Table of contents for April 2020 in Reason

“I WANT TO be elected. I think I am a great president. I think I am the greatest president there ever was, and if I am not elected, the national interest will suffer greatly.” These are the words of a hypothetical president, as imagined by Alan Dershowitz in his role as one of Donald Trump’s lawyers during the final days of the Senate impeachment trial. That hypothetical president, said Dershowitz, would not have committed an impeachable offense if he offered an otherwise-legal quid pro quo partially motivated by a desire to improve his own electoral chances. After all, “every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest.” Despite Dershowitz’s Harvard credentials and long standing as a liberal stalwart, this thought experiment was greeted with…

SYRIA’S KURDS HAVE managed to defeat ISIS, manage multiethnic coexistence, and possibly hold off an invasion by a NATO army, all without a state of their own—not because of starry-eyed idealism but because of the practical advantages of a consensus-based, bottom-up society. In The Kurds of Northern Syria, Harriet Allsopp, one of the foremost experts on Kurdish political movements, and Wladimir van Wilgenburg, a journalist at the front lines of the fight, try to understand how the Kurdish revolutionary project has played out on the ground. Their book mixes interviews, sociological surveys, and reporting to draw a detailed picture of Syrian Kurdish life before and during the current civil war. AFTER THE FIRST World War, the Kurds found themselves under the thumb of four nationalist states, each of which saw…

“Can I come over, tonight?” asks Iggy Pop in an early song with the Stooges, the late ’60s/early ’70s band from Michigan that directly inspired many later wild rock music movements, especially punk. “We will have a real cool time, tonight.” Like most Stooges songs, it’s more of a chant, a primal mood set to grinding, twangy, sludgy guitars that sound like a factory assembly line, or maybe a military sortie in Vietnam, to name the two things Pop was desperately trying to escape in his early 20s. Iggy and the Stooges reduced rock to its essence of sex and drugs—of sensual, nihilistic escape from a dreary everyday life that seemed to be their birthright as members of the white working class. “Dope, dope, dope. Fucking Vietnam… Joy and insecurity…

15 YEARS AGO April 2005 “Less than two weeks after a 40-foot wave flattened swaths of Southeast Asia, the United States slapped a new round of tariffs on India and Thailand. As the federal government promised $350 million and private citizens pledged even more, the message to survivors was clear: Have our Marines, our pity, and our cash, but for the love of God, do not send us your cheap shrimp.” KERRY HOWLEY “Tidal Waves and Tariffs” 20 YEARS AGO April 2000 “Though the House was to impeach Clinton anyway, the growing mantra from that point forward was ‘move on.’ And move on the president has, in a neverending search for his place in History. Somebody should tell him that a special place has been reserved just for him.” CHARLES…

MORE THAN 250 foreign students have been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in a sting operation against “pay-to-stay visa mills”—fake universities that handle transcripts and paperwork so that foreign students can maintain their visa status without actually attending college. But sources connected to the students say the operation, which involved ICE setting up its own fake university, lured in a number of students who had done nothing wrong. Some of those students were even tricked into quitting legitimate schools in favor of the feds’ fake university. Meanwhile, real visa mills—the operation’s supposed target—remain unaffected. The latest chapter in the story began in 2015, when ICE decided to crack down on visa mills. The agency created the University of Northern New Jersey, a fake college that held no classes…

AT THE END of 2019, Congress repealed three significant tax components of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. Each of them had been included in the initial legislation to raise the revenue required to pay for the new spending the law called for. The biggest of the three was the so-called Cadillac tax, which was expected to raise about $197 billion over the next decade. Congress also nixed the law’s health insurance tax, projected to raise $150 billion over 10 years, and the medical device tax, projected to raise $25.5 billion. All three taxes were eliminated as part of a $1.4 trillion year-end budget bill that President Donald Trump signed at the last possible minute in order to keep the government open. The repeal of these taxes was predictable. Implementation…

IN SEPTEMBER, THE Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an American organization that monitors attacks on freedom of the press worldwide, issued a report on what it called a major threat to journalists—particularly female journalists—in the United States and Canada: online harassment. The report opened with an anecdote meant to illustrate the problem. A Texas-based freelancer suddenly found her inbox flooded with spam, from sale promotions to fake job offers, and realized that someone had subscribed her to dozens of email lists; she suspected that the culprit was a bigoted commenter previously banned from a website for which she wrote. It was, the report quoted her as saying, “kind of scary.” Given that CPJ deals with issues that range from censorship to beatings, kidnappings, and even murders of journalists, junk-mail bombing…

Monarchy is a soulless institution that stamps out all individuality, and its effects can be harshest on those at the top of the pyramid. That is the major ironic takeaway of the third season of Netflix’s The Crown, which continues its look at the modern British Royal Family, now in the turbulent 1960s and ’70s. The characters are older, as are the new actors playing them, aged by both time and the demands of their roles. With that age has come a palpable sense of regret for Queen Elizabeth II and her husband, Prince Phillip. Sequential episodes in the middle of the season show the two grappling with the fact that conformity to the needs of “the Crown” has prevented them from spending their lives the way they’d have preferred…

