Rand Paul describes the plot of Ayn Rand’s novel Anthem. If you’ve never heard of it, it sounds exactly like an Ayn Rand novel.

[via Weigel]

“President Obama plans this week to respond to a Republican blueprint for tackling the soaring national debt by promoting a bipartisan approach pioneered by an independent presidential commission rather than introducing his own detailed plan.” [WaPo, via Political Wire]

“Donald Trump will ‘probably’ run as an independent candidate for U.S. President in 2012 if he does not receive the Republican party’s nomination, he told the Wall Street Journal in a video interview on Monday.”

Trump Will ‘Probably’ Run as Independent If He Doesn’t Win GOP Nomination [WSJ]

“I’m a principled reformer, and my goal is to see the country turn around,” she said. “I’m also committed to being a one-term president if that’s what it takes in order to turn things around, because this is not about a personal ambition.” [Des Moines Register, via Gen. JC Christian]

Back in the late Eighties, Spy was needling Donald Trump, and Donald Trump was pretending to run for President. In 2011, Spy cofounder Graydon Carter edits Vanity Fair, Vanity Fair is needling Donald Trump, and Donald Trump is pretending to run for President.

“Best Wishes, Donald Trump”: A Future President’s Letter to Vanity Fair

Our guest columnists are scholars Joy DeLyria and Sean Michael Robinson.

There are few works of greater scope or structural genius than the series of fiction pieces by Horatio Bucklesby Ogden, collectively known as The Wire; yet for the most part, this Victorian masterpiece has been forgotten and ignored by scholars and popular culture alike. Like his contemporary Charles Dickens, Ogden has, due to the rough and at times lurid nature of his material, been dismissed as a hack, despite significant endorsements of literary critics of the nineteenth century. Unlike the corpus of Dickens, The Wire failed to reach the critical mass of readers necessary to sustain interest over time, and thus runs the risk of falling into the obscurity of academia. We come to you today to right that gross literary injustice.

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Garden & Gun

52 Things You’ll Only See In America [BuzzFeed, via Sully]