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LevelUp 2023 could be the highlight of your year—and the time to register is now! Early-bird pricing, which will save you 20–50% on registration, ends March 15. Here’s an indication of what past attendees say about the conference.

What’s Love Got to Do With It? is a well-written and refreshingly thoughtful film that shows the crucial importance of honesty and independent thinking in achieving happiness. It is a sensitive yet incisive study of the clash between Islamic and Western cultures—and between collectivism and individualism.

Max Lugavere teaches nutrition for optimizing brain health through his bestselling books, including Genius Foods and The Genius Life, as well as his podcast. At LevelUp 2023, Max will discuss the science on nutrition as it currently stands in “Foods for Flourishing.”

The Stasi Poetry Circle offers an unusual glimpse of the relationship between communist totalitarianism and the poetic impulses of both its victims and their victimizers.

The program for LevelUp 2023 has been posted. Register now for your chance to learn from and engage with world-class thinkers on philosophy, self-development, cultural issues, politics, and the arts.

Welcome to the Spring 2023 issue of The Objective Standard. This begins the journal’s eighteenth year in publication, and I’d like to extend a tremendous thanks to everyone who subscribes and supports our work.

First and foremost a magnificent novel, George Orwell’s 1984 is also a terrifyingly prescient political commentary. Written by an Englishman in 1949, it substantially mirrors the trajectory of American politics today.

Babylon 5 is a unique science-fiction series that tells an epic story rich in philosophic ideas and moral messages. These make it timeless and well worth watching for anyone interested in complex drama.

Isabel Paterson’s The God of the Machine, Rose Wilder Lane’s The Discovery of Freedom, and Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, all published in 1943, launched the modern American liberty movement. Freedom’s Furies by Timothy Sandefur is the first book-length exploration of these women's relationships and context.

Contra those who think it’s not possible to ethically accumulate so much wealth, Taylor Swift has done so by trading value for value—never resorting to force or fraud. She created that wealth, and fans upset about this “need to calm down” and acknowledge this fact.

Because we’re still finalizing the (amazing!) program for Objective Standard Institute’s LevelUp, we’ve extended early-bird pricing to March 15. So you can still save 20–50%.

Knock at the Cabin depicts the vile notion that it is moral to sacrifice the person you love most—your highest value—for the benefit of others and/or to appease God.

What many of Lincoln's contemporaries—and many today—mistook for paradoxes or even contradictions more often reflected the prudence of a leader facing the horrendous task of guiding the United States toward a philosophic principle when unprecedented bloodshed made it sometimes seem safer to disregard that principle.

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.