ReasonNovember 2025的目錄

HE LOOKED YOUNG, standing with his feet apart on the upper level of the Dupont Circle Metro station, half in shadow and head to toe in camo. A National Guard member. And in his hand: a tiny packet of Cheetos. He dug into the crinkly bag for the last crumbs as commuters streamed past—ignoring him, pretending not to notice, or nervously pretending they weren’t pretending. You’re not allowed to eat in the D.C. Metro. It’s a rule locals tend to take oddly seriously, like standing on the right of the escalator. But the guardsman wasn’t from here. He didn’t know the rules. He was just a guy from South Carolina or Mississippi or Ohio having a quick snack in a place where he has no business being. “I am not…

UNREASONABLY STRICT RADIATION exposure limits are holding back nuclear power development, according to a July report from Idaho National Laboratory (INL) researchers. The report challenges the current model for radiation exposure, arguing that recent evidence shows it is biologically unwarranted. The current linear no-threshold approach assumes any amount of radiation—even minuscule—increases cancer risk in direct proportion to the dose, with no safe threshold. This model underpins the Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules requiring exposures to be kept “as low as reasonably achievable,” which has effectively shifted to “as low as possible.” Americans, on average, are exposed to about 620 millirems of radiation annually—roughly half from natural sources such as soil, rocks, radon gas, and cosmic rays, and half from medical imaging. The Commission acknowledges that this amount “has not been shown…

WHEN MOUNTAIN RUNNER Michelino Sunseri climbed and descended Wyoming’s Grand Teton in record time last year, he posted information about his route on social media. According to the Justice Department, Sunseri thereby implicated himself in a federal misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail. The National Park Service, which initially recommended that Sunseri be prosecuted for his seemingly inadvertent use of an unapproved trail, reconsidered that referral in May. But the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Wyoming was unfazed. Its puzzling prosecutorial persistence provoked criticism from two members of the House Judiciary Committee, who said it epitomized “the problem of overcriminalization.” Reps. Harriet Hageman (R–Wyo.) and Andy Biggs (R–Ariz.) suggested that Sunseri’s prosecution violated President Donald Trump’s May 9 executive order urging restraint in deploying criminal penalties for regulatory…

THE FEELING WILL be familiar to many who have visited the great cities of history: I had come to Athens for the first time and made a pilgrimage to its democratic assembly, Plato’s Academy, and Aristotle’s Lyceum. And it left me with a sense of profound sadness. Here were the scenes of some of the most extraordinary moments in human history, and all that was left was rubble, garbage, and dog waste. Instead of bustling creativity, there was silence, interrupted only by the odd intoxicated passerby. To be sure, I also experienced spectacular beauty in Athens, such as the grand monuments on the Acropolis. But even that was a museum to bygone glory. This used to be the place around which the world revolved, and now it’s a collection of…

ROSE WILDER LANE, one of the founding mothers of modern libertarianism, and Frank Meyer, one of the founding fathers of modern conservatism, spent a decade engaged in friendly debate. They both did some work for the Volker Fund, a major source of funding for libertarian scholarship in the 1950s; Volker officer Richard Cornuelle brought Lane to the Meyer home once while passing through Woodstock, New York. The relationship grew from there, with Lane and Meyer trading detailed letters and occasional phone calls from 1953 to 1962. Their 60 or so letters resurfaced when a trove of tens of thousands of documents saved by Meyer turned up in an Altoona, Pennsylvania, warehouse in 2022. Those papers were a large part of the source material for my book The Man Who Invented…

THE IDEA OF “national security” is so ubiquitous that it is hard to imagine an American political culture without it. But as the Cambridge historian Andrew Preston shows in Total Defense: The New Deal and the Invention of National Security, the concept and its universal usage have not always been with us. They have a history firmly rooted in New Deal liberalism, its anxieties about economic insecurity at home, and its fears of illiberal forces abroad. Despite the framing suggested by the subtitle, this wellargued and often provocative book stretches from the 19th century through the early Cold War. Preston’s purpose, he writes, is “to find the source of the idea, now axiomatic, that the security of the United States often had little to do with the immediate safety of…

5 YEARS AGO November 2020 “As predicted by the vast majority of trade economists, [President Donald] Trump’s tariffs have failed in their stated intent to prop up domestic producers and jobs, triggered reciprocal actions that have punished American exporters, and created a cottage industry of lobbying in Washington for exemptions.” MATT WELCH “The Case Against Trump: Donald Trump Is an Enemy of Freedom” “[Joe] Biden’s career was built on the politics of panics. In the 1990s, he supported a Trumplike crackdown on illegal immigration, including a border fence and expedited removals, that resembled tactics he now deplores. A decade later, he was still calling for more border barriers, saying employers who hire unauthorized residents should go to prison, opposing driver’s licenses for people who can’t prove their citizenship, and condemning ‘sanctuary…

IN 2023, CALIFORNIA passed a law requiring a $20 per hour minimum wage for all fastfood restaurants with more than 60 locations nationwide. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom portrayed the union-supported law as pro-worker, saying it moved the state “one step closer to fairer wages.” Other California politicians supporting the law claimed it would provide a path to economic security for lower-income workers, enabling them to more assuredly put food on the table. “Sacrifice, dedication, and the power of a government who serves its people is what got us to this moment,” said then-Assemblymember Chris Holden (D– Pasadena). But the carve-out for smaller chains was an implicit acknowledgment that the law would come with costs—costs that smaller businesses with slimmer margins presumably could not afford. New research suggests that the mandate…

