Table of contents for February 2022 in Reason

NOT LONG AGO, parents spent time and energy worrying about contagious diseases other than COVID-19: respiratory syncytial virus (RSV); hand, foot, and mouth disease; strep throat; and even the boring old flu. But the default standards for “safety” haphazardly narrowed and heightened as COVID-19 burst onto the scene. Lockdowns, school closures, and other restrictions substantially limited people’s access to each other. There was one apparent silver lining to all this disruption: Flu circulation in the winter of 2020–21 stayed at an all-time low, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The 2020–21 RSV season failed to materialize as well. Pandemic-weary parents grasping at straws noticed their bored, under-socialized kids at least had no colds. Maybe lower childhood contagious disease rates could become a legacy of this pandemic?…

ZONING AIMS TO cram all human activity into neat little boxes: residential, commercial, agricultural. The system does not easily accommodate new, line-blurring ideas and practices, as Jordan Stevens learned when planning officials told her she was not allowed to host goat yoga classes on her farm in rural Hamilton County, Indiana. Since 2018, Stevens and her partner had been running goat yoga classes—where people strike traditional yoga poses while goats clamber on and around them—out of a local counseling center. When the pandemic shut down the counseling center, Stevens shifted the operation to her farm, Happy Goat Lucky Acres. The move allowed her to hold classes in a safer outdoor environment while eliminating the need to lug her Nigerian dwarf goats back and forth. It was the only full-time goat…

A MAN’S CAR is his castle. So declared the Washington Supreme Court, more or less, when it ruled last August that the city of Seattle could not impound a homeless man’s truck and require him to pay nearly $550 in towing and storage costs. Nor could the city sell the man’s truck, his sole source of shelter, at auction to pay off his debts. The justices held that Seattle’s practice violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of excessive fines and fees. It was one of the first times a state high court had applied the Excessive Fines Clause since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that it constrains the states. The ruling was significant not just for Eighth Amendment jurisprudence but also for the rights of homeless people. The court…

SHEILA JACKSON LEE, a black Democrat who has represented downtown Houston in Congress since 1995, thinks repealing marijuana prohibition is “an important racial justice measure.” Twice in the last three years, she has sponsored or co-sponsored bills that would have removed cannabis from the list of federally proscribed substances, eliminating a ban first imposed in 1937. “Thousands of men and women have suffered needlessly from the federal criminalization of marijuana,” Jackson Lee said in 2020, “particularly in communities of color.” Like the war on weed, gun control is historically rooted in racism and disproportionately harms African Americans. But on the latter issue, Jackson Lee’s agenda is decidedly different. In 2021, Jackson Lee introduced a bill that would create an elaborate nationwide system to license gun owners, register firearms, and punish…

IN FEBRUARY 1958, a distinguished liberal jurist named Learned Hand told a distinguished liberal audience something that it did not want to hear. The U.S. Supreme Court’s celebrated power of judicial review, Hand declared in a lecture at Harvard Law School, was fundamentally illegitimate. Hand was talking specifically about Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the now-landmark case declaring Kansas’ “separate but equal” public education system to be unconstitutional. Hand did not personally support the state’s racist school system. Rather, his argument was that the Supreme Court had no business passing judgment on it in the first place. Nine unelected judges, Hand said, should not be allowed to substitute their constitutional values for those of the democratically accountable officials that had created the policy. The problem with the Brown Court,…

In October, Donna Tartt’s lawyer sent a threatening letter to the creator of the podcast Once Upon a Time at Bennington College, perversely stimulating interest in the 14-part series. What could the author of the scandalously confessional novel The Secret History have left to hide about her undergraduate career? Lili Anolik has indeed gotten the goods about not just Tartt but two of her 1986 classmates: Bret Easton Ellis (Less Than Zero, American Psycho) and Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn). She weaves decades-old hot gossip into an insightful generational portrait of how upheaval in media and academia enabled fresh ways of telling stories. Anolik’s story began life as an assignment for Esquire, but podcast listeners hear the project evolve in real time—early interviews are marred with café noise and interruptions, later…

