2/28 Are dog owners evil? George Cordero’s bite is probably as fierce as his bark. Worth reading again is Shawn Klein on the moral status of animals.
And here is philosopher Tibor Machan’s controversial Putting Humans First.
2/26 Wired magazine says it’s time to re-think nuclear power. And worth checking out is energy researcher Rob Bradley’s book: Energy: The Master Resource.
2/25 In The Nation, a fine article on the deism and atheism of America’s Founding Fathers. (Via Arts & Letters Daily.) And for a to-the-point take on an age-old question, here’s the God F.A.Q. page.
2/24 Law professor Larry Ribstein lists and categorizes dozens of films and the moral messages they send about business and capitalism. And here are the top box-office-grossing movies of all time. (Via The Brutality of Reason.)
2/23 The excellent F.I.R.E. has taken up the cause of a student who kicked out of college for daring to write a paper expressing an unpopular opinion.
2/22 Four lively web logs worth checking out: Mark Lerner, Robert Bidinotto, Atlas Shrugged, and Jason Pappas.
2/21 John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis debunks Five Myths of Socialized Medicine. And John Enright captures poetically the economics of high medical costs.
2/18 1859: The Year in Publishing. In Modern and Postmodern, an Honors course I am co-teaching with chemistry professor Fred Hadley, we have read Wordsworth, Tocqueville, Marx and Engels, Bakunin, Darwin – and we are now starting John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. Both On Liberty and Origin of Species were published in 1859, which is also the year that Tocqueville died. Also published in 1859 were Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Hospitals, and Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help. (An excellent year to belong to The Book-of-the-Month Club.)
2/17 The Adam Smith Institute web log: classically liberal commentary from a major British free market think tank. Includes links to online editions of Smith’s major works, including The Wealth of Nations.
2/16 University of Colorado law professor Paul Campos explains the disgusting Ward Churchill affair as a lesson on affirmative action. Update: The Rocky Mountain News reports on Churchill’s odd route to tenure.
2/15 Isabel Paterson and Ayn Rand had an intellectually fruitful and complicated relationship. Stephen Cox has published his book on Isabel Paterson: The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America. Brian Doherty has a review of Cox’s book.
And Alec Mouhibian asks, provocatively, Who’s afraid of Ayn Rand?
2/14 In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nobel Laureate in Physics Robert Laughlin on reductionism and emergentism in causal systems. (Via Marginal Revolution.)
2/12 Reason’s Hit and Run excerpts an interview with environmental scientist Bjorn Lomborg and links to articles on the controversy over doomster environmentalism he has generated.
2/10 Fruits of the Enlightenment: the doubling of life expectancies since 1850.
2/9 Law and History professor David Mayer’s web log. Here are a thought-filled interview with Dr. Mayer in Navigator and the Amazon link to his fine book, The Constitutional Thought of Thomas Jefferson.
2/8 Postmodern architect Philip Johnson has died. Art critic Roger Kimball, architect Peter Cresswell, and columnist Anne Applebaum assess his career and significance. Cresswell follows up with a list of recommended reading: So You Want to Study Architecture?
2/7 Johan Norberg asks: When a Bozo is inconsistent, does economic self interest explain the inconsistency?
2/5 Has the American experiment run its course? Victor Davis Hanson considers some arguments.
2/4 Roger Kimball on Hamilton College’s downward spiral into Left lunacy. And here are economics professor Meir Kohn’s refreshing remarks on political correctness, given while introducing Daniel Pipes for a talk at Dartmouth College.
2/3 In The American Lawyer, Tony Mauro’s profile of the excellent The Institute for Justice. (Via Instapundit.) IJ is currently appealing a case before the Ohio State Supreme Court to stop the city of Norwood from condemning a couple’s home in order to allow a developer to tear it down.
2/2 Today is 100 years since Ayn Rand’s birth. To celebrate the event, The Objectivist Center is holding a one-day conference in Washington, D.C. Signet has published centenary editions of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. In The Chicago Tribune, columnist Steve Chapman has a tribute to Rand’s enormous influence. And here is novelist Erika Holzer’s reminiscence of Rand’s choices for the cast of a movie version of Atlas Shrugged. Update: Arts and Letters Daily has a fine Ayn Rand at 100 collection, and Catallarchy has a round-up of comments on Rand by public intellectuals.