Ayn Rand produced strident, if often pedantic works on individual freedom and rights, the pursuit of happiness, and the moral superiority of laissez-faire capitalism as a social system. She proposed a moral system based on rational self interest and developed […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Archive for Chris Bell – Justice and ethics in popular culture

I have never really thought of a gun as an accessory, like a wallet or a bowtie. Anton Chekhov, the great Russian short story writer and dramatist, once said that if a gun appears in the first act of a […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
Of all the possible superpowers, telepathy is the one most likely to double as a curse. Reading people’s minds and knowing their intentions even before they behave badly would certainly be handy, although it is telling that this scenario sounds […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
There’s an interesting cross-fertilization between American Westerns and Japanese Samurai films. Among others, the great Akira Kurosawa credited the American Western genre as an influence in his own films. Perhaps not surprisingly, several Kurosawa films were re-made as successful Westerns […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…

I teach a business school course on leaders, heroes and culture. After class the other day a student asked me if I considered Dexter, protagonist of a television show of the same name, to be a hero. Interesting question! If […] ↓ Read the rest of this entry…
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