Reason Video

"We've taught young people that any of their missteps or any of their heterodox opinions are grounds to tear them down. That's no way to grow up."  That was journalist Rikki Schlott speaking before a sold-out crowd on Monday night at a live taping of The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie podcast in New York City. Schlott, 23, teamed up with Greg Lukianoff to co-write The Canceling of the Americ...

About twenty-three years ago, public health officials began to notice increases in what would later be called "deaths of despair," referring to suicides, deaths from alcoholism, and drug overdoses. Public health officials and legislators responded by seeking to limit opioid prescriptions for non-cancer chronic pain. Their tactics included violent raids and criminal charges against doctors deemed t...

Every year, over 25 million tourists flock to the iconic National Mall in Washington, D.C. Yet as they explore some of the nation's greatest museums and monuments, visitors often find themselves faced with limited dining options, which boil down to either pricey cafes at the Smithsonian museums or food trucks parked along the Mall. The food trucks have, unsurprisingly, become a favorite among tour...

In 2001, Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg burst onto the international scene with his bestselling and controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist . The onetime member of Greenpeace said that climate change is real and that human activity is clearly contributing to it, but he said the best science didn't support the apocalyptic visions put forth by people like Earth in the Balance aut...

In 19th century America, trains symbolized modernity. Passenger rail connected the east and west coasts and helped settle the frontier. By 1916, rail accounted for 98 percent of intercity travel. As it became easier to drive or fly, passenger rail use plummeted. In 1971, the government created Amtrak, which survives on federal subsidies. And most recently the Biden administration gave Amtrak $66 b...

Erika Dyck is a professor at the University of Saskatchewan who studies the history of psychedelics with a special interest in the legacy of Humphry Osmond , the British-born psychiatrist who coined the term pyschedelic, gave Aldous Huxley his first dose of mescaline, and conducted pathbreaking work using LSD to help alcoholics stop drinking. Among Osmond's best-known patients was Bill W., the co-...

"I never pictured a world where marijuana would be anywhere close to legal, and it's mind-blowing to me that mushrooms are being decriminalized everywhere," says Shane Mauss, a comedian who tours the country discussing his psychedelic experiences. Reason caught up with him at the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference, held in Denver this June, where he participated in a "roast" of the psychedelic sc...

In June, I traveled to Denver with Zach Weismueller to cover the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference, organized by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies ( MAPS ), a group that has been working to gain Food and Drug Administration approval of MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD since the late 1980s. We produced a 30-minute documentary about today's " psychedelic renaissance ." The mo...

" Welcome to the psychedelic '20s!"  Rick Doblin, founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, proclaimed in his keynote speech to open the Psychedelic Science 2023 conference. At the event organized by MAPS in Denver this June, a reported 13,000 people gathered to talk about what seemed like every possible topic related to the productive use of these substances....

Everywhere around us, there are signs of a psychedelic renaissance: in medicine, therapy, commerce, and the arts. These drugs are getting serious, positive coverage in glossy magazines , best-selling books , literary memoirs , documentaries , and hit podcasts . Performers like Reggie Watts , Melissa Etheridge , and members of the Flaming Lips openly acknowledge the role of hallucinogens in their w...

The global movement against free trade and capitalism that burst into public consciousness at the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization coalesced around the idea that Western elites had ensnared Third World nations in a debt trap to coerce them into adopting neoliberal policies.  When poor nations couldn't afford to repay what they owed the World Bank and the International Monetary Fu...

Before Matt Taibbi was sparring with Democratic members of Congress on Capitol Hill earlier this year over the Twitter Files, he was a darling of the progressive left, appearing regularly on shows like Democracy Now! and others hosted by Bill Moyers and Rachel Maddow. Though he was always a fierce critic of the Democratic establishment, the rise of Donald Trump suddenly meant that anyone nominally...

Mike Rowe is a bestselling author , Emmy winner, and podcaster best known for his stint hosting The Discovery Channel's long-running Dirty Jobs , where he performed the sort of work we all rely on but don't want to think about too much. From cleaning septic tanks to putting hot tar on roofs to disposing of medical waste, he's done it all—and loves to talk about the value of the hard, honest work t...

"Próspera is the first time in human history that a group of people has said there's a way to deliver governing services, privatized for profit in a completely free market way," says Joel Bomgar, a Mississippi state representative and president of Próspera Inc., the company that's building a privately run charter city on the Honduran island of Roatán called Próspera Village. In Honduras, about hal...

In October 2017, a SWAT team showed up at Jameson Lopp's house in North Carolina,  allegedly because of a fake complaint called in by someone angered by a tweet. So Lopp posted a video of himself firing an AR-15 and then embarked on a journey to disappear in the physical world—unreachable by his enemies and far from the prying eyes of the surveillance state. Lopp had been obsessed with privacy lon...

Lowriding has been a part of Southern California and Chicano culture since the post–World War II era when hobbyists started using spare hydraulics from surplus aircraft parts to customize cars to ride "low and slow." "Owning a car is the American dream," says Denise Sandoval, a professor of Chicano studies at California State University, Northridge. "Lowriding is a great example, just like hip-hop...

Caitlin Long wants to start a new kind of bank…based on a very old  model. " A 100 percent reserve bank that would keep all of our cash at the Fed," she says. She was influenced by the work of Austrian economist Murray Rothbard, who saw fractional reserve banking as "a shell game, [and] a Ponzi scheme ," arguing that banks should work exactly like safety-deposit boxes, or "money warehouses,...

Fifteen years after Satoshi Nakamoto dropped a nine-page white paper on an obscure email list sketching out an idea for a new peer-to-peer digital currency, bitcoin has become a global phenomenon. And nowhere is its pomp and promise more on display than at the blockbuster annual conferences put on by Bitcoin M agazine in Miami Beach. But it's also had a disappointing couple of years. Bitcoin was s...

Is the world getting better? Or is it on the verge of collapse? Stefan Sagmeister emphatically believes that things are looking up, and his art exhibition " Now Is Better " showcases a bold new way to convince the world that he's right. He takes actual paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries, disassembles them, and creates new works by juxtaposing them with data visualizations of just how much...

As a gangly kid who had just arrived in the U.S. from Cameroon, West Africa, 16-year-old Joel Embiid had a lot of the gifts he'd eventually put to use in the NBA: the height, the athleticism, the massive 7-foot-6-inch wingspan.  But the one thing he couldn't do was actually shoot a basketball.  Embiid didn't get into the game at all until he was 15. Today, he has become not just the lynchpin of a...

If you want to get a politician to change the subject, ask them how they're going to deal with the federal debt, which is growing to be bigger than the U.S. gross domestic product and has us on a path to fiscal disaster. Economists across the political spectrum agree that large, persistent, and growing annual deficits and the national debt depress long-term economic growth, the one known way to in...

Who's that sliding into your Twitter DMs? Is it the federal government? Well, according to Elon Musk , who took over the social media platform last year, government bureaucrats were routinely taking a close look at users' content. Thanks to the Twitter Files, a collaboration between Elon Musk and independent journalists, as well as the Facebook Files , my own investigative project for Reason , we...

Homelessness has been rising in America's West Coast cities for more than a decade. Entire blocks of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Portland are occupied by tent encampments plagued by violence, drug overdoses, and disease. But the problem is concentrated in a handful of cities; nationwide the homeless population has been shrinking for a decade . To figure out why some places are so much more suc...