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS evolving fast. Large language models such as ChatGPT and Gemini can write papers and code, make quirky art, and attempt deep research and complex problem-solving. Now, AI is venturing into a more personal role: therapist. With loneliness on the rise and many Americans struggling with mental health, entrepreneurs such as Neil Parikh, co-founder of the AI therapy program Ash, argue that AI can help when traditional therapy is inaccessible. “Hey, Ash, our conversation earlier was super helpful. The thought’s still there, but it’s not bothering me nearly as much as it was before,” Parikh says into his phone in a video demonstrating the tool’s therapeutic know-how. “I’m glad to hear,” a calming female voice replies. “That’s the power of cognitive diffusion. The thought didn’t disappear, but you…

IF YOU LOVE walking, Stockholm was built just for you. Spread across 14 islands linked by bridges, the city brims with waterfront promenades, ferries gliding through inlets, the whir of bicycle wheels, and pedestrians spilling into lively café-lined squares. Not long ago, traffic clogged the bridges between the city’s neighborhoods. Despite a world-class public transit system and a relatively small population, Stock holm’s congestion rivaled that of London and Paris. For decades, city leaders proposed fixes, but nothing stuck until 2002, when Sweden’s parliament approved congestion pricing. The idea was simple: Charge a small fee for vehicles entering and exiting the city center to reduce traffic, improve accessibility, and clean the air. At the time, two-thirds of Stockholm’s residents opposed it, dismissing it as unnecessary or even a “catastrophe.” Then…

THE U.S. GOVERNMENT doesn’t want you to read what Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, has to say. In July 2025, the State Department announced that it was going to freeze her assets for her “lawfare that targets U.S. and Israeli persons.” Albanese, the State Department press release noted, had “directly engaged with the International Criminal Court (ICC)” at The Hague “in efforts to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute nationals of the United States or Israel, without the consent of those two countries.” And she had “recently escalated this effort by writing threatening letters to dozens of entities worldwide, including major American companies across finance, technology, defense, energy, and hospitality, making extreme and unfounded accusations.” A few weeks earlier, Albanese had submitted her report to…

A POLICE OFFICER had a woman jailed for over two years on false charges in connection with a bogus sex-trafficking ring. But the officer, Heather Weyker, cannot be sued, because a court ruled in July that she was acting under color of federal law. For years, Weyker, an officer in St. Paul, Minnesota, gathered evidence, cultivated witnesses, and testified under oath in connection with an interstate sex-trafficking ring run by Somali refugees. She did all that while allegedly fabricating the very ring she was investigating. Her efforts resulted in 30 indictments, nine trials, and exactly zero convictions. In 2011, Hamdi Mohamud, then just 16 years old, found herself arrested after a woman named Muna Abdulkadir attacked her and her friends at knifepoint. Inconveniently for Mohamud, Abdulkadir was crucial to Weyker’s…

I DIDN’T EXPECT economic insights from animatronic cow. In the Disney-style ride at Hershey headquarters that lays out the company’s chocolate mythos, the singing, dancing cattle are mostly there to underline the milk in milk chocolate. They also set the scene, explaining why the world’s best-known chocolate company was founded here amid the hilly pastures of central Pennsylvania. Many of those pastures contain cows, cows make milk, and back in the 1890s, it was easier to bring cocoa beans and sugar to the milk than the other way around. But there was something unexpectedly evocative in the ditty that played throughout the ride: “Wherever you go, no matter how far/You’ll always see a Hershey bar.” Human beings have been eating chocolate for centuries, but chocolate didn’t really become chocolate—the sweet,…

THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST produced an appalling roster of serial killers in the 1970s and ’80s, some of whom claimed very large totals of victims. We think immediately of Ted Bundy, but there is also Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, with his likely kill count of 50-plus victims; just over the Canadian border, British Columbia produced the serial child murderer Clifford Olson. By some measures, the region is the most prolific in the history of multiple murder. Observers have often spoken of an “epidemic” with its epicenter at Tacoma, Washington. It is very hard to track serial killings accurately, especially since some styles of murder are more easily detectable in some eras than others, so it is possible that this apparent spike is partly a statistical artifact. But the number…

MOVIE WEAPONS PETER SUDERMAN Weapons, the new horror film from writer-director Zach Cregger, is fascinatingly oblique. Unlike so much message-heavy, highly politicized modern horror, it lacks a single dominant metaphor. But the big idea it circles is clear enough. Weapons tracks a classroom full of kids who run away from home in the middle of the night. The movie then reveals all the ways that adult authority figures—cops, school officials, parents—have failed those kids, using them for their own ends, ignoring their duty to protect them, or just box checking bureaucratic requirements so they can go back to their own lives. We see tense town meetings with angry parents who cannot process the terrifying mystery of the disappearance. At times the movie seems to hint that it’s a metaphor for…

Belgium’s Permanent Commission for Linguistic Control upheld a complaint against train conductor Ilyass Alba for violating the country’s strict language laws. In 2024, a passenger objected when Alba used the French word bonjour alongside the Dutch goeiemorgen in a bilingual greeting on a train in Dutchspeaking Flanders, as the train approached Vilvoorde, near Brussels. The commission ruled that conductors should use only Dutch in Flanders, but they should use both Dutch and French in bilingual Brussels. Officials shut down 15-year-old Max McKinney’s bait stand in Spooner, Wisconsin, after deeming it a zoning violation. McKinney sold worms, sodas, candy, and T-shirts from a stand on his family’s farm. After only its second weekend in operation, the county’s zoning land use specialist sent out a cease-and-desist letter that ordered the stand’s closure…