Innehållsförteckning för March 2025 från Reason

ONE FLORIDA SCHOOL district is facing a legal battle over its decision to ban a book about gay penguins. In 2022, the state passed the Parental Rights in Education Act, which banned classroom discussions on sexual orientation or gender identity “in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students.” While the law initially applied only to kindergarten through third-grade classrooms, the Florida Board of Education later expanded the law to all grades. Several Florida school districts began removing books from their collections that could possibly violate the new law—including And Tango Makes Three, a picture book depicting two male penguins who raise a chick together. In 2023, the authors of the book filed a lawsuit against one school district that removed the book, arguing that “the Ban’s…

DOCUMENTARY BIGGEST HEIST EVER BRIAN DOHERTY If the federal government’s story in its successful prosecution is true, when Ilya Lichtenstein hacked the cryptocurrency exchange Bitfinex in 2016 and stole over 119,000 customer bitcoins (worth about $72 million at the time), he couldn’t have known he’d committed the most lucrative theft in human history. But thanks to bitcoin’s peculiar volatility, by the time the feds closed in on Lichtenstein and his wife, Heather Morgan (convicted of helping him launder the stolen proceeds), in 2022, their haul was worth well over $5 billion. Using some of their insufficiently laundered coins to buy gift cards for guests at their wedding helped doom them. The Netflix documentary Biggest Heist Ever, about the couple, the theft, the investigation, the arrests, and the prosecution, is fascinated…

30 YEARS AGO March 1995 “The new Republican-led Congress promises major changes in ‘welfare’—giveaways to the relatively destitute. But the federal government is equally adept at throwing other people’s money at those who haven’t even a surface excuse for needing it. The recent ‘Mexican bailout,’ $25 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to help keep Mexico solvent so it can eventually pay off its debt, is a good example. In essence, that move aided American banks improvident enough to toss good money after bad at the Mexican government. If the new congressional regime wants to prove that they mean an end to businessas-usual, they must cut off federal cash flow to the influential as well as the marginal. But contrary to [Labor Secretary] Robert Reich, who has taken to railing against…

WHEN PRESIDENT DONALD Trump announced his nomination of Pam Bondi as attorney general, he extolled her “incredible job” in “work[ing] to stop the trafficking of deadly drugs and reduc[ing] the tragedy of Fentanyl Overdose Deaths.” Yet those deaths exploded on Bondi’s watch as Florida’s attorney general. According to data from the Florida Department of Health, the age-adjusted rate of “deaths from drug poisoning” did fall a bit after Bondi took office, from 13.7 per 100,000 residents in 2011 to 12.1 in 2013. But then it resumed its upward trajectory, reaching 25.1—nearly double the 2011 rate—by the time Bondi left office in 2019. The death rate rose sharply in 2020 (as it did across the country), rose again in 2021, and declined in 2022 and 2023, when it was 30.8 per…

A FEW YEARS ago, the media were abuzz with some bad news: Bees were dying out in record numbers. Many culprits were suggested. Climate change. Insecticides. A mysterious disease known as “colony collapse disorder” seemingly caused worker bees to spontaneously go on strike, wander off, and die. There was little consensus about what was happening, but the decline was noticeable and worrying. The trend is now different. According to the most recent Census of Agriculture, the twice-per-decade federal counting of all domestic and farm animals in the United States, the number of bee colonies is up 31 percent since 2007. Due to how the Department of Agriculture collects those data, the bee renaissance may be somewhat less dramatic than reported—private organizations that also track the number of beehives say the…

“THIS VICTORY AGAINST Google is an historic win for the American people.” So declared U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in response to District Judge Amit Mehta’s August 5, 2024, ruling in United States v. Google, which found the tech giant guilty of amassing and wielding illegal monopoly power over the online search market. What Garland left unsaid was that the ruling was also a win for his boss, President Joe Biden, and for his boss’s predecessor, former President Donald Trump. That’s because the federal case against Google did not originate with the Biden Justice Department; it originated with the Trump Justice Department. “Two decades ago, Google became the darling of Silicon Valley as a scrappy startup with an innovative way to search the emerging internet,” the Trump administration argued in…

