Good Living

From everyone at The Objective Standard to everyone who thinks, produces, trades, and thereby creates the values on which human life and happiness depend: Thank you. Thank you profit-seeking businessmen who produce and sell everything from groceries to computers to automobiles to electricity. Your work—although often condemned—is in fact supremely…

I approach recreational poker as entertainment, not gambling. I enjoy playing, even though I’m a novice and often lose. As a game, poker offers some meaningful lessons. 1. Act on reason, not emotions. Praying, hoping really hard, or performing some superstitious ritual will not change the sequence of cards. The…

I needed to track my time for various projects, and I needed to track my to-do items. I found my solution in two apps for my iPod Touch available from Nonlinear Ideas Inc., whose motto is, “Software should be simple.” For tracking my time, I use Time Tracker Pro. The…

Observe the posture of the figures painted by Bryan Larson. His figures have relatively straight backs and necks, with shoulders rolled back rather than forward. They project self-confidence and an eagerness to achieve and live. That sort of posture was common in early America (and remains common in parts of…

Understandably, the horrific murders at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, have put many people around the country on edge. Obviously, we want to do what we reasonably can to protect ourselves and our families from criminal attacks. And we want our government to take seriously its responsibility to protect…

Neil Gaiman, author of The Sandman comics and novels such as Stardust and Coraline, recently delivered the commencement address to The University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Though he tailored his advice for students of the arts, much of what he had to say applies to any field: If you have…

A concise introduction to Ayn Rand's morality of egoism, the heart of her novel Atlas Shrugged.

Decorated eggs, the Easter Bunny, pretty dresses, lavish meals, Peeps, chocolates, extravagance, joy—religious claims to the holiday notwithstanding, Easter is a celebration of spring, fertility, and fun. People of faith are free to celebrate the alleged resurrection of Jesus. But people of reason ignore that myth and celebrate the secular…

[caption id="attachment_92906" align="alignnone" width="720"] Image by Gage Skidmore[/caption] The night after Andrew Breitbart died, I watched an episode of Red Eye w/Greg Gutfeld in which Gavin McInnes told a delightful story about Breitbart. In an earlier episode of Red Eye, Gutfeld and McInnes had been mocking the idea of Donald…

Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955 and died last fall. In his short life, he revolutionized the world of personal computing, digital animation, music distribution, and portable computing. Today I pay tribute to Jobs by writing these words on my 24-inch iMac running the state-of-the-art Lion operating system,…