Innehållsförteckning för October 2024 från Reason

FORENSIC EVIDENCE CAN be an important tool in solving and prosecuting sexual assault cases, but some victims don’t feel comfortable coming forward to police or medical examiners right away. Enter Leda Health, a company selling at-home evidence collection kits. “Collect time sensitive DNA after sexual assault,” the company advertises. Typically, rape kits—as they are unfortunately called—are administered by medical professionals. With Leda’s “early evidence kits,” people collect potential DNA themselves and send it off to be processed by the company’s partner labs. But some states think Leda is overselling what its product can do for a victim. “These kits essentially offer false promises to consumers by misleading them to think evidence collected privately at home can result in a criminal conviction—that is yet to have happened anywhere with the use…

“GUILTY,” PRONOUNCED THE May 31, 2024, Associated Press headline: “Trump Becomes First Former US President Convicted of Felony Crimes.” Just 11 days later, The New York Times blazoned, “Jury Finds Hunter Biden Guilty of 3 Felonies.” Regardless of what politicians and pundits performatively proclaim, Republicans and Democrats share some common ground. The term felony derives from the Old French felonie, which meant wickedness or treachery. That in turn came from the Medieval Latin term felonia, with similar connotations, though with a melodious flow that could have placed it on the top baby names of 2023 beside Olivia, Amelia, Sophia, and Aria. The word’s roots go further back to the Proto-Germanic word fel, which meant “to deceive” or “to betray.” From its inception, the word has been associated with severe moral…

THERE’S A SCENE in Richard Linklater’s 2004 film, Before Sunset, where protagonists Jesse and Céline drift past Notre Dame on a Paris riverboat. Taken by the cathedral’s beauty, Jesse tells a story of its neardestruction. Occupying Nazis filled Notre Dame with explosives and intended to blow it up during World War II, he says, but the German soldier tasked with detonating the cathedral couldn’t bring himself to do it. “That’s a great story. But you have to think that Notre Dame will be gone one day,” Céline replies. “There used to be another church, a cathedral, at the same [spot]. Right there.” The story is exaggerated. But the lesson is on display in Olomouc, an ancient city tucked away in the leafy eastern Czech Republic. The inner city’s crown jewel…

IN JUNE 2024, Anthony Fauci appeared before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic for a contentious confrontation with congressional Republicans. But it opened on what might have sounded like an amicable note, as the subcommittee’s chairman, Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R–Ohio), played up Fauci’s sainted status: “There were drinks named after you. You got bobbleheads made in your likeness. You were on the cover of Vogue. You threw out the first pitch at a Washington Nationals game.” Fauci was the closest thing the world of public health had to a rock star. For nearly 40 years prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Fauci had served as the influential but unassuming director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), a subsidiary of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)…

ROSE WILDER LANE—novelist, journalist, founding mother of the modern libertarian movement, and very likely uncredited co-author of her mother Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie books—was also, less famously, a columnist in the early 1940s for the largest black newspaper in the United States. Lane first learned about The Pittsburgh Courier in spring 1941 from a black woman who worked for her. After taking out a subscription, she sent a fan letter and an article submission to Joel A. Rogers, one of the paper’s columnists. Rogers, a selftaught popularizer of black history, was instrumental in getting her hired as a regular contributor. She wrote for the paper from 1942 to 1945, and the authors of this article have compiled most of her Courier columns in a forthcoming book, titled…

TV HACKS JOE LANCASTER The Max series Hacks hilariously examines gender and aging in show business, alongside the pitfalls of cancel culture. In the show’s first episode, the young comedy writer Ava (Hannah Einbinder) finds herself toxically unemployable after the internet commentariat deems one of her well-intentioned tweets homophobic. Desperate, she takes a job writing for Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), a legendary (read: old) Vegas comedienne who is obscenely wealthy but creatively bored. The characters clash—uberwoke Ava bristles against Deborah’s personally insulting comedy style while Deborah laments that nobody can take a joke anymore—but they eventually become friends. In the recently concluded third season, Deborah’s insensitive past stand-up sets go viral and threaten to derail her prospects of hosting a network talk show. Ava is sympathetic to her friend but…

