Robby Soave and Christian Britschgi kick off this week’s episode of Freed Up with a look at California’s socialist elections and Los Angeles’ worsening homelessness problem. Then, they discuss why socialism keeps failing, Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R–Texas) claim that he is “quite libertarian,” and the U.K.’s decision to ban Hasan Piker and Cenk Uygur.

Later, they break down Graham Platner’s growing list of scandals, debate whether Dracula is really a romance story, and consider when science and religion come into conflict. Finally, they talk about Robby’s struggles as a light sleeper, revisit the moment COVID-19 experts betrayed the public’s trust, examine how annual homelessness counts are calculated, and close with Robby’s memory of former President Barack Obama speaking at his university commencement.

0:00—The socialist elections in California

4:50—The Los Angeles homeless problem and Spencer Pratt

11:22—Socialism is bad.

19:48—Cruz claims he is “quite libertarian.”

22:49—Piker and Uygur banned from the U.K.

31:12—Platner has had enough scandals.

38:27—Dracula is a romance story.

41:33—When are science and religion in conflict?

50:03—Robby is a light sleeper.

58:13—This was the moment the COVID-19 experts betrayed us.

1:12:30—How they come up with the annual homelessness numbers

1:24:55—Obama was the speaker at Robby’s university commencement.

The post California Elections, Graham Platner, Recalling COVID Insanity appeared first on Reason.com.

Robby Soave and Christian Britschgi discuss the brewing Texas showdown between Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico. Then, they break down Rep. Nancy Mace’s (R–S.C.) proposal to give boomers a property tax break and Pope Leo XIV’s latest encyclical on artificial intelligence. Finally, they wrap up with some lighter debates over The Legend of Zelda, Nicolas Cage movies, retro-futurism, Jill Biden’s latest remarks, and whether President Donald Trump’s political influence will ever fade.

0:00—Heretics and hypocrites in Texas

14:30—Talarico takes back his former wokeness

19:10—If you can’t take it, don’t dish it

32:25—Coal mines are cool?

34:00—Mace’s boomer luxury communism

39:20—The pope’s views on AI

47:40—Why does anyone play video games?

58:59—Nicolas Cage is a good actor

1:05:57—Retro-futurism

1:10:26—Jill Biden’s latest remarks

1:18:36—Will Trump’s influence ever fade?

The post James Talarico vs. Ken Paxton, the Pope on AI, and Caves appeared first on Reason.com.

When Barret Hansen, better known as Dr. Demento, recently ended his weekly show, he had spent 55 years spinning weird, silly, or otherwise strange songs on the radio or online. No mere fringe figure, he was an influential figure in American comedy and one of the most important cultural libertarians of his era.

That might seem far-fetched to people who grew up in a post-SNL, post-Seinfeld world. But in the early 1970s, all that lay in the future. Television shows still had to pass strict censorial review to be aired, and the same code policed much of what could be heard on mainstream radio. Hansen’s program pushed against those strictures.

Listeners never knew what Hansen might play. One moment might bring a sweet, old novelty song like the Playmates’ “Beep Beep” about a “little Nash Rambler” that turned out to be more powerful than the Cadillac it was racing. The next moment you might hear a risqué song about sex, like Ruth Wallis’ “Davy’s Dinghy” (it’s not about his boat) or the Lemon Sisters’ lascivious “In My Country” (“The swamp is thick, but don’t be a wussie/Come steer your canoe right through my pussy…willows”). There was drug humor, from the relatively tame “Friendly Neighborhood Narco Agent” to a mid-’90s parody of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” called “The Devil Went Down to Jamaica” (“Johnny roll a ball of hash, and make sure it’s the bomb/’Cause the devil’s got the kind of stuff they smoked in Vietnam”). “Cows With Guns,” about bovines revolting against slaughter under the leadership of Cow Tse-tung, would compete with classic comic songs from Spike Jones and Tom Lehrer.

And sometimes the show could just get plain weird. Consider the program’s two biggest hits, Barnes & Barnes’ “Fish Heads” and Ogden Edsl’s “Dead Puppies.” The former informs us that fish heads “are never seen drinking cappuccino in Italian restaurants with Oriental women”; the latter laments, “Dead puppies aren’t much fun/They don’t come when you call/They don’t chase squirrels at all.” Other tunes in rotation found dark humor in everything from a school shooting (Julie Brown’s “The Homecoming Queen’s Got a Gun“) to a pedophile (Ogden Edsl’s “Kinko the Clown“). There were the college philosophy meanderings of Tom “T-Bone” Stankus’ “Existential Blues,” crude advice like Frank Zappa’s “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow,” and a song whose lyrics are mostly just the names of different Los Angeles streets, Felix Figueroa’s “Pico and Sepulveda.”

The program was periodically punctuated with cowbells and sound effects. The host was joined by funny friends with alliterative names, such as Captain Chaos and Laughing Linda. And each show ended with the “Funny Five,” the most requested songs of the week—a tradition that put the listeners at the center of the experience: On this show, you could help shape the dementia.

How Barret Hansen Became Dr. Demento

Hansen grew up in Minneapolis, where he was a loner who listened to records and played them at his high school dances. He went on to get two degrees in music: a Bachelor of Arts from Reed College and a Master of Arts from UCLA. After graduating, he wrote liner notes for record companies, collected records by the bushel, and DJed at KPPC, a free-form FM radio station.

That’s where he became Dr. Demento. One day he played Nervous Norvus’ 1956 novelty hit “Transfusion,” a song about a reckless driver who constantly crashes his car only to be revived by blood transfusions. Someone at the station said he had to be demented to play that record, and his persona was born.

The Dr. Demento Show started in 1971 as a rock show with some novelty hits thrown in, but Hansen quickly discovered that almost all the audience requests were for the funny stuff. By late 1971 he had hopped to KMET, where his four-hour showcase for what he called “loony laughing records” was the No. 1 Sunday night show in the Los Angeles market. He went into national syndication in early 1974 with a taped two-hour version of the show; it rapidly became a success. He was profiled in Newsweek and went on national TV. Some of the songs he played, such as “Junk Food Junkie” and “Shaving Cream,” crossed over and became Top 40 hits. “I was very happy when something that I kind of started hit the charts,” he said.

He had a short break from national syndication in 1977–1978, when his syndicator went bankrupt, but he kept broadcasting until his retirement—the third-longest run in American radio history for a single-hosted musical show. Listeners started sending him their own creations, giving Hansen a new role: Just as Johnny Carson or Lorne Michaels could make a comedian’s career by giving new talent a showcase, Dr. Demento became America’s arbiter of musical comedy.

He wasn’t wedded to any particular type of humor or any single musical genre. If someone sent him a decent record or tape, he’d play it. Let the audience decide was his mantra.

Dr. Demento and Weird Al Yankovic

In that way, he gave a boost to such musical comics as Brad Stanfield, Damaskas, a UCLA co-ed known as Sulu, and the most famous and enduring of his discoveries: Alfred Yankovic, a shy young teenager who gave Hansen his first tape in 1973.

