Table of contents for April 2017 in Reason

THE KIDS THESE days are incredibly lame. They barely do drugs. They hardly have sex. When they do finally get around to doing the deed, it’s at much later ages than previous generations. They’re responsible about birth control and disease prevention. They probably even make it home in time for curfew. Skeptical? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the average age of self-reported virginity loss is now nearly 18 years old. The percentage of high school students who say they have had intercourse has been falling for two decades. Two-thirds of the students who are having sex say it’s with a steady romantic partner. Eighty percent say they used contraception their first time, up from less than 50 percent in the ’80s. They’re also using more effective…

SOMETIME IN 2017, the total U.S. national debt will hit $20 trillion— more than the total gross domestic product (gdp) of the country in a year. That figure is projected to keep growing over time, thanks to rising annual deficits. Debt held by the public, a measure that counts all federal securities sold to individuals, corporations, and state and local governments, plus foreign investors, currently clocks in around $14 trillion. That figure is expected to hit $23 trillion in 2026. There are risks to carrying a debt burden this big. It increases the nation’s susceptibility to a fiscal crisis if interest rates rise, and it limits the sorts of projects government can take on in a constrained fiscal environment. The greater the debt, the greater these risks become. One of…

I’VE BEEN A woman since age 53, starting on Thanksgiving Day 1995. The concept of gender transition has burrowed into our culture—recently in a surprisingly cheerful way, as in Transparent, the funny, award-winning TV series in which the only sane person is the man becoming a woman, or Transamerica, the sweet 2005 movie for which Felicity Huffman playing male-to-female got a Best Actress Oscar nomination. But things weren’t always so happy-go-lucky. In northern Europe and its offshoots, starting with the birth of psychiatry in the late 19th century, governments came to have a deep interest in pushing people around in order to punish unconventional expressions of gender and unapproved sexual orientations. While you’re binge-watching those modern uplifting trans tales, don’t miss 2014’s The Imitation Game. It’s about the governmental ruination…

N AN UNREMARKABLE hotel room, a team of officers watches the footage streaming from a hidden camera next door. A middleaged man is making arrangements to pay a young woman for sex. Once she agrees, the squad will rush in, shouting instructions, their bulletproof vests bulging with firearms and emblazoned with police or fbi. The woman—or is she a girl?—will have her hands tied behind her back and her phone confiscated. She will sit on the bed, partially undressed, as a team of men search her room, pawing through her underwear drawer and toiletry bags, seizing any cash they find. She will eventually be fingerprinted, interrogated, and taken into police custody. Welcome to Operation Cross Country, the U.S. government’s huge, intrusive, and utterly ineffective effort to fight child sex trafficking.…

LOSHED ON 30 percent profit margins, the news media went on a drunkard’s tear over the final three decades of the 20th century. Some publishers, such as Gannett, spent their loot acquiring more newspapers. The Boston Globe blew a portion of its windfall on foreign bureaus, establishing its first in the early 1970s and eventually expanding to five. Newspapers everywhere expanded regional and national bureaus, sprouted additional sections, added color printing, hired more journalists, and boosted circulation as the money bender continued. Almost every news outlet—print or broadcast—spent heavily on investigative journalism, producing a scoop renaissance. The Johnny Deadlines dug deep to bust crooked cops, call out polluting corporations, and expose criminal justice outrages. Health care fraud, banking hijinks, payoffs, bribes, and government waste got a full press airing. But…

The world of board gaming has grown richer—and more intellectually demanding—over the last decade. In the eyes of serious gamers, once-popular pastimes like Monopoly and Risk are now basically indistinguishable from Candyland. Too much luck, not enough skill. The most addictive nextgeneration game is Dominion, a medieval-themed “deck building” card game that recently debuted its long-awaited, new-and-improved online mode. Each player begins with a hand of weak cards that are worth a certain amount of coin and must use them to purchase more valuable cards. Some of these produce additional coin, others increase the number of cards a player can hold at one time, and still others flood opponents’ decks with worthless junk. The story of Dominion Online is as entertaining as the game itself. For years, the games’ internet…

It’s remarkably difficult to gain admission to the newly opened National Museum of African American History and Culture—powerful evidence that such an institution was long overdue. The stunning, 400,000- square-foot structure now situated on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., houses a tribute to African Americans’ vast contributions to music, sports, and other aspects of the country’s culture, as well as a memorial to the violence and injustice of slavery and segregation. The museum opened in fall 2016. By December, new admissions procedures had to be implemented. With luck, on a weekday afternoon, you might obtain a walk-up pass; advance tickets—available three months out or starting at 6:30 a.m. for same-day entry—are strictly required for a weekend visit. Want more proof of skyhigh demand? Look no further than the timed…

