• • • Eight fun facts about Lululemon 

Atlas Shrugged  |Egoism  | Founded in 1998, Lululemon is now practically synonymous with yoga apparel in North America. The company, which designs and sells pricey yoga apparel and accessories, says its ‘vision’ is ‘elevating the world from mediocrity to greatness.’ In late October, the company began using shopping bags with the words “Who is John Galt?” a catchphrase from the 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, which rails against government and advocates self-interest as a key ingredient of a better world. The endorsement irked some customers.  

• • • Lululemon shopping bag: inspiration or irony? 
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Ayn Rand Institute  |Atlas Shrugged  |Egoism  |Onkar Ghate  | Lululemon Athletica Inc., the Vancouver-based retailer of choice for yoga devotees who want to strike a fashionable pose while attaining a higher state of being, is interrupting the positive energy flow of some of its most loyal customers by promoting a controversial novel by Ayn Rand.  

• • • Atlas Shrugged: A cheap near-mockery of capitalism 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Personal life  | To be charitable (as much as that might offend Rand’s legacy), Atlas Shrugged almost gets by as unwitting satire, though it would take a director of Alexander Payne or Jason Reitman’s satirical skills to do justice to its loopy premise: What would happen if all the millionaires went on strike? Would anyone actually notice?  

• • A billionaire’s Waterworld takes libertarianism to new depths 
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BioShock  | A certain segment of people reading this may think, “This all sounds familiar, I’ve played this game.” It’s called Bioshock, a video game about an objectivist utopia (okay, Bioshock takes place under the sea, but under the sea, over the sea is a fine line, one easily transgressed, mind the boom) in which the lack of medical and other regulatory oversight turns everyone into zombies with guns. Possibly this all suggests that far from learning too much from video games, as is frequently suggested, some people aren’t learning nearly enough.  

• Anderson Cooper set to join the daytime talk-show ranks 
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Interview with Anderson Cooper.
[Q:] Everyone knows Oprah, but what was unique about Donahue? [A:] At the time, a lot of the topics he was doing were groundbreaking and he was giving a voice to people who you didn’t normally see on television. The energy of the show and the interaction with the audience was always compelling. There were days when it was pretty tawdry and days it was serious. At one point he had Ayn Rand on for a series of conversations, which was something you didn’t see every day on television.  

• Rising GOP ‘Young Gun’ pedalling sour fiscal medicine 2013 will Americans swallow it? 
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Paul Ryan  | [Is Paul] Ryan heartless? His professed admiration for Ayn Rand, an icon of libertarians, has made him dangerous in the eyes of liberals. But his own politics have not been as doctrinaire as his choice of idols would suggest.  

• • The Situationists is a plodding, pointless comedy 
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Gilbert may have intended The Situationists to be a leftist companion piece to The Emotionalists, his 2000 drama about right-wing philosopher Ayn Rand, which received a revival at last year’s SummerWorks festival. Both plays are concerned with intellectual hypocrisy, but whereas The Emotionalists dealt with complex historical figures, The Situationists offers us only silly cartoons.  

• A nation of language obsessives has roared 
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Views on the serial comma, at least in Globeland, are split exactly down the middle. Many referred to the famous example of a hypothetical dedication that is made confusing without the comma: “For my parents, Ayn Rand and God.” But for every pedant inventing sentences full of unlikely lists to show possible ambiguities without the comma, there is a traditionalist who points out that we don’t write a comma after “and” in a list of two (“I bought eggs, and milk”).  

• Five MPs to watch this winter 
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Rona Ambrose, 41. [....] Inspiration: “Thanks to my mother, grandmother and aunt, I grew up reading Ayn Rand and Pippi Longstocking - powerful women and girls with sharp intuition and confidence.”  