“Weird Al” Yankovic went on to become the most successful musical comedian in U.S. history. He has won five Grammys and an Emmy. His singles have charted for more than 30 years. And Hansen gave him more than his first showcase: The Dr. Demento Show exposed Yankovic to such legendary comic musicians as Stan Freberg, Jones, Lehrer, and Allan Sherman. It was Hansen’s program that inspired Yankovic to become a musical comedian. There would be no Weird Al if there were no Dr. Demento.

When I compare their relationship to that of Col. Parker and Elvis, Hansen quickly notes an essential difference: “I never managed Weird Al.” But in some ways he was even more important than a manager would have been.

Hansen says he”considered myself perhaps a bit of a father figure” to Yankovic, something their roughly 20-year age difference made natural. The lyrics to Yankovic’s break-out song (“Another One Rides the Bus,” a parody of Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust”) were written in a cabin where Yankovic was spending the weekend with Hansen and some of Hansen’s friends. Hansen helped get Yankovic his first job after college, and he went on a joint tour with Weird Al when Dr. Demento was much the bigger name.

Yankovic has never resented or rejected this influence, and the two are still friends. Hansen remains friends with other protégés too, such as Sulu and Mike “Musical Mike” Kiefer. The DJ’s fans, who range from the alternative rockers Courtney Love and Dave Grohl to the Fox News personalities Greg Gutfeld and Kennedy, still revere him too: A 1990s chat group about the show has evolved into the burgeoning Demented Music Database. The extremely active Dr. Demento Facebook group has more than 146,000 members, and if you search YouTube for one of the novelty songs that Hansen once featured, you’ll almost always find someone in the comments recalling how they first heard it from good old Dr. Demento. Such displays of devotion are rare for a disc jockey years after his peak popularity.

But Hansen wasn’t just a disc jockey. Listening to Dr. Demento was like entering a secret club, one that valued intelligence, nonconformity, and humor. One of my friends calls his discovery of the show in 1974 a “lifeline, a realization that there were other people like me.” Former President Richard Nixon once said that as a boy, he would listen to the train whistle and dream of the “faraway places where he’d like to go.” Each Sunday, Hansen’s train would take us into a demented land and return us home safe and sound.

The Libertarianism of Dr. Demento

Hansen owned more than 200,000 records, one of the largest private collections in the world, and he was always happy to share his interests with his audience. That made him a teacher (some killjoys might say corrupter) of the young. What did he teach in his weekly forays into our homes?

Hansen never had a political agenda per se. He tended to shy away from overtly political humor, and he told Steve Martin in a 1977 interview that he didn’t especially like political jokes. In one of his final episodes, he decried the bitterness of contemporary politics. He told his listeners that anger had made many of the political songs he received less funny and that he played fewer of them as a result.

Nor did he seek to remake comedy. Lots of entertainers were doing that in the 1970s, and his show featured many of them: Mel Brooks, National Lampoon, Monty Python, Steve Martin. Yet, “I didn’t think of myself as being in the same boat” as those people, he says. He just “thought of myself as playing things on the radio that you would never otherwise hear on the radio.”

But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t part of that zeitgeist. Hansen believes in tolerance and freedom, and he brought that view to his show. Anyone could be featured, regardless of race, gender, or age. Anything could be lampooned as long as the treatment wasn’t cruel.

“Occasionally [it] would cross my mind,” he says, that he was a gatekeeper, that if he could open a door, other people could walk through it. “I don’t like barriers,” he adds, and the show certainly proved that. Rusty Warren, Benny Bell, and other longtime musicians whose risqué records had never been played on commercial radio suddenly found fame. Lehrer praised the Doc for helping to “keep him alive” by playing the morbidly satiric songs he’d recorded in the 1950s and ’60s, prompting record companies to reissue his discs. And then there’s Harry “The Hipster” Gibson and his 1943 number “Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine?” When Hansen interviewed Gibson in 1976, the singer told the DJ that the record had been banned from airplay for years for being “subversive”—until he got a call that “some cat named Demento” had been playing the forbidden song.

“You probably didn’t know it was labeled subversive,” Gibson told Hansen. His host chuckled softly and said, “Well…”

Hansen darn well knew it was subversive. That was why he played it.

In the early 1990s, Hansen aired some songs making fun of political correctness and commented that colleges falling prey to P.C. were defeating their mission of teaching people how to think for themselves. He believes that barriers are bad whether they come from the right or the left, an attitude that may help explain why he joined the Libertarian Party in the 1980s and spoke at this magazine’s 20th anniversary celebration. His show wasn’t overtly political, but it exuded a kind of cultural libertarianism: Have a good time, be who you are, and don’t worry. It was a message of genial toleration that reached into homes nationwide for two hours every Sunday night for almost 40 years.

What Is Dr. Demento Doing Now?

Just as radio killed vaudeville and television killed radio drama, the internet is killing old-fashioned, music-based radio stations. Those that remain tend to feature prepackaged formats that suppress the spontaneity and originality that the best disc jockeys brought to their programs. The easy accessibility of songs on YouTube and Spotify also means that unusual comedy acts no longer need airtime to get attention.

But Hansen’s still around, even if he isn’t hosting a weekly show anymore. He’s still assembling collections of funny music and recently released his own single, Get Demented.  He also showed up recently on the hit CBS sitcom Georgie and Mandy’s First Marriage. The show is set in the 1990s, when Demento’s radio show was still nationally syndicated; Hansen has had two cameos in the past season, evaluating and then playing a fictional song sent to him by one of the characters.

And people are still making the material he loved to transmit over the FM airwaves. Comic musicians (the artists in the Funny Music Project, the Wolves of Glendale, Kira Coviello) tour, post songs on their websites, or just make videos for social media, much as their novelty-act forebears labored in nightclubs and for niche record labels. Coviello’s stage act, Honest2Betsy and her Bawdy Broads, features singing, dancing, ventriloquism, and a segment where she touts herself as the world’s only topless accordion player.

You can call that silly, strange, or funny. But only one word truly captures it: demented.

The post The DJ Who Brought America Weird Al, Tom Lehrer, and 'Cows With Guns' appeared first on Reason.com.

In the 2024–2025 school year, 60.2 percent of grades awarded at Harvard were A’s, according to the school’s Office of Undergraduate Education. For context, only a quarter of undergraduates received A’s two decades ago, reported The Harvard Crimson. 

Harvard students are undoubtedly bright, but should professors be giving them that many A’s? According to Harvard’s new grade inflation policy, no. On Wednesday, the school’s faculty voted 458–201 to put a 20 percent cap on A grades starting in the 2027–2028 school year, reports the Crimson. The plan, the outlet reports, would also allow for professors to give four additional A’s per course enrollment. 

A 2025 report attributed Harvard’s “out of whack” (as one faculty member described it) grading system to a few factors, including professors’ unwillingness to be perceived as “demanding” compared to other faculty and “increasingly litigious” students. 

