Author: Adam Lee

Atlas Shrugged, p.80-88 No sooner has Dagny returned from her meeting with Dan Conway than a stranger bursts into her office: He was young, tall, and something about him suggested violence, though she could not say what it was, because the first trait one grasped about him was a quality of self-control that seemed almost…

• On Monday, I was on episode 3 of Ashley Miller’s web show/podcast, along with her FTB co-blogger Kate Donovan, to discuss sterilization of prisoners in California, The Lone Ranger, and mental illness. Here’s the YouTube link – check it out. (Yes, I know, I was harder to hear than everyone else. I need to…

To celebrate the Supreme Court’s DOMA decision, Dan Savage wrote a poignant column, “I Can Die Now“, about how his husband and son are now protected in a way they wouldn’t have been before if he were to die in some unlikely accident: My country wanted to make sure that if I died, Terry wouldn’t…

This caught my skeptical eye: an article about police efforts to fight the “blessing scam” in Asian neighborhoods in New York City. The scam involves a con artist who approaches the mark, usually an elderly person, to convince them that their cash and valuables are tainted by bad luck that can be removed by a…

Atlas Shrugged, p.65-80 There are a few plot developments at the start of this chapter that I’ll skim over. We find out that it’s getting difficult for Dagny to keep Taggart Transcontinental running, because their business associates are becoming unreliable: She was back from a trip to the plant of the United Locomotive Works in…

Back in June, I felt compelled to respond to a blog post by one of my Patheos colleagues, Bad Catholic, offering an apologetic for the argument from divine hiddenness: God is love. What merit is it to know of God’s existence as a man knows the existence of his right foot? God doesn’t want our…

This past weekend, the Sunday Assembly, an atheist congregation that got its start in the U.K., came to New York City as the culmination of a swing through the United States. I was in attendance, and I’ll be happy to tell you all about it! I have to admit that when I first got there,…

[Since the Supreme Court struck down part of DOMA this week, anti-gay Christian groups have been trying to start a trend on Twitter, under the hashtag “#1m1w“, to promote the “one man-one woman” view of marriage that the Bible allegedly teaches. With that in mind, it’s probably a good time to repost this essay from…

America went through some major changes this week, so in honor of the occasion, here’s a great song by Churchill, an alt-rock band from Colorado (not the U.K., in spite of their name). I first saw this video playing (silently) on a TV at my gym, and it intrigued me enough to check it out…

Atlas Shrugged, p.63-64 To finish out this section, there’s a short scene in the Taggart Terminal at night (the same place where the statue of Nat Taggart stands that Dagny uses for ancestor worship). She’s leaving work after an argument with Jim, who’s found out that she’s only running a few old and broken-down trains…