Innholdsfortegnelse for August/September 2025 i Reason

I WAS ALONE on a wide swath of soft grass near Shelburne, Vermont. A weekend away, phone off, brain quiet. I thought I’d listen to the wind rustling the cedar trees, but what I heard instead was the entire world. The rumble of a plane at 30,000 feet, whisking honeymooners to Mykonos or accountants to Minneapolis. The gentle hooting of the Ethan Allen Express, schlepping rail passengers from Burlington to New York. The crunch of tires on gravel. The lapping waters of Lake Champlain push boaters through a system of canals and locks to the Hudson River. This is the music of a connected world, a world where motion is the default and stillness the exception. Even when we pretend otherwise, the evidence of our interdependence insists on being heard.…

THE PEOPLE OF Georgia might well be the first folks who ever got properly wine-drunk. Straddling the Promethean Caucasus mountains, wedged between both Black and Caspian seas, Georgia is a cultural crossroads between Europe and Asia. Its fertile valleys and slopes yielded the oldest archaeological evidence of wine production currently on record. During my short yet delightfully buzzed visit last fall, it was apparent that they’ve only gotten better at both the making and the drinking. Georgian wine-making traditions are hard won; in the Soviet era, many indigenous grape varieties were lost to brutish demands for quantity, not quality. Some families preserved precious varieties in secret. I saw this heady spirit in the small town of Kachreti at the Burjanadze family home. At a traditional supra (banquet), my host and…

AS THE SECOND ceremony commenced and I was handed my halfdose of the plant medicine, I took a deep breath and thought, “This is going to be an amazing night.” I was transported to a cathedral-like space, and all around me were shapes and colors I can’t rightly describe. It was beautiful. I couldn’t stop looking around at these things I had never seen before. As I marveled, one shape seemed different. Somehow, I knew that I was going to be pulled into that shape. Indeed I was, and was taken to a new room with new shapes and new colors. It was scary at first, this new room. But I soon acclimated and returned to enjoying the view. Then another shape appeared—a scarier shape—and I was again pulled through.…

I CROSSED THE U.S./Mexico border six times in a month in 2018, an economic refugee in my own way. While the consumer price index indicates an overall U.S. inflation rate of around 85 percent since 2000, over that same period inflation in dental costs was more like 133 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I needed some extensive and expensive dental work, and so I crossed borders seeking my own version of a better (in my case, more affordable) life, sometimes under the piercing gaze of the federales. I occasionally drove through U.S. border inspection, many dozens of miles from the border on Interstate 8, being ordered via signs to come to a stop while an agent glanced at my car without actually engaging me in any conversation…

CHRIS ARNADE IS a photojournalist and the author of the Substack newsletter Chris Arnade Walks the World. He spent a decade walking through American landscapes and documenting what he saw. Now he has expanded his project to include cities around the globe, whether they’re large or small, and whether they’re easily walkable or not. His newsletter documents his mileslong walks off the tourist-beaten paths, showcasing real people everywhere from the Faroe Islands to Albany, New York; from Phoenix to Nairobi, Kenya. Arnade holds a Ph.D. in particle physics from Johns Hopkins University and spent years as a Wall Street bond trader. In 2011 he left finance to document the lives of lower-income Americans, a project that culminated in his 2019 book Dig nity. Along the way, he developed what he…

FAR BELOW DOWNTOWN Cincinnati, you’ll find large stone - and brick-walled caverns with dirt-strewn floors. Their great arched passageways loom over piles of century-old rubble, vast vats that once overflowed with beer, and recently added stairways to assist tourists passing through. As with so much in Cincinnati, we can chalk up these places to beer-loving German immigrants. The caverns were built for storing lager back before refrigeration was widespread. Unlike ales, lagers must be aged and stored at temperatures below 40 degrees. For the city’s burgeoning German population to make the sorts of lagers they had known back home, they had to dig deep. “The cities that made a lot of beer between 1850 and 1880, they all had lagering cellars,” says Michael Morgan, author of Over-the-Rhine: When Beer Was…

