Innehållsförteckning för May 2024 från Reason

ON SUPER TUESDAY, as this issue went to press, voters in 15 states and one territory went to the polls and grudgingly validated the inevitable. America is in for another presidential election pitting Donald Trump against Joe Biden. The following morning, Nikki Haley—Trump’s one serious remaining Republican primary competitor—dropped out. But the real Super Tuesday runner-up is still in the race: “None of the above” made a surprisingly strong showing. Nevada in the 1970s was the birthplace of many excellent ideas, and electoral reforms were no exception. The state’s “none of these candidates” option was introduced in 1976, and it remains the bluntest ballot language in the category. Due to a variety of byzantine complications—including the absence of Trump from the ballot and the existence of caucuses in addition to…

IN RECENT YEARS, the tide turned against standardized tests such as the SAT and ACT. Once a nonnegotiable metric for determining college admission, many universities have cast off such tests, declaring them unnecessary—or even racist. While many schools went test-optional during the pandemic, that trend seems to have continued even on the other side of COVID-19 panic. According to FairTest, an anti–standardized testing group, most colleges in America are now test-optional, and over 80 refuse to look at scores entirely. But the trend against testing may be reversing. New data show that standardized tests predict student achievement better than high school GPA alone. Some schools have even reinstated their testing requirement—including Dartmouth College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), whose dean of admissions told The New York Times, “Just getting…

EVERYONE KNOWS THE United States has the most powerful military in the world. No one else comes close to Washington’s ability to hunt down its enemies and quickly drop bombs on them from halfway across the world. But what if America runs out of bombs? The Ukrainian city of Avdiivka is a cautionary tale. On February 17, the city fell to a Russian assault because the defenders ran low on ammunition. Although Ukrainian authorities claimed they were overseeing an orderly withdrawal, the fighters faced a harrowing ordeal. One group of soldiers fled in a beat-up car, which limped to safety after a Russian rocket blew out a tire, French war correspondent Guillaume Ptak reported. Troops filmed themselves passing by an iconic landmark, a sign that reads “Avdiivka is Ukraine,” with…

“THE TRAGEDY OF today is that we are the heirs and the beneficiaries of thousands of years of progress and we take it for granted. You wake up in a nice soft bed. You go get fresh milk and orange juice from the fridge. You take a shower under hot running water. You hop on the train or car to work. You take the elevator up to the 40th floor. You earn your living by typing on a computer behind big plate glass windows in an air-conditioned building. You relax in the evening by streaming movies and music or catching up with friends from around the world in your real-time video calls. None of this existed a couple centuries ago. A lot of it didn’t exist a few decades ago.…

THEODORE ROOSEVELT WAS president at the start of the Celebrity Age, and at the start of much of the modern image of the presidency. The White House was just beginning to be called that (rather than the Executive Mansion); Roosevelt’s renovations on the building created the West Wing. And his daughter, Alice, created one model for presidential relatives over the next century. Aged 17 when her father became president, she was a gift to the Washington press corps. Photogenic and charming, she was nicknamed “Princess Alice” in the papers. She was invited to Edward VII’s coronation (she did not attend), and the German kaiser had her christen his yacht. Her hobnobbing with royalty didn’t sit well with her father’s man-of-the-people pose, but he could do nothing to stop his daughter’s…

10 YEARS AGO May 2014 “Several scholars have identified a confluence of human-trafficking discourse with calls for restrictions on immigration. The new panic has also given rise to new agencies within municipal and state governments whose charge to prosecute ‘traffickers’ has resulted in the prosecution of greater numbers of women voluntarily selling sex for money. In Florida, the state legislature is considering a bill that would allow involuntary psychiatric hospitalization of sex-trafficking ‘victims.’” THADDEUS RUSSELL “Sex Slaves and the Surveillance State” “In January, the federal government’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent agency charged by Congress with advising the president on the privacy and civil liberties repercussions relating to fighting terrorism, concluded that the NSA’s domestic surveillance ‘implicates constitutional concerns under the First and Fourth Amendments, raises serious…

ON FEBRUARY 22, Odysseus became the first private spacecraft to have a (largely) successful soft moon landing. It launched seven days earlier on another private sector success, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. Developed by Intuitive Machines, the mission carried cargo from NASA in addition to commercial and academic customers. Odysseus landed on its side, however, limiting how much data it was able to send in the limited number of days it had before being engulfed in the cold lunar night.…

