In September 1975, two California women each tried unsuccessfully to assassinate President Gerald Ford. The podcast Rip Current examines both women’s stories, plus the radical politics of a counterculture whose desperate last gasps informed their worldviews.

Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a 26-year-old Charles Manson disciple, tried to shoot Ford in Sacramento, but her gun misfired. Sara Jane Moore, a 45-year-old housewife who had gotten in too deep with radicals, fired at Ford in San Francisco 17 days later, but a bystander deflected the shot. The podcast recounts each woman’s history and the confluence of events that led them each to attempt to murder a sitting president.

Rip Current premiered on the anniversary of Fromme’s attempt, September 5. Coincidentally, this happened to fall just weeks after an attempted assassination of then-former President Donald Trump and just 10 days before officials foiled another attempt. While this moment in history feels tense—like the radical 1960s and ’70s—it’s worth remembering that, in fact, American political violence has been with us, and often more intensely, for a long time.

The post Review: The Radicals Who Tried To Kill Gerald Ford appeared first on Reason.com.

Pick your poison: Over the weekend, depending on your political flavor, you could have chosen between listening to a comedian hurl insults on stage at Madison Square Garden as part of a campaign rally; watching a sitting U.S. representative and a vice-presidential contender play video games and talk about scrapping the filibuster via Twitch; hearing a presidential candidate’s thoughts on whale psychology; or listening to a vulnerability researcher (?) and a presidential candidate gab about birth order.

Our sharpest political minds these are not.

It’s almost like everyone is avoiding talking about the actual issues—things like how to reduce inflation, how to bring government spending under control, how to make Social Security solvent, how to create an orderly and just immigration process, or how to improve the quality of our schools. The podcasting industry has, between the last election cycle and now, taken a glorious wrecking ball to cable news, creating a whole bunch of scrappy independent upstarts that presidential candidates (and their political consultants) finally understand to be an important way voters are receiving news and commentary. Unfortunately, the candidates themselves appear to have their heads filled with little more than fluff.

First, a predictable scandal: Tony Hinchcliffe, an insult comedian known for his off-color jokes, took to the stage to open for Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden yesterday. He made jokes about the Clintons, Diddy, and Latinos “making babies” and how they love to “come inside“—”just like they did to our country!”

He also said, “I don’t know if you guys know this but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” This became a political scandal, possibly jeopardizing Trump’s ability to win Puerto Rico’s electoral college votes. (Oh, wait…)

“When you have some a-hole calling Puerto Rico ‘floating garbage,’ know that that’s what they think about you….It’s what they think about anyone who makes less money than them,” said New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a response livestream with the Democrsats’ vice-presidential candidate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. (They’re apparently quite chummy now, or so they want voters to believe.)

“Can’t get over this dude telling someone else to change tampons when he’s the one shitting bricks in his Depends after realizing opening for a Trump rally and feeding red-meat racism alongside a throng of other bigots to a frothing crowd does, unironically, make you one of them,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X. “You don’t ‘love Puerto Rico.’ You like drinking piña coladas. There’s a difference.”

Can’t get over this dude telling someone else to change tampons when he’s the one shitting bricks in his Depends after realizing opening for a Trump rally and feeding red-meat racism alongside a throng of other bigots to a frothing crowd does, unironically, make you one of them. https://t.co/kr82avveYs

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 28, 2024

Were Puerto Ricans in attendance at the rally offended by this? Not really, or so it seems. But this whole saga is actually pretty emblematic of how this whole election has gone: We’ve almost entirely neglected to talk about actual issues. The Trump campaign keeps courting controversy, again and again and again, while the Harris/Walz campaign frequently defines itself in opposition to the Trumpists, reactive and apoplectic but rarely proactively defining what it is they would actually do.

Trump did Rogan: The most unhinged, meandering, and occasionally entertaining presidential candidate met his match in the most unhinged, meandering, and occasionally entertaining podcaster, and it was wild. Donald Trump and Joe Rogan talked about whale psychology. They talked about how Trump staffed his administration. They talked about the CHIPS and Science Act—which aimed to reduce reliance on Asia-manufactured chips, handing out subsidies for companies to produce semiconductor parts here at home—which Trump called “put[ting] up billions of dollars for rich companies,” saying he instead favored slapping large tariffs on the companies to try to boost growth of American manufacturing capacity. He explained his comments about the “enemy from within” and how he takes it to mean that there are “people that I really think want to make this country unsuccessful.” He, at times, got quite catty toward the ladies on The View.

