Table of contents for March 2021 in Reason

THE LOS ANGELES Police Department (LAPD) banned the use of commercial facial recognition apps in November after BuzzFeed News reported that more than 25 LAPD employees had performed nearly 475 searches using controversial technology developed by the company Clearview AI. That’s one of several recent developments related to growing public concern about police surveillance using facial recognition Clearview AI’s app relies on billions of photos scraped from Facebook and other social media platforms. The app, like other facial recognition technologies, pairs that database with machine learning software to teach an algorithm how to match a face to the photos the company has collected. Clearview is just one player in an expanding market. The Minneapolis Star Tribune reported in December that the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office had coordinated 1,000 searches through…

SO LET’S SAY psilocybin mushrooms are newly decriminalized where you live, and you are now open to having your first psychedelic experience. Allow me to share some of the practical knowledge I have gleaned from talking to experts and old heads, reading books and articles, and consuming various amounts of magic mushrooms in various settings. Begin by trying very hard to find a reason why you should not consume shrooms. What exactly are the laws where you live? Are you on parole or probation? Do you take any prescription drugs? Google your medication’s name and “shrooms.” Do you have epilepsy? Search drug forums to find out how other epilepsy sufferers have fared on psilocybin. Do you need to monitor your glucose throughout the day? Search drug forums for the experiences…

IN HIS VICTORY speech, Joe Biden promised to be “a healer, a uniter, a tested and steady hand.” If the new president wants to make good on his word, Reason staffers have some ideas for a few items to add to his policy agenda. These are suggestions that Biden might plausibly heed. We’re still gunning for the legalization of heroin, but we’d settle for descheduling marijuana. We’d love to see an end to all foreign adventurism, but just getting out of Afghanistan would be a good start. A robust private market in health insurance would be ideal, but the new administration could at least allow a larger variety of plans. No one expects Biden to be a libertarian president, but here are a few things he could do to make…

DONALD TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY began with a fruitless quest to repeal and replace Obamacare. The effort, which chewed up much of Washington’s attention during 2017, failed in part because neither Trump nor congressional Republicans managed to unify around a single plan. Trump, in particular, seemed unable to even explain the basics of what the various replacement plans were attempting to do; at best he promised health care that was “better” and “cheaper.” Yet out of the ashes of policy failure, the Trump administration did deliver an under-the-radar improvement to the health insurance marketplace, by loosening some of Obamacare’s insurance rules. Obamacare was designed on the premise that health insurance should be comprehensive. One of the law’s major components was a list of “essential health benefits” that every plan sold through the…

JOE BIDEN DOESN’T seem to be much of a space geek. Like virtually all American politicians, he says nice, bland stuff about “a bold space program that will continue to send astronaut heroes to expand our exploration and scientific frontiers.” That’s fine. If he simply sticks to Obama-era space policies, that will be more than enough to protect the incredible progress we have made returning Americans to orbit on privately built and launched vehicles in collaboration with NASA. In a somewhat unexpected twist, President Barack Obama supported privatization in the space sector, diverting funding to contract with commercial firms for resupply missions and more. That program bore fruit during the Trump administration with the stirring, successful manned missions that sent astronauts aboard SpaceX vehicles to the International Space Station (ISS).…

HOW BROAD WAS the California tax revolt of the 1970s? Broad enough to stretch from Ronald Reagan to the Black Panthers. The Panthers’ position is mentioned only briefly in Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland—just a single sentence meant to get across how widespread dissatisfaction with the state’s property taxes had gotten. But if you start poking around at that spot, you’ll find a deep rabbit hole just waiting for you to explore it. With “most tax increases,” proclaimed the Panther slate in Oakland’s 1973 municipal elections, “the poor always suffer and Black people, in particular, suffer most.” The candidates went on to decry everything from the property tax to the business license tax, and along the way they complained about how much money was spent on police pensions and downtown businesses. They…

After Disney bought the rights to Star Wars from LucasFilm in 2012, it promised a revitalization of the franchise. Fans had mixed feelings about the trio of prequels George Lucas released from 1999 to 2005, and there was a sense that the brand, once the emperor of American pop culture, had fallen into disrepair. A sequel trilogy, bookended by films directed by J.J. Abrams, debuted to big box office numbers. But the revenues declined as the sequels went on, and the series was plagued by production problems. Fans became increasingly disillusioned. Abrams and Disney, it seemed, had squandered the Star Wars universe. Worse, they had narrowed its scope, focusing on characters and events that sprang from the original series rather than building out the world they inherited. Yet even as…

WALTER WILLIAMS, THE free market economist and iconoclast, died in December at the age of 84. The author of 13 books, Williams was best known for 1982’s The State Against Blacks, which documented how government interference in the market has been especially harmful to African Americans. Born in 1936, Williams grew up in the Richard Allen Homes, one of Philadelphia’s first housing projects. When he was a small child, his father left his family. He was brought up by his mother, a high school dropout, and the family spent time on welfare. Williams would later draw a distinction between material poverty and what he called “poverty of the spirit.” He worked as a taxi driver in the City of Brotherly Love and was drafted into the peacetime Army. After his…

