New Individualist
Top 10 Articles
William R Thomas
Radicalism vs. Normality
Winter 2011 issue -- Did Jane Austen approve of slavery? In her novel Mansfield Park, published in 1814, the wealthy pater-familias Thomas Bertram is mostly absent, because he is off tending to his plantation on Antigua—where the fields would have been worked by African slaves. Yet, when he is mentioned, and again once he returns to his home, he is a positive and respected figure. Slavery isn’t a problem in the novel. His slave-holding leaves no more moral stain than does his bank account.
Is this Objectivism?
Sidebar article to: "Goddess Undeified." a review of the book Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, by Jennifer Burns.
Opportunity Lost?
Sidebar article to: "Why Was Ayn Rand?"
Fall 2009 issue -- I am an advocate of Objectivism, but I never met Ayn Rand. I regret that, as by all accounts she was fascinating and incisive. But sometimes I think it is just as well.
The Electric Car Contradiction
Fall 2009 issue — The vision of the electric car is a totem to the Progressive movement. But is it a realistic vision?
Jennifer Burns on TNI's David Kelley
Sidebar article to: "Goddess Undeified", a review of Jennifer Burns's Goddess of the Market
The New Individualist’s founding editor David Kelley gets a characteristically fact-based and sympathetic treatment from Jennifer Burns in the epilogue to Goddess of the Market. She discusses, inter alia, the development of the Objectivist movement after Rand’s death, in which David Kelley has played a crucial role. Two excerpts:
Why Ecology Requires Economics
BOOK REVIEW: Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking Penguin, 2005), 575 pp., $29.95.
Losing While Winning
Fall 2011 -- Newsflash: it’s a competitive world out there! Some of us are winning and some are losing. It’s the game of live-and-let-live together.
The Gumshoe of Quandaries
Summer 2011 -- A mysterious woman walks in on a man sitting behind a desk in a solitary private office. Is this the kick-off of a new detective story? Not really. Instead, it is a light journey into the meaning of life.
What Really Matters: Putting Social Status in Context
Summer 2011 issue -- How can we judge how we are doing in life? Most people look to society as a guage. For example, we might look to our pay and our prestige at work to determine what we’re worth. But in an economic crisis, prices gyrate, jobs evaporate, and home values drift down. Amid such wrenching changes, many of us are flailing about mentally to know where we stand and how we stack up. How can we tell what really matters?
