In June, I traveled to Denver with Zach Weismueller to cover the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference, organized by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies ( MAPS ), a group that has been working to gain Food and Drug Administration approval of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD since the late 1980s. We produced a 30-minute documentary about today's " psychedelic renaissance ." The most surprising speaker at the conference was Rick Perry , the former Texas governor and Trump adminis...
Aug 29, 2023•19 min
" Welcome to the psychedelic '20s!" Rick Doblin, founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, proclaimed in his keynote speech to open the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference. At the event organized by MAPS in Denver this June, a reported 13,000 people gathered to talk about what seemed like every possible topic related to the productive use of these substances. Founded in the late 1980s, MAPS has spent decades working to get approval from the Food and Drug Admi...
Aug 23, 2023•29 min
Everywhere around us, there are signs of a psychedelic renaissance: in medicine, therapy, commerce, and the arts. These drugs are getting serious, positive coverage in glossy magazines , best-selling books , literary memoirs , documentaries , and hit podcasts . Performers like Reggie Watts , Melissa Etheridge , and members of the Flaming Lips openly acknowledge the role of hallucinogens in their work. And a flourishing psychedelic comedy scene is springing out all over the place. But federal pro...
Aug 16, 2023•33 min
The global movement against free trade and capitalism that burst into public consciousness at the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization coalesced around the idea that Western elites had ensnared Third World nations in a debt trap to coerce them into adopting neoliberal policies. When poor nations couldn't afford to repay what they owed the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), these Washington-based organizations agreed to restructure the loans of debtor countries, i...
Aug 09, 2023•48 min
Before Matt Taibbi was sparring with Democratic members of Congress on Capitol Hill earlier this year over the Twitter Files, he was a darling of the progressive left, appearing regularly on shows like Democracy Now! and others hosted by Bill Moyers and Rachel Maddow. Though he was always a fierce critic of the Democratic establishment, the rise of Donald Trump suddenly meant that anyone nominally left of center—including progressive journalists like Taibbi—was expected to support Hillary Clinto...
Jul 26, 2023•58 min
Mike Rowe is a bestselling author , Emmy winner, and podcaster best known for his stint hosting The Discovery Channel's long-running Dirty Jobs , where he performed the sort of work we all rely on but don't want to think about too much. From cleaning septic tanks to putting hot tar on roofs to disposing of medical waste, he's done it all—and loves to talk about the value of the hard, honest work that he thinks is devalued by a society fixated on sending everyone to college. I caught up with Rowe...
Jul 19, 2023
"Próspera is the first time in human history that a group of people has said there's a way to deliver governing services, privatized for profit in a completely free market way," says Joel Bomgar, a Mississippi state representative and president of Próspera Inc., the company that's building a privately run charter city on the Honduran island of Roatán called Próspera Village. In Honduras, about half of the population lives in extreme poverty, and gross domestic product per capita is 25 times high...
Jul 06, 2023•27 min
In October 2017, a SWAT team showed up at Jameson Lopp's house in North Carolina, allegedly because of a fake complaint called in by someone angered by a tweet. So Lopp posted a video of himself firing an AR-15 and then embarked on a journey to disappear in the physical world—unreachable by his enemies and far from the prying eyes of the surveillance state. Lopp had been obsessed with privacy long before the swatting. He's a throwback to the long-bearded mathematicians and cypherpunks of the 199...
Jun 28, 2023•34 min
Lowriding has been a part of Southern California and Chicano culture since the post–World War II era when hobbyists started using spare hydraulics from surplus aircraft parts to customize cars to ride "low and slow." "Owning a car is the American dream," says Denise Sandoval, a professor of Chicano studies at California State University, Northridge. "Lowriding is a great example, just like hip-hop, of people using culture to tell their stories, to mark space in the United States, to say, 'This i...
Jun 27, 2023•10 min
Caitlin Long wants to start a new kind of bank…based on a very old model. "A 100 percent reserve bank that would keep all of our cash at the Fed," she says. She was influenced by the work of Austrian economist Murray Rothbard, who saw fractional reserve banking as "a shell game, [and] a Ponzi scheme ," arguing that banks should work exactly like safety-deposit boxes, or "money warehouses," required to keep all of their customers' money on hand at all time. Long has a law degree from Harvard and ...
Jun 21, 2023•54 min
Fifteen years after Satoshi Nakamoto dropped a nine-page white paper on an obscure email list sketching out an idea for a new peer-to-peer digital currency, bitcoin has become a global phenomenon. And nowhere is its pomp and promise more on display than at the blockbuster annual conferences put on by Bitcoin M agazine in Miami Beach. But it's also had a disappointing couple of years. Bitcoin was supposed to be an inflation hedge. But after the Fed fired up its money printer during the pandemic a...
Jun 20, 2023•22 min
Is the world getting better? Or is it on the verge of collapse? Stefan Sagmeister emphatically believes that things are looking up, and his art exhibition " Now Is Better " showcases a bold new way to convince the world that he's right. He takes actual paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries, disassembles them, and creates new works by juxtaposing them with data visualizations of just how much things have improved since the good old days. Some works chart the incredible decline in deaths on t...
May 18, 2023•20 min
As a gangly kid who had just arrived in the U.S. from Cameroon, West Africa, 16-year-old Joel Embiid had a lot of the gifts he'd eventually put to use in the NBA: the height, the athleticism, the massive 7-foot-6-inch wingspan. But the one thing he couldn't do was actually shoot a basketball. Embiid didn't get into the game at all until he was 15. Today, he has become not just the lynchpin of a championship-chasing team in Philadelphia, but he's also arguably the best basketball player on the pl...
May 15, 2023•3 min
If you want to get a politician to change the subject, ask them how they're going to deal with the federal debt, which is growing to be bigger than the U.S. gross domestic product and has us on a path to fiscal disaster. Economists across the political spectrum agree that large, persistent, and growing annual deficits and the national debt depress long-term economic growth, the one known way to increase living standards. When Reason asked GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy what he would ...
May 05, 2023•4 min
Who's that sliding into your Twitter DMs? Is it the federal government? Well, according to Elon Musk , who took over the social media platform last year, government bureaucrats were routinely taking a close look at users' content. Thanks to the Twitter Files, a collaboration between Elon Musk and independent journalists, as well as the Facebook Files , my own investigative project for Reason , we now know that social media companies constantly faced pressure to censor speech—and that pressure wa...
Apr 19, 2023•2 min
Homelessness has been rising in America's West Coast cities for more than a decade. Entire blocks of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland are occupied by tent encampments plagued by violence, drug overdoses, and disease. But the problem is concentrated in a handful of cities; nationwide the homeless population has been shrinking for a decade . To figure out why some places are so much more successful than others, we took a trip to Texas where the homeless population declined almost 30 percen...
Apr 18, 2023•26 min
In February 2022, the World Journal of Oncology published an article by a team of 13 researchers claiming that vapers are about as likely to get cancer as people who smoke traditional cigarettes. Citing this article, Stanton Glantz, a tobacco-control activist and retired professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, claimed that not only are there "some carcinogens in e-cigarette aerosol," but "now there is also direct evidence that people who use e-cigarettes are at incr...
Apr 11, 2023•12 min
Just days after the school shooting in Nashville that left three students and three adults dead, Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D–N.Y.) and Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) got into a fiery exchange captured on video by Emily Brooks, a reporter for The Hill . "There has never been a school shooting in a school that allows teachers to carry," said Massie. "More guns lead to more deaths," countered Bowman, "more guns lead to more deaths!" It's understandable that tempers flare and voices rise in the aftermath of s...
Apr 05, 2023•4 min
