Reason Video

On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it's worth asking: What was the American Revolution actually about? We all remember the broad strokes we learned in school: Independence from the British crown. Taxes on tea. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But on a deeper level, the American Revolution was—and is—a revolution in political theory, reimagining what a legitima...

Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal co-founder, has a provocative theory about how the Antichrist could take over the Earth and enslave humanity. "My speculative thesis is that if the Antichrist were to come to power it would be by talking about Armageddon all the time," Thiel told Hoover Institution interviewer Peter Robinson earlier this year. The greatest danger we face,...

In President Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous 1961 speech about the dangers of the military-industrial complex, he also cautioned Americans about the growing power of a "scientific, technological elite." "The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by federal employment project allocations and the power of money is ever present," warned Eisenhower. The federal government had become a major fi...

"Wise words," wrote Elon Musk about this 1999 viral clip described as "Milton Friedman casually giving the blueprint for DOGE [the Department of Government Efficiency]" as he ticks off a list of federal government agencies he'd be comfortable eliminating.  Musk is right. Friedman, a Nobel Prize–winning libertarian economist, did offer a solid blueprint for creating a smaller, less intrusive govern...

"Deny," "defend," "depose"—these three words were allegedly written on bullets found at the murder scene of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The slogan began appearing in graffiti, highway banners, and T-shirts. When the identity of the likely killer was revealed to be a man named Luigi Mangione, he developed a passionate fanbase.   "So many men and women are going nuts over how good-looking...

Ross Ulbricht was arrested at 29. Now, he's 40. He faces a double life sentence plus 40 years with no possibility of parole for creating the Silk Road, a dark web drug marketplace that facilitated $1.2 billion in bitcoin-denominated transactions. "I'll spend the next few decades in this cage. Then, sometime later this century, I'll grow old and die. I'll finally leave prison, but I'll be in a body...

Is a nuclear renaissance about to begin on the very site of the public relations catastrophe that practically destroyed the industry 45 years ago? Constellation Energy recently announced a deal with Microsoft to restore a retired reactor on Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island. Microsoft has agreed to purchase energy from the plant for 20 years to power its AI data centers. A U.S. nuclear reactor has...

Average toddler day care costs in Washington, D.C., exceed $24,000 a year, outstripping expenses in cities like New York and San Francisco. Despite the steep prices, parents such as Megan McCune and Tom Shonosky, who live in a suburban D.C. neighborhood with their children John and Lizzy, believe day care is still worth it. "They're doing these amazing activities with kids. John's last teacher was...

After surviving a disastrous congressional hearing, Claudine Gay was forced to resign as the president of Harvard for repeatedly copying and pasting language used by other scholars and passing it off as her own. She's hardly alone among elite academics, and plagiarism has become a roiling scandal in academia. There's another common practice among professional researchers that should be generating...

In his 1996 book, The Vision of the Anointed , economist Thomas Sowell sketched out a pattern that many of the "crusading movements" of the 20th century have followed. First, they identify a "great danger" to society, followed by an "urgent need" for government action "to avert impending catastrophe." A new book by psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation , argues that the go...

Once upon a time, America embraced nuclear power as the future of energy. Today it accounts for a mere 18 percent of the nation's electricity generation, while fossil fuels remain dominant at 60 percent. Why did nuclear fail to take off?  From 1967 to 1972, the nuclear sector experienced significant growth, and 48 new nuclear plants were built . But in March 1979, a meltdown at Pennsylvania's Thre...

As Ronald Reagan's first budget director, former Michigan congressman David Stockman led the charge to cut the size, scope, and spending of the federal government in the early 1980s. He made enemies among Democrats by pushing hard for cuts to welfare programs—and he ultimately made enemies among his fellow Republicans by pushing equally hard to slash defense spending. His memoir of the era, The Tr...

After enacting sweeping reforms in Argentina, President Javier Milei faced a major protest. Tens of thousands of people marched through the streets, hundreds of flights were grounded, and schools and businesses closed in protests to Milei's attempt to fix the troubled South American country.   Milei is the first self-described libertarian head of state in history. To avert economic disaster in a c...