A METAL MONOLITH discovered this year in the Utah desert looks like something straight out of Star Trek’s neutral zone, but all federal officials could see was a zoning violation. In November, members of the Utah Department of Public Safety’s Aero Bureau came across the alien-looking structure in a remote southeast portion of the state while performing a count of bighorn sheep. Who, or what, might have placed the 12-foot structure in the desert is a mystery. What’s not up for debate is the monolith’s legal status. “The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) would like to remind public land visitors that using, occupying, or developing the public lands or their resources without a required authorization is illegal, no matter what planet you are from,” the Utah branch of BLM declared…

IF THE BIDEN administration wants to make substantive gains in criminal justice reform without having to deal with Congress, it should turn to one of the least limited tools of the presidency: the pardon power. The last two presidents have handled the pardon power differently. Barack Obama launched an unprecedented large-scale clemency initiative aimed at nonviolent drug offenders. As a result, 1,715 federal inmates had their sentences commuted or reduced. But the process was dogged by foot-dragging and resistance from the Justice Department, and thousands of inmates were left behind. Pardon and clemency petitions are typically routed through the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney. This office solicits feedback on petitions from the very federal prosecutors who secured those sentences, which creates a conflict of interest. “This is something…

IMPROVING ON DONALD Trump’s immigration record won’t be a tall order. While America’s 45th president worked hard to scrap the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allowed roughly 640,000 immigrants who came to the country illegally as children to work and study here legally, Joe Biden says he’ll push for giving them a path to citizenship. But Biden should add a proposal with less precedent in the U.S. His administration should grant visas to Hongkongers looking to flee Chinese rule and start anew in the United States. In 1997, China’s “one country, two systems” policy extended autonomy to the island as a condition of Britain handing the territory over to China. (The arrangement was supposed to expire in 2047.) For the ensuing two decades, residents of Hong Kong enjoyed…

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN should lift the myriad tariffs that Donald Trump placed on foreign steel, aluminum, solar panels, and washing machines, along with a wide range of Chinese-made goods. Those tariffs have burdened American consumers and businesses—ironically harming manufacturers more than most—without accomplishing much else. Unilaterally repealing them would not be a surrender; it would be a refusal to keep firing a gun at America’s foot. Trump was right that the United States has a key role to play in standing up to China’s authoritarian tendencies. But our economic interests are too interwoven with China’s for Trump’s zero-sum approach to be successful. The goal should be not to defeat China but to encourage it to change—and to reward it for moving in a pro-freedom direction. Rather than spurning allies, Biden…

FROM THE SPREAD of COVID-19 and the wave of state-imposed closures that followed to the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the unrest that ensued, 2020 was a year in which American institutions flailed and failed. And few failures were bigger or more apparent than those of public-sector unions. By pushing to keep schools closed even as evidence mounted that in-person classes were relatively low-risk and remote learning was ineffective, teachers unions failed students and parents. By pushing to protect bad cops in the wake of multiple scandals, police unions failed the public they were sworn to protect. And in the process, America got a glimpse of what public-sector unions, regardless of the profession they represent, really do. Unions that represent government employees seek to maintain an…

Have you ever wanted to piece together an international conspiracy with nothing but a bunch of newspaper clippings, a corkboard, and some red twine? If you’re reading this, there’s an above-average chance you have, in which case you should check out A Hand With Many Fingers. This indie computer game puts you in the shoes of a researcher spending a few late-night hours alone (or are you?) in a CIA archive. The gameplay is actually just doing archival research: flipping through card catalogs, retrieving cardboard boxes from the basement, and pinning the clippings you find onto your corkboard. The incident you investigate is the real-life 1980 death of an Australian banker, whose associates included former CIA agents and U.S. special forces soldiers. You uncover a story of Cold War dirty…

When you hear the word eugenics, you may be more likely to think of Nazi Germany than California. But the former studied the latter’s sterilization practices to hone its approach. And while Germany’s program died with the Nazi regime, California’s has lasted much longer. To see it at work, watch Belly of the Beast, a documentary exploring forced sterilizations in the state’s women’s prisons. The film follows Kelli Dillon, who spent 15 years in the Central California Women’s Facility for killing her abusive husband. While she was behind bars, her uterus was removed against her will. In 2006, Dillon sued the government after experiencing menopause at the ripe age of 24. Along the way, she and her legal team received reports from other prisoners who were forcibly sterilized while giving…

