• • Interview with John David Lewis 
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Leonard Peikoff  |OCON  |Objectivist author  | On the eve of the 10th year since the worst attack in American history, I turned to my friend John Lewis, a visiting associate professor of philosophy, politics, and economics at Duke University and teacher at Objectivist Conferences (OCON), to discuss today’s war from an historical perspective. Dr. Lewis is the author of Solon the Thinker: Political Thought in Archaic Athens and Early Greek Lawgivers. [....] Scott Holleran: Are the U.S. military interventions in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan properly described as wars? John David Lewis: When you have combatants you have a war. As Ayn Rand said about the Vietnam War, and I’m paraphrasing, when foreign soldiers are killing Americans, it’s a war and nothing but a war. Certainly, these are wars, but they’re wars in which one side knows it’s fighting a war and the other side is desperately avoiding using that term.      View blog reactions

• • Interview with Gary Johnson 
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Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  | [Q:] Why is The Fountainhead your favorite novel? [A:] I think Ayn Rand put into words that the best thing I can do for my fellow citizen is to be the best I can be. I think that’s how I can impact other people’s lives—not by having government give to them but by being my best and leading by example. [Q:] Have you read all of her novels? [A:] No. I’ve read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. [Q:] Do you agree with Rand’s philosophy? [A:] Yes, I do.      View blog reactions

• • • Robert Mayhew on We the Living 
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Ayn Rand Archives  |Ayn Rand Institute  |Anthem  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |We The Living  |Egoism  |Personal life  |Objectivist author  | Interview.
[Q:] What is We the Living’s theme? [A:] The individual versus the state—especially the evil of statism. I think that’s how Ayn Rand talks about it in The Art of Fiction. It would never be the evil of Soviet Russia. That’s why I think We the Living is so much more effective than something like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, where you come away thinking the Soviets are evil, sadistic bastards but there’s no sense of what is the alternative. In We the Living, it’s clear why any dictatorship is evil. It’s not just a critique of Soviet Russia. Solzhenitsyn, in effect, says Soviet Russia is evil—Ayn Rand says why it is evil.      View blog reactions

• • • A 1936 novel still very relevant today 
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Atlas Shrugged  |We The Living  |Egoism  |Leonard Peikoff  |Image  |Objectivist author  | Though increased sales of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand have been getting the attention, Rand’s lesser-known first novel, We the Living (1936), is also strikingly relevant in today’s times. Rand once described We the Living, recently published in trade paperback and adapted for a film that’s available for the first time on DVD, as “a book for Americans.”      View blog reactions

• The Incredible Hulk 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Movie review.
Action scenes are pulsating, with an Atlas Shrugged-like Project X soundwave scene that's particularly powerful.      View blog reactions

• • • Interview: Lionsgate’s Michael Burns 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  | Interview with the vice chairman of Lionsgate, the company working on an Atlas Shrugged movie.
[Q:] Will Brad Pitt portray John Galt? [A:] No. I think Brad wants to play Howard Roark if they ever get [an adaptation of Ayn Rand's 1943 novel] The Fountainhead going. He's a big architectural fan, almost a [architect] Frank Gehry groupie. Maybe we'll have dueling Ayn Rand projects, though I think Paramount has [rights to] The Fountainhead. I wish we had it; I like that very much as well.      View blog reactions

• • • Interview: Director Vadim Perelman 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  | Interview with the writer and director of the upcoming film version of Atlas Shrugged.
[Perelman:] The tone of the Atlas Shrugged script is like the novel—though there are differences. The Doomsday device is not there, [the character] Cheryl's not there—but Lillian Rearden is. So are most major characters but I don't want to say too much because it's still in development.      View blog reactions

•The Queen 
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Movie review.
In the exacting Helen Mirren, who has played everyone from Rosalind in Shakespeare's As You Like It to Ayn Rand and countless royals in between, Queen Elizabeth is a dowdy figure of rituals, frowns and constant consternation.      View blog reactions

• •Column 
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Forget attending the Aug. 13 screening of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, presented by the Art Directors Guild (ADG) Film Society. It's completely sold out.      View blog reactions

•Column 
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Mickey Spillane—not the dominant intellectuals—was the true voice of the people, according to Ayn Rand, who expressed her admiration for Spillane's artistic style in a Los Angeles Times column in 1962. Mike Hammer, she observed, was a moral avenger. He did not appease evil; he killed it.      View blog reactions

• • •Thank you, Ayn Rand 
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What has Ayn Rand, who stood for reason, capitalism, individual rights and self-interest, to do with the movies? The answer: not much, not yet, which partly explains and is explained by the state of movies. But the answer is also: more than you think.      View blog reactions

• • •The New Orleans disaster and the Line on ‘John Galt’ 
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For those who remember the novel, the aftermath of this week's hurricane puts a pit in the stomach that sits there; it is eerily similar to what Miss Rand envisioned. While it is too soon to pinpoint the particulars, the anarchy in the Bayou is undeniably related to the widespread irrationality—the refusal to think—that Miss Rand dramatized so powerfully in Atlas Shrugged.      View blog reactions

• •Measuring the Apollo missions 
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Apollo 13's backup astronaut, Charles Duke, whose measles had prevented Ken Mattingly from boarding the spaceship, swore that, while looking out of Apollo 16, he was overwhelmed by what he called 'the certainty that what I was witnessing was part of the universality of God.' But writer Ayn Rand, who had been invited to witness the launch of Apollo 11—and did—had other ideas.      View blog reactions

•Oscar without glamour 
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Mr. Eastwood, like other conservatives, appeared content to have gained the approval of others, especially liberals. His Best Picture winner, Million Dollar Baby, seems to have dragged even producer Albert S. Ruddy—who produced Mario Puzo's The Godfather and once sought to make Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged—into what Miss Rand called "the cult of moral grayness," which in Mr. Eastwood's case means a bleak world drained of color, purpose and life.      View blog reactions