In President Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous 1961 speech about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, he also cautioned Americans about the growing power of a "scientific, technological elite." "The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by federal employment project allocations and the power of money is ever present," warned Eisenhower. The federal government had become a major financier of scientific research after World War II, and Eisenhower was worried that the spirit of ope...
May 19, 2025•13 min
"Wise words," wrote Elon Musk about this 1999 viral clip described as "Milton Friedman casually giving the blueprint for DOGE [the Department of Government Efficiency]" as he ticks off a list of federal government agencies he'd be comfortable eliminating. Musk is right. Friedman, a Nobel Prize–winning libertarian economist, did offer a solid blueprint for creating a smaller, less intrusive government. At the peak of his fame, he seemed poised to influence an American president to finally slash t...
Apr 08, 2025•16 min
"Deny," "defend," "depose"—these three words were allegedly written on bullets found at the murder scene of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The slogan began appearing in graffiti, highway banners, and T-shirts. When the identity of the likely killer was revealed to be a man named Luigi Mangione, he developed a passionate fanbase. "So many men and women are going nuts over how good-looking this killer is," said Jimmy Kimmel in a breezy monologue joking about his writing staff's adulation of...
Feb 24, 2025•7 min
Ross Ulbricht was arrested at 29. Now, he's 40. He faces a double life sentence plus 40 years with no possibility of parole for creating the Silk Road, a dark web drug marketplace that facilitated $1.2 billion in bitcoin-denominated transactions. "I'll spend the next few decades in this cage. Then, sometime later this century, I'll grow old and die. I'll finally leave prison, but I'll be in a body bag," he told an interviewer at a 2021 virtual blockchain conference. But a second chance might be ...
Jan 17, 2025•16 min
Is a nuclear renaissance about to begin on the very site of the public relations catastrophe that practically destroyed the industry 45 years ago? Constellation Energy recently announced a deal with Microsoft to restore a retired reactor on Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island. Microsoft has agreed to purchase energy from the plant for 20 years to power its AI data centers. A U.S. nuclear reactor has never before been brought out of retirement. Nuclear power was once considered the clean energy sour...
Sep 26, 2024•8 min
Average toddler day care costs in Washington, D.C., exceed $24,000 a year, outstripping expenses in cities like New York and San Francisco. Despite the steep prices, parents such as Megan McCune and Tom Shonosky, who live in a suburban D.C. neighborhood with their children John and Lizzy, believe day care is still worth it. "They're doing these amazing activities with kids. John's last teacher was planning just all these really stimulating, exciting experiences," McCune says. "That's just not so...
May 14, 2024•11 min
After surviving a disastrous congressional hearing, Claudine Gay was forced to resign as the president of Harvard for repeatedly copying and pasting language used by other scholars and passing it off as her own. She's hardly alone among elite academics, and plagiarism has become a roiling scandal in academia. There's another common practice among professional researchers that should be generating even more outrage: making up data. I'm not talking about explicit fraud, which also happens way too ...
May 07, 2024•9 min
In his 1996 book, The Vision of the Anointed , economist Thomas Sowell sketched out a pattern that many of the "crusading movements" of the 20th century have followed. First, they identify a "great danger" to society, followed by an "urgent need" for government action "to avert impending catastrophe." A new book by psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation , argues that the government must regulate social media because it's causing a teen mental health crisis. Haidt is, in m...
Apr 02, 2024•8 min
Once upon a time, America embraced nuclear power as the future of energy. Today it accounts for a mere 18 percent of the nation's electricity generation, while fossil fuels remain dominant at 60 percent. Why did nuclear fail to take off? From 1967 to 1972, the nuclear sector experienced significant growth, and 48 new nuclear plants were built . But in March 1979, a meltdown at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, which resulted in no casualties and no lingering environmental dam...
Mar 05, 2024•26 min
As Ronald Reagan's first budget director, former Michigan congressman David Stockman led the charge to cut the size, scope, and spending of the federal government in the early 1980s. He made enemies among Democrats by pushing hard for cuts to welfare programs—and he ultimately made enemies among his fellow Republicans by pushing equally hard to slash defense spending. His memoir of the era, The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed , is a legendary account of how libertarian prin...
