Required Reading: Atlas Shrugged

Editor’s Note: First posted this on tWF back in early 2005, this article predated my eventual reading of Ayn Rand’s complete novels and a few of her other writings. While I’m not a strict Objectivist, I still appreciate her ideas. And though the Kensico Cemetary statue in the photo below does not accompany Rand’s grave, I like it so much I think I’ll keep it anyway (if photographer Lee Sandstead doesn’t mind).

Kensico Cemetary by Lee Sandstead

I first met John Galt on a bumper sticker last December. A little Volkswagen silently asked, “Who is John Galt?” and for some reason I felt like someone had asked this before. Like it was some eternal question that had been in my subconscious mind for many years, finally springing to the surface thanks to a cute little German car. In any case, a quick Google search revealed the literary source of this question — Ayn Rand’s 1100-page masterpiece, Atlas Shrugged. Next time I was at Barnes & Noble, I picked up the paperback for $9.

(more…)

Go Gentle into That Good Night

The long-lived but only briefly updated Wild Ferret is going to stop paying its rent in the next couple of days, and thus the domain “thewildferret.com” will cease working. However, if you need to retrieve old contributions (and perhaps re-post them on your own site like I’ll be doing shortly), you can visit the temporary link here until I finally take that down by the end of March. For everyone other than the half-dozen contributors, The Wild Ferret was an online zine that went through more design changes than it had articles. A fun project at the time, but not worth the cost of a domain name.