Tabla de contenidos para July 2022 en Reason

HUMANS GET STUFF wrong. We do it all the time. We’re biased and blind and overconfident. We’re bad at paying attention and terrible at remembering. We’re prone to constructing self-serving narratives after the fact; worse, we often convince ourselves they are true. We’re slightly better at identifying these distortions in others than we are in our own thinking, but not by much. And we tend to attribute others’ mistakes to malice, even as we attribute our own to well-intentioned error. All of this makes the very concept of misinformation—and its more sinister cousin, disinformation—slippery at best. Spend 10 minutes listening to any think tank panel or cable news segment about the scourge, and it will quickly become clear that many people simply use the terms to mean “information, whether true…

THE DEBATE OVER whether businesses can be forced to provide goods and services for gay weddings will return to the Supreme Court in an upcoming case. In February, the Supreme Court agreed to hear 303 Creative v. Elenis. Lorie Smith owns and runs 303 Creative, a web design firm based in Colorado. Smith planned to design and host sites for weddings, but she has religious objections to same-sex marriage and does not want to be forced to design and host sites for LGBT couples. That puts her at odds with Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Act, which prohibits “places of public accommodation” from discriminating against LGBT customers. In her petition to the Supreme Court, Smith says she is not refusing to serve LGBT customers. Rather, she “cannot create websites that promote messages contrary…

EXPLANATIONS FOR RUSSIA’S 2022 war in Ukraine often go back to 2014, when the Revolution of Dignity replaced Kremlin ally Viktor Yanukovych with a pro-Western government and Vladimir Putin responded by annexing Crimea and sponsoring separatist enclaves in Eastern Ukraine. Others focus on 2005, when the Orange Revolution first brought a Westernoriented leadership to power in Kyiv. Some analysts look further back to the messy history of Ukrainian nationalism in the 1930s and ’40s, including the anti-Soviet fighters who collaborated with the Nazis. But the history of Russia and Ukraine goes all the way back to the Middle Ages. It raises fascinating questions about the role that different visions of liberty and the state played in their development. Russian and Ukrainian medieval and early modern history is sufficiently relevant that…

WHEN LEGISLATORS WHO oppose federal marijuana prohibition vote against your legalization bill, you probably are doing something wrong. That is what happened in April, when the House of Representatives approved the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act. The 220 ayes included 217 Democrats but only three Republicans, two fewer than voted for the MORE Act in 2020. That tiny tally suggests that Democrats are not really interested in building the bipartisan coalition that would be necessary to resolve the conflict between state and federal marijuana laws. Even if Senate Democrats unanimously supported a legalization bill, they would still need help from 10 Republicans to overcome a filibuster. But both the MORE Act and the legalization bill that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) planned to introduce by August include…

WHEN INTERFAITH SANCTUARY purchased an old Salvation Army building on State Street near downtown Boise, Idaho, in early 2021, it seemed like a dream come true. Everything about the property made it a perfect fit for the nonprofit’s new emergency homeless shelter. The only thing the organization needed to turn that dream into a reality was a conditional use permit from the city. That required talking to the neighbors. And that proved to be a problem. The visceral opposition of nearby residents to Interfaith Sanctuary’s shelter plans turned what should have been a permitting process of a few months into a bitter conflict that stretched out for over a year and put the entire project in jeopardy. “We are stuck,” Jodi Peterson-Stigers, the executive director of Interfaith Sanctuary, told Reason…

Hidden near the heart of many prestige ensemble television dramas—think Mad Men, The Sopranos, or even Hill Street Blues back in the day—lies that seemingly unsexiest of topics: management. So it is with HBO’s absurdly enjoyable if not quite great Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty. The show chronicles how basketball legend Magic Johnson and real estate hustler Jerry Buss converged upon Los Angeles to transform the NBA. Based on Jeff Pearlman’s 2014 book Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s, the series explores how Buss bluffs and sleazeballs his way to genuine entertainment and sporting innovation, and how Johnson navigates the workplace delicacies involved in taking control of a team led by the fiercely intellectual future Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar—at…

