Tabla de contenidos para July 2025 en Reason

THE U.S. IS a nation of symbols: the bald eagle, the Statue of Liberty, baseball, apple pie. One symbol, however, has taken a beating lately, though it represents the core of the American project. Lady Justice predates the founding, but her likeness—blindfolded, holding scales and a sword—stands for the principles that the Founders insisted should rule the American legal system. While her spirit pervades the Constitution, it is most prominently featured in the Fifth Amendment’s promise of due process: the principle that those accused of wrongdoing have the right to challenge the evidence against them before the government takes away their liberty. But not everyone who swore to uphold the Constitution is keeping that promise. “If you violated the law, you are not entitled to due process,” Rep. Victoria Spartz…

“I DON’T WANT to be told how many calories are in my Big Mac meal or my quarter pounder meal. I don’t want the government telling me that I can’t put salt on my food,” Sean Hannity declared on Fox News in 2010. “I like junk food. I like McDonald’s. I like Wendy’s. I like Burger King. I love Kentucky Fried Chicken.” This was a common sentiment for conservatives of the era, a time when many on the right viewed attempts to promote health as left-wing and therefore suspect. Some of this Republican pushback was rooted in righteous opposition to intrusions on the free market and consumer choice, as when Democrats attempted to impose sin taxes on sodas or limit the size of sugary drinks stores could sell. But too often,…

LONG BEFORE EUROPEAN governments or their colonies began to embrace “democracy,” something far more democratic was widely practiced in the world’s vast ungovernable spaces. Black Sam Bellamy’s 1717 pirate crew was “a collection of people in which there was likely to be at least some firsthand knowledge of a very wide range of directly democratic institutions,” wrote David Graeber, the late anarchist and anthropologist, in one of his essays collected posthumously in The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World…. Those institutions ranged “from Swedish things to African village assemblies to Native American councils”: a rich assortment of influences as the sailors found themselves “forced to improvise some mode of self-government in the complete absence of any state.” The very ungovernability of the Atlantic itself, the vast inland frontiers, the dense…

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DOES USING ALCOHOL, nicotine, or cannabis engender addiction by changing the structure of brains, or does the structure of brains incline some people toward using those substances? In standard brain disease models of addiction, the neurotoxic effects of abused psychoactive substances are thought to cause brain changes that spur compulsive cravings for drink, smokes, or dope. A recent study in JAMA Network Open, an open-access, peer-reviewed, international medical journal published by the American Medical Association, challenges that model and suggests that brain differences associated with addiction precede rather than result from substance abuse. A team of neuroscientists examined associations between brain structure and substance use initiation in nearly 10,000 children enrolled in the ongoing Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. Children aged 9 to 11 years were enrolled in the…

IN MARCH, PRESIDENT Donald Trump signed an executive order directing Education Secretary Linda McMahon to essentially abolish the department she runs. “Closing the Department of Education would provide children and their families the opportunity to escape a system that is failing them,” reads Trump’s order. “Ultimately, the Department of Education’s main functions can, and should, be returned to the States.” Actually killing the department requires congressional approval. McMahon has, though, moved to at least shrink it. Shortly before Trump signed the executive order, she cut its staff in half following almost 2,000 layoffs and buyouts. “This is a significant step toward restoring the greatness of the United States education system,” McMahon said in a March press release. While McMahon can’t erase the Education Department on her own, Congress could step…

THE COURSE OF Lyle McNeal’s life changed in 1972. Then a professor in California Polytechnic State University’s Animal Science Department, McNeal led the college’s Boots and Spurs club on a weeklong trip to the state’s agricultural Salinas Valley. The group visited a ranch whose owners, a father and son duo, provided horses to Hollywood productions. A few sheep who were there to graze the land caught McNeal’s eye. They turned out to be Navajo-Churro sheep. The descendants of animals brought to North America by the Spanish in the 1540s, Navajo-Churro sheep are of deep importance to the Navajo—and of great use to their keepers. Their fine wool comes in many colors and can be spun for use in weaving and other crafts, and they produce desirable meat and milk. They…

TV ADOLESCENCE AUTUMN BILLINGS Adolescence, a British TV series streaming on Netflix, depicts the arrest of 13-year-old Jamie for the brutal murder of his classmate, Katie, and the subsequent fallout in an imaginary English town. Shot in a continuous single-camera style, each episode explores the perspectives of Jamie’s family, law enforcement, and an evaluating psychologist. The limited-series format mimics the unsatisfying endings of real-life criminal justice cases. We see a legally defined conclusion, but many questions are left unanswered, as in life, leaving the characters—and viewers—to make sense of the chaos and what should come next after such a shocking act. Jamie’s parents ask what, if anything, they could have done differently, and face the uncomfortable reality that many circumstances lie outside of their control. The series clearly wants to condemn…

