Author Archives: Timothy B Lee

There’s very little that’s funny about the BP oil spill, but one of the few sources of genuine humor is the BPGlobalPR Twitter account, a satirical PR representative for the oil giant. The New York Times ponders the significance of … Continue reading →

For the last few months I’ve been writing about the challenges facing people at the top of large, hierarchical organizations, with the story of the US military’s failure in Vietnam (as told by David Halberstam) as a running example. You … Continue reading →

A few months ago, This American Life re-aired an episode from 2002 about the campaign to get the American Psychiatric Association to remove homosexuality from the official list of psychiatric disorders. Until the 1970s, the DSM, the bible of the … Continue reading →

One of the striking things about the immigration debate is the disconnect between public perception of the immigration situation and objective reality. A recent poll found that 59 percent of respondents consider illegal immigration to be a “very serious” problem. … Continue reading →

The New York Times recently ran a story about the supposedly insidious effects of connectivity and “multitasking” on our brains and our relationships with one another. They asked me to participate in a “Room for Debate” feature on the article: … Continue reading →

I don’t know anything about geology or marine biology, so I don’t have much to say about the oil spill. But I wholeheartedly endorse Gene Healy’s take on the flak President Obama has been getting: It’s hardly surprising that a … Continue reading →

Reader Pete makes a great point about Google’s Data Liberation Front: Moves like the Data Liberation Front function are a costly, and therefore credible, signal to users that Google they should be comfortable giving users their [data]. Google’s basically an … Continue reading →

Jerry Brito points to a BBC interview with Mick Jagger: People only made money out of records for a very, very small time. When The Rolling Stones started out, we didn’t make any money out of records because record companies … Continue reading →

I’m back. I’ve completed the requirements for the master’s portion of grad school and when I go back to school in the fall I’ll be a PhD candidate. I’m interning at Google this summer. As a reminder, nothing I write … Continue reading →

There’s been quite a firestorm over freshly-minted Republican Senate nominee Rand Paul’s comments about the Civil Rights Act. Fresh from his victory in Tuesday’s Republican Senate primary in Kentucky, Paul said he supported most of the CRA but would have … Continue reading →