Astrology blog Planet Waves (weird, but don’t shoot the messenger) relates a touching story from actress Nichelle Nichols. She played Uhura in the original Star Trek but was considering leaving after the first season to pursue a stage career. But then she ran into Martin Luther King Jr., who identified as a big fan and persuaded her to stay on in what he considered an inspirational role. It’s a great read.

Two articles remind me why I’m a National Geographic subscriber. 1,000 Days in the Ice is a gripping retelling of a turn-of-the-century expedition to the North Pole, with two explorers working their way across the ice to safety. Edge of the World is an overview of Scotland’s Hebrides Islands, offering the kind of breathtaking photos that make you want to set your life to exploring.

“Atlas Shrugged” never offered any serious alternative to the social order; whatever Rand’s intention, the novel was not a call to arms but an invitation to escape. The book could never, in fact, have been any shorter, because it needed to feel like a whole substitute world, a full-blown reassuring place—you’re right, they’re wrong; you’re special, they’re not—into which the discoverer can jump, as into a magic wardrobe, and then live, happily, airlessly, for weeks of reading and rereading.”

Thomas Mallon has an entertaining takedown of Ayn Rand’s caterwauling, tone-deaf fiction in the New Yorker. A subscription is required to read the whole thing, but it’s worth tracking down, if only for the line, “The O. Henry she describes bears more resemblance to the candy bar than to the story writer.”

A more thorough takedown of the Goddess of Greed is available in Ayn Rand: The Comic.

Rolling Stone muckraker Matt Taibbi has been contributing some excellent, counter–conventional wisdom blog pieces at True/Slant. This excerpt from today’s post, “Good News on Wall Street Means…What Exactly?” provided that rare instance of someone else summing up exactly what I was thinking much better than I could have.

No one mentions here that this is a carrot-and-stick story — the stick being that ordinary people have been robbed of the interest they should be getting in CDs and ordinary bank savings accounts by the various bailout programs and lending guarantees, which have brought the cost of capital down to nothing for the big banks, and punished those people who have been doing the right thing all along by saving. The Fed lends its money to Goldman Sachs and BOFA for free, why does anyone have to pay Grandma a high rate for her CD or her bank savings?

His April post, “The Peasant Mentality Lives on in America,” is also beautifully blunt.