Tabla de contenidos para November 2018 en Reason

THE FIRST WEEK of September saw the heads of tech companies hauled to Capitol Hill yet again to explain themselves to a bunch of grumpy senators. Whenever this happens, the hearing inevitably begins with hours of bloviation about “the public interest” before someone raises the idea that social media sites should be treated “like public utilities.” Rep. Steve King (R–Iowa) is a big fan of this line of questioning, raising it in the previous go-round with Google in July: “What about converting the large behemoth organizations that we’re talking about here into public utilities?” The notion that Twitter or Google are as vital to American citizens as water and electricity—and therefore must be subject to a much higher level of government scrutiny and regulation, or perhaps even government ownership—is misbegotten…

DEFENSE DISTRIBUTED, A company whose hardware and software allow users to make guns at home, is once again locked in battle with the government over its First Amendment rights. The business’s products let people “print” guns in 3D, but Defense Distributed doesn’t make or sell actual firearms. Nevertheless, in 2013 the government ordered the company to stop distributing its software files on the grounds that spreading such information was equivalent to the unlicensed export of munitions. Led by founder Cody Wilson, who in 2013 built and fired the first plastic gun made on a 3D printer, Defense Distributed sued in 2015, claiming that the software was First Amendment–protected speech, no different from any printed manual or book containing gun-making instructions. The software was already all over the internet and no…

THE INCREASING AVAILABILITY of plant-based alternatives to products that were traditionally derived from animals has been a blessing for vegans, vegetarians, and others who—for reasons biological or ideological—simply don’t enjoy animal-based fare. If milk makes you gassy, you can buy a white, milk-like substance made from almonds, cashews, or coconuts. If you love the texture of beef but not the idea of eating something that once had a face, you can get patties with a meaty texture that bleed beet juice. Although most of these products borrow terminology from the animal realm, American consumers don’t seem particularly confused about what makes them different. The ingredients in almond, soy, and coconut “milks,” for instance, are prominently featured on the packaging. Nearly all of these products are explicitly marketed as “nondairy,” and…

DONALD AND IRMA Shirkey tried to play by the rules, but Pacific Grove, California, turned their property rights into a game of chance. The couple purchased their brightly painted house on 5th Street, just a block from the ocean, in 1999. It was a second home for family and friends to use on visits. To cover the cost, the Shirkeys decided also to rent the house out as a vacation home. When Pacific Grove passed a new ordinance in 2010 requiring all short-term rental homes in the city to be licensed, they complied. When the city came back in 2017 and required a second license for the smaller guest quarters over the home’s garage—which the Shirkeys sometimes rented separately from the main house—they went along with that, too. Then in…

ELSA’S FATHER WAS a businessman. He was always looking for a good deal, and as the owner of a brick factory in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, he had money to invest. So in 2005, when he learned about a 2,000-square-meter piece of land for sale in a part of town where he expected property values to boom, he bought it. The deal was formal: Elsa’s father paid 100,000 birr ($3,641) in cash, signed the contracts in front of witnesses, and got a receipt. But there was one thing missing: a deed. So when Elsa’s father unexpectedly died just after the deal closed, her family was thrown into crisis. “As soon as [the previous owner] found out my father died, she changed her tune,” says Elsa, who asked that…

THE OFFICIAL MYERS-BRIGGS Type Indicator can be taken online for $50, but there are plenty of free knock-offs floating around the internet. I took two while writing this review. One says I’m ISTJ. The other typed me as ENTP. For those who aren’t familiar with the phenomenon, the test is made up of statements like “I prefer to stay home rather than go out” and “I prefer a tidy workplace,” which the test-taker marks as either true or false. In the end you are assigned to one of 16 possible personality “types,” based on the combination of results on four different axes: extroverted/introverted, sensing/intuitive, thinking/feeling, and judging/perceiving. As an ISTJ, I am introverted, sensing, thinking, and judging. Unless I am actually extroverted, intuitive, thinking, and perceiving. Whatever any of that…

In the era of big-budget comic book movies, Ken White is a different kind of superhero. The former federal prosecutor–turned–defense attorney has used his legal acumen and social media presence to educate Americans about the rites and rituals of U.S. attorneys and the finer points of the First Amendment. He is best known for putting out the “Popehat signal,” a reference to his time as a pseudonymous legal blogger; he lights the beacon on Twitter as a way of recruiting fellow lawyers to take on First Amendment cases pro bono. White’s stature has grown substantially in the age of Trump. He’s now a contributing editor at Reason and a podcaster whose appeal stems from a dedication to accuracy, a distaste for partisan politics, and an unshakeable commitment to the Constitution.…

Organizers of the Alaska Hempfest in Wasilla are facing possible fines for allowing people to use cannabis at the festival. While marijuana is legal for recreational consumption in Alaska, state law bars its use in public. Nordica Friedrich, communication and music director for the festival, says the fines make no sense. “People would never go to a beer and barley wine festival and just talk about beer and barley wine and just look at pictures of it,” she told the Associated Press. Chinese officials have blocked the release of Disney’s Christopher Robin in that country. The movie depicts the titular character, now an adult, getting a visit from his childhood friend Winnie the Pooh. Chinese censors have been cracking down on references to the comical bear on social media ever…