Craig A. Schmeckpeper, a former physical education teacher in Nebraska’s North Bend Elementary School, has been charged with child abuse not resulting in serious injury. Police said Schmeckpeper pinned a student’s arms behind his back in a physical education class before telling the rest of the class to line up and hit the boy while he held him. Schmeckpeper reportedly said “free hits” and “free punches” as students walked by. As part of its “zero COVID” policy, officials in the Chinese city of Langfang ordered the “complete culling of indoor animals” of COVID-19 patients in one neighborhood. The order was later stopped, but it isn’t clear how many pets were killed prior to repeal. While pets can get COVID-19 from their owners, the risk of them spreading it back to…

IN 1986, BILL Heine installed a sculpture of a 25-foot shark crashing through the roof of his home in Oxford, England, without getting the approval of local planning officials. His son, Magnus Hanson-Heine, said his father didn’t believe the government should be able to decide what art people should see. After spending years trying to get it removed, the local council has declared the shark a protected landmark—against the wishes of Hanson-Heine, who now owns the house.…

THE PATIENT PROTECTION and Affordable Care Act of 2010, better known as Obamacare, was designed to patch the insurance gaps between Medicare, Medicaid, and employer-sponsored health care, which is bolstered by a tax carve-out for workplace benefits. Obamacare was barely two years old when it faced its first challenge at the Supreme Court. A decade after that first challenge, the law remains on the books. But the outcome of that case has shaped both the health law’s evolution and its public perception, leaving Americans with a major federal program that even its fiercest advocates say does not live up to its goals. The justices heard arguments for and against the constitutionality of Obamacare’s health insurance mandate, which required every American who did not qualify for an exemption to carry federally…

BY THIS SPRING, nearly all the eviction moratoriums imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic had ended, either because courts blocked them or because legislators repealed them or allowed them to expire. One conspicuous exception was Los Angeles, where tenants were still protected from eviction by the city’s ongoing state of emergency. L.A.’s moratorium, one of the strictest and most open-ended such policies in the U.S., is a major headache for landlords. David Greenhut is an owner of eight rent-stabilized properties in Los Angeles, totaling 221 units. As of late March, Greenhut says, he had 40 tenants who were not paying rent. He also complains that he is not allowed to evict tenants who blare music or who won’t allow pest control into their homes. The city’s moratorium bars eviction for nonpayment…

ONE STRANGE THING about Watergate, the scandal that led Richard Nixon to resign as president, is that 50 years later we still don’t know who ordered the core crime or why. This was the crime: On June 17, 1972, a squad of five bagmen, all with at least past connections to the CIA, broke into the offices of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in the Watergate office building. They were supervised by James McCord, director of security for Nixon’s reelection committee. McCord made a series of baffling decisions that made being caught far more likely. To start, he taped open locks on doors to ease the way for the burglars, who were delayed in breaking in because a staffer was working late to cadge phone calls on the DNC’s dime.…

AMERICA’S FIRST WIRETAPPING conviction happened in 1864. A stockbroker named D.C. Williams had been tapping a telegraph line in California to get corporate information, which he used for advantageous stock trades. The law he broke had been passed two years earlier, making California the first state to regulate wiretapping. The telephone had not been invented yet, and the transcontinental telegraph had only just been completed. The Golden State’s legislators were ahead of the game. Ever since then, legislation dealing with electronic surveillance has been playing catch-up—both with the technology and with public sentiment. In the early days of the telegraph, privacy was a difficult issue to address. It was impossible to expect or demand that only the addressee could see your communication: Operators had to both transmit and receive the…

In April, the reality TV mogul and aspiring lawyer Kim Kardashian debuted a new collection of her lingerie/shapewear brand, SKIMS, via an ad campaign featuring a flock of former Victoria’s Secret angels. In a little under three years since launching the brand, Kardashian has pocketed a cool $1 billion while marketing lingerie that “fits everybody” and comes in a wider array of skin tones than that industry has traditionally offered—similar to Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty line, which was lauded by black beauty industry watchers (among others) for debuting with a whopping 40 different shades of foundation. SKIMS has unseated the reigning lingerie industry titan Victoria’s Secret—savagely stealing its iconic angels—by making a superior product. (Well, that plus the founder’s fame and marketing prowess.) SKIMS offers bras that are far more comfortable…

