- Ayn Rand (plato.standford.edu)
Ayn Rand (1905–1982) was a novelist-philosopher who outlined a comprehensive philosophy, including an epistemology and a theory of art, in her novels and essays. Early in her career she also wrote short stories, plays, and screenplays. Rand’s first and most autobiographical novel, We the Living (1936), set in the Soviet Union, was published only after many rejections, owing to widespread sympathy for the Soviet “experiment” among the intellectuals of the day. We the Living was quickly followed by the dystopian novel, Anthem (1938), written as “a kind of rest” from work on her next major novel, The Fountainhead (1943). The Fountainhead, also published after many rejections because of its individualism, and largely panned by critics, soon became a best-seller by word of mouth. The Fountainhead brought Rand international fame, and Atlas Shrugged (1957) sealed this fame. By 1958, Rand’s novels, increasingly philosophical, had won her ideas a sufficiently devoted following for her to form, in association with psychologist Nathaniel Branden (with whom she later broke), an official “Objectivist” philosophical movement, complete with journals and lecture courses. For all her popularity, however, only a few professional philosophers have taken her work seriously. As a result, most of the serious philosophical work on Rand has appeared in non-academic, non-peer-reviewed journals, or in books, and the bibliography reflects this fact. We discuss the main reasons for her rejection by most professional philosophers in the first section. Our discussion of Rand’s philosophical views, especially her moral-political views, draws from both her non-fiction and her fiction, since her views cannot be accurately interpreted or evaluated without doing so.
- Deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia (Wikipedia)
Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is a citizen of El Salvador who was illegally deported from the United States on March 15, 2025, in what the Trump administration called “an administrative error.” He was then imprisoned without trial in the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a maximum security prison in El Salvador, despite never having been charged with or convicted of a crime in either country. His lawyers argue that his imprisonment is part of an agreement to jail U.S. deportees there in exchange for payment, and this was confirmed by United States senator Chris Van Hollen, who had spoken with Félix Ulloa, El Salvador’s vice president. The administration has defended the deportation in the press by accusing him of membership in the MS-13 gang, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. This accusation was based on a bail determination made in a 2019 immigration court proceedings that Abrego Garcia contested.