Publication
Don't Blame AI Labs for What Hackers Do With Their Tools
On Friday, Axios reported that "Top executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies are privately gaming out scenarios for a public and political revolt after a catastrophic AI event." The executives "anticipate a large-scale event, most likely...
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Review: These Talking Dogs Give Children the Wrong Idea About Government
Shmoo & Ozzie Go to Washington, a self-published children's book about bipartisanship written by two high schoolers, Ellie Gottheimer and Larra Mullin, received favorable coverage this summer in The New York Times and Fox News. The national media...
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The Democrats' Socialist Moment
Ever since Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump crashed through the gates of American politics in 2015, the professional moderates of both major political parties have twisted their ears toward the dreaded sound of oncoming hooves. For Republicans, the...
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Prettifying Executions Does Not Make Them Quicker or More Reliable
After Tennessee unsuccessfully tried to execute Christa Pike last week, an ambulance whisked her to a Nashville hospital, where the condemned murderer became a patient in urgent need of lifesaving care. Should Pike recover from two botched...
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Are the Cornell 7 Being Tried on Social Media?
On this special edition ofThe Reason Roundtable, Senior Editor Robby Soave is joined by Associate Editor Liz Wolfe, reporter Reem Ibrahim, and Senior Producer Zach Weissmueller to discuss the sexual assault allegations against seven Cornell University...
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America Hits a New Debt Record at $40 Trillion and Counting
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) did not include the $40 trillion mark in its gross national debt projections for the coming decade, forecasting a gross federal debt of $36 trillion in 2030. By 2022, the CBO...
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Mamdani Promised To Freeze the Rent. Now His Rent Freeze Is in Court.
Perhaps more than anything else, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has been associated with his now-famous "freeze the rent" pledge for rent-stabilized units in the Big Apple. Throughout his campaign, Mamdani made bold promises, such as claiming: "As...
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Rand Paul Was Right To Block the Senate's Attempt To Censor the Internet
Congress' latest attempt to regulate the internet has been stalled until after the midterms. On Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) blocked efforts to pass the Senate's Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA)-a bill that would legally require platforms to...
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Review: RFK Jr.'s YouTube Cooking Show Is Both Informative and Unsettling
People tend to think of propaganda as "war is peace" rhetoric, not as an instruction to add nutritional yeast to your salmon cakes because it's "great for your microbiome." The Real Food Show reminds us that sometimes propaganda can sound like a guy...
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The Case for Good Faith
I've never been sure how to pronounce it. Bo-nah feed-ays? Bah-nah fieds? The term bona fides trips me up every time. But it's an important concept, so I try my best. You might even say I make…a good faith effort. To argue in good faith-the literal...
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Brickbat: Bad Dog
Bradley Page has filed a federal lawsuit against the Arizona Department of Public Safety, the Pinal County Sheriff's Office, and several officers over an incident that took place in February 2025 on Interstate 10. Page, who was suffering a stroke, had...
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Brickbat: Evidence Is Overrated
Nathaniel Stephens of Grayson, Kentucky, became the subject of a DUI investigation after a teenager backed into his car in his neighborhood. Officer Michael Bell accused him of being impaired, but Stephens recorded 0.00 on a breathalyzer and passed...
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Federal Courts Are Running a Surplus Charging for Public Records
For years, members of Congress and advocates of open government have been urging the federal court system to eliminate fees for its electronic records. In June, the federal judiciary took a look at the problem-and decided to hike the fees. The...
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In Chicago, Putting a Hot Dog in a Bun Can Get You in Trouble
Like many large progressive cities, Chicago receives its fair share of criticism for overbearing regulations and sclerotic government. It clocks in at number five on the list of large American cities where it is hardest to obtain a business permit. It...
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Border Agents Search Phones Without Warrants. This Case Asks the Supreme Court if That's…
What started as a "narrow constitutional exception" now "threatens to swallow the protection it was meant only to qualify," according to an amicus brief filed last week by the Cato Institute asking the Supreme Court to reconsider a petition about...
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Review: Jeremy Clarkson vs. British Bureaucracy
In the British documentary series Clarkson's Farm (Amazon's Prime Video), former Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson, a self-described libertarian, attempts to run a 1,000-acre farm in West Oxfordshire, England, with no prior farming experience. From...
