• The Difference Between You and Me,’ ‘Radiant Days,’ ‘The Miseducation of Cam 
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Madeleine George’s “The Difference Between You and Me” takes on a lot (homosexuality, cancer and loss, family, corporate business vs. small towns), but at its core it’s a funny and warm book about a romance between a 15-year-old who accepts who she is and her classmate who has let others’ expectations define her. [....] George sometimes defies character clichés (e.g., Wyatt, Jesse’s gay best friend, worships Ayn Rand instead of Judy Garland), but other times, embraces them: Emily is a pretty girl with problems, and her friends are mean clones.  

• Review: Peter Pan show high on its own starstuff 
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There’s [Alex] Timbers’ winky-winky, oh-so-witty cultural references -- Kelis’ “Milkshake,” Starbucks and Ayn Rand, all not terribly Victorian really -- that he also offered while helming “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” and there’s the endearing boyish naivety that Rees has added to parts on “Cheers” and “The Addams Family.”  

• • Bruins goalie Tim Thomas a champion of underdogs 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Individualism  | An English major, Thomas was particularly impressed by Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” an ode to rugged individualism in a society faltering under an overbearing government. He took full advantage of his scholarship, never lagging academically and graduating on time.  

• Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right by Thomas Frank 
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Capitalism  | Book review.
Frank is a historian, not a soothsayer, and the bulk of “Pity the Billionaire” is a tour of recent political ideology. Frank relies on a pop-cultural archive: from the succulent conspiracies spun by Glenn Beck and the fiery Tea Party insurgents in search of YouTube’s fleeting grace, to lavish Gordon Gekko culture and Ayn Rand’s novels. Anything, in fact, that championed the culture of fiscal aggression gained celebrants, leading to an inversion of victimhood. Traders and captains of industry, the very people that brought on the collapse, became heroes, and government regulators in Washington were cast as devils, simultaneously omnipotent and incompetent.  

• The Tree of Life 
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The Fountainhead  | Movie review.
Jack grows into an architect, played in a few cutaways by Sean Penn, who rides elevators and wanders a skyscraper. He looks miserable, like a man whose punishment for choosing the wrong path is this Ayn Rand afterlife.  

• All a-bored 
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Capitalism  | Thomas [the Tank Engine and Friends] is a story about work and the unending joys of serving your boss. Born from a 1940s series of books by an Anglican minister, it’s the sort of show Ayn Rand would have loved to foist on the children of the proletariat; it’s the story of engines that chiefly value being useful. They compete to be the most productive, and request more work when they can get it. (Typical story: Trevor the Traction Engine, bored with his cushy job in a pasture, can’t wait to haul some freight around a dock.)  

• • • Ayn Rand’s biggest fan 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | Interview with Atlas Shrugged producer John Aglialoro.
[Q:] Conventional wisdom is that young readers admire Rand’s Objectivism philosophy but “age” out of it. Why? [A:] It gets beat out of them over time. They forget the optimism of when life was ahead of them.  

• • Conservative embrace of Ayn Rand a troubling sign 
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Egoism  |Individualism  | With all of today’s neoconservative infatuation with Ayn Rand it is sad to contemplate the civic and cultural erosion that this trend implies (“Atlas mugged; Ayn Rand’s fans tout the worst aspects of her message,” Op-ed, April 19). Ayn Rand celebrated the ego, personal freedom, and the primacy of the individual at the expense of the common good. Today her acolytes treat this as an ancient truth that they have unearthed.  

• • Her passionate philosophy reached beyond politics 
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Atlas Shrugged  | One of the ironic aspects of Rand’s adoption by the Tea Partiers and other political activists is the fact that for much of her career she considered politics one of her least concerns. In fact, she once remarked that she left Soviet Russia so that she would never have to talk about politics again. Rand’s chief concerns in the latter half of her career were the nature and function of knowledge and roots and practice of morality; in these fields she made stunning observations worthy of attention by the layman and professional philosopher alike. But it is her work in these fields that is often ignored in favor of her sexier politics.  

