Reason

I DON’T KNOW whether artificial intelligence (AI) will give us a 4-hour workweek, write all of our code and emails, and drive our cars—or whether it will destroy our economy and our grasp on reality, fire our nukes, and then turn us all into gray goo

THE INTERSTATE COMMERCE Commission (ICC), which existed for about a century before being mercifully put out to pasture in 1995, is one of the best historical examples of how governmental attempts at regulating the economy can backfire. Created with t

IN NOVEMBER, SPACEX conducted the second unmanned test of Starship, with mixed success. Unlike in the first test, all 33 engines fired and the super heavy booster and Starship spacecraft successfully separated. Thirty seconds after separation, the ro

A FEDERAL CIRCUIT judge wants the Supreme Court to scrap a longstanding test for determining what is cruel and unusual punishment. In an October speech to the Federalist Society, Reuters reported, Judge Thomas Hardiman, appointed by President George

WHEN LOS ANGELES officials were looking to set up a new homeless shelter where residents could have their own space, they decided speed was the priority. For that reason, they declined to build the typical tiny home village in favor of an easier-to-a

IN THE LATE 1990s, my grandfather bought a mail-order bat box as a natural approach to mosquito management. The dark green plywood roost was mounted on tall wooden poles on a sunny patch in the yard and stabilized with tension wires. The catalog prom

AS CALIFORNIA’S LIEUTENANT governor in 2016, Gavin Newsom supported Proposition 64, the ballot initiative that legalized recreational marijuana in his state. As governor, he acknowledges the “exciting” potential of “psychedelic medicines” to “address

JAPANESE RESEARCHERS ANNOUNCED last year that healthy fertile mice had been born using eggs created from male mice’s tail-tip cells. The male-derived eggs were fertilized with regular sperm, thus producing pups with two fathers. Reproductive biologis

THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT is unfolding half a world away, yet virtually no other political issue inspires as much acrimony among U.S. college students. After the terrorist group Hamas killed approximately 1,200 Israeli civilians on October 7,

General Motors announced in 2013 that it had picked Chandler for the site of its fourth Information Technology Innovation Center, an internal software development facility. The company would invest $21 million and create 1,000 jobs, and in return Cha

I RECENTLY FOUND myself descending what looked like subway stairs into a dark underground parking garage. All alone, on the Portuguese island of São Miguel, in the city of Ponta Delgada—if you can even call it a city—I stumbled upon a veritable wonde

WE LIVE IN boom times for vegan alternatives, with new plant-based meat and dairy products seemingly constantly cropping up at grocery stores nationwide. While the momentum around particularly ambitious meat alternatives has cooled in the past year o

YOEL INBAR MUST not be allowed to teach psychology at UCLA—or so a student petition informed the California university’s administration this past July. Inbar is an eminent, influential, and highly cited researcher with a Ph.D. in social psychology fr

BACK IN THE day, columnists for the Financial Times were of a type. They were predominantly pale, male, Oxbridge-educated world travelers. Their politics ranged from centrist to libertarian right. Most importantly, they were fans of neoliberalism. Th

RUSS ROBERTS MOVED from the U.S. to Jerusalem to become president of Shalem College in 2021. He hosts a popular economics podcast, EconTalk. Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe interviewed Roberts on Reason’s YouTube show Just Asking Questions about what

IT MAY NOT seem unusual that a corporate CEO would want to focus on increasing shareholder value, but in October this was treated as big news. A Financial Times headline announced that “Unilever’s new chief says corporate purpose can be ‘unwelcome di

WHILE SOME NATIONS tremble at the thought of high indebtedness, we Americans bask in the warm, comforting glow of $34 trillion in government IOUs. Why worry about a debt crisis when everyone wants to buy U.S. debt? Those of us who advocate fiscal pru

“I’M UNDER NO illusion that humanity will completely eradicate the racial tribal instinct or racism or bigotry itself. But I feel that colorblindness is the North Star that we should use when making decisions,” argues Coleman Hughes, a writer and pod

IN OCTOBER 2005, Stephen Colbert invented a new word: truthiness. In a short monologue for The Colbert Report, a satirical show where the comedian played a caricature of a conservative blowhard cable news anchor, he took issue with an approach to new

“DO I WANT to live in a society where people can be identified secretly and at a distance by the government?” asks Alvaro Bedoya. “I do not, and I think I am not alone in that.” Bedoya, a member of the Federal Trade Commission, says those words in Ne

THE NATIONAL RIFLE Association (NRA) “favored tighter gun laws” in the 1920s and ’30s, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote in 2018. But since the 1970s, Kristof complained, the NRA “has been hijacked by extremist leaders” whose “hardline

CAROLINE CALLOWAY IS not exactly famous for telling the truth. Whether she’s hiring her former best friend to ghostwrite her Instagram captions or peddling a ramshackle collection of plastic flowers and salad bowls in the guise of a “creativity works

Ten years after the first episode of Attack on Titan, the anime ended with a finale that did not disappoint. The series began with the main characters—Eren Yeager, Mikasa Ackerman, and Armin Arlert—fighting from within a walled city against man-eatin

The stories told in the three seasons of the series Reservation Dogs are embedded in centuries of the government’s crimes against Native Americans. Those historical abuses have produced a reservation system that makes employment, poverty, family form

In the second season of his eponymous Marvel series on Disney+, Loki (Tom Hiddleston) becomes both more human and more godlike. The low-fi retro futurism and sweeping sci-fi score of the series are as gorgeous as the first season. The show’s vaguely

Alabama’s Jefferson County school system suspended a 6-year-old for pointing his finger like a gun while playing cops and robbers. He initially received a class 3 violation, the same one given to students who bring actual weapons to school, later dro

“Civil libertarians have no love for [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] or the surveillance state, but facial recognition technology is likely here to stay. If Amazon won’t sell it to law enforcement, someone else will. Haranguing any one company