• Groupon co-founder Keywell taping radio pilots 
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[Brad Keywell’s] online "bookshelf" on his personal website starts with his "Top 5" titles followed by more than 25 categories of recommended books, including "Books About Art," "Ayn Rand Books," "Books on a Balanced Life," "Books on Meditation," "Books on Philanthropy" and a category simply called "Wisdom."  

• • Banned book club a real-time lesson in censorship 
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The Fountainhead  | “I think that's a recurring thing in banned books,” [Alexa] Repp said. “The whole destroying something beautiful. I'm rereading ‘The Fountainhead' and this daughter, she buys a sculpture in Italy and throws it down the stairs.”  

• Biblioracle: Short and sweet, but no trend 
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The Fountainhead  | 1. “The Art of Fielding” by Chad Harbach
2. “Moby-Dick” by Herman Melville
3. “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand
4. “ The Mysterious Benedict Society” by Trenton Lee Stewart
5. “Bossypants” by Tina Fey

— Jorae R., Chicago

For Jorae, I think she'll enjoy the classic short story forms that Tom Rachman employs in his series of linked tales of a struggling English-language newspaper in Rome, “The Imperfectionists.”  

• What does Seth MacFarlane’s Twitter account tell us about how he’ll host the Oscars? 
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Atlas Shrugged  | [Seth MacFarlane:] "My Zero Dark 30 torture scenario: put me in a tiny room with just a beet salad, Atlas Shrugged, wet socks, and a Wall Street Journal."  

• • ‘Beautiful Creatures’: Supernatural love in a small town, again 
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The Fountainhead  | Shunned by the snippy little book-banning mean-girl twits of Gatlin ("The Fountainhead"? This town bans "The Fountainhead"?!?), Lena is one of a long line of [supernaturally gifted people].  

• • Super Bowl trivia that will put you in league of your own 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Paul Ryan  | If you're at a more liberal Super Bowl affair, you'll want to note that former vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan will watch the game from atop a sofa made of leather-bound copies of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" while eating nachos off the backs of hunched-over poor people.  

• • • Atlas isn’t shrugging 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Ron Johnson  |Image  | Charlie Peters, a self-described "neoliberal" who edited The Washington Monthly, told me many years ago tha the problem with liberals is they see themselves as heroes in a novel. Many conservatives today do the same thing, and they know just the novel: Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged." My friends at the Atlas Society have posted an interview with Sen. Ron Johnson, R-WI, an excessively devoted fan of the book. Much like Rand, he insists on reducing every policy issue to a simple fight for freedom against government oppression.  

• Flirtatious poking bothers girlfriend 
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Dear Amy: I love your literacy campaign to put "A Book on Every Bed." When my daughter was about 12 years old, we made a deal that either of us would read a book that the other thought was outstanding. [....] I would have never picked up books by Edith Wharton, Jane Austen, Margaret Mitchell, Daphne du Maurier, Ayn Rand, Willa Cather, and Mary Shelley on my own. [....] — Mark  

• • • Is selfishness the solution to our country’s problems? 
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Altruism  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Don Watkins  |Egoism  |Yaron Brook  | What if I suggested that selfishness is not only not to blame for our problems, but that selfishness can actually solve our problems? Ridiculous? Maybe not. A powerful new book from Yaron Brook and Don Watkins titled "Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand's Ideas Can End Big Government," argues that "Economic freedom can flourish only in an America that celebrates selfishness -- the individual's pursuit of his rational, long-term self-interest -- as a virtue." Did you catch that? Celebrate selfishness as a virtue. As someone who has written that "greed is good" and who has espoused the ideas of self-interest on John Stossel's TV show, I wholeheartedly agree.  

• • • ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ and so will most everyone else 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Image  |Syndicated  | They’ve recast the adaptation of Ayn Rand’s romance novel for the downtrodden rich, using former “name” actors in the leading roles. Thus, D.B. Sweeney is the mythical Galt, the guy luring America’s “I built this” crowd into some sort of Utopia for the 1 percent. But he doesn’t show up until the curtain. Not that this arrival animates this humorless rant.  

• • Help when necessary 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Paul Ryan  | I read “Atlas Shrugged” years before Paul Ryan was born, and I recall my reaction to the book: “I can succeed like those heroes did if government got out of the way and let me do my thing.” I was fresh out of college, and still ringing in my ears was the commencement assurance that the world was my oyster. As years passed, though, it became clear that government wasn’t what kept me from blossoming; in fact, government removed some of the barriers that had made it difficult for me and other African-Americans to get the chances we deserved.  

