In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie welcome special guest Ben Dreyfuss onto the pod ahead of this week's Democratic National Convention in Chicago to talk about Kamala Harris' truly terrible economic policy proposals.

02:48—Dreyfuss' YIMBY conversion thanks to Reason

13:20—Harris drops some lousy economic policy ideas.

32:37—The DNC begins.

44:25—Weekly Listener Question

53:33—Tariffs are timeless.

1:03:32—This week's cultural recommendations

Mentioned in this podcast:

"Kamala Harris' Dishonest and Stupid Price Control Proposal," by J.D. Tuccille

"DNC Readies for Protesters," by Liz Wolfe

"Harris' Economic Illiteracy," by Liz Wolfe

"Harris Joins the FTC's Food Fight Against Kroger-Albertsons Merger," by C. Jarrett Dieterle

"The times demand serious economic ideas. Harris supplies gimmicks." by the Washington Post editorial board

The price tag of @KamalaHarris's big, bold economic plan? According to penny pinchers at @BudgetHawks, a mere $1.7 to $2 trillion over the next decade. Given that gross debt is $35 trillion, maybe it's time to tap the brakes a bit?https://t.co/qA5wFJleLw pic.twitter.com/q80MwxoRD9

— Nick Gillespie (@nickgillespie) August 16, 2024

"When your opponent calls you 'communist,' maybe don't propose price controls?" Catherine Rampell

"How did Doug Emhoff hear Biden was out? After taking a SoulCycle class in WeHo. Without his phone," by Kevin Rector

"Database Nation: The Upside of 'Zero Privacy,'" by Declan Mccullagh

"Alien: Romulus Is a Slick, Empty Franchise Pastiche," by Peter Suderman

The Calm Down Substack by Ben Dreyfuss

https://x.com/nickgillespie/status/1824430467191312525

"Sing for Change Obama"

Upcoming Events:

• "Is the American Dream Alive?" A Free Press debate with Katherine Mangu-Ward on Tuesday, September 10 in Washington, D.C.
• "Reason Speakeasy: Kat Timpf & Nick Gillespie" on Wednesday, September 11 in New York

Send your questions to [email protected]. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.

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Audio production by Ian Keyser; assistant production by Hunt Beaty.

Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve

• Video Editor: Ian Keyser
• Producer: Hunt Beaty

The post Why Libertarians Hate Kamala Harris' Economic Platform appeared first on Reason.com.

In this week's The Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, and Peter Suderman scrutinize President Joe Biden's executive order updating asylum restrictions at the U.S.-Mexico border in response to illegal border crossings.

01:32—Biden's new asylum restrictions

21:38—The prosecution of political opponents: former President Donald Trump, Hunter Biden, and Steve Bannon

33:25—Weekly Listener Question

39:56—No one is reading The Washington Post

48:09—This week's cultural recommendations

Mentioned in this podcast:

"Biden Announces Sweeping Asylum Restrictions at U.S.-Mexico Border" by Fiona Harrigan

"Biden's New Asylum Policy is Both Harmful and Illegal" by Ilya Somin

"Travel Ban, Redux" by Josh Blackman

"Immigration Fueled America's Stunning Cricket Upset Over Pakistan" by Eric Boehm

"Libertarian Candidate Chase Oliver Wants To Bring Back 'Ellis Island Style' Immigration Processing" by Fiona Harrigan

"Donald Trump and Hunter Biden Face the Illogical Consequences of an Arbitrary Gun Law" by Jacob Sullum

"Hunter Biden's Trial Highlights a Widely Flouted, Haphazardly Enforced, and Constitutionally Dubious Gun Law" by Jacob Sullum

"Hunter Biden's Multiplying Charges Exemplify a Profound Threat to Trial by Jury" by Jacob Sullum

"The Conviction Effect" by Liz Wolfe

"Laurence Tribe Bizarrely Claims Trump Won the 2016 Election by Falsifying Business Records in 2017" by Jacob Sullum

"A Jumble of Legal Theories Failed To Give Trump 'Fair Notice' of the New York Charges Against Him" by Jacob Sullum

"Does Donald Trump's Conviction in New York Make Us Banana Republicans?" by J.D. Tuccille

