• Shoutin’ Bill Donohue Circles the Wagons 
Mark Shea, Patheos - Catholic and Enjoying It! Paul Ryan  | With a sort of preternatural persistence, a huge percentage of the Faithful Conservative Catholic subculture seems to batten on the wrong side in controversy after controversy–Maciel, Euteneuer, Corapi, siding with Michael Voris when he suggests good bishop Mulvey is part of a shadowy gay conspiracy to destroy Corapi, attacking the bishops of Medjugorje, laboring for years to defend torture and war crimes, comparing Randian corporate stooge (and now gay adoption supporter) Paul Ryan to St. Thomas Aquinas(!) and denouncing all who would not vote for pro-abort Romney as enemies of the Faith [...].   Published: 2013-05-03

• • Helping the poor on Capitalism Appreciation Day 
StartupSmart Capitalism  | “But Taskmaster, you wily old tory, why do you encourage the celebration of greed? Or, for that matter, the degradation of our natural resources? And who is the patron saint of this ‘august’ occasion? Ayn Rand? Milton Friedman? Friedrich Hayek?!” says [my] colleague. Of course, such a view overlooks the fact that many start-ups are designed to alleviate a social or environmental problem.   Published: 2013-05-03

• • • Try to justify doing anything but the right thing 
Margot Fernandez, The Examiner Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | I have maintained in my column that Rand was not as bad of a jerk as the Republicans make her out to be, indirectly, by adhering to principles that they kind of made up. I question the reading comprehension of some people who think that they have read and understood the long, tedious passages in Atlas Shrugged; when you read something as boring as that, you have to work at remaining focused on what the author keeps hammering home.   Published: 2013-05-03

• Rand Paul: The next and last GOP nominee? 
Bill Scher, The Week Paul Ryan  | Even Ayn Rand-disciple Rep. Paul Ryan recently distanced himself from the Tea Party by voting for the partial repeal of the Bush tax cuts and embracing immigration reform.   Published: 2013-05-02

• • Sam Harris and the New Islamophobes, Deconstructed 
Hamdan Azhar, Religion Dispatches Mr. Harris is an apologist—one of the best—for the worldview that modern liberals have appropriated from Perle, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Fukuyama in which American military dominance, paired with Silicon Valley solutionism [...] combines with Randian objectivism to usher in a new era of Pax Americana—with the silicon chip as the golden calf at the altar of modernity. [....] [I]n this era of a president defined by the mantra: "I am not and never have been a Muslim," the liberal intelligentsia has taken up the mantle of Islamophobia cloaked in objectivist garb. Harris meets Rand meets Griffith.   Published: 2013-05-02

• • Emulating a Good Man from Home 
Ryan Towey, The Heights (Boston College) Atlas Shrugged  | I do not smoke cigarettes—though I am the kind of guy susceptible to the idea that it looks cool to do so despite my knowledge of the health concerns that repulse me from trying. I like to think that I subconsciously agree with Ayn Rand’s sentiments on smoking: “I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips.” (In reality, I think that I would prefer to be just a bit more rebellious—so sue me.)

Ayn Rand was indeed one of my favorite writers as a younger teenager. Call it a phase. (Call it a guilty passion that may or may not persist to this day.) But regardless of one’s opinions regarding her views, one cannot deny that she had quite a way with inspiring words.   Published: 2013-05-01

• • Sexual revolution pioneer John Williamson dies 
John Rogers, Yahoo! News Atlas Shrugged  | John Williamson, a pioneer of the 1960s sexual revolution as co-founder of Topanga Canyon's Sandstone Retreat, where nudity and free love once took place with abandon, has died at age 80. [....] It was reading Ayn Rand's book "Atlas Shrugged" that John Williamson said prompted him to quit a defense-industry job in electronics and move to California in the early 1960s. The book portrays a society in which people, fed up with government and industry controlling their lives, walk away from their jobs.   Published: 2013-05-02

• • Jobs Numbers: Today’s Unemployed Are Better At Managing Risk Than Business Leaders 
Katya Grishakova, PolicyMic Atlas Shrugged  |Going Galt  | [S]omehow it’s hard to imagine that anyone with a well-paying job today [...] would voluntarily quit and fashion himself into a modern-day John Galt. If there’s money to be made the businesses will exist and there will always be a cache of people willing to take that job.   Published: 2013-05-02

• • Would you watch a movie about a counterfeiting cartel? 
George Smith, GoldSeek Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | Atlas Shrugged is a novel that does a lot of lecturing. How do you make it into a movie people will pay to watch? Answer: You omit the lectures, or at least scale them down considerably. But if you omit the lectures, what will you have? An entertaining something that’s not Atlas? Even with the lecturing at a minimum, Atlas parts I & II have lost money. There are other reasons for the losses - low budget, lack of big stars, splitting it up into parts - but without the lectures libertarians were disappointed, and they’re the ones who had to be fired up enough to drag others to see it.   Published: 2013-05-02

• • • Production brings audience in on the action 
Gus Clemens, San Angelo Standard-Times (TX) Night of January 16th  | Ayn Rand’s plot-twisting play “Night of January 16th” opens today at the Angelo Civic Theatre, and audiences will not only be entertained, but some of them will join the cast on stage and decide the ending.   Published: 2013-05-02

• • • Economic policy isn't baseball, it's war 
Zev Golan, Jerusalem Post Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Individualism  | Some people want to fend for themselves and others prefer to let others – whether rabbis or social scientists or governments or newspaper commentators – think for them or support them financially.

