Table of contents for August - September 2017 in Reason

IN APRIL, RESEARCHERS announced they had managed to keep several extremely premature lambs alive and growing in artificial wombs. After spending up to four weeks in a clear plastic “extra-uterine device” at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, each sheep transformed from a decidedly undercooked fetal specimen to a much more robust critter with long limbs and a fluffy wool coat, the sort of animal you wouldn’t be terribly alarmed to see plop to the ground in a field on a spring afternoon. The setup strongly resembles a sous vide cooking apparatus: a tiny, tender lamb floats in a large plastic ziplock, hooked up to tubes and monitors. But a video clip posted by the researchers has the emotional heft of feeling a fetus kick when you put a hand on…

SINCE DONALD TRUMP’S election, immigrant rights activists have been bracing themselves for mass round-ups of the estimated 11 million undocumented aliens currently in the country. As a candidate, after all, Trump cited Dwight Eisenhower’s Operation Wetback—when over a million illegal Mexicans were ejected by border patrol teams in the first year alone—as his “model.” That hasn’t happened. But less than a month after Trump’s inauguration, Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly radically revised the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP) that Barack Obama put in place in the last few years of his term. As its name suggests, the program’s goal was to focus on deporting hardened criminals—“bad hombres,” in Trump’s telling—but largely lay off everyone else. Kelly still wants to go after the violent offenders, but he has also given Immigration…

SIR ALEC JEFFREYS didn’t know what awaited him when he entered his lab in Leicester, England, on September 10, 1984. “My life changed on Monday morning at 9:05 a.m.,” he later told an interviewer at the University of Leicester. “In science, it is unusual to have such a ‘eureka’ moment.” But the discovery he made that day in the science of DNA would turn criminal justice on its head. The first genetic fingerprint was discovered “purely by accident,” says Jeffreys. He and his team were studying the evolution of mammalian globin genes when they discovered repetitive DNA sequences spread through the genomes of almost all the species they tested. Further examination showed that they were present in most mammals and that the patterns appeared to be different in each animal.…

NICK BILTON’S AMERICAN Kingpin is the story of the hunt for Ross Ulbricht, the man behind the website Silk Road. Its flaws resemble those of Bilton’s previous book, the 2013 bestseller Hatching Twitter (Portfolio/Penguin), which largely ignored the social media platform’s meaning to its users or the world at large, instead dishing on the founders’ squabbles over control, credit, and money. Similarly, while the ostensible topic of American Kingpin is an amazing combination of technologies that produced something new under the sun—a way to buy drugs that tended to be safe from the law as well as from rip-offs and overdoses—Bilton doesn’t seriously explore the technical or social side of Silk Road. Nor does he delve much into the legal and ethical issues surrounding the drug war. Instead he tells…

PHILADELPHIA USED TO require every public transit pass to say whether a rider was female or male. For Charlene Arcila, a transgender woman, it didn’t matter which option she chose; either way, some bus drivers deemed her pass illegitimate. Left to decide on the spot whether Arcila qualified as a man or woman, individual city workers would come to different conclusions—but every one of them had the power to refuse to let her ride the bus. Instituted in the 1980s as a protection against fraud, Philadelphia’s sex-identifying transit cards didn’t cause trouble just for transgender passengers. Plenty of cisgender folks— those whose gender identity conforms to the norm for their biological sex—fail to present as obviously male or female, and passengers of androgynous or ambiguous gender expression also found themselves…

Have you ever melted down a penny? Used a power tool at the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge? Sold jock itch cream without telling users to use it every day for two weeks? If so, congratulations, you’ve broken a federal law! The Twitter account @CrimeADay offers up, as it promises, one federal crime every day. It has been around for about four years and could go on for decades, given that the U.S. federal code, as printed by the Government Printing Office, contains 35 volumes each about 1,300 pages long. In his 2011 book Three Felonies a Day (Encounter Broadsides), civil rights attorney Harvey Silverglate estimated that Americans committed just that, on average, largely because federal laws have exploded in number and become incredibly broad and vague. There’s not even a…

