• What It Cost Eight Women Writers To Make It In New York 
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There are many, many writers that could have been included in this survey, and any such omission is not intended as a slight (except to Ayn Rand, of course).  

• Survey Says! The Complete Online Dating Advice Guide for Men 
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7 respondents would like you to have conversations topics at the ready that do not include “The Wire.” [....] Ayn Rand is also off limits, according to five people.  

• • With Ron Paul, Fighting for Minnesota 
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Atlas Shrugged  | There are 19 medical doctors in Congress (three senators); that’s an increase from 15 in 2009. (Trivia: Five doctors were among the 56 people who signed the Declaration of Independence.) Five of the 19 are Obstetrician-Gynecologists, and two of them are from Texas. They are Tom Coburn (R-OK), Phil Gingrey (R-GA) Michael Burgess (R-TX), Phil Roe (R-TN), and, of course, Dr. Paul (R-Atlas Shrugged). For some reason, Republican obstetricians abound.  

• • Contrasting Visions Of 2112: Gail Collins v. Neil Peart 
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Anthem  |The Fountainhead  |Individualism  |Rush  | If we have learned anything from Peart’s work on the subject, a man like Gingrich, a visionary comparable to say, the light-bringing electrician Equality 7-2521 or the rapist architect Howard Roark, would have no place in the “cold and empty life” brought about by the Federation’s social engineering.  

• Nine Wisconsinites Who Are Screwing Up America 
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[Paul] Ryan’s ever-present crap-eating golden-boy grin accompanies his every appearance as he defends his Randian budget plan that will never pass but in turn makes liberals so scared they’ll capitulate to the first “moderate” Republican cuts that come along. Respectable Republicans hate this smug scumbag too, but understand how powerful and necessary he’s become.  

• Drunken Notes from Last Night’s Republican Debate That Will Also Serve as Notes for the Next Eleven 
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[Ron] Paul: LIBERTARIANISM FREE MARKETS FED CONSPIRACY AHHHHHH WHY DON’T I JUST HAVE AYN RAND’S FACE TATTOOED ON MINE SO WHENEVER I SAY SOMETHING IT COMES OUT OF AYN RAND’S MOUTH ALSO.  

• • • When Alan met Ayn: Atlas Shrugged and our tanked economy 
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Alan Greenspan  |Altruism  |Atheism  |Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Individualism  |Personal life  |Image  |Video  | In Atlas Shrugged Rand creates a world where there are people who deserve to live because they are “intelligent” and “creative,” and those who do not. The former set out to rid themselves of the latter. These “men of the mind,” whom their author clearly worships, go “on strike” and refuse to be creative any more, which means that everybody else must perish. And because it’s a work of fantasy entirely under Rand’s control, they all go ahead and obediently perish. [....] For those who are inclined to find such ideas ludicrous, the book will fail, and utterly; its premises betray a bottomless ignorance of the deep interconnectedness of humankind, and the needs—economic, social, emotional, intellectual—of one human being for another.  

• Let’s talk “Peyton Place”: Abortions, enemas and the secret sex lives of New Englanders 
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The Fountainhead  | Is [Peyton Place] any good? Well, I mean, kind of? It’s not Revolutionary Road, or anything [...] , but it’s better than Twilight. It’s better than The Fountainhead, another novel that suggests that rape is one hell of a seduction tactic.  

• • Some men would like to be islands: The hows and whys of seasteading 
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Atlas Shrugged  | [Peter] Thiel’s libertarianism is a matter of public record, and it’s libertarianism that’s fueling the seasteading movement. For the discerning libertarian, seasteading represents a possible middle frontier, between the now of cyberspace and the distant future of the commercialization of outer space. The intended purpose of these miniature autonomous zones is to establish floating havens not technically in the US and accordingly outside the reach of the Feds and the individual states that together impinge on the enlightened citizen by imposing taxes and other impediments to self-actualization and bliss. Tiny little Galt’s Gulches, but asea.  

• Long distance projection: Believers making sense of Jared Lee Loughner 
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We The Living  |Inaccurate  | Conservatives gleefully noted that Loughner counted The Communist Manifesto among his favorite books; the left sniped back that he also included Ayn Rand’s gruesome objectivist fantasy We the Living on the same list.  

• Plight of the concords 
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The underdog is [...] a powerful element of the mystique of the American Dream—the idea John Q. Everyman can humble the powers that be with grit, ingenuity and a little (or a lot of) luck. It’s a mythology as pervasive as apple pie, Ayn Rand and the country’s first black president.  

