Innehållsförteckning för May 2025 från Reason

“LUXURY BELIEFS” ARE the ideological equivalent of an icy tray of Blue Point oysters—trendy, expensive, and often impractical for the average person, but deeply satisfying for those who can afford them. And, on rare occasions, sickening. The term, coined by writer Rob Henderson, describes a set of ideas that he believes confer status on elites while imposing costs on everyone else. In his accounting, these include: academic elites advocate prison abolition while living in low-crime neighborhoods; Silicon Valley billionaires declare that college is a scam, ignoring the elite-education connections that got them their first venture capital meetings; and urban intellectuals claim homeownership is overrated—right up until they buy a brownstone in Brooklyn. While this critique is more often levied against progressives, luxury beliefs are fascinatingly transpartisan. Like “virtue signaling” before…

THE MAN ON the motorcycle was an anarchist, a lawbreaker, a guy the Black Panthers could turn to when their leader needed transportation; his FBI file fretted that he might “participate in violent activities, such as bombings, should the right opportunity present itself.” He was in Vermont to speak at a hippie college, but he took a detour to visit someone else in a mountainside cabin about 40 miles away. It was the middle of the 1970s. The man in that cabin was a longtime Republican who had served in the state Legislature. He used to work for Richard Nixon, and he would soon write radio scripts for Ronald Reagan. He and the anarchist had never met before. They chatted in the kitchen for hours, enjoying each other’s company. After…

ACROSS 1. Pitcher with a great arm 4. Sith opponents 9. Month of the 2024 Libertarian Party national convention 12. “Let’s go!” 13. Extension of the soft palate 14. Bernie Sanders wearing mittens, for example 15. Type of citizenship Donald Trump attempted to circumvent in a Day 1 executive order 17. Utah ski site 18. Suspicious glance 19. Tries to achieve 21. Cool, Gen X–style 22. Way Trump described the migrant crisis in a Day 1 executive order 23. Main point of an argument 25. Form 1040 calculation: abbr. 26. Swampy area 28. Us-vs.-___ 30. Egg cells, medically 32. Situation Trump declared in a Day 1 executive order 37. Commodity affected by Joe Biden’s actions on January 5, 2025 38. Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars program: abbr. 39. Trials and tribulations…

IN 2024, A Mayan megacity was discovered in Campeche, Mexico. Swallowed by the rainforest, this lost urban center contained pyramids, plazas, amphitheaters, and highways. But this discovery wasn’t made by a team of seasoned explorers hacking through the rainforest with machetes. It was made by a Ph.D. student. And he found it by accident. “I was on something like page 16 of a Google search and found a laser survey done by a Mexican organization for environmental monitoring,” Luke Auld-Thomas, who is pursuing his doctorate at Tulane University, explained to the BBC in October. That overlooked, decade-old survey contained groundbreaking information hidden in plain sight. The survey used light detection and ranging (lidar) technology, a remotesensing method that sends thousands of laser pulses from an aircraft to map objects buried…

THE FIRST FEW weeks of the second Trump administration were a whirlwind of counterproductive, illogical trade policies. Trump returned to the White House with a promise to raise tariffs on his first day in office. That morphed into a threat to tax all imports from Mexico and Canada (two nations with which Trump negotiated a new trade deal during his first term) on February 1. When that date arrived, Trump backed down. Meanwhile, he slapped a new 10 percent tariff on all goods imported from China and followed that with a 25 percent tariff on all steel and aluminum imports. On March 3, the president reversed course again and moved forward with blanket tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada. Trump also began the process of implementing what he calls…

MY FATHER VISITED me once while I was working for Congress, and I took him to the D.C. Armory to see the marching bands perform. This was a brilliant stroke on my part as a son, as my father loves marching band music. He listens to John Philip Sousa every morning on his way to work, and he unwinds by playing Risk on his computer while listening to the kind of jaunty tunes you’d see in old war propaganda films as the aircraft carrier zips toward Japan. Dad might actually enjoy being invaded by a foreign army, so long as they did it while goose-stepping to a solid drumbeat. (I suspect he dislikes terrorists primarily for their lackluster showmanship.) At one point, the Army bands split into two sections, then…

