Innehållsförteckning för January 2017 från Reason

Editor in Chief KATHERINE MANGUWARD started at Reason as an intern in the summer of 2000. After stints at The Weekly Standard and The New York Times, she returned to begin a decade-long run at the magazine. She works in Washington, D.C. Art Director JOANNA ANDREASSON has worked as an illustrator, graphic designer, and art director in both Sweden and the U.S. While in Sweden, she helped launch Neo, a pro-market magazine. She lives in Brooklyn.  WHEN LANNY FRIEDLANDER assembled the first issue of Reason in a bedroom in his mother’s house in 1968, he was working with a limited budget and an even more limited set of tools. The name of the magazine was applied using Letraset press type—each black letter painstakingly transferred from a transparency onto the cover…

AFTER THE DRUG Enforcement Administration (DEA) announced an “emergency” ban on kratom at the end of August, a spokesman for the agency said “our goal is to make sure this is available.” In case that was not confusing enough, the spokesman, Melvin Patterson, also told The Washington Post that kratom, a pain-relieving leaf from Southeast Asia, does not belong in Schedule I, the most restrictive category under the Controlled Substances Act, even though that is where the DEA had just put it. He added that kratom, which the DEA says has “no currently accepted medical use,” is “at a point where it needs to be recognized as medicine.” The DEA apparently was surprised by the backlash against its ban notice, which included angry calls to Capitol Hill, a demonstration near…

For someone campaigning to help run Colorado’s university system, Matt Arnold didn’t seem too keen on higher education. His 2012 Republican primary campaign for a spot on the Board of Regents made headlines after the candidate admitted that he had misstated finishing his master’s thesis, maligned those who received degrees for their “pursuit of academic BS that no one cares about” by calling them “a bunch of people who hang letters after their names, but they have no useful skills,” and then publicized his opponent’s home address. In the heat of the controversy, a group called Coloradans for a Better Future (CBF) ran an ad criticizing Arnold’s campaign as “an embarrassing distraction.” This, it seems, was the moment that Arnold’s mission changed from winning political office to an antispeech vendetta.…

ALL TEXANS KNOW that Texas is the greatest state in the country. Many national observers would disagree, of course; they often do so for no apparent reason and with what I would describe as an objectively disproportionate degree of hostility. Narda Zacchino, a writer from California, is one such example. Her new book, California Comeback, sets out to explain how the state, which suffered more than most during the Great Recession, has turned things around. Her goal, actually, is even more ambitious than that. “California,” she writes, “has become the economic, social, and political model of the twenty-first century, which stands in contrast to the alternative examples of Texas, Kansas, Florida, and others hobbled by right-wing ideology.” As recently as a few years ago, California was the functional equivalent of…

THE DAY BEFORE this issue went to press, Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election. Many people—and not just Democratic partisans— experienced a sinking feeling in their stomachs as Hillary Clinton’s widely anticipated victory turned to ash. Faced, suddenly, with the prospect of a political neophyte snagging the awesome power of America’s executive office, they became anxious about what he might do with it. Welcome to the party, guys. Such intestinal-level disquietude is the lot of libertarians the morning after every election. In their shock, some on the left will act like the United States is merely experiencing a bug—as if the system that normally works so well unexpectedly glitched on November 8. That is incorrect. The problem isn’t that the wrong person won or that our mechanisms for picking…

A WHITE HOUSE council has declared junk science all too common in the criminal justice system, but the Department of Justice is refusing to implement recommendations that would increase safeguards against scientifically invalid testimony and require greater disclosure of misconduct and shoddy work. In September the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST) released a report finding “a dismaying frequency of instances of use of forensic evidence”—such as analyses of hair, bite marks, and shoe prints—“that do not pass an objective test of scientific validity.” This is not just a theoretical problem. Last year, the FBI admitted that nearly every one of the experts at its microscopic hair analysis lab had given scientifically invalid testimony. The breaches affected almost 270 cases. Of those, 32 defendants were sentenced to…

