Do dogs have some degree of freedom of the will? Dr. Leonard Peikoff, experimenting with a roundtable format, addresses this question and another in answer to an excellent letter from a truck driver—whom I think has a good point—about whether Objectivists tend to denigrate and dismiss middle class values and those who hold them. I don’t like this new format as a replacement of the usual podcast—I prefer Dr. Peikoff’s solo work as a rule—and I don’t think the participants get to the core of this correspondent’s concerns. Listen to the podcast and judge for yourself.
Sorry to say that pop singer Seal’s new album, Soul, is a bust. His relaxed vocal style does not suit these original rhythm and blues tunes, which require more intensity than Seal can muster. Seal, it turns out, lacks soul. But Seal managed to inspire actor Terrence Howard to write a song for his new album, Shine Through It. The soulful tune is called “Sanctuary,” and, while the album is mixed, Howard’s an honest artist whose sincerity comes through on every track. He wrote the tender, lush and romantic “Sanctuary” after hearing Seal and his wife, model Heidi Klum, talk about how they met and fell in love.
After hearing it compared to the brilliant German picture, The Lives of Others, I finally got around to seeing the Romanian picture 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007). The movie concerns two young college students in communist Romania in 1987; it is completely non-intellectual and, therefore, not comparable to The Lives of Others, an excellent dramatization of life under dictatorship. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days is a crude, naturalistic picture about young woman’s illegal abortion that manages to avoid any of the relevant issues surrounding her unwanted pregnancy, such as Catholicism, communism and the motives of the woman who helps her (how she wound up pregnant and by whom is not addressed). One can only suppose about various motives in this stark, subtitled movie, and one inevitably does fill in the blanks, but ultimately this is a graphic slice of life about getting an abortion.
