"In many cases," says Richard Rothstein, "the federal government did create...segregation in metropolitan areas and in cities that had never known segregation before. In other cases...it did reinforce segregation that was already in existence. But the country was much, much more segregated as a result of these federal policies than it was before, or would be today without them."

Rothstein is a former education reporter at The New York Times, a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and a fellow at the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund Thurgood Marshall Institute and University of California at Berkeley's Haas Instititue. He's also the author of The Color of Law, a revisionist history of housing segregation in America that argues that government policy was a major force in creating ghettos and making sure that blacks and whites lived in separate neighborhoods.

On today's episode of the Reason Podcast, Nick Gillespie and Rothstein discuss the role that government intervention played in establishing the patterns of segregated residency that persist to this day and how that squares with the current political climate.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

As the co-host of the immensely popular true-crime podcast Last Podcast on the Left, Ben Kissel regularly delves into the minds of serial killers and other moral monsters. And as the co-host of the political podcast Abe Lincoln's Top Hat, he susses out all sorts of issues about ideology, policy, and the status quo.

But it's his latest gig that just might be the most difficult: The 35-year-old Wisconsin native is running to be Brooklyn Borough President.

In a wide-ranging conversation with Nick Gillespie, Kissel talks about getting endorsements from both the Libertarian Party and the Reform Party (!), his "pragmatic" libertarianism and support for gun rights and rent stabilization (!), his presidential vote for Gary Johnson, and why new media has made it easier than ever for both producers and consumers of culture to get what they want when they want it.

President Donald Trump has dubbed this week "infrastructure week" and promised to roll out plans to revamp how the federal government funds the building and maintenance of roads, railways, ports, and more. His first concrete proposal is to shift the nation's air traffic control system from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to an independent, nonprofit corporation that will be funded by the airline industry.

Although this is the model that has been used successfully in Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, and elsewhere, it has long been sunk by a bipartisan coalition of congressional lawmakers who insist on maintaining an antiquated system in which flights are still kept track of the same way they were 50 years ago.

"It's an excellent idea," says Robert W. Poole, director of transportation policy at Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website. "The government-managed air-traffic system in the United States is lagging behind all the rest of the developed countries. Over the last 30 years, almost all of them have created government corporations mostly or a private nonprofit in Canada, which is really the best model, because a government bureaucracy has a really difficult time running a high-tech service business like air-traffic control. We have intermittent funding, we have sequestration of funding budget for the FAA, we have lousy managers of major procurements who can't seem to get them done on time or on budget. Meanwhile our competitors, so to speak, overseas in the U.K., in Australia, in Canada, [and] Germany have better technology that are all paid for by fees and charges, just like a utility."

Poole is the author of the 2013 study "Funding Important Infrastructure Spending in a Fiscally Constrained Environment," which analyzes public-private partnerships that have successfuly upgrade and operate roads, bridges, and more with little or no tax dollars being spent. In a conversation with Reason's Nick Gillespie, Poole points to projects such as the Indiana Toll Road, which was leased to a private company for 75 years for an upfront payment of around $4 billion under Gov. Mitch Daniels. In addition to the payment, the company committed to updating and improving the road itself and its service plazas while allowing the state oversight on any rate increases for users.

Poole is cautiously optimistic about Trump's infrastructure spending plan because the president is opening the process up to firms that have the capital necessary to modernize American infrastructure without governments at all levels borrowing huge amounts of money. These companies not only have expertise in building and operating large-scale projects, they "hundreds of billions" of dollars they're ready to invest, says Poole. It's just that there haven't been many projects available due to pork-barrel politics that tend to view infrastructure spending as a source of patronage jobs and influence-peddling.

Nick Gillespie, Andrew Heaton, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Matt Welch discuss topics in the news, including the responses to the London terrorist attack; the Trump administration's decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord; the fallout from Bill Maher's use of the n-word; Kathy Griffin's picture with Trump's severed, bloodied head (and claim that he had successfully destroyed her career); and the meltdown at Evergreen State College after activists asked white students and faculty to leave campus for the school's annual "Day of Absence."

Congress's Constitution is a 500-page academic book about legislative authority, written over the course of a decade.

How fortunate for author Josh Chafetz, a professor of law at Cornell University and contributor at The Hill, that his topic has suddenly become rather trendy, as the general public takes a newly keen interest in the question of what leverage the House and Senate have over, say, a newly elected president.

Tune in to hear Reason magazine Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward talk with Chafetz about how what you learned in school about the balance of powers isn't quite right, the story behind why filibusters are so common these days, and why former House Speaker John Boehner (R–S.C.) is underrated.

"The two things you need to know about the Paris agreement are, one, it is not going to do very much to tackle climate [change]...and it is incredibly costly." So says Bjorn Lomborg, the president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. Make no mistake, the Danish scientist believes climate change is happening and that human activity is the main cause. But as Lomborg stressed during an interview with Reason's Nick Gillespie, the Kyoto-Paris approach is a terrible way to tackle the problem and the US was right to withdraw from the treaty.

The study of psychedelics is "bringing psychotherapy and medicine together," says David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacologist at Imperial College London and a co-author of the first imaging study looking at the effects of LSD on the human brain. "Drug-assisted psychotherapy is going to be the great advance in the [field in the] next 20 years."

In 2009, Nutt was fired from his job as a drug adviser to the British government after he made comments about ecstasy and other illegal drugs being less dangerous than alcohol and even horseback riding.

Reason's Zach Weissmueller sat down with Nutt at the Psychedelic Science 2017 conference in Oakland to talk about the results of his groundbreaking imaging study, what he learned about drug policy while working as a science adviser for the English government, and what he sees for the future of psychedelics and mental health treatment.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller

Music by Sergey Cheremisinov.

Bill Barhydt, the founder and CEO of the Mountain View, California-based startup Abra, discusses his mission of making it possible to send money "between any two smartphones in the world with no bank in the middle," bitcoin as "regulatory arbitrage," and whether rising transaction fees on the bitcoin blockchain could undermine the company's mission.

"[The] problem with the all-out libertarian argument of 'anything goes' is that we live in a world where everything you do affects someone else," says Nick Bilton, former New York Times columnist, Vanity Fair special correspondent, and author of American Kingpin:The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road.

Reason's Brian Doherty called the book "a lurid cops-and-crooks story" in his recent review.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller

Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

Nick Gillespie joins fellow Reason editors Katherine Mangu-Ward and Matt Welch to discuss topics in the news, including Greg Gianforte's body-slamming of The Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs; Trump's big trip and what it says about the future of U.S. dominance in the world; the TSA's proposed laptop ban on foreign flights; and the growing possibility of some sort of rapprochement, if not active alliance, between progressives sick of the Democratic Party and libertarians alienated by Trump and the two-party system.