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BORN IN 1956 and raised in Massachusetts, Grover Norquist is the unofficial head of what he calls the 'Leave Us Alone Coalition,' a loose affiliation of people and groups dedicated […]

If the recently concluded HBO series The Wire is arguably the most aesthetically accomplished fictional indictment of the decades-long war on drugs, there is no shortage of contenders for the [...]

IF YOU'VE SEEN a case of state-on-citizen injustice become a mainstream outrage from coast to coast, chances are Chip Mellor had something to do with it. Mellor founded the Institute […]

Here's a history test no currently breathing American citizen should fail: Name a president whose 'only reading materials were government documents and Bible scriptures' and whose tenure was linked to […]

If you're trying to divine the future of American politics from the 2008 presidential primary season, the absolute worst place to look is the winner's circle. John McCain, Hillary Clinton, [...]

KURT LODER HAS been chronicling cutting-edge culture in the United States since the 1970s, first with the defunct rock magazine Circus and then during a legendary stint at Rolling Stone. […]

Amity Shlaes, author of a new history of the Great Depression, talks about Franklin D. Roosevelt's baleful economic legacy, the growth of government, and the death of classical liberalism. WITH [...]

IF THE 2008 presidential election is a baseball season, we're still in that early, delusional phase when even Tampa Bay Devil Rays fans can dream of a World Series ring. [...]

En route to selling a mind-blowing 250 million copies worldwide since it was first mass-produced in 1935, Monopoly has generated a story more epic and entertaining than playing the game [...]

En route to getting shellacked by historic proportions in the 1964 presidential race, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) suffered through a smear job as oversized and ugly as Lyndon B. Johnson's [...]

IN LATE AUGUST reason hosted a three-day conference in Amsterdam dedicated to exploring the future of free expression and free markets in Europe. The opening evening featured a conversation with [...]

WHEN CHRIS ANDERSON became the editor-in-chief of Wired in 2001, he took over an eight-year-old San Francisco-based magazine that had not only redefined print journalism in the 1990s but proved [...]

Welcome to the landmark legal case of CleanFlicks et al. v. Kate Winslet's Titanic Breasts. Utah-based CleanFlicks is one of a dozen or so companies that delete sex, violence, and […]

To COMMEMORATE the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, reason talked with military analyst Chet Richards and political scientist John Mueller about Iraq, Al Qaeda, and the legacy of the […]

In 1971, according to the Association of Departments of English, about eight out of every 100 bachelor's degrees were awarded to English majors. Today that figure stands at a bit [...]

It's hard to read Ron Powers' engaging new Mark Twain: A Life (Free Press) and not conclude that there's a congenital defect in the very heart of American literature. Powers, [...]

In 1955 future Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman kick-started modern education reform with an article titled 'The Role of Government in Education.' Bucking the 'general trend in our times toward [...]

Americans don't know much about history. Polls regularly indicate that upward of 95 percent of us can't even name the century in which we were born or say whether we [...]

To many, maybe even most, Americans, Jane Fonda is the Wal-Mart of activist celebrities--a category killer when it comes to personifying the loathsome limousine liberal, that subspecies of Hollywood Democrat [...]

Was Frank Zappa, the memorably mustachioed musician who died in 1993 of prostate cancer, rock and roll's answer to Herman Melville? Maybe so, and not just because the Moby-Dick scribe […]

As THE HIGHLY rated home to the likes of Abu Ghraib apologist Sean Hannity and the document-shredding constitutional scholar Oliver North, the Fox News Channel is about the last place [...]

In a country where one of the most popular genres of music is called 'alternative,' the great refusenik Henry David Thoreau is a national icon, and acknowledged pot smokers have [...]

IN 1944, with World War II raging and the fate of the Free World far from clear, Friedrich A. Hayek (1889-1992), one of the great intellectual heroes of reason, published […]

ALMOST 70 YEARS after a U.S.-backed coup deposed Iran's democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and replaced him with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, relations between the two countries remain at [...]

Strolling through Haight-Ashbury in 1967, it was George Harrison--the quiet Beatle, for God's sake, and the one with the sitar!--who delivered one of the most caustic putdowns of hippies ever. [...]

WHEN reason last caught up with PennJillette--the self-described "larger, louder half" of the magical duo Penn & Teller--the year was 1994, and then-Attorney General Janet Reno and other Clinton administration […]

HIS DECISION TO loosen media ownership rules 'insulted your intelligence and wounded democracy,' one newspaper columnist declares. He's obsessed with 'trying to save America's virtue' writes another. He has presided [...]

AS THE C0VID-19 pandemic prompted shoppers to clear supermarkets of toilet paper, rice, and canned vegetables, Matt and Noah Colvin loaded up a U-Haul with all the hand sanitizer and [...]

'And yet, it's hard to find a 'libertarian' who is satisfied with the name, which only came into common usage in the late 1960s. The list of complaints is a [...]

IT DIDN'T TAKE long after the coronavirus crisis began for the smart set to write off small-government types in articles with such snarky headlines as 'There Are No Libertarians in [...]

IN EARLY JANUARY, the United States took out Iran's top military leader, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, as he passed through Iraq. President Donald Trump's decision to order the killing of a [...]

'Can I come over, tonight?' asks Iggy Pop in an early song with the Stooges, the late '60s/early 70s band from Michigan that directly inspired many later wild rock music [...]

IN TWO DECADES at the nation's largest cable network, Fox News analyst Andrew Napolitano has provided an unapologetically libertarian critique of state power, regardless of the party holding control in [...]

As DEVOTEES OF free minds and free markets, we spend our nights pining for a major-party politician who not only looks dreamy while reading a Teleprompter but shows some passion [...]

For the past 10 years, the reality TV show Shark Tank has entertained and edified millions of viewers by dramatizing how entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to venture capitalists. None of [...]

Here's a special reason to be happy that Napster, the notorious outlaw file-sharing system that took a long, court-ordered hiatus, has returned as a major-label-backed enterprise offering single-track downloads for […]

An interview with Jay Bhattacharya, a professor at Stanford University and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, is presented, discussing his involvement in a lawsuit alleging government pressure on social media to censor dissenting COVID-19 opinions. Topics include his surreal experience of being on a government blacklist, collusion between government agencies and social media platforms, and violations of the First Amendment.

IF THERE IS any moral certainty underpinning today's anti-globalization movement, it's that desperate actions from sometimes violent street demonstrations to public crop burnings to dressing up as giant sea turtles--are [...]

Of course I remember my first time. Only a true cad--or a true liar--doesn't. When I look back on it, I was way too young--just 14. It happened, of all […]

WHAT ARE WE to make of the fact that Saddam Hussein selected Frank Sinatra's version of 'My Way' as the theme song for his 54th birthday? Cultural pessimists and critics [...]

In an age of space shuttle catastrophes, Middle Eastern war, apocalyptic terrorism, and--perhaps most on point--declining rates of teen sex, the continuing interest in the quantity and quality of "lust-see […]

As its title makes plain, the interesting new book The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon (Sourcebooks), by Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. [...]

When reason interviewed George Mason University economist Vernon L. Smith back in May, one of the first questions we put to him was, 'You're always mentioned as a short-lister for […]

In a country that has long been cuckoo for catch phrases--from "Give me liberty or give me death" to "I want my Maypo" to "Whassuupp"--It's hardly surprising that 9/11 would […]

STEVEN PINKER HAS BEEN called 'science's agent provocateur' by the Guardian, named an 'evolutionary pop star' by The Washington Post, as a 'wunderkind' by The Washington Post, and acclaimed by […]