The college also acknowledged that the pressure to inflate grades may come from the school itself, admitting that professors were increasingly expected to provide emotional support to students struggling with “difficult family situations,” “imposter syndrome,” and “stress.” As a result, “requirements were relaxed, and grades were raised, particularly in the year of remote instruction.” Many faculty members wanted to “reverse that shift,” but they reportedly feared whether the administration would “have their back.” Finally, the school shifted from assigning high-stakes exams to giving more, lower-stakes assignments, which many professors found difficult to assess in a “sufficiently differentiated way.”   

Harvard is not the only school struggling with grade inflation. In Yale’s recent report examining why Americans have lost trust in higher education, the school acknowledged that grade inflation was partially to blame. To “restore common grading norms,” the report recommended instituting “a 3.0 mean, or some other college-wide standard, so that letter grades can once again be used in a reliable and comparable way.” The report also recommended that Yale transcripts provide context for where students stand “relative to the rest of the class,” so students are not penalized for taking more demanding courses. Reason’s intern Ari Shtein, a current Yale student, has suggested this may be a more sensible, context-based approach to tackling grade inflation than instituting a grading cap.

Princeton recognized the grade inflation problem early, and in 2004, it adopted a grade cap policy. But it “abandoned the system a decade later after criticism that it disadvantaged students in competition for jobs and graduate school admission,” reported the Associated Press. Since then, the problem has resurfaced, with A-minuses, A’s, and A-pluses making up 66.7 percent of undergraduate grades in the 2024–2025 school year. 

Tackling grade inflation always seems to produce some controversy, understandably among students. When Harvard released its October report on grade inflation, several students told the Crimson the report “misrepresented their academic experience and would add pressure to an already demanding campus environment.”

In a statement released Wednesday, Harvard’s dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh said that grade inflation is a “complex and thorny issue.” Still, she encourages other institutions to confront similar issues with “the same level of rigor and courage.”

Harvard is taking a risk by curbing grade inflation, but it is one that others would need to adopt to restore meritocracy across the board. If other schools continue to dole out A’s like Oprah while others assess students more harshly, employers will continue to receive unclear and potentially misleading signals about students’ academic performance. And grades are not just for employers’ eyes; they are for the students to understand how well they have mastered a subject. If the purpose of a university is to pursue truth, students deserve honest feedback from their professors, even if that means receiving lower grades.

The post 60% of Harvard Grades Were A's in 2025. Now the School Is Fighting Grade Inflation. appeared first on Reason.com.

Reason has been nominated for 17 Southern California Journalism Awards, the Los Angeles Press Club announced Monday. We have nominees in magazine, video, and podcast categories. The winners will be announced on June 28 at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles.

MAGAZINE

Columnist

Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward for “Hypocrisy on Bodily Autonomy at the DEA,” from the February 2025 issue of Reason; “Why Free Movement Is Essential to a Free Society,” from the August/September 2025 issue of Reason; and “Don’t Fear ‘Frankenfood.’ We’re Already Living in the Lab-Grown Future,” from the October 2025 issue of Reason.

Investigative

Reporter Billy Binion for “Not Guilty but Punished Anyway,” from the May 2025 issue of Reason. This delves into a little-known aspect of the U.S. criminal justice system: Defendants can be sentenced for charges a jury rejected.

Feature, Entertainment (Over 1,000 Words)

Assistant Editor Joe Lancaster for “How the Punisher, a Murderous Anti-Hero, Became the Mascot for Increasingly Militarized Police Forces,” from the December 2025 issue of Reason. This explores how law enforcement figures have adopted Marvel’s Punisher as an aspirational symbol rather than a cautionary one.

PRINT/ONLINE

NATIONAL POLITICS/GOVERNMENT REPORTING

Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey for “Can America Get Out of the Gerontocracy Trap?” from the May 2025 issue of Reason. This examines the harms of America’s gerontocracy and explores a surprising solution.

IMMIGRATION REPORTING, Sociopolitical

Deputy Managing Editor Fiona Harrigan for “An El Paso Christian Charity Is Caught Up in Texas’ Border Fight Against the Feds,” from the February 2025 issue of Reason. This reports on the government’s pursuit of a Christian charity that feeds, shelters, and clothes immigrants.

PRINT

BUSINESS REPORTING

Reporter Eric Boehm for “Trump’s War on Chocolate: ‘There’s No Way for Us To Source This Domestically,’” from the November 2025 issue of Reason. This probes how tariffs have been hurting American chocolatiers.

activism journalism

Reporter C.J. Ciaramella for “Texas and Florida Have Become National Models for Using the Police State To Wage Culture War Battles,” from the November 2025 issue of Reason. This explores how some governments are using culture-war battles to fuel a police state that threatens individual freedom.

ONLINE

INVESTIGATIVE, Government Related

Reporter Christian Britschgi for “New Jersey Town Says Small Setbacks, Stray Cats Allow It To Seize Private Property.” This examines allegations that a local government is trying to seize property from business owners by using flimsy accusations of blight.

ART/PHOTOGRAPHY

BEST ISSUE

Art Director Joanna Andreasson for her work on the August/September 2025 issue, which looks at freedom around the globe.

BROADCAST—TV/FILM/RADIO/PODCAST

Humor/satire writing

Producer Andrew Heaton, Senior Producer Austin Bragg, Director of Special Projects Meredith Bragg, and Producer John Carter for “Andor v. Star Trek: How Star Wars gets government right.”

Producer Andrew Heaton, Senior Producer Austin Bragg, Director of Special Projects Meredith Bragg, and Producer John Carter for “Every confirmation hearing ever.”

activism journalism

Senior Producer Zach Weissmueller, Editor John Osterhoudt, and Motion Graphics Artist Lex Villena for “Snowden was right. Now Trump should pardon him.”

solutions journalism

Editor at Large Nick Gillespie, former Producer Justin Zuckerman, Editor Hana Ko, Audio Engineer Ian Keyser, and Motion Graphics Artist Lex Villena for “How Texas beat California on housing.”

TELEVISION/FILM BROADCAST

Investigative

Contributer Aaron Brown for “Are poor geniuses being shut out of science?,” “Does legalizing sex work increase human trafficking?,” and “The global warming rat apocalypse debunked” from Wrong Number, his series that challenges common narratives based on misreadings of data.

HUMAN INTEREST FEATURE (Over 5 Minutes)

Senior Producer Zach Weissmueller, Editor John Osterhoudt, and Motion Graphics Artist Lex Villena for “Why Trump made a deal to free Ross Ulbricht.”

AUDIO JOURNALISM

PERSONALITY PROFILE/INTERVIEW, Entertainment Personalities (Over 10 Minutes)

Editor at Large Nick Gillespie for “Alton Brown: A Culinary Legend Offers Food for Thought.”

PERSONALITY PROFILE/INTERVIEW, Non-Entertainment Personalities (Over 10 Minutes)

Reporter Billy Binion for “Helen Prejean: Why This Nun Is Fighting To End the Death Penalty.”

The post <em>Reason</em> Receives 17 Nominations for Southern California Journalism Awards appeared first on Reason.com.