Designated Survivor, Kiefer Sutherland’s follow-up to 24, imagines the actor as Tom Kirkman, a mild-mannered minor Cabinet member—he’s the secretary of housing and urban development—catapulted into the presidency after nearly everyone else in the federal government is killed in a State of the Union night attack on the U.S. Capitol. Debuting in September 2016, the first half of the abc series has played out as almost as much of a libertarian fantasy as The West Wing’s president was a progressive one. As Kirkman— who describes himself as “a registered independent”— works to find and punish the perpetrators, rebuild the ranks of the federal government, and restore some semblance of normalcy to America, he opposes rash militarization, eschews “enhanced interrogation,” welcomes Syrian refugees, prizes practicality over partisanship, reveres due process, and…

ON THE EVENING of November 8, 2016, as it became clear that assumptions about Hillary Clinton’s certain electoral victory were wrong, investors began to squirm. Dow futures dropped by more than 700 points that night, and the liberal economist Paul Krugman wrote at The New York Times that “if the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.” The next morning, however, the stock market completed a stunning reversal to end at a record high. What some have called a “Trump rally” has continued ever since, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average hovering just above the 20,000 mark at press time. One explanation for Wall Street’s seeming euphoria is that investors believe they’re now less likely to see the continuation of tax hikes and micro-regulation desired by…

JANUARY MARKED THE first time in American history that a president-elect launched a Twitter feud with his celebrity replacement on a reality TV show. “Wow, the ratings are in and Arnold Schwarzenegger got ‘swamped’ (or destroyed) by comparison to the ratings machine, DJT,” Donald Trump tweeted after the 2017 debut of Celebrity Apprentice, the show he long hosted before obtaining new employment. “So much for being a movie star…But who cares, he supported Kasich & Hillary.” Schwarzenegger, who governed California from 2003 until 2010, had indeed backed Ohio Gov. John Kasich in the gop primaries, and then anti-endorsed Trump in the general election for a reason dripping with irony: groping allegations. “For the first time since I became a citizen in 1983, I will not vote for the Republican candidate…

BELIEVE THE EXPERTS! Experts are not perfect, but they are more likely than non-experts to be right. Experts know what they do not know, and are therefore more cautious and better able to self-correct. Sometimes, in small ways, non-experts may outperform experts. But in general, America and the world need more respect for expertise. That is the thesis of Tom Nichols’ The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters. It is also, as it turns out, a critique of the book itself. Nichols, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, is an expert on Russia and national security; he is not, however, an expert on expertise. His discussion of democracy is not backed up by credentials in political science. His hand wringing about kids…

IN NOVEMBER 1848, a socialist activist gave a speech at the 13th annual meeting of the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society. “Mr. Inglis” began his remarks well enough, reported the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, who was also there to give a speech that day, “but strangely enough went on in an effort to show that wages slavery is as bad as chattel slavery.” Douglass soon became infuriated with the socialist speaker. “The attempts to place holding property in the soil—on the same footing as holding property in man, was most lame and impotent,” Douglass declared. “And the wonder is that anyone could listen with patience to such arrant nonsense.” Douglass heard a lot of arrant nonsense from American socialists. That’s because, as the historian Carl Guarneri has explained, most antebellum socialists…

DURING THE LAME duck session in December, Congress did something amazing: It actually passed a criminal justice bill. Tucked among the provisions of the bipartisan law were new state reporting requirements on prison rape. While that’s great, there’s a lot more that could be done if the federal government is serious about stopping this heinous crime. Back in 2003, Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions worked across the aisle with Democrat Sen. Ted Kennedy to pass the Prison Rape Elimination Act (prea). Evangelical Christians, led by Chuck Colson—the former Watergate conspirator who turned to prison ministry after his own stint on the inside—were instrumental in whipping gop support. But the Justice Department didn’t adopt national prea standards until 2012. Four years after they went into effect, the Associated Press reported that only…

