Lanny Friedlander, Founder of Reason Magazine, Dies at 63

The cause was a heart attack, his lawyer, George H. Murphy, said.

Perhaps fittingly for a man who was an enigma for so long, Mr. Friedlander’s death commanded little notice outside libertarian circles.

Even within those circles, Mr. Friedlander was a phantom presence. In an obituary posted on March 26 on Reason’s Web site, Nick Gillespie, the editor in chief of reason.com and reason.tv, the magazine’s video arm, wrote that neither he nor anyone else currently at the magazine had ever met him.

In 2007, when Reason opened an office in Washington (its headquarters are in Los Angeles), Mr. Gillespie cast about for a picture of Mr. Friedlander to hang on the wall. None could be found.

Until last year, Mr. Gillespie wrote, no one at Reason was certain whether Mr. Friedlander was dead or alive.

In its dorm room days, Reason never attained a circulation of more than a few hundred copies per issue. Today, the magazine is a glossy publication with a monthly circulation of about 50,000; its Web site receives four million visits a month. Reason.tv broadcasts original and archival video programming online.

As Mr. Friedlander conceived it, Reason was neither strictly right-wing libertarian nor strictly left — in modern parlance, neither red nor blue but a purple amalgam of the two. It was genuinely purple at first, as it was run off on a ditto machine.

“When REASON speaks of poverty, racism, the draft, the war, studentpower, politics, and other vital issues, it shall be reasons, not slogans, it gives for conclusions,” Mr. Friedlander wrote in the first issue, published in May 1968 and peppered with typographical errors and misspellings. “Proof, not belligerent assertion. Logic, not legends. Coherance, not contradictions. This is our promise: this is the reason for REASON.”

By all accounts Mr. Friedlander was an intuitive genius of design, publishing issues in the magazine’s post-ditto period that had stark, evocative graphics; coolly elegant sans serif typefaces; and layouts that reinforced the editorial content.

He seemed likely to have been headed for a vibrant career had it not been for the schizophrenia that took hold of him in his early 20s.

Lanny Friedlander was born in Boston on Dec. 7, 1947. His mother suffered from mental illness while he was growing up, Mr. Murphy said in a telephone interview on Friday, and his parents eventually divorced. Mr. Friedlander entered Boston University but, experiencing the first signs of his own illness, left before graduating.

In the early 1970s, unable to run Reason effectively, Mr. Friedlander sold it to a consortium of its writers. (It is now owned by the Reason Foundation.) He was retained as an editor there for only a short time.

At some point during these years, Mr. Friedlander, who opposed the draft, enlisted briefly in the Navy amid the Vietnam War. His illness was detected before he could be sent overseas, and he was discharged.

He fetched up in New York, where he worked as a graphic designer and appears to have driven a cab, Mr. Murphy said. In the early 1970s he made a pilgrimage to Paris to visit the grave of Jim Morrison, the lead singer of the Doors. There, Mr. Friedlander became agitated and was sent home by the authorities.

He spent much of the rest of his life in psychiatric hospitals and had lived most recently at a Veterans Affairs halfway house in Lowell. At times he declined to take medication, Mr. Murphy said, because he felt it made the world run painfully slowly, like a 78 r.p.m. record played at 331/3.

Mr. Friedlander’s survivors include his father, Herbert, and a brother, Daniel.

In December, Ronald Bailey, Reason’s science correspondent, received a letter from Mr. Friedlander in response to an article he had written on developments in genomics.

Writing by hand in block letters, Mr. Friedlander said, “I think you should take your thinking one step further and write about the prospects of immortality in the foreseeable future.” He continued, “I also wonder if magicians can reverse the effects of old age.”

At the bottom of the letter, he wrote: “P.S. I started Reason magazine in 1968.”

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India Sees New Reason to Distrust Pakistan

Many Indian officials, who have long accused Pakistan of providing shelter to terrorist groups, felt vindicated by the discovery of Bin Laden in the town of Abbottabad, an hour’s drive north of the capital and home to a large military base.

Now these officials are repeating their demands that the Pakistani government arrest and prosecute all the perpetrators of the November 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, an assault carried out by militants trained in Pakistan who killed more than 160 people.

“We believe that the perpetrators of the Mumbai terror attack, including the controllers and handlers of the terrorists who actually carried out the attack, continue to be sheltered in Pakistan,” Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said in a statement on Monday.

In recent months, India and Pakistan have made modest progress in reviving a relationship that has been largely frozen since the Mumbai attacks. In February, the foreign secretaries of both nations met on the sidelines of a regional conference in Bhutan.

Last month, Mr. Singh sat with Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani of Pakistan during a cricket match between the countries. Mr. Singh had also been considering a possible visit to Pakistan later this year.

“Whether he will go now remains to be seen,” said Salman Haidar, a former Indian foreign secretary. “Certainly, this doesn’t help him.”

India and Pakistan are nuclear-armed neighbors that have fought three wars and continue to have a litany of disputes, including deep disagreement over the fate of Kashmir. India’s political establishment is deeply distrustful of Pakistan, especially the Pakistani military, and Mr. Singh has been criticized at home for his persistent efforts to engage Pakistan.

Gopalapuram Parthasarathy, a former Indian high commissioner to Pakistan, said Bin Laden’s location inside Pakistan vindicated the Indian belief that Pakistani military and intelligence officials are knowingly sheltering terrorists.

“It is now obvious that at least from 2005, he has been living comfortably in the middle of a Pakistani garrison town, surrounded by the Pakistani military,” said Mr. Parthasarathy, who has been critical of Mr. Singh. “Nobody would believe that the Pakistan military would not have known he was there.”

Similar sentiments were common in India’s news media on Tuesday, and some analysts speculated that domestic pressure would mount on the prime minister to take a harder line on Pakistan.

In his own short statement, Mr. Singh refrained from taking the same tough stance against Pakistan as that of his home minister. He welcomed Bin Laden’s death as “a significant step forward” and called on Pakistan to take steps against groups that harmed innocent civilians.

Mr. Haidar, who has supported the efforts at dialogue, said of Mr. Singh, “He hasn’t really rubbed this in their faces, the fact that they have been caught with their pants down.”

Further, Mr. Haidar said: “My own personal view is we are going too slow and we needed a jolt. Unfortunately, the jolt has come in the opposite direction. It makes life more difficult for Dr. Manmohan Singh.”

He added, “But I don’t think we’re at a full stop.”