• • • The Politics of Business Responsibility 
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Atheism  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Individualism  |Personal life  | For 25 years (until a politically driven recantation in April), Ryan was a slavish Rand disciple, quoting her, handing out her books, and declaring that America was locked in battle between “individualism [yay!] and collectivism [boo!].” Rand -- who died before Ryan could seek her out and actually genuflect in her presence -- was a Russian atheist whose “heroic” vision owed debts to, among other megalomaniac wet dreams, the Norse gods and Valkyries, Ivan the Terrible, and Friedrich Nietzsche.      View blog reactions

• Contrarianism of the Ostracized Engineer 
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Vern had never been “cool” in high school. But he attained instant cool when he decided to get a degree in English, among the hippies and tree-huggers up on the hill. Meanwhile, Vern’s classmate, Victor, chose engineering. He grew more and more conservative as his college years progressed. Victor -- like Vern -- didn’t take any political science courses, nor did he pay much heed to politics at all. He didn’t even read Ayn Rand.      View blog reactions