Arts & Culture

Olympic contender Oscar Pistorius ran the 400 meter race Sunday in 46.54 seconds. That’s a speed of over 19 miles per hour. Stunningly, Kirani James beat Pistorius by 1.95 seconds. Anyone who has seen Pistorius race knows why James paid him tribute by asking for his name bib: Pistorius runs…

In light of depressed movie attendance due partly to the recent murders at an Aurora movie theater, we should remember the profound joy and inspiration good movies can offer. TOS has reviewed a number of films: The Avengers, Act of Valor, The Help, Atlas Shrugged: Part I, and The King's…

As Ayn Rand writes in The Romantic Manifesto: Consciously or subconsciously, explicitly or implicitly, man knows that he needs a comprehensive view of existence to integrate his values, to choose his goals, to plan his future, to maintain the unity and coherence of his life. . . . That power…

My advice: Go see The Dark Knight Rises asap. The final film of Christopher Nolan’s outstanding Batman trilogy is not a typical comic-book movie; it is a serious action drama in which a few of the characters happen to wear masks. The story is epic in scale, involving the life…

In 1947, Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers to become the first American of black African descent to play Major League baseball, breaking professional baseball’s self-imposed “color line.” The famous Robinson is rightly considered an American hero. But there was another 1947 black hero who, unfortunately, was historically overshadowed by…

Although Ridley Scott’s film Prometheus is an incoherent mess, it does feature an obvious theme. It glorifies altruism, selfless sacrifice to others. Children’s author and blogger Adrian Bott explains what’s going on in the opening of the film: Let's begin with the eponymous titan himself, Prometheus. He was a wise…

After interviewing Bryan Larsen for the Summer issue if TOS, I reread my favorite part of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, the scene in which Ragnar Danneskjold meets Hank Rearden on a road at night and hands him a bar of gold, returning some of the money that the government has…

Rush’s raw 1974 self-titled album, written before lyricist and drummer Neil Peart joined the band, features anything but subtle lyrics, yet one of the lines from the very first song in some ways summarizes Rush’s body of work: “I’m finding my way back home.” Rush—a “progressive rock” trio featuring Peart,…

Daniel Wahl reviews Farnsworth's Classical English Rhetoric, by Ward Farnsworth.

Andrew Bernstein reviews Act of Valor, directed by Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh.