Arts & Culture
Arts & Culture, Ayn Rand & Objectivism
Realizing Romanticism
Jon Wos August 19, 2022
Art is like a lantern that we use to illuminate and clarify, spotlighting what’s important in life. Romantic Realism is a particular way of using that light, to see both what is and what could be. I now realize it is far more than just a theory of art—it is a whole approach to life.
Arts & Culture, Politics & Rights
Wokeism and How to Counter It
Ayaan Hirsi Ali August 19, 2022
Rational people prize impartiality, fairness, and reasoned debate. The “woke” do not. What they demand is submission and obedience. A free and open society, where individual rights are respected and protected, cannot long survive if people cower in fear of losing their livelihoods for engaging in rational debate.
Arts & Culture, Good Living
Music, Mind, and Morality
Jon Hersey August 19, 2022
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.
Arts & Culture, Politics & Rights, Reviews
Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America by David E. Bernstein
Timothy Sandefur July 15, 2022
Racism is premised on the false and immoral idea that people’s minds are functions of their ancestry and, consequently, that a person’s accomplishments are less morally relevant than the color of his skin. But George Mason University law professor David E. Bernstein shows in Classified that racism contains still another layer of incoherence.
Arts & Culture, History, Reviews
Straight Line Crazy by David Hare
Thomas Walker-Werth June 7, 2022
Despite some faults, Straight Line Crazy does an excellent job of bringing to modern audiences the harsh reality of how governments, even in wealthy, developed countries, can ride roughshod over people’s rights, rich and poor alike.
Arts & Culture, Reviews
Stories in Paint by Luc Travers and Windows on Humanity: A History of How Art Reflects Our Ideas about Our Lives and World by Sandra Shaw
Timothy Sandefur June 4, 2022
By giving us doorways into a wider world of art and ideas—and doing so without the backing of any major publishing houses—Luc Travers and Sandra Shaw have not only done us all a great service but have testified to the enormous value of art in all our lives.
Arts & Culture, Ayn Rand & Objectivism
Dominique Francon: Ayn Rand’s Profoundly Misunderstood Heroine
Andrew Bernstein May 21, 2022
Because Dominique is The Fountainhead's heroine and second most important character, we will not fully understand the book (arguably one of the greatest novels in literature) if we do not comprehend her character.
Arts & Culture
Seven Poems on the Power of Music
Various Authors May 21, 2022
Including works by Amy Lowell, Robert Herrick, Walter de la Mare, William Shakespeare, Thomas Moore, G. K. Chesterton, and John Dryden.
Arts & Culture, Ayn Rand & Objectivism
Ayn Rand’s We the Living: Back on the Silver Screen—and Better Than Ever
Robert Begley May 13, 2022
Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Duncan Scott is preparing a newly restored high-definition edition of the 1942 movie of Ayn Rand's novel, We the Living. Set during the Russian Revolution—a period that Rand witnessed firsthand—We the Living shows how a totalitarian state makes human life impossible.
Arts & Culture
John Williams’s ‘Love Affair with Orchestra’ Continues
Jon Hersey May 10, 2022
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.