Meanwhile, you have J.D. Vance—ostensibly the policy guy of the Trump campaign—talking about globalization on comedian Tim Dillon’s podcast. Vance said “London doesn’t feel fully English anymore,” while “New York of course is the classic American city. Over time, I think New York will start to feel less American.” (Is he saying that large cosmopolitan cities are adopting a certain sameness over time? What exactly is he predicting or talking about?)

Between Trump’s protectionism, Hinchcliffe’s off-color jokes, and Vance’s unclear issues with globalization, it all comes together to paint a portrait of a campaign with very different values and priorities than, say, what I have.

Then there’s Kamala: The Democratic presidential candidate went on vulnerability/empathy/shame researcher Brené Brown’s podcast and it was…kind of full of nothing. Brown asked Harris plenty of questions about her background—birth order! Harris’ nickname given to her by her sorority!—but never did they ever get to anything serious. They talked about the core values of “daring leaders.” If you had been playing a drinking game where you take a shot every time someone says “lived experience” or “Venn diagrams,” you would be face down on the rug.

Maybe we don’t deserve better from our leaders. Maybe our politics were always fated to be ground down to this. But boy is it depressing to see it all laid out before you, via hours and hours of longform content on different podcasts, consumed by polar-opposite portions of America who increasingly seem to believe they have very little in common with one another.

Scenes from Miami: I’m in Miami for an event run by Founders Fund, and I went to a Catholic Church yesterday that is coming out in full force against Florida Amendment 4, which would add abortion protections to the state constitution, including the text: “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.” (More on Amendment 4 here.)

Currently, Florida outlaws abortion after 6 weeks, and doctors and activists have been engaged in a campaign to draw attention to edge-case stories where women have been forced into medically difficult situations because the law purportedly does not make it clear that doctors are allowed to abort in life- and health-threatening circumstances. Proponents claim Amendment 4 will clarify this. The bishops of Florida, on the other hand, write: “We urge all Floridians of goodwill to stand against the legalization of late-term abortion and oppose the abortion amendment. In doing so, we will not only protect the weakest, most innocent, and defenseless of human life among us but also countless women throughout the state from the harms of abortion.”

QUICK HITS

• On Saturday, Israeli fighter jets hit multiple “air-defense systems, missile-making facilities and launchers” in Iran, reports Bloomberg, in response to Iran’s attack on Israel earlier this month. The attack was not extremely damaging in terms of lives lost—four Iranian soldiers have been reported killed—but it showed critical vulnerabilities in Iran’s weapons and nuclear-development infrastructure. An American military official, “speaking to reporters on the condition of anonymity, said President Joe Biden’s administration had worked with Israel to come up with a ‘proportional’ response and urged Iran not to retaliate again,” per Bloomberg.
• On a campaign stop in West Philadelphia, Kamala Harris “announced a plan to boost Puerto Rico’s economy and power grid,” again per Bloomberg.
• “Egypt has proposed an initial two-day ceasefire in Gaza to exchange four Israeli hostages of Hamas for some Palestinian prisoners, Egypt’s president said on Sunday as Israeli military strikes killed 45 Palestinians across the enclave,” reports Reuters.
• Interesting trend piece on how younger women are eschewing wearing their engagement rings and wedding bands daily; as a surfer, I am precluded from wearing mine for much of the summer, but I didn’t realize all the others were copying me.
• This “coach in chief” New York Times article is the most cringe thing I’ve read in a long while. Consume with caution.

The post Brené Brown vs. Joe Rogan appeared first on Reason.com.

• Video Editor: Ian Keyser

The post Kat Timpf: An Unapologetic Libertarian at Fox News appeared first on Reason.com.

What’s wrong with American health care?