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Brickbat: California Scheming
A federal judge sentenced former Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputy Christopher Cadman to 21 months in prison after Cadman pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy against rights and one count of filing a false tax return. Prosecutors said Cadman...
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Brickbat: I Disavow My Actions
Arielle Kayabaga, a Liberal Party member of Canada's Parliament, has distanced herself from a petition that she herself sponsored after critics argued it could restrict journalism and the public's ability to document what happens in public places. The...
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Brickbat: Unclipped
Top governments officials in Australia have asked lawmakers to restrict people from sharing clips of parliamentary hearings on social media, arguing that short clips can remove important context and expose officials to ridicule, abuse, and personal...
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Brickbat: I Spy
High school principal Eric James has been arrested and charged after authorities discovered four hidden recording devices in areas where female students changed clothes at Brooke High School in Wellsburg, West Virginia. A custodian first found a device...
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AI Companies Promise Humanoid Assistants. How Will the Robots Know What To Do?
The newest home robots look less like a Roomba and more like C-3PO. Last year, a demo of 1X Technologies' home robot, NEO, went viral. In a video produced by The Wall Street Journal, the mouthless bot attempted to load a dishwasher. NEO moved clumsily...
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Cancer Vaccines, Anti-Aging Treatments, and 5 Other Exciting Biomedical Advances
We are at the dawn of a golden age of biosciences, characterized by massive leaps in molecular biology. Breakthroughs in precise gene editing, mRNA vaccines, targeted cancer treatments, and more are transforming biomedicine. Move Over, Wegovy and...
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Review: Ben Franklin, Frankenstein, and the Wonders of Electricity
Tucked away along one of Minneapolis' picturesque lakes, the Bakken Museum is a quirky celebration of human creativity and ingenuity with a backstory that's nearly as fascinating. The museum is themed, quite loosely, around electricity. Exhibits...
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Brickbat: Swing, Swing
Two sisters, ages 10 and 12, ended up in court after a playground swing broke while they were playing at Veterans Memorial Park in Springdale, Pennsylvania. The girls, along with several other children, twisted the swing's chains so it would spin them...
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Brickbat: Missing in Action
A South Korean police officer admitted that he closed missing-person cases without properly investigating them because he wanted to avoid doing the work. The officer, whom officials identified only by the surname Bu, falsely told families that missing...
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Brickbat: E.U. Blues
The European Union has placed ChatGPT, Reddit, and Roblox under stricter rules after all three passed the threshold of 45 million average monthly users in the E.U. Under the Digital Services Act (DSA), they must now assess and reduce risks involving...
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Moving Soon? Here Are 10 Modern Conveniences That Will Make It Easier.
For much of human history, moving house has been a death-defying ordeal. When pioneer Loren Hastings reached Portland, Oregon, in 1847, he looked back on the Oregon Trail and called it a "graveyard." Today, you can pack up everything you own and move...
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European Cars Are Spying on Their Drivers. The Same Tech Could Be Coming to the U.S.
European cars are now tasked with more than just moving people from one locale to another. A new safety regulation that applies to the 27 countries in the European Union (E.U.) requires automobiles to spy on their passengers too. As of July 7, all new...
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Trump Said He Would Rid the Kennedy Center of 'Woke.' He Injected His Own Politics Instead.
When President Donald Trump announced a takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts last year, he claimed to be fighting a specific sort of cultural rot at the Washington, D.C., institution. "We don't need woke at the Kennedy...
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Review: An Alternate History of Soviet Space Exploration
What happens when a space program isn't guided by science but by government paranoia? Star City (Apple TV) shows viewers how that might have played out. Set in the same universe as the show For All Mankind, it offers a timeline where the Soviets have...
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Brickbats: October 2026
A sheriff's deputy in Orange County, Florida, forced a driver off the road near Walt Disney World while merging and then left the scene. The driver, Ivan Schiffino, said the deputy cut across a painted divider without using a turn signal, forcing both...
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Brickbat: Mein Gott
Sven Hüber, the deputy chairman of Germany's largest police union and a high-ranking government official with the Federal Police, has resigned after media reports brought up accusations of abuse and misconduct. While serving as an officer in the East...