IF HIS SELECTION of Antony Blinken as secretary of state is any indication, President Joe Biden’s promised return to normality will extend to his administration’s foreign policy. A veteran of the U.S. State Department and Democratic Party foreign policy establishment, Blinken, 58, will bring competence and professionalism to the job of America’s top diplomat. But he offers little hope for “a new and fresh foreign policy that doesn’t involve global military primacy, continued intervention overseas, and [a] massive military footprint,” says Kelley Vlahos, a senior adviser at the Quincy Institute, a noninterventionist foreign policy think tank. As then–Vice President Biden’s national security adviser, Blinken supported the Obama administration’s disastrous Libya campaign, despite Biden’s opposition to that intervention. In 2015, Blinken, then assistant secretary of state, favored the Obama administration’s policy…

IT’S SNUGGLY TIME with your little one, who is not even in kindergarten yet. His little head rests against your shoulder as you open up a picture book. “See?” you say, pointing not to the furry bunny or diabolical cat or tree that keeps amputating herself. “These are the words on the page. This sentence has seven words. This dot is called a period, and it shows the end of a sentence.” At least, that’s what you’d do if you followed the stultifying advice in a recent Parents magazine piece on how to “Supercharge Every Storytime.” And that’s what we’re here to talk about today: parents who believe they must supercharge every story time, and all the rest of the time they spend with their kids as well. These parents…

IN BOTH 2011 and 2013, the Obama administration announced its intention to get all our conventional forces out of Afghanistan, where they did little but prop up corruption, provide targets for insurgents, and waste taxpayers’ money. As vice president, Biden tweeted that we would be out of Afghanistan in 2014. He failed to come through then, but he can make up for it now. Washington currently finds itself, by realpolitik necessity, negotiating with the same force—the Taliban—that it sent troops to Afghanistan to overthrow. We stayed long enough, caused enough death and chaos, and funded enough bad governance for the wheels of history to transform a war that looked like a U.S. victory into an occupation that looks sadly pointless. The best thing we can take away from the experience…

UNLIKE MOST OF the candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination (including his eventual running mate), Joe Biden opposes federal legalization of marijuana. Instead, he says he wants to “decriminalize cannabis use,” expunge the records related to such cases, and move marijuana to a less restrictive legal category. Those first two steps would not have much impact, since the Justice Department rarely prosecutes low-level possession cases. Moving marijuana from Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), a category supposedly reserved for exceptionally dangerous drugs with no accepted medical use, to Schedule II, which indicates that a drug has a high abuse potential but can be used as a medicine, might facilitate research. But it would not address the untenable conflict between the CSA and the laws of the 36…

THERE’S A WELL-WORN tale about modern American conservatism: It says that the movement as we know it came into being during the mid–20th century as a “fusionist” coalition of economic libertarians and religious traditionalists. These groups, whose goals and priorities differed from the start, were held together mainly by two things: the sheer charisma of National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr., and the shared enemy of global communism. As long as the Cold War endured, the story goes, each wing was willing to cede some ground to the other. In light of the threat posed by a rampaging Soviet Union—as militantly atheistic as it was militantly anti-capitalist—the differences between the libertarians and the traditionalists did not seem so great. Their interests, at least, were aligned. But the fall of…

THERE ARE MORE than a few antique shops in historic Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, a short walk from my suburban neighborhood. Antiquing is normally of interest only if my mother-in-law is visiting, but some years back a friend messaged me to let me know one of the shops had something I should see. On the back wall, shunted behind a variety of well-preserved 19th century furniture, were two large Soviet propaganda paintings. The first was a portrait of three strapping Russian sailors, wearing bandoleers across their chests, in front of the Aurora—the infamous ship that fired the first shot on the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, launching the Russian Revolution. The second painting, of soldiers smoking in a field in Afghanistan, was less dramatic but a better and more impressionistic…

The Netflix adaptation of Walter Tevis’ 1983 novel The Queen’s Gambit has punched above its weight since it started streaming in October. The sets and costume are gorgeous and the acting is good, but the stakes are nonexistent: We know from the first episode that child chess prodigy Beth Harmon (played by 24-year-old Anya Taylor-Joy) is going to win a lot of matches, even with a tranquilizer habit clinging to her back. But there is more to this story than a phenom making the most of her gifts. Set in the 1950s and ’60s, The Queen’s Gambit has more to say about geopolitics and culture than it does about opening moves. Episode by episode, we learn that America’s best players were largely anonymous, duking it out in drabby hotels and…

Andrew Sullivan made the jump from New York magazine. Matthew Yglesias bounced from Vox, a website he helped start. Glenn Greenwald noped out of The Intercept, which he also helped found. What has lured so many big names away from traditional media? Substack. The company, which enables paid online newsletters, was founded in 2017; it is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, and other investors known for glomming on to the next big online thing. Many veterans of the early blogosphere are attracted to Substack because they believe it promises a return to the freewheeling days of chatty, unedited internet commentary—and an opportunity to keep more of the fruits of their labors. I look forward to the day when clusters of Substack writers with some kind of shared interest start…