"The Myth of the Federal Private Nondelegation Doctrine, Part 1" by Sasha Volokh

"Federal Court Condemns Congress for Giving Unconstitutional Regulatory Powers to Amtrak" by Damon Root

"Make Amtrak Safer and Privatize It" by Ira Stoll

"Biden Threatens To Veto GOP Spending Bill That Would 'Cut' Amtrak Funding to Double Pre-Pandemic Levels" by Christian Britschgi

"This Company Is Running a High-Speed Train in Florida—Without Subsidies" by Natalie Dowzicky

"Do Not Under Any Circumstances Nationalize Greyhound" by Christian Britschgi

"With Ride or Die, the Bad Boys Movies Become Referendums on Masculinity" by Peter Suderman

"D.C. Water Spent Nearly $4,000 On Its Wendy the Water Drop Mascot" by Christian Britschgi

Upcoming Reason Events:

Reason Speakeasy: Corey DeAngelis on June 11 in New York City

Send your questions to [email protected]. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.

Today's sponsor:

• We all carry around different stressors—big and small. When we keep them bottled up, it can start to affect us negatively. Therapy is a safe space to get things off your chest—and to figure out how to work through whatever's weighing you down. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online. Designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist, and switch therapists any time for no additional charge. Get it off your chest, with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com/roundtable today to get 10 percent off your first month.

Audio production by Justin Zuckerman and John Carter

Assistant production by Luke Allen and Hunt Beaty

Music: "Angeline" by The Brothers Steve

• Producer: Hunt Beaty
• Video Editor: César Báez

The post Partisan Border Wars appeared first on Reason.com.

One way to understand the Bad Boys franchise is as a referendum on shifting cultural views of masculinity. 

The first two films, released in 1995 and 2003 respectively, followed the brash antics of two hard-charging Miami cops, Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) and Mike Lowrey (Will Smith). Mike and Marcus are a classic cinematic odd couple: Marcus is sloppy, goofy, messy, harried, and married; Marcus is handsome, uptight, hard-charging, and very, very single. But they shared a certain bro-code—vulgar, violent, competitive, sex-obsessed, and constantly engaged in insult comedy, much of which had homophobic undertones. They were also brothers in arms, unshakably loyal to each other. Today flagrantly crude behavior would be cast as toxic masculinity. But that label didn't exist back in 1995. Back then, it was just masculinity. 

The early movies, both directed by Michael Bay, the noisy commercial auteur who would go on to make Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, and the first five Transformers films, understood that their behavior was extreme, aggressive, and obnoxious. They were, after all, bad boys. But they didn't care if anyone was offended. 

Will Smith and Martin Lawrence were playing larger-than-life action heroes and their obnoxiousness was meant to be endearing. The audience was intended to enjoy their naughty behavior, to derive pleasure from the offense of it all. They were just guys being guys. Bros being bros. The subtext of all the swearing, leering, swaggering, and shooting was, more or less, "dudes rock." 

But when the franchise picked up again with Bad Boys For Life in early 2020, just weeks before the pandemic shut down most movie theaters, that confident assertion seemed more like a question. 

Marcus and Mike were still swaggering, swearing, shoot-first alphas. But their back-and-forth insult volleys, while not exactly PG-rated, were a little less graphic, and they moved a little bit slower. They were older now, their facade of invulnerability punctured, and their youthful recklessness was finally catching up to them. Mike, it turned out, had a long-lost son who was connected to the drug cartel they were trying to take down. Marcus became a grandfather and announced his intention to retire from police work. There were costs, deadly costs, to their conduct. This is what it meant to be a bad boy, for life. 

The newest installment, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, takes this notion even further but with diminishing returns. In the opening minutes, Mike, the longtime womanizer, gets married. Marcus has a heart attack at the ceremony. And when the bad guys show up and the gunfire and explosions begin, Mike's long-lost son is, naturally, involved. There's still swearing and shooting galore. There's still an anti-authoritarian streak that puts the two cops at odds with their superiors. And Mike and Marcus are still the tightest and loyalist of bros. But 2024's bad boys are not quite as bad as they once were. 

Which is a shame, because they're not quite as fun either.

