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IF THE SOVIET Union was notoriously incapable of producing blue jeans, smokeable cigarettes, and durable cars in the numbers its citizens craved, it was unrivaled at producing world-class chess grandmasters. [...]

CHLOE VALDARY HAD an unusual childhood. She grew up in a Christian family, but one that celebrated Jewish holy days. She was raised in New Orleans, a city dominated by [...]

SEN. CYNTHIA LUMMIS (R-Wyo.) might not seem like your typical cryptocurrency owner. She's 66 and doesn't have a tech background, but she's 'in it for the distance.' Bitcoin emerged just [...]

IN AN AGE of cancel culture, it's perhaps fitting that the death of a free speech hero would receive little fanfare. So when the poet, publisher, and provocateur Lawrence Ferlinghetti [...]

JANE COASTON IS the new host of The Argument, a massively popular New York Times podcast that seeks to showcase civil and informed discussions about the most pressing issues of [...]

HAS ANYONE LIVED a more interesting, influential, and inspiring life than Stewart Brand? Born in 1938 and educated at Stanford, Brand was a Merry Prankster who helped conduct Ken Kesey's [...]

CARL HART IS a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Columbia University. He served in the United States Air Force, earned a Ph.D., and raised three children to adulthood. As [...]

interview by NICK GILLESPIE photos by Dean Alexander WHY DID PRESCRIPTION opioids bring so much misery to the small towns of postindus-trial America? The standard narrative puts the blame on [...]

THE SATURDAY AFTER voters in Washington, D.C, and Oregon voted to loosen legal restrictions on magic mushrooms, my girlfriend and I celebrated in the most appropriate way possible. We each [...]

FEW JOURNALISTS ARE more relentlessly iconoclastic than Glenn Greenwald, who shared a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Edward Snowden revelations. Though unapologetically progressive, the 53-year-old former lawyer [...]

IN 1977, THE American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) went to court to defend the rights of American neoNazis to march through the streets of Skokie, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago [...]

IN 1993, JONATHAN Rauch wrote Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, an influential defense of free speech and open inquiry that was excerpted in Reason. The book took [...]

ON MAY 25, George Floyd, an unarmed black man, died at the hands of Minneapolis police. Six years ago, after cops killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, just 43 percent [...]

WHEN PSYCHEDELIC DRUGS finally become legal in the United States and elsewhere around the world, the lion's share of the credit will go to Rick Doblin. Since founding the Multidisciplinary [...]

MATT RIDLEY is one of the best-selling--and best-regarded--science and economics writers on the planet. He wrote recently that in the face of the coronavirus pandemic 'we are about to find [...]

IN 1964, PRESIDENT Lyndon Johnson announced plans for what he called 'the Great Society,' a sweeping set of programs that would represent the most ambitious and far-reaching expansion of the [...]

ROGER EBERT ONCE called documentary director Errol Morris 'as great a filmmaker as Hitchcock or Fellini.' In keeping with that assessment, Morris received an ovation when he debuted American Dharma, [...]

'IF 2018 WAS the year that the concept of 'cancel culture' went mainstream,' writes Meghan Daum near the beginning of The Problem With Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture [...]

WHEN LIBERTARIANS DOLE out blame for the growth of government, perhaps we should take a look in the mirror. Is it possible that our arguments--correct and widely accepted though they [...]

OVER THE PAST 20 years, arguably no libertarian thinker has cut a broader or deeper intellectual swath across American public policy and culture than Tyler Cowen.The 56-year-old New Jersey native [...]

IN 1992, FRANCIS Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man, an extended argument that the combination of liberal democracy and market capitalism could represent the end state [...]

BE MORE KIND is the seventh studio album by the British singer-songwriter Frank Turner. The title is based on a Clive James poem published in The New Yorker, and like [...]

AFFIRMATIVE: Private, Contractual Methods Are More Efficient and More Just I'M AN ANARCHIST because government tends toward ineptitude and consent is extremely important. If you describe yourself as a libertarian, [...]

JONAH GOLDBERG IS worried about the state of the nation. In his new book, Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying [...]

STEVEN PINKER IS famous for observing that human material well-being has undergone tremendous, and vastly underrated, improvement over the last few hundred years. 'We've got this problem called obesity,' the [...]

