Each year the Ayn Rand Institute publishes dozens of new videos on its YouTube channel. Although the 2017 calendar year isn’t quite over, we thought we’d highlight the five videos from 2017 that attracted the most viewers.
Merion West’s Alex Baltzegar interviews Steve Simpson, director of Legal Studies at the Ayn Rand Institute, on Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism, how it applies to free speech and foreign policy, and whether one can reconcile Christianity with her philosophy.
ARI employees were up bright and early this week at a nearby warehouse collecting copies of Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead and Anthem to distribute for our Free Books to Teachers program. Twenty thousand books to be exact.
Philosopher Robert Mayhew discusses the inability of a New York Times drama critic to appreciate Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead: “The sound perception of an ant does not include thunder.”
ARI foreign policy expert Elan Journo went on Facebook Live yesterday to share his perspective on the Trump administration’s controversial announcement recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. In the video, Journo evaluates the administration’s decision and considers the wider implications for America’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“Since knowledge, thinking, and rational action are properties of the individual, since the choice to exercise his rational faculty or not depends on the individual, man’s survival requires that those who think be free of the interference of those who don’t.”
Following the recent Ivo Van Hove international production of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Gilman Opera House, a panel discussion appeared on Facebook Live. The panelists were Gregory Salmieri, philosophy fellow at the Anthem Foundation; Shoshana Milgram, associate professor of English at Virginia Tech; and Ann Ciccolella, artistic director at Austin Shakespeare.
The Federalist recently published an adapted excerpt from Yaron Brook and Don Watkins’s new book In Pursuit of Wealth: The Moral Case for Finance, in which they indicate why Ayn Rand’s philosophy is “indispensable for understanding and defending the morality of finance.”
As the world celebrated a national day of giving, #GivingTuesday, on November 28, ARI launched its own campaign, #TradingTuesday, in honor of what Ayn Rand calls the “trader principle.” We encouraged fans of Rand to advance their values by contributing to ARI's Free Books to Teachers program. The program places Rand’s novels in the hands of students across the country.
Each year, the Ayn Rand Institute distributes hundreds of thousands of copies of Ayn Rand’s novels and nonfiction books to schools through our Free Books to Teachers program. Putting a book directly into the hands of students is a powerful way to expose them personally to Ayn Rand’s ideas. Most of these books are sent by mail to middle schools, high schools and colleges across the United States and Canada. So it’s a rare treat when we can deliver the books face-to-face.
