• Real As Hell: A Conversation With George Saunders 
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[George Saunders:] [....] I had a period in high school and college where I was reading a lot of sort of schmaltzy light philosophy-type stuff—Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Kahlil Gibran. And an Ayn Rand phase. We used to get those Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and I’d plow through those…  

• • • ‘Atlas Shrugged’: Who Is John Galt’s Chiropractor? 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Personal life  |Rush  |Image  | I really wanted to be extremely open-minded about this novel. Obviously because we take our Classic Trash deathly seriously, but also because people who are super into Atlas Shrugged are the sort of people who send nasty emails about how you are a parasitic Communist who couldn’t make a better kind of steel to save your life. Guilty as charged, curiously combative Randians! But I feel as though I have given it a fair shake. I was a reed, bending in the wind. My mind was deliberately vacant, waiting to be filled.  

• • The Delights Of ‘Diamond Joe Biden: Vice Presidential Jams’ 
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It seems, however, that this year brought a new internet. A sullen one. A teenaged one, but without any of the fun teenaged antics like kegstands or unwanted pregnancies. This internet was all moderate-to-severe acne and monosyllabic responses. [....] [I]n the interest of making 2013 a better year on the internet, we've gathered up a few contributors to share the things they've been enjoying while the rest of us have been suffering through the internet's Ayn Rand phase.  

• Tonight! The Baffler Mag Party; Nonfiction Reading; Imagined Soundscapes; “Massage Performance 
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The Baffler is having an issue release party, with “Ayn Rand: The Game Show” as played by Thomas Frank and Julie Klausner, at Housing Works!  

• • The End of Books, Plus New Insults For Long-Dead Ayn Rand 
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Humorist Joe Queenan has some thoughts on books, and also describes Ayn Rand as "a fascist and a creep, either of which could be forgiven. But she also cannot write."  

• What Was Your Weirdest Celebrity Sex Dream? 
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Anna Holmes. [....] It was a sort of frenzy! (Not to mention decadent and ominous. Think Fritz Lang meets Ayn Rand meets Stanley Kubrick.)  

• How To Accidentally ‘Invent Liveblogging’ 
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Paul Ryan  | When Joe Biden and Zombie Ayn Rand Paul Ryan begin their televised debate Thursday night, hundreds of professional media employees will be "liveblogging" the proceedings for hundreds of topical websites, from the New York Times to (maybe?) PerezHilton.com.  

• What It Cost Eight Women Writers To Make It In New York 
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There are many, many writers that could have been included in this survey, and any such omission is not intended as a slight (except to Ayn Rand, of course).  

• Survey Says! The Complete Online Dating Advice Guide for Men 
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7 respondents would like you to have conversations topics at the ready that do not include “The Wire.” [....] Ayn Rand is also off limits, according to five people.  

• • With Ron Paul, Fighting for Minnesota 
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Atlas Shrugged  | There are 19 medical doctors in Congress (three senators); that’s an increase from 15 in 2009. (Trivia: Five doctors were among the 56 people who signed the Declaration of Independence.) Five of the 19 are Obstetrician-Gynecologists, and two of them are from Texas. They are Tom Coburn (R-OK), Phil Gingrey (R-GA) Michael Burgess (R-TX), Phil Roe (R-TN), and, of course, Dr. Paul (R-Atlas Shrugged). For some reason, Republican obstetricians abound.  

• • Contrasting Visions Of 2112: Gail Collins v. Neil Peart 
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Anthem  |The Fountainhead  |Individualism  |Rush  | If we have learned anything from Peart’s work on the subject, a man like Gingrich, a visionary comparable to say, the light-bringing electrician Equality 7-2521 or the rapist architect Howard Roark, would have no place in the “cold and empty life” brought about by the Federation’s social engineering.  

• Nine Wisconsinites Who Are Screwing Up America 
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[Paul] Ryan’s ever-present crap-eating golden-boy grin accompanies his every appearance as he defends his Randian budget plan that will never pass but in turn makes liberals so scared they’ll capitulate to the first “moderate” Republican cuts that come along. Respectable Republicans hate this smug scumbag too, but understand how powerful and necessary he’s become.  

• Drunken Notes from Last Night’s Republican Debate That Will Also Serve as Notes for the Next Eleven 
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[Ron] Paul: LIBERTARIANISM FREE MARKETS FED CONSPIRACY AHHHHHH WHY DON’T I JUST HAVE AYN RAND’S FACE TATTOOED ON MINE SO WHENEVER I SAY SOMETHING IT COMES OUT OF AYN RAND’S MOUTH ALSO.  

• • • When Alan met Ayn: Atlas Shrugged and our tanked economy 
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Alan Greenspan  |Altruism  |Atheism  |Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Individualism  |Personal life  |Image  |Video  | In Atlas Shrugged Rand creates a world where there are people who deserve to live because they are “intelligent” and “creative,” and those who do not. The former set out to rid themselves of the latter. These “men of the mind,” whom their author clearly worships, go “on strike” and refuse to be creative any more, which means that everybody else must perish. And because it’s a work of fantasy entirely under Rand’s control, they all go ahead and obediently perish. [....] For those who are inclined to find such ideas ludicrous, the book will fail, and utterly; its premises betray a bottomless ignorance of the deep interconnectedness of humankind, and the needs—economic, social, emotional, intellectual—of one human being for another.  

• Let’s talk “Peyton Place”: Abortions, enemas and the secret sex lives of New Englanders 
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The Fountainhead  | Is [Peyton Place] any good? Well, I mean, kind of? It’s not Revolutionary Road, or anything [...] , but it’s better than Twilight. It’s better than The Fountainhead, another novel that suggests that rape is one hell of a seduction tactic.  

• • Some men would like to be islands: The hows and whys of seasteading 
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Atlas Shrugged  | [Peter] Thiel’s libertarianism is a matter of public record, and it’s libertarianism that’s fueling the seasteading movement. For the discerning libertarian, seasteading represents a possible middle frontier, between the now of cyberspace and the distant future of the commercialization of outer space. The intended purpose of these miniature autonomous zones is to establish floating havens not technically in the US and accordingly outside the reach of the Feds and the individual states that together impinge on the enlightened citizen by imposing taxes and other impediments to self-actualization and bliss. Tiny little Galt’s Gulches, but asea.  

• Long distance projection: Believers making sense of Jared Lee Loughner 
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We The Living  |Inaccurate  | Conservatives gleefully noted that Loughner counted The Communist Manifesto among his favorite books; the left sniped back that he also included Ayn Rand’s gruesome objectivist fantasy We the Living on the same list.  

• Plight of the concords 
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The underdog is [...] a powerful element of the mystique of the American Dream—the idea John Q. Everyman can humble the powers that be with grit, ingenuity and a little (or a lot of) luck. It’s a mythology as pervasive as apple pie, Ayn Rand and the country’s first black president.  

• Football is socialism 
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Atlas Shrugged  | The “I Am John Galt” petulance evinced by [Randy] Moss essentially everywhere he has worked—always a new culprit, be it quarterbacks who can’t accommodate his genius, coaches who will not utilize it, or bosses and fans who can’t comprehend it—is common among the NFL’s most-blessed and least-loved receivers.  

• • Inside Ron Johnson’s victory party: Reason concedes to Ron Johnson 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Ron Johnson  | [Ron Johnson] is a man who claims to worship the values of Atlas Shrugged’s objectivism, with its stress on personal responsibility and freedom from government regulation of the individual. Yet he is for government restrictions against homosexuals.