Table of contents for August/September 2020 in Reason

A DEADLY PANDEMIC originates in Asia and sweeps around the globe, killing more than 100,000 Americans. A successful manned space mission briefly unites a nation with a sense of wonder. Police and National Guardsmen face off against protesters demanding racial justice and suppress riots in city streets. The military is tied up in unwinnable foreign entanglements, a culture war rages, and electoral politics is a dumpster fire. It is 1969. Reason magazine is a baby, just over a year old, and editor Lanny Friedlander is wrapping up the November issue. It is a small operation, so he has also written most of the contents. The question he poses on the cover is “The Cops: Heroes or Villains?” He sketches the landscape: “After each recent mass police action that shed blood—People’s…

THERE’S A SCENE in the HBO drama The Wire where several Baltimore homicide detectives come to the realization that the murderous gangster they’ve been chasing for the better part of three seasons might have moved on to a new profession. “Seems that Stringer Bell is worse than a drug dealer,” says one. “He’s a developer,” finishes another. The line is a joke, but it’s also an important piece of exposition: The money from Baltimore’s drug trade is fueling a corrupt redevelopment of the city that will wipe away what little is left of deeply rooted (but deeply troubled) communities. The Wire was a groundbreaking show in many ways. Its casting of land developers in the role of shadowy villains is the most ordinary thing about it. In Hollywood, a developer…

Consumer culture continues into the afterlife in Amazon’s sci-fi/mystery/romance/workplace comedy mashup Upload. The show portrays heaven as a place on Earth—a server room, to be precise—where people on the verge of death can transfer their consciousness into a virtual environment while casting their physical selves aside. After a mysterious self-driving car crash wrecks his body, Nathan Brown (Robbie Amell) is a newly uploaded resident to virtual woodland resort Lake View. He settles into a tony afterlife paid for by his vapid, still-living girlfriend (Allegra Edwards). Soon he develops feelings for his also-living “angel” Nora (Andy Allo), a customer service pro there to make sure his needs are fulfilled. This consumer-oriented paradise is full of upselling opportunities, microtransactions, and heavenly haves and have-nots. Jokes are framed around a familiar conflict: the…

The Netflix documentary Becoming, which follows Michelle Obama as she goes on a book tour, contains little to discourage those who hope she may someday be persuaded to run for elected office. Brimming with well-rehearsed anecdotes that are by turns humorous and inspiring, the film is carefully stage-managed to give audiences the sense that they’ve gotten a peek behind the curtain without in fact revealing anything new. Whether she’s addressing the crowd in a packed arena, talking direct to camera, chitchatting with fans, or showing us around her childhood home, the former first lady comes across as charming and competent—exactly what you would expect from a documentary made by a production company owned by the Obamas, which, not incidentally, this film is. After mentioning that her legal career was interrupted…

ON A FRIDAY morning in April 2012, heavily armed sheriff’s deputies stormed into Bob and Addie Harte’s house in Leawood, Kansas, looking for a nonexistent marijuana garden. The deputies confined the Hartes and their two children to a living room couch for two hours as they conducted an increasingly desperate search that discovered nothing illegal. The Hartes were the victims of a comically inept publicity stunt executed by cops who did not realize that hydroponic equipment could be used to grow tomatoes and did not know the difference between tea and marijuana. The fiasco led to seven years of litigation that culminated in a settlement, unsealed in May, in which the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office agreed to pay the family $150,000. The Hartes were targeted because Sgt. James Wingo of…

“ONE OF THE things this crisis has taught us,” Peter Navarro, a top administration economic adviser, explained from behind the podium in the White House’s briefing room, “is that we are dangerously overdependent on a global supply chain.” It was April 2, and, after weeks of largely ignoring COVID-19 as it spread around the world and into the United States, the Trump administration was finally taking the pandemic seriously. That is to say, it was responding in much the same way as it has throughout President Donald Trump’s tenure: by finding new ways to use old laws to expand federal power—particularly power over the free exchange of goods across international borders. As the novel coronavirus swept the globe and jammed up international supply lines, Navarro was appointed policy coordinator for…

THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC has upended business as usual at the U.S. Supreme Court. In March, the body announced that it was postponing all remaining oral arguments from its 2019–2020 term while it “examine[d] the options for rescheduling those cases in due course in light of the developing circumstances.” After weighing its options, the Court took the unprecedented step of rescheduling several of the remaining cases for early May, with all parties participating remotely by telephone while a live audio feed went out to the media. Just like millions of their fellow Americans, the justices would have to adjust to the strange new realities of social distancing and working from home. It actually went pretty well. The justices asked their questions in order of seniority, producing calm and orderly discussions that…

AS OF MAY 30, more than 300 incarcerated people across the United States have died from COVID-19. Victims of the virus include a woman who was sent to federal prison during her third trimester of pregnancy, a Michigan man who was two weeks away from release, and a wheel-chair-bound 67-year-old man with no legs who died in a hospital two days after his release date. None of these prisoners were sentenced to death. When the pandemic first hit, an unusual alliance of civil liberties groups, public defenders, and prison guard unions warned that prisons and jails were ill-equipped to handle the problem. They knew better than anyone that a deadly and contagious disease would expose problems with prison systems that have been ignored for decades. U.S. prisons and jails are…