Bad Boys: Ride or Die is a fan-service-laden retread of its predecessor: Once again, there are cameos and reminders of the franchise's decades-long history. Once again, there are mid-life milestones meant to reflect on growing older, realizations and revelations about the meaning of life, and goofy jokes about the indignities of aging, most of which revolve around Marcus' obsession with junk food after his doctor orders him to improve his diet. 

It's not quite a beat-for-beat remake of the previous film but it feels like an uninspired remix, with nearly every major element repeating something from Bad Boys for Life. Given that film's success—thanks to pandemic shutdowns it ended up as the top-grossing movie of 2020—that's understandable. There are scattered laughs to be had in the comic riffing; even in their dotage, Will Smith and Marcus Lawrence are still a potent on-screen odd couple. And directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah concoct some energetic (if silly) action set pieces, including a POV-heavy shootout at an abandoned gator-haunted theme park in South Florida.

But for the most part, Bad Boys Ride or Die feels creatively safe and cautious in a way that's at odds with the franchise's earlier throw-it-against-the-wall recklessness. It's studiously inoffensive, not awful but perfunctory, and vaguely ashamed of all that came before. They're still guys being guys, bros being bros—but, seemingly by design, these dudes don't rock quite like they used to. As the song goes: Whatcha gonna do? 

The post With <i>Ride or Die</i>, the Bad Boys Movies Become Referendums on Masculinity appeared first on Reason.com.

If you're looking for a political message in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, consider the following: The story begins "many generations" after the death of the previous reboot trilogy's hero, Caesar. Caesar was the first ape to speak, following the spread of a strange virus. Eventually, he became the leader of the apes in a war against the remnants of humanity. Caesar's teachings—apes should not kill each other, and apes are stronger together—have become quasi-religious dogma (ape-ma?) amongst the apes who live on in the post-apocalyptic world. 

But those beliefs have been perverted by an authoritarian sect run by Proximus, a strutting, vainglorious bonobo bent on unifying and dominating the fragmented ape clans into something greater. Proximus preaches strength and glory; it turns out the bonobos, like all men, are obsessed with Rome. But his footsoldiers massacre peaceful ape clans, and his murderous forces wear face coverings and are known as "masks." His whole kingdom appears to be built on personal whim and something resembling slavery. Talk about a banana republic. 

Masks, mad dictators, post-pandemic chaos, power fantasies of restoring Rome? Perhaps this is a story about Trump? About antifa? About revolution and empire? But no, not really. It's just a story about a bunch of animated monkeys fighting. 

The sociopolitical notions about an ape society built atop the ashes of human civilization are the most interesting concepts in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes—and the least well-explored. Rather than dig in and engage with the story's fundamentally political underpinnings, the story is, instead, content to nod in their direction while pursuing a notably less thoughtful action-adventure story. 

The end result isn't bad: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is a solid enough summer blockbuster, with top-notch special effects and a family-friendly emotional core that most movies of this class lack. But what's frustrating is that the movie gestures at something much more interesting than what ends up on screen.  

The story starts with a trio of young chimpanzees who belong to a peaceful, idyllic clan devoted to the raising of eagles. But soon their village is attacked by masked-wearing outsiders, including a silverback brute named Sylva. Truly, it's gorilla warfare. 

Noa, the son of the eagle clan's leader, manages to escape. The movie then becomes a sort of road movie in which Noa must return to his tribe and free them from Proximus' authoritarian rule. Easy rider, raging apes. 

Noa is no Caesar, but he's a chimp off the old block: thoughtful, full of moral conviction, yearning to grow into something more. After the attack on his village, he runs into Raka, a wise old Orangutan who has studied Caesar's teachings, and who steals every scene he's in. The pair are soon joined by Mae, a human woman who initially appears to be a mute scavenger but turns out to be something more. All of this comes to a head when Mae and Noa reach Proximus' kingdom, which consists of a gigantic, rusted-out ship that's been beached near a massive, locked bunker that he believes holds tools that will make him more powerful. There's a sort of Mad Max parallel here, but with inquisitive monkeys instead of leather-clad car fiends; perhaps this picture should have been called Furious George. 

Proximus has been studying ancient Rome, with the help of Trevathan, an older human man (William H. Macy) who has accepted the notion that apes will rule the earth. Some of the movie's most interesting scenes involve Trevathan arguing with Mae about whether to accept ape dominion. But until the movie's final moments, it's not at all clear what Mae's alternative is, or why she even thinks there is an alternative. What is Mae even fighting for? Too much of the movie's worldbuilding is shuffled into what are effectively footnotes. 

