ReasonDecember 2025的目錄

USUALLY WHEN WE’RE in the midst of a government shutdown, I’m in a good mood. Sure, recent shutdowns haven’t accomplished much in terms of shrinking the cost or scope of the federal government in the long run, but it’s nice to walk around feeling a little less governed than usual. But even that small pleasure has turned sour. Yes, fiscal restraint matters. It matters to this magazine, which has made cutting spending the subject of a greater percentage of our cover stories than perhaps any other publication. And it matters to me personally; I’ve spent the last 25 years writing about the need to take debt and spending seriously. The size of the state is inversely proportional to personal liberty in ways that are too often overlooked. But the intense…

SANTA CLAUS MIGHT be able to evade customs checkpoints as he magically smuggles toys into the country for the good boys and girls—but everyone else doing Christmas shopping this year could run into some problems. Thanks to higher tariffs and other disruptions to global trade, some toys might be more expensive this holiday season. Others might be in short supply, and those that arrive from foreign countries by mail could come with a surprise nastier than a stocking full of coal: an expensive tax bill from the U.S. government. To the average toy buyer, higher costs are the most visible impact of President Donald Trump’s tariffs, which are taxes applied to goods that enter the United States. Imports from China, where many basic toys and games are made, are now…

THE CANADIAN PULITZER Prize–winning journalist Katie Engelhart wrote the new book The Inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die. In this conversation with Reason’s Kevin Alexander, Engelhart discusses why people choose assisted death, compares U.S. and Canadian health care systems and assisted-dying laws, and addresses debates about disability rights and media coverage of medically assisted dying. Q: Why did you choose to structure your book around these different stories? A: I wanted to bring readers on this journey of increasing discomfort. I opened the book with a legal, medical assisted death that I watched in California of an 89-year-old man. His doctor predicted that he had two or three weeks left. This man decided he wanted to die by medically assisted death. His three adult children, who lived in three…

THE DRONE HOVERED low, whirring like a giant bug above the lush, green northern California fields. Its camera was trained on the curved roof of an aging dome home. Inside, Keni Meyer, a petite, ponytailed 54-year-old, didn’t know her property was under surveillance again. But the Sonoma County authorities were taking another step in a harassment campaign, ostensibly aimed at unpermitted cannabis grows. Drone photos of the property spurred the county to allege a series of building code violations. Those citations drew Meyer into a doomed six-year fight to save her property, as Sonoma’s covert cannabis surveillance operation warped into an attack on less affluent residents. For dozens if not hundreds of people, a crackdown on unlicensed cannabis crops has led to six-figure fines, foreclosures, and evictions. The result has…

Algospeak sometimes veers into woke clichés that feel about five years out of date. The concept of “cool” began as “a concealed act of resistance against the straight white norms of the English language,” Aleksic writes in a chapter titled “It’s Giving Appropriation.” The chapter gives a fairly value-neutral assessment of how slang develops in minority subcultures and enters mainstream culture, but Aleksic declares this “harmful” to minorities. Paradoxically, he goes on to complain that mainstream society is not accepting enough of slang and minority dialects. Despite his political leanings, Aleksic documents well how both the censorship and the subcultures trying to escape it cut across political lines. Incels and “body-positivity” advocates both play the same game. So do LGBT activists and homophobes. Users replace white with YT and a…

IN AUGUST 2025, President Donald Trump took control of the police force in Washington, D.C., and deployed the National Guard throughout the city. To justify the incursion, he said the district was experiencing a “crime emergency”—a highly debatable characterization. Violent crime remains a problem in the district, but the homicide rate has been down over the past two years, and it remains considerably lower than it was in the 1990s. As federal agents rounded up civilians en masse and Trump pledged to widen his occupation to more American cities, many feared this was a step toward an authoritarian takeover of the country. That remains a possibility, but skeptical grand juries have so far provided an important backstop for liberty by refusing to go along with the administration’s most overzealous prosecutions.…

GOING TO ANY public events soon? You might have a harder time hearing the speakers than you once did. While annual inflation through August 2025 came in at 2.9 percent, the price of audio equipment like new speakers had risen 12.2 percent. “They’re some of the few electronics not exempt from tariffs (most smartphones/computers are still tariff-free),” as Apricitas Economics writer Joey Politano posted on X. The price of those tariff-free computers, by the way, is down 2 percent over the same timeframe, though still up 2.4 percent from January 2025 at the start of the Trump administration. Alcoholic beverages at home Change since January 2025 0.4% Change since August 2024 0.3% Alcoholic beverages away from home Change since January 2025 2.3% Change since August 2024 3.8% Tobacco and smoking…

PABLOS HOLMAN IS a legendary hacker and cypherpunk whose career spans everything from helping Bill Gates fight malaria to working with Jeff Bezos at Blue Origin. Holder of more than 100 patents and founder of the venture fund Deep Future, Holman has built a life around what he calls “technology that matters.” His new book, Deep Future, is a call to “boycott dystopia” and to tackle civilization-scale challenges. Holman backs inventors who think big: mushroom-based treatments that save collapsing bee colonies, revived Roman concrete formulas that could let buildings stand for thousands of years while cutting carbon emissions, space-based solar arrays that beam constant clean energy to Earth. For Holman, this is “deep tech” that can radically improve how people live, far beyond the incremental gains of another smartphone app.…

