Table of contents for July 2021 in Reason

AS PRESIDENT JOE Biden takes executive action to strengthen federal gun laws, state legislators across the country are working to weaken their enforcement by emulating immigration activists. Since 1987, Oregon has prohibited law enforcement agencies from arresting or detaining people whose only crime was entering or living in the U.S. illegally. Hundreds of other jurisdictions have followed suit, becoming so-called sanctuary cities. “The methods that we need to use are the ones already being used by the left,” says Anthony Sabatini, a Republican member of the Florida House of Representatives. “Nullifying unconstitutional federal laws is both legal and the right thing to do.” Sabatini is co-sponsoring a Florida bill that would bar state employees from enforcing or attempting to enforce any of several listed federal gun controls, including taxes, registrations,…

FEW FIGHTS IN Congress are more bitter than fights over Senate procedure. That’s because those disputes are rarely just about the rules. Instead, they are fights about the legitimacy of political power and who gets to wield it. The latest round of procedural warfare began after Democrats took control of both chambers of Congress and the White House following the 2020 election. Pundits speculated that they might eliminate the legislative filibuster, but they appear to have found another procedural maneuver: reconciliation. Although Democrats have 50 seats in the Senate and Vice President Kamala Harris’ tiebreaking vote, the filibuster effectively requires a 60-vote supermajority to pass legislation. Obtaining 60 Senate votes means negotiating with Republicans. Yet many on the left see Senate Republicans as obstructionists, thanks largely to the not entirely…

IF YOU HAVE health insurance but no primary care physician, the process for getting a physical can be a bit complicated. Whether or not you get your health insurance through an employer, you’ll probably have to find a practice in your area that is in your network. Then you’ll have to find out if it’s accepting new patients. You may have to wait months until the office will let you come in for a physical. You’ll have to figure out if you’re responsible for a co-pay. Even after the visit, you may need to cover the additional cost of any blood work or other tests, and you probably can’t figure out how much you’ll be billed for that ahead of time. At some point, you’ll also have to decide whether…

“Real CSI is not like what you see on TV,” writes Duke law professor Brandon Garrett in Autopsy of a Crime Lab. That’s an understatement. Some forensic specialties—including bite mark, blood spatter, hair, fiber, and footprint analysis—are deeply dubious. Even such venerable techniques as latent fingerprint and ballistic comparisons are not as well-grounded as commonly thought. When you add incompetence, corruption, cognitive biases, and pseudoscientific certainty to the mix, innocent people can end up spending years or decades in prison while the actual perpetrators remain free to continue their criminal careers. Garrett began studying the science behind commonly used forensic tools after he discovered that they often figured prominently in the wrongful convictions of people who were ultimately exonerated by DNA evidence. Based on testimony from analysts who exuded unjustified…

PARENTS WHO WAIT with their kids at the bus stop, cheer every soccer game, and can’t imagine a child walking home alone from a play date two blocks away go through some kind of looking glass/time warp/brain transplant when they pull into a campground. “Bye, kids! Be back in time for dinner. Don’t feed the bears!” What is it about camping that turns 21st century worriers into parents with positively Spielbergian nonchalance? “At campgrounds, everyone just seems to expect to see kids roaming around,” says Lindsay Smith-Munoz, a scientist in Edmonton, Canada. “Maybe it’s just that there’s no one for the do-gooders to call? Social services isn’t going to drive two hours out of the city because some kids were spotted at a camp playground unsupervised.” Polly Karr, a Cleveland…

THE TRADITIONAL MOTTO of the United States is e pluribus unum—from many, one. Suggested by the French designer Pierre Eugène du Simitière, the phrase is apparently derived from the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero. In De Officiis, his treatise on ethics, Cicero proposes that “when men have similar pursuits and inclinations, it comes about that each one is as much delighted with the other as he is with himself: the result is what Pythagoras wanted in friendship, that several be united into one.” Americans frequently recur to the ideal of unity on ceremonial occasions. In his inaugural address, President Joe Biden used the word eight times. “With unity,” he promised, “we can do great things.” Biden acknowledged the legal disputes and violent interference that preceded his inauguration. But he affirmed…