RUSSIA’S BRUTAL AND unprovoked invasion of Ukraine was not even a week old when there was a backlash against Western ladies who thought Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was sexy. “Enough With the Zelensky Thirst,” scolded the feminist website Jezebel. Added The Forward: “It’s weird.” Weird, maybe; inexplicable, not at all. Sure, the comedic-actor-turned-president is charismatic and easy on the eyes in his tight olive T-shirt, if a tad short for my taste. But the real reason the Ukrainian leader became an “unlikely sex symbol as photos defending Kyiv emerge[d],” per a Daily Mirror headline, is right there in the word defending. Defense is inherently sexy. “We are here,” Zelenskyy said in the video that catapulted him to international celebrity. “We are in Kyiv. We are defending Ukraine.” This image was…

HOURS AFTER THE federal government released data showing that inflation hit a 40-year high in March 2022, President Joe Biden said Russian President Vladimir Putin was responsible for “70 percent of the increase in prices.” Biden was partly right: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which caused much of the world to reduce or stop purchases of Russian oil, contributed to a spike in gasoline prices, which in turn was a major factor in overall inflation in March. But the current bout of inflation—which hit 8.5 percent in March, the worst devaluation of the dollar since the early 1980s—predates Russia’s invasion, and the underlying causes go beyond higher gas prices. If Biden is looking to spread the blame evenly, he should look in the mirror. The textbook explanation for inflation is that…

IMAGINE A FEDERATION of independent regions. Each of its cities is a mosaic of distinctive, self-governing neighborhoods, where “people can choose the kind of subculture they wish to live in, and can still experience many ways of life different from their own.” Homes and workplaces sit side by side, and those workplaces are a mix of owner-operated businesses and self-managed workshops. Bureaucracy is minimal, and services are administered in small offices without red tape. Children roam the city freely, and the playgrounds are filled with raw materials for kids to build with. Instead of compulsory schooling, there are voucher-funded “networks of learning”: freelance instructors, shopfront schools, apprenticeships, museums. Instead of conventional universities, there are scholarly marketplaces where anyone can offer classes to willing customers. The most important mode of public…

LAST DECEMBER, COLORADO Gov. Jared Polis was one of the few Democratic governors willing to talk sensibly about pandemic policy after more than 18 months of blue-state lockdowns, mask mandates, school closures, and businesscapacity restrictions. “Public health [officials] don’t get to tell people what to wear; that’s just not their job,” Polis told a Colorado public radio station, declaring that the “medical emergency” phase of the pandemic had passed. Even when the omicron variant spiked this winter, Polis refused to reinstate mandates. His message was clear: Coloradans had had the opportunity to get vaccinated. They could decide their own risk tolerance. The 46-year-old governor and former five-term congressman is presiding over one of the fastest-growing states in the country, a place that has one of the lowest death rates during…

DURING J. EDGAR Hoover’s 48 years as FBI director, people often gossiped about whether his bedroom tastes were as straight as his agents’ marksmanship, citing everything from his fondness for socializing in male groups to his close relationship with longtime deputy Clyde Tolson. Spreading such rumors might earn you a visit from the FBI itself: As James Kirchick relates in Secret City, the bureau made it a practice to “detect, hunt down, and intimidate private citizens who spoke ill of the director.” Among the persons brought in for grilling sessions on this sensitive topic were the owners of a diner and a hair salon, an American visiting London, a prison inmate, and a woman who had gossiped about the director at a bridge party. In the last case, the party’s…

FADI ELSALAMEEN IS a political commentator on Arab-Israeli affairs and an adjunct senior fellow at the American Security Project. He’s a vocal critic of Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, and he has received several death threats and survived an assassination attempt. Elsalameen believes that an important step in liberating Palestinians is monetary freedom—specifically bitcoin, which can help them bypass the Palestinian Authority’s control over their finances. In April, he spoke with Reason’s Noor Greene at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami. Q: What role does the Palestinian Authority play in Palestine today? A: The Palestinian Authority is a burden on the Palestinian population. Almost 84 percent of the population believes that the Palestinian Authority is corrupt. We’ve spent almost $40 billion inside the Palestinian territories since 1993,…