• Danielle Smith: ‘My life will fall under the microscope’ 
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Inevitably, comparisons have been made between the young, telegenic, unambiguous and plain-spoken Ms. Smith and a certain American politician. The heroes Ms. Smith cites, however, are Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, “early [Ralph] Klein” and Ayn Rand. She admits though, that recently, she has found Sarah Palin’s message of limited government and cutbacks to spending inspirational.  

• • Very, very long books 

Atlas Shrugged  |Image  | Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. If it’s the only book on the island, or if you’re a confused 15-year-old... Close to 1,200 pages.  

• • How billionaires bagged the Tea Party 
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Atlas Shrugged  | In the comic strip Little Orphan Annie, billionaire Daddy Warbucks didn’t just have watch over the pupil-less waif, he also had to fend off attacks from envious politicians and malicious do-gooders. Although not published until 1957, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged grew out of the ideological debates of the 1930s and survives as one of the most influential stories of the ill treatment of the overclass.  

• One day, we’ll look back and thank Jim Flaherty 
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Capitalism  | “People think I have some grand political notion,” [Flaherty] told the Toronto Star. “I’m not an ideological person.” Friends back him up on this, arguing that Conservative politics is simply the most comfortable fit for a man whose values are rooted firmly in his Irish middle-class upbringing in Montreal. His inspiration comes not from Ayn Rand or Milton Friedman—rather, he says, it comes from his mother, who ran a household of eight children on a limited budget.  

• • Viral marketing, mobile advertising, and Atlas Shrugged 
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Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  | “Read Ayn Rand.” That’s the message Nick Newcomen drove more than 19,000 kilometres to tell the world. Mr. Newcomen who spent about $4,000 on the trip, used a GPS device that, when turned on, recorded his travels. He uploaded his route to Google Earth, complete with links along the way to videos and photos, and then climbed into his car to drive routes across the United States in the shape of the letters of his message.  

• Stockwell Day’s prisonyard of dreams 
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Where the hell is the Prime Minister in all this [controversy over prison funding]? Researching in Demark? Off at Ayn Rand Sleep-Away Camp? Just vanished? No wonder only 94 per cent of Canadians feel safe.  

• • • The good-bad books of summer 
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Atheism  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Egoism  | Exodus wouldn’t make anyone’s list of literary masterpieces. But it surely ranks among the most influential American novels of the 20th century – not with other writers, but with the public. The same is true of Atlas Shrugged, which, I am embarrassed to say, also made a profound impression on my young and malleable mind.[....] [Ayn Rand’s] book embodied just the kind of rigid, judgmental absolutism that’s irresistible to self-absorbed adolescents who believe society is fundamentally screwed up and their parents are hopeless losers. No doubt, it helped make me more than usually insufferable. Eventually, I forgave my parents. I came to realize that laissez-faire capitalism was not, in fact, the answer to everything, nor were all religious people dupes and fools. Ayn Rand now seems a faintly ridiculous figure.  

• Summer’s best personal finance reading 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Suggested summer reading for MBAs: GQ and Bloomberg Business Week magazine, plus Atlas Shrugged and more.  

• A wanderer from Islam with a message for the West 
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Ms. [Ayaan] Hirsi Ali’s admirers call her the bravest woman of our time. Critics (and they are legion) dismiss her as naive, simplistic, a dupe of the neo-cons, “a willing darling for Western chauvinists” and a convert to the cult of “Randian individualism.”  

• Entering Rushdom 
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The three band members [of Rush] – Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart – aren’t secretly hyper-self-conscious. Nor are they staunch individualists, despite Peart’s lyrical flirtations with Ayn Rand.  

• Bubble brains 
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Capitalism  | The Road from Ruin: How to Revive Capitalism and Put America Back on Top, by Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, Crown [...]. The book is a delightful and stimulating read by two of today's best business writers. Throughout, they take insightful deep dives into the history of capitalism, from the 1720 credit crunch in England to today, showing how the system has been built on constant crises. With a fresh view that is hard to categorize, they dismiss free-market fundamentalists such as Ayn Rand or Arthur Laffer, along with left-wing advocates who argue that markets can do no good.