• Chris Grayling calls me a job snob for questioning those who pay so little 
,
I want Britain to aim for the social and economic balance that thrives in Nordic nations. But Grayling, with his welfare cuts, draws inspiration from all the neoliberal small statism wafting across the Atlantic, imbued with the Ayn Rand and Fox News meanness of spirit.  

• New traumas reveal the truth in old songs 
,
Capitalism  | When the times are a-changing, we pump out Dylan. When they feel hard (ditto), we quote Dickens. Yet as it unfurls, history has a way of hauling back into the limelight artists and works that have fallen into obscurity. Ayn Rand, for instance, is currently enjoying a moment among rightwing economists in the US.  

• Rewind TV: Mad Men; Titanic; One Night – review 
,
The executives (in Mad Men) are all too hung up on their own status to see the seismic shifts under way in the world outside. "Dissatisfaction is a symptom of ambition," said Pete Campbell's wife, as though she'd been studying Ayn Rand. "It's the coal that fuels the fire."  

• • • Guardian Weekly Letters, 30 March 2012 
,
Atlas Shrugged  |The Virtue of Selfishness  | If George Monbiot is saying that Ayn Rand and Marx were each taken as demigods by those who had read little of their works and understood less, it would be hard to disagree (Ayn Rand is the Marx of the right, 16 March). However, I must take issue on one or two points.  

• • • Guardian Weekly Letters, 30 March 2012 
,
Alan Greenspan  |Atheism  |Personal life  | [George] Monbiot rightly pegs [Ayn Rand] a "psychopath'' who deliberately spiked her fictional tales of dashing male heroes with '"cruelty, revenge and greed'', elements incidentally that are key elements in the dystopian novels now popular with young adults, such as The Hunger Games.  

• • In praise of … shaking hands 

Egoism  | The Olympic Games are supposed to embody peaceful friendship among peoples. Shaking the hands of strangers and rivals is also one of the oldest signs of peaceful intent. The British Olympic Association’s advice to UK competitors not to shake hands with rivals and dignitaries at the London Games is thus bizarre and outrageous. The association says the threat of illness to performance means that competitors should avoid unnecessary contact, including handshakes. This advice is offensive on multiple counts. It elevates individual self-interest, Ayn Rand style, above all other objectives. It subverts the universal ideals on which the Olympics pride themselves.  

• • • How Ayn Rand became the new right’s version of Marx 
,
Alan Greenspan  |Altruism  |Atheism  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal  |The Virtue of Selfishness  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Personal life  |Inaccurate  |Syndicated  | It has a fair claim to be the ugliest philosophy the postwar world has produced. Selfishness, it contends, is good, altruism evil, empathy and compassion are irrational and destructive. The poor deserve to die; the rich deserve unmediated power. It has already been tested, and has failed spectacularly and catastrophically. Yet the belief system constructed by Ayn Rand, who died 30 years ago today, has never been more popular or influential.  

• • Keynes - Hayek by Nicholas Wapshott - review 
,
Glenn Beck has rediscovered Hayek as a hero, but the great prophetess of libertarianism, Ayn Rand, privately scourged him as a “total, complete, vicious bastard”.  

• Want to get ahead? Move to Denmark 
,
Romney is still trying to win votes from Tea Partiers, Southern Baptist supply-siders and readers of Ayn Rand comic books. So far, he’s had a tin ear for the country’s anger. In Iowa last summer, he snapped at a heckler, “Corporations are people, my friend.”  

• The Wonderbox by Roman Krznaric 

Capitalism  | The fact that the lessons Krznaric finds in his wonderbox end up coinciding with the bromidic formulations of every self-help book not inspired by Ayn Rand is, of course, itself a historical accident. “I believe that the real monuments worth visiting are people,” he intones. “It is seldom easy to close the gap between our beliefs and our actions,” he warns. “Anybody who feels that the main point of work is to make money should beware that having lots of it is rarely an effective way of achieving personal fulfilment,” he reveals.  

