The Ayn Rand Cult
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The Ayn Rand Cult
''The Ayn Rand Cult'' is a book by journalist Jeff Walker, published by Open Court Publishing Company in 1999. Walker discusses the history of the Objectivist movement started by novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, which he describes as a cult. Background The Objectivist movement began with a small group of Rand's confidants and students who supported her philosophy of Objectivism. This group was at first known informally as "The Collective", and later gained more structure in the form of the Nathaniel Branden Institute (NBI), named after Rand's protege Nathaniel Branden, and a magazine that Rand and Branden co-edited. From its early days, Rand's following was sometimes criticized as a "cult" or "religion". Walker's book is another entry in this vein of criticism, and the first full-length book to focus entirely on the "cult" allegation. Walker worked on a two-hour radio program about Rand for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. The program was called ''Ideas: The Legacy of Ayn ...
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Objectivist Movement
The Objectivist movement is a movement of individuals who seek to study and advance Objectivism, the philosophy expounded by novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand. The movement began informally in the 1950s and consisted of students who were brought together by their mutual interest in Rand's novel, ''The Fountainhead''. The group, ironically named "the Collective" due to their actual advocacy of individualism, in part consisted of Leonard Peikoff, Nathaniel Branden, Barbara Branden, Alan Greenspan, and Allan Blumenthal. Nathaniel Branden, a young Canadian student who had been greatly inspired by ''The Fountainhead'', became a close confidant and encouraged Rand to expand her philosophy into a formal movement. From this informal beginning in Rand's living room, the movement expanded into a collection of think tanks, academic organizations, and periodicals. Rand described Objectivism as "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with ...
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Alan Greenspan
Alan Greenspan (born March 6, 1926) is an American economist who served as the 13th chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006. He works as a private adviser and provides consulting for firms through his company, Greenspan Associates LLC. First nominated to the Federal Reserve by President Ronald Reagan in August 1987, he was reappointed at successive four-year intervals until retiring on January 31, 2006, after the second-longest tenure in the position, behind only William McChesney Martin. President George W. Bush appointed Ben Bernanke as his successor. Greenspan came to the Federal Reserve Board from a consulting career. Although he was subdued in his public appearances, favorable media coverage raised his profile to a point that several observers likened him to a "rock star". Democratic leaders of Congress criticized him for politicizing his office because of his support for Social Security privatization and tax cuts. Many have argued that the "easy-money" policies ...
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Canadian Non-fiction Books
Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of their being ''Canadian''. Canada is a multilingual and multicultural society home to people of groups of many different ethnic, religious, and national origins, with the majority of the population made up of Old World immigrants and their descendants. Following the initial period of French and then the much larger British colonization, different waves (or peaks) of immigration and settlement of non-indigenous peoples took place over the course of nearly two centuries and continue today. Elements of Indigenous, French, British, and more recent immigrant customs, languages, and religions have combined to form the culture of Canada, and thus a Canadian identity. Canada has also been strongly influenced by its linguistic, geographic, and ec ...
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Books About Ayn Rand
A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover. The technical term for this physical arrangement is ''codex'' (plural, ''codices''). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page. As an intellectual object, a book is prototypically a composition of such great length that it takes a considerable investment of time to compose and still considered as an investment of time to read. In a restricted sense, a book is a self-sufficient section or part of a longer composition, a usage reflecting that, in antiquity, long works had to be written on several scrolls and each scroll had to be identified by the book it contained. Each part of Aristotle's '' Physics'' is ...
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1999 Non-fiction Books
File:1999 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: The funeral procession of King Hussein of Jordan in Amman; the 1999 İzmit earthquake kills over 17,000 people in Turkey; the Columbine High School massacre, one of the first major school shootings in the United States; the Year 2000 problem ("Y2K"), perceived as a major concern in the lead-up to the year 2000; the Millennium Dome opens in London; online music downloading platform Napster is launched, soon a source of online piracy; NASA loses both the Mars Climate Orbiter and the Mars Polar Lander; a destroyed T-55 tank near Prizren during the Kosovo War., 300x300px, thumb rect 0 0 200 200 Death and state funeral of King Hussein rect 200 0 400 200 1999 İzmit earthquake rect 400 0 600 200 Columbine High School massacre rect 0 200 300 400 Kosovo War rect 300 200 600 400 Year 2000 problem rect 0 400 200 600 Mars Climate Orbiter rect 200 400 400 600 Napster rect 400 400 600 600 Millennium Dome 1999 was designated as th ...
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Chris Matthew Sciabarra
Chris Matthew Sciabarra (born February 17, 1960) is an American political theorist based in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of three scholarly books—''Marx, Hayek, and Utopia''; '' Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical''; and ''Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism''—as well as several shorter works. He is also the co-editor, with Mimi Reisel Gladstein, of ''Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand'' and co-editor with Roger E. Bissell and Edward W. Younkins of ''The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom''. His work has focused on topics including Objectivism, libertarianism (particularly the work of Friedrich Hayek and Murray Rothbard), and dialectics. Life Sciabarra was a visiting scholar at New York University from 1989 to 2009, where he earned his BA in history (with honors) in 1982; his MA in Politics in 1983; and his PhD in Political Philosophy, Theory, and Methodology in 1988, under the supervision of Bertell Ollman. In 1999 he became the ...