THE CHERNOBYL EXCLUSION zone is the closest we have to a reallife postapocalyptic wasteland. After the infamous 1986 meltdown of a Soviet nuclear reactor, around 1,000 square miles in northern Ukraine were evacuated due to radioactive contamination. Video games such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Call of Duty imagine the zone as a lawless wasteland, with bandits and spies fighting in Soviet-era ghost towns while dodging radiation patches. In reality, Chernobyl is less abandoned than outsiders might imagine. The ill-fated nuclear reactor and the containment shell around it require ongoing maintenance. The area as a whole is monitored constantly for levels of contamination. A legion of Ukrainian workers regularly commutes into the exclusion zone from the nearby city of Slavutych, built after the meltdown for evacuated Chernobyl staff. And in February 2022,…

WILL THE INCOMING Trump administration and Republican Congress get to the bottom of how the COVID-19 pandemic began? There’s every indication that they’ll at least try. The idea that the pandemic originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China—and that U.S. government–funded research contributed to the virus’s creation—has gone from a derided conspiracy theory to a credible hypothesis with some mainstream acceptance in the past few years. Thanks to information obtained through congressional probes and investigative journalism, we already know that U.S. government–funded researchers were engaged in gain-of-function research on coronaviruses at the WIV. We know the same researchers proposed using federal grants to create viruses with many of the unique features of the virus that caused the pandemic; they even cited the cost-effectiveness of doing so under…

CALIFORNIA WAS ONE of President Donald Trump’s largest foes during his first term; the state sued his administration over 120 times. Lawsuits from the Golden State impeded several of Trump’s deregulatory moves, including attempts to curb regulations regarding methane emissions from landfills and fracking on federal lands. Then-California Attorney General Xavier Becerra also led a coalition of 22 states in challenging the Trump administration’s final rule to modernize the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). The first significant overhaul of the law in decades, the rule set hard page and time limits for completing an environmental review and was designed to streamline permitting in the United States. While the lawsuit did not reverse the rule, the NEPA modernization was ultimately rescinded when President Joe Biden took office. With Democratic Gov. Gavin…

MARTIN GURRI IS a former CIA analyst and author of The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. He is known for his incisive analysis of how social media disrupt traditional power structures. In a post–2024 election conversation at the Reason Speakeasy in New York City, Gurri sat down with Nick Gillespie and discussed his vote for Donald Trump and why he is cautiously optimistic about the next four years. Q: Before the election, you wrote a piece saying, “I didn’t vote in the previous two presidential elections, but I’m voting for Trump this time.” The dividing line, you said, was that the Democrats and Kamala Harris were the party of control. What did you mean by that? A: We’ve had a set of…

RICK DOBLIN HAD come to believe that psychedelic experiences are the “common core” of all religions, and he wanted to test this thesis. In February 1984, the 31-year-old college student living off a trust fund in Sarasota, Florida, typed out a letter to the United Nations, proposing a study that would double as a “training program for a variety of religious ministries.” He needed only 50 volunteers, he said, plus a panel of scholars and religious mystics (including His Holiness the Dalai Lama) to judge the results. Doblin reached out to several politicians for help too. He even wrote a letter to Pope John Paul II. In the meantime, he took on what might have been an even more daunting task, though today it sounds almost mainstream: turning MDMA into…

STARTING AN ULTIMATE Frisbee league to repair a war-torn country sounds like the plot of a buddy comedy, yet it’s a reality in Iraqi Kurdistan. After German and American aid workers introduced Frisbees to the country in 2019, the sport quickly caught on. By 2023, the scrappy Duhok Shepherds team was flying to Dubai for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Ultimate Club Championship. It was the first time many team members had left Iraq. By November 2024, the team was competing in Doha, Qatar, their uniforms proudly displaying both the Iraqi national flag and the Kurdish tricolor. The spread of Ultimate Frisbee testifies to a kind of Western soft power in the Middle East, one far friendlier than bombs or bullets. Invented by New Jersey high schoolers in…