• • The Big Decision: More CBC pro-business blarney 
,
Capitalism  |Video  | One reason The Big Decision is not great TV is its slavish devotion to the billionaire-hero myth. The iconography is groan-inducing – the billionaire in the sky looking down on us, and the possible recipients of his largesse are like hand-wringing serfs hoping to please the god or the king, or whatever it is that the billionaire is supposed to represent. This is the Ayn Randian sensibility, the exaltation of the entrepreneur, reduced to comic-book drama. The whole world depends on the grace of the deity that is the super-rich entrepreneur. It’s an insult to the hard-working business people seen on the show, and to viewers who don’t think the Ayn Randian sensibility is gospel.  

• • A child’s garden of curses 
,
Book review: Arcadia, by Lauren Groff.
Groff can do funny too. When Bit and his dinner date discover a common interest in reading, he listens, horrified, as his date’s love of Ayn Rand gushes forth. Later, when they both accept that the spark has fizzled out, he says “I think it was the Ayn Rand.” She laughs and laughs at this, graceful under the implied criticism, under the sting of the differences between them.  

• Treasure this book!!! Also, read it!!! 
,
Book review: Treasure Island!!!, by Sara Levine.
If you can think of Sara Levine’s very funny and winning fictional debut as one of those quickie Hollywood elevator pitches, maybe as Robert Louis Stevenson (obvious) meets Holden Caulfield meets Ayn Rand, you’ll have some idea of the tenor of this wackily original tale.  

• Why would anybody care what Tim Thomas thinks about politics? 
,
Hey look, hockey world’s most fervent Ayn Rand disciple strikes again. You’d have thought Boston Bruins goalie Tim Thomas had enough of being pilloried after his White House snub and the baffling verbal attack on U.S. democracy that accompanied it. You’d be wrong.  

• • Lululemon ad pokes fun at customers – and goes viral 
,
Atlas Shrugged  |Egoism  | In October, new shopping bags with a phrase from the novel Atlas Shrugged chafed some customers who felt Ayn Rand’s philosophy of self-interest clashed with the teachings of yoga.  

• • A three-way split in the battle for America’s soul in Iowa 
,
Capitalism  | A Ron Paul rally is a unique political event, best described as Ayn Rand meets Iron Maiden. Clean-cut, college-aged capitalists bond with shaggy-haired, semi-employed potheads, all in the name of the Paulite mantra of individual liberty.  

• • CEO of the Year: Christine Day of Lululemon 
,
Atlas Shrugged  |Inaccurate  | [Day] says that she considers Lululemon to be “part of, and contributing to, a bigger macro-trend that affects consumers from their early teens to their 70s. Investing in your health will pay big dividends for individuals and society...elevating the world from mediocrity to greatness.” But then, what’s interesting about the chosen quote is that it layers an interest in community over a reference to Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand’s treatise on the essential shamefulness of being merely like everyone else and the necessity that truly great people strive through all obstacles toward individual dominance.  

• • • How would Mrs. Dalloway look in Lululemon pants? 
,
Ayn Rand Institute  |Atlas Shrugged  |Onkar Ghate  | Our most popular story this week was Simon Houpt’s tale of how Lululemon has upset the intelligentsia with its controversial take on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. It all comes down to a shopping bag. And your interpretation of objectivism and yogic values, but let’s start with the bag.  

• • Dumb, smart & funny things people said and did today 
,
Capitalism  | Tweet of the day from @JustinWolfers: "Welcome to the free market! Lululemon's stock down 3.5% as they learn latte-sipping yoga moms abhor Ayn Rand." A reference to today's article by Simon Houpt.  

• • • Eight fun facts about Lululemon 

Atlas Shrugged  |Egoism  | Founded in 1998, Lululemon is now practically synonymous with yoga apparel in North America. The company, which designs and sells pricey yoga apparel and accessories, says its ‘vision’ is ‘elevating the world from mediocrity to greatness.’ In late October, the company began using shopping bags with the words “Who is John Galt?” a catchphrase from the 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, which rails against government and advocates self-interest as a key ingredient of a better world. The endorsement irked some customers.  