• • • Atlas mugged 
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Altruism  |Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |We The Living  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Individual Rights  |Image  | More than half a century after publication, and after years of talk about an “Atlas Shrugged” movie project, Ayn Rand’s best-selling novel finally hit the big screen this past weekend — met with indifference by most critics, with excitement in libertarian and conservative circles. Why now? Partly because the last two years have seen something of a Rand revival, based on the belief that the “Atlas” vision of a bleak, collectivism-ridden, freedom-stifling future America is a prophecy for the age of Obama. As a moderate libertarian conservative with a longtime interest in Rand’s work, I have mixed feelings about this revival.I believe that Rand is underappreciated and often unfairly maligned. But I also fear that the current Rand vogue often focuses on the worst, not the best, aspects of her legacy — and will widen the gap between Rand acolytes and non-believers who see her as the evil guru of the right.  

• • • Atlas Shrugged: Part 1 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | Its politics are the least of the hurdles for “Atlas Shrugged,” the movie. About to lose his long-held rights to Ayn Rand’s novel, and perhaps to cash in on apparent Tea Party interest and support, producer John Aglialoro (the CEO of Cybex International in Medway) rushed this film into a low-budget production and it shows in every frame. Even fans of Rand’s 1957 antigovernment manifesto may balk at having to endure dialogue that would be banal on the Lifetime channel, along with wooden performances, particularly from Taylor Schilling as rail tycoon Dagny Taggart, and a tedious plot that reduces political and high finance machinations to boring dinner table patter. To make matters worse, this is merely part one, covering just the first third of Rand’s opus.  

• Essence of the ’80s 
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Capitalism  | [In Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live in Now — Our Culture, Our Politics, Our Everything, David] Sirota describes the 1980s as an era of deep political retrenchment yet startling technological, commercial, and media advances. At his best, he smartly dissects Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign, launched in 1988, and sees in its “message telling the audience that the difference between success and failure is individual desire” echoes of Ayn Rand. Such a belief system, of course, wasn’t new to the 1980s, but Sirota argues that American hyper-capitalism reached a kind of apex then, and has stayed there.  

• • Getting to ‘yes’ with budget nay-sayers 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Who is Kent Conrad? No, he’s not the mysterious figure of the Ayn Rand novel, “Atlas Shrugged,’’ struggling beneath the weight of a government that suppresses the forces of innovation — that would be John Galt. But over the next three months, as the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee attempts to pass a budget through a sharply divided Senate, he may well feel like Atlas, with the weight of the world, or at least a few trillion in taxpayers’ money, sitting squarely on his shoulders.  

• Kindles on loan at the Watertown Free Library 
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[The Kindle devices] available at the library come pre-loaded with around 125 titles ranging from Ayn Rand to the complete works of Shakespeare, and they have been flying off the shelves since being introduced last month.  

• • You are what you read 
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Atlas Shrugged  | The definition of “interesting’’ is hardly universal. The folks who might want to discuss the “merits’’ of “Atlas Shrugged’’ could be fascinating from a sociological standpoint, but that’s not something I want with my morning coffee. Or ever. But people attracted by the crustacean waving from the cover of “Consider the Lobster,’’ by the late, great David Foster Wallace? That’s the kind of interesting that interests me.  

• For game, a wrinkle: Timing 
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The original, set in a fantasy world based on the writings of libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand, earned Irrational Games a reputation for work that challenges the mind as well as the trigger finger.  

• Patricia Neal, 1926-2010 
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For someone who had such a checkered movie career, thanks not just to health issues but also how much theater she did (Neal played Helen Keller’s mother in the original production of “The Miracle Worker”) and television, too, she showed up in several very notable movies. Besides “Hud,” “A Face in the Crowd,” and “Tiffany’s,” Neal had the female lead opposite Gary Cooper in King Vidor’s “The Fountainhead” (her tumultuous affair with Cooper is one of the more famous off-screen romances in Hollywood history).  

• State schools look to realign with nation 
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The Fountainhead  | National standards order up more reading of nonfiction and informational texts — the types of material students are more likely to confront in the workplace — versus the current state standards, which favor literature. But don’t worry about schools tossing out Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” or Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird.” State officials say schools will probably make more room for nonfiction reading in science and social studies, instead of scaling back literary offerings in English classes.  

• • Once upon a time, athletes could be Amazing 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Much of the premise [of Amazing Grace and Chuck] hews closely to conservative icon Ayn Rand’s plot in her classic novel “Atlas Shrugged,’’ wherein the business and engineering brains of the world go on strike.  

• Through memoirs and reality TV, studying people 
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Interview with actress Jenna Fischer.
[Q:] What books did you like growing up? [A:] When I was a kid, I loved V.C. Andrews and Judy Blume. When I got older, I got into Kurt Vonnegut. [....] And of course, in college, I went through an Ayn Rand phase.