• • Pity the Billionaire by Thomas Frank 
,
Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | [Thomas Frank] has read all 1,200 pages of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the allegory of purified capitalism that is easily the most influential book in American politics. Frank makes out a plausible case for the charm of the book as an inverted proletarian novel, with techniques that Rand picked up from her reading of Stalinist fiction.  

• The best television of 2011: factual 
,
All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. Adam Curtis’s three-parter was a televisual mind bomb – the fragments of which are still lodged in my brain. It combined wonderful archive footage with well-chosen music and a provocative narrative that suggested, among other theories, that 1940s Ayn Rand was the catalyst for the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. The result was hypnotic.  

• RBS? Milly Dowler’s hacked phone? Watch out for the blame game 
,
Alan Greenspan  |Capitalism  | As for light-touch regulations, the US Federal Reserve Bank – chaired by Alan Greenspan, disciple of the whacky free market guru Ayn Rand – made identical mistakes to [Gordon] Brown’s – but more so.  

• • How BioShock Infinite will be prescient – interview with Ken Levine 
,
BioShock  |Atlas Shrugged  | [Q:] American hegemony is a driving theme in BioShock Infinite. Is there much of an overlap with that and the objectivism that informed the world in BioShock? [A:] I don’t think I agree with that. Objectivism wasn’t necessarily attached to the United States in any particular way except that Ayn Rand happened to live there and it matched, as close as it could at the time, her principles and her philosophy. She was very unhappy with a lot of things, though – the New Deal for example is something she found utterly repulsive.  

• • Constructive criticism: the week in architecture 
,
The Fountainhead  |The Fountainhead movie  | [Peter] Murray calls A Passion to Build, his online novel, “a racy tale of two architects, Harry Jamb and Frederick Shaw, who start out in practice together but, after an acrimonious ‘divorce’, compete furiously”. [....] Murray’s tongue may well be firmly in his cheek, yet he is following in a literary tradition that portrays fictional architects as egotistical, over-ambitious and perhaps even insane monsters. Think of Howard Roark, hero of Ayn Rand’s blockbuster novel The Fountainhead (more than 6.5m copies sold since first published in 1943). Roark, played by Gary Cooper in the gloriously OTT film of the book, dynamites one of his own buildings after second-rate talents are brought in to complete it without him.  

• Library campaigners mount vigils to prevent Brent council clearing shelves 
,
Sustained by fury – not to mention the odd cup of Earl Grey laced with Spanish brandy – [campaigners] have resisted the council’s attempts to board up the [Kensal Rise] library and remove its stock. To underline their point, they have set up their own lending library: a few cardboard boxes of donated books where Dick Francis and Maeve Binchy lie spine-to-spine with Ayn Rand.  

• • People like Rory Weal can’t be leftwing on planet Mail 
,
Capitalism  | There's a certain arrogant sheen of the true Ayn Randian, anti-regulatory, rampant free-marketeer that needs to be polished with a bit of hard cash.  

• • Apps rush: Adele, Tonara, Nosy Crow’s Cinderella, Ayn Rand and more 
,
Atlas Shrugged  | US author Ayn Rand has been an influence on many Silicon Valley thinkers, although the portrayal of her was less sympathetic in Adam Curtis’ recent All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace TV series. Anyway, her Atlas Shrugged book is now an iPad “Amplified Edition” from Penguin, with video and audio excerpts of Rand herself, full-length audio lectures, and all manner of timelines, photo galleries and social features.  

• The books are burning! Which would you save? 

The Fountainhead  | In the discussion of our inaugural Reading Group book, Fahrenheit 451, BookAvatar posed the following dilemma: “You are in a burning library ... on a table are the last two copies in existence of two books (let’s say The Fountainhead and Brave New World). You can carry only one more book. Which would you leave behind?” We liked the question, so here it is, with a couple more options thrown in. Let’s vote!  

• Jonathan Ross: look who’s talking – interview 
,
Jonathan Ross can’t stop talking. Within minutes of meeting him, he has segued from the subject of madness to how he and Ricky Gervais think they didn’t like ELO as kids because they made music for adult ears, to Ayn Rand and objectivism.