Table of contents for April 2021 in Reason

“WE NEED TO act big,” declared Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in a February 4 interview with Good Morning America about COVID spending. The next day Vice President Kamala Harris took those words to heart, wielding her tie-breaking vote to push a package worth nearly $2 trillion through the split Senate, ignoring the official Republican counterproposal to spend a mere $618 billion. But the right was far from united behind that smaller (yet still massive) package. The same morning Yellen was on TV, conservative columnist David Brooks was in The New York Times declaring “Biden Is Right To Go Big.” This, of course, was after outgoing President Donald Trump left the country with budget deficits so large that the y-axis on every chart had to be adjusted. The stated excuse for…

ONE WEEK AFTER being trapped inside the United States Capitol as thousands of pro–Donald Trump marauders attempted to forcibly “stop the steal” of the presidential election, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.) suggested one possible federal government response: convening a national commission on media literacy. “We’re going to have to figure out how we rein in our media environment so that you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation,” Ocasio-Cortez told her followers in a video message. “It’s one thing to have differing opinions, but it’s another thing entirely to just say things that are false.” The road to speech restrictionism is paved with political rhetoric about protecting the proletariat from falsehoods. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán last year cited the potentially deadly dangers of “fake news” while ramming through a law punishing…

IN THE MID-1990S, just before the arrival of PayPal and more than a decade before bitcoin, an oncologist from Florida named Douglas Jackson created a system by which people could send each other digital payment tokens backed by gold. Jackson’s e-gold became the world’s first truly successful digital currency, serving over half a million customers and doing billions of dollars’ worth of business. But after a decade of success, the feds came after him, raiding his company’s office, taking computers, freezing bank accounts, and ultimately extracting a guilty plea for conspiring in an “unlicensed money transmitting business.” Once trailblazing, e-gold was quickly forgotten, derailed first by legal hassles and then by the tsunami of interest in blockchain technology. Now Jackson has uncovered information that he thinks can not only overturn…

BEFORE THE “BRIDGE to Nowhere” became a legislative cliché, there was the highway to Dennis Hastert’s farm. Hastert was speaker of the House in 2005 when he secured a $207 million earmark, tucked into a $244 billion transportation funding package, to build the so-called “Prairie Parkway”—a proposed 33-mile highway through the exurbs west of Chicago that was ostensibly meant to connect two interstates. Hastert promised that it would ease traffic flows, and President George W. Bush described it as “crucial” for the fast-growing region’s economic fortunes when he signed the massive transportation bill into law during a visit to the area. But there was another crucial quality to the Prairie Parkway. Plans called for it to pass within a few miles of nearly 300 acres of land that Hastert, his…

If you’ve heard of the 18th century English writer Mary Wollstonecraft, it’s likely because of her 1792 book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a muchcited entry in both the feminist and the classical liberal canons. In Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics, the Cambridge historian Sylvana Tomaselli aims to reveal the rest of Wollstonecraft’s worldview, demonstrating that she was more than just an early advocate for women’s education and women’s rights. Wollstonecraft, Tomaselli shows, had an oeuvre “impressive in its variety, originality, and indeed volume, given her tumultuous existence” and “her life’s brevity.” (Wollstonecraft died at age 38, shortly after the birth of her daughter, Frankenstein author Mary Shelley.) The book details its namesake’s views on such topics as reason, human nature, God, sex, revolution, slavery, her intellectual contemporaries,…

In 1911, the logging industry lobbied for a national ban on black currants, arguing that they were hosts for certain forms of fungal diseases that threatened pine trees. The lobbyists succeeded in passing this prohibition, but botanists developed disease-resistant varieties of the berries as the century progressed. The feds eventually allowed states to legalize the plants, and various states started doing so in the ’60s. New York only repealed its ban in 2003. The use of black currants in cocktails has lagged, as delicious domestically produced liqueurs are still hard to come by. That makes Current Cassis, a new small-batch product from the Hudson Valley, all the more exciting. Having tasted this tangy, bittersweet liqueur in many different drinks, I’ve concluded that the best way to imbibe it is in…

