Innehållsförteckning för June 2020 från Reason

ANOTHER ABORTION CASE is now in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court. At issue in June Medical Services v. Russo is the constitutionality of a Louisiana law that requires physicians who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at local hospitals. According to the state, the law serves a valid health and safety purpose and should be upheld as a legitimate exercise of government power. According to the legal challengers, the law is a bogus regulation whose only purpose is to drive lawful abortion providers out of business. The Supreme Court decided a nearly identical case in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (2016), striking down a Texas law requiring physicians who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at local hospitals on the grounds that the law conferred no “medical benefits…

THE ADMINISTRATION OF President Donald Trump promised to “restore deterrence” against Iran when it assassinated Iranian spymaster Gen. Qassem Soleimani outside Baghdad International Airport on January 3. But months later, the Iraqi militias formerly armed, trained, and advised by Soleimani seem undeterred, and American troops in Iraq find themselves in an escalating cycle of conflict with no end in sight. In March, militia forces fired a barrage of Katyusha rockets at Camp Taji, killing a U.S. Army soldier, a U.S. Air Force airman, and a British servicewoman. A local militia close to Iranian intelligence services called Kata’ib Hezbollah appeared to take credit for the attack in a social media diatribe invoking the “right to resist” America’s “malicious project of occupation.” American forces responded with what the Pentagon calls “precision defensive…

“THESE DAYS,” CHARLES Glover’s lawyers noted in a Supreme Court brief last year, “traffic safety is so pervasively regulated that it is difficult to drive on a regular basis without violating some law. When an officer observes an infraction—any infraction—he can initiate a traffic stop.” Glover was challenging the police practice of automatically stopping cars that are registered to drivers whose licenses have been suspended. While the assumption that the registered owner is behind the wheel might seem reasonable, it could prove to be wrong in the vast majority of cases, since those cars can be legally driven by relatives, friends, and neighbors. Condoning such traffic stops, as Kansas urged the justices to do in a case they heard last November, therefore would expose many drivers to the constant threat…

TV UGLY DELICIOUS LIZ WOLFE In “As the Meat Turns,” the last episode of Ugly Delicious’s second season on Netflix, chef David Chang explores Levantine, Arabian Gulf, and Iranian food. Chang doesn’t explicitly say so, but the episode seems like a paean to cultural appropriation: It shows Oaxacan Angelenos experimenting with Lebanese-Mexican cuisine (chorizo kebabs, black bean hummus, and tahini salsa verde) and Lebanese brothers making “the most disrespectful sandwich ever created”—bacon, egg, and cheese Levantine flatbread, with the added bastardizing influence of Hot Cheetos. The result is tasty but so anti-traditional that it’s scorned by oldtimers in their Dearborn, Michigan, immigrant community. (The critics eventually became regulars, and their creation is now copied in Beirut.) Baker Reem Assil praises Mexicans’ Lebanese shawarma appropriation (tacos al pastor), and in her…

IN 2009, WISCONSINITE Todd Bol created the first “Little Free Library”: a free-standing book pantry, little bigger than a birdhouse, where passersby can take and leave books at will. The nonprofit Bol founded estimates that in the decade since, fans of the idea have independently constructed 100,000 little libraries in more than 100 countries. During the coronavirus pandemic, those libraries are serving a new purpose: People have started replacing books with nonperishable foods and toiletries for their needy neighbors…

“I PROMISE YOU, one day you will say, first they came after conservatives, and I said nothing,” opined Dennis Prager at a Senate hearing in July, invoking the famous Holocaust poem by Martin Niemöller. In this case, they refers not to Nazis but to YouTube, which Prager contends is censoring his business. The right-leaning radio host runs Prager University, also known as PragerU, a nonprofit that publishes videos to YouTube, a Google subsidiary. Prager sued the platform in 2019 after YouTube classified some of its videos in a way that hid them from the 1.5 percent of users who had opted into “restricted mode,” which screens out content with mature themes. While it’s worth debating whether YouTube should handle political content identically to violent and sexually suggestive content, PragerU’s suit…

