Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2023 i Reason

WHEN A STORM flooded Baton Rouge in 2016, Priscilla Lefebure took shelter with her cousin and her cousin’s husband, Barrett Boeker, an assistant warden at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola. During her stay at her cousin’s house on the prison grounds, Lefebure later reported, Boeker raped her twice—first in front of a mirror so she would have to watch, and again days later with a foreign object. Lefebure’s allegations led to a yearslong court battle—not against her accused rapist but against District Attorney Samuel C. D’Aquilla, who seemed determined to make sure that Boeker was never indicted. As the chief prosecutor for West Feliciana Parish, which includes Angola, D’Aquilla sabotaged the case before it began. When a grand jury considered Lefebure’s charges, D’Aquilla declined to present the results of…

IN A CAREER that has spanned seven decades—and included such classic shows and movies as Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Fawlty Towers, Life of Brian, and A Fish Called Wanda—the comedian John Cleese has relentlessly satirized politics and religion while stretching the boundaries of decorum and good taste. Now 83, Cleese—who studied law at the University of Cambridge—has set his sights on political correctness, which he says is the enemy not only of humor but of creative thinking in all areas of human activity. “There are people sitting there who are deliberately waiting for the thrill of being offended,” he says, emphasizing the importance of paying attention to context, without which irony and sarcasm can’t be properly understood. Reason’s Nick Gillespie caught up with Cleese at Freedom-Fest, an annual July gathering…

“LIBERATION CAPITAL,” AS investor Arthur Rock called it, “was about much more than keeping a team together in the place where its members happened to own houses.” In 1957, Rock took a gamble on the “traitorous eight”—a team of promising engineers at Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory—and counseled them to free themselves of their authoritarian boss by quitting en masse and striking out to form Fairchild Semiconductor. Rock was an amalgamation of consigliere and connector. He helped the group secure funding, cementing his place in history as the father of modern venture capital, which offered an alternative to stuffy East Coast financial institutions that were leery of lending to tech ventures they perceived as risky. In The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future, journalist Sebastian Mallaby draws…

IN LATE AUGUST, California air regulators announced that the state would ban the sale of most gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035, a policy aimed at encouraging a shift to electric vehicles (E.V.s). A week later, amid a massive heat wave, California officials begged E.V. owners not to recharge their cars during peak evening hours so as not to overload the state’s energy grid. The regulations that the California Air Resource Board (CARB) unveiled in August are aimed at meeting a target that Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom announced in 2020. Yet if all Californians bought E.V.s tomorrow, it would be a nightmare for the state’s power grid. There are more than half a million E.V.s in California, the most of any state. Although that represents a tiny share of the 14 million…

REP. RAÚL GRIJALVA (D–Ariz.), chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources, was pissed. The prominent progressive had just left a July 26 committee meeting on the Puerto Rico Status Act, a legislative compromise negotiated by the territory’s nonvoting House member, Rep. Jenniffer González-Colón of the New Progressive Party (PNP). The bill would allow Puerto Rico to conduct a binding referendum on the island’s status. It was supposed to be a momentous day for Grijalva, a longtime supporter of Puerto Rican statehood. Instead, he and the bill’s other backers were handed a surprising defeat. Although Grijalva’s committee had approved the bill earlier that week, it was stalled by amendments, keeping it from advancing before the end of the summer session. His fellow progressives were to blame. Reps. Chuy García (D–Ill.)…

EVEN IF YOU didn’t know about the scandal that preceded its release, you still might notice the digital sleight of hand on Beyoncé’s new album, Renaissance. It comes toward the end of the song “Heated,” as Bey snarls her way through the lines of a staccato rap. Yada, yada, yah, yada, yada, yah-yahYada, yada, yada, bom-bom, kah-kahBlastin’ on that ass, blast on that assFan me quick, girl, I need my glass You don’t have to be a Beyoncé fan—or even able to pick her out of a lineup—to sense that something’s not quite right. Maybe your brain stalls for a moment on the question of what it means to blast on someone’s ass, since neither of the two possible meanings—that Beyoncé is either threatening to shoot someone or commanding someone…