THE COVID-19 VACCINES made by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech were developed and brought to market at a blistering pace, but their distribution has been hobbled by poor organization and rigid eligibility rules. The planned rollouts didn’t give local officials and health care workers enough flexibility to adjust to the realities on the ground—or to make tradeoffs between treating as many people as possible and strictly adhering to the guidelines. Alex Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason University who blogs at Marginal Revolution, has been promoting an idea called “First Doses First,” which the United Kingdom recently adopted. This approach would allocate all available vaccines to be used as first doses, while pushing off second doses for weeks (or even months) until production can catch up. While U.S. regulators have so far…

FOLLOWING THE JANUARY 6 riot in which five people died, more than 5,000 members of the National Guard descended on Washington, D.C., ahead of President Joe Biden’s inauguration. The U.S. Capitol was subsequently surrounded with fencing and razor wire, and crowds of uniformed men and women lounged in the halls of Congress. “The last time there were troops sleeping in the Capitol itself was during the Civil War,” the United States Capitol Historical Society’s Jane L. Campbell told Roll Call. Plans are now underway to make many of the defenses permanent.…

MEXICO AND ISRAEL are racing to become the third country where marijuana is legal for recreational use at the national level. Racing may be too strong a word, because both governments are moving more slowly than originally advertised. But both are officially committed to joining Uruguay and Canada on the short list of countries that allow adults to consume cannabis without a medical justification. In 2018, the Supreme Court of Mexico ruled that pot prohibition was unconstitutional because it violated “the fundamental right to the free development of the personality.” Although the court originally required the Mexican Congress to legalize cannabis within 90 days, it has repeatedly extended the deadline because of the legislature’s difficulties in settling on a detailed plan. In November 2020, the Mexican Senate approved a legalization…

FOR A LONG time, Richard “Dickie” Lynn didn’t think he’d ever see the mesmerizing blue waters of the Florida Keys again. The former drug smuggler and onetime escapee from federal prison had received seven life sentences after he was convicted as part of a massive 1989 drug trafficking sting. He was released last June after serving 31 years. I caught up with Lynn, 66, a few months after his release. Today, he sports a mop of light brown hair and a graying goatee. He’s back in his element, wearing the typical Keys uniform: performance fishing shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. I wanted to talk to him not only because his story is a wild true crime tale involving Cuban dissidents, former U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and corrupt Customs agents. I…

THE LAST FEW years have seen a strong, often bipartisan push for criminal justice reform. But certain categories of criminalized acts—those perceived as primarily harming women and girls—have been nearly immune from that spirit. “Those most vocal about prison reform are also often the most punitive about gendered offenses, even minor ones,” writes Aya Gruber, a law professor at the University of Colorado, in her recent book The Feminist War on Crime (University of California Press). Gruber, a former public defender, worries that “women’s criminal law activism [has] not made prosecution and punishment more feminist” but instead has “made feminism more prosecutorial and punitive.” There are generations of precedent for that. From the suffragists who played up xenophobic fears through Clintonera feminists’ zeal for sex offender registries, several waves of…

In 1978, a conflict between the city of Philadelphia and the black anarcho-primitivist group MOVE, which had already featured a police blockade aimed at evicting the movement’s followers by starving them out, culminated in a shootout that killed Officer James Ramp. The HBO documentary 40 Years a Prisoner looks at what happened before, during, and after that confrontation, tracking efforts to free the nine MOVE members who were convicted of third-degree murder in connection with Ramp’s death. Mayor Frank Rizzo, an authoritarian former police commissioner who took every opportunity to escalate tensions, threatened to use deadly force against MOVE members who resisted eviction, “children or not.” He ordered MOVE’s headquarters demolished immediately after the shootout, possibly destroying crucial evidence. It remains disputed who killed Ramp. Former Mayor Wilson Goode doesn’t…

Ava, the fetching and friendly blue antibody, is the protagonist of Ava Antibody Explains, a timely children’s book written by Andrea Cudd Alemanni and delightfully illustrated by Roman Diaz. Ava is a big player on the body’s immune system team, a force that fights off villains such as the virus Charlie Chickenpox. Vaccines, the book explains, tell Ava what Charlie looks like so he can’t sneak past her. Because Ashley had her Chickenpox vaccine last year, Charlie couldn’t invade her body: When he tried, Ava and her teammates identified and stopped him before he could make her sick. Ava also explains that “Getting the vaccine helps you keep your friends healthy, too!” Since your antibodies protect you, you won’t accidentally pass bad actors like Charlie on to other kids whose…