Police in Miami suspended an officer pending an investigation into an incident in which she sat in her patrol car while numerous bikers assaulted a man in front of her. Video shows the bikers not only beating the man but jumping on the hood and roof of his car and breaking his windshield, while the officer never left her vehicle. The Massachusetts Office of the Inspector General says the city of Everett wrongly paid Mayor Carlo DeMaria $180,000 in bonuses. The city enacted a rule in 2016 giving mayors $10,000 after each term, but a last-minute word change instead gave mayors $10,000 for each cumulative term. The change allowed DeMaria—then in his fourth term—to pocket $40,000 each year instead of $10,000 every four years. When the City Council found out…

WHEN INDUSTRIES CAN boost profits more easily by lobbying for tariff exemptions than by competing in the marketplace, they will—and those incentives grow stronger as government intervention in the economy increases. On April 2, President Donald Trump announced a baseline 10 percent ad valorem tariff on all countries. These purportedly reciprocal tariffs, which were implemented on top of the country- and goods-specific duties already in place, were calculated by referencing trade deficits—not foreign tariffs—on American exports. Tariffs harm consumers and hamstring domestic producers by increasing the price of imported inputs, forcing domestic firms to increase the price of final goods. Importers often direct capital, labor, and time to achieve exemptions from tariffs to decrease their operating costs, no matter who is in power. Annex II of the president’s executive order…

WHEN THE SPANISH colonized Peru in the 16th century, they tore down the Incan temples and palaces, leaving the base level of original stone masonry in place. On top of those they built European-style white stucco walls, ornate baroque stonework, and intricately carved wooden balconies. This fusion of Incan and colonial architecture, particularly in Cusco, helped earn the city the designations of Historical Capital and Tourism Capital of Peru. On May 21, 1950, an earthquake rocked Cusco, damaging approximately half of the city’s buildings. The worst destruction affected old adobe houses and colonial-era churches, including the Church of Santo Domingo, which was built atop the Coricancha (“Temple of the Sun,” dedicated to the Incan sun god). Spanish chronicler Pedro Cieza de León once marveled at the temple’s “excellent masonry,” noting that…

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP owes his second electoral victory, in no small part, to voter frustration over the rising cost of living. Over the course of Joe Biden’s presidency, the price of a typical American house increased by nearly 40 percent, and rents followed a similar trajectory. As of 2024, approximately 771,480 Americans lack reliable shelter—at once a new high and a new low. All of these issues are most acute in states governed by Biden’s fellow Democrats. In California, the median home price is now more than 10 times the median household income. Economists generally view three to five as a healthy ratio. Polling data suggest that many key voting blocs in the 2024 presidential election were primarily motivated by the rising cost of living and by out-of-control housing costs…

WHEN PRESIDENT DONALD Trump announced a sweeping set of tariffs on nearly all imports, he promised that April 2—what the White House dubbed “Liberation Day”—would “forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn.” That’s not the way Michele Derrigo-Barnes sees it. Trump’s tariffs are “killing” small American manufacturers like hers, she tells Reason. As CEO of Plattco Corporation, a small business that makes industrial valves, Derrigo-Barnes runs the sort of blue-collar industrial production shop that Trump and his allies say they want to help. Instead of being helped, she found herself dealing with fallout from the tariff announcement: canceled orders, higher prices, and enough uncertainty to put on hold a planned expansion of the company’s Plattsburgh, New York, manufacturing center on the banks of Lake Champlain. What would…

LAY RISEN, A New York Times reporter who has written several volumes of popular history, has now tackled the familiar story of the Second Red Scare—the period after World War II, when the nation’s institutions mobilized against the Communists believed to be burrowing into American society. But his new book, Red Scare, doesn’t stick to that era: It also aims to comment on contemporary American politics. When wearing his historian hat, Risen blends an established academic understanding of the Second Red Scare, which he describes as “a long-simmering conflict in which social conservatives faced off against the progressives of the New Deal,” with a popular recollection that it was produced by “the sudden, terrifying onset of the Cold War.” This is a reasonable approach, though it has its limits: His…