Scott Coomes
Pages upon pages of John Galt self-righteously sneering at all the ‘looters’ (socialists, vegetarians, Christians, liberals, Buddhists, academics, environmentalists, Mexicans, etc.) seem not only like a pathetic attempt to overwhelm a reader who would be impressed by the volume of pages, but also like the product of a small mind. John Galt’s cheery speech was more than my well meaning young-Republican-lite ideology could take. Rand helpfully packaged this ideology in weapons-grade concentration and laid it all out for easy scrutiny and swift rejection.
Jonathan Pope
Sarah Palin is a succubus for American liberals. We could deal with a pro-life, pro-oil, pro-war, pro-God wack-stupid Governor when he was from a rich political dynasty, but when it’s a she and she comes from Middle-earth and is insatiably proud of her own faults, she’s like the no-bullshit dream girl of our Woody Allen fantasies. Everyone compares her to Tina Fey; the better comparison is to Diane Keaton. Palin is turning the middle American dumbasserazzi on to the hotly nerdish girl, thirty years later; and, in the process, she’s getting liberal America wet and hard.
Darren Franich
“Orson Welles lists Citizen Kane as his best film, Alfred Hitchcock opts for Shadow of a Doubt and Sir Carol Reed chose The Third Man—and I’m in all of them.”
—Joseph Cotten
Kevin Hilke
Obama’s retrospectively vindicated opposition to dumb war in the face of supposedly airtight evidence for launching it has proven a victory not just for Obama, but for the legitimacy of ambiguity itself as a space for positive thinking in the making of serious decisions by individuals and societies. With the discrediting of certitude undergirded by the hyperspecific comes the complementary embrace of an ineluctably abstract, indefinable hope—a hope we have espoused, often reluctantly, because the sober and steady hand of the man who has become its global symbol checks its pesky quixotism.