IN JANUARY 2018, a powerhouse trio of megacorporations—Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase—announced a new health care venture. It didn’t have a name or a CEO or a specific product, but it did have a mission: to fix America’s health-care mess and, in particular, to bring down costs, especially for companies and employees facing everrising medical bills. “The initial focus of the new company will be on technology solutions that will provide U.S. employees and their families with simplified, high-quality and transparent healthcare at a reasonable cost,” the companies said in a joint press release, promising that the venture would be backed with extraordinary resources and “free from profit-making incentives and constraints.” The cost of providing health care represented “a hungry tapeworm on the American economy,” said Berkshire Hathaway CEO…

ANY PASTA ENTHUSIAST worth her salt will tell you that bucatini—which is like spaghetti but thicker, and with a hole in the middle—is the gold standard of deliciousness, unrivaled in texture and taste. So naturally, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) felt the need to ruin consumers’ bucatini bliss. The absence of bucatini on store shelves since about April 2020 should be attributed not to the COVID-19 pandemic and related supply chain disruptions but rather to an FDA rule mandating that all pasta contain 13–16.5 milligrams of iron per pound. Imports of De Cecco’s bucatini have been stopped at the border since March 30 due to the FDA’s discovery that the massive pasta company’s product contained only 10.9 milligrams of iron per pound. (Typically, customers would also be able to…

LIKE SO MUCH of the government response to COVID-19, the rollout of vaccines has been beset by poor planning and bad management. While vaccine distribution is underway, federal predictions that 20 million Americans would be vaccinated by the end of 2020 were off by an order of magnitude; the actual number was a bit more than 2 million. Eleven days into 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that only 9 million or so Americans had received their first doses. “It was a planning error, and I am responsible,” U.S. Army General Gustave F. Perna, chief operations officer for the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed vaccine program, said in December. Perna was responding to state officials who complained that the federal government was slow to deliver vaccines…

WHEN RIOTERS STORMED the U.S. Capitol in January, Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.) was there. Not only was he happy to see the mob assembled outside his workplace; he cheered them on. Shortly before the group of conspiracists and reactionaries broke into the building—vandalizing offices, taking selfies amid the wreckage, and dramatically halting business on both the House and Senate floors as lawmakers were evacuated to secure locations, sometimes fearing for their lives—Hawley had been photographed giving them a raised fist of encouragement. Earlier that morning, then–President Donald Trump had addressed a rally at the National Mall. “We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women,” he directed. “And we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for…

AFTER PRESIDENT DONALD Trump’s loss in 2020, a majority of his supporters believed the election had been rigged. Some adopted wild conspiracy theories involving Chinese supercomputers, Hugo Chavez, and state-level Republican officials. These beliefs culminated in an attack on the U.S. Capitol that left five people dead. To make sense of these events, many officials have argued that platforms such as Facebook and Twitter allowed conspiracy theories to spread unimpeded, leading to erroneous beliefs and deadly behaviors. In other words, they blame misinformation for the violence. But it strains credulity to believe random tweets can lead otherwise normal people to drive across the country and stage an insurrection. That places an undue focus on misinformation itself, rather than on the people and institutions sharing it and on the people who…

Set in Night City, an expansive California cityscape brimming with rogue A.I.s, body-modded street thugs, and virtual cathouses for every class and taste, Cyberpunk 2077 is a video game about sex, drugs, and robots—and what to do about them. Based on a long-running series of tabletop roleplaying games, the game is constructed from a stew of ’80s and ’90s science fiction references: There’s more than a hint of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, of Johnny Mnemonic and The Matrix, including a star turn by Keanu Reeves as a long-dead revolutionary rocker who turns up as an A.I. construct lodged in your consciousness. Reeves makes an amusingly sardonic, irritably charming guide to Night City, a companion and antagonist who wants to get out of your head as much as the player…

The latest offering from the Swedish game developer Oskar Stålberg might loosely be described as a city-building game. There are no missions to complete or resources to gather. There isn’t even a menu of buildings to pick from. Instead, Townscraper players add one block at a time atop a placid sea and watch as the structures they’re creating morph automatically into streets, homes, apartments, and towers. That barebones simplicity, objective-free gameplay, and calming setting will make you feel less like a city administrator and more like you’ve been administered a digital Valium. It’s hardly a thrilling experience. But there’s still a lot of Zen fun to be had in seeing your individual mouse clicks snowball into city blocks or castle-like complexes. That organic, incremental growth makes Townscraper a refreshing change…