Sorry about the delay in posting here. After an exciting several years at Box Office Mojo (BOM)—including our recent sponsorship of the Newport Beach Film Festival and my hosting Red River starring John Wayne—I have decided to move on. I wish the BOM bunch well in the future. This summer, I have been enjoying the Objectivist Conference (OCON) in Newport Beach, visiting Disneyland and the beaches of Malibu and working on other projects.
OCON 2008 was fabulous. The Ayn Rand Institute’s Yaron Brook and Onkar Ghate delivered a lecture series on cultural change, which was very rewarding. In a related development, the opening of the new Ayn Rand Center (ARC) in Washington, D.C. was also announced.
OCON highlights included two optional courses—a comprehensive three-lecture class by Clemson’s Eric Daniels on the history of free speech in America and Virginia Tech Professor Shoshana Milgram’s extremely informative four-lecture course on Ayn Rand’s admiration for It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis. That’s one of my favorite novels and I gained new insights. During the class, I also learned about Ayn Rand’s appreciation for her lawyers and I enjoyed several such sidebars. Her note to Ann Watkins comes to mind.
Leonard Peikoff’s Question and Answer was a real treat—as others have observed, he’s in top form—and, while I was unable to attend every lecture, I enjoyed the general sessions. Archivist Jeff Britting showed me the impressive Ayn Rand Archives and the conference staff was thoroughly professional (thanks to Dave and Bryan). Finding the Independence Day luncheon was not easy (Arwen Morton’s patriotic vocal performances were outstanding) but, as usual, OCON was worth every dollar.
