“DID YOU HEAR the one about the world’s greatest watch thief? He stole all the time.” But even that guy might be impressed by the sticky fingers of the National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse (NRFC), a tiny corner of the Department of Health an

TIKTOK IS IN trouble: In April, President Joe Biden signed bipartisan legislation that forces ByteDance, the popular social media app’s Chinese parent company, to sell its majority stake to a U.S.-based firm. If it fails to do this, the app will be b

BRYAN CAPLAN IS known for his unconventional approach to tackling big issues. With his latest book, Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation, he employs a graphic novel format to make the case for a more open approach to housi

THE U.S. DEPARTMENT of Education has jeopardized access to financial aid for millions of college students and their families—all because it failed to create a functional online form. In what is possibly the largest web-based government fumble since t

BRETT BROWNLEE’S ENTREPRENEURIAL streak started simply: as a kid, for kid reasons, with his brother. “Growing up, he and I just used to push mowers around our parents’ subdivision to try to save up money to buy basketball shoes,” he says. The venture

NATALIE DOWZICKY In the first episode of Netflix’s latest hit documentary series, Unlocked: A Jail Experiment, an inmate with newfound autonomy says, “There’s no way we can let criminals govern themselves.” But for six weeks, 46 inmates at Arkansas’

IS THE AMERICAN family doomed? Fewer than half of U.S. adults are married. The nation’s fertility rate has fallen below replacement level. The percentage of children living with married parents has fallen drastically. There’s no denying the trend lin

WHEN GOV. RON DeSantis needed a place to host a signing ceremony for a bill banning homeless people from sleeping in public, the Florida Republican chose Miami Beach. It wasn’t picked just for its iconic beach and breakers. Last September, Miami Beac

IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE to avoid the “strange bedfellows” cliché when reading about the criminal justice reform movement in the 2010s. Conservatives and evangelicals worked alongside bleeding-heart liberals and civil libertarians to fix what they all (at t

THOUGH STILL ON the books, Arizona’s near-total ban on abortion was buried deep in the state’s history—until recently. An April decision from the state’s Supreme Court breathed new life into this long-dormant law. The ban in question—first passed by

REPUBLICAN CHINA HAWKS have a problem. They’re eager to sell us on the notion that China is, as old GOP hand Newt Gingrich puts it, “the greatest threat to a free America that we have faced in our lifetime.” Gingrich pins China’s ascendancy on its “t

ON MARCH 14, 2024, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.), a man who 13 months prior had vowed at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center that “as long as Hashem breathes air into my lungs, the United States Senate will stand

In India, Ishwar Deen spent more than two months and 250,000 rupees ($2,995) modifying his car to look like a helicopter, welding a propeller to the top and a boom to the back. The first day he took the car on the road, police seized it for illegal m

A GRAY-HAIRED DARTMOUTH professor was tackled, zip-tied, and detained on May 1 along with about 90 other protesters. “I’ve been teaching here for 34 years,” Annelise Orleck told The New York Times after video of the arrest went viral. “There have bee

“IT WAS A very safe city.” So said Mike Waters, owner of a pub in D.C.’s long-gentrified Dupont Circle area, in a neighborhood Zoom meeting this past January, neatly encapsulating a seemingly sudden deterioration in public safety. Violent crimes rose

AS OF EARLY May, more than three years after New York legalized recreational marijuana, just 119 licensed dispensaries were serving that market in the entire state. Unauthorized pot shops outnumbered legal outlets by 20 to 1, according to The New Yor

MANY SOUTH FLORIDA residents remember with grief a day in the early ’00s when the government came for their citrus trees. “They didn’t ask politely, ‘Can we please come in and take your trees?’ No, they said, we’re taking the trees,” one Orange Count

DONALD TRUMP WAS not the first celebrity presidential candidate who could reasonably be accused of insurrection against the United States. Many decades before Trump, another best-selling author and charismatic leader in a rowdy movement to upend domi

OVER THE LAST two decades, Alexander Hamilton has become a folk hero. In 2004, Ron Chernow’s massive Hamilton biography was a bestseller. A decade later, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s spectacularly successful Hamilton: An American Musical further heightened t

IN MARCH, REASON’S Nick Gillespie talked with one of the great pioneers of podcasting: Dan Carlin, the host of Hardcore History. Carlin’s deeply researched and urgently delivered takes on everything from Julius Caesar’s wars in Gaul to Imperial Japan

July 2019 “Calling someone a cop invokes the worst sorts of police overreach, a legalistic authoritarianism that exists for its own sake. During her 28-year tenure as a county prosecutor, district attorney (D.A.), and state attorney general (A.G.), [

THE TERM WICKED PROBLEM has become a standard way for policy analysts to describe a social issue whose solution is inherently elusive. Wicked problems have many causal factors, complex interdependencies, and no ability to test all of the possible com

A trip to the hospital is rarely fun. The AI-powered app Vital aims to make the experience a little less painful. Used by more than 100 hospitals, the program predicts wait times and explains medical results to patients without technical jargon that

THE TURING TEST—OBSESSED geniuses who are now creating AI seem to take three clichéd outcomes for granted: 1. That these new cyberentities will continue to be controlled, as now, by two dozen corporate or national behemoths (Google, OpenAI, Microsoft