Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2025 i Reason

HERE’S A NEWS item no one saw coming: A man was deemed unworthy of heading the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) because he didn’t demonstrate sufficient respect for Americans’ rights to take risks with their own bodies. Watching President-elect Donald Trump assemble a Cabinet has been chaotic, to say the least. But no saga has been more interesting for the fate of bodily autonomy than the squabble over the DEA. Trump announced the selection of Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister on November 30. The local Florida lawman was an odd choice for a federal agency that runs complicated international operations and has about 10,000 employees. There were also immediate whiffs of corruption; he’s married to the daughter of former San Francisco 49ers owner Edward J. DeBartolo Jr., whom Trump pardoned during…

WALKING INTO A bank feels like walking into any other business. Sure, there are a few extra cameras and an armed guard or two, but otherwise, it’s a typical experience. What you don’t see is the flood of reports—tens of thousands every day—that banks and other financial institutions file with the government, logging what Americans are doing with their money. Banks may look like private businesses on the outside, but they have long been deputized on the inside as undercover agents for federal law enforcement. Finance is among the most private aspects of our lives—we cover the keypad at ATMs, shred financial statements, and use multifactor authentication for online accounts. Yet what we really have is the illusion of financial privacy. Our information might be shielded from much of the…

IN 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022, voters approved a raft of drug policy reforms. They included legalization of recreational marijuana in 11 states, authorization of medical use in eight, decriminalization of low-level drug possession in Oregon, approval of “psilocybin service centers” in the same state, and decriminalization of five naturally occurring psychedelics in Colorado. The 2024 election results were a different story. Legalization of recreational marijuana lost in Florida, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Nebraska voters over-whelmingly approved medical marijuana, but a pending legal challenge may prevent implementation of that policy. A Massachusetts psychedelic initiative similar to Colorado’s went down by a double-digit margin. And California voters resoundingly approved an initiative that increased penalties for several drug offenses, reinforcing the message that Oregon legislators sent when they overturned decriminalization in…

SISTER HELEN PREJEAN is probably not the archetype that comes to mind when you think of a nun, yet she is probably the country’s best-known living Catholic layperson, famous for her anti–death penalty activism. In the early 1980s, Prejean met a prisoner on death row—Elmo Patrick Sonnier—after an activist asked her to write him a letter. It was a life-altering experience. She served as Sonnier’s spiritual adviser and accompanied him to his death, which inspired her work against capital punishment. This story was immortalized in her 1993 book, Dead Man Walking, which in turn inspired a movie starring Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon, who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Prejean. Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s opera of the same name premiered in 2000 and opened the New…

5 YEARS AGO February 2020 “By accident as much as design, our system makes it painfully difficult to remove a president. And the political culture makes it harder still, by erecting barriers nowhere to be found in the Constitution. We’ve come to view the process as a source of constitutional crisis itself, rather than as a potential solution to one. Yet if history is any guide, we have little to fear from what’s shaping up to be our fourth serious effort at presidential impeachment. Whether it succeeds or not, the attempted firing of Donald Trump will cause the republic little harm and may even do it some good.” GENE HEALY “Don’t Freak Out About Impeachment” 20 YEARS AGO February 2005 “The [George W.] Bush administration has spent no political capital in the…

IT DOESN’T MATTER who Satoshi Nakamoto is or was, are or were. That’s the point of the newly revealed art piece in Ciani Park, Lugano, Switzerland. The metal statue, almost completely transparent from the front, was 21 months in the making by Italian artist and bitcoiner Valentina Picozzi. Unveiled during the Plan B Forum in October 2024, the installation, Picozzi said, is supposed “to give to the viewer this feeling of disappearance, and the sense that the inventor stays between the lines.” The cloaked silhouette of the super-coder it depicts pays homage to the crypto-anarchist(s) who made bitcoin—and then immortalized it by disappearing.…

LAST FALL, AN extraordinary legal drama played out in Texas that shook the foundations of the death penalty in a state that still stands for hang-’em-high justice. Hours before he was scheduled to become the first person in the country to be executed based on evidence of what used to be called “shaken baby syndrome,” Texas death row inmate Robert Roberson was granted an unprecedented reprieve when a state House committee subpoenaed him to testify before it. Roberson did not testify because the committee and the Texas Department of Corrections couldn’t agree on the logistics. In November, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that a legislative subpoena couldn’t halt the execution. When this issue went to press, a new execution date had not been set for Roberson. But the unusual legislative…