“I’LL DO WHAT they want, but I’m not going to do it their way,” Etienne Constable told The Washington Post after the city of Seaside, California, ordered him to build a fence to cover the boat parked in his driveway. In July 2023, Constable received a letter from the city, saying the municipal code requires that boats be hidden by a 6-foot fence. Threatened with a citation and fine, Constable enlisted the help of his neighbor, muralist and graphic artist Hanif Wondir, to paint the fence to look exactly like the space it was built to cover up.…

IN JUNE, LOUISIANA Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, signed a bill mandating that all public school classrooms display a poster of the Ten Commandments. Just over a week later, Oklahoma’s State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters declared that “every teacher, every classroom in the state will have a Bible in the classroom and will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom,” later telling PBS News Hour, “the separation of church and state appears nowhere in the Declaration of Independence or Constitution.” Since 2023, four states have attempted to mandate or are considering legislation mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in public school classrooms. Arizona legislators actually passed a Ten Commandments mandate, but Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs ultimately vetoed the bill. In Utah, lawmakers passed a watered-down version of…

IN 1984, THE Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling in favor of an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule stemming from the Clean Air Act. The EPA rule allowed states to treat all pollution from a unified industrial group as a singular pollution source for regulatory purposes. A cohort of environmental groups challenged the rule, arguing that it allowed pollution-emitting devices to operate that would not have passed regulatory muster considered on their own. It was a technical exercise in statutory interpretation—but the case’s long-term impact had little to do with pollution or the intricacies of the Clean Air Act. Embedded in that decision, Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., was a small revolution in administrative law. Under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), which governs regulatory agencies, courts are…

“WE FACE UNPRECEDENTED challenges to the reliability of our nation’s electrical system.” That was the testimony of Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) chairman Willie L. Phillips in a May 4, 2023, hearing of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. FERC is the agency that regulates the interstate transmission and wholesale of electricity, and it is sounding the alarm about our electrical grid. Until recently, Americans took electri cal grid reliability for granted. “The average U.S. customer loses power less than two times per year for a total of less than five hours, which represents 99.95 percent reli ability,” notes National Renewable Energy Laboratory grid analyst Paul Denholm. But that may be changing. Former FERC Commissioner James Danly pointed out during the hearing that a large part…

THE PSYCHEDELIC ASSEMBLY attracts a certain type of clientele. The walls of the group’s Manhattan meeting space are lined with LSD blotter art and Alice in Wonderland paraphernalia. Rows of bookshelves are filled with esoteric titles on tryptamines, DMT entities, and magic-mushroom alchemy. The people who gather there converse easily on topics ranging from visits with Mother Ayahuasca in the jungles of Peru to tips for throwing a successful group MDMA experience. Suffice to say, those who find their way there tend to check certain boxes: liberal, Northeastern, experienced with mindaltering substances. They do not tend to be politically and religiously conservative lawmen from one of the reddest states in the U.S. But on a sunny morning in May, that’s exactly who walked in: Bryan Hubbard, an attorney fresh from…

IN 1845 THE editor of the New York Evening Post, William Cullen Bryant, traveled to England. In America, Bryant’s paper was famous for its radical support of free trade, free banking, international peace, and the abolition of slavery. In Europe, he was America’s most famous and accomplished poet—and a strong ally to Richard Cobden in the Anti–Corn Law League’s war to bring down the price of bread by rolling back tariffs. The movement against the Corn Laws was reaching a fever pitch: a tipping point toward free trade and peace in the world’s premier empire, with repercussions that could ripple around the globe. The next year, Prime Minister Robert Peel buckled under the pressure and Parliament repealed the hated trade barriers. Free traders gained their greatest victory to date, Britons…

