Innehållsförteckning för March 2017 från Reason

AS 2016 CAME to a close, dictionary makers Merriam-Webster posted a pathetic little tweet—a cry for help, really—that quickly went viral: “‘Fascism’ is still our #1 lookup. # of lookups = how we choose our Word of the Year. There’s still time to look something else up.” Why the sudden interest? As Donald Trump wrapped up the Republican nomination and then the presidential election, political commentators and opinionated uncles at dinner parties started tossing around this vintage 20th century political terminology with abandon. Which caused a bunch of intrepid dictionary searchers to wonder: Here at the dawning of the Trump era, does fascism mean what we think it means? In a technical sense, the word is a pretty good descriptor for what we’ve seen of Trump’s economic policy so far.…

BIG CITIES ARE great places if you’re looking for work, stimulation, love, or a new life. But the density that fosters excitement and opportunity also erodes security and identity. Amid the crush of strangers, a single person can feel violated or insignificant. So city dwellers are quick to adopt any technology suitable for carving out personal space in public. Before the smartphone or the hoodie, the iPod or the Walkman—even before the automobile—that technology was the umbrella. It gave its bearer space and a semblance of privacy. Like the smartphone and the music player, it also provided ample material for humorists, social critics, and arbiters of manners. In 1891, an anonymous Chicago Daily Tribune columnist called the umbrella “worse than a Gatling.” Average women, the writer declared, “have not yet…

IN APRIL 2015, Jamycheal Mitchell, 24, was accused of stealing $5 worth of snacks from a convenience store. A Virginia judge ordered Mitchell, who had been prescribed schizophrenia medication, to be sent to a psychiatric hospital, but there were no open hospital beds, so he was put behind bars instead. Five months later, Mitchell was found dead in his cell at the Hampton Roads jail, 36 pounds lighter and lying in a urine-soaked bed, according to his family. In December, the Justice Department launched an investigation into civil rights violations in that facility. “All prisoners, including those with mental illness, have a constitutional right to receive necessary medical care, treatment and services,” Assistant Attorney General Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said in a statement. If…

ON FEBRUARY 10, 2016, the Indiana-based furnace company Carrier announced that it would close two factories in the U.S.—one in Indianapolis and one in Huntington— and shift production to Mexico. Just three days later, presidential longshot Donald Trump bragged on Twitter: “I am the only one who can fix this. Very sad. Will not happen under my watch!” Then on April 20, just 13 days before the May 3 Indiana primary, he promised to impose stiff taxes on companies that moved jobs out of the country, singling out Carrier as part of the problem. On July 12, he attacked Carrier again. On November 8, of course, Trump won the presidential election. Less than three weeks later, on Thanksgiving, he tweeted that he was “working hard” to keep the plant in…

Y PARENTS OPENED my first savings account for me when I was seven,” Lisa Servon writes at the beginning of The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives. “The teller gave me a green Pulaski [Savings and Loan] passbook with gold lettering. It made me feel important, like I’d crossed some threshold and joined a club that bigger kids and grownups got to be a part of.” Clearly nostalgic for her rite of passage, Servon, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania, sets out to discover why that experience has become alien to so many modern Americans, and what practices and services they’ve adopted to replace banks in meeting their financial needs. She speaks with experts, entrepreneurs, and people trying to make ends…

Culinary cable celebrity Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown on cnn has covered a lot of territory, including a recent surprise interview with Barack Obama over noodles in Hanoi. More than 15 years after his best-selling memoir Kitchen Confidential gutted New York’s gastronomical underbelly, the former junkie and chef continues to find new ways to piss off nearly everone. Q: You’re a liberal. What should liberals be critiquing their own side for? A: There’s just so much. I hate the term political correctness, the way in which speech that is found to be unpleasant or offensive is often banned from universities. Which is exactly where speech that is potentially hurtful and offensive should be heard. The way we demonize comedians for use of language or terminology is unspeakable. Because that’s exactly what…

IN THE 1997 case Printz v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional for the federal government to direct state and local law enforcement officers to enforce certain provisions of the 1993 Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. “The Federal Government may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems,” the late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his majority opinion, “nor command the States’ officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program.” In short, Printz held, the feds may not commandeer the states for federal purposes. At the time it was decided, Printz was criticized by many liberals for being a “conservative” decision that promoted states’ rights at the expense of duly enacted national reforms. In other words, they saw…

THE UNITED KINGDOM’S Gangmasters and Labour Abuse Authority is not part of an agency tasked with fighting terrorism. It’s a licensing body that “regulates businesses who provide workers to the fresh produce supply chain and horticulture industry, to make sure they meet the employment standards required by law,” according to its mission statement. Nevertheless, under a new mass surveillance law, high-ranking officials in this agency will have as much access to the private internet information of British citizens as agencies that actually do fight terrorism. So will officials in the U.K.’s Department of Health, its Food Standards Agency, and its Gambling Commission, along with dozens of other government bodies. This is the outcome of the recent passage of the Investigatory Powers Act, also known by critics as the Snooper’s Charter.…

