• A&E highlights: Opening Day, Chick Corea, Paul Havas show 

Mike Daisey. The monologuist who made news last year with a controversial set of interviews on “This American Life” returns to Seattle with the West Coast premiere of two pieces, “American Utopias” and “F***ing F***ing F***ing Ayn Rand,” performed on separate nights.  

• • • Bill would require all Idaho school kids to read ‘Atlas Shrugged’ to graduate 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Egoism  | The chairman of the Idaho Senate’s Education Committee, Sen. John Goedde of Coeur d’Alene, introduced legislation Tuesday to require every Idaho high-school student to read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” and pass a test on it to graduate from high school. When Sen. Bob Nonini, R-Coeur d’Alene, asked Goedde why he chose that particular book, Goedde said to laughter, “That book made my son a Republican.” [....] Sen. Cherie Buckner-Webb, D-Boise, questioned the choice of the book for a graduation requirement. “We have a wide variety of children who will be trying to graduate and reading and grasping some of these things, and their cultural context may be different,” she said. Goedde responded, “I don’t plan on moving this forward — it was a statement.”  

• Professor Bernanke, meet Professor Gordon 
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Alan Greenspan  | Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke doesn't speak in the Yoda-like riddles of his predecessor, the bubble-blowing Ayn Rand disciple saxophonist Alan Greenspan.  

• The 'on your own' delusion 
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Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no Ayn Rand law-of-the-jungle types caught in a calamity so big that it can only be solved by a “We Society,” not a “Me Society.” Hurricane Sandy has caused perhaps $20 billion in damage in the Northeast, including knocking out power to 14 million, bringing an unprecedented storm surge that flooded the New York subway and for a second day shutting down the world financial center.  

• • ‘In Sunlight and Shadow’: Mismatched lovers in ‘40s Manhattan 
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The Fountainhead  | The story opens in 1946 after 32-year-old Harry Copeland, a modern-day Achilles who is "six feet tall and solid as a rock," catches sight of a woman on the Staten Island Ferry who is so astonishing that he describes her in ethereal terms, as "a flow of color" floating on his horizon. [....] He is a man with the proportions of "The Fountainhead's" Howard Roark (befitting [author Mark] Helprin's conservative political values) — determined to fight injustice, increasingly aware of the dangers he faces, and yet, having survived the wounds of war, inured to the risk he is taking.