Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2023 i Reason

“I’M ALL FOR conservation,” Frank Ribelin, a landowner outside Austin, Texas, told U.S. News & World Report two decades after passage of the Endangered Species Act, “but I’d like to club the little bastards.” He meant the golden-cheeked warbler, a sparrow-sized songbird that leaves the state only to winter in Central America. As a family member said, land like theirs “used to be sold by the square foot, but that all crumbled the day the warbler was listed.” Once an endangered species was found there, the land’s value plummeted. Thirty years later, the warbler’s status remains unchanged: It is still listed as endangered. The bird’s fate exemplifies several things about the act, which has become one of the most controversial laws on the books since being passed 50 years ago…

EAGER THOUGH WE all are to learn how the Ukraine war ends for Ukraine, there is another great unanswered question about the invasion: How will the war end for Russia? Will it revert to a quasi-Soviet totalitarian past, this time with a simulacrum of capitalism and an ideology of religious nationalism instead of communism? When Vladimir Putin’s death or downfall comes, will that bring a new liberal “thaw”? Or will the country slide into violent strife between warlords like the late Yevgeny Prigozhin—leading, perhaps, to an even more belligerent fascist dictatorship? Or will the Russian Federation disintegrate as the Soviet Union did 32 years ago, with some of its constituent entities breaking off into independent states? And would that reduce Russia to a shrunken, humbled, impoverished, and increasingly irrelevant country?…

PODCAST THE RETRIEVALS EMMA CAMP The Retrievals, a podcast from The New York Times, examines how one rogue nurse at Yale Fertility Center systematically stole fentanyl intended for patients, leading as many as 200 women to experience excruciating pain during procedures. Worse still, the women who alerted their doctors all had their concerns dismissed. On its face, the podcast is a dispatch from the contemporary drug war. The thieving nurse was a middle-aged mother taking the fentanyl to deal with her divorce-related stress. But it is also a tale of institutional incompetence and rampant sexism. As the podcast tells the story, it becomes mind-bogglingly clear just how easily the theft should have been discovered. The thieving nurse was sloppy, and scores of women—many of them medical professionals themselves—repeatedly told their…

After the city of Atlanta demolished Everett Tripodis’ house without properly informing him, city officials sued him to recoup the $68,000 they claim to have spent tearing it down. The city wants to force the sale of the lot to pay for the demolition retroactively. A local TV station found that Tripodis’ house was on Lawton Street; the city building inspector’s office sent warning letters to Lawton Avenue, in a different zip code. New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell vetoed a bill that would order a city-owned apartment to be rented out at market rate. The unit was supposed to be used by visiting elected officials, but the city discovered last year that Cantrell had been staying there without paying rent. After the city council overrode her veto, Cantrell called it…

TO SOLVE ITS worst-in-the-nation homelessness problem, Los Angeles is considering the novel and legally suspect approach of commandeering empty hotel rooms as shelter housing. Come March, city voters will decide on a ballot initiative backed by the hotel union Unite Here requiring hotels to report their empty rooms to the city’s housing department. The homeless would then be given vouchers to rent the vacant rooms. Hotels don’t have to leave those rooms available; they just can’t refuse service to homeless customers paying with housing vouchers. The idea has its roots in Project Roomkey, a federally funded, state-run initiative during the pandemic that moved the homeless out of superspreader congregate shelters and into empty hotels. Project Roomkey and similar programs in other states worked smoothly enough because the feds were willing…

FOR THE FIRST time in 20 years, nine cases of locally acquired malaria have occurred this summer in the United States: seven in Florida, one in Texas, and one in Maryland. The feverish illness is caused by infection through the bites of mosquitoes carrying protozoan parasites. The parasites were introduced to the Americas via colonization and the transatlantic slave trade and adapted to local mosquito species. “By 1850 malaria had become established in practically every settlement from New England westward to the Columbia River valley and from the southernmost part of Florida to the inland valleys of California,” wrote the Tulane University parasitologist Ernest C. Faust in 1951. The U.S. Census Bureau reported that in 1850, malaria was responsible for 45.7 out of every 1,000 deaths nationally and 7.8 percent…

JUST WEEKS AFTER the U.S. Supreme Court opened the door to more extensive judicial oversight of executive branch agencies’ internal courts, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) dropped dozens of those cases—including one that prompted the Court’s ruling. The sudden mass dismissal of 42 cases within the SEC’s administrative legal system was the result of what the agency calls a “control deficiency.” That’s quite the euphemism for what actually happened. In a statement, the SEC admitted that officials within the enforcement division had accessed memos and drafts from within the administrative court system. In layman’s terms, the SEC’s police force was able to view documents akin to notes between judges and their clerks. The scenario highlights one of the fundamental problems with the administrative legal systems that independent executive agencies…