That’s the question that drives the new season of Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, the Reason limited-run podcast series. Over the past few months, host Eric Boehm has been speaking with some of the doctors, medical professionals, and activists who are pushing back against the special interests, government contractors, and bad laws that make the American health care system such a mess.

Some of those problems are obvious. Prescription drugs are often too expensive and sometimes not available when you need them.

Others are less obvious, such as a series of state-level regulations that make it harder for medical professionals to offer their services. Or a monopoly government contractor that’s a big part of the reason why thousands of Americans die every year waiting for a new kidney.

On the new season of Why We Can’t Have Nice Things, you’ll hear a whole new set of stories about how the government is making Americans poorer and sicker, and how we can cure those ills. 

It all kicks off next Thursday, September 5, with special guest Mark Cuban. He’s the co-founder of Cost Plus Drugs, an innovative attempt to inject some market competition into the prescription drug industry.

Tune in to new episodes every Thursday through October 10—and if you haven’t listened to the first season of the show, check it out now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. 

• Producer: Hunt Beaty

The post Trailer: <em>Why We Can't Have Nice Things</em> Season 2 appeared first on Reason.com.

In March, Reason‘s Nick Gillespie talked with one of the great pioneers of podcasting:Dan Carlin, the host of Hardcore History. Carlin’s deeply researched and urgently delivered takes on everything from Julius Caesar’s wars in Gaul to Imperial Japan’s horrific conquest of Asia are downloaded by the millions. Gillespie and Carlin discussed how to understand the moral choices made in the past, how Carlin would update his 2019 book The End Is Always Near in light of COVID-19, and whether we can really learn meaningful lessons from history.

Reason: Who are your listeners and what do you think they’re getting out of the show?

Carlin: I don’t ask them questions about themselves or delve into who they are or what they make or where they live and how old they are and what their religious beliefs are. But the podcasting tools that are out there now give us more information than they used to. When we started, I feel like it was much more U.S.-centric, and now the international audience is growing more.

To give you a real answer, though, I don’t know a ton about the listeners, and I don’t want to. I feel like their privacy is valuable to them like mine is to me, and what the podcasting services give us is enough.

In 2019, you came on this podcast to talk about The End Is Always Near: Apocalyptic Moments from the Bronze Age Collapse to Nuclear Near Misses. This book came out just a few months before COVID became the latest apocalyptic moment. Did you feel like you were conjuring up material for the paperback version?

To be honest, I know the standard technique is to claim credit for all these things, but really I was one of the last people on the bandwagon of saying we’re vulnerable to another pandemic. I mean, there were a lot of people running around for years saying, “Warning, warning, warning.” We had near misses. It didn’t take a genius to see that coming. I do think the timing was just a little weird.

Were people more interested in what you were talking about during the pandemic or less, or did you notice any difference?

We did well during COVID, and we’ve seen a drop-off since, but I think it’s because people are back at work. One of the real benefits of audio over video is that you don’t have to watch something and you could be mowing the lawn or ironing a shirt or making dinner and still have the ability to multitask. So during COVID, people took the opportunity to listen to what we were doing while they were doing something else. Or we were just a good time waster, right? My shows are long.

Is history the story of massive forces that sweep over whole periods of time, or is it about heroic individuals who changed the course of history?

I think there’s a little bit of an axis of two lines crossing. One line is the personality of the people involved, and the other are the events, the trends, the forces of the times we live in. When those things intersect, I think that’s when you hit that sweet spot.

I try to get some perspective by imagining somebody else in a role. If Richard Nixon wins the ’60 election and he’s the one handling the Cuban missile crisis, does it go the same or does it go differently? Or better yet, what if the Cuban missile crisis happens a few years earlier and you have Gen. [Dwight D.] Eisenhower in the White House?

If you say, “Hmm, I don’t think it does turn out the same with those other people,” well, then you can say that having [John F.] Kennedy in the White House at that time and under those circumstances actually made history go in a different direction than it otherwise would.

Do you have historical figures that you consider heroes?