MOVIE CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD PETER SUDERMAN Never trust a president, even if he’s an elderly but still charismatic Harrison Ford. That’s one way to interpret Captain America: Brave New World. In theory, Brave New World is the fourth movie in the Captain America subfranchise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the first to star Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson, the not-quitesuper-soldier previously known as Falcon, in the title role. But it’s really more of a sequel to an old and better-forgotten Marvel movie, 2008’s The Incredible Hulk. Except in this case, the hulk is cherry red—and also the president of the United States, played by Ford. Yes, it’s a superhero movie about a president with rage issues. Billed as a conspiracy thriller, a sort of super-powered riff on Three…

FIVE YEARS AFTER giving birth to a baby girl in 2019, Mississippi mother Brandy Moore was arrested for “aggravated domestic violence” based on a postnatal drug test. The timing was puzzling, and so was the legal reasoning of the prosecutor who accused Moore of that felony, which is punishable by up to 20 years in prison. Postnatal drug tests, even when they are erroneous, can trigger grueling investigations by state-appointed social workers, which can lead to separation of mothers from their newborn children and criminal charges. But Moore’s case was unusual because, for reasons that were unclear, she was not arrested for her alleged prenatal crime until her daughter, Remi, was in preschool. It was also unusual because the prosecutor dropped the charge after reconsidering his strategy of trying to…

A MENTAL HEALTH survey administered to Seattlearea middle and high schoolers is putting their sensitive personal information at risk, according to a February investigation from The Seattle Times and the education-focused outlet The 74. While parents and schools were sold on the survey as a tool to identify struggling students, a public records request showed just how invasive many survey questions are. The survey, called Check Yourself, takes around 12 minutes to complete and asks students about general demographic features, along with questions about their mental health. For example, it asks students, “During the past year, did you ever seriously think about ending your life?” According to The 74, King County, which includes Seattle, has spent more than $21 million on the survey and related mental health supports since 2018.…

“OH, GIVE ME a home, where the buffalo roam, where the deer and the antelope play,” goes the venerable Western folk song “Home on the Range.” Fences strung throughout the western United States to corral cattle and other livestock, however, block buffalo from roaming and restrict the play of deer and antelope. The deployment of virtual fencing may free wildlife to prance unfettered by barbed wire across the vast landscapes of the American West. Ranchers will also benefit from this cheaper and more flexible tool for managing the grazing of their herds. How does virtual fencing work? “Animals (primarily cattle) wear GPS-enabled collars that emit sound, vibrations, and mild electric pulses to guide their movement to encourage them to stay within—or deter them from entering—designated areas,” explains a November 2024…

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP promised on the campaign trail that he’d go after Mexico’s drug cartels, which he claimed in January “essentially run” that country. Since taking office, he has leaned on militaristic tactics to stop the flow of fentanyl into the U.S., an approach that invites conflict—and plenty of collateral damage. In January, when Fox News asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth whether the administration would use the military against cartels, he replied that “all options will be on the table.” In February, the State Department designated eight cartels and transnational organizations as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) and specially designated global terrorists (SDGTs). Those designations in and of themselves “are not exactly a declaration of war,” wrote Reason’s Matthew Petti. An FTO designation “bans Americans—or anyone who wants to immigrate to the…

WHEN WILLONTE YATES, Malik Perry, Dayonta McClinton, and three other young men arrived at a CVS on College Avenue in Indianapolis on a Tuesday night in October 2015, they were there to rob the pharmacy at gunpoint. It did not go as planned. McClinton helped guard customers. Yates, who dubbed himself the “mastermind” of a string of similar robberies, led the charge with Perry. But their target, the safe, was equipped with a timed lock, meaning they would not be able to access the drugs inside for several minutes. Each passing moment meant the police could be drawing closer. So the group made off with a small bottle of hydrocodone—a sacrificial offering set aside by the pharmacy for situations like this one—along with kidney medication and cough syrup containing codeine.…

WHEN YOU THINK of the Marx Brothers, you likely think of Groucho’s wisecracks, Harpo’s sight gags, and even Chico’s piano specialties. You don’t think about their brother Zeppo. When you think of the Three Stooges, you likely think of three guys slapping and poking each other: Moe, Larry, and Curly. Not Curly’s replacement, Shemp (and certainly not later replacements Joe Besser and Joe DeRita). Show biz has few stars but plenty of also-rans. And as if fate ordered it, two new biographies published within two weeks of each other—Zeppo: The Reluctant Marx Brother, by Robert S. Bader, and Shemp!, by Burt Kearns—tell the stories of Zeppo Marx and Shemp Howard, unsung members of famous comedy teams. What a time to be alive. Zeppo is the dullest Marx brother on screen,…