What's left is a relatively simple narrative about a young ape struggling to free his clan and finding himself in the process. It's competently told, and the computer character animation is consistently excellent, with everything from wet fur to minor skin blemishes convincingly rendered. Yet that impressive level of detail doesn't extend to the story, which at two and a half hours long threatens to turn this into Kingdom of the Planet of Bored Apes.

In many ways, it's a relief that the movie doesn't really attempt to be a Trump-era political tract. (Remember the Gorilla Channel?) But I do wish the story had taken its own ideas about politics and civilizational conflict a little more seriously. The movie is fine, but simian swagger aside, it doesn't have much thematic heft; Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes amounts to little more than a couple hours of monkeying around.  

The post <i>Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes</i> Is Just a Lot of Monkeying Around appeared first on Reason.com.

There's a well-known saying about finding connection in the nation's capital city: If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.

Robot Dreams, a new animated film that is up for this year's Academy Award for best animated feature, proposes a sort of twist on that idea. What if you are a dog? And you live in New York City? But you still want a friend.

Well then. Maybe the answer is to get a robot.

Robot Dreams is a whimsical, wordless story set in a fantasy version of early 1980s New York in which every person is an animal. It follows Dog, a lonely apartment dweller in the East Village who spends his days playing Pong and watching television, as he purchases a mail-order robot who quickly becomes his best and closest friend. But after a swim on a day trip to the beach, Robot becomes inoperable. Dog is forced to leave Robot on the beach for the long winter, when the beach is closed. What will he do without his best friend?

The answer, it turns out, is that he'll have to find a new friend—perhaps in the form of Duck, a pretty, sporty pal he meets flying kites in Central Park, or perhaps in the form of a new Palbot, one who isn't the same as his old Robot, but who offers a different form of companionship. Robot, meanwhile, spends the winter on the beach, dreaming of Dog, and hoping for a way to escape his strange entrapment.

Robot Dreams is a tale of love and friendship, and it is decidedly sweet-natured without being sentimental. The story's indie comic roots—it was adapted from a 2007 comic of the same name—are obvious: More than most animated films, it captures the distinctive, quirky sensibility of hand-drawn, indie comic line work.

That gives the central story an affable, fablelike quality. It also allows for a level of environmental and period specificity that is rare in any sort of film, animated or otherwise. The movie's early 1980s NYC setting is rendered in pointillistic detail, with intricate sign work and gritty city blocks populated by animal versions of New York street characters.

That includes the city's difficult, impersonal bureaucracy: One reason Dog can't rescue Robot from the beach is that there's a grumpy NYPD officer who refuses to let him through the locked gate onto the sand. Dog visits the city courthouse to plead his case, but his application for a special winter visit to the beach is quickly denied. There's a layered, lived-in quality that even the busiest Pixar movies and the most precisely recreated historical live-action films lack.

The contrast between the ordinariness of the scenario, the unconventional intricacy of the animation, and the fantastical animal characters gives the movie a peculiarity and a particularity that keeps the low-key sweetness afloat. There's magic in the mundanity of it all, which, come to think of it, is how love and friendship work too.

The post Oscar-Nominated <i>Robot Dreams</i> Is a Gentle Animated Love Story About Dogs, Robots, and 1980s New York appeared first on Reason.com.

Separation of powers is a core concept of America's Constitution. In the Founders' scheme, Congress, the courts, and the executive are independent branches of government, with their own roles and duties, intended to check one another.

But since 1984, the Supreme Court has hamstrung its own ability to act independently in the face of executive power. In Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the high court adopted a blanket presumption of deference to statutory interpretations put forth by regulatory agencies in any case where the statute was ambiguous, so long as the interpretation was reasonable.

If there is ambiguity about what the text of a law says, the Supreme Court decided in that case, then the courts should defer to the government's experts. This became known as the Chevron deference.

In practice, the Chevron deference undermined the Court's independence, since it forced courts to just accept executive branch interpretations in many tough cases.

