Last week, the Cato Institute hosted a theatrical reading of selected scenes from Ayn Rand’s We the Living/The Unconquered. In the panel discussion that followed, ARI’s Onkar Ghate commented on several topics, including Ayn Rand’s development as a writer, the difference between teaching philosophy and dramatizing it in a novel, and the value of a plot that’s driven by conflicts between good people.
“Editing a live presentation for print publication is like translating from one language to another,” said Marlene Trollope, editor of Discovering Great Plays: As Literature and As Philosophy by Leonard Peikoff. “And, as the saying goes, ‘Something may be lost in translation.’ My challenge was to keep that loss to a minimum.”
“Trump’s election motivated me to bring Ayn Rand’s story of life in Soviet Russia to Washington, D.C.,” said Ann Ciccolella, the Austin Shakespeare artistic director who is the organizing force behind the upcoming theatrical reading and panel discussion of scenes from Rand’s We the Living/The Unconquered at the Cato Institute on July 11. “As actors bring to life scenes from Rand’s play, I expect their salience, given today’s authoritarian trends, will ring out.”
Within a couple of generations, the former British colony of Hong Kong became one of the richest places in the world. Yet, despite its stratospheric rise in prosperity, Hong Kong is reversing course. Why?
“I'm often asked why someone with a penchant for philosophy and an academic life joins the Marine Corps. Why, some ask, does a scribe lower the pen to pick up the sword?” So begins this stirring and thought-provoking address by Lt. Col. Scott McDonald, USMC, to attendees at Objectivist Summer Conference 2015 in Charlotte, North Carolina.
In this episode of The Yaron Brook Show, Brook discusses the assault on speech at Middlebury College. Why were students silencing Charles Murray? The answer lies in the religious notion of “intersectionality.”
A new article by Tara Smith, professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin and BB&T Chair for the Study of Objectivism, highlights her recent interest in the subject of religious exemptions in the law. “Religious Liberty or Religious License? Legal Schizophrenia and the Case against Exemptions,” published in the Journal of Law & Politics, “seeks to demonstrate that religious exemptions are unjustified in theory and corrosive, in practice,” according to the article’s abstract.
In this episode of The Yaron Brook Show, Brook discusses Dennis Prager’s claim that if there’s no God, murder isn’t wrong. Also, he explains why a God-based morality is not only inessential to our civilization, but also detrimental.
