Author Archives: Timothy B Lee

The next Bottom-Up chat will feature Adam Thierer, president of the Progress and Freedom Foundation and mastermind of the Technology Liberation Front, the world’s leading libertarian tech policy blog. One of his recurring features at TLF is an annual review … Continue reading →

Will Wilkinson revisits his case against birthright citizenship: Now, if you’re a solidaristic nationalist, as most notable liberals are, the ideal of liberal equality suggests something like equality of opportunity for full insider status for people who are already inside … Continue reading →

At the urging of several readers, I’m now reading James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State, which is a critique of what Scott calls “high modernism”: the kind of “clean slate” thinking that so enthused Western elites during the 20th … Continue reading →

Over at Ars Technica, John Siracusa has a good summary of the state of the mobile market. Google’s Android operating system has been firing on all cylinders recently. Some analysts have Android-based phones taking the lead in sales in recent … Continue reading →

Tomorrow evening I’ll be doing another Envolve chat, and I’m excited that we’ll have a special guest. My friend Reihan Salam is a blogger for National Review, a columnist for Forbes, a fellow at the New America Foundation, and a … Continue reading →

If you don’t normally read the comment section, I encourage you to click through to yesterday’s post about “clean slate” thinking. I particularly want to endorse this perspective from Jed Harris: I think it turns on on whether one gives … Continue reading →

A fantastic column by Gene Healy about our bloated new national security state: The system vomits up some “50,000 intelligence reports each year — a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.” Details about December’s “underwear bomber” vanished amid … Continue reading →

A few years before her death, in 2000, Jane Jacobs gave a really fascinating interview with Jim Kunstler. It’s a long interview, but it’s packed with interesting ideas from a woman who was still in her intellectual prime well into … Continue reading →

A great comment by reader “Eric”: The same barriers that supposedly keep crime out, are the same ones that concentrate it. At the end of the day, it doesn’t solve the problem. Furthermore (funny how the worm turns), now the … Continue reading →

Last week I argued that driving freeways through the heart of urban neighborhoods can have devastating effects. In case you’re skeptical about that claim, consider the case of McRee Town, a St. Louis neighborhood not far from the Forest Park … Continue reading →