Reason April 2018

IN THE FRONT of the SUV, a man in a black T-shirt is unconscious, or nearly so, and slumped over the steering wheel. Next to him on the passenger side, a woman’s bra strap slides off her thin shoulder as her head lolls. In the back, a 4-year-old is strapped into his car seat, looking oddly placid. The image, published by a local Ohio police department in 2016, is the most striking of the steady drip of such photos and videos, disseminated by well-meaning authorities with the goal of scaring the pants off of Americans and discouraging abuse of heroin, fentanyl, and other opioids. The opioid crisis—the sharp uptick in opioid-related deaths in recent years—provides endless human fodder for local newscasts. Newspapers and magazines publish story after story about the…

CONGRESS IS DYSFUNCTIONAL—and nothing illustrates that like the body’s increased reliance on short-term funding bills in place of comprehensive budgets, right? These continuing resolutions (C.R.s) are often used in times of crisis to prevent a government shutdown when Democrats and Republicans can’t agree enough to pass any of the 12 regular appropriations bills before October 1, the beginning of the next fiscal year, as required by the Congressional Budget Act of 1974. Yet a look at the data suggests that the number of C.R.s hasn’t actually spiked in the last few years. According to the Congressional Research Center, between 1977 and 2018, Congress has enacted an average of 4.4 continuing resolutions per year to keep the government running. While there has been an uptick in their use, it started way…

WHEN LIJ SHAW’S daughter was born, he decided to work from home so he could spend more time with his family. A record producer in Nashville, Shaw found a slightly offbeat solution to achieving work-life balance: Investing over $100,000, he completely soundproofed his house’s detached garage and transformed it into The Toy Box Studio, a professional recording space featuring state-of-the-art digital equipment and classic analog devices. Over the next decade, Shaw hosted countless musicians, one of whom even mixed the album that won the first ever Grammy Award for Best Roots Gospel Album. During this time, not one of his neighbors ever complained to Shaw about noise, traffic, or anything else regarding his studio. Nonetheless, in 2015, Nashville’s code enforcement ordered Shaw to cease and desist. Only by dropping the…

THERE IS AN alternative universe where not only did Hillary Clinton win in 2016, she won by 60 percentage points. Guns are scarce and arduous to legally obtain; bikes are ubiquitous. Public transit is so widespread that millions of adults don’t even own cars. People disdain Donald Trump and look down at the intelligence of his supporters. This place, this progressive nearutopia, is called New York City. And it is run by morons. “It’s time for Big Oil to take responsibility for the devastation they have wrought,” New York Mayor Bill De Blasio, recently re-elected by 39 percentage points, tweeted in January. He went on to announce he is suing five of the world’s biggest oil companies for the damage caused by Superstorm Sandy and starting the process of divesting…

IN THE FIRST days of January, a meme spread through Iran. The image featured Telecommunications Minister Mohammad Jahromi drop-kicking the logos of Tor, an encrypted proxy network, and several social media platforms—a reference to the Iranian government’s ban of the messaging service Telegram in response to protests in late December. On January 4, the meme ended up on the front page of Ghanoon, a newspaper aligned with the country’s liberal Reformist movement. The same day, Jahromi reposted it on his Instagram account along with the caption: “The National Security Council—which the Telecommunications Ministry is not part of—has decided, along with other security measures, to impose temporary restrictions on cyberspace in order to establish peace… instead of addressing the roots of the protests and unrest, some are trying to blame cyberspace.”…

IN 1969, THE Zinacantec Maya of Mexico’s Nabenchauk Valley all wore essentially the same clothes: square ponchos and shawls over simple cotton shirts, shorts, and skirts. Their outfits bore red and white stripes, with the proportions dictated by the type of garment. Ponchos and shawls had a lot of red and a little white, making them look pink from a distance, while women’s blouses were mostly white with two narrow red stripes dividing them into thirds. “All clothing, for toddlers up to adults, conformed to a closed stock of about four patterns,” Patricia Marks Greenfield recalls in her book Weaving Generations Together: Evolving Creativity in the Maya of Chiapas. When she first came to the valley in the southern Mexican state that year, the clothes, like Zinacantec culture, had barely…