty rhetoric of U.S. presidents and their actual policies. When it comes to immigration, Donald Trump does not have that problem. His rhetoric and policies are remarkably aligned. He is saying and doing things that no one—not even the most hardline restrictionists—thought imaginable a few years ago. In 2015, Trump kicked off his election campaign with an infamous speech claiming that Mexico was sending “rapists and criminals” to America—never mind that immigrants, both authorized and unauthorized, commit crimes at far lower rates than the native-born, according to numerous studies by academics, think tanks, and the government itself. Any hope that he would dial back such dehumanizing comments once he got to the White House was quickly dashed. The president has denigrated people…

SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS have wondered for years what an all-encompassing surveillance state might look like. China decided to build it. Over the last year, The New York Times has revealed the lengths to which Beijing has gone to identify and control Uighurs, a Muslim minority that has lived for centuries on the country’s western frontier. While Chinese state secrecy means we don’t know the full extent of the regime’s malevolent policies, what has been uncovered should chill every civil libertarian to the bone. Within Kashgar, a majority Uighur city, residents must line up to be scrutinized before they can move from place to place. They are legally required to travel with ID cards and to swipe them at each checkpoint. They are also required to expose their faces to cameras…

IF YOU WERE a U.S. trade negotiator in the 1950s or 1960s, you might be a little shocked by the aggressive trade rhetoric thrown around today. China is an existential threat? Our European allies are almost as bad? What exactly went wrong with U.S. leadership of a rules-based trading system? In truth, the state of American trade policy has been precarious for a while now, and for understandable reasons: the industrial development of a sizeable portion of the developing world; the expansion of trade rules beyond traditional issues of protectionism; and a more powerful international judicial system with “teeth” that can have an impact on U.S. policies. We cannot expect a return to the post–World War II era of bipartisan support for trade agreements. But thanks to President Donald Trump,…

THE WORST HUMANITARIAN crisis in modern Venezuelan history is unfolding against the backdrop of a power struggle between President Nicolás Maduro and opposition leader Juan Guaidó. Because Maduro’s government has refused to publish basic data, it is virtually impossible to know the full scale of the disaster. But human rights organizations, independent agencies, and journalists on the ground have painted a gruesome picture of a country in economic ruin, with crumbling infrastructure leading to chronic power blackouts and residents unable to meet basic human needs. Food shortages began in earnest in 2015, when supermarket shelves went empty. Venezuelans reported waiting hours to get the few items available for purchase each day. While that part of the crisis has lessened in the past year, hyperinflation and the price of food have…