A WOMAN SHOWS up at the police station and says she would like to press charges for rape. Asked about the perpetrator’s identity, she says “My husband.” A laugh track plays. The show was Barney Miller, the year 1978. “The subject of marital rape is handled fairly sensitively,” writes Sarah Weinman in Without Consent. And yet, she notes, that laugh track keeps coming back throughout the episode. It was in this muddled atmosphere that 22-year-old Greta Rideout (née Hibbard) accused her husband of just over two years, 21-year-old John Rideout, of raping her. The Oregon-based couple had been struggling with issues both mundane—money woes, erratic employment—and volatile. By the fall of 1978, Greta had already left John once over what she described as both emotional and physical abuse; there had…

EXHIBIT POWER & LIGHT ERIC BOEHM The best antidote for politicized nostalgia that hails an imagined idyllic yesteryear full of abundant blue-collar jobs? Taking a good, hard look at how those workers actually lived. “Power & Light,” a temporary exhibit at the National Archives Museum in Washington, D.C., displays dozens of pictures taken in 1946, when the federal government dispatched photographer Russell Lee to document living conditions in coal mining towns across Appalachia. What he captured is not glamorous or desirable. One family documented by Lee’s photos paid $7 per month ($124 in today’s money) for a home with no running water. They shared an outhouse with “four or five” other families. They weren’t unique. Electricity and indoor plumbing are rare sights in the photos. Only half the mines even…

DEFENDING COVID-19 POLICIES against legal challenges, government officials relied heavily on Jacobson v. Massachusetts, a 1905 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a smallpox vaccine mandate imposed by the Cambridge Board of Health. But the breadth of the license granted by that decision is a matter of dispute, even as applied to superficially similar COVID-19 vaccination requirements. Critics of those mandates argued that COVID-19 shots, unlike smallpox vaccination, do not prevent disease transmission, so requiring them amounts to paternalistic intervention rather than protection of the general public. Last summer in Health Freedom Fund v. Carvalho, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit dismissed that distinction as constitutionally irrelevant. Rejecting a challenge to a 2021 COVID-19 vaccine mandate that the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) imposed…

DANA CHADWELL FOUNDED Chattanooga Yarn Company three years ago. She envisioned “a place to find fine yarns for hand knitting and crochet, and a place to build community around yarn crafting.” It’s been successful—but her shop is now enveloped in a fog of uncertainty because of Trump’s tariffs. From knitting needles to garment fabric to bottles of paint, American crafters work with many materials produced abroad. That has left them particularly vulnerable to Trump’s trade war. Imports from Europe currently face tariffs of 15 percent, and while sky-high tariffs on China are currently subject to a 90-day pause, they still stand at 57.6 percent, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Worse still, Trump has done away with the de minimis exemption, which allowed goods valued at under $800…

JENNIFER WILLIAMS’ SON, Justin Sanchez, was a teenager when he committed the crimes that would land him behind bars. Now 31, he is still a prisoner—even though he’s served his sentence for the two sexual offenses he committed at ages 15 and 16. Like many others who have served their time for sex crimes, Justin is trapped indefinitely in the Texas Civil Commitment Center (TCCC). The TCCC is a retrofitted former juvenile prison in Littlefield, Texas. Justin is not allowed to leave, to have a job, or to talk with his mother on the phone. The institution is supposed to help reintegrate its inmates into society via therapy. In reality, Justin and the 500 or so other inmates spend most of their days reading, watching TV, and playing video games.…

ON A SUNDAY evening in June 1964, about 20 men gathered at a farm in Ohio for a Ku Klux Klan rally. The event featured a cross burning, some stray racist and antisemitic remarks, and a short, desultory speech by a TV repairman named Clarence Brandenburg. The meeting was so small and inconspicuous that no one aside from the participants would have noticed it if Brandenburg had not invited a local television station to document his publicity stunt. But thanks to footage shot by a cameraman at Cincinnati’s NBC affiliate, the rally triggered a police investigation that resulted in criminal charges against Brandenburg. Five years later, that case produced a Supreme Court ruling that still reverberates in debates about the limits of free speech. The Court’s 1969 decision in Brandenburg…

5 YEARS AGO December 2020 “Increasing numbers of Americans see those who disagree with them as subhuman and view politics as a worthy cause for violence, even if they’re not ready or willing to do violence themselves. For these new Jacobins, the romance of the guillotine persists.” KATHERINE MANGU-WARD “The Dangerous Lure of Political Violence” “The vast majority of students have been out of the classroom for nearly half a year because of the K-12 school closures brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. Although it’s technically back-to-school season, millions of children won’t actually be returning to school buildings. About threequarters of the nation’s 100 largest public school districts decided not to reopen with any in-person options this fall, which has left families scrambling for alternatives. We now have substantial data suggesting…