MOST JUDGES BALK at the prospect of jury nullification—the right and power of juries to bring “not guilty” verdicts when defendants violate laws that jurors consider unjust or wrongly applied. Some of them get extremely mad when a fellow judge endorses the practice in his own courtroom. That’s exactly what happened in December 2019, when a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals rebuked U.S. District Judge Stefan Underhill for telling prosecutors and defense attorneys that before them was a “shocking case” that “calls for jury nullification.” The prosecution that shocked Under hill was a dubious federal “child pornography” charge growing out of a state statutory rape case. A U.S. Attorney’s Office press release alleged that defendant Yehudi Manzano, 31, “sexually assaulted a 15-year-old female victim…

ONE OF THE most important issues for people worried about the consequences of marijuana legalization is the extent to which cannabis serves as a substitute for alcohol, which is more dangerous in several significant ways. Recent evidence from Canada and the United States rein forces the hypothesis that people tend to drink less when marijuana is legally available, although the issue is far from settled. During 2019, the first full year of legalization in Canada, the volume of beer sold there fell by 3 percent, the Financial Post reports. That drop was large compared to the annual declines seen in the previous five years, which averaged 0.3 percent. Vivien Azer, an industry analyst quoted by the Post, said the accelerated slide was probably related to marijuana legalization, and she predicted…

WHEN THE OHIO village known as Amelia voted to dissolve its government last year, The New York Times seemed bewildered and a little alarmed. The paper acknowledged that it isn’t exactly unprecedented for a municipal regime to shut its doors: Since 2012, it noted, “at least 12 in Ohio alone” have “dissolved or are in the process of doing so.” But it added that these fights usually happen “for financial reasons, often because shrinking populations or reduced state funding make paying for basic services unsustainable.” Amelia was growing, and it wasn’t in particularly dire financial straits. The battle there erupted over what the Times called “a new local tax of just 1 percent.” That sort of conflict is not especially unusual. In a 2012 paper for The Yale Law Journal,…

THE U.S. DEPARTMENT of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) sent a major rewrite of federal fair housing regulation to Congress in late December. The proposed rule would ask localities receiving federal housing funding to report on their housing market outcomes and then to propose concrete steps for improving housing affordability. Localities that either have affordable housing or see housing become more affordable over a five-year period could be rewarded with additional grant money and other incentives. The department told Congress it would “focus remedial resources and potential regulatory enforcement actions” against the lowest-performing jurisdictions. The rule is a marked change from the one issued by the Obama administration in 2015, which required HUD grantees to collect voluminous amounts of demographic data and then use that data to craft plans on…

IN LATE 2006, a public defender went before a Napa County judge to argue for his client’s freedom. Rex McCurdy, a 49-year-old man, had been detained for seven years at Atascadero State Hospital under a 1995 California law authorizing “civil commitment” of people who have been convicted of sex offenses, a practice that keeps them confined long after they have completed their sentences. In 1983, McCurdy had pleaded guilty to a rape, for which he served two years in state prison. In 1990, he was convicted of a burglary and served another six years. In 1998, McCurdy says he was brought in on a parole violation for living too close to a school, contrary to his conditions of release. Prosecutors used that violation and the two prior convictions to get…

I haven’t read The Presidential Plot, but I want to. According to the new anthology Sticking It to the Man, Stanley Johnson’s 1969 novel features a CIA so fed up with the failure in Vietnam that it orchestrates a coup and installs a black-power leader called Panther Jones as president. The book reportedly presents this deep-state operation as a good thing, not a betrayal. And—oh, yeah—it was written by future U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s dad. Despite its name, the counterculture of the ’60s and ’70s didn’t always counter the mainstream. It mixed with it, often in unpredictable ways. Sticking It to the Man explores how that played out in the worlds of pulp fiction and mass-market paperbacks. Sometimes it meant embracing the ferment around them. Sometimes it meant half-assed…

“Reasons to quit: The low is always lower than the high,” sings Texas stoner royalty Willie Nelson. Alcoholics know that firsthand. Others, too, are discontent with paying for the lows via hangovers and liver problems. Enter Sans Bar, a sober establishment in Austin started by former substance abuse counselor Chris Marshall. Sans Bar feels like a calm, diverse house party (“I started my three-month intensive fast on the solstice!” said one health-nut patron while I was there). Serving good non-alcoholic cocktails and using a “pay what you want” model, all it asks is that patrons not be under the influence while there (which, given the Alcoholics Anonymous logo in the window, shouldn’t surprise gallivanters). For Nelson, “The reasons to quit don’t outnumber all the reasons” to drink. Others feel differently,…

A presentation about the perils of A.I. and facial recognition could easily fall into fearmongering clichés about the end of privacy and the dangers of evil corporations. Instead Face Values: Exploring Artificial Intelligence, an award-winning exhibit showing at the Cooper Hewitt in New York through May 25, humbly poses the question: How much can we really know about people from their faces? A brief history of attempts to glean information from facial topography by criminologists, beauticians, doctors, and eugenicists primes visitors with a sense of the fallibility of the science. Then interactive stations allow them to watch tools designed to do things like detect emotions or assess age succeed or fail in real time. Face Values offers moments of humor—with both state and corporate hubris as the butt of the…

IN EARLY JANUARY, the United States took out Iran’s top military leader, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, as he passed through Iraq. President Donald Trump’s decision to order the killing of a foreign government official was controversial both at home and abroad. Is Trump charting a bold new course in the Middle East or following the failed footsteps of Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush? A day before Iran responded to the killing with a bombing campaign against two U.S. military bases in the region, Reason’s Nick Gillespie spoke with Christopher A. Preble, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. In 1990–93, Preble served as an officer in the U.S. Navy on the USS Ticonderoga. He’s the co-author of Fuel to the Fire: How Trump…