"Atlas Shrugged" Essay Contest Doubles in Size!
September 30, 2009 by Keirsten Hoffman · Leave a Comment
“Atlas Shrugged” Essay Contest Doubles in Size!
IRVINE, Calif., September 30, 2009–The Ayn Rand Institute announced a new record in submissions for its annual “Atlas Shrugged” essay contest. ARI received more than 4,000 entries this year, more than twice as many as last year’s record.
ARI credits the surge in essay contest submissions to the recent boom in “Atlas Shrugged” sales, along with the continued growth of ARI’s free books to teachers program. The ARI essay contest is part of a larger educational program that encourages high school and college educators to use the book in their classrooms.
Ayn Rand Institute Announces $2 Million Fundraising Campaign–the Atlas Shrugged Initiative
July 31, 2009 by Administrator · Leave a Comment
IRVINE, CA, July 24, 2009—The Ayn Rand Institute has announced a $2 million fundraising campaign—the Atlas Shrugged Initiative—in an unprecedented effort to increase readership of Ayn Rand’s best-known novel, Atlas Shrugged.
The impetus behind the Atlas Shrugged Initiative, explains ARI President and Executive Director Yaron Brook, is the fact that “At no time in history has there been greater public interest in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. And its message has never been more urgent.
“The torrent of destructive, statist policies emanating from Washington represents both a crisis—and an opportunity. Through the Atlas Shrugged Initiative, we intend to capitalize on the soaring grassroots interest in Ayn Rand and her ideas.”
Adds Dr. Brook, “The Atlas Shrugged Initiative is off to an outstanding start. A very generous benefactor has already offered to match every dollar donated to this Initiative—up to a total of $500,000—and as a result of early and substantial funding, the bookstore promotions that are a key component of the Initiative are already well underway.”
Key elements of the Atlas Shrugged Initiative include significant bookstore promotions of the novel; an expansion of ARI’s web-based efforts to spur readership of Atlas Shrugged; expansion of ARI’s long-running educational programs for high school and college students; and targeted outreach to pro-liberty, pro-capitalist activists around the nation.
Visit the Ayn Rand Institute’s Atlas Shrugged Initiative campaign page to learn more or to support this campaign.
Atlas Shrugged Selling in Record Numbers
July 13, 2009 by Administrator · Leave a Comment
Atlas Shrugged Selling in Record Numbers
Irvine, CA, July 13, 2009–Penguin USA, publisher of the four American editions of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, has reported that in the first half of 2009 it shipped well over 300,000 copies of Atlas Shrugged to distributors, bookstores, bookstore chains, online resellers, libraries, businesses and other institutions.
As Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, noted, “Considering that in the first half of 2008 Penguin shipped about 85,000 copies, the spectacular jump to 300,000 copies in the first half of 2009 represents an increase of almost 250 percent in gross sales of Atlas Shrugged!
Reports from industry sources indicate that more copies of Atlas Shrugged were sold in book stores and by online resellers in the first half of 2009 than in all of 2008, when a new all-time annual record was established with more than 200,000 copies of the novel sold in the United States.
“The spike in sales of Atlas Shrugged more than a half century after its initial publication is truly remarkable,” Dr. Brook pointed out. “Annual sales of Atlas Shrugged have been increasing for decades to a level not seen even in Ayn Rand’s lifetime. Sales of the U.S. paperback editions averaged around 70,000 copies a year in the 1980s, and doubled to about 140,000 copies a year in the current decade. And the pace of sales has been accelerating recently, reaching an all-time high during the novel’s 50th anniversary in 2007, surpassing this mark in 2008, and on course to set another record in 2009.”
Almost 7,000,000 copies of Atlas Shrugged have been sold since it was first published in 1957.
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Over a Million Ayn Rand Novels in Classrooms This Year
May 18, 2009 by Administrator · Leave a Comment
IRVINE, CA, May 18, 2009–As part of its mission to promote Ayn Rand’s ideas in today’s culture, during this school year the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) shipped 350,000 free copies of Anthem, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged to high school teachers across North America. Adding these books to those sent in recent years, and which remain in classrooms today, ARI estimates that more than 1 million students studied Ayn Rand’s novels in 25,000 classrooms this year. More than 32,000 teachers and 1.4 million students have participated in this program since it began in 2002. The program is funded through the generosity of ARI’s contributors.
