Innehållsförteckning för August/September 2023 från Reason

AT THE BEGINNING of the year, the United Nations World Tourism Organization predicted that international tourism could reach 95 percent of pre-pandemic levels. As of mid-May, the travel website Kayak reported that a fully vaccinated traveler could visit 202 countries without meeting a COVID-19 testing or quarantine requirement. An unvaccinated traveler could visit 177 countries without testing or quarantine and another 21 countries with just testing. Summer 2023 is the first one in four years that Americans taking an international trip largely don’t have to worry about cumbersome entry requirements, masking in public places, or the possibility of being stranded abroad by a positive COVID-19 test. But we still need passports to travel, and the U.S. State Department is taking longer than ever to process them. COVID-19 helped cause the…

IF THERE IS a lesson from Detroit’s 2013 bankruptcy, it’s that going broke can only take a city so far. Municipal bankruptcy is a process that gets a city out of debts that it can’t pay. But city residents don’t get better services when those debts are canceled. There are some things that ought to surprise people about city finances. When Detroit filed for bankruptcy in July 2013, residents found out that the group the city owed the most money to was not banks or bondholders or city contractors—it was the city’s pensioners. Former city employees accidentally became Detroit’s largest creditors because the city didn’t have enough money to pay them what they were owed. This should not be. When governments promise to pay their employees pensions, they should set…

AT THE END of 2021, John Morse hoped he could breathe a well-earned sigh of relief. It had been two tough years. The pandemic had pushed Celebrations—the wedding venue he and his wife Laurie had owned and operated for two decades in rural Caroline, New York—to the brink of ruin. But with public health restrictions disappearing and with brides and grooms planning nuptials once again, the Morses were ready to resume business. “We have a beautiful piece of property. But we’re not a castle on the lake with marble columns,” he says. “There [are] wedding venues out there that are booked three, four years in advance. That’s not us. We’ve always had to work hard for the business that we have.” Morse hoped that 2022 would be a normal, relatively…

IN 1973, SEBASTIÁN Edwards was a supporter of Chile’s socialist president, Salvador Allende. He was, he recalls, an assistant to the “director of costs and prices” at the Chilean Directorate of Industry and Commerce, where his unit “oversaw every controlled price in the country.” After Augusto Pinochet deposed Allende in a coup that year, Edwards “opposed the dictatorship and fled the country in 1977 because of it.” So Edwards is no starry-eyed apologist for the Pinochet junta, and he readily acknowledges the regime’s abysmal litany of murder and torture. He also notes that Chile’s later democratic governments willingly embraced (and in some ways extended) much of the Pinochet era’s economic policies, and he gives those reforms much of the credit for the dramatic post-1983 improvement in Chile’s economic performance. But…

Comedian John Mulaney shot to fame as a clean-cut “wife guy.” His extremely online teenaged fans in particular had an almost ravenous fixation on the comedian. When Mulaney went to rehab, divorced his wife, and announced he was expecting a son with actress Olivia Munn, internet controversy raged for weeks. In Baby J, Mulaney’s first stand-up special since 2018, he attempts to contend with this radically new image, weaving farcical stories about his drug problem and his lifelong, clawing desire for attention. The whole routine is delivered with his trademark auctioneer-like pace (which he slyly implies might have arisen from cocaine abuse). It’s not always clear how much we can believe. “As you process and digest just how obnoxious, wasteful, and unlikeable that story is,” Mulaney says at one point,…

What if you could choose your own adventure for the future of the United States? That’s the premise of American Futures, written by Tom Jenney, an Arizona native of libertarian bent who spent years as a fixture on the state’s think tank and lobbying scene. Within the book’s conceptual framework, aliens are among us and can control our minds, to the degree they can force majorities to agree with and act on any given ideology. As a sort of social science–fiction experiment, the reader can impose any of 14 different political philosophies onto the nation. The book then becomes a series of choose-your-own-ideology adventures narrating how things would likely turn out in each timeline. The book is massive—three volumes in its printed doorstop edition. But it’s an easy read, since…

5 YEARS AGO Aug/Sep 2018 “America’s main allies and adversaries—Europe, Japan, South Korea, Russia, and China—are facing even more severe problems of falling youth and rapidly increasing aging populations. They will need to bring in young people from elsewhere in the world to refuel their economies. Whether they accept migrants and train them or seek to recruit the most skilled workers from abroad, they will be looking to scoop up talent. If the U.S. instead shuts its doors to immigration, it will inflict upon itself the severe shrinkage in the number of new workers that is challenging other developed countries. The economy will grind nearly to a halt as more and more resources are devoted to taking care of the aging rather than improving the productivity of the young.” JACK GOLDSTONE…

IF THE U.S. Supreme Court nixes President Joe Biden’s plan to forgive up to $20,000 in federal student loan debt for millions of borrowers, another portion of Biden’s proposal could still leave taxpayers on the hook. And the final price tag for that aspect of Biden’s policy could be double what his administration originally claimed. Currently, federal student loan payments can be capped at 10 percent of a borrower’s discretionary income, which the Department of Education defines as any income above 150 percent of the federal poverty line. Biden plans to lower the monthly payment to just 5 percent of a borrower’s discretionary income. The new rule also forgives outstanding federal student loan balances after 10 years for borrowers who took out less than $12,000 and after 20 years for…

