[caption id="attachment_3328" align="alignright" width="199"] Image: SpaceX[/caption] A question has been bothering me since a Colorado high school student asked me last year: Why don’t the news media report more good news? Part of the answer lies in the nature of the business: “If it bleeds, it leads,” goes the rationale.…

In The Hunger Games, tyrannical rulers of a future dystopia force children to fight to the death in an annual tournament as a means to suppress and control the population. Given the story’s gruesome subject matter, what explains the popularity of Suzanne Collins’s book and the new film based on…

An almost-unbelievable story in The Sun claims that teachers at some UK schools have banned “best friends.” Harry Hawkins writes for that paper: Teachers are banning schoolkids from having best pals—so they don’t get upset by fall-outs. Instead, the primary pupils are being encouraged to play in large groups. Educational…

Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke is “one of the most powerful men in Washington,” notes the New York Times. Of course he is: He holds near-dictatorial powers over the nation’s money supply. In a recent talk at George Washington University, Bernanke condemned the gold standard for hampering the government’s ability…

The Supreme Court helped protect property rights yesterday by deciding unanimously that Mike and Chantell Sackett can legally challenge the EPA’s demand that they cease work on building their new home. The Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), which represented the Sacketts, announced the victory. A Reason TV video summarizes the case.…

Here’s the problem: Sending people through warehouses to retrieve goods consumes a lot of time and resources. Here’s the solution: Build robots that bring the shelves to the people. That’s what Kiva Systems did. As one of the company’s videos explains, its “robots deliver shelves of inventory to ‘pick’ stations,”…

Surprise, surprise: “A new study has failed to find evidence that psychic ability is real,” reports Live Science. But we didn’t need a “new study” to figure that out. The background is that, last year, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published Daryl Bem’s article purporting to show “retroactive…

To Americans, it is almost unimaginable that a country still exists where hundreds of thousands of people are slaves. Yet in the impoverished western African nation of Mauritania, slavery is widespread, CNN reports in an extraordinary set of articles. Americans rightly express outrage over such injustice. Slavery—aka involuntary servitude—violates the…

For one thing, both advocate censorship. Fonda wants to use the power of the federal government to shut down Rush Limbaugh’s radio broadcasts (as I’ve discussed); Santorum wants to use the same power to shut down internet pornography. Both Fonda and Santorum are enemies of freedom of speech. As Steven…

The Encyclopaedia Britannica is dead. Long live the Encyclopaedia Britannica! The encyclopedia’s publisher has announced that, in response to the ongoing digital revolution, it will discontinue its printed version and provide exclusively digital content. The publisher’s decision marks a new era for the encyclopedia, and more broadly it marks a…

Although I may disagree with what Rush Limbaugh says, I will defend to the death his right to say it. That sentiment, inspired by Voltaire, is the proper attitude to take with respect to anyone with whom one disagrees. But in an article recently published by CNN, Jane Fonda, Robin…

After two weekends in theaters, the film Lorax earned more than $120 million, reports Bloomberg Businessweek. That’s an impressive haul for a film condemning capitalism. But the irony is apparently lost on the filmmakers. In the original Dr. Seuss story on which the film is based, a manufacturer chops down…

The Obama administration finally found a program it is willing to cut, albeit a tiny one. However, the administration is facing opposition to this reduction by. . . conservatives. As the Washington Times reports, the U.S. government has spent around $2 million per year to facilitate the “adoption” of so-called…

Should college students with a permit to carry concealed handguns be legally allowed to carry a gun on campus? On campuses subsidized by taxpayers, they should—subject, of course, to the state’s restrictions on use and trade, prohibition of menacing, and the like. Recently the Colorado Supreme Court correctly overturned the…

Few things could better illustrate the deep corruption of U.S. law than the Department of Justice’s grotesquely unjust assault on Apple, one of America’s most beloved and most successful companies. What is Apple’s alleged crime? It is contracting voluntarily with willing publishers to sell digital books to willing customers, thereby…