“ZIMBABWEANS ARE HEARTBREAKERS, trust you me,” drawls Prince Matsika as he reworks a hand-strung necklace in front of his stall at an outdoor city market. People bustle by, but few even glance at the beaded trinkets and wooden crafts crowded onto tables and baskets. With rapidly rising inflation and food shortages across the country, now only the wealthy and foreign tourists can afford his wares. “Even if [tourists] come, they would think our prices are ridiculous,” Matsika says. He’s selling a piece of his own design for $20, a king’s ransom for the developing world. “But we are trying to earn that little money,” he explains, even though “it doesn’t really have serious value around here.” It is January, and the coronavirus epidemic in China has just begun making headlines…

AFTER THE OREGON Supreme Court imposed new limits on police authority to grill drivers during routine traffic stops last year, Bobbin Singh of the Oregon Justice Resource Center called the decision “incredibly important for communities of color.” While white drivers may assume that getting a ticket is the worst thing that can happen when they’re pulled over for a traffic violation, Singh told Oregon Public Radio, “there’s not really any expectation of where the limits are” when people with darker complexions find themselves in the same situation. Research confirms the impression that racial minorities tend to be treated differently during traffic stops. A 2018 analysis of stops in Portland, Oregon, found that black drivers were subjected to discretionary searches 9 percent of the time, compared to a rate of 3…

THEY SAY A lie will go ’round the world while truth is pulling its boots on, but today’s debates over vaping may make you wonder if truth should even bother tying its laces. No matter how thoroughly they’ve been debunked, scare stories about the widespread lethality of e-cigarettes keep seizing the imaginations of journalists, politicians, and concerned parents. The latest example is Quit Vaping, a new book by the Los Angeles–based “certified intervention specialist” Brad Lamm. Just looking at the front cover, you can see signs that Lamm’s approach may be less than scientifically rigorous. There’s the line boasting a foreword by Mehmet Oz, better known as Dr. Oz, a TV host notorious for promoting purportedly miraculous dietary supplements. Then there’s the subtitle: Your Four-Step, 28-Day Program To Stop Smoking…

TO JUDGE BY conversations with friends and acquaintances over the years, my family isn’t the only one to treat the gifting of a knife as a rite of passage. It’s an acknowledgment that the recipient has passed a milestone, having become sufficiently familiar with spatial relationships and mortality to avoid severing anything too terribly important from themselves or others. It’s also the entrusting of a reliable tool, perhaps the most useful one that humans have invented and can own. I no longer have the first knife I received—a somewhat unwieldy device that included a fork and spoon—but I still own the Colonial Forest Master camp knife that I bought on an elementary school field trip to Bushkill Falls (“the Niagara of Pennsylvania”). My classmates and I pretty much cleaned out…

TWO AND A half weeks after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) slammed Michael Bloomberg for trying to “buy this election,” the former New York City mayor left the presidential race, having spent $570 million of his own money to win 58 delegates—3 percent of the number needed to secure the Democratic nomination. Tom Steyer, the other billionaire in the race, did even worse, abandoning his campaign after spending more than $250 million and earning zero delegates. Those spectacular failures should give pause to the politicians and activists who think money poses such a grave threat to democracy that the Constitution must be amended to authorize limits on campaign spending. Bloomberg and Steyer—who outspent former Vice President Joe Biden by factors of more than eight and nearly four, respectively—demonstrated that no amount…

Red Tape Stymied Testing and Made the Coronavirus Pandemic Worse RONALD BAILEY THE UNITED STATES is home to the most innovative biotech companies and university research laboratories in the world. That should have provided us with a huge advantage with respect to detecting and monitoring emerging cases of COVID-19 caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Public health officials had the opportunity to slow, if not contain, the outbreak: By tracing the contacts of diagnosed people and quarantining those who in turn tested positive, they could have severed the person-toperson chains of disease transmission. South Korea demonstrates that such a campaign can work. While both countries detected their first cases of COVID-19 on January 20, the trajectories in the U.S. and South Korea have since sharply diverged. By the beginning of March,…

Officials at Florida’s Love Grove Elementary School had Martina Falk’s 6-year-old daughter, Nadia, involuntarily committed to a mental institution for two days after the girl allegedly threw a tantrum at school and threw chairs. Body camera footage shows that two deputies called to transport the child were skeptical about the assignment and that the girl was well-behaved and chatty with them. One of the deputies even called her “very pleasant,” although that didn’t stop them from taking her away. Warren, Rhode Island, Police Detective Michael Clancy has retired after more than 33 years on the force. He spent the last 22 of those years on paid sick leave. State law requires that firefighters and police officers who are sick receive their full pay and benefits. Clancy claims a staph infection…