IMMEDIATELY AFTER PRESIDENT Joe Biden took office, he instructed acting Attorney General Monty Wilkinson to rescind former President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, which separated thousands of migrant parents from their children at the U.S.-Mexico border. Buried in the news coverage of Biden’s gesture was the fact that the updated guidance did not stop family separations. It just told prosecutors to use their discretion. Wilkinson said federal prosecutors should not rule out charging border crossers with misdemeanors, which requires family separation when parents are taken into custody. But prosecutors should “take into account other individualized factors,” he wrote, “including personal circumstances and criminal history, the seriousness of the offense, and the probable sentence or other consequences that would result from a conviction.” That certainly represents an improvement on Trump’s…

WHEN THOMAS SOWELL arrived at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1959 to begin his Ph.D. studies, Milton Friedman had been on the faculty for more than a decade. But Sowell hadn’t gone there to study under Friedman, and the University of Chicago hadn’t been his first choice. The original plan was to pursue his doctorate at Columbia University, where he had just earned his master’s degree, and study under another future Nobel economist, George Stigler. As an undergraduate at Harvard in a course on the history of economic thought, Sowell had read an academic article by Stigler on the theories of the classical economist David Ricardo. Sowell was so taken by the subject matter, and so impressed by Stigler’s command of it, that he turned his own…

FLOYD MCKISSICK WAS a high-profile activist of the 1960s civil rights movement, combating Jim Crow through rallies, sit-ins, the Freedom Rides that integrated interstate buses and stations throughout the South, and the Freedom Summer campaign to register black voters in Mississippi. Elected national director of the Congress of Racial Equality in 1966, the African-American attorney turned the organization toward Black Power, with a particular emphasis on achieving economic autonomy for his people. He resigned his position in 1968, when the organization rejected his plan to create new cities across rural America, all of them to be built and run by black people. So McKissick devoted the next dozen years to creating one such community. Soul City took shape on 5,000 acres of the North Carolina Piedmont, the site of a…

Dorfromantik is an indie video game from Germany. (The name translates to “Village Romanticization.”) The player is fed a randomly generated pile of hexagon tiles, each representing a different physical feature: a town, a forest, a field, a river, a railroad. The challenge is to place them, one by one, onto the playing field, lining up matching features so that a handful of trees becomes a forest, a couple of houses become a village, and so on. Gradually, the player builds a fiefdom. You start with a limited number of tiles, earning more of them—and increasing your score—by carefully completing challenges to create lengthy rivers and large, connected tracts of forests and towns. Over time, the randomness of the tiles you receive makes it increasingly hard to place them in…

After his homemade car is impounded because it lacks license plates, the socially awkward but inventive Italian engineer Giorgio Rosa (Elio Germano) dreams up a way to escape the government’s arbitrary intrusions: With help from some friends, he constructs a 400-squaremeter steel platform in the international waters of the Adriatic Sea. The seasteaders drill for fresh water, build a bar (naturally), and attract attention from mainlanders eager for something different from the dull and heavily regulated beach club scene in nearby Rimini. From there, it’s just a small step to asking the United Nations to officially recognize the Respubliko de la Insulo de la Rozoj as a sovereign nation. (That, they hope, will fend off the Italian Navy.) Rose Island, released on Netflix and based on real events from the…

20 YEARS AGO July 2001 “To say ‘neoliberal’ is the same as saying ‘semiliberal’ or ‘pseudoliberal.’ It is pure nonsense. One is either in favor of liberty or against it, but one cannot be semi-in-favor or pseudo-infavor of liberty, just as one cannot be ‘semipregnant,’ ‘semiliving,’ or ‘semidead.’ The term has not been invented to express a conceptual reality, but rather, as a corrosive weapon of derision. It has been designed to devalue semantically the doctrine of liberalism. And it is liberalism—more than any other doctrine—that symbolizes the extraordinary advances that liberty has made in the long course of human civilization.” MARIO VARGAS LLOSA “Global Village or Global Pillage?” “What has gone mostly unseen and unremarked upon is the effort by industries who benefit from copyright law to shift the…

