866 Articles tagged with: Culture

• Salvation Through Annihilation

  Editor’s note:  While we speed into production with our next three Draw My Life videos, our creative partner on those productions hears echoes of Ayn Rand’s worst villains raising their voices to take advantage of the current coronavirus … Read Article

• Not #MeToo, but #MeFirst

  What would you rather be remembered for: “Read my lips” or “Dodge my hands”?  Breaking the tax pled… Read Article

• How Not to Argue on Facebook

  For Ayn Rand, an argument was the distinctive human banner, the banner of reason and persuasion.  Where brutes force, human beings argue, a distinction embodied in her famous description of man’s mind, which “may be hampered by others, it may… Read Article

• Films that Make Us Feel Alive

  In The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature, published in 1971, Ayn Rand articulated a simple framework for classifying art.

  Using literature as the primary exposition tool, Rand constructed a dichotomy which addresses the making… Read Article

• Watergate Reruns: The Campaign to Overturn the Election

  What I call the “Not Our President Elite” (NOPE) believes that a frighteningly ignorant, bigoted, and distinctly inferior America—not the America of NOPE—elected Donald Trump. Defeated in the election, not only for President, but for contr… Read Article

• Disney’s Zootopia Teaches Kids about Inept Government


  The popular Disney kid-flick Zootopia does something unusual for Hollywood: it takes a swipe at government.  

  The cartoon film is set in a city where all animals, the minority predators and the majority herbivores, seemingly live in peace… Read Article

• Living an Extraordinary Life | A profile of Lauren Zander

  The biggest moment of her life was about to arrive, and Katie Torpey didn’t even care. It was a Saturday night in Los Angeles, and Katie and her husband had dinner plans with friends. Katie, an award-winning screenwriter, was about to have h… Read Article

• SpaceX Sticks the Landing

  The rocket has landed!

  SpaceX, the rocketry startup founded by Elon Musk, succeeded on December 21, 2015 in bringing the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket back to land after boosting a group of satellites into orbit. The impossible has be… Read Article

• The Robots of Labor Day

  Fear of robots has been rising: not just fear of the sci-fi killer kind but also fear that robots will take our jobs.

  … Read Article

• The American Ethic of Success

  America was founded on the idea of liberty, and it succeeded because Americans highly valued individualism and achievement. But when philosophers today talk about ethics, they mostly talk about self-sacrifice, togetherness, and kindness. Do Americ… Read Article

• Romanticist Writers Panel

  Atlas Summit 2015 - Four fiction writers who write in the Romanticist tradition form a discussion panel to narrate their personal writing journeys and take questions from the audience.

  The writers are poet and novelist Walter Donway, poe… Read Article

• "Selling" Ayn Rand's Ideas

  Atlas Summit 2015 -- In the decade and a half since the publication of What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand, Louis Torres and Michelle Kamhi have been actively engaged in promoting the basic principles of Ayn Rand’s theory of art in the … Read Article

• An Open Letter to J.K. Rowling

  Editor's note: Today, July 31,  is J.K. Rowling's birthday. We wish her continued success. In honor of her many achievements, we republish this open letter.

  Dear Ms. Rowling: 

  … Read Article

• Four Facts for Human Achievement Day

  July 20 is the anniversary of one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments, the first lunar landing.

  … Read Article

• "The Literary Art of Ayn Rand" now in ebook form

  We're pleased to announce that we have published a second edition of The Literary Art of Ayn Rand. The first edition of Literary Art grew out of a set of remarkable lectures delivered at our annual conference. This second edition is supplemente… Read Article

• Ex Machina movie review

  How will we know if an artificial intelligence actually attains a human level of consciousness? 

  As work in robotics and merging man and machine accelerates, we can expect more movies on this theme. Some, like Transcendence, will be dysto… Read Article

• Eggs, Global Warming, and Science

  The arguments for man-made global warming remind me of the argument that eating eggs causes heart disease. 

  … Read Article

• Google's Pony Express & an Objectivist Theory of Video Games

  Around midnight on April 14th, 1860, the rider on the first westbound run of the Pony Express clattered into San Francisco, California, on his horse. The mail he carried had been borne at a gallop across the desert of the American West. He was the… Read Article

• Baltimore riots as Criminal Culture Writ Large

  The rioting in Baltimore represents criminal culture writ large. It is what happens every day on a smaller scale in poor minority communities: theft, vandalism, and violence.

  The flames in Baltimore hideously illuminate the fact that the c… Read Article

• How anti-individualist fallacies prevent us from curing death

  Are you excited about Silicon Valley entrepreneurs investing billions of dollars to extend life and even “cure” death?

  It's amazing that such technologically challenging goals have gone from sci-fi fantasies to fantastic possibilities.… Read Article