15 YEARS AGO October 2009 “The Federal Reserve’s monetary base statistics show that in the last year the money in circulation has increased far faster than at any other point in American history. Thus, by the dictionary definition, we have inflation. But prices have been relatively stable because downward recessionary pressures are currently counterbalancing the upward pressures of the expanded money supply. The new money has been largely parked in financial institutions. Thanks to government prodding and aggressive stimuli, it will soon be showered on the economy at large. When the tide rolls in, there will be more money chasing fewer goods. (Recessions reduce the supply of things.) The result: higher prices.” PETER SCHIFF “Inflation Returns!” “Because technologists have yet to figure out how to break government monopolies on levying…

PODCASTER AND FORMER Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe stars in Something to Stand For, a patriotic documentary film in which he tells unknown stories about legendary figures in American history. Reason’s Nick Gillespie spoke with Rowe about the film, his influences, and what to think about the decline of patriotism. Q: Tell us about Something to Stand For. A: Really all I did was take the format that worked well on the podcast, which was to tell these historical tales through the lens of a mystery while stealing shamelessly from the late, great Paul Harvey. We visited some monuments and memorials, and every few minutes you get another story, another mystery, something you didn’t know about somebody you do. Q: The storytelling is very engaging, but there’s always a reveal…

Source images: Chevron, Natural Resources Defense Council EFFORTS TO MAKE MDMA legally available as a psychotherapeutic catalyst hit a daunting roadblock in August. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) declined to approve a new drug application submitted in February by Lykos Therapeutics, a company created by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). The FDA was following the recommendation of an advisory panel that had expressed several concerns about two Phase 3 studies of MDMA’s safety and effectiveness in treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), including inadvertent unblinding of subjects, potential underreporting of adverse events, and allegedly inadequate assessment of MDMA’s abuse potential. The FDA requested an additional Phase 3 trial, which would take years and millions of dollars. Lykos described that request as “deeply disappointing,” saying it hoped existing evidence…

IN THE USUAL liberal account, President Donald Trump reawakened America’s atavistic, bigoted side, driving both the Republican Party and the United States to the right. In the usual conservative retort, it’s the left that became more extreme in the 2010s, adopting radical views on race and gender that meant a moderate could seem to be moving rightward while in fact he was standing still. But there is a third possibility: that liberals spent the decade moving leftward on questions of race and sexual orientation—and so did conservatives. And while the so-called Great Awokening has cooled somewhat since Joe Biden succeeded Trump as president, Republicans may have quietly continued to trend leftward on racial issues. To be clear: I am speaking of public opinion here, not public officials or public policy.…

AUDRA WORLOW THINKS of herself as prolife. A 32-year-old, married stay-at-home mom in Ohio, Worlow takes her Catholic faith seriously. She’s against both in vitro fertilization (IVF), which she calls “another form of eugenics,” and surrogacy. She thinks abortion is not only harmful to babies but also “psychologically damaging to women.” Yet in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, Worlow isn’t excited about states’ new ability to ban abortion at any point in pregnancy. She still wants to see an end to abortion. “I just don’t know if the legal system is the right route to go with this,” she tells Reason. “I’m worried that babies and women are going to die.” She points to the Brittany Watts…

IN HIS CLASSIC book Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History, the anthropologist Thomas Barfield argued that Afghan society had seen stability only when its rulers respected the diversity of the country’s com munities and allowed them some space to govern them selves. In Shadow Empires: An Alternative Imperial History, Barfield extends this argument to empires throughout his tory. The most important ingredient in imperial longevity, he argues, wasn’t brutality; it was respect for pluralism. The empires whose rules had more room for cultural difference were the empires more likely to thrive. To be an empire, by Barfield’s definition, a state must have at least 5 million square kilometers and at least 40 million people. Within those criteria, he distinguishes two groups. Endogenous empires are created through a process of…