FROM JULY TO November 2021, an 11-foot puppet named Little Amal traversed eight countries and 65 towns and cities to raise awareness of refugee rights and celebrate human migration. A project of the Handspring Puppet Company and Good Chance Theatre, Little Amal, whose name means hope in Arabic, represented a 9-year-old Syrian refugee girl. Little Amal’s travels began on the Syria-Turkey border and ended in Manchester, England. She was received with warmth and vitriol alike. In Rome, she met the Pope. In Greece, protesters pelted her with stones.…

RECENT COMMENTS FROM Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell hinted that the Fed may soon get serious about hitting the monetary brakes to slow the economy. Until recently, inflation was described as transitory. But at some point, that story has to change. Price levels likely will rise into 2022. The all-item consumer price index (CPI) was up more than 5 percent on a year-over-year basis for July, August, and September. The increase for October was 6.2 percent—the largest jump since 1990. The Fed considers 2 percent inflation to be its goal. Obviously, there is a large gap between that and what we are seeing. The producer price index, a leading indicator of consumer prices, is up even more than the CPI. It shows an 8.6 percent year-over-year increase for September and…

NEARLY 107,000 AMERICANS are waiting for a lifesaving organ transplant; 90,000 of them are hoping for a kidney. The demand for organs clearly exceeds the supply. In October, transplant surgeons at New York University (NYU) took a small but significant step toward addressing this shortage with organs from other species. They transplanted a kidney from a pig that had been genetically modified to not express the carbohydrate alphagal, which occurs in all mammals except humans and other primates. Because infants develop antibodies to alpha-gal in response to gut microbiota, transplants from other mammals provoke a devastating immune rejection. The NYU surgeons attached the modified pig kidney to blood vessels in a deceased woman’s upper leg (with the permission of her family). Her bodily functions were maintained with a ventilator. Researchers…

IMAGES OF U.S. Border Patrol agents supposedly whipping Haitian migrants in Del Rio, Texas, went viral online in September. President Joe Biden responded by suspending horse patrols. But the photographs and subsequent reporting on them quickly came under fire: The “whips,” it seemed, were not actually whips. The media kerfuffle diverted attention from a very real problem: In spite of Biden’s promises to sculpt immigration policy into something more humane, the Haitian migrants in those pictures—seen running from government agents on horseback—essentially had no legal avenue to come to the United States. While the Border Patrol is far from compassionate, the root issue is the policies it is charged with enforcing. Border Patrol apprehended more than 45,000 Haitians at the U.S.-Mexico border during the fiscal year that ended on September…

Police in Bedfordshire, England, were mocked on Twitter after posting a picture of a flintlock pistol they seized during a drug raid. The photo of the pistol showed that it had no trigger and no hammer. David and Paula Knight were dumbfounded when they received a ticket for driving in a bus lane in Bath, England, about 125 miles away from their home in Dorking. The ticket included a photo from a traffic camera that was supposed to be proof of the violation. Instead, it showed a woman wearing a T-shirt with the word knitter written on it walking in the lane. Somehow, her shirt had been confused with the Knights’ license plate, which reads “KN19 TER.” Former Pulaski County, Kentucky, constable Michael “Wally” Wallace has been sentenced to 11…

CHINESE OFFICIALS HAVE started directing citizens to stock up on food amid rising vegetable, egg, and pork prices. Encouraging people to become preppers could just be how the Chinese government expresses concern about cold snaps and potential future COVID-19 lockdowns. But some fear it’s a more sinister sign, indicating that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wants people to prepare for the growing threat of war. For years, tensions between China and Taiwan remained at a simmer. But in October, China sent a record number of warplanes, 149, into the Taiwanese air defense identification zone while conducting military exercises in a province directly across the water from Taiwan. “The current situation is the most challenging since I joined the army four decades ago,” wrote Taiwan’s defense minister, Chiu Kuo-Cheng, in The…