If the avatar of the alt-right movement was Pepe the Frog, its equivalent for today’s far-right youths is a corpulent cartoon toad called Groyper. That character has become so associated with the antisemitic influencer Nick Fuentes and his legions of fanboys that its name now does double duty as a label for their online community.

In broad strokes, Groypers are aggrieved Gen Z men who spend too much time on the internet. Some self-identify as incels, short for involuntary celibates—those who despair of ever receiving the sexual attentions of a woman. Many claim the mantle of traditional Christianity, though without the imprimatur of any church.

Following their leader’s example, Groypers generally adopt an ironic posture and winking delivery intended to make onlookers feel unsure whether to be horrified by their unabashed racism and misogyny or to laugh it all off as performance art. Since transgressiveness is their main source of in-group social capital, a status competition has emerged to see who can be most inflammatory and offensive. Thus Fuentes has gleefully described Adolf Hitler as “really fucking cool” and once declared with a grin that “a lot of women want to be raped….There’s like a lot of women who really want a guy to beat the shit out of them, but also, they have to pretend that they don’t.”

In 2019, Fuentes launched what he called the Groyper War, dispatching his followers to attend Turning Point USA events and use the question-and-answer sessions to lambast the group’s celebrity founder, Charlie Kirk, for supporting Israel, tolerating homosexuality, and otherwise supposedly selling out conservatism. Before Kirk’s assassination, Fuentes frequently mocked him and boasted of having “impregnated” Turning Point with Fuentes’ ideas.

The influence and relevance of Groyperism to right-wing politics is increasingly hard to deny. “When I began my career in 2017, I was considered radioactive in the American Right for my White Identitarian, race realist, ‘Jewish aware,’ counter-Zionist, authoritarian, traditional Catholic views,” Fuentes wrote in 2023. Six years later, “on almost every count, our previously radioactive views are pounding on the door of the political mainstream.”

In October 2025, the former Fox News star Tucker Carlson posted a chummy two-hour conversation with Fuentes to his social media channels. Kevin Roberts, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, defended the interview, sparking a dramatic revolt among the think tank’s donors and staff.

Fuentes responded with a video celebrating the fracas as evidence of the “ascendancy” of Groyperism. “I get recognized everywhere I go, and it’s all young guys high-fiving me, [saying] ‘Keep talking about the Jews!'” he said. “Infiltration is not a pipe dream. It’s not talk. It’s happening. We did it.”

The post What Exactly Is a Groyper? appeared first on Reason.com.

Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Happy St. Patrick’s Day, have a Guinness or two (or 10).

Before we start, I want to make sure you know about our March Madness bracket groups. Click here for the men’s bracket group, and click here for the women’s one. Alas, there’s no monetary prize for winning this year, but it’ll be fun to see how your bracket compares to Reason staffers (several colleagues who don’t like sports usually join in) and fellow subscribers.

This edition also marks Free Agent‘s first anniversary. No gifts necessary, you can just forward this newsletter to a friend who might enjoy it, or send them straight to our subscription page. It’s been a really fun year—many thanks to all of you for reading and subscribing!

With that, let’s get into the World Baseball Classic, sports betting, legendary sports moments, and, unfortunately, a debate about sexy sports.

Locker Room Links

• Days before March Madness, Alabama’s Aden Holloway is suspended indefinitely after getting arrested for allegedly dealing marijuana.
• After Venezuela reached the World Baseball Classic final, President Donald Trump posted on social media, “STATEHOOD, #51, ANYONE?“
• Washington state is implementing an income tax on millionaires. “It’s gonna sting” in free agency, the Seahawks general manager said. Maybe a flat tax is the way to go?
• Next week NBA owners will vote on exploring expansion—but only in Las Vegas and Seattle.
• How lobbyists for the Portland Trail Blazers pressured politicians into spending $400 million on the team’s city-owned arena.
• Formula 1 canceled two races because of the Middle East war—the races had been planned for Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.
• The White House is posting more bombing videos from the war, now interspersed with footage from Wii Sports.
• J.C. Tretter resigned from the NFL Players Association in shame back in July—now he might get the union’s top job anyway.
• The Reason team was shocked and saddened last week by the death of our longtime colleague Brian Doherty. Brian’s work with Reason spanned four decades, a long and unmatched journalism career: from interviewing Milton Friedman in the ’90s, to chronicling the rise of libertarian Rep. Ron Paul in the 2000s, to countering antigun misinformation in the 2010s, to profiling Elon Musk’s MAGA turn in the 2020s, and many more timeless pieces I don’t have room to list. It’s a terrible loss for Reason, and for everyone who believes in freedom for all.
  

  A farewell to our colleague Brian Doherty, dead at 57 https://t.co/vNY3iVvTqf

  — reason (@reason) March 14, 2026

For Every Sport, a World Cup?

If there’s one thing most people seem to feel strongly about, it’s geography. The place they’re from? It’s better than the place you’re from. That goes whether it’s players from who-knows-where playing on their local professional sports team, or their fellow citizens playing on a team representing their country, or whatever kind of pizza their city is famous for.

Those strong feelings are why every sport would be wise to have a World Cup of some kind.

We’re seeing it now with the World Baseball Classic. The Marlins can’t give enough tickets away to fill their ballpark, but if you just pit the Dominican Republic against Venezuela there with some stakes on the line, you’ll see a $300 get-in price. At some point, MLB started to realize it had a potential hit on its hands—games went from being hidden on MLB Network to shown on FOX, they added more teams and more games, and higher-quality players started opting in, too.

The NHL is ramping up its international involvement, too, with pros finally back in the Olympics and the NHL bringing back the World Cup of Hockey and taking it more seriously. Flag football at the 2028 Olympics has the NFL’s blessing. (The NBA seems to be missing the boat—perhaps because the Basketball World Cup is organized by FIBA and not the league itself, so there’s not much of a direct financial benefit.)

It’s a great way to grow sports internationally. What’s better? Staging a game abroad between two teams that foreigners have little attachment to, or staging a competitive game with a team of players from their country? Foreigners are obviously going to be more interested in following the latter long-term.

Even though these are competitions with a winner and many losers, they generally don’t sow actual hatred between different countries. Maybe you skipped the Canadian maple syrup during the Olympics, but now you wouldn’t think twice about it.

International competition gets players and fans excited—they care about the stakes, unlike in most All-Star Games. They give people something new to watch and care about, and are clearly a great avenue to deepen fandoms. Whatever sport it might be, leaders would be wise to figure out a way to get more of a focus on international team competitions.

Betting With Company Dollars

Lots of talk online last week about The Atlantic‘s new cover story, in which the magazine gave staff writer McKay Coppins $10,000 to gamble on sports during the most recent NFL season. The headline on the cover is “My Year as a Degenerate Gambler,” in case you had any hopes of it being a fair and balanced piece (also, fact check: the NFL season was less than six months long, not a “year”).