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Mimi Reisel Gladstein
Mimi Reisel Gladstein (born 1936) is a professor of English and Theatre Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso. Her specialties include authors such as Ayn Rand and John Steinbeck, as well as women's studies, theatre arts and 18th-century British literature. In 2011 she was named to the El Paso Historical Hall of Honor. Life and scholarship Gladstein was born in Nicaragua and moved with her family to the United States at an early age. She grew up in Las Cruces, New Mexico and El Paso, Texas, and became a US citizen at the age of 19. She obtained a PhD in Contemporary American Literature from the University of New Mexico. She is married and has three children. She was a pioneer in the field of women's studies, teaching a class on "Women and Literature" in the early 1970s. In an attempt to provide students with an example of a successful female character in literature, she began assigning Ayn Rand's '' Atlas Shrugged'' for her class. This led her to write one of the earlie ...
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The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Guardian Media Group, owned by the Scott Trust. The trust was created in 1936 to "secure the financial and editorial independence of ''The Guardian'' in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of ''The Guardian'' free from commercial or political interference". The trust was converted into a limited company in 2008, with a constitution written so as to maintain for ''The Guardian'' the same protections as were built into the structure of the Scott Trust by its creators. Profits are reinvested in journalism rather than distributed to owners or shareholders. It is considered a newspaper of record in the UK. The editor-in-chief Katharine Viner succeeded Alan Rusbridger in 2015. Since 2018, the paper's main news ...
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Liberty (1987)
''Liberty'' is a libertarian journal, founded in 1987 by R. W. Bradford (who was the magazine's publisher and editor until he died from cancer in 2005) in Port Townsend, Washington, and then edited from San Diego by Stephen Cox. Unlike ''Reason'', which is printed on glossy paper and has full-color photographs, ''Liberty'' was printed on uncoated paper stock and had line drawing cartoons by S. H. (Scott) Chambers and Rex F. "Baloo" May, no photographs except for advertisements, and only one extra color (blue), which was limited to the cover and occasionally a few ads. Beginning in November 2010, the magazine transitioned to an online-only format. History Bradford had planned the launch of ''Liberty'' for several years during the 1980s, waiting, in part, for the development of desktop publishing software to make the endeavor cost-effective for a short-run periodical. The magazine achieved Bradford's target circulation by the end of the first year of publication. Starting it as ...
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The Globe And Mail
''The Globe and Mail'' is a Canadian newspaper printed in five cities in western and central Canada. With a weekly readership of approximately 2 million in 2015, it is Canada's most widely read newspaper on weekdays and Saturdays, although it falls slightly behind the ''Toronto Star'' in overall weekly circulation because the ''Star'' publishes a Sunday edition, whereas the ''Globe'' does not. ''The Globe and Mail'' is regarded by some as Canada's " newspaper of record". ''The Globe and Mail''s predecessors, '' The Globe'' and ''The Mail and Empire'' were both established in the 19th century. The former was established in 1844, while the latter was established in 1895 through a merger of ''The Toronto Mail'' and the ''Toronto Empire''. In 1936, ''The Globe'' and ''The Mail and Empire'' merged to form ''The Globe and Mail''. The newspaper was acquired by FP Publications in 1965, who later sold the paper to the Thomson Corporation in 1980. In 2001, the paper merged with broadcast ...
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Kirkus Reviews
''Kirkus Reviews'' (or ''Kirkus Media'') is an American book review magazine founded in 1933 by Virginia Kirkus (1893–1980). The magazine is headquartered in New York City. ''Kirkus Reviews'' confers the annual Kirkus Prize to authors of fiction, nonfiction, and young readers' literature. ''Kirkus Reviews'', published on the first and 15th of each month; previews books before their publication. ''Kirkus'' reviews over 10,000 titles per year. History Virginia Kirkus was hired by Harper & Brothers to establish a children's book department in 1926. The department was eliminated as an economic measure in 1932 (for about a year), so Kirkus left and soon established her own book review service. Initially, she arranged to get galley proofs of "20 or so" books in advance of their publication; almost 80 years later, the service was receiving hundreds of books weekly and reviewing about 100. Initially titled ''Bulletin'' by Kirkus' Bookshop Service from 1933 to 1954, the title was ...
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Atlas Shrugged
''Atlas Shrugged'' is a 1957 novel by Ayn Rand. It was her longest novel, the fourth and final one published during her lifetime, and the one she considered her '' magnum opus'' in the realm of fiction writing. ''Atlas Shrugged'' includes elements of science fiction, mystery, and romance, and it contains Rand's most extensive statement of Objectivism in any of her works of fiction. Rand described the theme of ''Atlas Shrugged'' as "the role of man's mind in existence". The book explores a number of philosophical themes from which Rand would subsequently develop Objectivism, including reason, property rights, individualism, and capitalism, and depicts what Rand saw as the failures of governmental coercion. The book depicts a dystopian United States in which private businesses suffer under increasingly burdensome laws and regulations. Railroad executive Dagny Taggart and her lover, steel magnate Hank Rearden, struggle against "looters" who want to exploit their productivity. Th ...
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