•If it’s art, it’s Annah! 
T.J. Dennison, Grayson County News-Gazette (KY) Profile of 18-year-old artist Annah Nichole Hood.Annah said she enjoys the works of authors such as Ayn Rand, John Irving, Bradley Trevor Greive, Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss) and Stephen King. 07:38 AM    View blog reactions

• • •Ayn Rand and Judaism 
Dovid Polterak, Algemeiner.com Ayn Rand held that man’s only responsibility is to himself. Does that sound familiar to the Talmudic dictum, “Man is obligated to say: ‘the world was created for me.’”? If you’re a bit taken aback by that Talmudic saying, know that there are many just like it. 07:33 AM    View blog reactions

• •American capitalism and the moral poverty of nations 
Jason Miller, UnCapitalist Journal "America's abundance was created not by public sacrifices to the common good, but by the productive genius of free men who pursued their own personal interests and the making of their own private fortunes." Thank you, Ayn Rand, for affirming the naked brutality and avarice of America’s socioeconomic system, a system which enables a privileged few who "play the game" well to mercilessly pursue their personal interests, amass private fortunes, and hoard the lion’s share of "America’s abundance." 07:28 AM    View blog reactions

•Sorel’s people 
Richard Lingeman, The Nation Review of Literary Lives, by Edward Sorel.The book consists of irreverent comic-strip biographies of Tolstoy, Proust, Elliot, Yeats, Sartre, Jung, Brecht, Ayn Rand, Lillian Hellman and Norman Mailer. It is the gap between feet of clay and feats of greatness that sparks Sorel's perverse comic vision. 08:47 AM    View blog reactions

•GRIDS and lost opportunity 
Ted Mitchell, Raise the Hammer (Hamilton, ON) Western social democracies derive all of their civility and distributed wealth from an intelligent balance of state and capital power. [....] Without the balance, you have something like communist Russia. What a disaster. Too far the other way, you have modern capitalist Russia, which is perhaps even worse. Check out their skewed wealth distribution for a taste of laissez-faire capitalism. America looks communist in comparison. Even Ayn Rand would be unimpressed with her former nation's quagmire. 08:24 AM    View blog reactions

•‘Sketches’ blueprint for Gehry’s artistic vision 
James Verniere, Boston Herald Review of the movie Sketches of Frank Gehry.A short, pear-shaped, older man with a rubbery face, Gehry doesn’t strike you as the Ayn-Rand-Howard-Roark-Great-Architect type (the tall, broad-shouldered Pollack is more the mold). 07:38 AM    View blog reactions

•A book called Malice 
Brian Heater, New York Press Review of Ego & Hubris, by Harvey Pekar.Ego & Hubris is, quite simply, the story of Michael Malice, the hotheaded, 30-year-old, Ayn Rand-obsessed Russian immigrant who moved to the United States at a year-and-half old. 08:24 AM    View blog reactions

• •Comment: A gouging market 
Matthew Rothschild, The Progressive The choice of having an ice cream cone is a luxury. Driving a car, for many of us, is a necessity. That’s something the hardcore free market apologists don’t grasp. “Gas station owners cannot force us to buy gasoline,” writes Alex Epstein of the Ayn Rand Institute, in an article entitled “The Myth of Price-Gouging.” “They can only offer us a trade, which we are free to accept or reject.” But how free is the independent trucker, or the taxicab driver, or the traveling salesperson?  12:06 PM    View blog reactions

•Hello, any Democrats out there? 
John Sugg, Creative Loafing If you're still reading Ayn Rand, the Georgia Libertarians are for you. 12:04 PM    View blog reactions

• •Seattle public schools smear the antidote for racism 
Nicholas Provenzo, Capitalism Magazine Commentary on a Seattle Public Schools definition of "cultural racism" that includes the example of "emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology."In her 1963 essay Racism, Ayn Rand observed that "Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism." 11:58 AM    View blog reactions

•Comics of note 
Noel Murray, Keith Phipps, and Tasha Robinson, The Onion A.V. Club Review of Ego & Hubris: The Michael Malice Story, by Harvey Pekar.150 pages of self-aggrandizing, vitriol, spite, and (inevitably) Ayn Rand boosterism gets awfully wearying… 11:54 AM    View blog reactions

• •Platonic competition, Part I 
George Reisman, Free-Market News Network Reprint of an article from The Objectivist.The concept of “pure and perfect competition” [...] proceeds from an ideology that obliterates the existence of individuals, of private property, and of exchange. It is the product of an approach to economics based on what Ayn Rand has characterized as the “tribal premise.” 11:51 AM    View blog reactions