OUR YEARS AGO, Alberto’s career prospects were bleak. The 23-year-old Venezuelan had just graduated from college with a degree in computer science, but his nation’s economy was already shredded by 13 years of socialism. “There were job opportunities, but they paid like $20 a month, and we were used to traveling and buying things from abroad so we couldn’t settle for that,” his friend Luis recalls. Alberto and Luis—whose names have been changed for their own safety—teamed up to start a clothing business, but the venture floundered. Then Alberto discovered bitcoin mining. He read about it on an Argentinian gaming forum. An item posted to the site described a process of getting paid in a new internet-based currency denominated in strings of numbers and letters, in exchange for running computations…

TV WESTWORLD ROBBY SOAVE The “hosts”—humanoid robotic attractions at a massive Wild West–themed park—didn’t always seem so human, their engineer explains in the first episode of HBO’s exciting new sci-fi drama Westworld. “They repeated themselves, broke down constantly,” says their aging and melancholy inventor, portrayed by Anthony Hopkins. “A simple handshake would give them away.” That has changed in the grippingly realized future presented in this show, one that promises as much twisty world building and compelling human interest as Game of Thrones. The hosts have become real enough that guests can’t always tell the difference—at least not at first. But that’s part of the thrill: The guests can befriend the hosts, have sex with them, or even kill them if they want. Come morning, the hosts are always…

THE UNPRECEDENTEDLY BIZARRE presidential election we have just survived taught us many unpleasant lessons. Among the most startling was the extent to which, even in a year dominated by voter revulsion at the two leading candidates, the two-party mindset nonetheless continued to maintain a powerful magnetic pull on the actions and reactions of so many people. Consider Bill Maher’s treatment of Colin Kaepernick. The San Francisco 49ers backup quarterback created a national stir in August by refusing to stand for the National Anthem, explaining: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color....There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.” There were follow-up controversies about Kaepernick wearing…

IT’S NOT EVERY day that libertarians find themselves cheering for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the powerful D.C. agency responsible for enforcing U.S. antitrust laws. But that day came on October 14, 2014, when the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of North Carolina Board of Dental Examiners v. Federal Trade Commission. At issue was whether the dental board, a state agency largely staffed and controlled by licensed, practicing dentists, was guilty of using public power for personal gain when it prevented non-dentists from competing in the state’s lucrative teeth-whitening market. In February 2015 the Court ruled against the board’s “private self-dealing,” with Justice Anthony Kennedy declaring that “active market participants cannot be allowed to regulate their own markets free from antitrust accountability.” It was a resounding…

ICAME OF AGE in the era of gangsta rap. As a kid, I was baffled by the “clean” versions of songs —the radio edits of Eazy-E’s “Eazy Duz It” and Dr. Dre’s “Nothin’ But a G Thang”— which were basically just the “dirty” versions with the expletives bleeped out. I certainly knew exactly what words were being removed. Why, I wondered, was the bleeping sufficient to make the song radio-friendly? My parents raised me not to use “bad” language, but late in elementary school my friends and I learned both how to curse and how to turn off our cursing when grown-ups were around. Just as I wasn’t supposed to curse around adults, I was, in some sense, expected to curse around my friends. Such experiences are explained in Michael…

20 YEARS AGO January 1997 “In a representative government, who watches the watchers is neither a rhetorical question nor an easy riddle to solve. Although outside groups can exercise some oversight, the unsettling truth is that, to a considerable degree, the watchers must be able to watch themselves.” NICK GILLESPIE “Out of Sight, Out of Hand?” “Americans have always had mixed feelings about psychoactive substances. To deal with our ambivalence, we tend to divide drugs into neat categories: good and bad, legal and illegal, therapeutic and recreational. We are not comfortable with drugs that straddle categories, as the opioids do.” JACOB SULLUM “No Relief in Sight” 30 YEARS AGO January 1987 “Until the satellite dish came along, communications technologies had always spread from population centers outward. But the dish revolution…