Each school year ARI distributes promotional flyers that offer free classroom sets of Ayn Rand’s novels to English and language arts teachers, department heads and principals, as well as selected counselors and high school administrators. “This offer,” said Marilee Dahl, ARI’s Education department manager, “is available to both public and private high schools throughout the United States and Canada.”
“Each teacher who requests these books,” explained Ms. Dahl, “receives a classroom set of the novels, along with a teacher’s guide, lesson plans and information about ARI’s annual Anthem, Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged essay contests. We also offer phone and e-mail support to teachers, as needed, to facilitate their teaching of the books in their classes. The response has been fantastic and a very positive sign for America’s future.”
More information on the Free Books to Teachers program is available at the Ayn Rand Institute’s Web site.
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To interview Ms. Marilee Dahl or for more information on ARI’s educational programs, please contact: media@aynrand.org
The Ayn Rand Institute Speaks Out on ‘Going Galt’
March 20, 2009 by Administrator · Leave a Comment
rvine, CA, March 18, 2009–In a recent appearance on PJTV, Yaron Brook, president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, addressed the current media sensation known as “going Galt,” in which productive individuals consider withdrawing their labor from society. The phrase is a reference to John Galt, the central character in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, and a strike that he leads against an oppressive government, and the society that supports it.
“I would encourage people not to go on strike, in that sense,” says Brook. “It’s not time to go on strike, to leave and go to Galt’s Gulch. It’s time to fight. What I would call for is a moral revolution. Let’s get rid of the morality that says ‘your moral responsibility is toward your neighbor,’ that ‘you are your brother’s keeper.’ Ayn Rand presents us with a new morality, a morality of rational self-interest. There is a lot of fight left in us, and I think it’s too early to give up on this world.”
Ayn Rand Institute Now Offering Impact Newsletter Free on the Web
January 15, 2009 by Administrator · Leave a Comment
The Ayn Rand Institute is pleased to announce that its Impact newsletter is now available electronically to Web visitors. Beginning with the January 2009 issue, ARI’s Web site will now offer all of its Impact issues online as PDF documents.
Impact, which remains available in a print edition for ARI donors of $35 or more each year, delivers the latest news and progress reports on ARI’s programs, along with interviews of Objectivist intellectuals and monthly highlights of different aspects of Ayn Rand’s philosophy.
The new, free electronic format will serve as an excellent way of introducing newcomers to ARI’s goals and programs. Additionally, visitors may now view a three-part introductory video on ARI’s home page, which provides information about Ayn Rand, Objectivism, and the Ayn Rand Institute.
» View ARI’s Impact newsletter online
Watch and Learn from Hugo Chavez
January 12, 2009 by Administrator · Leave a Comment
Washington, D.C. – Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez has halted construction of a private shopping mall in downtown Caracas as a first step toward confiscation. “We’re going to expropriate that and turn it into a hospital–I don’t know–a school, a university,” said Chavez on his weekly radio show.
“Americans can learn an important lesson from the spread of socialism in Venezuela,” said Thomas Bowden, an analyst at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. “What is Chavez counting on when he grabs a private building and vows to make it into a hospital, school, or university? He’s counting on his listeners to excuse the seizure of private property because a higher moral purpose is supposedly being served.
“Chavez is relying on the fact that socialism embodies the world’s moral ideal of individual sacrifice for the ‘common good.’ History has taught him that no opponent will denounce that ideal. And so he climbs to the moral high ground, turning his back on socialism’s dismal historical record of economic decline, lost freedoms, and human misery.
“As long as the moral ideal of self-sacrifice remains unchallenged, socialism will continue to spread–not only in the third world, but in America as well.
“There is a rational alternative. It’s laissez-faire capitalism, which upholds the individual’s moral right to live and work for his own sake, not society’s. But to establish freedom we must dig up the moral roots that continue to nourish socialism worldwide.”
Islamic Totalitarianism’s Threat to Civilization
October 7, 2008 by Administrator · Leave a Comment
Islamic Totalitarianism’s Threat to Civilization
What: A panel discussion about the nature of Islamic totalitarianism and how to defeat it. A Q&A will follow.
Who: Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, and Dr. Wafa Sultan, outspoken critic of Islam
Where: HIB (Humanities Instructional Building), Room 100, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697
When: Monday, October, 13, 2008, at 7 pm
This event is open to the public. Admission is FREE.