GOOGLE’S PARENT COMPANY, Alphabet, revealed in December that an unaccompanied blind man had successfully traveled around Austin, Texas, in one of the company’s cars, which had neither a steering wheel nor floor pedals. That same month, Alphabet announced that it is spinning off its self-driving vehicle technology into a new division called Waymo. Also in December, Uber launched an experimental self-driving ride-sharing service in San Francisco. The future is rushing toward us. Unfortunately, the government wants to help. In the case of Uber, the California Department of Motor Vehicles (dmv) was so eager to help that it ordered the company to shut down its service, declaring that its regulations “clearly establish that an autonomous vehicle may be tested on public roads only if the vehicle manufacturer, including anyone that installs…

ANYONE WITH A Facebook account this year likely witnessed a barrage of false, conspiracy- laden headlines. My news feed informed me that Hillary Clinton was gravely ill, was already dead, had a body double, and murdered dozens of people. (It’s amazing what you can learn when you have the right friends.) I also found out that President Barack Obama had worked his way through college as a gay prostitute. (Who could blame him? Columbia is very expensive!) Reeling after November’s unexpected loss to Donald Trump, Democrats have taken to blaming such “fake news” for that outcome. Trump won, the argument goes, because Americans were exposed to inaccurate information; if only they’d had the right info from the right people, voters would have made better choices. A Washington Post piece took…

FILM HACKSAW RIDGE STEPHANIE SLADE It features grisly, horrifying battlefield carnage shot in high definition, with a lead who refuses to pick up a gun because God says killing is wrong. Yet Hacksaw Ridge is not an anti-war movie. Andrew Garfield stars as Desmond Doss, the real-life Army medic who became the first conscientious objector to be awarded a Medal of Honor. In the second half of the film, he’s shown crawling through muck to save his injured fellow soldiers. One by one, he lowers 75 men down a cliff to safety, enabling his company to fight another day and eventually take the ridge from Japan. He is, in other words, an integral part of the military machine. But Doss would not have made it to Okinawa at all if…

Gale Griffin and Wendell Harvey spent two and a half months in an Arkansas jail after drug field tests falsely showed that the baking soda they had in the truck they were driving was cocaine. The duo was eventually freed after a public defender insisted on an actual lab test. But they say their truck was damaged when they got it back and that the arrest cost them their security clearance, which means they can no longer do their job transporting explosives for the government. Just three months after the Rio Olympics ended, the $19 million golf course built for the games is rarely used, and the company responsible for its upkeep has not been paid by the government for two months. Few Brazilians golf, but organizers of the event…

“WE’RE BOTH VERY cautious,” says Amy Thornborrow of herself and her husband. “He’s actually more so.” So when their son brought home a project from his Menlo Park, California, school asking students to do something on their own for the first time, she wasn’t sure her husband would be up for it. But she took a chance and placed the information packet where he would see it. And then? “He did a 180!” Thornborrow says. “He liked it so much that he cut out a little quote from it and put it on the kitchen cabinet.” That quote—“All the worry in the world doesn’t prevent death. It prevents life”—sums up the philosophy of Free- Range Kids, the movement I founded after becoming fed up with how unnecessarily terrified we’ve become…

IN HIS FIRST address as president-elect, Donald Trump repeated his campaign promise to invest in America’s infrastructure. “We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals,” he said. “We’re going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.” His plan is for the federal government to entice private investors with $137 billion in tax credits. The idea is that this will unleash up to $1 trillion worth of infrastructure investment over 10 years, spur economic growth, and create countless American jobs. Politicians’ love affair with infrastructure spending isn’t new. Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and many before them have…

WHEN JOHN STOSSEL was diagnosed with lung cancer in April, he announced it in the most characteristic way possible: He dashed off a column from his hospital bed with a quickie economic analysis of why nurses don’t care when your outof- date heart monitor beeps all night long. (The explanation involved the word sclerotic and the phrase “hospitals are largely socialist bureaucracies.”) Stossel, 69, is now cancer-free and ready to move on to the next thing. In recent years, the man with the moustache has developed an alarming habit of giving away the Emmys he won as a consumer reporter, saying he considers them ill-gotten gains; they all predate his conversation to libertarianism and the subsequent realignment of his career to preach the gospel of free markets and consumer choice.…

T THE 1996 Republican convention, Newt Gingrich gave what the editors of The Weekly Standard condemned as “the worst and most embarrassing speech of his career.” Pulling Olympic gold medalist Kent Steffes up on stage, the speaker of the House and leader of the Republican Revolution sang the praises of the unplanned creativity that had produced...beach volleyball. “There’s a whole new world of opportunity opening up that didn’t exist 30 or 50 years ago—and no bureaucrat would have invented it,” he said. “That’s what freedom is all about.” Yikes. Newt obviously didn’t get the memo. Conservatives weren’t supposed to celebrate beach volleyball. They were supposed to be serious, to praise hard work, self-restraint, and small-town virtues—“God, family, honor, duty, country,” as nominee Bob Dole said in his convention speech. Not…