So Who Is John Galt, Anyway?

Announcement by , September 26, 2019

I’m pleased to announce that So Who Is John Galt, Anyway? A Reader’s Guide to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is now available at Amazon. You can buy it as a paperback or as an e-book. A lot of credit goes to my wife, Sherri, for spending a couple of weeks of her time making the […]

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How to Work from Home As If You Actually Want to Enjoy It

Feature Article by , March 19, 2020

Now that everyone is stuck at home during the Time of Coronavirus, you may be getting a lot of advice on how to telecommute. It usually runs somewhere along these lines: make a separate and closed-off space just for work, keep a regular 9-to-5 work schedule, and get dressed and ready in the morning the […]

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The Plague Year

Commentary by , March 16, 2020

What You Need to Know About the COVID-19 Pandemic Should you panic about COVID-19? That’s a trick question, because it’s too late. All the hand sanitizer and toilet paper (which is somehow necessary for dealing with a pandemic) has already disappeared from the store shelves. Judging from the state of my local Walmart, canned soup […]

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“We’re Going to Face This Virus for Some Time”

Feature Article by , March 15, 2020

An Interview with Amesh Adalja Transcript RWT: This is Salon of the Refused, I’m Rob Tracinski. My guest today is Amesh Adalja, and he’s a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, and I’m talking to him about the coronavirus pandemic. Now, the first big question, the sort of overarching question people […]

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Salon of the Refused, Episode 17

Announcement by , March 13, 2020

Episode 17 of my podcast series, Salon of the Refused, is now available. I talk with Amesh Adalja, Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. The conversation includes: how COVID-19 is different from the flu, the risk of “surge mode” overwhelming our health care system, what the US government has done and […]

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Trump’s Self-Induced “Authoritarian Blindness”

Feature Article by , March 12, 2020

Donald Trump’s position heading into November’s presidential election is surprisingly strong. He remains personally unpopular, of course, but he heads toward re-election with—for now—a strong economy and—for now—no major foreign policy crisis. Notice that I keep saying “for now.” There’s one glaring weakness that could bring Trump down hard, and we’re seeing it on full […]

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Ayn Rand’s Answer to the “Social Contract”

Feature Article by , March 11, 2020

As part of the research for my new book in defense of individualism, I’ve been reading several key books from the newly strident illiberal “nationalist” conservatives. I’ve noticed that they have mixed feelings about the “social contract.” Patrick Deneen rejects it because it’s too individualist: it assumes that “the individual ‘creates’ the state,” while he […]

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All They Had to Do Was Not Be Crazy

Commentary by , March 6, 2020

The Search for Sanity, Part 3 As many of us having been saying, all the Democrats had to do to have a good shot at winning back the White House this year was to not be crazy. Here’s a version of that argument from last June. Trump’s personal problems are myriad. He is as polarizing a […]

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Authoritarian Blindness

Commentary by , February 29, 2020

Five Things You Need to Read Today 1. Authoritarian Blindness How soon we forget the big lessons of the Cold War. There is a weirdly persistent tendency to think of dictatorships as strong, orderly, and effective, when all the evidence indicates that they are weak, chaotic, and hugely inefficient. This is not just a lesson […]

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Have You Accepted the Free Market as Your Personal Savior?

Feature Article by , February 27, 2020

Hello, friend. I’m knocking on your door today to ask whether you have accepted the free market as your personal savior. If you haven’t, I’m here to share the good news. I am, obviously, riffing on the latest talking point from the nationalist conservatives, who have formed a new think tank based on the complaint […]

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Sharing the Good News

Commentary by , February 23, 2020

I was into optimism before it was cool. I think it was about fourteen years ago that I caused a bit of a stir in the Objectivist movement by arguing that civilization was not collapsing but seemed to be thriving instead, and that the movement hadn’t really taken this fact on board. I called it […]

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