Description: From the Iranian hostage crisis to September 11 to the London subway attacks to the Iraqi insurgency–it is clear the West faces a grave threat from a committed enemy. Conventional wisdom holds that the enemy is a rogue group of fanatics, who have hijacked a great religion in order to justify their crimes. It tells us there is no way to permanently eliminate these violent groups, that we have entered an “age of terror” and that we must give up the desire for a decisive victory . . . but is the conventional wisdom right?
Bios:
–Dr. Yaron Brook is executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute and a recognized Middle East expert who has written and lectured on a variety of Middle East issues. Dr. Brook has served in the Israeli Army and has discussed the Israeli-Arab conflict and the war on Islamic totalitarianism on numerous radio and TV programs, including FOX News, CNN and a C-SPAN panel of experts on terrorism.
–Dr. Wafa Sultan is a secular Syrian-American writer and thinker, best known for her participation in Middle East political debates, widely circulated Arabic essays and television appearances on CNN, FOX News and Al-Jazeera. She named the Islamic threat to the West as “a battle between modernity and barbarism which Islam will lose.” Her outspokenness has brought her both threats and praise. Dr. Sultan is currently working on a book to be titled “The God that Hates.”
For more information: e-mail media@aynrand.org
The Looming Crisis over Free Speech
September 29, 2008 by Administrator · Leave a Comment
What: A lecture examining the escalating censorship in America and explaining what is needed to protect our freedom of speech
Who: Eric Daniels, research assistant professor at Clemson University’s Institute for the Study of Capitalism
Where: 101 Morgan Hall, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720
When: Monday, October 6, 2008, 7 pm
Description: In this lecture, Dr. Daniels examines the state of free speech in America and finds that it is under serious threat. From campus speech codes to anti-discrimination and harassment law, from campaign finance to commercial speech, Americans today enjoy less and less freedom in communicating their ideas. Today’s colleges and universities have become a hotbed of censorship, producing generations of Americans who have accepted suppression of speech as the norm. Daniels argues that the emerging crisis is a result of the lack of a proper understanding of individual rights, especially property rights. Only by understanding the proper basis of rights can we act to secure our freedom of speech and to protect the rights that give rise to it.
Bio: Dr. Eric Daniels is a research assistant professor at Clemson University’s Institute for the Study of Capitalism. He has lectured internationally on American history, particularly on American intellectual history, business history and political history. He taught for five years at Duke University’s Program on Values and Ethics in the Marketplace, where he was nominated for a university-wide teaching award. Dr. Daniels was a contributor to the recently published Oxford Companion to United States History, and wrote a chapter in The Abolition of Antitrust. He has appeared on C-SPAN and Voice of America Radio.
For more information on this lecture, please e-mail media@aynrand.org.
Beware the Obesity Alarmists
August 11, 2008 by Administrator · Leave a Comment
By Keith Lockitch
Irvine, CA - A new study on America’s “obesity epidemic” projects that if trends of the past thirty years continue, every American could be overweight by 2048. Warning that this epidemic could impose hundreds of billions of dollars in health-care costs on Americans, obesity activists are urging coercive measures to curb obesity, such as forcing the fast food industry to offer healthier fare.
“No doubt the obesity alarmists will use this study’s far-fetched conclusion to try to scare us into giving up more of our freedom,” said Don Watkins, a writer for the Ayn Rand Institute.
“What their arguments spotlight, however, is not a need to curtail freedom, but to expand it.
“In warning us of the massive ’social costs’ imposed by obesity, the obesity alarmists fail to ask a crucial question: Why are we footing the bill for other people’s health care in the first place? The answer is that the government forces us to. Through paternalistic welfare state programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, and through the government-imposed employer-based health insurance system, government relieves the individual of the financial burden of his own health care, and passes the buck on to the rest of us.
“If the government then begins to dictate how many cookies we can eat, or what food McDonald’s can sell, it would compound that injustice: using a problem caused by paternalism to justify more paternalism.
“Of course it should worry us if millions of Americans are becoming unhealthily overweight. Those who are genuinely concerned should try to persuade people to eat better and exercise. What we must not do is let the state assume coercive control over diets and food supplies.
“We may or may not be suffering from an obesity epidemic, but there is no question we face an epidemic of paternalism. And for that the solution is simple: more freedom.”
Contact: Larry Benson
E-mail: media@aynrand.org
Phone: (949) 222-6550, ext. 213
Founded in 1985, the Ayn Rand Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead.”