PENNY LANE’S NEW Netflix documentary, Confessions of a Good Samaritan, delves into her life-changing decision to donate a kidney to a stranger. Known for her thoughtful and provocative storytelling, Lane has explored human connection and empathy in films such as Hail Satan? and The Pain of Others. Last October she spoke with Reason’s Nick Gillespie and shared her emotional, physical, and philosophical experience with anonymous kidney donation and the challenges that came with it. Q: This is a film about your decision to give a kidney to a stranger. Can you tell us about the type of donation and why you decided to do this? A: The type of donation is known as an altruistic donation. The gift is anonymous. So I don’t know who received it, and I never will.…

IT WAS THE most indelible image of the 2024 presidential campaign: Donald Trump on a stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, right fist raised in defiance over a scrum of Secret Service agents, blood streaming from a bullet wound to the ear, shouting, “Fight! Fight! Fight!” One of the millions of people moved by that moment was the world’s richest man, the industrialist and futurist Elon Musk. Musk—America’s most famous immigrant—runs, among other companies, Tesla, which sells the majority of electric cars in the U.S.; SpaceX, developer of the first-ever reusable booster rocket and also the only reliable transport for astronauts to and from the International Space Station; and X (formerly known as Twitter), one of the globe’s most-discussed and influential social media platforms. In the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt,…

A former middle school teacher in Washington state was charged with unlawful imprisonment for locking a 14-year-old student in her classroom and forcing him to pray with her for more than an hour. According to court documents, the student stayed after class to apologize for being disrespectful, but the teacher locked the door and said he could not leave until they prayed. When the student said he was not religious, she called him “Satanás,” which means Satan in Spanish. A cheerleading coach at a public middle school in Lubbock, Texas, was placed on administrative leave after making cheerleaders crawl on hot asphalt when the temperature was over 100 degrees. Thirteen cheerleaders were treated for first- and second-degree burns on their hands; they claim the coach was punishing them for performing…

THE CULTURE WAR is costing school districts billions, according to a report released in October 2024 by the UCLA Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access. The report surveyed superintendents at 467 school districts nationwide about extra expenditures they undertook because of increased conflict over culture war issues such as critical race theory, book challenges, gender-related debates, and other politicized topics. The report estimates that such fights cost school districts around $3.2 billion during the 2023–2024 school year. Superintendents reported increased security costs, legal fees, and expenditures related to high staff turnover, as well as other culture war spending. One superintendent interviewed for the report said these cultural conflicts, at a level he considered “high,” required his district to spend an extra $100,000 to hire “armed plainclothes off-duty officers.…because people coming…

DURING PRESIDENT DONALD Trump’s first term in office, the national debt increased by $8 trillion—due, in large part, to huge spending hikes that Congress passed and Trump signed. Can SpaceX CEO Elon Musk help Trump avoid a repeat performance? While campaigning alongside Trump in the final days of the presidential race, Musk pledged not merely to limit future spending increases but to cut the cost of government in a big way. When asked at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in October how much waste “we can rip out” of the $6.75 trillion annual federal budget, Musk estimated “at least $2 trillion.” That sentiment reflects the relentless pursuit of efficiency that has become a hallmark of Musk’s companies, including Tesla and X, where Musk purged more than 6,000 jobs after buying…

EL PASO IS the U.S.-Mexico border in miniature: Once a permeable landscape, the Texas city is now separated from its sister to the south—Ciudad Juárez—by a harsh apparatus of walls and wire. Thousands of people travel between the two cities daily, splitting their lives between two nations, all while debates rage over who may cross the border and how. When five young Catholics set out to help El Paso’s most vulnerable residents in the late 1970s, these questions weren’t their primary concerns. “They were reading the Bible and saying, ‘Where do we encounter God in this world? If we take our faith seriously, what kind of actions does that call us to?’” says Mary Fontana, a member of the board of directors (and longtime volunteer) at Annunciation House, a nonprofit…

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