• • Can You Pass a ‘Beverly Hillbillies’ Test? 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Syndicated  | With five decades’ distance it’s clear that books as seemingly different as “The Organization Man,” “The Lonely Crowd,” “The Feminine Mystique” and “Atlas Shrugged” were really all about the same thing: the alienation and discomfort of gifted, independent-minded individuals in a society in which the “normal” ruled. The “cognitive elite” felt left out of or oppressed by the country’s culture and, as a result, scorned it.      View blog reactions

• • • Ayn Rand at Lululemon and Bloomingdale's: Individualism, Inspiration, and Self-Improvement 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Individualism  |Image  | As Molly Worthen writes on Slate, “Yoga and Rand have both spawned subcultures of devotees not because Americans are either pantheistic mystics or objectivists but because they are individualists who belong to the church of self-improvement.” Worthen’s observation is borne out by another Rand sighting, this one in Bloomingdale’s (click photo for larger view), where a Rand quote appears alongside similarly inspirational lines from Katharine Hepburn, Mae West, Diana Vreeland, Betty Friedan, and Raquel Welch: “Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplacable spark....The world you desire can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.” Oprah couldn’t have said it better.      View blog reactions

•The iconographer 
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(Subscription required.) On the architectural photography of Julius Shulman.
Even Ayn Rand, whose Fountainhead celebrated skyscrapers as “the shapes of man’s achievement on earth,” socializes within the curving aluminum wall of her Neutra-designed patio.      View blog reactions