The doctrine also creates perverse incentives for the other two branches. For example, by giving deference to agencies in ambiguous cases, it gave executive branch regulators incentive to hunt for ambiguities in order to expand their own power. This led to decades of executive overreach, as administrations used convoluted readings of statutes to pursue agendas Congress never imagined.

By the same token, Chevron deference shifted the burden of making well-written and fully thought-out laws away from Congress. Empowering regulators meant that, at the margins, Congress had less reason to write clear, consensus-based legislation.

The result, over 40 years, has been a shift away from the intended constitutional order, in which Congress writes laws, the executive branch implements them, and the courts rule independently on matters of dispute. We now live under an often dysfunctional system in which Congress is less inclined to compromise and legislate on tough issues, regulators are more inclined to take matters into their own hands, and courts have less power to tell executive branch officials when they have overreached.

The system lends itself to politicized regulatory pingponging, as courts are generally required to defer to the differing and even dramatically opposed interpretations put forth by shifting Democratic and Republican administrations.

This was what was at stake in January, when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments that put the legacy of Chevron on trial. In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, a group of herring fishermen from New Jersey objected to a federal rule requiring them not only to host government monitors on their boats but to pay the cost of those monitors—about $700 a day.

That requirement was based on the 2007 Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA), which does require some types of fishing operations to host and pay for government monitors. But the fishermen in this case weren't explicitly covered by that requirement, so when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) decided to expand the purview of the MSA in order to cover a budget shortfall, the fishermen went to court.

The fishermen's cause is important on its own merits. But for larger constitutional purposes, it's something of a red herring. The specifics of their complaint are less important than whether or not the courts had to defer to NOAA's newly stretched interpretation of the MSA.

In oral arguments, the three justices appointed by Democrats seemed inclined to keep Chevron as is, with all three suggesting that experts in regulatory agencies are better equipped than courts are to make tough decisions about difficult-to-parse statutes.

But the rest of the Court seemed skeptical. Justice Neil Gorsuch noted that Chevron deference tends to empower agencies at the expense of less-powerful individuals, such as immigrants, veterans, and Social Security claimants. Addressing the Court, Paul Clement, who defended the fishermen, put it this way: "One of the many problems with the Chevron rule is it basically says that when the statutory question is close, the tie goes to the government."

Outside the Court, news reports and activists warned of the consequences of taking down Chevron, noting that much of the federal government's vast regulatory authority rested on its rule of deference. As a USA Today report on the case noted, "The court's decision could undo decades of rules and procedures involving land use, the stock market, and on-the-job safety."

Loper Bright was not the only Supreme Court case to challenge major parts of the government's regulatory authority this term. Sheetz v. County of El Dorado takes aim at regulatory takings, and Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy revolves around the question of whether the government violates the Seventh Amendment's requirements about jury trials when judging securities claims. Collectively, wrote Cameron Bonnell in The Georgetown Environmental Law Review, these cases "indicate the Court's eagerness to continue shaping the proper scope of government regulatory authority."

For too long, the administrative state has run unchecked over much of American life. That might finally be coming to an end with this year's Supreme Court term. In discussing the problems with Chevron with NPR, Clement said, "I think it's really as simple as this, which is: When the statute is ambiguous, and the tie has to go to someone, we think the tie should go to the citizen and not the government." One can hope.

The post SCOTUS Takes on <i>Chevron</i> Deference appeared first on Reason.com.

As I watched the gigantic, awesome, triumphant, overwhelming, punishingly large and loud Dune: Part Two in IMAX earlier this week, I couldn't help but think of an old meme. 

Sometime before the 2021 release of Dune: Part One, a clever anonymous poster mocked up a "know your candidates" page featuring Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Only the "issue" they were discussing wasn't health care or foreign policy. It was, "What is Dune about?" 

In the meme, Sanders' answer was typically long-winded and discursive: "Well, it's hard to say Dune is about any one thing, because Dune is rich with themes. The first book, for example, is about ecology, and the hero's journey, and as a criticism of the Foundation series' take on declining empires, among other things. The second book subverts the hero's journey told in the first book, and the later books follow in…" and then the fake Sanders answer trails off the page. 

The meme version of Biden simply responds: "Dune is about worms." 