• • •The soda fountainhead 
Arianne Cohen, New York Magazine Objectivists have no need to schmooze. Except with each other, which they now can do over vegetarian food at the Fountainhead Café, on West 10th Street. 08:45 AM    View blog reactions

•The maverick 
Chris Garcia, American-Statesman (Austin, TX) Profile of entrepreneur Mark Cuban.Favorite book: "The Fountainhead" by Ayn Rand. "It's about the strength of the individual, of a person's spirit," he says. "You define yourself by yourself, not how other people see you." 08:37 AM    View blog reactions

•Searching for a culprit in the collapse of 2000 
Roger Lowenstein, New York Times Review of Bubble Man, by Peter Hartcher, which criticizes former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan.A youthful disciple of Ayn Rand and a free-market purist, Mr. Greenspan was ever skeptical of regulation, and this other, ideological Alan never disappeared from view. 08:29 AM    View blog reactions

• •Worth its weight 
Kiplinger Magazine In Atlas Shrugged (Signet Books, $9), Ayn Rand's classic tale of capitalism, individualism and even feminism, the philosophy Rand espouses is compelling, the themes powerful, and even the clunky dialogue somehow works as comic relief. Worth wading through 1,000 pages. 08:54 AM    View blog reactions

•Booked for life! 
Deccan Herald (Bangalore, India) Rohini Malur, a student, says, “[...] I think people who are really reading today are the people who were reading yesterday. For the most part, I suspect that an adult who claims to have started reading recently is either trying to sound intellectual ('I read Ayn Rand, I’m smart!') or is following a trend. The latter need to be warned that familiarity with Dan Brown does not imply functional literacy.” 08:44 AM    View blog reactions

•Surfing the future of news 2.0 
John Gorenfeld, AlterNet Wikipedia's Ayn Rand-obsessed founder Jimmy Wales [...] sees "neutrality" as the holy grail of citizen journalism. 08:39 AM    View blog reactions

•SMS joke : What do financiars say after ´Darna Man Hai´ & ´Darna Zaroori Hai´? 
Planet Bollywood (India) No one can deny the fact that Ramgopal Varma's 'Darna Mana Hai' and 'Darna Zaroori Hai' have both flopped at the box-office. But that does not dissuade the egoistic and headstrong Ramu from announcing the third part 'Darna Mangta Hai' . Well, that may be giving Ramu a high as he can feel happy that he is the self destructive modern day Howard Roark ('Fountainhead'), who does what he feels is correct. 08:35 AM    View blog reactions

•Science can be tested, repeated 
Bill Shaw, Jr., The Town Talk (Alexandria-Pineville, LA) Letter to the editor.Regarding Carlton Vance's quote from Ayn Rand, the Bible doesn't say, "money is the root of all evil." It says, "the love of money (i.e., wealth) is the root of all sorts of evil," (I Timothy 6:10). It's a common mistake, but a big difference. 07:05 AM    View blog reactions

• •IQ: Precocity on parade 
Psychology Today "Geniuses tend to be enfants terribles who suffer no fools," says Martin Seligman. Author and philosopher Ayn Rand fell in that category. She was a bigot about brains, says her biographer Barbara Branden. 07:03 AM    View blog reactions

•Reading comprehension for dummies: curriculum 
Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times Review of The Knowledge Deficit: Closing the Shocking Education Gap for American Children, by E.D. Hirsch Jr.Youngsters who have acquired a sufficient amount of background knowledge and who have become good readers will themselves seek out material that will open their minds to viewpoints, ideas and voices slighted or ignored by the curriculum, be it Andrea Dworkin's or Ayn Rand's, Karl Marx's or Cardinal Newman's. 06:57 AM    View blog reactions

•The Da Vinci Code: Blasphemy hits the big screen 
Don Feder, Human Events Online The novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand was once asked why she primarily wrote fiction, instead of works of philosophy. Rand explained that it's far easier to convey ideas through fiction than non-fiction. 06:55 AM    View blog reactions

•2006 All-USA High School Academic third team 
USA Today Charlotte Seid, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology, Alexandria, Va. Research finding Gracilaria seaweed isn't an effective nursery habitat to restore blue crabs; Ayn Rand Institute Anthem Essay Contest first and second place; Academic Team president. 06:56 AM    View blog reactions

•Driven In 2K6! 
Marlena Martin, BlackFlix.com Ayn Rand once said, "The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me." 06:53 AM    View blog reactions