In this Nov. 30, 2005 file photo, an anti-abortion supporter stands next to a pro-choice demonstrator outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta) (NA)   As Eugene Volokh notes, yesterday, in Yellowhammer Fund v. Attorney General, a federal district court invalidated an Alabama law criminalizing assisting or facilitating the procurement of an out-of-state abortion by an Alabama resident. Eugene's post focuses mostly on the First Amendment part of the ruling. I will focus on the right to travel. In  Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization the ..read more

This week's featured article is "The Future of AI Is Helping Us Discover the Past" by Virginia Postrel. This audio was generated using AI trained on the voice of Katherine Mangu-Ward. Music credits: "Deep in Thought" by CTRL and "Sunsettling" by Man with Roses The post <I>The Best of Reason</I>: The Future of AI Is Helping Us Discover the Past appeared first on Reason.com ..read more

The Hill (Lexi Lonas) reports: [MIT] announced Monday it no longer will require diversity statements from prospective faculty. The school said the decision was directed by President Sally Kornbluth "with the support of the Provost, Chancellor, Vice President for Equity and Inclusion, and all six academic deans." "My goals are to tap into the full scope of human talent, to bring the very best to MIT, and to make sure they thrive once here," Kornbluth said in a statement. "We can build an inclusive environment in many ways, but compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don ..read more

A federal judge has allowed a lawsuit against Alabama's Attorney General Steve Marshall to go forward. The decision comes after Marshall filed a motion to dismiss, arguing that several abortion rights groups lacked standing to sue him for threatening to prosecute anyone who helps an Alabama woman obtain an out-of-state abortion. On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Myron Thompson declined to dismiss the case, ruling that the abortion rights group had standing and that Marshall's stated plan to prosecute those who aid in abortions likely violated several key Constitutional rights.&nb ..read more

From NBC News (Angela Yang): Washed Out's latest song, "The Hardest Part," was released Thursday, complete with a four-minute music video following a couple's romance from high school through the rest of their adult lives together — speeding through scenes alluding to a wedding, child-rearing and eventual death. The video's director, Paul Trillio, wrote in a statement shared by Washed Out's record label, Sub Pop, that he had wanted to film such an "infinite zoom" concept for a decade now but never attempted it because he believed it would be too ambitious. "I was specifically inter ..read more

Neither of the two men most likely to be elected president in November has anything that could properly be described as a workable plan for addressing the approaching insolvency of America's two largest entitlement programs. This week's news from the Social Security and Medicare trustees ought to underscore just how foolish that is. On Monday, annual reports from the officials charged with running the two old-age entitlement programs confirmed once again that the clock is ticking for both: Social Security is expected to hit insolvency in 2035, while the portion of Medicare that pays for hospi ..read more

You can read the just-filed Complaint in C.M. v. Davidson County Bd. of Ed.; here's my post on the incident from when it first hit the news. [* * *] The New York Post (Yaron Steinbuch) reports: A 16-year-old North Carolina high school student says he was suspended just for saying "illegal alien" while discussing word meaning in English class — possibly ruining his chances of landing a college sports scholarship. Christian McGhee, a student at Central Davidson High School in Lexington, received a three-day suspension last week after he used the term in English class, the Carolina Jou ..read more

An interesting Persuasion interview (text and audio). I expect I disagree with Patel on much, but I found his comments to be thoughtful and well expressed. One excerpt from the beginning: What's happened is an interesting critique morphed into a paradigm which then shifted into a regime. Anti-racism is an interesting critique. Here's what you're not talking about: you're not talking about structural racism; you're not talking about oppressed peoples; you're not talking about oppressors, etc. So I think that's an interesting critique. But when it becomes a paradigm, it seeks to explain all of ..read more

After surviving a disastrous congressional hearing, Claudine Gay was forced to resign as the president of Harvard for repeatedly copying and pasting language used by other scholars and passing it off as her own. She's hardly alone among elite academics, and plagiarism has become a roiling scandal in academia. There's another common practice among professional researchers that should be generating even more outrage: making up data. I'm not talking about explicit fraud, which also happens way too often, but about openly inserting fictional data into a supposedly objective analysis. Instead of d ..read more

Going into Rafah: "The Israeli military said on Tuesday that it had sent tanks into Rafah and established control over the Gaza side of the border crossing with Egypt, in what it called a limited operation aimed at destroying Hamas targets it says were used to attack Israeli soldiers," reports The New York Times.  The day prior, Israeli authorities had warned Palestinians sheltering in Rafah to move elsewhere, saying an invasion was imminent after Hamas had launched rockets from Rafah that killed four Israeli soldiers. "A sense of panic coursed through Rafah, in southern Gaza, on Mo ..read more