The magic of director Denis Villeneuve's two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert's 1965 sci-fi novel is that it captures both of the fake candidate answers from the meme. It's an intricate desert epic about ecological balance, the harshness of nature, the economics of resource extraction, imperialism, tribal politics, corporate intrigue, groovy psychedelic drugs, culture clash, and Golden Age science fiction missing the point, among other things. 

But it's also about, you know, worms. 

Specifically: very, very big worms. 

Even more than the first film, which covered a little more than half of Herbert's novel, Dune: Part Two is a showcase for cinematic grandiosity, for movies as conveyors of sheer, terrifying enormity. The movie is the tale of young Paul Atreides, a young duke whose family was killed by their rivals the Harkonnens after a distant emperor granted the Atreides charge of the planet Arrakis. 

Arrakis isn't just any planet: It's the home to spice, a psychedelic drug that also happens to power interstellar travel, which is made by the planet's native giant sandworms. Imagine if oil was also LSD, and it was produced by roving, murderous whales who lived deep in the desert sands. 

The first installment was the story of Atreides' journey to Dune and the defeat of his family. The second is the story of his triumphant revenge, as he unites the local people, the Fremen, in defiance of the Harkonnen overlords.

Herbert's novel is replete with descriptions of corporate structures and what amount to company strategy discussions about economic fundamentals and resource extraction metrics, all mixed with complex political machinations and semi-inscrutable hallucinogenic dream logic featuring religious prophecies and drug-addled visions, plus a lot of asides about the elegant sustainable eco-technology of life on a barren sand planet. At times, reading Dune resembles reading minutes from a corporate board meeting while tripping balls with green-tech climate activists in the desert. 

Anyway, you can probably see what meme-Bernie was talking about. 

The movie, however, captures all of this clunky complexity quite well, capturing desert life among the Fremen and gesturing at their political structures and religious beliefs without subjecting viewers to drawn-out exposition. Villeneuve and co-screenwriter Jon Spaihts understand that a thoughtfully imagined fictional world doesn't need to constantly stop to explain itself; it can just go about its business. 

But then, in the midst of all this, there are the worms. In contrast to Dune: Part One, which closed with a hint of the possibility, this time Paul Atreides gets to ride them. And it is awesome. 

In Dune: Part Two, Villeneuve delivers a handful of truly gargantuan set pieces featuring Arrakis' skyscraper-sized sandworms as they plow through the desert of the film's alien planet. Along with his work on the first-contact film Arrival, they mark Villeneuve as Hollywood's most successful purveyor of colossal mystery.

As with that movie's obelisk and its tentacled alien inhabitants, there's something truly alien about the sandworms of Arrakis, and also a sense of scale and vastness that few other filmmakers convey. Watching a sandworm plunge through desert valleys, blasting tidal waves of sand in its wake, on an oversized IMAX screen in kneecap-rattling surround sound is the sort of audiovisual experience that big-budget, big-screen movies were made for. Dune: Part Two is a glorious, overwhelming sensory smorgasbord. 

In recent years, far too many blockbusters have served up weightless, ugly, computer-generated, mediocre-at-best set pieces. Villeneuve's Dune films are reminders of what real cinematic spectacle looks like. They are movies about worms—really big worms. Hell yeah, they are.  

The post <i>Dune: Part Two</i> Is a Glorious Sci-Fi Spectacle appeared first on Reason.com.

For four seasons, Apple TV+'s For All Mankind has presented an alternate history of the space race, starting in a world where Russia, not America, put the first person on the moon. That single incident creates a domino effect on history: In the first season, set in the 1960s and '70s, the United States allows women into the NASA pilot program. In the 1980s, both America and Russia build small manned bases on the moon. By the 1990s, American and Russian space programs are competing not only with each other but with private space tourism efforts, including a massive orbital hotel.

In the fourth season, set in 2003, the U.S., Russia, a private space exploration company, and North Korea have set up a joint settlement on Mars. But tensions run high when the workers revolt, staging a strike just as an asteroid ripe for mining drifts through the solar system. There are black market operations and an illegal speakeasy, high-stakes geopolitical negotiations, and deadly outer-space operations. The show presents space exploration, under whatever national or corporate aegis, as risky, difficult—and gloriously necessary for the growth of humanity.

The post Review: <i>For All Mankind</i> Offers an Alternate History of Moon Exploration appeared first on Reason.com.