The Soviet Union collapsed 30 years ago in part because its government-run economy was incapable of producing the blue jeans, cigarettes, and automobiles that its citizens wanted. What it was great at was producing champion chess players. From the end of World War II until the Evil Empire dissolved in 1991, all but one world […]
Andrew Yang’s run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination didn’t last all that long, but his support for a universal basic income (UBI) pushed that arcane topic to the center of ongoing policy debates about how best to help Americans dislocated by technological and economic change. The 46-year-old entrepreneur, who also ran unsuccessfully this year […]
In his bestselling books The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now, the Harvard linguist Steven Pinker made the surprisingly controversial case that humanity has been getting richer and less violent over the past two centuries. In Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, and Why It Matters, he argues that our ability […]
In the controversial yet bestselling books The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now, Harvard linguist Steven Pinker made the case that humanity has been getting richer and less violent over the past two centuries. In his new book, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters, he argues that our […]
What are the long-term psychological effects of growing up in a world where the 9/11 attacks and school shootings drastically restructured your childhood around overblown fears of random violence, where the Great Recession wiped out your parents’ savings, and the historically slow economic recovery hampered your job prospects for a decade, and where you were […]
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 which have been made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. These were the biggest anti-government demonstrations in Cuba in decades. They were enabled by social media […]
Chloé 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 Catholicism and its symbols, but her church was anti-Catholic. She’s black, but her first steps into identity politics and activism were in opposition to antisemitism. […]
Because of the war on terror, argues Rafia Zakaria, American feminism has been recast from a “movement that existed in opposition to the state, as a critique of its institutions and mores…[to] one that serve[s] the state’s interests through any means imaginable.” Nothing exemplifies this tragic turn better, she says, than the Oscar-winning movie Zero […]
What are the long-term psychological effects of growing up in a world where the 9/11 attacks and school shootings drastically restructured your childhood around overblown fears of random violence, where the Great Recession wiped out your parents’ savings and the historically slow economic recovery hampered your job prospects for a decade, and where you were […]
The country is currently in the throes of a moral panic over social media, says Reason Senior Editor Robby Soave in his new book, Tech Panic: Why We Shouldn’t Fear Facebook and the Future. Instagram is accused of making our daughters bulimic and YouTube is turning our sons into alt-right terrorists. Amazon is forcing us […]