SCIENCE WRITER GARY Taubes has a knack for subverting conventional wisdom. Sixteen years ago, he published a groundbreaking feature article in The New York Times Magazine arguing that decades' worth [...]

'IF YOU BAN my ability to express my message, whether it's a political message, whether it's a marketing message,' says Flying Dog brewery CEO and co-founder Jim Caruso, 'you're effectively [...]

P.J. O'Rourke writes in his new book, How the Hell Did This Happen? (Atlantic Monthly Press). 'Then supporters of that politician become shocked and weepy when another politician, whom they [...]

IN 2005, WHILE an editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, Flemming Rose commissioned a series of cartoons about the prophet Muhammad. His goal was to highlight the dangers of self-censorship [...]

Gary Johnson reached into his pocket to make a point about the emancipating wonders of modern technology, and then panicked. 'Where is my iPhone? Oh my gosh, where is it?' [...]

NATIONAL SECURITY WHISTLEBLOWER Edward Snowden remains in exile in Russia, but on February 20, the former federal contractor who exposed government incursions on privacy spoke with reason's Nick Gillespie via [...]

DAVID BOWIE was weird, even for a rock star. From his first burst of fame in the late 1960s, when he hit the big time with a song narrated by [...]

'WHAT WE'VE WITNESSED in the past 25 or 30 years is just incredible,' says Geoffrey Zakarian about the food and restaurant revolution in America. As one of the country's most [...]

Growing up as 'a gender nonconforming entity' in Eisenhower's America wasn't easy for cultural critic and best-selling author Camille Paglia. Her adolescence in small-town upstate New York was marked by [...]

Things were tense at the end of February, as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) prepared to vote on a proposal that would revamp the way Washington regulates the Internet. The [...]

'PUTIN IS a paranoid, aging dictator who believes he is Russia,' says chess-champion-turned-human-rights-activist Garry Kasparov. 'Russia today is not like the old Soviet Union or modern China. It is not [...]

There was a moment at the 2013 Grammy Awards that captured how millennials are different than Gen Xers and baby boomers, and what it all means for the future of […]

Krist Novoselic is best known as the co-founder and bassist of Nirvana, one of the most influential music groups of the past quarter century. The release of the band's albums [...]

'Video games can never be art,' thundered movie critic Roger Ebert in 2010. Responding to a provocative TED Talk that argued the opposite, Ebert dismissed the examples mentioned in the [...]

Intelligence analyst William Binney's revelations preceded Edward Snowden's by more than decade. Why didn't anyone listen? 'Where I see it going is toward a totalitarian state,' William Binney says of [...]

'IF WE ARE lending money that ostensibly we don't have to kids who have no hope of making it back in order to train them for jobs that clearly don't [...]

IN 1971 A YOUNG writer named Louis Rossetto co-authored a cover story in The New York Times Magazine announcing that young people were turning against the played-out politics of right [...]

IN JULY, THOUSANDS of Cubans in dozens of cities took to the streets to protest the island nation's Communist dictatorship and chronic shortages in food, energy, and medicine, all of [...]

'IT TOOK US four years just to identify the virus that caused AIDS in the '80s,' says author Steven Johnson. 'Imagine COVID where it's four years before we even know [...]

ANDREW GRUEL JUST might be the patron saint of restaurateurs, small business owners, and service workers during the pandemic. He's the founder and owner of Slapfish, a growing national fast-casual [...]

Branded 'perhaps the most powerful journalist in America' by The Wall Street Journal, Will appears in more newspapers than any other columnist in America and was a sharp-witted commentator on […]

REP. JUSTIN AMASH (R-Mich.), often touted as 'the next Ron Paul' (by this magazine, among others), had a rocky start to his second term in Congress. After overcoming a redistricting [...]

VERY FEW American novels have demonstrated the remarkable staying power of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Published in 1925, it remains a critical darling, a widely read popular novel, [...]

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB is a former trader and hedge fund manager, a bestselling author, and a groundbreaking theorist on risk and resilience. A finance professor at New York University and [...]

'THERE'S A LOT MORE demand for people who want to just improve themselves than anyone would have guessed,' says Salman Khan, founder of the wildly popular free educational video series [...]