THIS YEAR MARKS the 50th anniversary of the original edition of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), the granddaddy of tabletop role-playing games and one of the urtexts of nerd culture. The golden anniversary could hardly have come at a better time; over the past decade, the game has undergone an unexpected renaissance, reaching levels of cultural saturation and sales that exceed even its 1980s heyday. Critical Role, a live-play D&D podcast, sold out London’s 12,000-seat Wembley Arena last October. Even a passingly good Dungeons & Dragons movie helped mark the game’s half-centennial. If it seems strange that something as anachronistic and exquisitely dorky as D&D is popular again, consider that those qualities may be exactly why people are drawn to it. The Atlantic recently reported that Americans are suffering a “kind…

“WE MUST END this uncivil war that pits red against blue,” President Joe Biden implored in hisinaugural address, a speech that used the word unity no fewer than 11 times: “Unity is the path forward.” It’s a familiar tune, one we were hearing from presidents long before it started to feel like the country was coming apart. “A kinder, gentler nation” was George H.W. Bush’s formulation. “I’m a uniter, not a divider,” the rendering of his feckless son. Barack Obama wouldn’t just stop the oceans’ rise; through the sheer power of presidential happy-talk, he’d kumbaya us into “one America,” beyond red and blue. Given the way things have been heading lately, you can’t blame Biden for sounding a bit desperate about it. Donald Trump, who threw out the old playbook…

IN MARCH, OREGON legislators over-whelmingly approved recriminalization of low-level drug possession, reversing a landmark reform that voters endorsed in 2020. Although critics of that ballot initiative, Measure 110, cited escalating drug-related deaths as a reason to reinstate criminal penalties, there is little evidence that decriminalization contributed to that problem. Deaths involving opioids have been rising nationwide for more than two decades. That trend was accelerated by the emergence of illicit fentanyl as a heroin booster and substitute, a development that hit Western states after it was apparent in other parts of the country. “Overdose mortality rates started climbing in [the] Northeast, South, and Midwest in 2014 as the percent of deaths related to fentanyl increased,” RTI International epidemiologist Alex Kral noted at a January conference in Salem, Oregon. “Overdose mortality…

A ROUND 2 A.M. on Monday, December 6, 1875, a “posse of police” led by Captain William Douglass descended on 609 Dupont Street in San Francisco. The cops arrested Fannie Whitmore, Cora Martinez, James Dennison, and Charles Anderson, along with “two Chinamen who kept the place.” That place, The San Francisco Examiner explained, was an “opium den,” and this was the first raid conducted under an ordinance that the city’s Board of Supervisors had enacted on November 15. The new law decreed that “no person shall, in the city and county of San Francisco, keep or maintain, or become an inmate of, or visit, or shall in any way contribute to the support of any place, house, or room, where opium is smoked, or where persons assemble for the purpose…

FEW INDIVIDUALS HAVE had a bigger impact on the libertarian movement than David Boaz, the long-time executive vice president of the Cato Institute, D.C.’s most prominent think tank. For decades, virtually every idea and policy utterance that Cato published crossed his desk at some point, where it was scanned not just for grammar and punctuation but for coherence, persuasiveness, and ideological seriousness. He also put his own thoughts out into the world, in innumerable columns, articles, and policy papers. In 1997, he published Libertarianism: A Primer, an encyclopedic yet succinct account of libertarian thought rich with real-world examples of how free speech, free trade, and the free movement of people created a richer and more interesting world. In 2015, he published an updated and revised version called The Libertarian Mind:…

TECHNOLOGY APPLE VISION PRO JUSTIN ZUCKERMAN The new Apple Vision Pro feels like magic—for about 30 minutes. Then the awe starts to fade. The Vision Pro is Apple’s first spatial computing headset. It allows users to interact with digital elements in the real world without the need for button clicking or screen swiping. It’s incredibly immersive for the user; you can’t help but smile as you seem to be sitting peacefully on the lunar surface or being gently nudged by the snouts of 3D hippos. But the amazement is unfortunately unsustainable. The device is big and clunky. Features like the eye-tracking selection tools are not always responsive, leaving you straining your eyes or desperately snapping your fingers in hopes of selecting different digital objects. The inevitable future iterations will likely…