THE MONTEREY PINE tree of California’s Central Coast has developed an ingenious method for propagating the species in a state bedeviled by irregular wildfire: The evergreen’s distinctive pine cones, sealed shut by a protective resin, open to release their seeds only in response to extreme heat. Competing brush having been newly cleared by fire, the serotinous sentinels are then better positioned to produce new growth. Elections operate on a more regular schedule than California conflagrations, and those November Tuesdays don’t always rise to the level of catastrophe for an entire political party. But the surprise 2021 victory of GOP outsider Glenn Youngkin over heavily favored Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe in Virginia’s gubernatorial race, along with a handful of other shock victories for Republicans and shock defeats for pet progressive causes,…

S.B. 8, A Texas law that took effect on September 1, 2021, bans pre-viability abortions, which is clearly unconstitutional under the U.S. Supreme Court’s precedents. To dodge legal accountability for that in federal court, Texas outsourced S.B. 8’s enforcement to private actors. The law authorizes “any person” to sue “any person” who performs or facilitates an abortion after fetal cardiac activity can be detected, which typically happens around six weeks into a pregnancy. It promises successful plaintiffs a bounty of at least $10,000, plus reimbursement of their legal fees. Because state officials are not implementing the law, Texas maintains, they cannot be sued in federal court to block its enforcement. In November, when the Supreme Court considered the viability of that dodge, Justice Brett Kavanaugh cut to the heart of…

TWO MAJOR CITIES, Seattle and Detroit, this fall approved measures aimed at protecting consumers of “entheogenic” plants and fungi from arrest and prosecution. Those new policies are part of a broader trend that began when Denver voters approved a ground-breaking 2019 ballot initiative making adult possession of psilocybin the city’s lowest law enforcement priority and prohibiting the use of public money to pursue such cases. A resolution that the Seattle City Council unanimously approved in October likewise urges police to leave psychedelic users alone, but its reach is broader than the Denver initiative’s. It covers noncommercial “cultivation” and “sharing” as well as possession, and it applies to “any living, fresh, dried, or processed plant or fungal material, including teas or powders, that may contain currently scheduled or analog psychoactive indolamines,…

IN 1999, HUMANITY tumbled down the rabbit hole of The Matrix, and the world was never the same. The film followed a group of hackers battling the sentient A.I. who had enslaved the unknowing human race inside a simulation—the titular matrix, a Descartes’ demon for the digital age. There was a smorgasbord of ’90s-era cinematic points, combining Hong Kong–style martial arts action with the geek chic of Hackers and the murderbot apocalypticism of Terminator 2. But despite the familiarity of the elements, it became a cultural event of unparalleled resonance, both long-lasting and widespread. At the time, the movie’s fandom comprised a motley crew of wildly disparate groups, each finding a slightly different meaning in its message. The nerds of the world went wild for the vision of a revolution…

Frank Herbert’s Dune is a hard novel to film and an easy one to misunderstand, as shown by the reaction to the 2021 movie version. Director Denis Villeneuve has been widely praised for turning a bizarre, lore-drenched book about a feudal fight over a desert planet filled with drug-spewing sandworms into a film enjoyable for both casual audiences and superfans of the book. Genre storytelling often elicits political criticism. One common, misplaced ideological swipe is that the film peddles “white saviorism” by having the protagonists, the Atreides clan, rescue a backward desert tribe from foreign oppressors. That critique doesn’t hold water. With a subtle touch, the film shows that the Atreides—while more sympathetic than their duplicitous, physically monstrous Harkonnen rivals—are no unalloyed heroes. They too are aristocrats using force and…

Across dozens of blockbuster movies, sequels, and spinoff TV series, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) is fundamentally about a team of superheroes who can be relied upon to save the day when humanity needs them. Eternals, the latest entry in Disney’s MCU and the franchise’s first unmitigated train wreck, introduces another team of remarkable people—the titular Eternals—and implausibly suggests that they were there all along, serving as Earth’s silent protectors for thousands of years. Frustratingly, the film’s ham-fisted attempts to explain why the Eternals—guided by official den mother Ajak (Salma Hayek) and including an all-star roster of underdeveloped leads—interfered in some human events but not others fall flat. Indeed, according to the stated goals of Arishem, the group’s alien puppet master, preventing the events of Avengers: Infinity War should have…