Table of contents for April 2018 in Reason

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…

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…

CONCEIVED AND WRITTEN 200 years ago by the 19-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley during a dreary summer sojourn to Lake Geneva, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus is the story of a scientist who, seduced by the lure of forbidden knowledge, creates new life that in the end destroys him. When the novel debuted, it created a stir for its lurid gothic style and unusual conceit. Early reviewers scolded the then-unknown author, complaining that the slim volume had “neither principle, object, nor moral” and fretting that “it cannot mend, and will not even amuse its readers, unless their taste have been deplorably vitiated.” Yet almost from the moment of its publication, Shelley’s narrative has been pressed into service as a modern morality play—a warning against freewheeling scientific experimentation. That reading is pervasive…

In theory, Netflix doesn’t care when you watch its programming. Unlike broadcast television or Hollywood blockbusters, which rely on huge marketing pushes tied to their release dates, the goal isn’t to have viewers watch things at specific times. Instead, it’s to have a vast library of content available for people to watch wherever, whenever. It’s a new way to make both movies and television—one that is less interested in individual blockbusters and more interested in piling up popular programming. But that doesn’t mean the old rules have completely gone away. The company doesn’t mind when viewers tune in to a new film all at once, as happened with the release of Bright in December. The movie—a buddy-cop fantasy starring A-listers Will Smith and Joel Edgerton as a human cop and…

As in Monopoly, which it resembles in some ways, accumulating wealth is the goal of the board game Bulls and Bears. Refreshingly, this new entrant in the increasingly vibrant board game market is not a zero-sum game. The rules encourage all players to succeed through buying and selling, without forcing them to bankrupt their opponents. In other words, it’s a more realistic, less harsh and condemnatory take on how markets actually work. Players earn a salary for each lap around the board and use the income to buy stocks and bonds. Periodic “News Flash” cards trigger shifts in asset prices, and responding with timely trades is the best way to build wealth. The first player to double his or her money—while paying off a mortgage and funding insurance premiums—wins. If…

Stylish sepia-toned labels on the bottles of 19 Crimes wines feature gritty, unsmiling photos of men and women who received “punish by transportation” to Australia. The Down Under makers of this series of reds also offer a snazzy app that lets you “come face to face with these infamous convicts.” Whip out your phone, point it at the bottle, and the app animates the label. The ghostly prisoners themselves tell highly elided, dubiously accurate, and aggressively poetic versions of their life stories. It’s the perfect wine to bring to a dinner party where the assembled guests might be interested in conversation about criminal justice, immigration, or booze. (In other words, the only dinner parties worth attending.) 19 Crimes is also a rare wine with gimmicky marketing that is actually quite…

IN 2004, ASCENSION Alverez-Tejeda and his girlfriend were stopped at a traffic light in Oregon when their car was rear-ended by a drunk driver. The police arrived and arrested the drunk, but while Alvarez-Tejeda was outside dealing with the situation, a thief jumped in his car and tore off down the road. Police recovered the car and, after obtaining a search warrant from a judge, found in it cocaine and methamphetamine that Alverez-Tejeda was trafficking from California to Washington. It looked like a case of very bad luck for Alverez-Tejeda. The truth didn’t come out until the trial: The whole thing had been staged. The only ones who weren’t in on the plot were Alverez-Tejeda, his girlfriend, and the judge who signed the warrant. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), relying…

CRAIG, A MIDDLE-AGED banking consultant who was on his school’s lacrosse team in college and played professionally for half a dozen years after graduating, began developing back problems in his early 30s. “Degenerative disc disease runs in my family, and the constant pounding on AstroTurf probably did not help,” he says. One day, he recalls, “I was lifting a railroad tie out of the ground with a pick ax, straddled it, and felt the pop. That was my first herniation.” After struggling with herniated discs and neuropathy, Craig consulted with “about 10 different surgeons” and decided to have his bottom three vertebrae fused. He continued to suffer from severe lower back pain, which he successfully treated for years with OxyContin, a timed-release version of the opioid analgesic oxycodone. He would…

GOVERNMENT AT ALL levels fuels an educational arms race through lavish and indiscriminate funding. Given all we know and suspect about the low social returns on investments in schooling, what practical changes should concerned citizens favor? Sharply reduce government support not only for higher education, but for high school as well. The increasingly popular “Too many kids are going to college” slogan suggests that social returns are merely low for the weakest post-secondary students. In fact, social returns to education are low virtually across the board. The good news is that basic economics provides a simple remedy for wasteful investments: Reduce them. If the car industry earns a low return, automakers should respond by building fewer cars, starting with the biggest money losers. As the supply of new vehicles falls,…

MORE THAN 40 civil wars have been waged in postcolonial Africa. Some never end. Others—Libya, South Sudan—restart after brief lulls. The results are devastating: crumpled infrastructure, blighted agriculture, declining investment, increasing misery. Populations have been uprooted and traumatized; combatants have committed barbaric acts. How do you pursue justice after a war finally concludes? Two options are available. Western jurisprudence tends to stress punishing the guilty. Traditional African jurisprudence tends to emphasize reconciliation, restitution, and the restoration of social harmony. The first path is retributive, the second restorative. Two well-researched and magnificently written books on the experiences of Sierra Leone and Rwanda grapple with each approach. In both countries, the relatively restorative option was far more cost-effective. In Sierra Leone, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) cost $5 million, while the…