YOU CAN’T LEGALLY own a gun if you have been convicted of most felonies with a potential sentence of more than one year of imprisonment (or, if it’s a misdemeanor, more than two years). Federal law, at 922(g)(1) of the U.S. Code, makes that clear. But some offenders who were banned from possessing firearms have succeeded in getting lower courts and a federal appeals court to agree that the statute can, in certain applications, violate people’s Second Amendment rights. In January, the federal government applied for certiorari to the Supreme Court in Binderup v. Holder, which consolidates two such cases. One of the plaintiffs is Daniel Binderup, who had a consensual but illegal sexual relationship with a 17-year-old in 1998. He was sentenced to probation for three years under a…

SIMON TAM DIDN’T think it would be a big deal when he applied for trademark protection on the name of his band, The Slants. It was 2011, and the band—a dance-rock group whose members are all Asian-American—had been getting some buzz. A lawyer buddy told Tam he’d do the application, saying the process would take a couple hundred bucks and six months, tops. “Things turned out a little bit different,” Tam told Reason several years later, on the eve of Supreme Court oral arguments over his trademark case. Since 1946, the federal Patent and Trademark Office (pto) has been charged with blocking the registration of trademarks that “may disparage...persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute.” It was on those grounds that…

A MAN WHO lived with more than one woman was anathema in the 19th century; the media called polygamy an “act of licentiousness” that deserved to be categorically denounced, its adherents disenfranchised. In 1885, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal law making plural marriage a felony, declaring that “the union for life of one man and one woman in the holy estate of matrimony [is] the sure foundation of all that is stable and noble in our civilization.” A New York Times editorial celebrated that result, observing cheekily that “we had not supposed there had ever been any serious question.” Today, it’s the old-timey view that marriage is between one man and one woman only—and that sex should be reserved to that union—that raises the Grey Lady’s ire. When…

Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight is a triptych tale delving into the childhood, adolescence, and adulthood of a young gay black man immersed in poverty and the drug trade in Southern Florida. That summary may sound like a recipe for lectures and melodrama. But the life of Chiron (played by three different actors at different ages) is instead a quiet, reflective coming- of-age story of a young man learning how to fit in, but also to find himself, in what is at times a harsh culture. The viewer watches Chiron working around his mother’s drug problems as a child, coming to terms with his sexuality as a teen, and reflecting on how all these experiences inform the decisions he makes as a man. Drug dealing and addiction, violence, desperation, bullying, and incarceration…

It sounds like a deranged hummingbird, it has a comically small range, and its photo quality is abysmal, but there’s something weirdly appealing about The World’s Smallest Camera Drone ($26.99 from the BoingBoing online store; also available at Amazon). The temptation to personify the wee unmanned aerial vehicle— with its cheerful red and blue led lights, drunken bumblebee flight patterns, fleeting battery life, and tendency toward rotor jams—is almost irresistible. From the first jerky takeoff, the bright orange mini-drone feels more like a recalcitrant pet than cuttingedge tech, even though it can capture a rather large volume of video footage and still photos on the 2GB of storage on the included micro SD card. If you’re looking to conduct stealth surveillance, take keepsake photographs, deliver tacos, or rain death on…

Like most comics devotees of the late 20th century, Gary Groth—co-founder of America’s leading publisher of high-quality comics, Fantagraphics Books—started off as a superhero obsessive. But Groth grew out of that passion, and he loved a good fight. So in the mid-’70s he started slamming his aesthetic foes and advocating for smarter, more literary, more adult comics in his pugnacious and brilliant magazine The Comics Journal. By the early 1980s, he was seeking out and publishing such comics despite the total lack of a demonstrated market for such things. Over the next four decades, Fantagraphics launched or elevated the careers of many of modern comics’ most vital and brilliant creators, including Jaime Hernandez, Gilbert Hernandez, Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Joe Sacco, Carol Tyler, and Reason’s own Peter Bagge. Publications of…

15 YEARS AGO April 2002 “Immediately after the attacks, President Bush was widely mocked for imploring people to go shopping, to get on with their normal lives, to do anything to show the terrorists that they couldn’t destroy our way of life. At times, he seemed to stop just short of telling people to have more sex to enrage Osama bin Laden and company.” NICK GILLESPIE “Back to Bedrock” “No cause in the history of mankind has produced more cold-blooded tyrants, more slaughtered innocents, and more orphans than communism. It surpassed, exponentially, all other systems of production in turning out the dead.” ALAN CHARLES KORS “Rose-Colored Glasses” “The ACLU report focuses on Ybor City, Florida, where police began installing surveillance cameras with facial recognition technology last July. Faces caught on…