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.

Declassified tells the stories not only of the loves and losses of Beethoven and Brahms but of the heartbreak of a young musician who built a life for herself atop the expectations of others—and who, in the wake of inevitable disappointment, learned to salvage her love of classical music and spotlight its value for all to see.

Ayatollah Khamenei has said that an Islamic revival is spreading through the Middle East, not by conscious intent, but “like the scent of spring flowers that is carried by the breeze.” Maybe so, but a headwind is blowing steadily and insistently from the West.

On Friday, September 30, join our friends at Atlas Academy for their Alternative Education Conference, featuring TOS contributing editor Andrew Bernstein and Montessori consultant Susan Mayclin Stephenson.

“Who sets the tone of a culture?,” asked Ayn Rand. “A small handful of men: the philosophers.” According to Robert Tracinski, many of Rand’s followers have taken this to mean that efforts toward a better future should focus on university humanities departments. But, in his latest book, Tracinski argues that this is only part of the story.

Rights pertain to how people may treat one another. They establish a baseline of permissible conduct between individuals. But when we’re talking about a pregnant woman, we’re not talking about two individuals, each with rights, one of whom just happens to reside within the other.

Welcome to the Fall 2022 issue of The Objective Standard, packed with articles building on the foundation of rational philosophy identified by Ayn Rand.

Most of us don’t know how or why music affects us the way it does, why we like the songs that we do. It’s the closest thing that we rational 21st-century people have to alchemy. But knowledge is power.

No single recording could exhaustively capture even just the highlights of Williams’s career, spanning six decades, but Deutsche Grammophon’s latest culls a varied set of gems, from the uplifting Olympic theme, to the sinister sounds of Close Encounters, to anthems from the beloved Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, and Star Wars franchises.

Justice requires that the Washington Post fire Maxine Joselow for journalistic malpractice and publicly commit to honest journalism, free of smearing.

“Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort.” —Ayn Rand

Love him or hate him, Djokovic served Aussies a valuable opportunity—to pause, reflect, and reconsider the implications of individual rights for pandemic policy. Unfortunately, they’ve double-faulted.

I recently spoke with Cal Newport about living the “deep life,” how our standard operating procedures are diminishing our ability to do meaningful work and what to do about it, and about what he’s learned from heroes such as Lincoln and Socrates about building a better world.

Where in Rand’s corpus should a curious reader begin? As someone who’s read it all, I would say that, for most people, there’s no better place to start than with one of Rand’s major works of fiction—Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, We the Living, or Anthem—and I suspect Rand would agree.

When parents are free to vote with their feet and their dollars, they will flock to the schools that best satisfy their standards. Schools that don’t will, instead of teaching, be taught a valuable lesson: Satisfy customers or close your doors.