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Brickbat: Thinkin' About My Doorbell
A police officer in Greenville, North Carolina, was placed on administrative leave after a Ring doorbell video showed officers entering Uniquea Teel's home without a warrant and detaining her even though she was not a suspect in a crime. Police went to...
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RFK Jr.'s MAHA Cooking Show Is Government Propaganda. I Kind of Love It?
We're now three episodes intoThe Real Food Show, a YouTube cooking class hosted by Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And I'm hooked. Don't get me wrong: In principle, I hate it. The government has no place being in the...
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Photo: AI Unfurls an Ancient Scroll
In June, Italian researchers announced that they had used artificial intelligence to virtually unfurl and interpret a papyrus scroll that was burnt to a crisp during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius nearly two millennia ago. Scholars were able to...
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The Iraq War Cheerleaders Were Wrong. They're Wrong About Iran Too.
The George W. Bush administration and its camp followers in the media sold the Iraq War with lies and spin. Before the war, hawkish pundits such as CNN host Fareed Zakaria and New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman promised that it would bring...
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Brickbat: School of Hard Knocks
A former school administrator and two others received federal prison sentences after pleading guilty to wire fraud. Brian Metcalf, a Chicago school principal, and Kimberly Maddox falsely claimed that Maddox or her husband provided services to two...
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Brickbat: Seeing Red
Authorities in China are investigating comedian Guo Degang for changing the lyrics of a famous revolutionary song during a performance in Wuhan. Guo sang "Playing My Beloved Pipa," a song connected to China's revolutionary history, but changed the...
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Review: A Novel Capturing the Cruelty of Mass Incarceration
Suzanna's fictional mother in The Hill-much like author Harriet Clark's real-life mother-is imprisoned for a botched leftist bank robbery. Suzanna's childhood is a dreamy Groundhog Day loop of visits, guards, waiting rooms, fluorescent lights, and...
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Brickbat: Fake Stop
Baltimore police officer Dequwan Houchins has been indicted on charges of misconduct and making false entries in public records for allegedly filing fake reports about traffic stops he didn't actually make. During an undercover investigation,...
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Brickbat: Texas Two-Step
Social media messaging app Discord has agreed to a Texas court order requiring it to introduce the same age-verification it already uses in the United Kingdom. Within 90 days, Texas users will not be able to access certain content unless they are...
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Brickbat: The Big Easy
New Orleans police officer Brandon Coleman faces 350 criminal charges for allegedly claiming more than $111,000 in overtime pay that he did not actually earn. Investigators say Coleman repeatedly reported working long shifts, while surveillance footage...
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Euclidean Zoning: How Our 'Arbitrary and Oppressive' City Planning Scheme Got Its Name
The practice of separating homes, businesses, and factories into their own dedicated districts is called "Euclidean zoning." Given that Euclidean zoning involves the slicing and dicing of city maps into color-coded districts, you might assume it is...
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New Jersey Revives the Fight To Reclassify Gig Workers as Employees
For close to a decade, the political left has sought to reclassify independent contractors and gig workers as full-scale employees. Most notably, there was the notorious showdown over the issue in California, after which the push generally seemed to...
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Colombia's New President Wants More U.S. Military Help Fighting Cartels
The Trump administration is expanding the footprint of its war on drugs in Latin America. On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that Colombia would join the "Shield of the Americas" initiative. When the multinational security coalition...
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Review: Is Exit 8 an Anti-Screens Metaphor or Something Deeper?
Based on an atmospheric video game about a man stuck in a subway station who must notice "anomalies," Exit 8 is a tightly wound horror thriller that neatly transforms a simple puzzle game into an elaborate metaphor about taking responsibility and...
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Brickbat: Banned in Moscow
A court in Moscow has taken away 123 properties from the Jehovah's Witnesses and given them to the Russian government. The properties include 63 homes and business buildings totaling more than 11,000 square meters (118,000 square feet) plus 60 pieces...
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Brickbat: Anyone for Tennis?
In San Francisco, Sam Dogen took his 6-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son to play tennis at Golden Gate Heights Park on an empty public court so they could spend time together. After about 20 minutes, two park rangers approached him wearing vests and...
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Brickbat: Stop Asking Questions
In England, London's Metropolitan Police investigated reporter Jack Grove after he and others raised questions about possible plagiarism and résumé embellishment by Jason Arday, a professor at the University of Cambridge. Arday, who has since resigned,...