The British psychiatrist and neuropsychopharmacologist David Nutt had reached arguably the pinnacle of his field as chairman of the government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. Then in 2009 he was summarily dismissed from his position. In May, Reason TV’s Zach Weissmueller sat down with Nutt to discuss his sacking, and what he’s learned from the psychedelic research he continues to do at Imperial College London. Q: What happened that caused you to lose your job? A: We did an enormous amount of research into the comparative harms of drugs, and I discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that alcohol was actually the most harmful drug in the U.K. I started explaining to the government, “Our drug laws are wrong. Putting people in prison for cannabis possession is not fair,…

AFTER YOU BRING that bouncing baby home from the hospital, forget about hand-knit booties. Today’s trendy tots are sporting the Smart Sock 2. This $299 foot adornment contains sensors that, in the words of its website, “track baby’s heart rate & oxygen from your phone.” Thanks to technology “used in hospitals around the world,” you now have the ability to treat your healthy baby to the level of scrutiny she’d get if she were born without a liver. “Peace of mind in parenting is closer than you think,” the ad copy whispers in soothing tones. And it is. If you throw out the sock. The product can be a parent’s first baby step into the scared new world of constant child monitoring—one filled with gadgets that let parents watch literally…

DESPITE IMPROVEMENTS IN DNA matching and reliability, forensics labs across the country still continue to train and monitor technicians improperly, resulting in shoddy work and tainted cases. Austin, Texas THE AUSTIN POLICE Department’s DNA lab closed last June after state officials discovered it had been using outdated statistical methods for years, which may have led it to overstate its confidence in DNA matches. New, more reliable methods were established in 2010 and eventuexperience ally adopted by every accredited DNA lab in the country—except Austin’s. “One would think it would have been picked up,” Lynn Garcia, general counsel for the Texas Forensic Science Commission, told the Austin American-Statesman. There were other problems as well, including freezer failures. It will cost $7–$14 million to review the roughly 4,000 cases suspected to be…

CORY DOCTOROW, OF BoingBoing and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) fame, has returned to adult fiction after a long stint in the young adult hinterlands (Little Brother, Homeland). His new novel, Walkaway (Tor), circles back to the theme of his first novel, 2003’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom: the question of what a post-scarcity world might look like. A fascinating cadre of John Galt–style opters-out form the core of the new novel, but the story is concept-driven, not character-driven. As usual, Doctorow’s politics permeate his writing. And, as usual, they’re just heterodox enough to provide moments of delightful confirmation bias and squirm-inducing challenge for readers of nearly every ideological stripe. Doctorow, a civil libertarian who identifies with the political left, has staked out a broad and eccentric territory for…

EVENTY YEARS AGO, the Soviets launched Sputnik and, with it, the space race. For Americans who grew up since then, the exploration of space has always been linked closely with the government. Private space companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin may have had successes, but they still arouse skepticism from people who cannot imagine anyone other than NASA or its foreign rivals sending people to the cosmos. But in The Long Space Age, the NASA historian and economist Alexander MacDonald uncovers a rich, multi-century history of privately funded space exploration. In the long view, the age of government-funded space travel may be a just a temporary detour from an older tradition. In the beginning, the exploration of space took place from here on Earth, with the astronomical observatories of…

Five to 10 people sit around a table. Most of them are liberals, in the broad sense of favoring civil liberties and selfgovernment. Some of them are fascists. And one of them is, as the kids say, literally Hitler. They’re playing Secret Hitler, a board-and-card game for anyone eager to conjure the spirit of late Weimar Germany in the comfort of his living room. The fascists want to install a dictatorship; the liberals want to stop them. And the fascists are all posing as liberals, a fact that can make the liberals as paranoid and purgehappy as their opponents. One of the designers behind Secret Hitler is Max Temkin, co-creator of the card game Cards Against Humanity, and like his previous project this one has attracted accusations of bad taste.…

Novelist and memoirist Ayelet Waldman does a good turn for the cause of sane drug policy reform under the guise of a quirky self-help memoir. Her project is in the title: She experimentally microdoses herself with LSD in pursuit of A Really Good Day (Knopf). The author is charmingly— even goofily—fanatical about minimizing risk. She researches every conceivable health problem that could arise from taking 10 micrograms of the drug every three days for one month. And she frets over LSD’s illegality, fearing that obtaining it might be dangerous and worrying about how others will perceive her if they know she’s using. Waldman winningly relates the problems with mood disorders, pain, productivity, and her relationship with her husband—the writer Michael Chabon—that led her to seek a solution in LSD. Finally,…