• Gossip fades a bit as the political scene fires up 
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Syndicated  | "They pray to Jesus and bow to Ayn Rand," writes Allegra Smith about the tea partiers who are gathered in Tampa.  

• • • Ryan vs. Rand: Consider yourself dumped 
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Atheism  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Individualism  |Nathaniel Branden  |Personal life  |Image  | Teaching at Michigan State University in the 1960s I spotted on a bulletin board a note posted by a student driving to New York and looking for a passenger to share expenses. The terms seemed good: split the cost of gas; drive straight through, no motel bills. What the note didn’t say was that the young man had read “The Fountainhead,” Rand’s novel about an architect who refuses to subordinate his creative genius to the demands of a conformist society. For the student, it was a conversion experience — like St Paul’s on the road to Damascus — that he was eager, nay insistent, to share. Figuring me for a leftist professor (an accurate assumption) he was determined to wean me off Marxism with force feedings of objectivism, Rand’s philosophy. More than once, as he pulled up to a fuel pump, I considered making a run for it.  

• • The question: #literarybuffet 

Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  | Last week, we asked you to flex your creative muscles and invent new literary titles using food items. We started with "The Crepes of Wrath" and, boy, did you top us. [....] "The FountainHead Cheese" — @sstantis. "Apples Shrugged" "A Kale of Two Cities" — @ComradeColonel.  

• Office Space: Media, consumer researcher Scott Turner 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Resting on the bookcase behind his desk is a framed photo of Turner’s auto mechanic father, Ed “Nitro” Turner, standing in front of a blue 1937 Ford he painted. [....] A copy of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" is on the same shelf, but Turner is reading "The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry is Defining Your Identity and Your World," by Joseph Turow, about online data collection.  

• • Lessons from The Budget 
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Individualism  | The Budget's readers get [in a recent issue]: a report from Albion, Pa., that church attendance was down because "sickness is still going around the settlement." A tale of woe from Mrs. Leroy Yoder, of Mifflintown, Pa., about pesky starlings who hog her bird feeder, refusing to share with other species: "I holler at them and call them worthless sinners, but of course they don't care what they're called." [....] Wary of government, [the Amish] refuse to serve in the military. If harmed, they decline to take the offender to court. So on that score, they might be Republicans — except that they don’t vote. But their devotion to community makes the Democrats look like Libertarians. The Amish have no more use for Ayn Rand-style rugged individualism than Mrs. Yoder had for those selfish starlings.  

• • Office Space: Chef Charlie Trotter 
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The Fountainhead  | New paperback copies of “The Fountainhead,” Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel about a young architect who struggles to be an individual and leader in the face of a rival architect, are stacked on a large wooden table in the middle of [Chef Charlie Trotter’s] office. He gives one to every new employee — or “team leader,” as he calls them — to read before working with him.  

• • The Alewives: Lowlights and low-lifes of 2011 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Egoism  | Something we thought we’d never say about Ayn Rand: Thanks for the laughs. Bad enough that a producer blamed critics for the Ayn Rand adaptation “Atlas Shrugged: Part One” bombing, but then the DVDs had to be recalled because the packaging read, “Ayn Rand’s timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice comes to life.” As producer Harmon Kaslow explained, “‘Atlas’ is quite literally a story about the dangers of self-sacrifice.” All righty, then, on to the actual new, sexy tag line: “Ayn Rand’s timeless novel of rational self-interest comes to life.”  

• • Bizarro books the GOP reads 
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Egoism  | National Journal has reported that Ron Paul quotes Ayn Rand on the House floor more than any other member does. Rand was a virulently anti-Christian uber-libertarian whose turgid prose and supremely selfish philosophy has inspired decades of trust-fund kids to smoke dope at boarding school and mock homeless people.  

• Christian comedy: And he saw that it was funny ... 
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[Jeff] Allen was close to filing divorce papers, he said, when his wife had a change of heart. Then Allen said he began reading Ayn Rand and listening to Bible study tapes. Around that time he was performing a show in Denver, when, after the show, a woman came up and said, “I think you’re very funny, but why do you have to be so blasphemous?” Allen realized he’d unwittingly been saying “goddamn” throughout his act. He was using it as a crutch.