Table of contents for January 2022 in Reason

A FEDERAL COURT is mulling whether Elon Musk’s SpaceX should have to complete time-consuming and expensive environmental reviews of private space launches for its satellite-beamed internet service, Starlink. The legal battle, which began in December 2020 and now awaits a ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, was initiated by ViaSat, a satellite communications company and SpaceX competitor. If the courts side with ViaSat, the case could pile huge new regulatory costs on private space flights and satellite launches, based on regulations that are decidedly earthbound. At issue is the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), a Nixon-era law that requires federal agencies to conduct extensive environmental reviews before granting approval for new projects. Although it was obviously intended to regulate the construction of projects such…

AFTER 80 YEARS of life and roughly 6,000 newspaper columns, you might think George Will would be tired of arguing. But “arguing about the nature of the country is as American as frozen apple pie with a slice of processed cheese,” the Washington Post columnist says. “So let’s argue.” Facts, of course, are important for arguing, and Will prides himself on the number of facts that fill his opinion writing. He frequently visits the deep well of history to make a point. Problems arise, though, in cases where at least one side gets the facts wrong, as with The New York Times’ 1619 Project, or has no facts at all to support its position, as with Donald Trump’s claims about the 2020 election. Will’s newest book is American Happiness and…

CAROL ANDERSON CLAIMS the Second Amendment is rooted in the goal of suppressing slave insurrections and therefore is irredeemably racist. Yes, racism has infected other constitutional provisions. But for the Second Amendment, Anderson argues in The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, the affliction is incurable. “The Second Amendment is so inherently structurally flawed, so based on Black exclusion and debasement, that, unlike the other amendments, it can never be a pathway to civil and human rights for 47.5 million African Americans,” Anderson writes. She compares the “current-day veneration of the Second Amendment” to “holding the three-fifths clause sacrosanct,” arguing that both were “designed to deny African Americans humanity and rights while carrying the aura of constitutional legitimacy.” Reading these claims, I expected a full-frontal attack on…

The central conflict in Isaac Asimov’s classic science fiction trilogy, Foundation, is between science and the state. Composed from a series of linked short stories originally published between 1942 and 1950, the books follow the creation of a scientific outpost, the Foundation, meant to preserve knowledge during a predicted collapse of the ruling Galactic Empire. The book’s heroes are scientists who (sometimes grudgingly) learn they must practice politics—or at least work within its limitations—in order to survive. Foundation, a lavishly produced Apple TV+ series based on Asimov’s books, is less of a direct adaptation and more of an expansion on the original stories, with a host of new characters and plot elements, including a cloned emperor who takes governing advice from older versions of himself while training a younger cloned…

Sally Rooney’s new novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, is a follow-up to her internationally bestselling Normal People and Conversations With Friends. All three books mix moderately annoying Marxism with moderately depressing sex and produce results much better than you’d expect from those ingredients. This is thanks in part to Rooney’s accomplished prose, which is as translucent as the skin of a Dublin gal who has been good about applying sunscreen. The semi-auto-fictional protagonists’ muddled yet deeply held views on politics, religion, and relationships sat better on the 20-somethings of Rooney’s previous works than they do on the 30-somethings of Beautiful World. And Rooney’s own politics have caused some real-life drama around a Hebrew translation of the novel. But as politics becomes an increasingly totalizing and consuming force, the book…

IN 2017, HONDURAS granted a charter to a private company allowing it to operate a zone of separate governing policies, called Zones for Economic Development and Employment (ZEDEs), inside of Honduras’ borders. Advocates hope that the zones will, through regulatory and governance innovation, create greater security and prosperity than the rest of the troubled country, famously mired in crime and corruption. The first ZEDE is run by a company called Próspera, which launched its website publicly in spring 2020 and began operating in a 58-acre area of the Honduran island of Roatan; the company is now also operating a ZEDE on the mainland, in La Ceiba. One of its big selling points is no tariffs or trade barriers for nonhazardous or nonillegal items. In October, Reason’s Brian Doherty interviewed Próspera’s…

ELECTRONIC CIGARETTES, WHICH deliver nicotine without tobacco or combustion, are the most important harm-reducing alternative to smoking ever developed, one that could prevent millions of premature deaths in the U.S. alone. Yet bureaucrats and politicians seem determined to negate that historic opportunity through regulations and taxes that threaten to cripple the industry. In October, seven years after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officially declared its intention to regulate “electronic nicotine delivery systems” (ENDS), the agency finally approved one such product. But the FDA, which has rejected applications for millions of other vaping products, still seems inclined to ban the e-liquid flavors that former smokers overwhelmingly prefer. Why? Because teenagers also like them. The FDA authorized the marketing of R.J. Reynolds Vapor Company’s Vuse Solo device, along with two tobacco-flavored…

