Hear the Beatles' last song, Tom Bukovac's Plexi Soul (now on vinyl), a new Van Morrison record that makes sitting still impossible, and more.

Alice Sara Ott releases a deluxe edition of her Echoes of Life, Duran Duran unearths a Halloween-themed dance-party soundtrack perfect for zombies, werewolves, and witches—and more.

Robbie Robertson comes around full circle, The Rolling Stones show some new colors, Glen Hansard stares melancholy firmly in the face, and Dave Barnes wields old tricks for new delights.

Two widely celebrated guitarists recently released new records. They represent not merely different musical approaches appropriate to their different genres, but two divergent worldviews.

Welcome to “Noteworthy,” a periodic update on new music and related news. This week’s noteworthy picks span the musical universe.

Practicing what Rand advocated requires not only having (and, when appropriate, providing) valid reasons for one’s views and values, but also raising one’s standards of evaluation and refraining from “unprovoked moral denunciations or debates.”

Welcome to the Summer 2023 issue of The Objective Standard. I hope you enjoy the issue—and that you’ll join the six hundred or so people coming to Phoenix for 2023’s most life-enhancing conference!

Adam Smith and Ayn Rand are widely considered to offer merely different flavors of pro-capitalist thought. But their differences are greater—and far more consequential—than their similarities.

Not only do many educators and parents fail to encourage and help children learn how to think and become efficacious, they also paint the whole of mankind as incompetent, or worse, self-destructive.

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.

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.

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.

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?