Oh, man, I should have a ready answer to a question like that, shouldn’t I? It’s funny, but off the top of my head, no one comes immediately to mind. But that’s not because there aren’t people that I greatly admire. Personality-wise, I am not much of a hero worshiper. Sometimes I look at people and I just wonder if I could have done what they did. People in the civil rights struggle in the 1950s and 1960s—when you look at the death threats that those people got, I always ask myself, “Would I have forged ahead knowing that people are talking about hurting my kids or firebombing my house?” To me, rather than the hero side of it, sometimes I measure myself against these other people. So there’s admiration there, but not hero worship.

Daniel Akst wrote a book called War By Other Means, which was a study of conscientious objectors during World War II. Looking at those guys and what they put up with, it was like being a mile underwater with the pressure on you to just cave. It’s pretty remarkable. I think we tend to think that we’re going to be the person who stands out in a crowd, but we’re probably kidding ourselves.

If nothing else, it’s the old line of, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” You look at these kinds of things and you just go, “Hmm, would I have been the one to shelter a Jewish person in occupied Europe?” Those are the tests. You don’t know until you get there. When I read these stories, rather than hero worship, I sometimes feel a little shamed by the whole thing and worried about how I might react in the same situation.

You define yourself as a pessimist—or maybe you’re a realist—but one of the things that your podcast shows again and again is that all societies collapse. All civilizations end at some point. I also hear you talking about how things get better. When you think about something like COVID happening, do you feel like we’ve gotten to a better place, or are you a long-term pessimist but a short-term optimist?

To me, that’s kind of a macro-micro question. I think on a micro level, an individual human level, there are always bad places to find yourself: bottom of the economic scale, trapped in a murderous dictatorship like North Korea. There’s awful places to be in any period in history, and they’re probably equally terrible to some degree or another.

On a macro level, there are obviously times and places that are better than others, right? So I think that sometimes you’re lucky to find yourself in a nation that’s technologically sophisticated and wealthy on the macro level of things: health care if you get hurt, not too many invasions during your lifetime.

Nothing lasts forever, whether it’s good times or bad times. I’m 58 years old right now, and life is good, but you can’t help but notice when you’re 58 that life isn’t going to be good forever. I don’t think that’s being pessimistic to just know that all good things must pass, and hopefully all bad things must pass, because change is inevitable.

Is world history ultimately military history? Or is it the history of trade? Or maybe migration? Where do you see those lines intersecting?

Sometimes I’ll do speaking engagements with schools, and you’ll have middle school or high school students that really don’t want to hear some guy talk to them about history. What I try to teach them is that because of the way history has to be segmented into so-called important events or important dates, that’s a construct of historians. What choice do they have? Imagine writing the history book of everything. You can’t do that, right? So the main thing that historians try to do is find out what’s important. Even these chapters where we decide one era has ended and another began is part of the human construct of just trying to organize everything that’s ever happened.

What I tell students is that you don’t necessarily have to understand when Columbus stumbled upon the Americas. That’s an important event according to somebody else. If you’re interested in motorcycles or fashion or dentistry or dogs, there is a history of that and that’s part of the past, too. There is no rule about what’s important in the past. What’s important in the past is what is important to you. The most important thing in my mind, and this is what I tell the students, is context and understanding how things go from where they were to how they are.

If you’re interested in motorcycles, find the first motorcycle ever built and find the one that just came out yesterday, and then trace the development from one to the other. You start to see the process of change in historical development and how things move over a course of decades. That teaches you the idea of the history of moving events. Then ask yourself, when you’re looking at these different motorcycles over the different eras, why they are the way they are. It teaches you the context that creates the circumstances about how these new motorcycles get developed, why they have these new features, these new parts.

So between the two of them, the context and the idea of historical change, you are getting the most important part. People are going to forget 1492 the minute the test is over, but they’re not going to forget the important parts of context and the historical change process if they learn it with something that they’re already interested in, that has a past that’s as much a part of the grand history of things as anything else is.

The past is kind of an infinite attic where you can rummage through and construct a lot of different stories that help you make sense of where you are, who you want to be, and where you want to go. Do you feel like people are cognizant of that?

I feel like we’ve never been more likely to judge people from the past by current modern moral sensibilities, which is something that obscures the past rather than illuminates it.