Jan 31, 2024•1 hr 21 min
After enacting sweeping reforms in Argentina, President Javier Milei faced a major protest. Tens of thousands of people marched through the streets, hundreds of flights were grounded, and schools and businesses closed in protests to Milei's attempt to fix the troubled South American country. Milei is the first self-described libertarian head of state in history. To avert economic disaster in a country facing huge deficits and a 160 percent inflation rate that has since spiked to over 211 percent...
Jan 30, 2024•6 min
If we all went a little nuts during the COVID-19 lockdowns, it's absolutely true that some of us—including many of our country's leaders and people in the media—went absolutely batshit crazy, often with disastrous results. Exactly why that happened is the subject of author Jon Ronson 's latest season of Things Fell Apart , a podcast that explores the deep origins of today's culture wars in controversies, panics, and delusions from decades ago. Reason 's Nick Gillespie talked with Ronson about wh...
Jan 24, 2024•1 hr 5 min
"If the problem with campus speech codes is the selectivity with which universities penalize various forms of bigotry," wrote James Kirchick recently in The New York Times , "the solution is not to expand the university's power to punish expression. It's to abolish speech codes entirely." Kirchick was writing about widespread outrage at the nuanced and hypocritical defense of speech offered by the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania at a congressional hearing about ant...
Jan 17, 2024•57 min
Did you know that by 2050, fully a quarter of the planet's population will reside in Africa? Yet despite abundant natural resources and a young and ambitious population, the continent remains the poorest of them all . Born in Senegal and now residing in Austin, Texas, Magatte Wade is director of the Center for African Prosperity at the Atlas Network , a nonprofit that supports think tanks and activist groups in the developing world. A serial entrepreneur, she's currently the CEO (and founder) of...
Jan 10, 2024•1 hr 38 min
During his two terms as governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey managed to pass a flat income tax with a rate of 2.5 percent, reform public sector pensions, universalize important school choice measures , reform occupational licensing rules, turn a budget deficit into a surplus, and substantially shrink the size of the government workforce. He also built a makeshift border wall out of shipping crates, pushed back on marijuana legalization, and was accused of doing both too much and too little by his con...
Jan 03, 2024•43 min
William D. Eggers is co-author, with Donald F. Kettl, of Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries to Solve Big Problems . He's now the executive director of Deloitte's Center for Government Insights , but 30 years ago, he ran the privatization center for Reason Foundation , the nonprofit that publishes Reason . Eggers has since worked with dozens of governments at all levels, both in the United States and internationally, and he's written a shelf's worth of books on the proper sco...
Dec 27, 2023•1 hr
"Was Milton Friedman the most important libertarian of them all?" Reason' s Nick Gillespie asked Stanford historian Jennifer Burns during a live taping of The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie podcast in New York City. Burns is the author of the masterful and definitive new biography of the Nobel Prize–winning economist, titled Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative . Friedman was arguably not just the most influential free market economist of the 20th century but the central figure in buildi...
Dec 20, 2023•1 hr 24 min
Quitting is massively underrated, says Annie Duke, an author, doctor of psychology, and former professional poker player who holds a bracelet from the 2004 World Series of Poker. Her latest book is Quit: The Power of Knowing When To Walk Away . Using examples ranging from Muhammad Ali's refusal to retire from boxing earlier in his career to the over-budget, much-delayed California high-speed rail project to catastrophic American wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, she makes the case that bli...
Dec 13, 2023•56 min
After their invention in the late 1800s, sneakers became a pop-culture staple by the 1970s and '80s with models like the Adidas Superstar , Puma Clyde , and Nike Air Force 1 . But it wasn't until the release of the Air Jordan in 1985 that sneaker fandom became an international obsession and evolved into a disruptive shoe market. Resellers all over the world feed sneakerheads' voracious appetite for shoes. Some act like speculative investors, stocking up on inventory as a bet that prices will ris...
Dec 12, 2023•11 min
After a dozen years of legal tussles , seven years in the crosshairs of ambitious prosecutors , and five-and-a-half years fighting a federal case that saw his business forcibly shuttered, his assets seized, and his longtime partner dead by suicide , alt-weekly newspaper impresario Michael Lacey was found guilty Thursday on just one of the 86 criminal charges levied against him in connection with the online advertising platform Backpage. But the government's fanatical pursuit of Lacey and his fou...