The latest installment of Netflix’s sci-fi anthology series Black Mirror casts its typically skeptical eye on how technology and human nature mix and clash. The six episodes of season four—each a dark but compellingly told stand-alone story—explore the darker side of nerd fandom, the trials and tribulations of high-tech helicopter parenting, the possibility of homicidal robot dogs, and the promise of 99.9 percent accurate Tinder matches. Black Mirror’s simple, self-contained treatments of slightly futuristic but eminently believable technologies flesh out the deeply relatable human desires and insecurities of both the show’s characters and its viewers. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in this season’s second episode, “Arkangel,” in which a terrified single mother implants a chip in her daughter’s head that lets the mom not just see the world from…

Enemies of the Clintons were delighted to hear Tom Cruise was using one of his rare non-action blockbuster roles to tell the true-life-ish story of Barry Seal, a flyboy man of mystery murdered in 1986 by associates of Colombian drug lords. The tangled web of infamy that Seal was enmeshed in through the early 1980s touched on the former first couple. Providing airplane-based aid to the CIA, the DEA, the Medellín Cartel, and the Nicaraguan contras, the airstrip from which he flew guns, drugs, and rebels in and out was in Mena, Arkansas, during years Bill Clinton was governor. The final product will disappoint Clinton haters, however. One scene in American Made features an off-screen call in which the governor leans on a local district attorney to cease pursuing drug…

20 YEARS AGO April 1998 “The president has what is popularly known as a zipper problem.” VIRGINIA POSTREL “License to Grill” “If cigarette ads are a bad influence on kids, that is something for parents and other concerned adults to counter with information and exhortation. They might even consider a serious effort to enforce laws against cigarette sales to minors. But since we clearly are not helpless to resist the persuasive powers of Philip Morris et al.—all of us see the ads, but only some of us smoke—it is hard to square an advertising ban with a presumption against censorship.” JACOB SULLUM “Cowboys, Camels, and Kids” “It is an open question whether requiring grade-school students to wear uniforms—one Clinton recommendation—or bribing college students through Ameri-Corps to do community service makes…

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…

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…

EVER WONDERED WHY evidence is sometimes excluded during criminal trials? In Weeks v. United States (1914), the U.S. Supreme Court announced a far-reaching doctrine known as the “exclusionary rule,” which generally bars the use in court of illegally obtained evidence. Weeks arose after federal officials kicked down a criminal suspect’s door, scoured his home without a search warrant, and discovered various incriminating documents, which were later used against him at his federal trial. “If letters and private documents can thus be seized and held and used in evidence against a citizen accused of an offense,” the Court ruled, “the protection of the Fourth Amendment declaring his right to be secure against such [unreasonable] searches and seizures is of no value.” In Mapp v. Ohio (1961), the Court extended the rule…

JEFFREY HAVARD’S STORY began the evening of February 21, 2002, when the Mississippi man was keeping an eye on Chloe, the 6-month-old daughter of his girlfriend, Rebecca Britt. According to Havard, Chloe had spit up on her clothes and bedding, so he gave the girl a bath. As he pulled her up out of the tub, she slipped from his grip and fell. As she fell, her head struck the toilet. Havard would later say the bump on Chloe’s head didn’t appear serious, so he dressed her in clean clothes and put her to bed. Not wanting to worry Britt (or perhaps not wanting to anger her), he said nothing about the incident when she returned. When she did get home, Britt checked on the baby, who seemed fine. So…

SAY YOU’VE SPRAINED your ankle. You consult Google, where you find copious information about using compression bandages to stabilize your sprain. But you’d like some back and forth with someone who has experience. You post about your injury on Facebook, triggering a real-time conversation with volunteer first responders offering pro tips. You then pop over to Amazon, because the nearest drug store is more than 16 miles away and you don’t want to drive with a sprained right ankle. You’ve got too much debt riding on your credit card to add to it blithely, but no problem—you use PayPal to get a bandage delivered to you that same day. And if your sprain leads to hard-to-handle bills, you can put out a call for help using GoFundMe. A totally banal…

In the 1950s and ’60s, folk revivalists rediscovered old records, interviewed the musicians who made them, and wove a textured, diverse, and mythic vision of the past. That spirit is alive today at such labels as the Chicago-based Numero Group. Numero is best known for its Eccentric Soul series, which explores the lost treasures found on forgotten small-time R&B labels. But these pop archeologists’ catalog covers many genres, some innately cool (the psychedelic country of Cosmic American Music, the Central American funk of Belize City Boil Up), some so relentlessly uncool that they attain an anti-hip cachet (the mellow ’70s sounds of Private Yacht). Much of the music is best described as “accidentally unique.” None of the acts on The 123s of Kid Soul managed to become the Jackson 5—but…

Steven Spielberg brings his cinematographic chops to bear in The Post, which tells the mostly true story of one newspaper’s efforts in the early ’70s to build and publish an exposé on America’s role in Vietnam. Dramatic lighting and meticulous shots of lead type clicking into place and printing presses groaning into gear are sure to get any First Amendment lover’s libido going. The film is 116 minutes of high-production-value journalism porn. To be sure, at a moment when the president of the United States publicly ruminates on techniques for censoring critical news outlets, there’s a case for celebrating reporters and publishers, past and present, willing to risk anything to protect their sources and bring the truth to light. An all-star cast including Bradley Whitford, Matthew Rhys, and Bob Odenkirk—to…