Coppins is a strong writer, and I can see why readers were drawn to his personal experience. He starts as a reluctant Mormon, begrudgingly participating in gambling for the sake of good journalism, before the betting devolves into an obsession that’s a strain on his family life.

But as someone who’s read every scolding “here’s how this person ruined their life through sports betting” article out there, I was disappointed. Thirteen thousand words and I didn’t see any new arguments I hadn’t heard before, or learned anything new other than “Don’t ask McKay Coppins for betting advice.” (I learned much more from a better and shorter Atlantic piece published over the weekend, “The Cure for Snoring“).

Coppins finishes the season having lost $9,891 of The Atlantic‘s money. While tempted to keep betting, he decides to fill out a self-exclusion form that bans himself from it instead. The takeaway for most readers, it seems, is that the pull of sports betting is too strong for mere mortals to deal with and must be stopped.

My takeaway is different. People should bet for fun. If they’re not having fun, they’re probably trying too hard to get rich quick (or make up for financial losses), which will probably make them poor and unhappy. The law should treat adults as capable of making choices that are best for them, even though a small fraction of the population will cause problems for themselves while everyone else is having fun. While the public narrative seems to think more and more people are getting consumed by sports betting’s temptations, there’s ample evidence that the number of people betting has plateaued.

Thankfully, defenders of betting got good news this week when a new poll found legalized sports betting has more supporters than opponents.

The best rebuttal to the piece, though, is all around you this week: tens of millions of people casually betting with their friends in March Madness bracket pools.

Legends Never Die

Is anything in sports truly legendary anymore?

There’s an interesting case study to be had about nothing in sports feeling legendary anymore. I don’t think it’s a nostalgia thing at all, I think it’s the rise of social media and accessibility so we move on from everything immediately.

— ⁸???????????????????? (@33643pts) March 11, 2026

It’s a sentiment that I sympathize with at times, but I think is totally wrong. When you grow up hearing about legends of the distant past like Babe Ruth and Gordie Howe, it’s easy to miss the fact that you’ve seen the legends of today’s era like LeBron James and Tom Brady. It’s also a weird sentiment to share after the whole country just celebrated a legendary moment thanks to the U.S. men’s hockey team (it was no Miracle on Ice, sure, but it captured the country’s attention for a week).

To be fair, some of this feeling is because of how quickly the news cycle moves. Before the last piece of confetti has been cleaned up, The Athletic and ESPN have “Way-Too-Early” power rankings ready for next season, and a free agency preview to keep your mind thinking forward instead of reveling in the champion’s glory. Yet I’m more likely to click on those early rankings to see how my team stacks up for next year rather than read about the in-depth profile of how some team I don’t care for finally won their title (or worse, did it again).

It’s fine to feel nostalgic about sports (unless you’re a politician thinking about subsidizing a stadium), but don’t let nostalgia cloud your appreciation for the amazing sports moments surrounding you. It’s easier than ever to enjoy all kinds of sports, and sports fans should be incredibly thankful for that.

Sports, Sexy? (Sorry.)

I regret to inform you that this post inspired a vigorous conversation at Reason on which sports are and aren’t sexy, and that I’ve been told this list would make good content.

Skiing is sexy and bowling isn't https://t.co/lCwJcP42kc

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) March 11, 2026

Sexy sports: Skiing, swimming, billiards, tennis, basketball, soccer, curling(?), gymnastics, biathlon (“The guns make it sexy”), field hockey, speed skating, luge (“uncomfortably sexy”)

Not sexy sports: Bowling, hiking, cross country, golf, football, table tennis, wrestling, cricket, competitive weightlifting, chess (unless it’s chess boxing), squash, pickleball (“too many olds”), quidditch (“unsexy to consider it a sport”).

In between: baseball (“only if you’re into dadbods“), equestrian sports (“I don’t want to call a sport with a horse sexy” vs. the outfits), ice hockey (“if you like no teeth“), rugby (“incredible thighs” vs. bleeding ears), water polo, fencing (“inherently sexy, but unsexy uniforms”).

(Sports are not ranked by sexiness, just listed in the same order they came up in our bonkers conversation.)

If you have thoughts on which sports are sexy and which aren’t, I beg you to email me about anything else at freeagent@reason.com.

In all seriousness, to answer the original question of why skiing gets more media coverage than bowling, I suspect it’s because skiing happens in ski-specific resort towns and other centralized areas that have newsworthy stories connected to economics, politics, environmentalism, and travel. Bowling just happens down the street from everybody.

Replay of the Week

You’re going to want to see this one from multiple angles.

WHAT DID WE JUST WITNESS? pic.twitter.com/EKguhwjeFA

— Sportsnet (@Sportsnet) March 13, 2026

That’s all for this week. Don’t forget to join the bracket groups! Click here for the men’s bracket group, and click here for the women’s one. Enjoy watching the real game of the week in an even older bracket competition, Detroit City F.C. against the Michigan Rangers on Tuesday night in soccer’s U.S. Open Cup.

The post Should Every Sport Have Some Kind of World Cup? appeared first on Reason.com.

Brian Doherty, a longtime Reason senior editor and the leading historian of the libertarian movement, was found dead Friday morning after a fall the night before in Battery Yates park along the San Francisco Bay. He was 57.

Doherty, who began working at Reason in 1994, was the author of six books, most notably the definitive 2007 study, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement. Conservative writer Jonah Goldberg called Radicals an “extraordinary accomplishment“; libertarian economist Bryan Caplan dubbed it a “remarkable labor of love.”

Doherty’s other book-length treatments of libertarian phenomena included Gun Control on Trial: Inside the Supreme Court Battle Over the Second Amendment (2008), Ron Paul’s rEVOLution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired (2012), and Modern Libertarianism: A Brief History of Classical Liberalism in the United States (2025).

“Brian was the historian of the libertarian movement,” says Reason Foundation President David Nott. “He lovingly and comprehensively portrayed the colorful characters in the libertarian world.”

Born in Brooklyn and raised mostly in Florida, Doherty first caught the libertarian bug at age 12 by gobbling up the Illuminatus! trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

“One of the specific purposes of that work, according to Wilson, was to do to the state what Voltaire did to the church—that is, reduce it to an object of contempt for all thoughtful people,” he recalled in 2018. “I wound up mail ordering a copy of the Principia Discordia, the founding religious document of the Discordian Church discussed in Illuminatus! I tracked down this volume in the rich, fascinating, and frightening catalog of the bookseller Loompanics. Afterward I delved deeper into its offerings of forbidden or hated ideas, eventually ordering a copy of Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson. That book’s version of economics matched the ethical conclusion that felt undeniable to me after reading Illuminatus!: that shaping the human social order primarily by granting one set of people working under an institutional cover the poorly restricted right to rob, assault, and kill others at their will seemed like a bad idea.”

Hazlitt led to Ludwig von Mises, F.A. Hayek, and above all Murray Rothbard, the latter of whom, fittingly, was the subject of Doherty’s last piece published before his death, “100 Years of Murray Rothbard.”

