Author: Adam Lee

Content note: Contains some spoilers. It says something about our era that so many of the most popular movies and TV shows are grim, depressing stories of disaster and dystopia. Is it a reflection of the popular mood? A sign that we’ve lost hope in ourselves and our ability to achieve great things? Why are…

Atlas Shrugged, part III, chapter III Almost as soon as Dagny returns to work, Jim comes to her in a panic. He insists she appear on the radio that night, on a talk show hosted by Bertram Scudder, to reassure the people that she hasn’t quit and that she believes the government’s policies are working.…

Editors’ Note: This article is part of the Patheos Public Square on Consumerism Gone Wild. Read other perspectives here. The Guardian ran a column on a group of unsung heroes: the therapists to the super-rich, whose job it is to help their clients deal with the stress and strain of having all that money. According…

There was some rare good news on the sexual-harassment front last week, with the news that Geoff Marcy has resigned. Marcy is a scientific pioneer in the field of exoplanet astronomy, who’s often been mentioned as a potential Nobel laureate. He’s also long been trailed by rumors of inappropriate, predatory behavior toward women. According to…

Changing your mind about the belief system that’s defined your life is a rare occurrence, one that demands an uncommon degree of courage and intellectual honesty. For obvious reasons, it’s something that atheist bloggers don’t expect to see too often, even if most of us would say that helping it happen is the whole purpose…

Following up on the theme of their last album, 2012’s Synthetica, Metric delves deeper into a retro electronic-and-neon, 1980s-arcade-inspired sound and aesthetic on their new release, Pagans in Vegas. It comes off as cold and artificial on a first listen, and most of it took me a while to warm up to (especially “Cascades“). But…

Atlas Shrugged, part III, chapter III The sky had the stagnant breath of a furnace and the streets of New York were like pipes running, not with air and light, but with melted dust. Dagny stood on a street corner, where the airport bus had left her, looking at the city in passive astonishment. The…

Last month, construction was in progress at the Masjid al-Haram in Mecca, the holiest mosque in Islam, when a heavy crane collapsed in high winds and crashed through the roof of the mosque. Over a hundred pilgrims were killed and almost 400 were hurt or trapped beneath falling debris. An employee of the Saudi Binladen…

My latest column is now up on AlterNet, “10 Things I Discovered About Ayn Rand’s Addled Brain After Reading ‘Atlas Shrugged’“. It summarizes ten more of the very important political and moral lessons I’ve learned over the last year reviewing part II of Atlas Shrugged. Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the…

• eBible Fellowship, a Christian group with ties to Harold Camping, predicted the world would end on October 7. Oops! After the date came and went, they put up a defiant post in which they conceded their error, yet insisted the world is still going to burn in hell anyway. (Here’s a graphic of some…