Reason

“MOST SECTORS OF the economy are a conspiracy between the big incumbents and their punitive regulators,” venture capitalist and software engineer Marc Andreessen tells Reason this month (page 48). Asked to identify pockets of relative freedom and com

FROM HIS INAUGURATION to March 24, 2023, President Joe Biden increased the regulatory paperwork obligation by 220 million hours, reports American Action Forum’s Dan Goldbeck. The regulatory paperwork burden under Biden “exceeds the combined total acc

IN 2020, THE U.S. Supreme Court stopped the Trump administration from unilaterally rescinding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The administration’s attempted cancellation of DACA, which protects unauthorized immigrants who a

THE CANNABIS LEGALIZATION bill that New York enacted in 2021 included a provision that was supposed to help people convicted of marijuana felonies by downgrading their records in line with current law. But a typo-graphical error made that relief hard

“CANCER SIGNAL NOT detected.” That was the happy finding of my Galleri multi-cancer early detection (MCED) blood test from the Silicon Valley biotech company GRAIL. The Galleri test presages an emerging wave of new precision biomedical tests produced

WHEN PRESIDENT JOE Biden sparred with Republicans during his State of the Union address in February, he vowed to veto any attempt at cutting Social Security benefits. Yet the budget proposal he unveiled in March lacked a plan to avert the mandatory S

IN DECEMBER 2022, a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle 23-Year-Old Family Reserve sold at auction for $52,500—more than the list price for a base-model Tesla. The long-aged bourbon from the Buffalo Trace Distillery is arguably the most sought-after bottle of

AN EPITHET HAS emerged on the post-liberal fringes of the online conservative movement: right-liberal. It’s a term these critics apply to libertarians, old-school Reaganite conservatives, and anyone else who prefers individualism to collectivism or b

HERE IS ONE version of the left-right spectrum, as described in 1975 by a former Barry Goldwater speechwriter who had left the conservative movement to break bread with Black Panthers and Wobblies. The far right, Karl Hess wrote in Dear America, was

THE STORY WENT something like this: A white woman pulled up to a Black Women Matter protest in Charlottesville and told attendees they would make “good fucking speed bumps.” When protesters confronted her, the driver cried and called the police. If y

THE 2024 REPUBLICAN presidential primary has largely been framed as a referendum on former President Donald Trump. He’s expected to face at least half a dozen serious rivals, with one possible contender, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, sometimes—but not a

THE EXISTENCE OF a drone program was a secret. The legal justification for the drone program was a secret. It was a secret that through a program called SOMALGET the National Security Agency was recording and archiving the content of every single cel

MARC ANDREESSEN HAS helped a lot of people get rich—including Marc Andreessen. He’s made millions of people’s lives more fun, more efficient, or just a little weirder while making himself into a billionaire. He is the co-creator of the first widely u

THE JUNE FORECAST calls for plenty of rainbows, regardless of the actual weather. Once a small and highly political gesture of defiance against a government and culture that refused to grant gay and transgender people the same rights and respect as o

“WE ARE RAPIDLY heading toward a world of brain transparency, in which scientists, doctors, governments, and companies may peer into our brains and minds at will,” Duke University bioethicist Nita A. Farahany declares in The Battle for Your Brain. As

EFFERSON COWIE IS a prodigious researcher who often shows sensitivity to historical complexities, and his narrative skills shine. The Vanderbilt historian’s latest book, Freedom’s Dominion, is readable and often provocative. But it superimposes a dub

SINCE THE 2016 election, the term Christian nationalism has been used, narrowly, to describe conservative Christian support for Donald Trump and, broadly, to describe any right-wing vision of Christian politics that left-wing observers deplore. This

MOVIE Many things were banned in New York City for much of the 20th century but are legal today. Pornography. Recreational marijuana use. Pinball? As if his namesake airport isn’t bad enough, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia led the crusade against pinball

“Just as Americans do not know when the government uses secret subpoenas to look at their telephone, internet, and financial records, they do not know when the government secretly listens to their conversations or reads their email exchanges with peo

Less than two weeks after a driver rammed into his Austin, Texas, home, Chris Newby got a letter from the city telling him his house was now in violation of city code and that he had 30 days to get it repaired or face $2,000 a day in fines. Officials

Diana Alvarez’s son always wanted to go to college, so she started working in a smoke shop to earn some extra cash. What started as a part-time job evolved into a full-time family business: Lit City Smoke Shop, located in Washington, D.C. When the ci

ON THE LEFT and the right, in Europe and the United States, a consensus is growing: People aren’t having enough kids—not enough to support the welfare state, not enough to preserve the culture, not enough to keep advanced economies young, thriving, a