MY FATHER DIED in bed just about the time our plane set down on the tarmac at BWI airport. It was earlier than we expected—but maybe just what he’d hoped for. “I guess this is it,” he’d told me days earlier when he called to say the doctors had run out of ideas for fighting his cancer. They gave him anywhere from two weeks to two months. To play it on the safe side, I booked the first available flight east. My sister planned to drive over the same day so we could have a family visit and a collective send-off. My son Anthony and I traveled light and made good time. We arrived to the house maybe 45 minutes after wheels down. But when she opened the door, my…

IN 2010, NEW York state prison inmate Mark Burns says he was stocking the commissary when a can of spaghetti sauce fell on his head. He says he duly reported the accident, but afterward, two guards approached him and said they’d heard he’d been assaulted by another inmate. The guards had an offer, according to Burns: They wanted him to become an informant and provide false testimony against another guard. When he refused to play along, he was put in “involuntary protective custody.” For nine months, he spent 23 out of every 24 hours locked in a cell by himself—“for his own safety.” So Burns filed a federal civil rights lawsuit, claiming the guards violated his constitutional right not to snitch. The Supreme Court has ruled on compelled speech in…

EVERYBODY POOPS, BUT not everybody has to deal with a cartel when trying to dispose of it. This is a widespread problem for residents of Dakar, capital of Senegal. The city’s sanitation relies heavily upon septic tanks and latrine pits, which have to be routinely emptied. If not drained on a frequent basis, the latrine systems overflow, wreaking (or reeking?) havoc on residents. Roaming the city are large tanker trucks equipped with industrial pumps to extract human waste. Driving these trucks are individuals known as “toilet suckers.” These men work together as an association with fixed prices and a collective noncompete agreement. In other words, they are a cartel. The truckers congregate at central locations in various communities in Dakar, where local residents can approach them about their services. Costs…

YOU PROBABLY THINK you know which states have the best and worst education systems in the country. If you regularly dip into rankings such as those published by U.S. News and World Report, you likely believe schools in the Northeast and Upper Midwest are thriving while schools in the Deep South lag. It’s an understandable conclusion to draw from those ubiquitous “Best Schools!” lists. It’s also wrong. The general consensus on education, retold every few news cycles, is that fiscally conservative states are populated by cheapskates. In those necks of the woods, people are too ignorant to vote in favor of helping their illiterate and innumerate children. Intelligent people understand that high taxes and generous pensions for public school teachers are the recipe for an efficient and smoothly functioning education…

ON THE HEELS of a draconian border crackdown and interior deportation raids, President Donald Trump has quietly opened another front in his war on immigration. This time, he’s going after authorized immigrants. After failing to get Congress to institute the 40 percent cut in legal immigration he sought, Trump is trying to achieve administratively what he couldn’t legis latively—by wrapping each legal immigration category in red tape and handing his bureaucrats sweeping powers to deny applications for the flimsiest of reasons. It’s working. A recent Washington Post analysis found that the total number of people receiving visas to live in the country is on pace to drop 12 percent in just the first two years of the Trump presidency. Trump got things rolling by targeting asylum seekers and refugees. To…

THE SUPREME COURT this June expanded First Amendment protections to cover public employees who don’t want the state extracting union dues, voters who seek to wear political clothing or paraphernalia at the polls, and some businesses that chafe at being told by the government that they must display certain information. This has been, The Volokh Conspiracy’s Jonathan H. Adler concluded, “the most speech-protective Supreme Court in our nation’s history.” The citizenry, meanwhile, was moving in the opposite direction. In a memo leaked in June, staffers at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) agonized that the organization’s fabled commitment to the First Amendment might have a “harmful impact on the equality and justice work to which we are also committed.” All summer long, rightists and leftists took turns trying to get…

BE MORE KIND is the seventh studio album by the British singer-songwriter Frank Turner. The title is based on a Clive James poem published in The New Yorker, and like many of Turner’s previous works, the record blends elaborate folk storytelling with a punk rock attitude, overtly political themes, and pleas for social decency. With song titles like “Make America Great Again” and “21st Century Survival Blues,” Be More Kind is an album full of literary, political rock ’n’ roll. It has also been a critical and commercial hit, pulling rave reviews at publications such as NME, topping the British charts, and rising to 90th on Billboard’s top-200 album list. Turner has described himself as both a libertarian and a classical liberal—ideological descriptors that are rare in his corner of…

FOR ALL THE florid journalistic commentary about voter polarization, extensive empirical studies have shown that the American electorate is no more polarized today than it was in the 1970s. What’s changed is that the parties have sorted: Democrats have become more homogeneously liberal, Republicans more homogeneously conservative. But even taking sorting into account, partisan hostility appears greater than any objective differences on the issues would seem to justify. To explain this divergence, a number of scholars have argued for a view generally known as “affective partisanship.” Ordinary Democrats and Republicans may not differ that much on public policy, the argument goes, but they dislike the other side more than they used to, ascribing negative traits to them and even claiming they would be upset if their offspring married someone from…