Here is the first paragraph from a new article in Fortune magazine, the full version of which is available only to Fortune subscribers:
“Please listen carefully, Mr. Roark,” newspaper mogul Gail Wynand instructs the architect hero of Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel, The Fountainhead. “I wish to undertake the construction of the Wynand Building at once. I wish it to be the tallest structure of the city.”
The article is accompanied by a photo essay of some impressive skyscrapers.
While apparently not influenced much, or enough, by Ayn Rand’s political principles, 1960s leftist activist Joan Baez credits The Founainhead with influencing her own trenchant approach to politics:
A little music, a little politics. It’s always been that way for Baez, but only now is it a comfortable balancing act. The woman whose silver soprano held audiences spellbound at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival has occasionally seen her career buffeted by her commitment to social causes. While Baez helped turn “We Shall Overcome” into a civil rights anthem, she also devoted an entire side of an album to a listener-proof account of a U.S. bombing raid on Hanoi.
“Dark Chords” is the singer’s coming-out party of a sort, and she’s celebrating her newfound confidence after a 15-year break from activism, during which she focused on her inner folk star.
“For the first 20, 25 years, I was steadier in my politics than I ever was in my image of myself musically,” she said. “Nobody could trip me up politically, and that came before the music. That started when I was 10 years old and reading Ayn Rand’s ‘Fountainhead’ while living in Baghdad.
See the full profile in TCPalm.com for more info about Baez’s development as a woman, singer, and songwriter.
North Carolina sculptor Robert Toth created a bust of Sigmund Freud that has been prominently featured on Fox News’ sitcom “Cracking Up.”
His next project? A bust of Ayn Rand:
He’s currently working on a bust of Ayn Rand, one of his favorite authors. Rand wrote “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.”
See his profile in the Salisbury Post for more info.
Ed Hudgins, TOC Washington Director, attacks the subtle racism of John Kerry’s appeal to African American voters in his latest Report from the Front and he explains why African American leaders rejected Kerry’s clear pandering to racial politics. Lastly, Hudgins reflects on Ayn Rand’s thoughts on racism:
[T]his episode points to the moral and political bankruptcy of those who, as Ayn Rand wrote in her essay “Racism” over four decades ago, “Instead of fighting against racial discrimination … are demanding that racial discrimination be legalized and enforced… Instead of fighting for equal rights … are demanding special racial privileges.” But she also observed that, “the smallest minority on earth is the individual.” Individuals should not identify first with accidents of birth such as their race or social class, nor should they see these circumstances entitling them to other people’s money. Rather, their self-esteem should come from what they make of themselves through their own efforts to realize their own dreams, whether in the face of old-fashioned Southern-bigot white racism, which thankfully is disappearing from America, or the more subtle but equally dangerous version that is perpetuated by Clinton, Kerry and much of the black establishment.
Read the full article….
In a review of the movie My Architect for the Grand Rapids Press, reviewer John Douglas reports shades of Howard Roark in the movie’s lead character:
Nathaniel [Kahn] also went to see the structures his father designed. As the film progressed, Kahn began to remind me of Howard Roark, the uncompromising architect in Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.” Thus he became a very interesting character in my eyes, because I loved [Roark] when I read the book.
See the full review for additional details. (And please send us your own comments, if you’ve seen the movie.)
David Strom, president of the Taxpayers League of Minnesota, counts Ayn Rand as a significant influence on his thinking. From a profile of Strom at the Star Tribune:
In recent weeks, Strom, president of the ardently conservative Taxpayers League of Minnesota, triggered an angry backlash over his provocative assertions that the strike-idled Twin Cities bus system does nothing to relieve congestion and that taxpayers would be better off buying used cars for low-income folks who are dependent on transit.
The voice of a dominant advocacy group in Minnesota, Strom has been mounting similarly scalding attacks on government spending and liberal thinking since 1997, shortly after the League was founded by a group of wealthy entrepreneurs.
See the full article for the scoop on how and why he made a “right turn on the ideological highway.”
In today’s LATimes.com, James P. Pinkerton has a commentary titled “Reining In Prescription Prices Is a Seductive Idea. But It Might Kill You.” [registration required]
From his comments:
Why not have price controls on pharmaceuticals? That’s a tempting idea for the federal government, which is desperate to restrain its spending and the size of its deficit. But a closer look ? and a look back at history ? shows that price controls are the falsest of false economies. […]
The Kennedy-Pelosi effort has gained momentum. Sen. John Kerry, the apparent Democratic presidential nominee, has added his oomph, promising that he will do everything to make sure “the American people have affordable medicine available to them.”
That all sounds innocent, doesn’t it? What’s wrong with negotiation? And surely there’s nothing wrong with affordable medicine.