PADMA DANTURTY HAS been a legal resident of the United States since she was 8 months old. But had she come to the country illegally, her future in the U.S. probably would be more secure. That’s because 18-year-old Danturty does not qualify for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which protects about 650,000 young immigrants who came to the U.S. unlawfully as children through no fault of their own. DACA beneficiaries, known as “Dreamers,” are protected from deportation and able to apply for work permits. Danturty, meanwhile, is one of about 200,000 “Documented Dreamers,” people brought to the U.S. legally by parents who obtained work or student visas. These children face deportation if they are unable to obtain a green card or visa by the time they turn…

What’s a cop sitcom to do when the decidedly unfunny killing of George Floyd by a police officer upends the plan for its eighth and final season? Brooklyn Nine-Nine didn’t address Floyd in depth, but it didn’t shy away from acknowledging police brutality and police union corruption nor from offering a subtle critique of politicians more interested in virtue signaling than in solving problems. Criminal justice reform wasn’t the sole focus of a season that revisits all the sitcom’s traditions. But in the season opener, Detective Jake Peralta, often depicted as an investigative genius, assures a victim of police brutality that he’s “one of the good ones” before coming to realize that, actually, the system often doesn’t work even when good people are involved. Later in the season, Peralta makes…

AMERICANS CAN BE forgiven for thinking that every critical system we rely on is breaking down. The country—nay, the globe—has endured years of social, political, environmental, and epidemiological upheaval. Pick your shock: COVID-19, wildfires, George Floyd protests, climate change, January 6. They all seem like harbingers of a chaotic future. But backlogs in Pottery Barn orders are when shit gets real. From Bosch dishwashers to bucatini to chicken wings to pipette tips, the past year has seen a raft of press coverage about delays, price spikes, and other disruptions to the production and shipment of goods to the United States. Strains in the global supply chain caused semiconductor shortages and big price increases for used cars. Toyota, Ford, and General Motors have all scaled back production in recent months because…

ON A MAY day in 2015, a task force of Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents and Miami-Dade Police Department officers raided Miladis Salgado’s suburban Miami home and seized $15,000 in cash that they found in her closet. The DEA agents were acting on a tip from a confidential informant that Salgado’s estranged husband was laundering drug money. The cash in Salgado’s closet was not drug proceeds, however. It was money that Salgado, who worked at a duty-free store in the Miami airport, had been saving up for her daughter’s quinceañera, an important coming-of-age 15th birthday party. Salgado had been planning to book a banquet hall, D.J., and photographer. Suddenly bereft of her savings, she had to cancel the party. It took two years for Salgado to get her money back,…

Public radio is much older than NPR. As early as the 1910s, universities were transmitting weather reports to farmers and, in one historian’s words, “esoteric jokes” to themselves. In the 1920s, as New York’s municipally owned WNYC started operation, one of its founders argued that the government should establish big outlets in each region while “cutting out poorer and weaker stations which broadcast inferior programs.” Drawing on both original research and earlier scholarship (including—full disclosure—my own work), James T. Bennett’s The History and Politics of Public Radio surveys those two strains of noncommercial broadcasting, one scrappy and bottom-up, the other centralist and elitist, with an eye on the subsidies and regulations that have boosted the centralist tradition. It covers funding fights (which do not always fall along expected left/right lines),…

Psychologist Stanton Peele’s memoir of his “lonely quest to change how we see addiction” could have been titled I Don’t Get No Respect. His persistent promotion of the thesis that drug users are neither criminals who belong in jail nor patients who belong in “treatment” has been a long and often solitary struggle. As Peele concedes in A Scientific Life on the Edge, his “reckless personality” helps explain his lack of success in academia. But it is also true that his nuanced understanding of addiction—which rejects the disease label and emphasizes the personal, social, cultural, and economic factors underlying self-destructive preoccupations with drug use and many other pleasurable activities—cogently contradicts the prejudices that still dominate the drug policy debate. Prohibitionists, along with many of their foes, want us to believe…

15 YEARS AGO January 2007 “NewSpacers have passed out of their whiny adolescent phase and into industrious young adulthood. Their aspirations are appropriately modest—mostly suborbital, just a quick trip to the edge of the atmosphere. They’re setting aside deep space exploration and the moon for now (though they talk a big game about what’s next), opting instead for reasonable, practical, short-term goals: quick hops for tourists and other near-to-Earth fun.” KATHERINE MANGU-WARD “Space Travel for Fun and Profit” 20 YEARS AGO January 2002 “Why…is [the World Health Organization] concerned with seatbelts and smoking when the world’s poor are still dying of measles and tuberculosis? Public choice analysis—which presumes that government agencies, like their private-sector counterparts, seek to grow their market share—suggests an answer: Since the WHO’s funding is mostly from First…