CITIES HAVE A lot of pluses, including their tendency to be dynamic, creative, and vibrant. They’re also crowded. Dynamism, creativity, and vibrancy are partially a result of those crowds, but that density became a source of anxiety when COVID-19 started spreading. Those anxieties have been amplified by the protests, looting, and urban unrest that began in late May. Their legacy may reset the long-running city vs. country feud as Americans reconsider the allure of open spaces where social distancing is a regular part of life. “For years, urban planners have been singing the praises of population density,” Steven Greenhut wrote in a mid-pandemic Orange County Register column. “Yet after the dust clears from the lockdowns, more Californians will likely be tempted to rethink the high-density status quo. Obviously, diseases spread…

ELEVEN DAYS AFTER the first case of an American suffering from COVID-19 was reported, an essayist at an online journal run by the Claremont Institute—whose stated purpose is to “restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life”—argued that a sensible response would be to prohibit humans from crossing oceans. “The obvious solution to an emerging pandemic,” wrote Curtis Yarvin in The American Mind, “is cutting off flights to China, then all air travel across the Pacific, then across the Atlantic.” This was more than an extreme emergency reaction to an extreme emergency crisis. Yarvin was using COVID-19 as a news hook to push the long-term strategic goal, common among a curious new subset of conservatives, to “refute internationalism” and replace it with…

I AM A ventilator—and not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me. Thankfully, that does not mean that I cannot be made. In fact, thousands of my brothers and sisters have been produced since the COVID-19 pandemic began. When General Motors agreed to build 30,000 ventilators by August, its managers contracted with 91 suppliers to provide more than 400 parts from all over the world. My main chassis might have been built in Washington state, using more than 40 parts, many of which came from elsewhere. Some of my rubber components were molded in Minnesota, but the rubber itself probably came from Indonesia or Thailand. I draw electricity through a cable likely manufactured in China (source of 35 percent of the low-voltage A.C.…

“SO MANY BUSINESSES have taken it upon themselves to make lemonade out of lemons, in almost the truest sense, and really turn around and care for their communities for no reason than because they have kitchens and people to cook,” says Cheesetique proprietor Jill Erber. “I know it’s something that’s debated out there. Business has no heart. Business is just about profits. And if the government didn’t give people handouts, nobody would help them. I just don’t think that’s true.” Erber, better known to her neighbors as The Cheese Lady, is the founder of a small chain of “cheese-centric” restaurants and retail cheese and wine shops. With three locations in Northern Virginia, she had a pre-COVID peak of 110 employees. As of late May, she had two locations open with…

When Dropkick Murphys had their St. Patrick’s Day concert canceled thanks to coronavirus, the Celtic punk rockers instead broadcast a free live “Streaming up from Boston” show on Facebook and You-Tube. Such online COVID concerts have become a trend. As bans on mass gatherings persist, musicians are increasingly turning to livestreamed shows as a substitute for traditional performances. Big names such as John Legend and Chris Martin have gotten in on the action. Post Malone and Blink-182’s Travis Barker played a surprisingly good socially distanced cover concert of Nirvana songs. (It was unfortunately raising money for the World Health Organization, which bungled the early days of the crisis badly.) Metallica and the Rolling Stones are posting past concert footage once a week on their YouTube pages. The underground is at…

Want a guided tour of what’s upsetting the woke and sparking a backlash among the “extremely online” this week? The new podcast Blocked and Reported might be for you. Each week, hosts Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal dissect the latest in internet outrage, employing humor, nuance, and a healthy appreciation for absurdity. As journalists and self-described “internet obsessives,” Herzog and Singal are well-versed in the fights, factions, and fictions that drive Twitter mobs and animate internecine web feuds. And as liberal-leaning thinkers with an aversion to performative self-flagellation and a willingness to still stick up for civil liberties, they’ve found themselves on the receiving end of “cancel culture” more than a few times. But rather than “leave the left,” Herzog and Singal dedicate themselves to pointing out their side’s culture-war…

15 YEARS AGO August/September 2005 “Statins are not the only class of safe drugs still under lock and key. Medical information is available to more people than ever before, and Americans are buying more drugs and making more-sophisticated choices about their health. Yet access to everything from insulin to Viagra still requires a day off from work and a trip to the doctor’s office. For Americans growing more knowledgeable about the specifics of self-care, the prescription regime presents a significant and sometimes insurmountable barrier.” KERRY HOWLEY “Locking Up Life-Saving Drugs” “From a civil libertarian perspective, it’s clear enough why the unequal treatment of gay parents is objectionable: The human desire for family isn’t exclusive to heterosexuals, and attempts to prevent gays from raising families both stigmatize them and threaten to…

Jo Jorgensen, a senior lecturer in psychology at Clemson University, had such a wonderful time running as the Libertarian Party (L.P.) vice presidential candidate in 1996, on a ticket with Harry Browne, that she has contemplated taking a swing at the top slot ever since. On May 24, she won her party’s nomination for president. Reason’s Brian Doherty spoke with Jorgensen by phone just before she was named the 2020 L.P. presidential nominee in an online convention. They spoke about how the party can appeal to Democratic and Republican voters and what libertarianism can offer America in the midst of the economic crisis brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Q: What do you think the Libertarian delegates want in a candidate this year? A: They want what I’m selling: a…