The problem is that it won’t be a real negotiation. The federal government is so big and so powerful, as former head of the Medicare program Gail Wilensky said, that “government doesn’t negotiate prices; it sets them.” And so medicines will be affordable ? for as long as they are available. But as in some present-day addendum to Ayn Rand’s classic novel “Atlas Shrugged,” price controls could cause capitalists and their capital to go on strike; they could pursue more profitable ventures elsewhere in the free market, leaving the rest of us alone with our illness.
See the full article for further analysis.
Cypress Semiconductor CEO T.J. Rodgers has a reputation for standing up for rational principles, and has been known to require his managers to read Atlas Shrugged.
In the mid-90s, Rodgers “rebuked a nun who had criticized Cypress for its lack of women or minority board members, saying it would be immoral for him to pick directors based on criteria other than merit.”
More recently, an article for the San Francisco Chronicle reports that he’s decided to run for office. In particular, he’s running for the board of trustees for his alma mater, Dartmouth College, in a bid to reform its politically correct and educationally destructive policies:
Rodgers, class of 1970, said he’s concerned that his alma mater, long a bastion of traditional education, is wasting scarce money “in the diversity area.” He wants the college to stop adding ethnic studies classes and refocus its resources on the fundamentals, such as civics, science and history.
“I could live with (the spending) if it was for academics,” said Rodgers, who is running on a platform of fiscal prudence and a return to basics.
He was urged to undertake this diversion from running Cypress’ $863 million business by another Bay Area iconoclast — former legislator and Superior Court Judge Quentin Kopp.
“He is a man of convictions, unafraid to express those convictions, and a believer in Dartmouth,” said Kopp, class of ’49 and an active member of the college’s 62,000-member alumni association.
Clara Lovett, president of the American Association for Higher Education in Washington, D.C., said Rodgers and Kopp are not the only prominent alumni trying to counter “what they see as too much political correctness on campuses.”
“You can argue about their opinions or disagree with them, but they are people whose education has served them well,” Lovett said. “They can think, they care, and they can make an argument.”
See the full article for more details.
Psychologist author (and long-time Rand associate) Nathaniel Branden has announced a new self-directed online course based on his book The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem. From the announcement:
The online course includes audio and/or video of Dr. Branden in every chapter,
so you can hear and see the man behind the words.
The course package also includes three life changing calls with Dr. Branden:
Call One: Basic Principles of Self-Esteem
Call Two: Internal Sources of Self-Esteem
Call Three: External Influences on Our Self-Esteem
More information is available on the ConsciousOne web site.
Linda Rodriguez of the Columbia News Service has an article in today’s Chicago Tribune discussing the Atlasphere’s dating service [registration required] and its, er, founder:
As a 30-year-old doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of New Mexico, Joshua Zader saw philosophy as a common ground for love interests. Thus he launched his Internet dating site on Nov. 1, 2003.
Tastefully accented in green with a dark blue background, the Web site features pictures of happy couples who, like site visitors themselves, are presumably all aficionados of the work of Ayn Rand, creator of the philosophy known as objectivism and author of “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged.”
Actually, they’re stock photography models. One day we may replace them with member photos.
Zader started the site to bring together people sharing their common interest.
“When you have a very strong artistic response to something like a novel, there’s a very strong chance that your soul mate also had the same reaction,” said Zader, who met his wife at an Ayn Rand conference. “You can be sure that they have similar life views.” […]
Samantha Johnston, a 41-year-old Portland, Ore., resident who plans to go to law school after completing a degree in philosophy, has been a user of Zader’s Atlasphere dating service since it was launched.
Though she hasn’t met her love-match yet, she is confident that it could happen, especially since the odds are in her favor: There are 382 male members on the site and 97 female members.
“You tend to find `The Fountainhead’ or `Atlas Shrugged’ when you’re in high school or college, and the ideas resonate so deeply with you that it tends to carry you through the rest of your life,” she said.
“You’re hoping to find someone who reflects that back at you.” […]
The backbone of online dating’s niche sites is acceptance, understanding and common interests, something that many people are finding more and more difficult to find on larger, more general sites.
“I tried Match.com and Yahoo personals, and I got a lot of hits that way,” Johnston said. “But they were from people whose philosophical differences were almost diametrically opposed to mine, so I unsubscribed within a few months.” Match.com, for one, has nearly a million subscribers.
Johnston was ecstatic to find Atlasphere. “There’s just a lot that you don’t have to explain about yourself,” she said. “You’re starting out on a much higher level of compatibility that you just don’t get at other sites. At other sites, you have to do a lot more mining.”
See the full article for more discussion of the advantages of niche dating.
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