Reason articles from May 2003

Reason archives from May 2003

Human choice machines. (Editor's Note).(Editorial)
May 1, 2003... "Is all that we see or seem/But a dream within a dream?"--Edgar Allan Poe NOT LONG AFTER my first encounter with the great, insane Poe, I began to separate the world into two kinds of people: those who have entertained the notion that they...

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2003... Brain Chemistry Ronald Bailey's "The Battle for Your Brain" (February) seemed more like a persuasive pill popping agenda than an article. Evidently, in the future, the avant-garde population will be popping pills for memory and...

Comic bureaucracy. (E.U. Superheroes).(Troubled Waters comic book)
May 1, 2003... WATCH OUT, SUPERMAN and Wonder Woman. There's a new hero in town, and she's a member of the European Parliament. In an effort to educate Europe's youth, the European Parliament has published a slick, glossy comic book, Troubled Waters,...

What's your damage? (Corn Losers).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2003... IN FEBRUARY THE creators and distributors of genetically modified (G.M.) StarLink corn settled a $110 million class action suit from corn farmers, marking a victory for environmentalist panic that could retard biotech development. Back in...

Bureaucratic enrichment zone. (A Radical Proposal Wasted).(Cincinnati Empowerment Corporation )
May 1, 2003... CINCINNATI'S "empowerment zone" program, a federally funded effort to jump-start development in several low-income neighborhoods, has just been audited by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). According to the report,...

Massively misguided transit. (Adventures in Light Rail).
May 1, 2003... ALTHOUGH THEY invariably cost far more per passenger mile than buses or automobiles, light-rail trains continue to capture the hearts of urban planners nationwide. Light-rail systems, as opposed to heavy-rail systems like New York's famous...

Indecent rules. (Pleasing the Censors).(fines for playing the "wrong" songs)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2003... TWO YEARS AGO, the Federal Communications Commission hit the cash-strapped noncommercial Oregon station KBOO with a $7,00 fine. Its crime: playing Sarah Jones' "Your Revolution," a sexually explicit slap at hip-hop misogyny. Now the commission...

Nicotine fights. (Bootlegging and Violence).
May 1, 2003... "INCREASING THE cigarette tax saves lives," New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared last year while pushing a 19-fold increase in the city's levy. To the contrary, suggests a recent report from the Cato Institute: Increasing the cigarette tax...

We want your house. (Eminent Domain Takings).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2003... TODAY, A BEAUTIFUL home sits at 604 Calvert Street in Muncie, Indiana. Sometime soon, if an eminent domain case brought by Ball State University is successful, it will be replaced by a parking lot. Until October 2002, 604 Calvert was the...

Cosmetic surgery. (Drug War Spending).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2003... PUBLIC DISSATISFACTION with the war on drugs is mounting, putting federal warriors under increasing pressure to cut an enforcement and treatment budget that has ballooned from $65 million in 1969 to $19.2 billion rn 2003. But rather than...

Overflowing barrels. (The Porkiest Bill Ever?).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2003... IN FEBRUARY, FACING a yet-to-be-calculated bill for war with Iraq on top of budget deficits as far as the eye can see, Congress did what it does best, passing what may have been the most pork-laden spending bill ever. The $397 billion...

25 years ago in reason.
May 1, 2003... "The greatest enemies of free enterprise in the U.S. are intellectuals and businessmen." --Milton Friedman, "Which Way for Capitalism?" "Our Doublespeak Award goes to Judge Donald T. Barbeau of Minnesota, who rejected Mr. Michael...

Source.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2003... Can't afford a celebrity-style fact-finding mission to Iraq? Then visit http://dear_raed.blogspot.com/, a weblog written by a Baghdad resident writing under the nom de plume "Salam Pax." Filled with on-the-ground observations and dark humor, it...

Y'Hica Institute for the Visual Arts. (Brickbats).(false organization set up for loan audit)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2003... Two students from the Y'Hica Institute for the Visual Arts in London recently received student loans from a program administered by the U.S. Department of Education. Not bad for a school that doesn't exist. The school was created by the General...

Keystone Citgo Laundry Carwash. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2003... When Brad Knotts and William Van Sickle offered to help unload a delivery of cigarettes at the Keystone Citgo Laundry Carwash in Indianapolis, no one blinked. The men were regulars at the store and had become friends with its employees. But...

Great Britain's Home Office. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2003... Great Britain's Home Office has granted asylum to a Taliban soldier who fought British and American troops in Afghanistan. The man says he fears persecution from the new Western-backed government in Kabul. The U.K. reportedly is considering...

European Union. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2003... European Union bureaucrats have ruled that children's swing sets can be no higher than three meters. They've also issued strict regulations on how far seats can be from the ground and from the frame. The rules aren't law. But if anyone is...

One in five Britons is obese. (Brickbats).
May 1, 2003... One in five Britons is obese. Ten percent of 6-year-olds are obese. Now British public health officials are pointing the finger at restaurants and packaged-food companies that serve massive meals. They are calling on firms to sign a code of...

Fazl Hadi Shinwari, Afghanistan's new chief justice, has banned cable television. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2003... Fazl Hadi Shinwari, Afghanistan's new chief justice, has banned cable television. Shinwari, who is also a Muslim cleric, says some of the foreign news, sports, and entertainment programs are contrary to Islam. The chief justice also wants to...