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Brickbat: Traffic Toll
Former Ruleville, Mississippi, police officer Antonio Wade was sentenced to seven years in federal prison plus three years of supervised release for using his position to extort money. During a traffic stop in 2025, Wade learned the driver was...
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Brickbats: August/September 2026
Police in Davie, Florida, arrested Demarquize Dawson under a state law criminalizing the concealment of license plate information because the frame on his rental car covered the first S in Sunshine State. Dawson spent a night in jail and suffered a...
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Trump's New Birthright Citizenship Executive Orders Are Mostly Theater
President Donald Trump signed two executive orders on Thursday that attempt to restrict birthright citizenship narrowly. This comes a little over a month after the Supreme Court struck down his attempt to suppress birthright citizenship much more...
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Review: Feuding Neighbors Snoop on Their Enemies
The word neighbors evokes white picket fences, borrowed cups of sugar, Norman Rockwell, and Mr. Rogers. The HBO docuseries Neighbors shows the decay of this ideal in a world saturated with surveillance technology. Each episode chronicles petty...
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Brickbat: Cash Back
New York Assemblywoman Nikki Lucas (D-Brooklyn) has proposed a bill that would require supermarkets and other retailers to give customers who use self-checkout a 10-percent discount. Lucas argues that shoppers are doing work once performed by cashiers,...
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Brickbat: Banned T-Shirt
In Australia, Ian Minus was fined $1,500 dollars (U.S. $1,050) after being convicted of knowingly displaying a Nazi symbol in public without reasonable excuse. Minus wore a T-shirt with a banned Nazi swastika outside a royal commission investigating...
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Brickbat: Where in the World?
The U.S. State Department apologized after showing a map of Africa at an international AIDS conference in Brazil that mislabeled every country it highlighted. The incorrect map, which appeared to have been created with AI tools, placed countries such...
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Brickbat: The Other Side of the Street
City officials in Bnei Brak, Israel, have set up gender-segregated sidewalks near event halls and wedding venues, with signs and barriers directing men and women to walk on opposite sides of the street. This followed a directive from the city's...
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Archives: August/September 2026
5 years agoAug/Sept 2021"In the two decades since the September 11 attacks, the absence of REAL ID enforcement has not made domestic flights more vulnerable to terrorism. Meanwhile, the federal government and the states have not been able to implement...
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Walt Whitman's American Vistas
On Democracy, by Walt Whitman, introduction by David Bromwich, Library of America, 210 pages, $12.50 When Walt Whitman was born in 1819, traversing Long Island took days and was probably best done on foot. Brooklyn, still independent of New York City,...
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Review: When Banks Do the Government's Bidding
Financial institutions have become a tool for suppressing speech. Rainey Reitman learned this in 2011, when PayPal froze the account of a group she was working with to help free whistleblower Chelsea Manning. After negative publicity, PayPal reinstated...
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A Pennsylvania Mom Says the Cops Were Called on Her 4 Times-for Letting Her Kids Be Outside
Whenever Ms. Gordon lets her sons go outside now, she cleans house. "All right, my kid just went around the block to his friend, let me sweep," she says. "Because I know if the house is clean, that's the first step toward making a good impression on...
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Brickbat: We'll Know It When We Read It
Hong Kong Secretary of Security Chris Tang warned booksellers to make sure the books they sell do not harm national security, comparing it to making sure food is safe to eat. This came after police raided two independent bookstores, Have A Nice Stay...
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Brickbat: Waiting on Hold
Brian Hurton died alone in East Kilbride, Scotland, after calling 999 twice, complaining of severe breathing problems. Dispatchers told him both times that no ambulance would be sent right away because they were busy. Instead, they said a clinician...
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The Best and Worst States To Be a Smoker
A smoker landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City would have to pay $19 for a pack of Marlboros. If that same smoker drove a few hundred miles south to North Carolina, he would pay less than half that price. The same product...
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California's War on Goats Could Worsen the Wildfire Crisis
Wildfire risk just got a lot worse in California, where some of the state's most effective fire prevention specialists-goats-are under regulatory attack. As of July 1, the state's standard minimum wage and overtime laws now apply to goat-herding...
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