Reidy

Historical note: Rand was more enthusiastic about Nixon in 68 than in 72. She endorsed him in the June Objectivist (which actually came out in the fall), mainly for his opposition to the draft and his support of the Anti-Ballistic Missile system. She also said that "spokesman for capitalism" would get a hearing in a Nixon administration. Presumably she meant Greenspan, who worked for Nixon's campaign at the time, though she didn't mention him by name.

The video you link to does not give sources, at least in the part I watched. Do you have this information?

An alternative explanation, requiring no special access to the inside of anybody's mind, is that zombie movies need less makeup, less skillfully applied, and no digital special effects and are thus cheaper to produce.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/about-ayn-rand/faq.html

While the typewriter story can't be true, I can believe that Rand told it to BB among others. She was solicitous of her family's political security in the USSR, and the Remington-Rand explanation would have kept people from prying further and finding out her birth name. The Cyrillic story, while probably true, would have given the secret away.

Rand's recommendation of Hugo paid off handsomely. I struck out on Dostoyevsky and Conrad. The Secret Agent has some amusingly contemporary allusions, but otherwise both authors escaped me.

No, because the money to support these schools was taken from you and others by force. This is not your doing. See Rand's The Question of Scholarships.

My advice is always to read the novels first, then the anthologies - The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism the Unknown Ideal and The Romantic Manifesto - depending on what topics interest you. Then the secondary sources the others have mentioned. One reason to start with the novels is that the non-fiction writings (by Rand and others) refer back to them constantly, revealing their storylines in the process. You won't understand the essays if you haven't read the novels, and you won't enjoy the novels if you already know how they turn out. A reason to read Rand before you move on to Peikoff, Bernstein, etc. is that the secondary literature constantly refers back to Rand's essays. For the New Intellectual, The Early Ayn Rand, the letters and the journals are optional.

A new way to fight the brain drain

This is a quite different statement from the ones she made about Branden. She approved works of Peikoff that she had already seen. By contrast, she said Branden's word was Objectivism and that she approved his future statements in advance. (Come to think of it, "intellectual heir" has a meaning after all, namely this blank-check endorsement that she did not give to Peikoff.)

As far as I know Rand never named anybody but Branden as her intellectual heir. Can you provide a citation about Peikoff? (Not that the phrase means anything anyway)

To get back to the Columbia University tapes, most of them are online. Apparently the ones with Hospers and the Brandens have been memory-holed.

One of Rand's biographers - Heller, I think - talks about her pep pill use and quotes a letter from Isabel Paterson in the late 1940s, warning her strongly to lay off at once.

In Oak Park IL on Thursday the 11th, a rare chance to hear the music that inspired We the Living in the building that inspired Roark's Stoddard Temple: http://www.utrf.org/operetta-in-exile/

I don't see that unfaithfulness requires deception. It simply means having a sexual partner other than one's spouse (or committed partner). She made her marriage the public's business by talking about it. Nor do I see that Peikoff was merely being discreet. Rand and the Brandens had both dishonest by omission in their original explanation. Had Rand merely said, in a sentence or two, that she and the Brandens were going their separate ways, then discretion would have been been due. Instead she denounced him publicly for all manner of depravity, specified or not, while withholding the real reason. By 1986, when BB's biography came out, there was a pent-up demand for the whole story. Rand was a famous and historically important person, and people want to know about her life. If people want to attack you ad hominem, they're going to find a way. What you make public and what you keep private won't change this. For example, some have denounced her for taking Social Security and Medicare in later years, and they didn't need any gossip or personal secrets to do this. I'm not sure. Did Peikoff ever deny on the record that the affair had taken place?