40 Years of Free Minds and Free Markets

An oral history of reason

Brian Doherty from the December 2008 issue

(Page 8 of 10)

Rick Henderson was on staff from 1989 to 1999.

Rick Henderson: Virginia was quite explicit: What she was hoping to do by hiring Jacob [Sullum], who had daily newspaper experience, and by hiring me, who was at least attempting to make journalism a profession, was to make reason more of a journalistic publication. She wanted to elevate reason’s profile to the extent that people would talk about it when talking about The New Republic, National Review, The Nation, or even later on The New Yorker, The Atlantic, large general-interest publications that deal with ideas seriously.

She became reason’s editor at age 29, similar to when Buckley started National Review and when Kinsley took over at The New Republic. She viewed herself that way.

She tried to bring a more journalistic approach, more original reporting, more the stuff of life in stories rather than dry policy pieces. She realized we needed to provide more compensation to get better-quality pieces. She encouraged staff-generated feature-length stories.

One I worked on continues to have impact, one I did in ’90 dealing with auto pollution. A professor in Denver named Donald Stedman, a chemist, developed a technology that could check real-time emissions of cars.

He found over many thousands of tests that roughly half of pollution comes from 10 percent of cars, those cars not old necessarily but of any age not being properly maintained. If you used his machine to test cars and notify the owners that they are polluting and force them to get the cars fixed, you can cut pollution dramatically. Then we got in touch with John Stossel, who had at the end of the '80s done a piece for 20/20 largely inspired by an essay Bob had written in the 20th anniversary issue of reason, which said that things are pretty good right now, largely because of consumer choice, less government regulation—to use Virginia’s term, more dynamism.

It took months for this to play out, but it became a thing on 20/20 and it got local news coverage, and what I find gratifying is that the move [toward using Stedman’s methods] hasn’t stopped. It’s now part of the EPA’s accepted model for pollution testing, to use remote sensing. It had an impact on pollution in a big way.

Jacob Sullum became an assistant editor in 1989; he is currently a senior editor.

Jacob Sullum: I started identifying in college as a classical liberal, picked up my first copy of reason after graduating, and saw this whole intellectual tradition of which I had been only somewhat aware. One of the best things about reason was that it gave me all these things to read. I hadn’t read any Rand, Hayek, Mises, or Bastiat. I started getting pointers about things to read in political philosophy and economics.

I thought the magazine was kind of crazy because it was very extreme. But the more I read, not just reason but things reason led me to, the more I started to see the thread of consistency. And consistency is good. You should be intellectually rigorous and have principles you apply consistently, regardless of your initial tastes or preferences.

Laws against private racial discrimination were hard for me to give up. But I didn’t have a problem with the idea that people should be allowed to say hateful things. It was the same general idea of letting people exercise freedom even if you don’t approve of what they do with it. Subsidies for space exploration were hard to give up, which seems ridiculous in retrospect because that should be pretty easy.

reason really changed the way I looked at things. That was an impressive accomplishment for a magazine. Whenever I worry about whether what I do has an impact, I think about how reason can have that kind of effect. You hear stories about people like John Stossel and Drew Carey, public figures who have a very broad reach, being persuaded by reason. It convinces me of the power of solid arguments, well-expressed, backed up by evidence.

Nick Gillespie became an assistant editor of reason in 1993 [Ed. note: Corrected from print edition]. He served as editor in chief from 2000 to 2007 and is currently in charge of reason.tv and reason.com.

Nick Gillespie: [On encountering reason while in college at Rutgers in the early 1980s] I think I had a moment of recognition similar to what transsexuals feel when they realize they are women trapped in men’s bodies. It spoke to what I felt or what I intuited about things. I had not been the type to read political magazines. I liked that it was contrarian. This was a triumph of the original ethos of the magazine: You always had a sense it was showing its math, giving enough support for its arguments that you could interrogate the argument even as you were being persuaded by it. In the first issue, Friedlander had that line about “logic not legends,” which is a shitty way to run a political movement—it’s death to widespread success—but absolutely the most interesting and appealing form of journalism.

Postrel: The problems I thought I faced at reason? The assumption that you are marginal and weird, and also an assumption that people know what you think in advance, that knowing you’re a libertarian they know everything important about you.

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Lefiti|11.17.08 @ 12:21PM|#

But this marginal right-wing shit doesn't sell very well. Donate now!

Lefiti|11.17.08 @ 12:22PM|#

My breath smells like cat food! Donate now!

Lefiti|11.17.08 @ 12:33PM|#

I have not posted on this thread yet, you circle-jerkers!

