• Free Events at Littlefield, and a PEN Reading in Carroll Gardens 
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The youngsters should probably be cleared out for Sunday’s evening program, a free 7:30 performance of Adam Guthman’s one-man show, “The Conceit of My Pants,” described as something of an extended circular improvisation involving terrifying elements like wormholes, murder, apocalypse and Ayn Rand. It sounds like a laugh to the Miser, at least.  

• • Ryan’s Rise From Follower to G.O.P. Trailblazer 
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Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  | [Paul] Ryan likes to dispel two “urban legends” around him. First, he said, he is not a disciple of Rand, the strident libertarian. Second, he never drove the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. In fact, there is some truth to both. In a 2009 Facebook video, Mr. Ryan said the “kind of thinking” in the Rand epics “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” was “sorely needed right now.” As for the Wienermobile, one summer as he was pressing Oscar Mayer Lunchables and turkey bacon on meat buyers in rural Minnesota, two “very nice young ladies” who were driving the hotdog-shaped vehicle did let him “take it for a spin,” he confessed.  

• The Gullible Center 
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Syndicated  | So, can we talk about the Paul Ryan phenomenon? And yes, I mean the phenomenon, not the man. Mr. Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee and the principal author of the last two Congressional Republican budget proposals, isn’t especially interesting. He’s a garden-variety modern G.O.P. extremist, an Ayn Rand devotee who believes that the answer to all problems is to cut taxes on the rich and slash benefits for the poor and middle class.  

• • Moochers Against Welfare 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Syndicated  | Representative Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, requires that staffers read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” in which heroic capitalists struggle against the “moochers” trying to steal their totally deserved wealth, a struggle the heroes win by withdrawing their productive effort and giving interminable speeches.  

• Government and Its Rivals 
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The Fountainhead  |Egoism  |Individualism  |Syndicated  | When liberals are in a philosophical mood, they like to cast debates over the role of government not as a clash between the individual and the state, but as a conflict between the individual and the community. Liberals are for cooperation and joint effort; conservatives are for self-interest and selfishness. Liberals build the Hoover Dam and the interstate highways; conservatives sit home and dog-ear copies of “The Fountainhead.” Liberals know that it takes a village; conservatives pretend that all it takes is John Wayne.  

• Jobs, Jobs and Cars 
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Atlas Shrugged  | From the G.O.P.’s perspective, it’s all about the heroic entrepreneur, the John Galt, I mean Steve Jobs-type “job creator” who showers benefits on the rest of us and who must, of course, be rewarded with tax rates lower than those paid by many middle-class workers.  

• • • ‘Pity the Billionaire’ 
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Alan Greenspan  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | It may bear recalling that the former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan — who presided placidly over the fraudulent housing bubble leading to the 2008 meltdown — is a lifelong Rand disciple, devoted to the dogmatic view that markets are always and everywhere self-regulating.  

• • ‘Pity the Billionaire’ 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Michael Kinsley is wrong to reject the “notion” that “Atlas Shrugged” “plays any role in, say, the debate over ‘cap and trade.’ ” Paul Ryan, the right-wing Republican representative from Wisconsin, was one of the leading voices against “cap and trade.” “Atlas Shrugged,” by his own account, is his personal bible, and he requires anyone who works for him to read it.  

• • The Rise of the American Oligarchy 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | Book review: Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right, by Thomas Frank.
The two great antiheroes of “Pity the Billionaire” are Ayn Rand and Glenn Beck. [....] Frank spends 11 out of 187 pages (before the endnotes) in this short book on an entertaining deconstruction of Ayn Rand’s masterwork, “Atlas Shrugged.” “For me,” Frank writes, “it is the political flimflam of our times wrapped up in one big package: the manifesto of the deregulators and free marketeers who caused the economic disaster.” “Atlas Shrugged” is certainly a ridiculous book, and a good illustration of the absurd self-pity of the rich that Frank so deftly skewers in “Pity the Billionaire.” But the notion that this 1,000-page novel about the breakdown of society due to a corrupt government plays any role in, say, the debate over “cap and trade” seems far-fetched.  

• Analyst Who Is Able to Back Up Opinions 
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The Fountainhead  | A voracious reader, [Golf Channel announcer Brandel] Chamblee packed “Pride and Prejudice” and “The Fountainhead” for the Hawaii trip.  