I had a professor once who was so good at trying to get us to put ourselves in the shoes of people from the past. He’d ask the question, “When they do things that we think are despicable now, was that their goal? Were they trying to do despicable things?” We were talking about people who tried to convert natives to Christianity, and the current line of thinking was that this was an awful thing to do. We were destroying native cultures and belief systems, forcibly taking them away from their families, and teaching them the white man’s religion. We can determine now that that was a huge loss in terms of what those people could have preserved and passed on to their children and all these kinds of things, but was the goal at the time to do something negative? He said, “No. You have to look at the way those people who did the converting saw the world.”

You could see it with the Spanish when they came to the New World. If you literally believe that your view of religion is correct and that there is a fiery place called Hell that you will go to if you don’t believe what they tell you to believe, and then they convert somebody to believing that, then they think they’ve done a good thing. Now, that doesn’t mean they have done a good thing. But when we look back on the past and judge people, we do so because every generation before us has done the exact same thing. We judge people based on our own modern sensibilities, and then we infuse people in the past sometimes with sort of evil overtones that if you could bring them back in a time machine would confuse and befuddle them—not because they didn’t do something that we could objectively look at today and say is bad, but because that wasn’t their goal at all. They thought they were doing good.

The reason I bring this up is because it’s very possible, in fact almost inevitable, that the same thing is going to happen with us. In the future, they’re going to look back on us and absolutely demonize us for any number of things that we couldn’t possibly know. I mean, airplane travel, eating meat, experimentation on animals.

A good example is somebody like Winston Churchill. If you’re raised in America or England, you love Winston Churchill: He was the man who saved the West during World War II. But if you’re from the Indian subcontinent, you have a radically different view of Winston Churchill. We shouldn’t pretend as if one side or the other doesn’t exist. We should really sit with the complications and try to work things out rather than dismiss the things that we have to work to understand.

We should point out that Churchill lived long enough and was involved in politics. He didn’t die until 1965. He was born in the 19th century and was active politically almost that whole time. So we’re talking about a figure that spanned the British Empire at its height to the postwar British coming down from imperial heights. Contextually speaking, he had detractors during his lifetime and political career. Before the Second World War broke out, there were a lot of people that thought he was a warmonger.

So that’s a wonderful example of what we were talking about earlier, when the axis gets crossed between the individual meeting the proper time and place. And Churchill knew it. I think he said if he could go back in time, he would always choose May 1940. That was his moment, and he knew it.

But to me, someone like Churchill, you have to ask yourself how much that guy could have been different given where he came from—his influences growing up. How much did that guy have any agency in thinking any differently?

I don’t want to write off good and evil in the past, because if you take this too far the wrong way, it makes you not able to judge Hitler or Stalin. So we have to be careful. But at the same time, I do try to sit there and go, “OK, these people are all products of their time and political and social environment and the civilization they came from, and we have to take that into account too.”

How do you decide what you’re going to get into? “Supernova in the East” is a real achievement. The “Celtic Holocaust” series is amazing too. Do you go looking for these horrifying episodes in the past, or do they find you?

Well, first of all, you’re really kind. I appreciate that. If I’m interested in it, that right there is requirement No. 1, because we don’t have scripts for these shows. I just go in and record it. So it’s based on inspiration. If I’m not into the topic, it just doesn’t work. You would hear it in my voice, right?

It’s also why I can’t talk about certain things. I’ll get requests like, “Can you please talk about 17th century India” I’ll have to say no because I don’t know anything about 17th century India, and I couldn’t learn enough about it in the short span [of time]. It’s funny, the listeners think it’s forever between shows, but if you’re trying to educate yourself from ground zero, it’s a short amount of time. So all of these topics we choose, the No. 1 requirement is that I have to be interested in them. No. 2 requirement is I have to have some foundation of knowledge that we can then build upon. So all these topics that we do shows on, I knew something about before we did them.

As far as what I’m interested in, well, a lot of these stories you may have noticed have what we call “philosophical spines.” The ancient historian Thucydides said that history is philosophy taught by example.

We did one called “The Destroyer of Worlds,” which was about the early years of trying to live with nuclear weapons. The spine in that one is: Can human beings learn to live with the power of their ever-evolving weapons system? So even if you manage to live with what we have today and design systems and safeguards and everything, what happens when you invent the next most powerful weapons system after that? So that’s an idea, a philosophical question that runs through the entire show.

