Science
Reason magazine
Cracks in the Map
THE IDEA OF carving out territorial exceptions to, or escape zones from, the hand of the nation-state has long captured the imagination of free market enthusiasts. In the 1990s, I was involved in several organizations devoted to the idea, and I witnessed the movement's gradual shift from a pipe dream of libertarian theorists to something attracting serious interest, and investment capital, from entrepreneurs, as libertarian-oriented free ports, special economic zones, charter cities, and even floating maritime cities (seasteads), began to look more politically possible. In 1993, my “free nation” group was meeting in a local North Carolina hotel; by 2011, I was sipping cocktails at a rather swankier “free cities” conference on the resort island of Roatán, Honduras—which, not coincidentally, today boasts its own charter city, Próspera.
5 min |
October 2025
Reason magazine
DOGE BEFORE DOGE
BEFORE TRUMP HAD ELON MUSK, NIXON HAD HOWARD PHILLIPS.
10+ min |
October 2025
Reason magazine
Poland Climbs, Hungary Slips
LOOKING BACK ON his career as one of Poland's most prominent economists and political leaders, Leszek Balcerowicz offered a succinct lesson for policymakers everywhere.
3 min |
October 2025
Reason magazine
PUTIN AND THE D-WORD
IN DONALD TRUMP'S VIEW, VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY IS A \"DICTATOR,\" BUT VLADIMIR PUTIN ISN'T.
10+ min |
October 2025
Reason magazine
EDUCATING THE WORLD'S BEST AND BRIGHTEST— THEN SHOWING THEM THE DOOR
AMERICA'S STATUS AS A TOP DESTINATION FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS IS AT RISK.
10+ min |
October 2025
Reason magazine
WHY EUROPEANS HAVE LESS
EUROPE IS POOR BECAUSE IT CHOOSES TO BE.
10+ min |
October 2025
Reason magazine
Let Prisoners Work for Themselves
For nearly two decades, some Puerto Rican prisons allowed a very different sort of prison labor.
3 min |
October 2025
Reason magazine
What's Special About the Fed?
IN HIS SECOND term, President Donald Trump has tried to fire numerous federal officials, with varying degrees of success. Courts have occasionally intervened, raising questions about the extent of the president's power to terminate employees without cause and which agencies he can and cannot touch. But Supreme Court justices seem unanimous in their belief that the Federal Reserve is its own creature.
2 min |
October 2025
Reason magazine
Strangling AI, One State at a Time
JUST HOURS BEFORE its passage, the Senate version of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) cut a proposed moratorium on states enforcing their own AI regulations. Though some regard this as a win for federalism, others argue that the current patchwork represents an abdication of the federal government's jurisdiction over interstate commerce, permits excessive compliance costs to be imposed on the American AI industry, and may ultimately sacrifice the U.S. lead in the field to geopolitical adversaries.
1 min |
October 2025
Reason magazine
A Spy's Eye View
NOT ALL OF James Bond's gadgets were fictional. In the 1969 movie On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Bond uses a strange-looking metal square to photograph supervillain Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s secret plans. The same metal square appears in the 2013 season of the Cold War-themed show The Americans, when an FBI asset is sent to copy documents in the Soviet Embassy.
3 min |
October 2025
Reason magazine
Chatbots Win the Debate
IN A MAY 2025 study in Nature Human Behavior, researchers set up online debates between two humans, and between a human and the large language model GPT-4. In some debates, they provided both humans and AI with basic personal information about their opponents—age, sex, ethnicity, employment, political affiliation. They wanted to find out if such personalized information helped debaters both human and machine to craft more persuasive arguments.
3 min |
October 2025
Reason magazine
Richard Dawkins on the New Enemies of Scientific Thinking
THE LEGENDARY ATHEIST AND EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGIST ARGUES THAT TRUTH SHOULDN'T BEND TO FAITH OR FASHIONABLE POLITICS.
10+ min |
October 2025
Reason magazine
Taxing the Poor, Globally
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) into law on July 4. One measure buried deep in the 870-page law imposes a 1 percent tax on remittances—the money that people send to friends and relatives in their home countries. The 1 percent tax applies to all remittance senders in the United States, though not to transfers sent from bank accounts and U.S.-issued debit or credit cards.
1 min |
October 2025
Reason magazine
The Depopulation Bomb
NATALIST PANIC IS rife nowadays. The White House is weighing initiatives to boost the number of births, ranging from a $5,000-per-baby bonus to awarding “National Medals of Motherhood” to mothers with six or more children. In March, the NatalCon gathering in Austin, Texas, declared that we're “living through the greatest population bust in human history.” In April, the tech billionaire (and father of 14 children) Elon Musk posted on X: “Low birth rates will end civilization.”
4 min |
October 2025
Reason magazine
Cairo: The Unfinished City
DRIVE ABOUT 40 minutes from the Giza Pyramids to the ancient step pyramid of Saqqara and you'll pass rows of half-built apartment blocks, skeletal overpasses, and roads that seem permanently under construction. Leave central Cairo and you'll see more of the same: neighborhoods where concrete beams poke out of rooftops, brick walls are left raw and unpainted, and windows are missing entirely from apartments.
2 min |
October 2025
Reason magazine
Making Food Out of Thin Air
THANKS TO INNOVATIONS in food science and agriculture, the world is producing more food than ever before. While this has significantly reduced global hunger since the 1970s, it has impacted the environment; in 2023, food production generated about 26 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to Our World in Data.
1 min |
October 2025
Reason magazine
DOJ Aims To Restore Gun Rights
MELYNDA VINCENT, A Utah social worker specializing in drug harm reduction, was convicted of bank fraud in 2008 because she paid for groceries with a bad check. Seventeen years later, Vincent is still not allowed to own a gun or even temporarily possess one.
3 min |
October 2025
Reason magazine
Our Lab-Grown Future
THINGS DIDN'T GO well the first time Rebecca Torbruegge took a turn at the go-kart track. She ended up with a burn on her leg that refused to heal and eventually—skip the next bit if you're squeamish—\"started bubbling.\" Doctors in Sydney quickly determined she'd need a graft. But instead of following the usual procedure of scraping a patch from the 22-year-old's backside, slapping it over the wound, and hoping for the best, researchers wondered if she'd like to try something new: custom-printed skin, laid down layer by layer by a machine, built from her own cells.
3 min |
October 2025
Reason magazine
Tiny Nations in the Crack of the Map
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.
5 min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
HOW TO WALK, AROUND THE WORLD
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.
10 min |
August - September 2025
Reason magazine
A Beatnik Tourist in Ayahuasca Country
LONG BEFORE IT was popular for New Age norteamericanos to visit the Andes Mountains seeking psychedelic enlightenment from ayahuasca, the Beat novelist William Burroughs made the trek. But he took the journey in 1953, when the literary template for a psychonautic vision quest had not yet been set—not that a grumpy cynic like Burroughs was likely to write that way in the first place. Instead his account feels like the diary of an easily aggravated American tourist with firm views on the quality of the local hotels, officials, “god awful greasy food,” and prostitutes.
3 min |
August - September 2025
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 |