While majoring in journalism at the University of Florida, Doherty “met some congenial and hilarious people manning a booth for the…College Libertarians in the autumn of 1987,” and was off to the races, mixing intense philosophical curiosity with an equally deep interest and participation in the more animal spirits of DIY music and expressive freedom.

Relocating to Los Angeles in the mid-’90s, he fell in with “a gang of arty pranksters you’ve likely never heard of” called the Cacophony Society, who “inspired or created phenomenon ranging from the novel/movie Fight Club to urban exploration, billboard alteration, the Yes Men, flash mobs, and ‘Santa Rampages.'”

Cacophony’s most lasting stunt was the one that evolved into the annual temporary art festival in Nevada called Burning Man. “I thought my deskbound, magazine-reporter, bedroom record label–running self would be destroyed by the pitiless desert,” Doherty would later recall. “So I didn’t go in ’94. By 1995, I had heard so much about Black Rock City’s functional anarchy that I had to go—anarchy being one of my primary intellectual interests.”

Those words can be found in the prologue of Doherty’s first book, 2004’s This Is Burning Man: The Rise of a New American Underground, which grew out of a 2000 Reason cover story. He never stopped going to Burning Man, nor participating wholeheartedly in obscure art/music happenings that some of his bemused work colleagues would find almost as inscrutable as some of his counterculture pals viewed libertarianism.

“Brian’s contributions to the art scenes in L.A. and San Francisco were monumental,” says his best friend, the showman/experience designer Chicken John Renaldi. “His passing leaves so many people and so many systems impoverished.”

Doherty’s knowledge of pop culture, rock music, and comic books was encyclopedic, as evidenced not just by his heroically cluttered workspaces but by his 2022 book, Dirty Pictures: How an Underground Network of Nerds, Feminists, Misfits, Geniuses, Bikers, Potheads, Printers, Intellectuals, and Art School Rebels Revolutionized Art and Invented Comix.

“Libertarians talk a lot about freedom and responsibility. Brian embodied both,” Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward recalls. “His weird, colorful life—filled with comics and festivals and music and books—was a model of life lived freely and openly. And in his thinking, reporting, and editing, he was one of the most conscientious and responsible people I have ever met. A libertarian hero in every sense.”

Spelunking in subcultures both libertarian and whimsical led to a lot of early discoveries that the normies only sussed out later. Doherty profiled New Hampshire’s Free State Project way back in 2004, caught Seasteaders on their then-rise in 2009, and started covering Bitcoin in 2013. Though, as he ruefully admitted later, he knew about the groundbreaking crypto currency as early as July 2010 yet somehow neglected to cash in.

“Had I shelled out, say, $2,000 on this innovative, anti-inflationary currency even a lazy six weeks after I was introduced to it,” he wrote, “today I would be sitting on 28,571 bitcoins, the equivalent at press time of over $212 million in cash.” More like $2 billion now, but who’s counting?

After news of his death broke, Doherty’s work colleagues filled up a long Slack thread with fond memories of his deep-seated sense of tolerance, his garrulous laugh, his fury at personal technology, his sometimes elliptical prose style. A staffer once made a T-shirt from a typically verbose Dohertian Slack message: “I try not to assume that because crazy people with crazy beliefs believe or used to believe the things I believe for what I think are right and sane reasons, that that is a sign that I am crazy. But it’s getting harder and harder I confess.”

Doherty in recent years had suffered from a series of physical ailments and setbacks that left him walking with a cane. It is likely that condition contributed to his deadly tumble Thursday, as he took a stroll away from—of course!—an art gathering atop an abandoned World War 2 gun battery. More details are expected to emerge next week, though the (terrible) news remains the same.

What we’re left with is a sui generis body of work. Explorations of “the hippie capitalism of the Grateful Dead.” Massive oral histories of the Libertarian Party and Reason. A full-throated libertarian critique/condemnation of a man many of his fellow Rothbardians took a flier on, Donald Trump.

“He and his work will be missed,” former Reason Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie tweeted Saturday. “And more important, remembered.”

The post Brian Doherty, Historian of the Libertarian Movement, Dead at 57 appeared first on Reason.com.

The National Park Service reinstalled Washington, D.C.’s only statue of a Confederate soldier in October 2025 as part of the Trump administration’s effort to restore preexisting monuments in the capital. The depiction of Brigadier General Albert Pike was toppled by protesters in the summer of 2020, with many treating it as just another symbol of Confederate nostalgia. But it was erected to honor Pike’s civic and philanthropic legacy, not his role in the Civil War.

Pike’s bronze likeness was not donated by a Southern historical society or heritage league, nor funded by a Jim Crow–era government. It was privately commissioned by the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry of Washington, D.C., as part of a fundraising effort that began in the 1890s—years before the wave of Confederate monument construction. The statue honors Pike not for his service to the Confederacy but for his postwar work as a legal scholar, philanthropist, and advocate for the rights of indigenous tribes. This is emphasized by depicting him in civilian garb and holding a book rather than wearing his dress blues and brandishing a rifle.

Pike represented Native American nations in their claims against the federal government. He made various legal contributions in his home state of Arkansas, publishing The Arkansas Form Book, which helped standardize the state’s legal codes. He also advocated for expanding access to quality education for those on the frontier.

The reaction to the reinstatement of Pike’s statue ignores these other roles Pike played in American history and falsely lumps this specific monument in with every other Confederate memorial. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D–D.C.), for example, referred to it as “morally objectionable” and “an affront to the mostly Black and Brown residents of the District of Columbia.” Norton, who was at the forefront of attempts to move the statue as early as 1992, has again introduced legislation to permanently remove it.

The context surrounding the Pike statue is different from efforts in parts of the South to reerect Confederate war memorials and rename schools. It’s an effort to restore the monument in alignment with its original purpose. In doing so, the National Park Service isn’t celebrating Pike; it’s complying with legal obligations to maintain, upkeep, and protect monuments located on federal land.

Public memory often shoehorns complex historical figures into two categories: virtuous heroes or irredeemable villains. This impulse depends on rejecting historical context in favor of theatrical certainty. Pike’s life cannot be placed neatly into either box.

The post D.C.'s Statue of a Confederate General Isn't What Its Critics Think It Is appeared first on Reason.com.

There aren’t many video games about political philosophy. Even fewer are about Ayn Rand and the outer limits of Objectivism. But BioShock is exactly that.

Released in 2007 to huge sales and near-universal acclaim, the first-person, science fiction shooter went on to become a touchstone in gaming, bringing moral and philosophical nuance to a genre defined by lowbrow shoot-’em-ups. The game is an interrogation of the notion of choice, giving players a sense of moral agency while toying with the formal conventions of video games in ways that reveal how empty many interactive game choices really are.

BioShock was created by Ken Levine, one of gaming’s most elusive figures. He has sometimes described himself as both an individualist and a capitalist, and he says the game was inspired by Rand’s uncompromising vision for society—and a question about what would happen if that vision were taken to a dystopian extreme.