Most of the shows we do—I don’t want to ever have a formula or a format, so sometimes we switch it up just to be different and get out of the sameness of it all—but most of the shows have a philosophical throughput idea that we’re trying to explore. A lot of times that’s the first thing that makes me go, “Aha. Well, this would be a good thing to talk about because exploring that philosophical throughput idea would be interesting.”

The last thing is more of a practical thing. I try to look at the archives the same way I look at history, trying to imagine it 10 or 15 or 20 years from now, and ask, “Do we have a nice mix?” We usually keep about 10 shows free, and then we move them to the paid archive after four or five years. I try to make sure we have enough subject matter diversity in the 10 or so free shows so that if you didn’t like “Supernova in the East,” which was about the Second World War in the Pacific and Asian theater, do I have a couple shows then from widely differing periods? So you could go, “Oh, I’m really not interested in that. But I like the idea of the Romans and the Celtic people, so I’ll listen to that show.” So there are some attempts to try to switch it up a little bit in terms of historical periods or throughput ideas.

What would you say is the happiest show that you’ve done?

That’s a trick question, isn’t it? I did one once called “The Organization of Peace” that was about the League of Nations. The whole League of Nations thing is this almost rainbows-and-unicorns attempt to try to imagine a better world through a shared understanding that we had just been through the worst war in the history of the world and we never want to go through that again. There were so many fun aspects of it, like the idea—it was never this major League of Nations proposal—but the idea of Esperanto and that we have to have human beings communicate better if we want to avoid the kinds of things that happened before. So there’s a lot of hopeful stuff in that show, because the League of Nations itself was almost a naive attempt to hope for a better world and try to figure out what the heck would be involved in working toward it.

What’s the function of history for you?

I truthfully look at it more like the past is there to teach us what can happen. You have examples of the worst-case scenario.

What the past doesn’t teach are the kinds of lessons that most people want it to teach. For example, you’ll often hear someone say something like, “We know appeasement doesn’t work, because look what happened with Hitler in the 1930s.” But that’s not what history teaches you, because you’re not taking into account the variables. First of all, Hitler’s a person. All dictators are not exactly the same, and all circumstances aren’t exactly the same. So you can’t turn around and say, “We learned from Munich that you can’t appease dictators, therefore we shouldn’t appease Saddam Hussein because he’s going to act exactly like Hitler acted. We know that because Hitler acted that way.” It doesn’t work like that.

What history really teaches you is how, contextually, things get involved. When we see, for example, rights being taken away from people in a society—like political parties being banned, or safeguards that keep people from being able to be thrown into prison without any sort of due process—I think history teaches you what’s going to follow next in most of those cases. Usually, that doesn’t teach you anything specifically. It teaches you generalities.

Now, the [George] Santayana quote about if you did not learn from history, you’re doomed to repeat it: I think it doesn’t work that way, because we take the wrong lessons. I think people use history to have it prove what they want it to prove. There’s an old line that even the devil can quote scripture for his purpose, and history is far more subject to that than biblical narratives are.

So that’s why I think you have to be careful about this idea about history teaching x, y, or z and become suspicious of the teacher that teaches you that. Give it a sideways glance and ask what the person trying to teach you about the past is trying to get you to understand.

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

The post Dan Carlin on Podcasting, History, and Hero Worship appeared first on Reason.com.

In Rutherford County, Tennessee, kids as young as 7 years old were getting thrown in jail for incredibly minor offenses—stealing a football or pulling someone’s hair. Some kids were even jailed for acts that weren’t crimes at all, such as failing to stop an after-school fight. Worse still, the kids were frequently put in solitary confinement, even though that’s explicitly prohibited for children under Tennessee law.

Not only were these jailings illegal, but pretty much everyone working in the Rutherford County Juvenile Court knew it—including the county’s sole juvenile court judge, Donna Scott Davenport.

In The Kids of Rutherford County, a four-part podcast series from Serial Productions and The New York Times, Meribah Knight examines how so many kids could be unlawfully detained and why it took so long to stop the practice.

