Category: Culture

The Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, Israel, features Ayn Rand on its online “Who is Who in the Jewish World?”
The web page honors “[a] gallery of famous Jewish personalities, who have left a significant imprint on history” and provides information on “personalities chosen from various fields of historical, cultural, religious, political and scientific life.”
Each week, a person is featured as “Personality of the Week.” Ayn Rand was featured with a fair and accurate entry on her life and achievements:

Ayn Rand (Alissa Rosenbaum)
(1905 – 1982) writer and philosopher
Born in Russia, she studied at the University of Petrograd graduating in 1924. She immigrated to the United States two years later and became a screenwriter in Hollywood. During the late 1930s, she began developing her philosophy of Objectivism, a worldview proclaiming support for each individual’s talent and effort that according to her opinion finds his or her best expression solely within a pure Capitalist framework. Rand argued in favor of her viewpoint in a number of novels, among them “The Fountainhead”, published in 1943, and “Atlas Shrugged” released in 1957. She further elaborated her views in a number of non-fiction works as well as in two journals under her editorship: “The Objectivist” (1962-1971) and “The Ayn Rand Letter” (1971-1976).

Today’s Sydney Morning Herald contains this interesting ramble by Ruth Wajnryb about the power of remaking oneself in one’s own image:

[Tom] Cruise wasn’t always going to be Cruise. He used to be a gawky, orthodontically challenged, two-bit nobody. Then he had his teeth fixed, and who knows what else, and emerged looking as close as he could dream to being a latter-day James Dean in Top Gun. Then he was A Few Good Men’s hunk – the white-uniformed fledgling lawyer-officer with God on his side, a baseball bat in his hand and Demi Moore beside him.
Call me weird, but I actually carry around in my day-planner a very old picture of Tom Cruise – and I mean old. Before Nicole, before Top Gun, before the radical teeth work. It’s a before-pic, to which I’ve attached an after-pic; together they serve as a kind of talis(wo)man. They keep me grounded, reminding me that what we know of Cruise has been commodified to within an inch of his life. Grumpy old woman that I’m becoming, that’s nice to know. It is, well, settling.

And:

Yet face work and air-brushing only go so far. It’s really in the language that Cruise constructs his persona. He talks the talk masterfully. He’s the expert. A major part of talking the talk is massaging past biography into a version that’s congruent with the present. I read somewhere that Cruise said that when he was young he used to look about in the street for people he might help – little old ladies struggling to cross the road, others laden with heavy shopping.
Now hold this boy scout image against the code of the Samurai, which he will passionately explicate for anyone who asks, obligingly allowing his on-screen identity to bleed into him: “Be acutely honest throughout your dealings with all people. Believe in justice … To the true Samurai, there are no shades of grey. There’s only right and wrong. A life of honour, a life of honesty. These are things, the way I try to live my life. Doing things right, and treating people with respect.”

The ending:

My pictorial talisman started out quite personally – used to be something to glance at while waiting at the periodontist. Then I started showing the pictures to people and discovered their reaction gave me a buzz. Some, like me, were astounded at what cosmetic work can do for a face. But most have bought the Cruise line – dazzling success can be anyone’s, provided you really want it. It’s an Ayn Rand world: the rugged individual is born, has hopes and dreams, is single-mindedly ambitious, but also kind to old people, children and animals. All Cruise has done is embrace enthusiastically the pursuit of happiness that is everyone’s right.
Narro ergo sum. Loosely, I am my narrative.

See the full story for a bit more background.

In a new article “The Politics of Architecture: WTC Freedom Tower Reprise,” architecture student Aaron Margolis draws an extended comparison between Howard Roark’s design of Cortlandt Homes and Daniel Libeskind’s design of Freedom Tower. From the article:

When I think of the bastardization of Libeskind’s Freedom Tower, I immediately think of another architect, Howard Roark, from Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.” For those unfamiliar with Rand’s novel, Howard Roark was an architect who broke from convention; rather than copying from the masters as society has prescribed, Roark designed his buildings from within himself, designs that were not understood by his contemporaries.

Along these same lines, last month Frank Heynick published an article at the Atlasphere, “Roark Libeskind, and the Freedom Tower,” making similar observations about the parallels between Howard Roark and Daniel Libeskind.
(It may be worth pointing out that Daniel Libeskind is apparently no friend of free markets, and so any comparisons between he and Howard Roark are perhaps best kept to the realm of architecture.)

The New York Times recently published an article summarizing the results of a new study, “What Makes You Click: An Empirical Analysis of Online Dating,” conducted by researchers from the University of Chicago.
From the Times’ summary of the study:

What are people looking for? The most important variable, for both men and women, is looks. Furthermore, posting a photo is a big help: women who post photos receive about twice as many e-mail messages as those who do not, even when they report that they have “average looks.”
Having a lot of money is good for attracting e-mail messages, at least for men. Those men reporting incomes in excess of $250,000 received 156 percent more e-mail messages than those with incomes below $50,000. Women like men with a higher income than they have but men do not want to date women who earn more than they do.
The stated goals for using the service make a big difference in how many e-mail messages are received. Men who are “hoping to start a long-term relationship” receive substantially more e-mail than those who are “just looking/curious.” The worst thing a man can say is that he is “seeking a casual relationship,” receiving 42 percent fewer e-mail messages than he would otherwise. A woman, by contrast, gets 17 percent more e-mail messages by reporting this goal.

Thanks to Don Hauptman for the tip.

I don’t know what Apple CEO Steve Jobs thinks of Ayn Rand, or if he’s even read the novels, but he is an inspiring visionary in many ways, and recently gave a commencement speech at Stanford that’s worth reading.
Here’s an excerpt, after his harrowing tale of getting kicked out of his own company, starting other companies, and eventually finding himself back at the helm of Apple:

I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

See the full speech for more.