Science
Reason magazine
In Defense of 'Tourist Traps'
IF YOU EVER go to New Orleans, one of your first stops should be the very unhidden gem of Café Du Monde’s French Market location. There you can buy some New Orleans special beignets and, if the weather is hot enough (it almost certainly will be) a frozen coffee to wash them down.
6 min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
Wildlife Thrives on Privately Owned Reserves
SITTING IN THE front seat of an open Land Rover being driven furiously backward for about a half-mile while being chased by a bugling, ear-flapping, and very pissed off elephant matriarch is, well, pretty exciting. Our guide later speculated that she had been spooked earlier by a roving pride of lions.
3 min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
Visit Your Ancestral Homeland
LAST YEAR I honeymooned in Rome, which was a long day trip from the tiny 2,500-year-old village in the Campania region of Italy that my maternal grandparents left in the 1910s. Of course I had to go—it was surely my only chance to see where that side of my family had come from.
3 min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
The Possible Birthplace of Wine and Definite Birthplace of Stalin
THE PEOPLE OF Georgia might well be the first folks who ever got properly wine-drunk.
3 min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
CONFLICTS AND CONTRASTS MAKE JERUSALEM ENDLESSLY FASCINATING
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.
6 min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
THE NEARLY FREE MARKETS OF GUATEMALA
EVERYONE KNOWS ABOUT the McDonald's Happy Meal—a global icon, with its bright box, its golden arches, and a toy that keeps kids entertained long after the fries are gone. What most don't know is this worldwide sensation was born in Guatemala, a small Central American country more often associated with coffee, bananas, and (unfortunately) crime.
4 min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
IN SEASIDE, LIVING IS A WAY OF LIFE
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.”
5 min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
A CITY BUILT BY IMMIGRANTS—AND BEER
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.
6 min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
PASTÉIS AND PARENTING IN PORTUGAL
MY BABY WAS stolen in a Portuguese airport.
4 min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
6 PLACES TO REALLY GET AWAY FROM IT ALL
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.
3 min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
12:00 THE RISE-AND DEMISE?-OF FREQUENT FLYER MILES
I JOINED MY first frequent flyer program—American AAdvantage—before a trip to Australia in 1991. Sadly, I let those miles expire. Five years later I was out of college, flying regularly for work, and reading all the materials airlines used to send in the mail.
9 min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
TRACKING A UNICORN IN ADAM SMITH'S EDINBURGH
SET AMONG CRAGS, hills, and Gothic spires, Edinburgh—also known as “Auld Reekie” or “Old Smokey”—was an unlikely center of progress in the 18th century: congested and smelly, with a sordid underground at the edge of an empire. Yet it was there that Adam Smith first published his Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759.
6 min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
TRUMP'S CRACKDOWN ON FOREIGNERS IS CRIMPING AMERICANS' TRAVEL PLANS
AS THE TRUMP administration began snatching college students, detaining legal European tourists, denying entry to British crust-punks, rejecting transgender passports, deporting tattooed Salvadorans, insulting the sovereignty of Canadians, and floating plans to ban visitors from 43 countries, the domestic travel and tourism industry braced itself for bad news.
5 min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
CAPITALISM IN THE CRACKS
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.
8 min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
The Rise of the Digital Nomad
\"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.
10 min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
The Final Vacation Frontier
LOOKING TO GET really away from it all? How about 250 miles straight up and traveling at 17,500 mph away from it all? This year, why not take a vacation in low earth orbit—specifically, on the International Space Station (ISS)?
2 min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
See Milei's Transformation of Argentina First-Hand
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.
3 min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
A Beautiful Private Bridge
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.
1 min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
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.
4 min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
11-Day Middle-earth Fantasy in New Zealand
IT’S LITTLE SURPRISE that many libertarians count The Lord of the Rings among their favorite stories.
3 min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
Tropical Culture in Canada's Multicultural Arctic Outpost
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.
8 min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
NOTRE-DAME REBORN FROM THE ASHES
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.
3 min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
Losing My Religion, Finding My Humanity at an Ayahuasca Retreat
AS THE SECOND ceremony commenced and I was handed my half-dose of the plant medicine, I took a deep breath and thought, “This is going to be an amazing night.”
10+ min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
The Glories of Mexican Dentistry
I CROSSED THE U.S./Mexico border six times in a month in 2018, an economic refugee in my own way.
4 min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
McCarthyism, Past—and Present?
CLAY 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.
5 min |
July 2025
Reason magazine
The Best Democracy Is Anarchy
Or: Why are cops so scared of puppets?
4 min |
July 2025
Reason magazine
Ross Douthat
IN HIS APRIL essay “An Age of Extinction Is Coming. Here’s How to Survive,” New York Times columnist Ross Douthat argues that falling birth rates and fraying cultural institutions signal a civilizational bottleneck— and that mastering our digital tools may be the only way through it. Douthat joined Reason’s Just Asking Questions podcast in April to discuss demographic collapse, technological alienation, and whether the American suburbs might be more resilient than they seem.
2 min |
July 2025
Reason magazine
The Coming Housing Crisis
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP owes his second electoral victory, in no small part, to voter frustration over the rising cost of living.
6 min |
July 2025
Reason magazine
The Fusionist Politics of Ronald Reagan
WHAT THE 40TH PRESIDENT TEACHES US ABOUT LIBERTY, VIRTUE, AND THEIR LIMITS
10+ min |
July 2025
Reason magazine
This Is Your Brain Before Drugs
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?
2 min |