When the new Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale—based on the beloved 1985 Margaret Atwood novel of the same name—debuted in April 2017, it was quickly cast by the popmedia as a cautionary tale of great relevance to the Donald Trump era. The story centers on “handmaid” Offred (Elisabeth Moss), a baby-bearing slave in the new fascist and patriarchal Republic of Gilead. In this society, women are forcibly cast as wives, housekeepers, or handmaids; homosexuality is outlawed; surveillance is standard; God is the justification; and once-powerful women like Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski) are now barred from intellectual and practically all public life. Thankfully, the series, created by Bruce Miller, avoids heavy-handed attempts at contemporary political allegory and lets the artfully shot, star-studded, chillingly dystopian story speak for itself. If only the…

EVERY LIBERTARIAN KNOWS the script: “Never fall in love with politicians. They will always disappoint you.” This spring in Washington was rough on several political figures’ libertarian fan clubs. Start with the second-time’sthe- charm effort by House Republicans to, well, not repeal and replace Obamacare exactly, but to tinker around its edges— mostly in the form of reduced burdens on taxpayers and insurance companies. “The [American Health Care Act] repeals fewer than 10 percent of the provisions in the Affordable Care Act,” one prominent pro-market legislator explained. If passed, it “will continue to drive up the cost of health insurance— while bolstering the largest insurance companies—and the modifications contained in the AHCA cannot save it. Many of the AHCA’s provisions are poorly conceived or improperly implemented.” Yet that same critic—Rep.…

“THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT should repeal the ban on marijuana,” The New York Times declared in an editorial published on July 27, 2014. That week, the paper ran a series of essays fleshing out the case for legalization, including a piece in which editorial writer Brent Staples exposed the ugly roots of pot prohibition. “The federal law that makes possession of marijuana a crime has its origins in legislation that was passed in an atmosphere of hysteria during the 1930s and that was firmly rooted in prejudices against Mexican immigrants and African-Americans, who were associated with marijuana use at the time,” Staples wrote. He mentioned “sensationalistic newspaper articles” that tied marijuana to “murder and mayhem” and “depicted pushers hovering by the schoolhouse door turning children into ‘addicts.’” He did not mention…

OU’VE HEARD THE story: Honeybees are disappearing. Beginning in 2006, beekeepers began reporting mysteriously large losses to their honeybee hives over the winter. The bees weren’t just dying—they were abandoning their hives altogether. The strange phenomenon, dubbed colony collapse disorder, soon became widespread. Ever since, beekeepers have reported higher-than-normal honeybee deaths, raising concerns about a coming silent spring. The media swiftly declared disaster. Time called it a “beepocalypse”; Quartz went with “beemageddon.” By 2013, National Public Radio was declaring “a crisis point for crops” and a Time cover was foretelling “a world without bees.” A share of the blame has gone to everything from genetically modified crops, pesticides, and global warming to cellphones and highvoltage electric transmission lines. The Obama administration created a task force to develop a “national strategy”…

Now in its second season, the startlingly peculiar Sense8, a Netflix sci-fi/action series created by the Wachowski sisters (The Matrix) and J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5), focuses on eight people— Chicago cop, San Francisco hacker, Icelandic DJ, German mobster, Indian pharmacist, Mexican actor, Nigerian bus driver, and Korean businesswoman— who share a mental connection allowing the members of the “cluster” to communicate telepathically and share physical skills. The first season required patience but also rewarded it. Rather than rushing into mythology, Sense8 focused on the characters’ confusion, fear, and wonder as they discovered their powers and experimented with them—including in one of the strangest orgies ever seen on television. It was not until the season finale that the series’ true antagonist (a shadowy global organization trying to use the “sensates”…

25 YEARS AGO August/September 1992 “‘Particularly at school,’ a prominent Japanese journalist told me one day...‘we are trained not to make a mistake, even if this means we achieve nothing spectacular.’ At retirement, he said, Japanese tend to express satisfaction not by speaking of their accomplishments but by saying that they made no big mistakes. One often hears variations on this theme—the Japanese hate to make mistakes— and on the whole I found it to be true. The exception is where everybody makes the same mistake together, in which case it is not a mistake. Now, aversion to error makes people careful, and there is nothing wrong with that. Especially not in industrial manufacturing, where the idea is to make large numbers of things perfectly, and where the Japanese genius…