In the United States, American history and culture provide role models for both sides of the game. In good schools, teenagers learn about the arguments among the country’s founding fathers on some of these issues. Books that deal with controversial presidencies, during which these debates were strong, sell well. And books by writers like Ayn Rand continue to sell millions of copies half a century after their original publication, affording new generations examples of different kinds of people.

A common critique of Rand is that she simplified things, portrayed the conflict in black and white. She described the individualist who thinks and works for his own happiness as heroic and the person who adopts other people’s values or wants a share of money he hasn’t earned as a failure or a villain. But this black-and-white view provides a simple scorecard making it obvious what the argument is about.   Published: 2013-04-24

• • The shortest Tennessee legislative session: the good, the bad and the ugly 
Richard Locker, Commercial Appeal (Memphis) Less than a month after the Sandy Hook massacre, there were scores of Tennessee bills to arm teachers, nullify federal gun laws, criminalize federal officers enforcing gun laws and prohibit employers from banning guns from their parking lots. There were bills to outlaw college diversity programs, ban programs and scholarships based on race, gender or ethnicity, and dock welfare payments to families whose children don't make satisfactory progress in school. [....] Those were the kinds of bills, a continuation from last year, that prompted liberal Mother Jones magazine to call Tennessee's legislature the worst in America and progressive writer Les Leopold to call Tennessee "Ayn Rand's vision of paradise" in a Salon.com article.   Published: 2013-04-28

• • For the rare and unusual, head to the Times Colonist book sale’s collectibles corner 
Katherine Dedyna, Times Colonist (Victoria, BC) Atlas Shrugged  | Every year, Donna Davis chooses to spend two weeks enmeshed in “the cage”— also known as the collectibles corner of the Times Colonist book sale. The wire-enclosed section in the Victoria Curling Club separates the long rows of books priced at $1 to $3 at this weekend’s sale from those rated as especially attractive, valuable, rare, fun or fascinating. [....] The volunteer staff has been funnelling their best bets to the cage for nearly two weeks now and there are hundreds if not more that rate special consideration. One of the most noteworthy is a first edition of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, still with its tattered 1957 jacket. A pristine and autographed copy can be had for $17,500 online, but here, the 1,168-page tome is a lot less.   Published: 2013-05-01

• • Sun Down 
Now (Toronto) Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  | Sun News Network is making the case to the CRTC for why cable providers across the country should be mandated to carry it. [....] Check out the people and organizations Sun News has selected to make presentations on its behalf • THE FREE THINKING FILM SOCIETY puts on an annual festival of conservative-friendly movies in Ottawa. The most recent fest included such films as Why Is It Hate? (about “why singling out and demonizing Israel at Gay Pride is hateful”) and Atlas Shrugged: Part I (the first instalment of a three-part adaptation of Ayn Rand’s book).   Published: 2013-05-01

• The White Wall 
Ben McGrath, The New Yorker While training in the past twelve months, [Dallas Seavey] burned through nearly fifteen hundred dollars' worth of audio books: nonfiction (biographies of Thomas Jefferson, for example) during the day, and fiction (Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, Ayn Rand) at night.   Published: 2013-04-22

• ‘Wanderer’ falls flat 
Callie Sutton, The Advocate (Baton Rouge, LA) Atlas Shrugged  | Novels focused on dystopian societies have been around for ages. Many have become famous for their depictions of what society could become in the future. “Atlas Shrugged,” “1984” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” are only a few among the many classics. Though the first dystopian novels were written centuries ago, their popularity for both novelists and readers has skyrocketed in the past 15 years.   Published: 2013-05-01

• • My summer of so-so movies 
Scott Dickensheets, City Life (Las Vegas) The setting for Elysium (Aug. 9) — an Earth in which the super-rich live on a luxe space station while everyone else slags it out on the trashed planet below — is so damn Ayn Rand that I guarantee Mitt Romney will cream his jeans if he sees it. Into the film’s lofty paradise barges Matt Damon, a poor man with a condition that can only be cured by rich people’s medicine, which, in a completely unbelievable twist, the rich aren’t willing to share. Unlike the 1 percenters of our own time, who indulge a haughty animus toward the poor, I indulge an utterly reasonable animus toward the rich, so this is a must-see.   Published: 2013-05-01

• Game Review: ‘Bioshock Infinite’ 
Carl Lyon, FEARnet BioShock  | 2007’s Bioshock was a once-in-a-lifetime title, a game that revitalized the long-stagnant FPS genre with deeper mechanics and one of the most compelling and original stories ever coded.  Ayn Rand-inspired objectivism was folded deftly into an introspective narrative that explored identity, destiny, and free will.   Published: 2013-05-01

• • Rats, Student Blocs and Solidarity Swarms: What to Expect on May Day 2013 
Sarah Jaffe, In These Times - Uprising Atlas Shrugged  | This year's Immigrant Worker Justice Tour, like last year's, departs from Bryant Park at noon and will stop at locations around the city where immigrant workers and others are fighting for their rights. Stops will include Atlas Media, where workers have been waiting over two years for a contract after winning their vote to organize with the Writers Guild of America East (the company's named after Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, which might explain the delay) [...].   Published: 2013-04-30

• Netflix Originals nabs prison drama Orange is the New Black as online exclusive 
Thomas Newton, Recombu Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  | Taylor Schilling, who starred opposite Zac Efron in The Lucky One (and in, er, Atlas Shrugged Part I) heads up the cast as Piper Chapman, who finds herself behind bars after selling drugs with her long-time partner Alex (Laura Prepon).   Published: 2013-04-30