In England, East Sussex education officials send out a notice each year reminding parents when school is about to start. (Brickbats).(Brief Article)
May 1, 2003... In England, East Sussex education officials send out a notice each year reminding parents when school is about to start. This year they sent notices to the families of at least 17 dead children. The error arose when local officials obtained the...

Balance sheet.
May 1, 2003... Search Party Airports in Seattle, Minneapolis--St. Paul, and Atlanta buck a directive from the Transportation Security Administration to search cars entering airport grounds. Airport officials say they need probable cause. Sober State...

Stimulant response. (Data).(of FDA to ephedra products)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2003... At the end of February, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) signaled that it may ban dietary supplements containing the herbal stimulant ephedra if it decides they pose "a significant or unreasonable risk of illness or injury." That phrase...

Is art good for us? (Soundbite).(interview with author Joli Jensen)(Interview)
May 1, 2003... In Is Art Good for Us?: Beliefs about High Culture in American Life (Rowman & Little-field), Joli Jensen answers her titular question with a resounding no. She wants "us to give up the faith in the arts as doing good, and commit instead to a...

The Mystery of Mary Rosh: how a new form of journalism investigated a gun research riddle. (Columns).(Column)
May 1, 2003... STORIES THAT MIGHT never be broken if a single reporter had to spend days researching them are now being covered by dilettante swarms rather than diligent professionals. It's a new form of journalism, reminiscent less of old-fashioned...

Skin flicks 101: what porn studies profs don't get about sex. .(Column)
May 1, 2003... LAST YEAR'S NEWS reports about a course at the University of California at Berkeley called "Male Sexuality" seemed like a cultural conservative's worst nightmare--or fondest dream, depending on how you look at it. The Story had everything from...

Hillbilly heartache: A Georgia senator gets a dose of reality. (Rant).(Zell Miller)
May 1, 2003... ZELL MILLER, A senator from the Georgia mountains who apparently identifies with the heartache of hillbillies, went on a little rampage recently, slamming CS President Leslie Moonves for developing a new reality show called The Real Beverly...

Pulling our own strings: philosopher Daniel Dennett on determinism, human "choice machines," and how evolution generates free will.(Interview)
May 1, 2003... CAN THERE BE freedom and free will in a deterministic world? Yes, declares the controversial philosopher Daniel C. Dennett. "Human freedom,"' he writes in his important new book Freedom Evolves (Viking), "is not an illusion; it is an objective...

Inside the spiritual Jacuzzi: what JewBus, Unitarian Pagans, and the Hot Tub Mystery Religion tell us about traditional faiths.(amalgamated faith groups)
May 1, 2003... THERE IS A GROUP n the Dallas area called the Hot Tub Mystery Religion. Its adherents hold to no particular spiritual dogma, borrowing freely from such sources as Jewish mysticism, Roman paganism, Islamic heresy, and experimental art. One of...

Velvet president: why Vaclav Havel is our era's George Orwell and more.
May 1, 2003... LAST FALL, AS the United States rumbled toward war against Saddam Hussein, literary reviews and higher-brow magazines wrestled with an intriguing if unlikely hypothetical: What would George Orwell say if he were here today? Christopher...

Measuring up: testing the pretensions of market research and polling. (Culture and Reviews).(Book Review)
May 1, 2003... Finding Out: Personal Adventures in Social Research--Discovering What People Think, Say, and Do, by Leo Bogart, Chicago: Ivan R. Dec, 306 pages, $27.50 Polling, Policy, and Public Opinion: The Case Against Heeding the "Voice of the...

Monster mash-ups: how musical collages are challenging traditional ideas of authorship. (Culture and Reviews).
May 1, 2003... "Rock the Party" is an incredibly generic title, but the song is anything but conventional. Its vocals are lifted from "Let's Get This Party Started," Pink's catchy and forgettable hitdu jour. Behind them, though, is the rattling beat of "Rock...

Property wrongs: can property exist without the state? (Culture and Reviews).(Book Review)
May 1, 2003... The Myth of Ownership: Taxes and Justice, by Thomas Nagel and Liam Murphy, New York: Oxford University Press, 238 pages, $25 THREE HUNDRED AND fifty years ago, at the height of the English civil war, Thomas Hobbes called for an absolute...

Standard issue: The dot-com tragedy denied. (Culture and Reviews).(Book Review)
May 1, 2003... Starving to Death on $200 Million: The Short, Absurd Life of The Industry Standard, by James Ledbetter, New York: PublicAffairs, 272 pages, $26 EARLY IN Starving to Death on $200 Million, his memoir of the short-lived Industry Standard...

Make Mine mutants! Marvel comics and plenitude in contemporary America. (Culture and Reviews).
May 1, 2003... DESPITE BEING WIDELY panned, the latest movie based on a Marvel comic book, Daredevil, was the No, I movie in America for the first two weeks of its release, pulling in some $74 mil lion in ticket sales during that period. While Daredevil's Dr....

Potter mouths. (Artifact).(effect of American culture on children)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2003... DO SEQUENCES LIKE this one from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets turn their young viewers into dolts? Some French filmmakers and critics think so. "I go very often to schools;' director Bertrand Tavernier recently told the BBC, "and I...

Our Schools and Our Future:...Are We Still at Risk?
May 1, 2003... It wasn't a "code orange" alert from the Department of Homeland Security, but twenty years ago the National Commission on Excellence in Education's landmark report, A Nation at Risk, was a warning as dire as many had heard from Washington,...