ARI News
Our celebration of seventy-five years of The Fountainhead continues this month with “Filming The Fountainhead: Ayn Rand’s First Plan” by Shoshana Milgram.
ARI News
We are just 10 weeks away from what is shaping up to be our largest Objectivist summer conference ever. With your help we could have over 500 attendees in Newport Beach, California, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead — including students who are able to attend because of our OCON scholarship program.
ARI News
Join Yaron Brook as he interviews Ayn Rand Institute fellow and foreign policy expert Elan Journo about his forthcoming book What Justice Demands: America and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
Culture & Society
One of the most popular quotes attributed to Ayn Rand is: “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.” Many people are inspired by the self-confident attitude these words imply. “I don’t need anyone’s permission to live my life,” the words suggest. “All I need is an unobstructed road. As long as nobody stops me, I’ll prove myself.”
Culture & Society
Despite all the graduation speeches enjoining us to “be passionate” about something, the experience of deep, passionate emotion is not an easy one to achieve, much less sustain. This talk offers guidance for achieving that rarified quality which Ayn Rand ascribed to one of Atlas Shrugged’s heroes — a “disciplined capacity to feel too deeply.” The talk by Gena Gorlin, a postdoctoral fellow at Boston University’s Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders, integrates tools from cognitive-behavioral therapy with insights from Rand’s theory of values, without assuming prior knowledge of either.
Government & Business
Robert Reich attributes a long list of current social ills to Rand’s influence over Donald Trump, political conservatives, and the culture at large. But his argument depends on distorting Rand’s actual views and exaggerating her cultural influence.
Government & Business
“Three Free Speech Myths” is the latest essay by Steve Simpson, the Ayn Rand Institute’s director of Legal Studies. It’s online at Merion West. Simpson will participate in a public debate and panel discussion at UC-Berkeley on March 8, “Are We Killing Free Speech?” He will be joined on the panel by Heather Mac Donald and Dave Rubin.
ARI News
Ayn Rand originally envisioned Atlas Shrugged as a socio-political novel that would build on the ethical ideas of The Fountainhead, but as she worked on Atlas, she developed and revised her ethical thought in unexpected ways. In his lecture course “Ayn Rand’s Ethics: From The Fountainhead to Atlas Shrugged,” available at ARI’s eStore, Darryl Wright explores how, and why, her ideas changed — as well as what did not change.
ARI News
One of the Ayn Rand Institute’s most popular education programs is its annual essay contests. Contests on Anthem, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged collectively attract the attention of approximately fifteen to twenty thousand students each spring, as they compete to win a share of more than $130,000 in cash prizes. ARI’s goal, however, is that participation in an essay contest should mark the beginning of a lifetime’s interest in Ayn Rand’s works.
Science & Industrialization
In her 1970 lecture The Anti-Industrial Revolution, Ayn Rand analyzes the arguments and underlying motivation of the emerging “ecology” movement, the forerunner of today’s environmentalism. Separating legitimate concerns about pollution from the movement’s deeper animus toward industrial civilization and technological progress, Rand explains her view of the proper relationship between human beings and their environment.