Reason magazine is published with the help of supporters who invest more than the price of a subscription by making contributions to Reason Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. We are grateful for their support of our journalism and public policy research. In this issue of Reason, we acknowledge members of our Torchbearer Society, a community of people who advanced the cause of “Free Minds and Free Markets” by making a contribution of $1,000 or more in 2024. Larry Abbott ACS Infrastructure Development John Aglialoro & Joan Carter Charles E. Albers Richard Allen Terry Allen Amazon.com, Inc. Dick Anderson K. Tucker Andersen Steven Anderson Anonymous Armar Archbold Daniel Armstrong Armstrong Fdn Arnold Ventures Autoblow George Bachich Neera Badhwar Barry & Sue Bakalor Lalita Balasubramanian Ann & Brian Balusek Bret & Melanie…

DOCUMENTARY THE ENDLESS SUMMER LIZ WOLFE When I’m trapped in New York City, and the February winds rattle the windows of my house, and the trees outside are bare, and even my wetsuit—which the 38-degree ocean feels somehow too cold for—lies fallow in the closet, I turn on The Endless Summer. I don’t need to tell you it’s from 1966; you’ll know by Bruce Brown’s narration, alternatively corny and wry. The story this documentary tells is simple: Two young surfers, unwilling to enter California’s cold winter waters, set off to find a place where it’s warm even in the winter, a place where that elusive perfect wave might be hiding (all accompanied by The Sandals’ iconic surf rock score). They try Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, Hawaii, Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, and…

THE HESS TRIANGLE is the result of an eminent domain fight that began in 1910, when New York City seized and demolished a Greenwich Village apartment building owned by the Hess family. The city had forgotten this roughly 25-inch plot on the edge of the property—until 1921, when officials demanded that the Hess estate pay back taxes on the land. The Hess family refused to give the plot to the city, and in 1922 it instead installed a sidewalk mosaic reading “Property of the Hess estate which has never been dedicated for public purposes.”…

POPULATION EST. 2025 18,346,819 POPULATION EST. 2025 34,665 TO HIDE FROM THE STATE, OR TO ESCAPE? IN HIS 1970 classic Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, Albert O. Hirschman explored three ways people can respond to institutional failure: by standing by the institution anyway, by speaking up to agitate for change within the institution, or by leaving the institution in protest. The European wars of religion, and persistent attempts by the victors in those conflicts to hem in the losers, produced manifold examples of all three. In 1834, a Calvinist minister in the Netherlands named Hendrik de Cock—fed up with theological liberalization within the official Dutch Reformed Church and especially with the church hierarchy’s decision to prohibit him from speaking against what he saw as errors being preached by his fellow clergymen—led some 120…

DAY 1 FLIGHT TO TBILISI It’s best to have a car to see Georgia at your own pace. Pick up a rental and head to your hotel. Stay in Tbilisi for three nights. DAY 2 EXPLORE TBILISI Start your adventure by getting a feel for Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi. This is a place where the old meets the new, offering a mix of historic sites and trendy bars and restaurants. The Holy Trinity Cathedral of Tbilisi is the largest Orthodox church in Georgia and boasts fantastic views of the city. Next, take the Tbilisi Funicular up to Mtatsminda Pantheon, where some of Georgia’s most prominent writers, artists, and national heroes are buried. Up there, you can enjoy Mtatsminda Park and get a view of former Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili’s stunning house.…

ON SATURDAY NIGHT, I had Indian food at a mosque potluck. The next day, I went to an African church service full of gospel music. In between, I went to a hockey game and stood on sea ice to watch a dogsled race. That’s life in Iqaluit, a Canadian boomtown on the edge of the Arctic. The semiautonomous Nunavut Territory has always been different from the rest of Canada. The majority of the people there are Inuit (singular: Inuk), a people known for their colorful animal skin fashion, soapstone carvings, and gregarious sense of humor. “I love traveling in the Arctic. You’ll always find something weird in the Arctic. Inuit are something funny,” said Inuk comedian Mary-Lee Aliyuk, wearing a sealskin skirt, during the Stand-Up North: Bush Party Baby tour.…