IN THE MID-2000s, the news media underwent rapid change, beginning a transformation from stodgy to spicy. Social media networks and trailblazing online-only news outlets changed the way everyone used the internet. Perhaps no one had a better view of the whole news landscape than Ben Smith. Smith was the first editor in chief of the recently shuttered BuzzFeed News, a New York Times media columnist, and a cofounder of Semafor. In his new book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race To Go Viral, Smith charts the rise and fall of Gawker, HuffPost, Breitbart News, and BuzzFeed News. In the 2000s and early 2010s, these sites dominated news cycles and pulled millions of eyeballs due to their unique abilities to shape media narratives in surprising and irresistible ways.…

“FOR OVER A decade,” Seton Hall Law School professor Gaia Bernstein recalls in Unwired, “I often sat down to write at my regular table at the coffee shop near my apartment. I took out my laptop, my iPhone, and my Kindle. I wrote down my list of tasks for the day. But then two and a half hours later, with little writing done and feeling drained, I wondered what happened. The answer was usually texts and emails, but more than anything, uncontrollable Internet browsing: news sites, blogs, Facebook. Every click triggered another. I no longer do this. At least, I try my best not to.” Although Bernstein calls her behavior “uncontrollable,” she also says she managed to control it. But after several years of studying “technology overuse” and advising people…

What happened to the right front door of the Mount Carmel Center? That’s a recurring question in Waco: The Aftermath, a five-episode Showtime drama built around the 1994 trial of Branch Davidians who had survived the lethal 51-day federal siege near Waco, Texas, the previous year. The mysteriously missing steel door, which should have withstood the fire that consumed Mount Carmel, could have helped resolve the issue of who shot first when agents dispatched by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) descended upon religious leader David Koresh’s followers at the beginning of the standoff. It is a powerful symbol of the government’s attempts to evade responsibility for the horrifying outcome: The siege resulted in the deaths of 82 men, women, and children who lived at Mount Carmel, including…

After 22 years on Wall Street, Caitlin Long got intrigued by bitcoin and the blockchain in 2012. From 2018 through 2020 she served as a member of the Wyoming Blockchain Task Force, which made the Cowboy State the most welcoming for blockchain companies. Long is the founder and CEO of Custodia Bank, a bitcoin-focused “full reserve” bank proposing to keep 108 percent of customer deposits on hand. The Federal Reserve has denied its application for membership, claiming that “the firm’s novel business model and proposed focus on crypto-assets present significant safety and soundness risks.” Custodia is currently challenging that decision. Reason’s Zach Weissmueller interviewed Long about the ongoing lawsuit and the future of bitcoin in May, at the Bitcoin 2023 conference in Miami. Q: Why did you start Custodia Bank?…

THE EMERGENCE OF THE ANIMAL tranquilizer xylazine as a fentanyl adulterant has prompted law enforcement officials to agitate for new legal restrictions and criminal penalties. That response is fundamentally misguided, because the threat it aims to address is a familiar consequence of prohibition, which creates a black market in which drug composition is highly variable and unpredictable. Xylazine, a.k.a. “tranq,” was first identified as a drug adulterant in 2006, and today it is especially common in Puerto Rico, Philadelphia, Maryland, and Connecticut. The combination of fentanyl and xylazine poses special hazards. Like opioids, xylazine depresses respiration, so mixing it with fentanyl can increase the risk of a fatal reaction. Unlike a fentanyl overdose, a xylazine overdose cannot be reversed by the opioid antagonist naloxone. Xylazine also seems to increase…

Ronald Gladden is summoned for that most dreaded obligation: jury duty. Thinking he’s being filmed for a documentary about how juries work, Gladden doesn’t know that he’s hearing a fake case, everyone else is a paid actor, and every scene is semi-scripted. Amazon Freevee’s prank-show-meets-mockumentary series Jury Duty pulls off a Truman Show–style story inside a truly absurd fake courtroom. Starting off with voir dire, potential jurors use every trick in the book to get out of serving. Excuses such as having 36 kids, suffering from a severe back injury, and being racist don’t get past the judge. But “needing to get something out of my body” or simply “it’s just not my thing” are grounds for dismissal. After they are selected, the jurors are asked how they feel. The…

The Covenant isn’t based on a specific true story, but its war-and-dishonor narrative is rooted in the reality of America’s shabby treatment of local allies during and after the Afghan war, especially those promised special immigrant visas for aiding U.S. forces. It tracks the close bond that develops between a U.S. military commander and his Afghan interpreter after the two escape a Taliban attack that leaves the rest of their squad dead. After being saved by his interpreter, the commander wakes up back in the United States. The interpreter himself is forced into hiding in Afghanistan, without the promised visa. The commander then struggles to obtain the visa from an incomprehensible and uncaring immigration system, which eventually becomes a full-on quest to rescue his friend. The gripping film is a…