In October, Levine spoke with Reason‘s Peter Suderman about how video games have changed, whether he’d be able to make BioShock now, and just how he ended up making a game about Rand in the first place.

Reason: How did you come to make a big-budget, first-person shooter video game about libertarianism, Objectivism, and Ayn Rand?

Levine: I had just read The Fountainhead. I wasn’t particularly politically tuned into anything. I didn’t really realize who [Rand] was and her larger philosophical mission.

But Rand writes a great potboiler, right? It’s a great story about this architect and everybody’s trying to destroy him. He stays true to his principles, and he’s handsome and charming, and there’s this woman who’s just in love with him. And it was a great story, but I started to get the themes, which I thought were certainly interesting—her notion of altruism being a negative thing. That’s obviously very different than what you’re sort of brought up with, but I just found it a really interesting thought experiment.

The challenge I saw in the books is they were very much written by somebody who wanted her side to win, and therefore the characters can be a little one-dimensional. You have the architect and then you have the critic character—who’s an amazing villain, who bribes him, blackmails him to change his work and to give up his artistic principles and he just won’t, even to the point where he burns down an architectural construct he built rather than compromising it.

Also Rand, she’s just a great speaker. She’s a great character when she talks.

For those who don’t know, the game takes the Rand idea and brings it to its extreme, very similar to what you see a lot of people talking about with seasteading and wanting to build a city on the ocean or underwater. I said, “Well, let’s do a bit of a fantastical story about an Ayn Rand–like figure who does try to build a society where everybody adheres to her principles and nobody’s going to come take that away from them, a sort of ultra anarcho-capitalist society where there are no limitations on growth, there are no limitations on creativity.”

She had given me—just through her voice—such a great persona that I was really able to just transliterate that voice into this character, Andrew Ryan, who had a very similar background to her. Was born in czarist Russia, but then the Soviets came in and destroyed his family, just like what happened to Rand’s family. I definitely thought that was a great origin story about somebody who was just constantly terrified of the Bolsheviks showing up at the door and turning his life upside-down again. I got that as a human being, and I’m like: “OK, let me see if I can try to tell a Randian-like story, but try to do it where the people are more like people I know, real people who have flaws.” But I had no interest in saying, “Oh, screw Objectivism. I’m just going to make fun of it.” I really want to engage with it, but how it intersects with real people rather than characters in a book.

Do you view the first BioShock as a critique of Objectivism?

No, I don’t think it is particularly. I never set out to take down Objectivism or libertarians. Just the whole concept of this very interesting worldview: Can you make a better world if you really focus on just yourself and improving yourself?

And the idea, going back to Adam Smith, right? The baker doesn’t bake bread because he wants to help other people; he bakes bread because he wants to make money to feed his family, but when doing so, he feeds the entire community. I just wanted to start with that principle, which is kind of true and brilliant. It’s market economies, and I’m a big believer in market economies.

But then we said, “Well, what if you took the regulatory structure and you just completely destroyed it?” And of course, it’s a video game. If I was writing a novel, I might’ve used a little more subtlety, but it’s a video game. And so—because a player is not reading text on a page, he’s engaging in this world, it’s a first-person shooter—I try to think: What does completely, completely unregulated commerce look like?

Part of what makes BioShock such an enduring game and so powerful is that you wrote it so that both sides can see their ideas reflected in it.

Absolutely. I think it’s really uninteresting to answer questions in art. I’d much rather pose interesting questions.

One of the things I’m proudest of is: I’ve talked to a lot of libertarians, a lot of Randians. I’ve never talked to one who played the game who doesn’t like the game. I really try to think through what would be the positives out of a society like that—because there are going to be positives, right? When you really empower artists and thinkers and scientists in a way that allows them to avoid the extremes of the regulatory state. But then also at the same time examining, well, where is that line where regulation becomes critical to a functioning society? And that’s what always interests me, not black and white issues. I like living in the gray.

Games are a tricky medium to tell a story. It’s a game where you shove a gun in the person’s hand and the primary interaction you’re having is shooting things. So to do all the other stuff, we focus so much of the attention on the world you’re doing it in.

Going back to our first game, System Shock 2, we always try to make the space believable that humans live there. By the time we got to BioShock, we were like, “OK, what is this world? If this world was created by this guy with these principles, what would the delta between this society be with our society?” And there’s just an endless ground of material to dig up.

I get it, because I made a character of an artist in it who wants no limits to their art. In fact, his art actually even ends up involving murdering some of his acolytes and making them into a part of a triptych or a quadtych on display because he didn’t believe in any limitations to his art.

As somebody who is an artist, who has a reputation for being uncompromising about the way you tell your stories, was that something that you felt a little bit of a connection with?

Yeah. Because, look, I’m very lucky that Take-Two, the company I work for, does not really come in and tell me what to do.

It almost happened on BioShock. There was a contingent that was pushing to get rid of the Little Sisters because they were worried about the backlash.

For those that don’t know, the Little Sisters are these little girls who carry around this incredibly valuable resource in their stomach that you use to essentially gene splice yourself into anything you want. And part of the game is deciding: Do you do that to those girls or do you forgo that and try to survive in this deadly situation without those benefits? I wanted to give that economic question to the player.

That’s interesting that you say that that’s an economic question. If you understand game design, it’s an economic question where you can decide which way you are going to build and power up your character over the course of the game. And that’s an economy. But in the game, as a narrative question, it’s presented as a moral quandary—as “What kind of person are you going to be?” How did you come up with that choice?

There’s this thing in games called boss monsters where generally every few levels, you end up in a room with this big, tough boss and you fight them. I always hated those, because they felt like you were constraining the player. And I’m like, “Well, what if our boss monster in the game were these bosses you never had to fight and they were just defending these little girls?” And those became the Big Daddies and the Little Sisters. And the Big Daddies’ mission was because the little girls were so economically valuable in the city, they were basically their escorts as they wandered around collecting this material which they ingest into their stomach, which they convert into this valuable resource.

The first idea I had was the notion of this protector character. Then I’m like, “Well, now that I’ve got Rand and I’ve got this protector character and you’re really talking about anarcho-capitalism at the bottom of the sea, where might this go?” We came up with the notion that people could—and it’s happening now, it wasn’t happening at the time, but with CRISPR, you now have gene splicing.

But we sat down and we talked about what if you needed these little kids for your own survival to splice yourself so you could have survivability in this very dangerous collapsed society. And give the player an interesting choice to make, but also really carry that throughout the entire story and reflect the themes of Rand and when you need to regulate the market and when you do not.

That’s always been an interesting question to me, as sort of a capitalist but very much understanding the need for regulation.

BioShock came out in 2007, and you were describing something that doesn’t sound very obviously commercial on paper—a philosophical video game based on the ideas of Rand. But the game turned out to be this huge hit. What was it that pulled people in and keeps pulling people into this game and to this world?

I remember being at Rockefeller Center with my wife and we were still trying to figure out what the aesthetic was. We hadn’t determined the aesthetic.

