Inhoudsopgave van December 2017 - Reason

HERE ARE TWO true statements: 1. The number of privately held firearms in America has nearly doubled in the last two decades while the number of gun murders per capita was cut in half. 2. The number of kids abducted by strangers in 2011 was 105, out of approximately 73 million children in the United States. That’s down slightly from 115 two decades ago. After Stephen Paddock killed 58 people and injured hundreds more by firing into a crowd from the 32nd floor of his Las Vegas hotel in October, America dove headfirst into our now-traditional national shoutfest about gun laws. One side sees its argument as self-evident: The moment when dozens of people lie dying in the street of gunshot wounds is the right time to pass laws restricting…

FACED WITH A mounting number of opioidrelated overdoses, state lawmakers across the U.S. are turning to the devil they know. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, for example—a moderate Republican— declared in August that opioids and gangs made it “critical that our laws give law enforcement the appropriate tools and enforcement measures to keep everyone safe.” The “tools” he was referring to were stiff new mandatory minimum sentences. A pernicious legacy of the 1980s’ war on crack cocaine, mandatory minimums essentially allow prosecutors rather than judges to decide how long convicts will be imprisoned. Because the minimum sentences are statutorily imposed and nonnegotiable, they empower prosecutors to issue the most illiberal of ultimatums: Plead guilty, or face a long term that can’t be alleviated by mitigating factors. Baker thinks anyone who supplies…

THE UNITED STATES’ corporate income tax needs a makeover. It’s not just that Uncle Sam tries to take a piece of all corporate income, including money earned (and therefore taxed) in other nations. It’s not just that America’s top statutory rate is higher than in all other countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). (According to the Congressional Budget Office, it currently stands at 39.2 percent including state levies; Trump has proposed a significant reduction in the federal rate, but prospects look weak.) It’s that over the years, American companies have seen other governments reform their tax systems while the U.S. has done almost nothing to fix ours. This chart shows the evolution of top statutory corporate tax rates (combining taxes at all levels of government) from…

Bojack Horseman, Netflix’s cartoon about a washed-up sitcom star who happens to be a horse, has drawn critical acclaim for its masterful mix of animated humor and emotionally harrowing takes on depression and personal failure. The fourth season, which dropped in September, delivers more gutpunching tearjerkers: an adopted kid seeking her mother, a son dealing with a mother he despises suffering from dementia, and the agonies of miscarriage, infertility, and troubled partnerships. In a year with painfully weird real-life politics, this season’s extended B story involves a goofily well-meaning but ignorant and easily manipulated canine TV star, Mr. Peanutbutter, running for governor of California against a seasoned, policy-smart, and dignified woodchuck. While doubtless conceptualized before Trump won, the show winningly avoids heavy-handed callbacks to our lived political reality and depicts…

The sleazy streets of 1970s New York City have become a cinematic cliché at this point, standing in for so many shifts in social mores, sex, and the cityscape. HBO’s The Deuce, created by David Simon (The Wire, Treme), explores how the era’s commercial pornography boom changed this scene. Its hard-working and entrepreneurial heroes—James Franco as twin brothers, Maggie Gyllenhaal as independent streetwalker Candy, Dominique Fishback as the sweet and rapidly wising-up young sex worker Darlene—dared to craft a new way of making a living off meeting others’ erotic needs while declaring their own worth. Much in the show parallels more recent shifts in the sex trade brought about by the internet, and to the extent that The Deuce can mine this territory for dramatically compelling material while avoiding well-worn…

DONALD TRUMP CERTAINLY knows how to drive the news cycle. When archivists of the future pore through the headlines from September 2017, they will see not only the real-world calamities of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, but such Trump-driven ephemera as calling the leader of North Korea “Rocket Man,” accusing old sparring partner Sen. John McCain (R–Ariz.) of delivering “a tremendous slap in the face to the Republican Party,” and sending the entire country into a culture-war tizzy over the oncesmall number of professional football players who kneel in protest during “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Jesus taught us that “ye shall know them by their fruits,” but as the Republican- led 115th Congress stumbles from one legislative nonstarter to the next, it’s becoming clearer that the president’s main fruits are his…

“WHY ARE YOU here?” the tech asked me when I went in for my cardiac stress test. It was a reasonable question. I’d walked in with normal body weight, low-normal blood pressure, and a resting heart rate of 48. So why did I need a cardiac stress test? The answer was that I was recovering from a central retinal vein occlusion—a stroke, but in my eye. It was probably brought on by stress, my doctors said, because I had none of the risk factors for cardiovascular trouble. Non-smoking (except for the occasional cigar) trail runners who watch what they eat and maintain a healthy weight over decades aren’t supposed to be likely candidates for dislodged blood clots. As the months passed and the tests turned up few follow-on problems, it…

“There is no doubt that until recently, many women’s claims of sexual assault were reflexively and widely disregarded,” journalist Emily Yoffe wrote in a three-part series published in September at The Atlantic. “But many of the remedies that have been pushed on campus in recent years are unjust to men, infantilize women, and ultimately undermine the legitimacy of the fight against sexual violence.” These problems, Yoffe explains, are rooted in a set of directives from the Obama-era Department of Education, which nudged college administrators to adopt new procedures for adjudicating sexual assault disputes under Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in higher education. While the goal of such changes may have been to protect victims and bring perpetrators to justice, the rules have in practice made it…

FOR MORE THAN 40 years, James Scott has written about those who resist being incorporated into political-economic systems. Initially focused on Southeast Asia, he later expanded his field of vision to large-scale bureaucratic institutions around the world. He has consistently emphasized the ways that such structures try to transform the populations they govern into well-behaved, easily supervisable units—laborers, taxpayers, soldiers—but also the ways those populations work around and subvert the aimed-for transformations. In a provocative new book, Against the Grain, Scott now challenges us to rethink legends about the state and its origins. Populations ruled by states tell stories about their emergence into civilization, stories that cast the non-state peoples around them as primitives and barbarians. These stories are familiar from the era of European imperialism and from early modern…

