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EMILY OSTER IS a Harvard-educated economist at Brown University--not the usual launching pad for gurudom. But she is nonetheless the sage at the center of a low-key cult. She popped [...]

'SO MANY BUSINESSES have taken it upon themselves to make lemonade out of lemons, in almost the truest sense, and really turn around and care for their communities for no [...]

WHEN PEOPLE INTRODUCE Dave Barry, they always say he won a Pulitzer Prize. Which is impressive, of course. But it doesn't really seem like the most salient fact about him. [...]

AT FIRST GLANCE, Mitch Daniels seems rather bland. His hair is straight and tidy. His suits are understated but tasteful. He speaks slowly and in quiet tones. He gently declines [...]

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, [...]

LYN ULBRICHT MOVED to Colorado last year. She uprooted her life to be near her son, Ross Ulbricht, who is an inmate in a federal maximum security prison an hour [...]

It's the season of free speech madness. Republicans, as is their habit of late, have positioned themselves as the defenders of First Amendment freedoms in a time of runaway political [...]

WHEN KURT LODER and Perm Jillette tell you you're a libertarian, you might be a libertarian. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Once upon a time, Kennedy was one of America's most famous Republicans. [...]

CORY DOCTOROW, OF Boing Boing and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) farne, has returned to adult fiction after a long stint in the young adult hinterlands (Little Brother, Homeland). His new [...]

WIKIPEDIA, THE 21-YEAR-OLD 'free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,' went from being a weird online experiment to a mainstay of the modern internet with astonishing speed. Even as the rest [...]

WHEN JOHN STOSSEL was diagnosed with lung cancer in April, he announced it in the most characteristic way possible: He dashed off a column from his hospital bed with a [...]

WHEN LIONEL SHRIVER took the stage at the Brisbane Writers Festival this fall, her speech was billed as a talk on 'community and belonging.' And in a way, it was. [...]

That sentiment--that nothing worth celebrating was ever found in moderation--animates everything the juggler turned magician turned occasional pundit does. Jillette has been known as the 'larger, louder' half of the [...]

'WELP, THIS IS all wrong now.' The collapse of the Soviet Union is marked for me by a single flickering recollection from sixth-grade homeroom. My classroom had one of those [...]

SOMETIMES WINNING LOOKS and feels like losing. This summer's bloody, tumultuous withdrawal from Afghanistan was a predictable disaster. It was also an incredible, surprising anti-war victory. My own thoroughly jaded [...]

THIS SUMMER, AMAZON founder Jeff Bezos went to the edge of space on a ship he built with his own earnings. A bunch of people saw the billionaire blast off [...]

AS A MATTER of astronomical fact, it is not actually darkest just before the dawn. The brightness of the night sky is largely determined by the phase of the moon, [...]

I DON'T KNOW the correct level of content moderation by Facebook, Twitter, Google, or Amazon. And neither do you. Sometimes I can pinpoint what looks to me like an obvious [...]

THE BOY IN the video is crying. He is 10 years old, and he has been walking alone on a rural road outside of La Grulla, Texas, for a long [...]

LAST YEAR, HASHTAG activists were ready to #AbolishICE, in part over the deaths of about 20 immigrants in custody in 2020. Protesters called on the government to 'defund the police' [...]

'WE NEED TO act big,' declared Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in a February 4 interview with Good Morning America about COVID spending. The next day Vice President Kamala Harris took [...]

IN HIS VICTORY speech, Joe Biden promised to be 'a healer, a uniter, a tested and steady hand.' If the new president wants to make good on his word, Reason [...]

WHEN I STEPPED out of the house on the afternoon of January 6 to pick up my kids from their neighborhood pandemic learning pod in Washington, D.C., it was very [...]

PEOPLE LOVE TO hate billionaires. And they really love to hate large pharmaceutical companies. But at the very least, the last year has complicated the popular narrative that drug manufacturers [...]

HERE Is A LIST of things that are thicker than a typical plastic grocery bag: A strand of hair. A coat of paint. A human cornea. High-density polyethylene is a [...]

Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist Andrew McAfee hasn't been replaced by a robot just yet. The following interview was conducted between two humans. Neither of the humans needed to bother [...]

They're sweeping my floors, watching my kids, and stealing my job. Here's why I'm not worried. The shiny white robot has a stooped, almost deferential stance as it approaches the [...]

THE GOOD NEWS is, everybody lost in the 2020 election--at least a little bit. Donald Trump lost the White House, Democrats lost ground in the House, and the Senate remains [...]

JUST DOWN THE street from the Reason offices in D.C., protesters recently built a guillotine. No necks were harmed that night; it wasn't fully functional. But they did it in [...]

THEY SAY IF you don't vote you can't complain. They're wrong. Complaining is prior to voting. It is deeper and more powerful than voting. It is the original act of [...]

What if the Soviet Union won the Cold War and Americanstyle capitalism was all but wiped out? That's the premise of alt-history master Harry Turtledove's The Gladiator. Published in 2007, [...]

The Family Firm: A DataDriven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years is the third book in Brown University economist Emily Oster's ParentData series, and it couldn't [...]

NOBODY LIKES PRAGMATISTS. To the revolutionary, the pragmatist sounds too much like an apologist for the status quo. To those who fear rule by the angry mob, the pragmatist has [...]

A DEADLY PANDEMIC originates in Asia and sweeps around the globe, killing more than 100,000 Americans. A successful manned space mission briefly unites a nation with a sense of wonder. [...]

AFTER SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, huge swaths of the federal government reorganized around the idea of fighting terrorism. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) became a maximally intrusive and minimally effective part [...]

THE CORONAVIRUS HAS broken everyone's windows, and the glazier cannot leave his house to fix them. In his classic essay, 'That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen,' [...]

HERE ARE TWO stories about modern Americans' economic lives. The first story is that the American Dream is dead. The cost of college is ballooning even as higher education becomes [...]

'I WANT TO be elected. I think I am a great president. I think I am the greatest president there ever was, and if I am not elected, the national [...]

'IF YOU WANT better men by any standard, there is every reason to regard ubiquitous pornography as an obstacle,' declared New York Times columnist Ross Douthat in a 2018 column [...]

'WHEN WILL THINGS be normal again?' In politics, this is a powerful wish and a commonly heard refrain. It's the desire that propelled Donald Trump into the White House with [...]

'YOU ARE GOING to be the proud owner of 25 million people. You will own all their hopes, aspirations, and problems. You'll own it all.' According to legend, Secretary of [...]

BY FOCUSING ALL of its efforts on impeachment during a presidential campaign, Congress has given away the game: Its members are little more than pawns in a winner-take-all battle for [...]

ONCE UPON A time, privacy was everyone's default setting. Imagine an era when most letters and ledgers existed only in a single hard copy, when long-distance communication was slow and [...]

It's technically a Netflix comedy special. But Inside is far more unsettling than any true crime show. Bo Burnham's latest foray into millennial musical comedy chronicles his crack-up over the [...]

Fans of locked room mysteries and boorish detectives will find much to love in Fugitive Telemetry, an outer space version of those classic tropes. This short novel is the sixth [...]

IF YOU'VE HEARD of Intrade, you probably know about the site's impressive record predicting the outcome of the last several U.S. presidential elections. Last November, traders at the online prediction [...]

The article presents the discussion on chaotic nature of the 2024 U.S. presidential election season, emphasizing the prevalence of incompetence over malice in political developments. Topics include replacement of President Biden due to cognitive decline, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump; and the rise and fall of Project 2025.