touchstone archives
Commonplaces
Piquant excerpts lifted from Touchstone editors' own reading & listening.
Is it any surprise that [Ayn] Rand strongly appealed to bright teenage boys? As comic book writer John Rogers remarked, “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
—Gary Saul Morson
“Atlas Schlepped,” a review of Ayn Rand: Writing a Gospel of Success, in the Jewish Review of Books (Fall 2024)
— Society — Commonplaces #215 — Jan/Feb 2025 —
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