AT A JULY hearing of the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, Republican members focused on social media companies’ moderation of largely conservative viewpoints and accused the Biden administration of working hand-in-hand with tech companies to censor critics. The First Amendment generally restricts the actions of the government and not purely private decisions of companies. A spirited, and unsettled, debate is emerging nationwide as to the extent of government pressure on platforms that should render a moderation decision a First Amendment violation. But some members of the Weaponization Subcommittee sought to minimize the concerns about moderation without engaging in a nuanced discussion about government pressure, or “jawboning.” “I’m an attorney by training, and one of the things I learned very early on in constitutional law is…

FOR TWO YEARS, we lived in a 72-squarefoot tiny house we built inside a van. Our van gave us the freedom to live rent-free across North America, making our home in picturesque high deserts, isolated mountaintops, secluded beaches, wineries, and even the streets of Manhattan. Whether you’re using your van for fulltime living or just for weekend escapes, you can strip down to the bare essentials while also making a comfortable living space. A van is about the size of a walk-in closet and must serve as a workspace, a bedroom, a kitchen, and a bathroom, so every inch counts. If that sounds like the life for you, these are some products that can help you live the dream. GETTING AROUND For our travels, we chose the 2017 RAM ProMaster…

When Meaghan Ybos was raped in 2003, it was the sort of assault you see more often in cinematic crime fiction than in reality. A stranger, wearing a ski mask, broke into her home, held a knife to her throat, and forced himself on her. Twenty years later, Ybos is president of Women Against Registry, an organization dedicated to ending sex offender registration across the country. Ybos’ advocacy started down that unorthodox path when her rapist was finally caught, nine years after the attack. She then learned that the Memphis Police Department had neglected to test the majority of the rape kits it collected, including hers. Since then, she’s been pushing back against the myth of the rape kit “backlog,” pointing out that in much of the country it isn’t…

RICHARD M. WEAVER’S Ideas Have Consequences, published 75 years ago, is not really a book about how ideas have consequences. It’s a book about what one idea, propounded by the medieval friar William of Occam—“the fateful doctrine of nominalism, which denies that universals have a real existence”—has wrought through the ages. In Weaver’s view, the answer was nothing good. Occam’s nominalist philosophy has produced a squishy relativism that rejects objective morality and a blindered materialism that doubts the validity of anything that can’t be empirically measured. It has led us to undervalue community, eschew tradition, and forget that rights are accompanied by duties. Weaver’s book, the title of which became an anthem of mid-century American conservatism, was an attempt to revive the notion “that there is a world of ought,…

WHEN THE SUPREME Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, everyone knew the fallout—for women, for doctors, for U.S. politics—would be profound. “The Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito in the majority opinion. With that, nearly 50 years of status quo surrounding abortion was ended. Dobbs torched the legal paradigm that had governed access across the nation since the Court’s infamous 1973 ruling in Roe v. Wade and its 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Unsurprisingly, American abortion laws and access have been radically transformed since the Dobbs decision was released. As of September, in more U.S. states than not, abortion access is now reduced, threatened, or barely existent. In the wake…

“I NEVER PICTURED a world where marijuana would be anywhere close to legal, and it’s mind-blowing to me that mushrooms are being decriminalized everywhere,” says Shane Mauss, a comedian who tours the country discussing his psychedelic experiences. For the 2018 documentary Psychonautics, he consumed a wide variety of substances on camera, from ayahuasca to LSD to ketamine to DMT, a smokable drug known to provoke especially strong hallucinations in which users sometimes encounter cartoonish “entities.” Mauss also hosts a science podcast called Here We Are, where he shares his thoughts about the mainstreaming of psychedelic drugs, the surprising pace of legalization efforts, and the role that podcaster Joe Rogan and other public figures play in normalizing psychedelics. In June, Reason’s Nick Gillespie caught up with Mauss at the Psychedelic Science…

THERE IS A story about crisis relief that a lot of people believe instinctively, one that’s built into our institutions: Governments and major international organizations, armed with resources and authority, are best equipped to quickly help people harmed by war, hunger, and violence. Dana Sachs offers a different narrative in All Else Failed: The Unlikely Volunteers at the Heart of the Migrant Aid Crisis. A million migrants crossed the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe in the year 2015 alone. As the refugees reached shore in Greece, “traditional relief networks proved themselves incapable of delivering a productive response,” she writes. Major humanitarian groups such as the International Rescue Committee and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) “offered only limited support on the ground.” The European Union shelled out “millions…