Ayn Rand’s selfishness-meets-the-free-market doctrines may be odious, but she must be taken seriously, argues Scott McLemee, if only for her influence. [T]he Rand market has never been anything but robust in the years since her death in 1982. Every year, her melodramatic novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1958) have sold at least 100,000 copies each. Rand’s other fiction . . .
Last year I joined the board of Girls Write Now, a nonprofit organization that pairs at-risk teen girls with professional writers who support them. The pairs meet regularly, alone and in groups, and the girls who finish the program all go on to college. Amalie, for instance, broke down a little in her first reading (until the other mentees . . .
Some astronomers believe that Jesus was actually born around June 17, 2 B.C., when a conjunction of Venus and Jupiter would have made the planets appear as a single “beacon of light” — the star the Wise Men followed to the stable. Good will toward men, and biometric fingerprinting: Today’s border agencies would not have let the Magi in. (See . . .
Jeanette Winterson admires Joan Schenkar’s The Talented Miss Highsmith. “Obsession is focused but not linear,” she says, “and this biography is the same.”