There’s a glut of true-crime podcasts right now, but only one delivers on its promise to take listeners behind bars. Ear Hustle—prison slang for eavesdropping—is co-produced by inmates in California’s San Quentin prison. California is one of the most carceral states in the nation, but the world inside places like San Quentin is often hidden from those fortunate enough to exist outside the system. The podcast lets prisoners explain everything from the mundane to the harrowing: the fraught process of finding a new cellmate, how conjugal visits work, the unwritten rules of race, and how the inmates arrived in their current confines. Unlike the stereotypes typically found in TV dramas, the inmates of Ear Hustle are funny, thoughtful, and complicated. There’s Drew the Party Planner, who keeps track of the…

Tequila is bad for bats, it turns out. Our nocturnal echolocationary pals love the blossoms of the blue agave plant, but liquor makers prefer to harvest agave before it blooms—and booming demand for high-end tequila and mezcal have turned every plant into a prize. But thanks to the efforts of biologist Rodrigo Medellín— who says bat pollination increases biodiversity and helps strengthen local ecosystems— some agave farms are experimenting with letting 5 percent of their plants flower in an effort to lure back the bats. In exchange, they get a holographic seal of approval and a new marketing strategy. So how does it taste? Tequila Tapatío’s new batfriendly Tequila Ocho is pricey—I found a bottle for $70 at one of D.C.’s more eclectic liquor stores—but light and grassy, with a…

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP is nothing if not a protectionist. He has promised time and again to tear up trade deals and build barriers against foreign people and products. Usually, he frames it as a defense of American manufacturers and the workers they employ. “I have visited cities and towns across this country where one-third or even half of manufacturing jobs have been wiped out in the last 20 years,” the then–presidential candidate said in one typical campaign address. “We import nearly $800 billion more in goods than we export. We can’t continue to do that.” But if the president goes through with his threats to raise the barriers to international trade, American companies will pay the price. Take Lektro Inc. For 72 years, the manufacturer of electric runway vehicles has…

SHE IS AN icon of 1920s modernity: an independent woman with bobbed hair and a short skirt, walking with her streamlined Borzoi, the quintessential Art Deco dog. Behind her is a New York City street. But instead of skyscrapers and neon lights, it’s lined with old-fashioned chimneyed houses. This image, with its up-to-the-minute foreground character and historic background tableau, is from a series of 1929 ads promoting the new season’s print fabrics from H.R. Mallinson & Co., a major silk-textile manufacturer. In a second ad, the modern woman, hand on hip, twirls her long pearl necklace in a stereotypical flapper gesture. In the background is a monument featuring the Mayflower and a hopeful-looking Pilgrim couple. A third ad shows the woman standing with her hand on a ledge, gazing thoughtfully…

“IT DOESN’T CHEAPEN the aims of this biography or the ambitions of its subject,” writes Chistoph Irmscher, “to describe what follows as a story largely about sex and communism.” What follows is the life of Max Eastman—poet, nudist, women’s suffragist, war resister, socialist editor, and finally a self-described “libertarian conservative.” William F. Buckley Jr. found his atheism unpalatable. But to a teenage Carly Simon, Eastman—by then in his 80s—was “the most beautiful man she had ever met.” She was far from the only woman to feel that way. Eastman’s star burned bright for more than half of the 20th century, as he wrote his way to fame, traveled the world, translated Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, and ended up as one of the red faith’s foremost apostates. What kind…

A nation that began by declaring that all men were created equal kept, at the same time, more than half a million black people in bondage. “The Mere Distinction of Colour”—a moving new exhibit at Montpelier, the home of President James Madison—explores this unhappy historical paradox as it shows how people who were treated as property lived and worked as families and as a community. The reconstructed cabins in the South Yard, just a couple of hundred feet from the main house, feature videos where the descendants of the plantation’s enslaved community speak vividly about the struggles and triumphs of their ancestors. Owing in part to the numerous gambling debts incurred by his wastrel stepson John Payne Todd, Madison died owing money and did not free any of Montpelier’s enslaved…

Thanks to critics from Charles Dickens to Michel Foucault, pre–20th century utilitarian philosophers have gained a reputation as amoral libertines or cold rationalists, impervious to what people today might call “social justice.” But William Godwin, Jeremy Bentham, and other classical utilitarians were dedicated humanists, deeply concerned with social reform, and often radically progressive on women’s rights, sexual relations, and other cultural issues. In The Happiness Philosophers (Princeton), the University of Chicago philosophy professor Bart Schultz explores how these liberal values were not in tension with utilitarianism but a natural outgrowth of the philosophy’s emphasis on maximizing happiness. As a reading experience, the book suffers from a dry academic tone and disjointed format, but it is peppered with interesting information. “Bentham, more than any other figure discussed in this book, needs…

José Luis Cordeiro is a founding faculty member at Singularity University, a Silicon Valley–based futurist think tank devoted to the idea that science may soon allow humans to transcend aging and death. At this year’s Freedom Fest in Las Vegas, Cordeiro sat down with Reason’s Nick Gillespie to discuss immortality, artificial intelligence, and why he’s so optimistic. Q: What are you most excited about right now? A: Medicine is being radically transformed. We are going to be living longer lives, healthier lives, probably indefinite life spans, very soon. Q: Define very soon. A: At the latest by 2045. I do not plan to die. Even more interesting, in 30 years, I will be younger than today, not older. Q: How? A: Because we are going to have rejuvenation techniques, and…