If we all went a little nuts during the COVID-19 lockdowns, it's absolutely true that some of us—including many of our country's leaders and people in the media—went absolutely batshit crazy, often with disastrous results. Exactly why that happened is the subject of author Jon Ronson 's latest season of Things Fell Apart , a podcast that explores the deep origins of today's culture wars in controv...

"If the problem with campus speech codes is the selectivity with which universities penalize various forms of bigotry," wrote James Kirchick recently in The New York Times , "the solution is not to expand the university's power to punish expression. It's to abolish speech codes entirely." Kirchick was writing about widespread outrage at the nuanced and hypocritical defense of speech offered by the...

Did you know that by 2050, fully a quarter of the planet's population will reside in Africa? Yet despite abundant natural resources and a young and ambitious population, the continent remains the poorest of them all . Born in Senegal and now residing in Austin, Texas, Magatte Wade is director of the Center for African Prosperity at the Atlas Network , a nonprofit that supports think tanks and acti...

During his two terms as governor of Arizona, Doug Ducey managed to pass a flat income tax with a rate of 2.5 percent, reform public sector pensions, universalize important school choice measures , reform occupational licensing rules, turn a budget deficit into a surplus, and substantially shrink the size of the government workforce. He also built a makeshift border wall out of shipping crates, pus...

William D. Eggers is co-author, with Donald F. Kettl, of Bridgebuilders: How Government Can Transcend Boundaries to Solve Big Problems . He's now the executive director of Deloitte's Center for Government Insights , but 30 years ago, he ran the privatization center for Reason Foundation , the nonprofit that publishes Reason . Eggers has since worked with dozens of governments at all levels, both i...

"Was Milton Friedman the most important libertarian of them all?" Reason' s Nick Gillespie asked Stanford historian Jennifer Burns during a live taping of  The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie podcast in New York City. Burns is the author of the masterful and definitive new biography of the Nobel Prize–winning economist, titled Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative . Friedman was arguably not...

Quitting is massively underrated, says Annie Duke, an author, doctor of psychology, and former professional poker player who holds a bracelet from the 2004 World Series of Poker. Her latest book is Quit: The Power of Knowing When To Walk Away . Using examples ranging from Muhammad Ali's refusal to retire from boxing earlier in his career to the over-budget, much-delayed California high-speed rail...

After their invention in the late 1800s, sneakers became a pop-culture staple by the 1970s and '80s with models like the Adidas Superstar , Puma Clyde , and Nike Air Force 1 . But it wasn't until the release of the Air Jordan in 1985 that sneaker fandom became an international obsession and evolved into a disruptive shoe market.  Resellers all over the world feed sneakerheads' voracious appetite f...

After a dozen years of legal tussles , seven years in the crosshairs of ambitious prosecutors , and five-and-a-half years fighting a federal case that saw his business forcibly shuttered, his assets seized, and his longtime partner dead by suicide , alt-weekly newspaper impresario Michael Lacey was found guilty Thursday on just one of the 86 criminal charges levied against him in connection with t...

" I'm under no illusion that humanity will completely eradicate the racial tribal instinct or racism or bigotry itself. But I feel that colorblindness is the North Star that we should use when making decisions," argues Coleman Hughes during a live  taping of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie  podcast in New York City. Hughes is a writer, podcaster, and opinion columnist who specializes in i...

Behind the scenes of a traditional bathhouse in Brooklyn, something extraordinary is taking place: The pools, heated to 104 degrees, are not warmed by conventional means but by computers mining for bitcoin. A profit-seeking drive for energy efficiency has caused bitcoin miners to pop up in unexpected places, such as Jason Goodman's New York bathhouse, where the cost of heating his pools is about t...

Swedish historian Johan Norberg is author of The Capitalist Manifesto: Why the Global Free Market Will Save the World , which caught the eye of Elon Musk, who tweeted , "This book is an excellent explanation of why capitalism is not just successful, but morally right." Norberg wrote the book to combat a growing belief on the right and the left that libertarian values of individual autonomy, proper...