The podcast follows two public defenders, Wes Clark and Mark Downton, who eventually launched a successful lawsuit against the county after years of maddening attempts to convince Davenport that her practices were illegal.

Thanks to Clark and Downton’s suit, Rutherford County is no longer illegally detaining its children on minor offenses and Davenport is no longer on the bench. But the pair didn’t end up with an unalloyed victory. The $11 million payout that Clark and Downton won in court? Only 23 percent of the eligible recipients could be contacted to make claims, so just $2.2 million was distributed to the jailed kids.

The Kids of Rutherford County showcases just how difficult it is to force broken government systems to change, and how difficult it is to make the victims of injustice whole.

The post Review: Exposing a Broken Juvenile Court System appeared first on Reason.com.

This week’s featured article is “True Crime Distorts the Truth About Crime” by Kat Rosenfield.

This audio was generated using AI trained on the voice of Katherine Mangu-Ward.

Music Credits: “Deep in Thought” by CTRL S and “Sunsettling” by Man with Roses

The post <i>The Best of Reason</i>: True Crime Distorts the Truth About Crime appeared first on Reason.com.

You probably don’t think much about tin cans, even when you’re buying one. It’s the product inside the can—soup, beans, maybe hairspray or sunscreen—that seems to matter.

But the humble tin can is both a crucial component of modern, globe-spanning supply chains and a product of them: About half of the metal used to make tin cans in the U.S. is imported from abroad. And that’s why tin cans—more specifically, tinplate steel, the type of metal used to make those cans—are at the center of a behind-the-scenes fight over tariffs that illustrates so many of the problems with protectionist policies.

On one side of that fight is Cleveland-Cliffs, one of just two companies in the U.S. that produces tinplate steel. In a recent petition to the Commerce Department, Cleveland-Cliffs asked for tariffs of up to 300 percent against imported tinplate steel—the products that account for over half of the supply of tinplate in the American economy.

Those tariffs will translate into reduced supply and higher prices, says Tom Madrecki, vice president of supply chain and logistics for the Consumer Brands Association.

“When the tariffs go into effect, they raise the cost of steel, they raise the cost of the packaging,” says Madrecki. The can itself is often the most expensive element of a canned food item, so those prices quickly cause the overall price tag to rise. “You [will] see food prices go up 19 to 30 percent. That translates to 36 to 58 cents per can,” he says.

And while new tariffs might protect some tinplate-making jobs at Cleveland-Cliffs, research suggests the higher prices will cause far greater losses throughout the rest of the economy. The Trade Partnership, a think tank, estimates that the proposed tariffs could cause up to 40,000 jobs to be lost in downstream industries, including blue-collar jobs like can-making and food production. If the steel in their tin cans is suddenly more expensive, food production companies might simply purchase finished—and less-highly-tariffed—cans overseas.

“You’re going to go to the grocery store one day…and you’re going to look at the receipt in disbelief and say, ‘How did this happen?'” says Gerard Scimeca, vice president at Consumer Action for a Strong Economy, a free market group that opposes the tariff proposal. “Well, this is how that happened: You had a company trying to take advantage of our trade policy for personal gain.”

And here’s the real kicker: As a rule, the Department of Commerce doesn’t even consider the potential (and often obvious) consequences of these decisions. The tariff petition process is one-sided and skewed heavily in favor of companies seeking protectionism at the expense of consumers and workers throughout the economy.

Government policy, no surprise, is one of the big reasons why we can’t have nice things.

Further reading for this week’s episode:

“Biden Administration Considering New Tariffs That Will Hike Prices for Canned Goods,” by Eric Boehm, Reason.

“U.S. Plans New Tariffs on Food-Can Metal From China, Germany, and Canada,” by Yuka Hayashi, The Wall Street Journal

“Tinplate Steel Tariffs Will Harm American Consumers and Manufacturing Jobs,” by the Consumer Brands Association

“Four Areas for Congress To Exercise Trade Policy Oversight,” by Tori Smith, American Action Forum

Written by Eric Boehm; produced and edited by Hunt Beaty; mixing by Ian Keyser; fact-checking by Katherine Sypher.