Nov 18, 2023•5 min
"I'm under no illusion that humanity will completely eradicate the racial tribal instinct or racism or bigotry itself. But I feel that colorblindness is the North Star that we should use when making decisions," argues Coleman Hughes during a live taping of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie podcast in New York City. Hughes is a writer, podcaster, and opinion columnist who specializes in issues related to race, public policy, and applied ethics. His new book , The End of Race Politics: Argu...
Nov 15, 2023•46 min
Behind the scenes of a traditional bathhouse in Brooklyn, something extraordinary is taking place: The pools, heated to 104 degrees, are not warmed by conventional means but by computers mining for bitcoin. A profit-seeking drive for energy efficiency has caused bitcoin miners to pop up in unexpected places, such as Jason Goodman's New York bathhouse, where the cost of heating his pools is about the same as it was before he plugged in the bitcoin miners, but now with the bonus of earning bitcoin...
Nov 14, 2023•16 min
Swedish historian Johan Norberg is author of The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World , which caught the eye of Elon Musk, who tweeted , "This book is an excellent explanation of why capitalism is not just successful, but morally right." Norberg wrote the book to combat a growing belief on the right and the left that libertarian values of individual autonomy, property rights, limited government, and free enterprise are failing to raise living standards and need to...
Nov 01, 2023•1 hr
"We've taught young people that any of their missteps or any of their heterodox opinions are grounds to tear them down. That's no way to grow up." That was journalist Rikki Schlott speaking before a sold-out crowd on Monday night at a live taping of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie podcast in New York City. Schlott, 23, teamed up with Greg Lukianoff to co-write The Canceling of the American Mind . Lukianoff, 49, is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIR...
Oct 25, 2023•1 hr 15 min
About twenty-three years ago, public health officials began to notice increases in what would later be called "deaths of despair," referring to suicides, deaths from alcoholism, and drug overdoses. Public health officials and legislators responded by seeking to limit opioid prescriptions for non-cancer chronic pain. Their tactics included violent raids and criminal charges against doctors deemed to overprescribe pain relief. Opioid prescriptions for non-cancer chronic pain fell dramatically. The...
Oct 11, 2023•9 min
Every year, over 25 million tourists flock to the iconic National Mall in Washington, D.C. Yet as they explore some of the nation's greatest museums and monuments, visitors often find themselves faced with limited dining options, which boil down to either pricey cafes at the Smithsonian museums or food trucks parked along the Mall. The food trucks have, unsurprisingly, become a favorite among tourists. "The diversity is incredible. The food is so well cooked. You could see they really poured the...
Oct 04, 2023•5 min
In 2001, Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg burst onto the international scene with his bestselling and controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist . The onetime member of Greenpeace said that climate change is real and that human activity is clearly contributing to it, but he said the best science didn't support the apocalyptic visions put forth by people like Earth in the Balance author and former Vice President Al Gore. Lomborg went on to create the Copenhagen Consensus , a think ...
Sep 27, 2023•54 min
In 19th century America, trains symbolized modernity. Passenger rail connected the east and west coasts and helped settle the frontier. By 1916, rail accounted for 98 percent of intercity travel. As it became easier to drive or fly, passenger rail use plummeted. In 1971, the government created Amtrak, which survives on federal subsidies. And most recently the Biden administration gave Amtrak $66 billion in federal subsidies as part of the federal infrastructure bill. But in Florida, Brightline i...
Sep 20, 2023
Erika Dyck is a professor at the University of Saskatchewan who studies the history of psychedelics with a special interest in the legacy of Humphry Osmond , the British-born psychiatrist who coined the term pyschedelic, gave Aldous Huxley his first dose of mescaline, and conducted pathbreaking work using LSD to help alcoholics stop drinking. Among Osmond's best-known patients was Bill W., the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Reason sat down with Dyck at the MAPS Psychedelic Science 2023 conf...
Sep 13, 2023•33 min
"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. Reason caught up with him at the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference, held in Denver this June, where he participated in a "roast" of the psychedelic scene. The conference was sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or M...
Sep 06, 2023•31 min
