Arts & Culture

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.

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.

Despite occasional oversights, Kevin Birmingham's The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece offers a dramatic and enlightening introduction to the complicated context in which one of literature’s greatest and most horrifying novels was created.

3 Idiots (2009), a Hindi-language coming-of-age film, follows the story of three engineering students at one of the top engineering universities in India. It focuses on the happiness a man can achieve when he lives for himself.

Including works by A. A. Milne, Thomas Paine, A. E. Housman, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Frost, Edward Rowland Sill, Jon Hersey, and William Brighty Rands.

Star Wars is great for two principal reasons: A clear, moving story about good triumphing over evil; and likable, interesting characters. Unfortunately, The Book of Boba Fett falls short in both regards.

Henry Kitchell Webster's novels have charming, intelligent characters who pursue their goals in unusual ways. They show that there’s no good reason “why a serious novel should not be a good story."

Louis H. Sullivan's buildings are the remaining monuments to a genius who gave voice, as no artist had ever done before, to the distinctive achievement of the modern age: the skyscraper. Hopefully, books such as this will help ensure that this master builder is never forgotten.

Many Leroy Anderson compositions, written more than half a century ago, have become an enduring part of both American concert and popular music. His works are joyful and have a distinctive American flavor.

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.