Franklin Harris|11.17.08 @ 12:40PM|#

Oliver: An example I recall of how reason was breaking into a more mainstream thing: I was watching Cinemax, one of those late-night films with Shannon Tweed. She played a psychiatrist. In a scene to demonstrate how brainy she was, she was carrying a couple of magazines, and the one on top was reason. That was the early '90s.

"Indecent Behavior" (1993), I think. Or possibly one of the sequels.

|11.17.08 @ 12:42PM|#

40 years. Wow. And to think that in all that time you've achieved nothing. Time for plan B.

|11.17.08 @ 12:44PM|#

The Spreading Circle of Campus Terror

Now THAT's what I'm talking about. Get an editor with some Rick James in him.

Leftitti|11.17.08 @ 12:54PM|#

I'm a Unitard!

|11.17.08 @ 1:00PM|#

My breath smells like cat food! Donate now!

Whoever is spoofing Lefiti, you aren't very good at it. Everyone knows Lefiti's breath smells like Sterno and Milk Bones.

TallDave|11.17.08 @ 1:02PM|#

I like to think that fist is punching a socialist.

the innominate one|11.17.08 @ 1:21PM|#

Everyone knows Lefiti's breath smells like Sterno and Milk Bones.

no, no, no. Everyone knows lefiti's breath smells like santorum. I saw it written on the men's room wall, and that's confirmation enough for me.

the innominate one|11.17.08 @ 1:23PM|#

hmmm, for some reason the server squirrels are inserting their own html into my hyperlink to www.spreadingsantorum.com

|11.17.08 @ 1:24PM|#

Ok, on a serious note.

I enjoyed this article. As someone who discoved Reason when I went to college in the early 80s (and soon subscribed starting in the mid-80s), I'll been trying to build up a collection of them. Back in the 80s they used to sell back issues (either originals or xerox copies), but I was too poor to get them. I've been getting a few off ebay (including a dozen or so from the first 5 years or so).

I really wish Reason would do something I've seen a few other mags have done: make available a CD or DVD of ALL their back issues scanned into PDF. If such was made available for a reasonable cost, I'd get it.

(on a related note, I've been trying to get back issues of Inquiry, and recently put together a complete set of Liberty, thanks to their recent back issue blowout. I was also lucky to score off eBay the hardcopy of Liberatarian Forum in 2 volumes put out by the Ludwig von Mises Institue.)

NoStar|11.17.08 @ 1:32PM|#

As a sometimes subscriber going back to the early to mid seventies, this article brought back many fond memories.

|11.17.08 @ 2:44PM|#

... more people than ever recognize that top-down planning by force isn't the best way to run the world.

If by that you mean, "people keep turning out in droves to vote for politicians who take away our freedom", then sure.

Not That Michael|11.17.08 @ 2:45PM|#

I would be absolutely thrilled if reason brought back whatever designers were responsible for those incredible early covers from the mag's inception up until around '77. At least make the images in the website's cover archive able to be enlarged. Wow.

Andy|11.17.08 @ 4:44PM|#

You guys did help in my conversion. Unfortunately, the comments threads tend to help my deconversion lol. Also, I have no power whatsoever. I shudder to think how many Democrats in my age group have been created from the combination of Bush's incompetence and Obama's charisma. You've got your work cut out for you.

stay classy reason.

File under \"S\" for Subject-h|11.17.08 @ 4:48PM|#

"able to be enlarged. Wow."

|11.17.08 @ 9:47PM|#

Libertarianism minus Ayn Rand equals kooky lightweights.

|11.17.08 @ 9:58PM|#

I have subscribed, on and off, to reason for most of its history. One of the best reasons to subscribe to the print edition now is so that you'll have something to read when you're forced to step away from the computer and go to the bathroom.

SIV|11.17.08 @ 11:32PM|#

"Lefiti" at 12:21 FTW

An excellent article but you should have included some thoughts from former intern Taranto

the innominate one|11.18.08 @ 12:49AM|#

An excellent article but you should have included some thoughts from former intern Taranto

AKA SIV?

leviramsey|11.18.08 @ 1:22AM|#

Now I know where Howard Stern got his fist logo from...

Death to tyrants|11.27.08 @ 11:15AM|#

End the fed!

Trackback| 12.16.09 @ 11:12PM

ct credit repair, on ct credit repair, links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:

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nfl jerseys|11.5.10 @ 9:00PM|#

vsrb

sevo|3.26.11 @ 1:36PM|#

"I was excommunicated back in 1963 from the Rand thing."

In Soviet Union, excommunication comes to you!
L. Trotsky.

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