Innehållsförteckning för November 2023 från Reason

SINCE ALBERT JONES filed his U.S. patent for corrugated paper packing material in 1871, cardboard products have played the cart to globalization’s horse. Cheaper and lighter than a crate and more protective than paper or straw, cardboard has made myriad goods affordable and deliverable to just about anywhere. From carrying glass vials of medicine at the turn of the 20th century to entire couches at the beginning of the 21st, cardboard is a linchpin of modern life. So why do so many of us hate it so much? A few months back, I found myself losing sleep over the cardboard pile in our garage. It began with the disposable cocoons for a couch, bed frame, and mattress. As time schlepped on, the pile grew. Boxes for a dehumidifier (summer) and…

IN 2017, A 27-year-old Yale Law School student published an article arguing that the online retailer Amazon had grown so large that federal regulators should treat it as inherently suspect. Amazon, the paper said, engaged in a wide variety of harmful anticompetitive practices. The article did not merely demand far greater federal oversight of the company; it called for a complete overhaul of how regulators approach antitrust, urging more frequent, more aggressive legal action founded on a generalized antagonism toward large companies and corporate mergers. At the time, the view was relatively novel, with few adherents in government or the academy. But today that former student, now 34, leads the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and both the agency specifically and the Biden administration more generally are pursuing a concrete version…

PRESUME THE ECONOMIC case for free markets is true: that capitalism makes us freer and richer, creates better jobs and greater opportunities, and helps us solve environmental problems. Does it make us happier too? The American conservative Patrick Deneen believes liberal capitalism makes us “increasingly separate, autonomous, nonrelational selves, replete with rights and defined by our liberty, but insecure, powerless, afraid, and alone.” Under the exhaustive headline “Neoliberalism—the ideology at the root of all our problems,” the British leftist George Monbiot claims that these problems include (but are by no means limited to) “epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia.” Freedom “doesn’t make us free, it makes us lonely,” adds Christian conservative Joel Halldorf. “Increasing mental illness, isolation and populism are signs that liberalism cannot…

WHAT IS FREE will? Can a being whose brain is made up of physical stuff actually make undetermined choices? In Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, the Trinity College Dublin neuroscientist Kevin J. Mitchell argues that evolution has shaped living creatures such that we can push back when the physical world impinges upon us. The motions of nonliving things—air, rocks, planets, stars—are entirely governed by physical forces; they move where they are pushed. Our ability to push back, Mitchell argues, allows increasingly complex creatures to function as agents that can make real choices, not “choices” that are predetermined by the flux of atoms. How can that be? After all, just like air and rocks, bacteria and sharks and aardvarks and people are made of physical stuff. Determinism holds…

A SAFER, SANER social media world is possible, former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen told members of Congress in 2021. Instead, she said, leaders at the social media company chose engagement over democracy, using algorithms that kept people glued to the site but also angry, anxious, and ill-informed. Haugen’s diagnosis of the cause of our current political dysfunction (social media algorithms) and cure (“get rid of the engagement-based ranking” of content and return to displaying posts in simple chronological order) has become dogma for many politicians, members of the press, and would-be change-makers. Doing away with algorithms would also halt hate speech and misinformation, these groups insist. But more and more research is casting doubt on such claims. The latest comes from a collaboration between academics and Facebook parent company…

MIKE ROWE IS best known for his stint hosting the Discovery Channel’s longrunning Dirty Jobs, where he performed the sort of work we all rely on but don’t want to think about too much, from cleaning septic tanks to putting hot tar on roofs to disposing of medical waste. Rowe frequently talks about the value of the hard work that’s too often dismissed by a society fixated on sending everyone to college. In July, Reason’s Nick Gillespie caught up with Rowe at FreedomFest, held this year in Memphis, Tennessee. They talked about why men have fallen behind women in school and work, whether young people have been misled about the value of college, and how Rowe’s foundation—mikeroweWORKS—matches young people interested in learning trades with employers who need applicants. Reason: You’ve…

OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, IS “the edge case in American policing,” journalists Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham declare in The Riders Come Out at Night. “More has been done to try to reform the Oakland Police Department than any other police force in the United States.” It’s a bold claim, given the crowded field competing for the title. In Baltimore during 2016, a vice squad was essentially operating a criminal enterprise, using the police department as a front. The corruption and violence exposed in the Rampart scandal, which unfolded in the late 1990s and early 2000s, landed the Los Angeles Police Department under federal oversight for 12 years. Chicago is Chicago. But in their deeply reported and comprehensive book, Winston and Bond-Graham make a persuasive case that Oakland’s entrenched police corruption best…

Two Toronto cops were charged with theft, possession of stolen property, and breach of trust. Prosecutors said the men did not report two stolen bottles of Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch whisky they recovered from a man who had robbed a Liquor Control Board of Ontario location. Instead, they kept the scotch for themselves. New York City restaurants could face fines of $50 to $250 if they include utensils, packets of soy sauce or ketchup, and other plastic items in takeout orders if the customer did not ask for them. Under the new “Skip the Stuff” law, which is aimed at reducing plastic waste, the fines will start July 1, 2024. The U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court found that the FBI improperly searched an intelligence database for information on a…

Philadelphia recently installed two Portland Loos: modular, stand-alone public restrooms first commissioned by Portland, Oregon. The single-stall metal structures are easy to keep clean and feature rounded walls to deter graffiti and walls that are louvered at the top and bottom to deter mischief inside stalls. However, despite these supposed benefits, cities regularly spend absurd amounts of taxpayer funds to purchase and install the bathrooms. Philly plans to install six Loos over the next five years as part of the city’s public restroom pilot, which Philadelphia Health and Human Services launched in January 2021. The city has budgeted $1.8 million for six units, or $300,000 per unit, including installation costs. According to a Portland Loo spokesperson who spoke with Reason, the total cost is around $200,000: up to $155,000 for…

SINCE 2019, NEW York has sought to establish the nation’s first congestion pricing zone, which would charge drivers fees for rush hour trips to improve traffic flows and raise funds for the city’s dilapidated subway system. That plan to toll drivers entering lower Manhattan’s grid-locked streets recently hit another road-block: New Jersey. Congestion pricing would provide important benefits to drivers themselves. Less grid-lock means Manhattan’s roads can handle more cars. Faster travel speeds allow people with pressing errands to get where they need to be on time. New Jersey officials, however, argue that congestion pricing is a thinly disguised “shakedown” of their suburban constituents who commute to Manhattan. They complain that New Jersey drivers heading to New York would be charged thousands of dollars a year to pay for trains…

OVER-THE-TOP VIOLENCE IN such video games as Mortal Kombat and Doom drew hand-wringing moral outrage from worrywart parents and government scolds throughout the ’90s. Minesweeper—in which players click around a rectangular grid of squares trying to avoid hidden mines, using logical rules to interpret numbers—seemed like it should be safe from controversy. Yet somehow the game was central to a minor moral panic that formed around pre-installed computer games as Windows spread through offices in the ’90s. Together, Minesweeper and Solitaire were seen as an unwelcome office distraction at best and a dire threat to worker productivity at worst. That fearful response didn’t start right away, as Minesweeper didn’t receive much critical attention during its initial release in 1990. Ender’s Game author Orson Scott Card came closest to predicting the…

MOVIE THEY CLONED TYRONE PETER SUDERMAN In Netflix’s absurdist sci-fi black comedy They Cloned Tyrone, the U.S. government is a secretive, manipulative authority trying to enforce crude racial harmony in America by subjecting black people to bizarre experiments. The film follows a trio of black urban protagonists who stumble upon a grim secret: For years, the U.S. government has been running a series of experiments attempting to pacify black Americans in order to keep the peace between the races. The experiments include a tranquilizing substance added to fried chicken, mind-control signals embedded in hip-hop, and, as the title suggests, a series of genetic experiments that include cloning and selective breeding designed to eliminate blackness. The story echoes old conspiracy theories that the CIA had deliberately fueled the crack epidemic in…