If you’ve been to Rockefeller Center, it’s one of the only four square blocks, or a square block, in New York City that’s one architectural style. It’s all this beautiful expression of art deco. I saw it, and I remembered the cover of Atlas Shrugged I had was an art deco drawing of Atlas.

Rand loved those built urban environments.

Yep. Hated neoclassicism, loved modernism and art deco. And my wife and I just started taking pictures of the wall, the doorknob, the light fixture, everything. And I brought it back to the team when I got home and I’m like, “This is what this game looks like.”

We locked into a visual art style and that really helped. If you look at the opening of BioShock, I basically try to take Rand’s entire philosophy and crystallize it down to a 60-second Andrew Ryan speech and really deal with the principles and choices and being responsible for your choices and owning your life. And a resentment of the government and the church and all these people are trying to take control over you. And a sense of objective reality, that there is an objective reality.

When that game came out in 2007, the world of video game development was very different. Do you think that you could make BioShock now? And if you did, what would the reaction to it be like?

I don’t think BioShock per se. Infinite, the next game, I think definitely would be a very different conversation. But BioShock, we did have a couple of journalists who tried to ambush me with things because you have the option to harvest or essentially kill these little girls to gain this resource.

The game lets you be a moral monster.

People did talk to me about it and they were very concerned. And that element almost got pulled from the game because the publisher got nervous. But we had a great defender of ours at the publisher who said, “No, without that there’s no game.” And so they let us do it.

It was really before social media. I’m sure you can’t really do anything now without somebody getting upset about something. The next game, we got some shit about a bunch of stuff when it became much more about social media. Politics were a big discussion in the games industry, which they really weren’t in 2007. We were one of the first to really bring any kind of real political notion into games. And people really just seemed to generally, universally like it.

Let’s talk a little bit more about BioShock Infinite. There was a sequel in between that you didn’t really have much to do with, but BioShock Infinite is your follow-up and it is like the first game. It’s set in a beautiful and incredibly engaging world. It’s this dark and twisted vision of America. It’s a city in the sky rather than underwater, and it’s called Columbia—an early-1900s world that is supposed to be the ideal of America at the time. And this is, again, not exactly what you think of when you think of a big-budget commercial game that is an easy sell. How did you envision that world?

I had been reading a lot about the Gilded Age and period of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism. That was a big topic during the Iraq War. That topic of American exceptionalism came up a lot.

And it always struck me as a strange topic. I think America is exceptional because of what we do, not because there’s some external factor that has blessed us that way. But there was a big conversation about American exceptionalism, and neoconservatism was a major factor at that time. I think I was writing a little bit out of reaction to that: What does it mean to be American?

And also seeing can America be defined in a very specific way, the sort of deification of the Founders. Personally, I adore the Founders. I think they’re incredible people who figured out that separation of powers needed to be a thing, which is I think their most incredible innovation, but—

—and yet you also created a kind of a boss character who is a Founder bot, right?

Yeah, the Motorized Patriots.

And it’s one of the most memorable, big fights in the game.

You’ve got a Benjamin Franklin robot and a George Washington robot.

It’s very funny. It’s thrilling, but also it’s witty.

It was sort of a joke on the deification of any figure. I’ve talked to people who deify Rand, who say “I only do exactly what she says” and her word is gospel essentially. So you can turn anybody into a god. And I think people do that with the Founders.

The Founders, to be clear, I find to be exceptional, but they can get turned into people they weren’t. They can get turned into these godlike figures who had no flaws. But that’s what makes them amazing: As flawed, broken human beings, they did have a vision for the rights of man that wasn’t happening anywhere else in the world. I also wanted to criticize how that could be calcified into a bunch of received wisdoms like a church.

We were also wondering: What is a BioShock game, exactly? We thought that being based in sort of an alternate history was an important part of it. Eventually you find out that the worlds are quite connected, even though at first you’re like: “What the hell is this thing? It has nothing to do with the first game.” Different characters, different time period, but also an exaggerated sense of history, a focus on these philosophical debates that happen within America about what is America, who’s America for, that I still think resonate today.

Both of these games are about attempts to set up utopian societies that go wrong. They go wrong because they are ideological visions taken to their extreme, and because they are executed by people who are naturally flawed. Is that the through line here? Is that your worldview that you’re trying to put in these games?

I don’t talk about my politics very much, but certainly the notion of ideological capture, where people stop looking at reality and they keep looking at the text and say, “Well, the ideological text says this, so we have to do this even though the world’s falling apart.”

Look, people. We’re descended from animals. We’re not descended from angels. The best philosophies, the best ideologies, take that into account and manage that—that people have incentives and all those other things. But if you start from an ideology and you adhere to the ideology, quite often those rigid ideologies often lead to real disaster.

I know you just said you don’t talk about your politics too much, but you’ve said here that you are at least amenable to capitalism in some form. I think in other interviews you have said that you are some flavor of individualist. How does that inform your artistry?

I think the first thing I do is I say “whatever my political views are, they don’t get special treatment here.” I’m pretty skeptical of all rigid ideologies and I don’t really have one because, look, you use the tool for the job at hand and the job at hand often changes. When people say, “Well, I can’t do that because I’m a Democrat,” I’m like, “Well, what’s the outcome? Does it matter?” Or vice versa. “I’m a Republican. I can’t do it.” “I’m a Libertarian and I can’t do that.”

I’m a big fan of taking things as they come and acting appropriately. It was really important to me, in terms of writing the games, that I really didn’t want to write Andrew Ryan as a caricature. In fact, Rand’s voice is so helpful there because she was real.

This is part of why I wanted to ask you about what you think would happen if the BioShock games were released today, because we now view everything through such a political lens. A game like BioShock Infinite is political art. At the same time, there are people who are viewing these things not as art—just as politics. Is that constraining for video games as an industry?

It seems like you have tried to avoid that, but your last release was in 2014. You have not put something out into the world that we exist in now. How do you see this affecting this kind of art and culture?

There’s a moment in Infinite where the revolutionary group, we make clear, has their own moral challenges vs. the oppressor group, which you see in the founders of the city. But the revolution is an extremely bloody and violent revolution, like most revolutions tend to be.

The American Revolution was relatively squeaky clean, but there was still a lot of death and a lot of people cleansed out. You’ve got the loyalists being chased out of their homes. It was a mess. But most revolutions—I think about the French Revolution and the Haitian Revolution, they really devolved into a bit of a mess.

There were people who were pretty angry at the fact that I portrayed the revolutionary side as also having their own challenges. And that was interesting because we try to be very fair to everybody and we try to explain why they were so angry and why that might spin out of control. The Russian Revolution, Maoist Revolution—these are all not great examples of immediate peace and harmony.

I got a lot of crap about that, because there was a very particular viewpoint that it was racist or something to assume that that group of the underclass or the marginalized group would not stage a purely noble revolution. I got a bit of that. Probably, if it came out in 2020, it would’ve been a much bigger conversation, and that might’ve made some people very nervous.

But to me, that’s never a disincentive. If you’re not going to be brave about these things, well, you really shouldn’t be a writer.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

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