The post <em>Why We Can't Have Nice Things</em>: Can You Afford Tariffs on Tin Cans? appeared first on Reason.com.

By the time Josie Duffy Rice graduated from Harvard Law School, she knew she didn’t want to be a lawyer. Instead, she became a journalist sitting at the intersection of politics and the criminal legal system. Her latest story—Unreformed: The Story of the Alabama Industrial School for Negro Children—is a podcast delving into Mt. Meigs, a state-run institution where black children suffered “physical and sexual violence, unlivable facilities, and grueling labor in the fields surrounding the school.” That history had largely gone unreported. Centered around a moment in the 1960s when five girls escaped and tried to blow the whistle, the podcast is filled with uncomfortable truths that too many people would prefer to ignore. In February, Reason‘s Billy Binion interviewed Duffy Rice by phone.

Q: Why do you think these stories went untold for so long, despite being pretty shocking?

A: We make a lot of excuses for the way we treat people who we deem bad. I think this stuff also snowballs. If people got out—sometimes they didn’t—they never spoke about it again. They never told their families. They were so traumatized. Some of it is just seeing someone else being willing to speak out. One of the things you also realize is how many victims weren’t sure if they could trust their memory. They’re so young when they go to these places. What has been kind of amazing is seeing people’s experiences and memories validated. They’ve gone 50 years wondering what actually happened. And then you find other people who have the exact same story, who remember the exact same thing.

Q: There are some people who may say, “That’s in the past.” Why do you think it’s important these stories be told?

A: We really like this idea that there was a bad thing, something happened that fixed it, and now we don’t need to worry about it because that’s not who we are anymore. It’s cliché, but those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it. I have no reason to think what was happening back then is still happening at Mt. Meigs, but I haven’t heard good things. It’s really comforting to think that was unimaginably long ago when it wasn’t.

Q: A premise of the podcast seems to be that the injustices of the past bleed into the present and future.

A: What made me interested in this story is that exact thing. Many people who went to Mt. Meigs in the 1960s for loitering or breaking curfew, or because their parents died, are now serving life without parole or are on death row for murder. We allow institutions to shape people, and we like to imagine we wouldn’t be shaped the same way—and maybe we wouldn’t. Not everybody did those things. But a lot of people did.

This podcast is about the specter of state violence. Because what you see are tragic stories of kids who went in as children, got out as children, and it shaped the rest of their lives. They value life according to how much their life is valued. And a lot of people, their lives are just not valued by the state.

Q: Was there anything that surprised you as you were reporting?

A: A lot surprised me in the sense that it was so much worse than I would’ve imagined. But I am eternally surprised by people’s resilience. I think that gets manipulated a lot because the conversation becomes, “People are resilient so you can put them through whatever.” That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is the resilience of the human spirit is more remarkable than it gets credit for. People manage to make it through such hellish conditions without totally losing their humanity, and there’s always the chance they can find that humanity again.

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

The post Josie Duffy Rice Investigates Gruesome State Violence at an Alabama 'Reform School' appeared first on Reason.com.

Forty years ago, the National Commission on Excellence in Education published A Nation At Risk: The Imperative For Educational Reform, a scathing indictment of public K-12 schools in America. “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war,” announced the report’s authors, who included Nobel Prize–winning chemist Glenn T. Seaborg and Yale University President A. Bartlett Giamatti. The report catalyzed massive increases in per-pupil spending, standardized testing, and “common core” style curricula. Yet by almost every measure, educational outcomes are no better than they were in 1983.

In Mediocrity: 40 Ways Government Schools Are Failing Today’s Students, the Libertas Institute’s Connor Boyack and the American Federation for Children’s Corey DeAngelis outline what’s wrong with the ways our public schools function—and they offer concrete solutions to improve outcomes for children.

In this podcast version of The Reason Live Stream, I talk with Boyack and DeAngelis about why they support maximizing parental rights through education savings accounts (ESAs), disagree with conservative Republicans who want to ban critical race theory and other controversial concepts, and believe that the end of “factory schooling” will vastly improve the civic life of the United States of America.

The post Connor Boyack and Corey DeAngelis: Why K-12 Education Sucks and How To Fix It appeared first on Reason.com.