• Football is socialism 
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Atlas Shrugged  | The “I Am John Galt” petulance evinced by [Randy] Moss essentially everywhere he has worked—always a new culprit, be it quarterbacks who can’t accommodate his genius, coaches who will not utilize it, or bosses and fans who can’t comprehend it—is common among the NFL’s most-blessed and least-loved receivers.  

• • Inside Ron Johnson’s victory party: Reason concedes to Ron Johnson 
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Atlas Shrugged  | [Ron Johnson] is a man who claims to worship the values of Atlas Shrugged’s objectivism, with its stress on personal responsibility and freedom from government regulation of the individual. Yet he is for government restrictions against homosexuals.  

• • The fantasy of girl world: Lady nerds and utopias 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Stories can be dangerous; one of the most popular science fiction novels of the twentieth century is by a woman, after all, and it would be a completely harmless tale about a dystopian future and a death ray and a team of heroic scientists, except that it’s Atlas Shrugged.  

• • The fraudulent case for the benefits of wealth inequality 
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Capitalism  | “It’s probably a good thing that the public underestimates how much wealth inequality there is,” [George Mason University’s Bryan D.] Caplan says with a patronizing air rather unbecoming of a doctrinaire libertarian. After all, he explains, “they tend not to understand the ways that wealth inequality is good.” And how does Caplan possess the magisterial authority to proclaim a crushing paucity of material justice “good”? Well, we’re not sure, exactly—though his homepage autobiography helpfully explains that “It began with Ayn Rand, as it proverbially does.” He does go on to explain that he later came to regard his youthful infatuation with Objectivism and hardline Austrian economic theory as “mistakes.”  

• Unscrambling an egg 
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Capitalism  | Anything that speaks to an essential rottenness at the core of something one kind of likes and hasn't really thought all that much about, honestly, is going to make one feel bad, both about liking that thing and not noticing all that rot. And so the easy answers: thus the revelations of the economic collapse – that the market was not self-regulating, was not working, did not even make any [...] sense for the most part – lead to the reassuring self-righteousness of Randian fury or peevish CliffNotes Misesianism, which suggest that someone else – gross, grasping poors or stupid government – screwed up this objectively very good thing.  

• 90 minutes with Gene Simmons made me a member of the KISS Army for life 
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Radiohead [...] decided to give their album “In Rainbows” away on the Internet, for free. Or free if you wanted it to be. The idea was to let people pay what they “thought it was worth.” [....] Gene Simmons thought it was the single most stupid idea he had ever heard in his life. His entire worldview revolved around the making of money, and then, how to make more money from that money; his outlook was once eloquently described as “a subtle blend of Ayn Rand and Ron Jeremy.” The notion of an artistic experiment which spoke of an utter distain for the very structures which had made its creation possible in the first place did not interest him in the slightest.  

• Poking back, Part 2: Cheering Zuckerberg in Seattle 
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Egoism  | Movie-Zuck is a kind of moral void, an apolitical objectivist-libertarian type who’s incapable of human connection. What could be seen as selfless devotion to his vision is really just more selfishness: Facebook is nice, but it hardly seems worth ruining people’s lives over. Zuckerberg isn’t pursuing it because he knows the end product will be worth fighting for; he’s pursuing it because he wants to be able to do whatever he wants without anyone telling him he can’t.  

• • Dystopian Wisconsin: Who is Ron Johnson? 
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Atlas Shrugged  | [Ron Johnson] is passionate believer in the values of Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. But not the book’s fundamental view of the “monstrous absurdity” of original sin, as he is a fervent and active Lutheran who says “freedom of religion doesn’t mean freedom from religion.” [....] George Will’s backseat make-out session with Johnson in May heavily leaned on Atlas Shrugged symbolism, noting it was Johnson’s favorite book. Will noted Johnson’s belief that we are already living in the “novel’s dystopian world.” When newspeak replaces debate and the nation’s vocabulary gets smaller every election cycle, where doublethink goes unquestioned by voters, we are indeed sliding into a novel’s dystopian world, but it wasn’t written by Ayn Rand.  

• Rich people things: The bridge to somewhere 
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Capitalism  | [Michigan trucking mogul Manuel “Matty” Moroun’s son] Matt gives the standard Randian gloss on the battle [over the Ambassador Bridge]: “We’re doing our best to fight a government takeover of a private business that wants to spend private dollars in Detroit.”