THE LIST OF things that President Joe Biden hopes to accomplish with his American Jobs Plan is nearly as impressive as its $2 trillion price tag. “It’s not a plan that tinkers around the edges,” Biden bragged during an April speech in Pittsburgh. “It’s a once-in-a-generation investment in America. It’ll create millions of jobs, good-paying jobs. It’ll grow the economy, make us more competitive around the world, promote our national security interest, and put us in a position to win the global competition with China.” The president’s speech did not dwell on the specific projects he wants to fund or how he might go about delivering them in a cost-effective manner. He focused instead on all the money he plans to spend and its potential for stimulating the economy. For…

STAND ASIDE, SIRI and Alexa. An IBM team led by artificial intelligence (A.I.) researcher Noam Slonim has devised a system that does not merely answer questions; it debates the questioners. In a contest against champion human debaters, Slonim’s Project Debater, which speaks with a female voice, impressed the judges. She didn’t win, but that could change. As her developers explain in a March Nature article, Project Debater’s computational argumentation technology consists of four main modules. The argument mining module accesses 400 million recent newspaper articles. The argument knowledge base deploys general debating principles. The rebuttal module matches objections to the points made by the other side. The debate construction module filters and chooses the arguments deemed most relevant and persuasive. Project Debater was paired with three champion human debaters in…

Reason magazine is published with the help of supporters who invest more than the price of a subscription by making contributions to Reason Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. We are grateful for their support of our journalism and public policy research. In this issue of Reason, we acknowledge members of our Torchbearer Society, a community of people who advanced the cause of “Free Minds and Free Markets” by making a contribution of $1,000 or more in 2020. Larry Abbott Sean Abraham John Aglialoro & Joan Carter Charles E. Albers Terry Allen Douglas Allred K. Tucker Andersen Douglas Anderson & Mary Barnicle Steven Anderson Anonymous Doug Anton Armstrong Fdn Greg & Rebecca Arnold AT&T Inc. Charles Atkins Atlas Network Andrew Auerbach Dennis & Jan Austin The Bader Family Fdn Brian Balusek…

Thomas Pynchon’s reputation as a “difficult” writer may be exaggerated—some of his shorter fictions are pretty accessible—but it isn’t exactly undeserved. Books like V. and Gravity’s Rainbow are rich, encyclopedic, and frequently funny works of antiauthoritarian literature, but they’re also dense, complex, experimental, at times deliberately confusing, and prone to extended tangents. Pynchon’s postmodern doorstops are about as far as you could get from the spare simplicity of a Hank Williams song. But what if you could experience him as a Hank Williams song? Pynchon has always been prone to inserting verses into his novels. With Now Everybody—, the alt-country band Visit has set a bunch of those ditties to music. The group experiments with different genres: There’s a calypso number, a psychedelic rock song, some sound collages. But most…

In 1760, hundreds of Jamaican slaves began an insurrection against their British overlords. For 18 months they fought, hoping not only to reclaim their freedom but to seize the sugar plantations where they had been forced to labor. Scholars, drawing mainly on texts from the white plantation owners, called the rebellion “Tacky’s Revolt” after one of its leaders. In his exhaustively researched new book, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War, the Harvard historian Vincent Brown draws on letters, lieutenants’ logs, cartography, and other sources to make a convincing case that this was more than just an isolated event. Its duration, he adds, had less to do with Tacky than with complicated geopolitics. Brown argues that Tacky’s Revolt was really four wars at once. Slaves fought their white…

ANDREW GRUEL JUST might be the patron saint of restaurateurs, small business owners, and service workers during the pandemic. He’s the founder and owner of Slapfish, a growing national fast-casual restaurant chain based in Huntington Beach, California, as well as a widely recognized culinary innovator and familiar face on the Food Network and other cooking channels. Over the past year, Gruel has also gained prominence as an unabashed critic of arbitrary rules that put business owners like him at the beck and call of hypocritical politicians such as California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). Most famously, in an inspired rant that went viral on social media last December, Gruel listed all the ways in which California’s ban on outdoor dining made no scientific or economic sense before concluding, “I’m not an…