 Succesful opinion magazines are often launched by successful people. The New Republic was co-founded by the famous progressive intellectual Walter Lippmann. National Review was launched by the best-selling author William F. Buckley. Reason, on the other hand, was the brainchild of a 20-year-old Boston University student who wrote in one of his early editor's notes, I drive a delivery van for a living. Lanny Friedlander stapled together and mailed out the first mimeographed issues of reason from a messy room in his mother's house in Brighton, Massachusetts. He would sell the fledgling magazine just two years later and slowly fade away. And yet, Lanny's blazing and influential vision still lives on, visible in Reason's lowercase sans-serif logo, its sympathy for outsiders and dreamers, and in its hunch that technology, more than politics, is the driving force of human freedom. Within a few years, there's going to be computers in many homes and then eventually most homes. That means that you can have individualized news because you can just say, I only want news about Spiriti Agno, or I don't want any news about Spiriti Agno. Friedlander believed in gathering various strains of libertarianism under one roof for stimulating debate and was committed to engaging with the best ideas of his political adversaries. We would just discuss the structure of society and what we can do in the areas that we agree upon. Lanny's mix of startling visual presentation and contrarian writing created an almost instant momentum, tantalizing early readers and contributors alike with an infectious sense of unimagined possibilities. When Reason speaks of poverty, racism, the draft, the war, student power, politics, and other vital issues, it shall be Reason's, not Slogan's it gives for conclusions. Proof, not belligerent assertion. Logic, not legends. Coherence, not contradictions. This is our promise. This is the reason for Reason. So who was this disheveled visionary and why did he flame out so fast? Upon Friedlander's death in 2011, Reason's Nick Gillespie wrote that he had started thinking of Lanny as libertarianism's answer to Sid Barrett, the mad genius founder of Pink Floyd, who got something great started and then couldn't or wouldn't live in the world he did so much to create. In reality, Lanny Friedlander was an objectivist who believed in big-tent libertarianism, a student protester who reviled other student protesters, an anti-war, anti-draft activist who volunteered for the Navy. He was professionally charismatic and personally introverted, an exacting truth-seeker and unreliable narrator, a systemic thinker and disorganized coordinator. The printed format of this issue, he wrote, does not represent a guarantee that the next issue will also be printed. Wired co-creator, Louis Rosetto, who first encountered Reason as an undergrad at Columbia University, said in 2011 that the publication was my gateway to good design. Yet when describing his own self, Friedlander preferred the term writer-intellectual. That writing contained a breadth rarely seen among 20-somethings of any era. Friedlander argued persuasively that pollution is theft and applied Austrian economics to the question of how the police would operate in a free society. At turns theoretical and practical, pedantic and poetic, his voice vibrated with a visceral rage when touching on the dehumanization of modern institutions. Whatever reason the parents might have for leaving his children in the care of the state, he snarled in a piece about public schools. It will not diminish their intellectual death nor mitigate their emotional torture. As fate would cruelly have it, Friedlander spent much of the rest of his life institutionalized and chained to the dulling anchor of anti-psychotic drugs, a diagnosed schizophrenic under the wary eye of the paternalistic state. But before his sad decline, there was a bracing boldness to venture somewhere new, starting with how Lanny's magazine would look. Visual elements that decades later would become fattish in art schools were there from the very beginning. Lanny was a fan of Massimo Vignelli, so Reason had a perfect Swiss grid, very clean and pure, lots of white space, ragged write, helvetica type, conceptual illustrations, Rosetto recalled. Friedlander consumed the latest cutting edge books and periodical graphic design from nearby MIT Press, including mail order newsletters and zines, and of course, comic books. Reason, as early as 1969, published some original panels by legendary Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko. Reason was anti-establishment without being part of the new establishment and without being either crank left or kook right, Rosetto recalled. And it had this bright, shiny optimism and unshakable faith in the triumph of good ideas. In 1968, Friedlander's writing confronted the burning issues of the moment, violence, war, race relations, campus upheaval, with boldly counterintuitive takes. It is the initiation or threat of initiation of physical force by the government that is the major cause of violence in America, he wrote. Both Jim Crow and minimum wage laws were unambiguous examples of racism, and the new left in George Wallace had more in common than either would ever admit. Lanny was an odd duck, but always striking. He was a person of few words in conversation and always seemed to be somewhat detached or inward in his way, recalls Mark Frazier, who as a high school student helped with paste up and other tasks at the magazine. While the libertarian movement was blooming in New York City in the early 1970s, Lanny was starting to wither, declining even to participate much when his protege, Louis Rosetto, invited him to come around the offices of Outlook, another influential, if short lived, libertarian publication. After that, there's a period where he just disappeared. The wheels started coming off more often. The mental illness that had plagued his mother appeared to be derailing a promising young career. Freedlander's final byline in the magazine he created came in October, 1972, just shy of his 25th birthday. What came next were vague tales of trouble travels in the South, frantic calls for money, a drunken disorderly misdemeanor conviction in Miami in 1975. Somewhere within that flailing period, Freedlander enlisted in the Navy only to be discharged shortly thereafter on psychiatric grounds. So complete was Freedlander's break from his reason-founding past that even his own attorney didn't believe his friend's old war stories. Lanny was telling me that he was this great graphic artist and he started a magazine and everything. And of course, I'm thinking, this was just the psychosis, you know? I was all incredulous. Reinforcing that skepticism was the one time that Lanny got anxious about losing his art portfolio. After a search, the missing satchel was discovered and just like in a beautiful mind, the art was like third grade, Murphy says. It was basically gibberish. Back in 2008, when I was editing Reason, I asked my wife, who was a private investigator, to help track Freedlander down. Turns out he was in a veteran's home in Lowell, Massachusetts. She inadvertently got him on the phone. Is that you? She said, yes, he responded. She told him that Reason wanted to connect and asked if she could pass along his number. After a long pause, he declined, sounding shell-shocked and wounded, though not quite mad. We arranged to have the magazine and related swag sent to him on a regular basis. Then in December, 2010, Reason science correspondent, Ron Bailey, got a handwritten letter in the mail in response to an article about genomics. I think you should take your thinking one step further and write about the prospects for immortality in the foreseeable future, wrote a Mr. Lanny Freedlander. I also wonder if magicians can reverse the effects of old age. Then came the kicker. P.S., I started Reason Magazine in 1968. Lanny died of a heart attack the following year at the age of 63. Lanny Freedlander did more than just start Reason. He willed into being a demonstration project that you don't need money and other built-in advantages to launch a worthwhile journal of opinion. He showed people who didn't even know it yet that they were entrepreneurs, journalists, futurists, and even libertarians, that there was a different way of thinking and being in the world, that one could be revolutionary even while advocating the most modest of policy gains. Before his productive brain betrayed him, he was consumed with a question that challenges all of us to this day. How do you make social change? In a world where there is no single right answer, how do we explore, maximize, and expand all the avenues for making the world a better place? Not that theory isn't important, but it seems to be a movement primarily of philosopher kings. One person defined the libertarian movement as 800 people trading books. One man can stop the motor of the world, Einran wrote in Atlas Shrugged. The opposite is also true. One man can start the motor, not just of one world, but of several. That, in the end, is the legacy of Lanny Friedlander.