• Online Fracas for a Critic of the Right 
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Capitalism  | [A] counterrevolutionary spirit, [Corey] Robin argues, animates every conservative, from the Southern slaveholders to Ayn Rand to Antonin Scalia, to name just a few of the figures he pulls into his often slashing analysis. Commitment to a limited government, devotion to the free market, or a wariness of change, Mr. Robin writes, are not the essence of conservatism but mere “byproducts” of one essential idea — “that some are fit, and thus ought, to rule others.”  

• • Lululemon Athletica’s Founder Takes a Step Back 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Egoism  | Lululemon Athletica, the yoga wear retailer, said on Friday that Dennis J. Wilson, its founder and former chief executive, would leave his remaining executive role as chief innovation and branding officer at the end of January. [....] Mr. Wilson, who is known as Chip, has said that he was greatly influenced by Ayn Rand and has used her books, which promote the idea of people living for their self-interest, to guide his business. Last November, Lululemon provoked an outcry from some customers after it used the opening line from Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” on its shopping bags.  

• Workers of the World, Unite! 
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Individualism  |Syndicated  | The Republicans harvest their votes but have done a poor job responding to their needs. The leading lights of the party tend to be former College Republicans who have a more individualistic and even Randian worldview than most members of the working class.  

• • Inside the List 
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Atlas Shrugged  | [Much Ado About Loving] includes a chapter linking [David Foster] Wallace’s breakthrough, the 1,000-page “Infinite Jest,” to guys who talk too much. “The same thing does not occur,” [co-author Jack] Murnighan writes, “with women authors. Of the top 10 longest novels in English, only one was written by a woman — ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ by Ayn Rand — and I wonder, as heartless as she seems, whether she should even count as a woman.”  

• • William F. Buckley Jr.: Right Man, Right Time 
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Atheism  |Atlas Shrugged  | Book review: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of American Conservatism, by Carl T. Bogus.
From his hierophant’s chair at National Review, [William F. Buckley Jr] marginalized [Russell] Kirk and the new conservatives and excommunicated extremists, including John Birch Society paranoids and Ayn Rand, whose atheism and materialism undermined his drive to make conservatism respectable.  

• • • Lululemon Athletica Combines Ayn Rand and Yoga 
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Alan Greenspan  |Altruism  |Atlas Shrugged  |Egoism  | Lululemon Athletica, the retailer of yoga pants and hoodies, has long decorated shopping bags with slogans that appear to have been lifted from self-help books. But this month its bags have asked a question that some may find more provocative: “Who is John Galt?” The question is the opening line of “Atlas Shrugged,” the novel by Ayn Rand that was published in 1957. Followers of Rand’s free market philosophy, which promotes the idea of individuals living for their self-interest and dismisses altruism, sometimes use the question to signal their allegiance.  

• • Wait Wait ... Don’t Tell Me 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Egoism  | Quiz.
6. Fans of Ayn Rand celebrate her virtues of selfishness and greed. So they were distraught when they went to buy DVDs of the movie adaptation of her novel “Atlas Shrugged,” and saw it advertised as a story of: A. Self-sacrifice. B. Farm animals overthrowing the farmer. C. A poodle, on the adventure of a lifetime. D. Hamburgers.  

• • Spare Times for Nov. 4-10 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Ayn Rand Talk and Walk (Saturday, Sunday and Thursday) The writer is the subject of a walk and discussion at two different locations. “Atlas Shrugged,” a walk past the Midtown sites that appear in this novel, will be led on Saturday and Sunday by In Depth Walking Tours [...]. On Thursday at 6:30 p.m., a discussion, “Architects Shrugged? The Architectural Vision of Ayn Rand,” will take place at the Museum of the City of New York, 1220 Fifth Avenue, at 104th Street. The panelists include Anne C. Heller, author of “Ayn Rand and the World She Made” (Talese/Doubleday), and Donald Albrecht, the curator of architecture and design at the museum.  

• A Bookstore and a Hub for Readers 
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Books aren’t the only things to hunt down at Word. For those seeking roommates, a bulletin board titled “Random House Finder” can point toward kindred bibliophiles. For those longing for romance, there’s a board called “Between the Covers: a Matchmaking Service for Book Lovers,” where pinned ads flutter hopefully, like one from a “lass” looking for a “lad” who loves Faulkner and Harry Potter (Ayn Rand fans need not apply).  

• Panic of the Plutocrats 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Syndicated  | Wall Street’s Masters of the Universe realize, deep down, how morally indefensible their position is. They’re not John Galt; they’re not even Steve Jobs. They’re people who got rich by peddling complex financial schemes that, far from delivering clear benefits to the American people, helped push us into a crisis whose aftereffects continue to blight the lives of tens of millions of their fellow citizens.