• The worst of the decade 
Oliver Miller, The Faster Times Atlas Shrugged  Worst media personality: Glenn Beck. …And if you’re really pissed off by seeing Glenn Beck’s name on a “Worst of” list, then you must make up part of the 25% of Americans who think that Glenn Beck is a super-duper genius. You probably also think that “Atlas Shrugged” is the best book ever, and you no doubt believe that Obama was born in Africa or in Islamicland or on the planet Krypton or something. …Congrats.     Share on Facebook

• Best video games of the decade 
San Francisco Chronicle BioShock (2007). [....] Even with mutant Objectivists and monsters in diving suits, it's hard not to get swept away by the drowning Art Deco glamour as you try to negotiate through an illusion of free will in this sad, haunted aquarium of humanity.     Share on Facebook

• • Correspondence ceatively critiqued In ‘Yours Ever’ 
Maureen Corrigan, NPR - Fresh Air Personal life  Review of Yours Ever by Thomas Mallon.The letters Mallon quotes from Ayn Rand, in a chapter he calls "Advice," fascinate precisely because of their lack of elegance. Mallon observes that the ugly, pile-driving clarity of Rand's writing was suited to the giving of advice, at least in those instances when the requester needed someone else's certainty to pulverize hesitation. He then quotes from a letter that Rand wrote to her niece who asked for the loan of $25 to buy a dress. Auntie Ayn stipulated a repayment plan and signed off thusly: “If you become ill, then I will give you an extension of time, but for no other reason. If, when the debt comes due, you tell me that you can't pay then I will consider you as an embezzler. I will write you off as a rotten person and I will never speak or write to you again.”     Share on Facebook

• • A clunker of a year 
George Will, Newsweek Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism  Having used stimulus money to give raises to its 317 employees, Head Start in Augusta, Ga., reported 317 jobs created. A Georgia nonprofit multiplied the percentage of raises (1.84) it gave by the number of employees receiving them (508) and reported the stimulus had saved 935 jobs. What was stimulated, aside from bookkeeping nonsense, was demand for Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged, a hymn to unfettered capitalism. Sales exceeded 400,000, double the total in any of the 52 years since it was published.     Share on Facebook

• I.C. Public Library offering e-books 
The Gazette (Cedar Rapids, IA) Want to cuddle up with the glowing screen of a good electronic book? That may sound like blasphemy to (paper) book lovers, but for technology lovers, the Iowa City Public Library now has a collection of 170 e-books by authors such as Kurt Vonnegut, David Sedaris, Neil Gaiman, Paulo Coelho, James Patterson, Barbara Kingsolver, Ayn Rand and Stephenie Meyer.     Share on Facebook

• • Gifts you can bank on 
Terry Savage, Chicago Sun-Times Ayn Rand Institute  Atlas Shrugged  The best book: 'Atlas Shrugged'. Did you read this amazing book by Ayn Rand when you were in college? It's time for a re-read -- and you'll find it even more amazing now viewed through the lens of current events. You'll join the nearly 400,000 people who have ordered Atlas Shrugged in just the last year -- an underground current that is electrifying, just as it did when first published more than 50 years ago. Order online or find it in bookstores. For more information go to www.AynRand.org. The bookstores are filled with financial books [...]. But there isn't a better or more important book you can read this year than Atlas Shrugged. And that's the Savage Truth.     Share on Facebook

• Glenn Beck - December 8, 2009 
Glenn Beck, Fox News - Glenn Beck UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ayn Rand for Congress. Check out who the tea-partiers really want to see running.     Share on Facebook

• • A common thread 
Akhlesh Lakhtakia, Centre Daily Times (PA) Atlas Shrugged  [Joseph B.] Filko, who, in just 29 words, decries the greed of CEOs that has led to the impoverishment and probably indirect destruction of millions of human lives, wants people to read “Atlas Shrugged” in order to protect themselves from their own representative government that evidently wishes to protect them from the unheroic CEOs. He is right. He is wrong too. I do agree that citizens ought to read “Atlas Shrugged.” What one will learn from it may not be what Filko desires.     Share on Facebook

• Twenty gift ideas that can reveal another you 
Shoba Narayan, LiveMint.com Atlas Shrugged  Spend a lazy Sunday afternoon on a hammock by a river, rereading the books that made you laugh and cry as a child. Mine would be My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell, Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Vendor of Sweets by R.K. Narayan, and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.     Share on Facebook

• Ron Borges’ Patriots report card 
Ron Borges, Boston Herald Atlas Shrugged  "Atlas" Moss, the wide receiver formerly known as Randy, gave the verbal equivalent of "Atlas Shrugged" after catching five passes for 70 yards. That used to be an off-day.     Share on Facebook

