• GOP’s appalling silence 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Well, the presidential primary is over, and the various roving bands of locusts have left our state for the next tent show. The packs of journalists have gone too, trailing after the throngs of campaign functionaries and toadies. Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum, Former Mitten State Mitt and Ron “Atlas Shrugged” Paul took off too.  

• • Screwing the future 
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Today’s world is full of the ignorant, and of right-wing kooks clutching copies of Ayn Rand, people who think teachers don’t deserve a decent living, and that money spent on anything in the public sector is mostly wasted. Years ago, I myself spent time in places where their policies had been put into effect. They were called the Third World then, and nobody thought Michigan was likely to join it.  

• When books could change your life 
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When was the last time a book changed your life? I don't mean offered you new insights or ideas or moved you — I mean profoundly changed the way you see the world or shaped the kind of person you are? [....] About the last time in our lives when books have this kind of potent effect on us is in our early 20s, which not coincidentally tends to be the age of people you see poring over Nietzsche or that awful Ayn Rand.  

• •Light ‘em up 
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Perhaps no writer waxed as eloquent about meditative smoking as the polemical novelist Ayn Rand. In her mammoth work Atlas Shrugged, she wrote, "I like to think of fire held in a man's hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips."  

•Marxism not Stalinism 
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Letter to the Editor.
I think that you should encourage the public to think on their own by reading, not just hand-me-down political information, but original sources, such as Karl Marx, who supports unselfish individuality, in contrast with Ayn Rand’s selfish individualism.  

•Now let us praise free minds 
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Ayn Rand offers [a] system with all the answers, and so does Osama bin Laden, and so do various others of what George Orwell used to call “all the smelly little orthodoxies that are now contending for our souls.” What all these systems do is take parts of the truth and construct a brilliantly woven little system and substitute it for reality.