Articles

Dr. Andrew Bernstein, author of Why Johnny Still Can’t Read or Write or Understand Math: And What We Can Do About It, recently joined me to discuss the problems with American schools today, along with some inspiring solutions.

Recently, a growing chorus of voices has become increasingly hostile to free speech. Certain speech, we are told, must be suppressed in order to combat “hate speech,” stop misinformation, and “protect democracy.” But, as Jacob Mchangama explains in his book, Free Speech: A Global History from Socrates to Social Media, these arguments are not new.

If Jacinda Ardern were as empathetic, compassionate, and insightful as most reactions to her departure suggest, she would have respected the rights of New Zealanders, including their liberty to travel and to speak their minds freely. She didn’t, and that is how she should be remembered.

James Clear has joined the roster for Objective Standard Institute’s LevelUp 2023, in Phoenix, AZ, June 21–24.

You may have heard of Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Mobile, or Virgin Galactic, but how much do you know about the mastermind behind all the Virgin companies—a man whose entrepreneurial spirit earned him the nickname Dr. Yes?

Americanism isn’t a matter of where you live or which government rules over you. It’s a matter of the principles that recognize individuals as individuals with their own minds and lives, and thus enable them to live by the judgment of their own minds.

The stalemate over house speaker brings to mind a question: Isn’t it strange that in a nation of such ambition and inventiveness, our options for political candidates basically range from bad to worse, from senile morons with no understanding of basic economics to ditzy Marxists and outright frauds and crooks?

Responses to the Twitter Files display a fundamental misunderstanding of what censorship is—and point us toward “solutions” far more dangerous than the problem.

Incitement to violence and the spread of “disinformation” are common rationalizations for expanding government powers to restrict speech, but how does such censorship actually pan out?

The Chinese Communist Party perpetrates some of the worst censorship in the modern world. Film companies have a moral responsibility not to sanction the CCP and its horrors by capitulating to them—much less collaborating with them.

A. E. Stallings’s distinctive poetry succeeds because it merges a conscientious focus on meaningful content—saying relevant and powerful things about human experiences—with a painstaking attention to formal design. The results are masterpieces of integration.

On November 25, ten people were killed and nine more were injured in a fire in a residential tower in Urumqi, Xinjiang province. Although such fires are common in China, the Urumqi fire exposed the human cost of China’s unjust “zero-COVID” policy and precipitated some of the most overt antigovernment protests China has seen in decades.

TOS’s sister organization, Objective Standard Institute (OSI) has had a wonderfully productive year teaching the rising generation about the importance of philosophy, principles of Objectivism, and related ideas for living fully and advancing liberty.

Welcome to the Winter 2022 issue of The Objective Standard, which rounds out the journal’s seventeenth year providing conceptual clarity on the basis of rational philosophy.

Joe Kroeger was a delightful man. He was extremely intelligent, highly productive, and enjoyed a long career in the technology sector. But Joe was not merely a man of ability. He also loved human ability.