FOR MY 80TH birthday, my wife Lou offered to plan a trip somewhere I’d always wanted to go. I chose the Millau Viaduct—Europe’s highest and most wonderful bridge. I used a photo of the viaduct on the cover of my 2018 book, Rethinking America’s Highways, because it is a superb example of a major highway project as a business enterprise. There were no government subsidies involved in the 1,125-foot-high bridge, which spans the gorge valley of the River Tarn near Millau in southern France. It was financed and is operated and maintained based on toll revenue, exemplifying key ideas in the book. But it’s also more than that. Anti-privatizers like to portray privatized infrastructure as done on the cheap, potentially cutting corners in pursuit of a profit. I already knew…

THE CHURCH OF the Holy Sepulchre, traditionally identified as the site of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, is shared by half a dozen denominations under a baroque “status quo” agreement signed in 1757. The agreement, which could be viewed as an attempt to reduce conflict by establishing something like property rights, aimed to prevent interdenominational violence, which nevertheless occasionally breaks out between clerics with contradictory views of the prerogatives assigned to each group. Near the church’s entrance is a conspicuous symbol of that uneasy arrangement: a three-century-old wooden ladder that connects a ledge to an upper-level window. Although that section of the building is assigned to the Armenian Apostolic Church, no one is allowed to mess with the “immovable ladder,” lest all hell break loose. Old as they are, the…

THE SUGGESTION THAT Argentina could be the home of a self-described libertarian president would have seemed far-fetched, to say the least, only a few years ago. Yet today Javier Milei’s Buenos Aires is the city where libertarian history is happening. Buenos Aires wasn’t obviously destined to become a beacon of liberty. The city was abandoned not long after the Spanish founded it in 1536. Only after its resettlement in 1580 did the city slowly develop, but not until the 18th century would it flourish as a trade center. Many downtown sites from the colonial era are worth visiting. As in the United States, the war that led to Argentina’s independence started as a protest over free trade—the locals favored it but the Spanish Empire didn’t. On May 25, 1810, local…

AFTER THE INITIAL thrill of a few stamps on one’s passport, the idea of touching down in yet another nation-state may seem jejune. After you’ve seen one nation-state, how truly different can another one be? Airports and highways with instantly navigable signage, cultures and cuisines flattened to meet the supply and demand of global trade, traditions reduced to photo opportunities—just more of the same. The English essayist Samuel Johnson wrote that “the use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” More and more, it seems that “how things are” doesn’t require much travel at all to understand, and that despite the endless stream of novelties that bombard us, our imaginations are regulated by the ruthless…

4 YEARS AGO May 2021 “A common refrain during the Obama administration, echoed by both major-party presidential nominees in 2016, was that people in the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Database, which includes the no-fly list, should not be allowed to buy guns. Using the list to abridge civil liberties was a bad idea then, and it’s a bad idea now. The no-fly list is a civil liberties nightmare: secretive and nearly impossible to challenge.” C.J. CIARAMELLA “The No-Fly List Is a Civil Liberties Nightmare” 20 YEARS AGO March 2005 “It is correct that airline security should be rethought from the ground up. But ground-up rethinking should really start at the ground. The [Transportation Security Administration (TSA)] should be eliminated, not refocused…. TSA security measures have been inconsistent and mindlessly reactive. This is…

FIRE NEARLY DESTROYED the Notre-Dame Cathedral in 2019. Thanks largely to an outpouring of private donations, the cathedral now shines more brilliantly than it has for centuries. My personal history with the cathedral stretches back to my first Europe on $10 a Day backpacking and youth hosteling visit in the late 1970s. Advising me to eschew faux sophistication, my boss at The New Yorker urged me to visit popular sites like Notre-Dame because “they are tourist attractions for good reasons.” He was entirely correct. It was everything a youngish first-time traveler to Europe expected of an ancient gothic cathedral: gray, a bit dingy, yet magnificent. Owing to sheer good fortune, subsequent visits to the cathedral afforded me some very happy memories. One occurred after interviewing Friedrich Hayek in Freiburg, Germany,…