• • • Lululemon shopping bag: inspiration or irony? 
,
Ayn Rand Institute  |Atlas Shrugged  |Egoism  |Onkar Ghate  | Lululemon Athletica Inc., the Vancouver-based retailer of choice for yoga devotees who want to strike a fashionable pose while attaining a higher state of being, is interrupting the positive energy flow of some of its most loyal customers by promoting a controversial novel by Ayn Rand.  

• • • Atlas Shrugged: A cheap near-mockery of capitalism 
,
Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Personal life  | To be charitable (as much as that might offend Rand’s legacy), Atlas Shrugged almost gets by as unwitting satire, though it would take a director of Alexander Payne or Jason Reitman’s satirical skills to do justice to its loopy premise: What would happen if all the millionaires went on strike? Would anyone actually notice?  

• • A billionaire’s Waterworld takes libertarianism to new depths 
,
BioShock  | A certain segment of people reading this may think, “This all sounds familiar, I’ve played this game.” It’s called Bioshock, a video game about an objectivist utopia (okay, Bioshock takes place under the sea, but under the sea, over the sea is a fine line, one easily transgressed, mind the boom) in which the lack of medical and other regulatory oversight turns everyone into zombies with guns. Possibly this all suggests that far from learning too much from video games, as is frequently suggested, some people aren’t learning nearly enough.  

• Anderson Cooper set to join the daytime talk-show ranks 
,
Interview with Anderson Cooper.
[Q:] Everyone knows Oprah, but what was unique about Donahue? [A:] At the time, a lot of the topics he was doing were groundbreaking and he was giving a voice to people who you didn’t normally see on television. The energy of the show and the interaction with the audience was always compelling. There were days when it was pretty tawdry and days it was serious. At one point he had Ayn Rand on for a series of conversations, which was something you didn’t see every day on television.  

• Rising GOP ‘Young Gun’ pedalling sour fiscal medicine 2013 will Americans swallow it? 
,
[Is Paul] Ryan heartless? His professed admiration for Ayn Rand, an icon of libertarians, has made him dangerous in the eyes of liberals. But his own politics have not been as doctrinaire as his choice of idols would suggest.  

• • The Situationists is a plodding, pointless comedy 
,
Gilbert may have intended The Situationists to be a leftist companion piece to The Emotionalists, his 2000 drama about right-wing philosopher Ayn Rand, which received a revival at last year’s SummerWorks festival. Both plays are concerned with intellectual hypocrisy, but whereas The Emotionalists dealt with complex historical figures, The Situationists offers us only silly cartoons.  

• A nation of language obsessives has roared 
,
Views on the serial comma, at least in Globeland, are split exactly down the middle. Many referred to the famous example of a hypothetical dedication that is made confusing without the comma: “For my parents, Ayn Rand and God.” But for every pedant inventing sentences full of unlikely lists to show possible ambiguities without the comma, there is a traditionalist who points out that we don’t write a comma after “and” in a list of two (“I bought eggs, and milk”).  

• Five MPs to watch this winter 
,
Rona Ambrose, 41. [....] Inspiration: “Thanks to my mother, grandmother and aunt, I grew up reading Ayn Rand and Pippi Longstocking - powerful women and girls with sharp intuition and confidence.”  

• Danielle Smith: ‘My life will fall under the microscope’ 
,
Inevitably, comparisons have been made between the young, telegenic, unambiguous and plain-spoken Ms. Smith and a certain American politician. The heroes Ms. Smith cites, however, are Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, “early [Ralph] Klein” and Ayn Rand. She admits though, that recently, she has found Sarah Palin’s message of limited government and cutbacks to spending inspirational.  

• • Very, very long books 

Atlas Shrugged  |Image  | Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. If it’s the only book on the island, or if you’re a confused 15-year-old... Close to 1,200 pages.