ACCORDING TO THE New York Times, the “marijuana reform” that President Joe Biden announced in October represented “a fundamental change in America’s response to a drug that has been at the center of a clash between culture and policing for more than a half-century.” If only. Biden issued a mass pardon for low-level marijuana offenders and ordered a review of the drug’s regulatory status. Neither initiative affected the federal ban on marijuana, which he still supports. The pardons apply to people convicted of simple marijuana possession under federal law or the District of Columbia Code. Biden said that step would help “thousands of people who were previously convicted of simple possession” and “who may be denied employment, housing or educational opportunities as a result.” As an act of clemency, the…

AT A MOMENT when even modest immigration reform is politically contentious, several Republicans in Congress are open to letting in more “high-skilled” immigrants. But that approach overlooks the fact that the country would benefit from admitting workers at all skill levels. “Skills-based immigration reform” is “essential to maintaining our national competitiveness,” Sen. Todd Young (R–Ind.) said in March. “We want to encourage the best and the brightest from all over the world to be able to come here legally,” Sen. James Lankford (R–Okla.) concurred in April. Among Americans who believe the country should accept fewer immigrants, a 2019 Pew Research Center survey found, 63 percent still supported “encouraging highly skilled people to immigrate and work” here. “Selectionism,” or deciding whom to admit “on the basis of promoting the national interest,”…

WHEN FACEBOOK LAUNCHED in 2004, it was a fairly static collection of profile pages. Facebook users could put lists of favorite media on their “walls” and use the “poke” button to give each other social-media nudges. To see what other people were posting, you had to intentionally visit their pages. There were no automatic notifications, no feeds to alert you to new information. In 2006, Facebook introduced the News Feed, an individualized homepage for each user that showed friends’ posts in chronological order. The change seemed small at the time, but it turned out to be the start of a revolution. Instead of making an active choice to check in on other people’s pages, users got a running list of updates. Users still controlled what information they saw by selecting…

THE LEADERSHIP OF the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) sounded an optimistic note in summer 2021. The pandemic, the agency said, had a silver lining for the 117-mile rail transit system, which crisscrosses Washington, D.C., and reaches into the neighboring states of Maryland and Virginia. Radically reduced demand, it continued, meant WMATA could prioritize much-needed maintenance without crippling service disruptions. A steady flow of capital subsidies approved before the pandemic, coupled with emergency federal relief, meant the agency should have the resources to get the job done. “The region’s investment is paying dividends to our customers who are getting better service,” said Metro’s then–General Manager Paul Wiedefeld in an August 2021 press release. “Riders who are returning for the first time since the pandemic will see a more reliable…

AS A BOY, especially while lying in bed or suffering a fever, I was periodically troubled by harshly critical voices that vaguely charged me with misconduct and failures of character. As I grew up, the murmuring Greek chorus was replaced by a single voice, which by then I recognized as my own. If those seemingly external voices had persisted into adolescence and adulthood, I might have qualified for a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Instead, I became a garden-variety neurotic, assailed by self-recriminations that undermined my confidence and interfered with my happiness. Are these two states of mind categorically distinct, or do they occupy different spots on a continuum of mental health? Is one properly classified as a brain disease requiring biomedical treatment while the other is a psychological condition amenable to…

KERI BLAKINGER IS many things: a former elite figure skater, an Ivy League graduate, a prolific criminal-justice journalist, a convicted felon. The Texas-based writer recently published Corrections in Ink (St. Martin’s Press), a memoir that strings these seemingly disparate lives—from her near-Olympic rise to her drug addiction to her two-year prison stint to her Cornell graduation—into one very compelling narrative about redemption, second chances, and what you’re probably getting wrong about the legal system. In October, Reason’s Billy Binion interviewed Blakinger by phone about her book. Q: There’s a one-size-fits-all picture that much of society has when they think about prisoners. You and I have known each other for a while, but I think your memoir challenges that way of thinking. What do you think people misunderstand about who’s behind…