IT’S LITTLE SURPRISE that many libertarians count The Lord of the Rings among their favorite stories. J.R.R. Tolkien’s tales of bravery and camaraderie in the face of an evil lust for control have shaped many libertarian world-views. Though many adaptations have been made in the decades since Tolkien published The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, no films brought these beloved books to life as spectacularly as Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies, which owe a great deal of their visual power and emotional resonance to the natural beauty of New Zealand, where much of the trilogy was filmed. Visitors to Aotearoa—the Māori name for New Zealand—can find themselves immersed in a geography that feels magically pulled straight from Tolkien’s stories. The North Island (Te Ika-a-Māui) is home…

A THREE-STORY HOUSE tucked into a mere one-meter gap between tall buildings. A flower shop shaped like a triangle, wedged between a retaining wall and the sidewalk. A standing bar humming with laughter beneath the rumble of passing trains. In most cities, these spaces would be dead zones—awkward, overlooked, written off by zoning and building codes as unusable. But in Tokyo, they bloom with life. These microspaces are amenities. They’re capitalism in the cracks, not just in form but in function. These strange slivers often become homes for new ideas: a two-person bar, a bookstore barely wider than a fridge, a late-night shop that opens on a whim. They invite experimentation, economic as well as architectural. Tokyo’s ability to cultivate these spaces isn’t just a cultural quirk. It’s a byproduct…

“IT WAS A grueling three-hour commute to my Colorado office this morning. I left Telluride with a yellow day pack strapped to my back, and climbed north into the mountains through the golden glow of early-October aspens,” wrote Steven K. Roberts in his 1988 book, Computing Across America. Roberts made his way through the remnants of a mining camp before settling at the desk he’d cobbled out of industrial junk the day before. “My chair is an old dynamite crate; my computer a Hewlett-Packard Portable. I flipped open the display, fired up Microsoft WORD, and here I am at work—pattering into a mountainside text file,” he wrote. “No, I’m not on vacation. I am a high-tech nomad—pedaling a recumbent bicycle around the United States with a portable computer while funding…

SURE, PEOPLE ARE great, but sometimes you really want to be an individual—alone. Solitude and quiet, unfortunately, are becoming a luxury commodity. Here are six out-of-the-way places offering unique experiences to the antisocial traveler. JULES’ UNDERSEA LODGE NO ONE’S GOING to bother you at Jules Undersea Lodge in the Florida Keys, besides maybe a class of new scuba divers practicing in the lagoon outside your window. The lodge offers a hotel room that one must scuba dive down 20 feet to enter. The price includes underwater pizza delivery, too. NEW CAMALDOLI HERMITAGE WHEN MY NEIGHBORS crank up their gas-powered leaf blowers for the umpteenth time, I consider the finer points of joining the brothers of the New Camaldoli Hermitage, a Camaldolese Benedictine hermitage overlooking the cliffs of Big Sur, California.…

YOU MIGHT NOT expect there to be much for libertarians to like about a town that boasts a master plan, where design conformity is rigorously enforced across virtually every building and street, and whose admirers wax poetic about a building code that covers “everything from building materials to roof pitch.” But Seaside, Florida, often defies expectations. It’s a town built on political contradictions: Its surfaces are planned and regulated down to the last nail, but it boasts of individual freedom in its building designs. It was founded on neo-hippie environmental and communitarian ideals, but it was privately built on explicitly capitalist notions of urban development. It’s designed to feel like both a tiny town and a big city, with the comfortable intimacy of small village life and the walkable amenities…

The California Assembly Transportation Committee voted to advance Assembly Bill 435, which would require all children under age 10 and shorter kids under 13 to sit on a booster seat. Teens up to 16 years old would also be banned from the front seat altogether unless they meet the height requirements. Currently, children at least 8 years old or 4 feet, 9 inches tall do not have to use a booster. A Canadian man was sentenced to life in prison in Dubai for possession of cannabis and CBD products. Kevin O’Rourke was traveling to South Africa through Dubai International Airport when he was stopped and searched. Authorities found 118 grams of cannabis and CBD, which O’Rourke’s wife says he uses to treat the chronic pain from Addison’s disease, a rare…