The Reason Roundtable

"On what level could torture ever be acceptable?" This weekend, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) declared that he would do everything in his power to block President Danald Trump's pick for CIA director, Gina Haspel, because of her role running a torture program at a secret detention facility during George W. Bush's administration. "There are a few things in life where it is worth standing up and saying, 'Enough is enough. This is wrong. This is, you know, this is beneath contempt,'" Paul said.

On today's Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and special guest Elizabeth Nolan Brown discuss Paul's filibuster threat, which also extends to Trump's secretary of state nominee Mike Pompeo; the emerging controversy over Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, a social media analytics firm that worked for Trump's campaign; and Trump's push for "reciprocal" tariffs with rival nations and whether it threatens the existence of the World Trade Organization.

Science writer Gary Taubes has a knack for subverting the conventional wisdom. Sixteen years ago, he published a groundbreaking feature in the The New York Times Magazine, arguing that decades of government-approved nutritional advice attacking fatty foods and praising carbohydrates was flat-out wrong, ideologically motivated, and contributed to rising rates of obesity and diabetes.

He was widely attacked—including in the pages of Reason. His 2007 book Good Calories/Bad Calories followed up on that story, as did Why We Get Fat and What To Do About It, which appeared in 2011. Today, his thesis is gaining traction among heath and nutrition researchers, and has been highlighted once again in The New York Times and Time magazine.

Reason's Nick Gillespie sat down with Taubes in his kitchen in Oakland, California, to talk about his latest book on nutrition, The Case Against Sugar, which recently came out in paperback.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Interview by Nick Gillespie. Camera by Paul Detrick, Justin Monticello, and Weissmueller. Additional graphics by Brett Raney.

From emulating China to opening up with North Korea, what to do when the president says the damndest things?

"The only way to solve the drug problem is through toughness," President Donald Trump asserted at a rally Friday, before launching into a laughter-generating anecdote about Chinese President Xi Jinping telling him that China doesn't have a drug problem because it uses the death penalty. The comment came on the heels of Trump expressing a similar sentiment at a White House meeting on opioids and overdoses. As Jacob Sullum pointed out last week, "Treating such deaths as homicides is not only unjust; it may have the perverse effect of making opioid-related fatalities more likely."

Another week, another exploration of the meaning and import of the president's words on Reason Podcast, featuring Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman, and yours truly. Besides the drug stuff, the quartet gets into Trump's North Korea diplomatic initiative, his really existing trade war, his taste in economic advisers, and the difference on any/all of the above from his predecessors.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

"How can we optimize ourselves personally to live the happiest, healthiest, longest lives possible? What does that look like? What are ethical ways of doing that? What are unethical ways of doing that? Where are the slippery slopes?"

Those are the sorts of questions that Wired co-founder Jane Metcalfe is exploring at Neo.Life, an online magazine that both chronicles and informs "the early adopters of the Neobiological Revolution." Lushly illustrated and beautifully designed, recent articles include "I Study the Female Brain. Here's What 'The Female Brain' Gets Wrong", "Get Ready for Same-Sex Reproduction," and "Will a $5,000 Checkup Save Your Life?"

"The basis of Neo.Life," Metcalfe tells Reason's Nick Gillespie, "is that computer science and engineering thinking have invaded biology....How do we think about human life differently if we start thinking about 'code'?"

If you're interested in the pioneers, dreamers, and tinkerers who are trying not just to edit a few genes but to overhaul the entire human "operating system," cure their own cancer when doctors have given up, and bring back the wooly mammoth, Neo.Life is a must-read.

"Libertarianism" says Robert W. Poole, is "about more than just economics and politics, it really is. It's about human flourishing and what are the conditions for human beings to have satisfying, flourishing [lives]."

Reason magazine was founded 50 years ago, in 1968, by Lanny Friedlander (1947-2011), who was then a student at Boston University.

Nobody has been part of Reason longer than Poole—Bob to everyone who knows him. Along with philosopher Tibor Machan and attorney Manny Klausner, Poole took over financial and editorial responsibility for the publication within a few years of its founding and eventually created the nonprofit Reason Foundation that publishes the print mag, this website, and our video and audio platforms. He is internationally known for his work as a transportation policy analyst. In the newest Reason podcast, Poole tells Nick Gillespie about his years at the helm of Reason and what we got right (privatization, deregulation, private space flight, what caused Love Canal, and more) and wrong (including the real reason for Howard Hughes' Glomar Explorer) back in the day.

"I always thought that honesty would rule the day. I always thought integrity would rule the day. I always thought that telling the truth would rule the day. And it doesn't," says Gary Johnson, the 2016 Libertarian presidential candidate and a two-time former governor of New Mexico, in an exclusive new interview with Reason.

Visiting Washington, D.C. in late February to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in late February, Johnson talks candidly with Nick Gillespie about his presidential run, which mixed memorable gaffes ("Aleppo") with historic triumphs (he pulled 3.27 percent of the final vote, more than tripling the best of any previous LP candidate). "I'm done with elected political office," he avers, even as he discusses his ongoing work with Our America Initiative, a nonprofit dedicated to training libertarian candidates and promoting libertarian positions on immigration, sentencing reform, occupational licensing, and more; his involvement in CB1, a hedge fund devoted to publicly traded marijuana investments; and why he's done with running for office.

Johnson also weighs in of the presidency of Donald Trump, whom he said was appealing to racist sentiments during the 2016 campaign. Trump's tone, says the former governor, remains absolutely awful, but some of his policies, such as those regarding regulation and corporate taxes, are worth celebrating. When asked whether Hillary Clinton would have been a better president than Trump, Johnson says, "I think we would have kind of a myriad of other issues with Hillary that would probably be equally as bad.... I think it would be horrible if Hillary would have been president, but I think Trump's got his horrible also."

Edited by Mark McDaniel. Creative Commons music by Ketsa.

Reason editors dispute presidential notion that "trade wars are good, and easy to win," and also argue over the Oscars.

Katherine Mangu-Ward, Nick Gillespie, Peter Suderman and Matt Welch talk about President Trump's half-cocked trade war, Academy Awards politics, a huge new threat to free speech dressed up as an anti-sex trafficking bill, and more

Legendary journalist—and Reason's resident movie reviewer—Kurt Loder talks with Nick Gillespie about this year's Academy Awards, which take place on Sunday, March 4, starting at 8:00 P.M. E.T.

The Rolling Stone and MTV veteran discusses why he loved best-picture nominees Lady Bird and Get Out but found The Post a total snooze-fest; ruminates on the singular career of best-actor nominee Gary Oldman, who has played Winston Churchill, Sid Vicious, and Lee Harvey Oswald, among nutjobs; how Wonder Woman and Black Panther benefited from having a female and African-American director, respectively; and explains why he thinks Harvey Weinstein should burn in hell but also that the #MeToo movement in Hollywood has gone too far in chucking over due process when it comes to James Franco. Loder talks about—and welcomes!—the end of baby-boomer cultural hegemony, how horror and moster movies captured his generation's heart, and what a recent biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner got wrong.