Contributors
ROGER DONWAY. After forty-five years of living with Atlas Shrugged, our senior editor is surely qualified to assess that grand book’s merits and impact for this special celebratory issue—and does so in his latest “Private I” column. In “Ayn Rand’s ‘Persecuted Minority’,” Roger also weighs in on a theme central to Rand’s concerns and his own: government oppression of American businessmen.
WALTER DONWAY is a founding trustee of The Atlas Society and the founding editor of Cerebrum: The Dana Forum on Brain Science. Walter also is a past contributor to these pages, including his stirring homage to the great railroad entrepreneurs, “Empire of Earth” (Fall 2006). He shares another poetic tribute this month—this one to the author of Atlas Shrugged on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of her birth.
WILLIAM THOMAS is director of programs for The Atlas Society and a TNI contributing editor. Will runs TAS seminars, coordinates student training programs, and lectures on all aspects of Objectivism. Here, he compares and contrasts “Ayn Rand’s Philosophical ‘Stunt Novel’” with other philosophical literary classics.
EDWARD L. HUDGINS, executive director of The Atlas Society and TNI contributing editor, ponders the amazing prophetic accuracy of Ayn Rand’s great cautionary tale. He also resumes his series of reviews surveying great television documentaries of the past by looking back at the late Milton Friedman’s classic pro-capitalist polemic, Free to Choose.
DAVID KELLEY is the founder of The Atlas Society and also a TNI contributing editor. An internationally respected Objectivist philosopher, he’s a consultant to the current film production of Atlas Shrugged. In “A Philosophy for the 21st Century,” Dr. Kelley eloquently assesses the continuing relevance of Ayn Rand’s seminal novel for our time.
SHAWN KLEIN is a philosophy professor at Rockford College in Rockford, Illinois, and is co-editor of Harry Potter and Philosophy: If Aristotle Ran Hogwarts. He is completing his Ph.D. in philosophy at Arizona State University. For his debut in these pages, he reviews Tara Smith’s important new work, Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics.
ROBERT L. JONES, TNI’s entertainment editor, reviews the return of Bruce Willis to his popular screen role as detective John McClane in the new thriller Live Free or Die Hard—perhaps the best yet in the series. Besides his work for TNI, Robert contributes to San Antonio magazine, which recently featured his photo essay “Los Colores de Coahuila” (with commentary by Marimer Navarrete, a past TNI contributor in December 2006).