• Past decade could belong to old era or new 
Edward Lotterman, Pioneer Press (St. Paul, MN) Capitalism  History may not have ended in 1989, but except for a few die-hard Marxists, largely Latin American or European academics, and for naïve Libertarians who dream of an Ayn Rand-ish economy that prospers without public goods, no one now thinks there is a viable alternative to mixed markets where the private sector and government each play indispensable roles. There is much argument about which functions are best carried out by which sector, but agreement on the basic model prevails across political parties and countries.     Share on Facebook

• • A plan for everyone? 
R. Eggers, Daily Camera (Boulder) On Nov. 11, ABC News asked Obama on television if he would give up his current health care plan to go under the ones being pushed through Congress. He refused to answer the question. Not so mute, however, are those House and Senate bills (creating 111 new administrative groups). Each bill excludes the president, Congress and all other federal employees from being under the plans. Hmmm. This brings to mind author Ayn Rand’s observation: “The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evident, which everybody has decided not to see.”     Share on Facebook

• • 45 of the weirdest college scholarships 
Lisa Capitelli, Zen College Life The Fountainhead  Essay Contests  Ayn Rand The Fountainhead Scholarship – If you enjoyed the book The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand and are in the 11th or 12th grade, you could receive up to $10,000 in scholarship money by writing the best essay concerning the novel.     Share on Facebook

• • Ayn Rand 
Edwin A. Locke, Harvard Magazine Atlas Shrugged  Objectivist author  Letter to the editor in response to an article by Jennifer Burns.There are now at least 60 academic programs that involve reading Ayn Rand’s works. There are at least 155 professors who teach and study Rand’s works. The American Philosophical Association includes an Ayn Rand Society which will soon have its own journal. Both Cambridge University Press and Blackwell have published or have in press books or collections of essays on Rand’s ideas. Atlas Shrugged has sold over seven million copies and has shown dramatic increases in sales in the last few years. Rand was a cultural pariah in the 1960s, but her ideas are now on the verge of changing the culture itself.     Share on Facebook

• • Ayn Rand 
Barry Goldstein, Harvard Magazine Capitalism  Egoism  Letter to the editor in response to an article by Jennifer Burns.A puff-piece about Ayn Rand, a “philosopher” who deserves ever more ignoring? Absurd, especially with the full-scale economic and social experiment we’re still enduring thanks to only an approximation of her glorification of selfishness. And touting Alan Greenspan as an example of the success of her principles? Spare me.     Share on Facebook

• • Ayn Rand 
Michel Choban, Harvard Magazine Letter to the editor in response to an article by Jennifer Burns.I had a hard time explaining Rand to a Harvard friend [...] since putting her ideas into plain words, without the emotional drama of the novels, makes them sound idiotic, undeveloped, and cruel. Which they are, of course.     Share on Facebook

• • • Ayn Rand flawed, but her novels still shine 
John F. Di Leo, Illinois Review Atheism  Anthem  Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  We The Living  Inaccurate  Ayn Rand’s four masterpieces are “Atlas Shrugged,” “We the Living,” “The Fountainhead,” and the marvelously slim “Anthem.” Works of fiction, they tower among the greatest novels of the 20th century. Like any work of 800 pages, Atlas and the Fountainhead drag a bit here and there – the two or three 20-page speeches in each are sometimes worth skipping past – but otherwise, they are monuments to great storytelling.     Share on Facebook

• • • The value of Ayn Rand to the freedom movement 
Brian Doherty, Reason - Hit & Run Atlas Shrugged  The Fountainhead  Clearly Rand both offends and converts. It is my belief that she offends for the most part only the ones who could not be converted--that is, people whose core moral and intellectual values would make them enemies of economic liberty whether or not they ever came across the scabrous invective of Ayn Rand or were ever forced to wonder how much Ellsworth Toohey they might have in them.     Share on Facebook

• • • Queen of hearts 
Pradeep Sebastian, Businessworld Atlas Shrugged  Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  The Fountainhead  The Virtue of Selfishness  We The Living  Personal life  Review of Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne C. Heller.I came under the spell of Ayn Rand in high school. I was drawn to her natural gift for plotting and storytelling, the scale of her melodrama, her improbable characters, and most of all, her absolute, uncompromising idealism. But I was never crazy about her philosophy. But after all these years you still get a high from encountering her tormented romantics taking on the world.     Share on Facebook

• • 100 notable books of 2009 
New York Times ‘Ayn Rand and the World She Made,’ by Anne C. Heller. Heller maintains critical perspective while conveying the conviction and odd charisma of Rand, whose angry message resonates today among the anti-Obama right.     Share on Facebook