title: Enid Blyton

text: Blyton published several further books featuring the character of Scamp the terrier, following on from "The Adventures of Scamp", a novel she had released in 1943 under the pseudonym of Mary Pollock. "Scamp Goes on Holiday" (1952) and "Scamp and Bimbo", "Scamp at School", "Scamp and Caroline" and "Scamp Goes to the Zoo" (1954) were illustrated by Pierre Probst. She introduced the character of Bom, a stylish toy drummer dressed in a bright red coat and helmet, alongside Noddy in "TV Comic" in July 1956. A book series began the same year with "Bom the Little Toy Drummer", featuring illustrations by R. Paul-Hoye, and followed with "Bom and His Magic Drumstick" (1957), "Bom Goes Adventuring" and "Bom Goes to Ho Ho Village" (1958), "Bom and the Clown" and "Bom and the Rainbow" (1959) and "Bom Goes to Magic Town" (1960). In 1958 she produced two annuals featuring the character, the first of which included twenty short stories, poems and picture strips.


title: Enid Blyton

text: Many of Blyton's series, including Noddy and The Famous Five, continued to be successful in the 1960s; by 1962, 26 million copies of Noddy had been sold. Blyton concluded several of her long-running series in 1963, publishing the last books of The Famous Five ("Five Are Together Again") and The Secret Seven ("Fun for the Secret Seven"); she also produced three more Brer Rabbit books with the illustrator Grace Lodge: "Brer Rabbit Again", "Brer Rabbit Book", and "Brer Rabbit's a Rascal". In 1962 many of her books were among the first to be published by Armada Books in paperback, making them more affordable to children.


title: Enid Blyton

text: After 1963 Blyton's output was generally confined to short stories and books intended for very young readers, such as "Learn to Count with Noddy" and "Learn to Tell Time with Noddy" in 1965, and "Stories for Bedtime" and the Sunshine Picture Story Book collection in 1966. Her declining health and a falling off in readership among older children have been put forward as the principal reasons for this change in trend. Blyton published her last book in the Noddy series, "Noddy and the Aeroplane", in February 1964. In May the following year she published "Mixed Bag", a song book with music written by her nephew Carey, and in August she released her last full-length books, "The Man Who Stopped to Help" and "The Boy Who Came Back".


title: Enid Blyton

text: Blyton cemented her reputation as a children's writer when in 1926 she took over the editing of "Sunny Stories", a magazine that typically included the re-telling of legends, myths, stories and other articles for children. That same year she was given her own column in "Teachers' World", entitled "From my Window". Three years later she began contributing a weekly page in the magazine, in which she published letters from her fox terrier dog Bobs. They proved to be so popular that in 1933 they were published in book form as "Letters from Bobs", and sold ten thousand copies in the first week. Her most popular feature was "Round the Year with Enid Blyton", which consisted of forty-eight articles covering aspects of natural history such as weather, pond life, how to plant a school garden and how to make a bird table. Among Blyton's other nature projects was her monthly "Country Letter" feature that appeared in "The Nature Lover" magazine in 1935.


title: Enid Blyton

text: "Sunny Stories" was renamed "Enid Blyton's Sunny Stories" in January 1937, and served as a vehicle for the serialisation of Blyton's books. Her first Naughty Amelia Jane story, about an anti-heroine based on a doll owned by her daughter Gillian, was published in the magazine. Blyton stopped contributing in 1952, and it closed down the following year, shortly before the appearance of the new fortnightly "Enid Blyton Magazine" written entirely by Blyton. The first edition appeared on 18 March 1953, and the magazine ran until September 1959.


title: Enid Blyton

text: Noddy made his first appearance in the "Sunday Graphic" in 1949, the same year as Blyton's first daily Noddy strip for the London "Evening Standard". It was illustrated by van der Beek until his death in 1953.


title: Enid Blyton

text: Blyton worked in a wide range of fictional genres, from fairy tales to animal, nature, detective, mystery, and circus stories, but she often "blurred the boundaries" in her books, and encompassed a range of genres even in her short stories. In a 1958 article published in "The Author", she wrote that there were a "dozen or more different types of stories for children", and she had tried them all, but her favourites were those with a family at their centre.


title: Enid Blyton

text: In another letter to McKellar she describes how in just five days she wrote the 60,000-word book "The River of Adventure", the eighth in her Adventure Series, by listening to what she referred to as her "under-mind", which she contrasted with her "upper conscious mind". Blyton was unwilling to conduct any research or planning before beginning work on a new book, which coupled with the lack of variety in her life according to Druce almost inevitably presented the danger that she might unconsciously, and clearly did, plagiarise the books she had read, including her own. Gillian has recalled that her mother "never knew where her stories came from", but that she used to talk about them "coming from her 'mind's eye", as did William Wordsworth and Charles Dickens. Blyton had "thought it was made up of every experience she'd ever had, everything she's seen or heard or read, much of which had long disappeared from her conscious memory" but never knew the direction her stories would take. Blyton further explained in her biography that "If I tried to think out or invent the whole book, I could not do it. For one thing, it would bore me and for another, it would lack the 'verve' and the extraordinary touches and surprising ideas that flood out from my imagination."


title: Enid Blyton

text: Blyton's daily routine varied little over the years. She usually began writing soon after breakfast, with her portable typewriter on her knee and her favourite red Moroccan shawl nearby; she believed that the colour red acted as a "mental stimulus" for her. Stopping only for a short lunch break she continued writing until five o'clock, by which time she would usually have produced 6,000–10,000 words.


title: Enid Blyton

text: A 2000 article in "The Malay Mail" considers Blyton's children to have "lived in a world shaped by the realities of post-war austerity", enjoying freedom without the political correctness of today, which serves modern readers of Blyton's novels with a form of escapism. Brandon Robshaw of "The Independent" refers to the Blyton universe as "crammed with colour and character", "self-contained and internally consistent", noting that Blyton exemplifies a strong mistrust of adults and figures of authority in her works, creating a world in which children govern. Gillian noted that in her mother's adventure, detective and school stories for older children, "the hook is the strong storyline with plenty of cliffhangers, a trick she acquired from her years of writing serialised stories for children's magazines. There is always a strong moral framework in which bravery and loyalty are (eventually) rewarded". Blyton herself wrote that "my love of children is the whole foundation of all my work".


title: Enid Blyton

text: Victor Watson, Assistant Director of Research at Homerton College, Cambridge, believes that Blyton's works reveal an "essential longing and potential associated with childhood", and notes how the opening pages of "The Mountain of Adventure" present a "deeply appealing ideal of childhood". He argues that Blyton's work differs from that of many other authors in its approach, describing the narrative of The Famous Five series for instance as "like a powerful spotlight, it seeks to illuminate, to explain, to demystify. It takes its readers on a roller-coaster story in which the darkness is always banished; everything puzzling, arbitrary, evocative is either dismissed or explained". Watson further notes how Blyton often used minimalist visual descriptions and introduced a few careless phrases such as "gleamed enchantingly" to appeal to her young readers.


title: Enid Blyton

text: From the mid-1950s rumours began to circulate that Blyton had not written all the books attributed to her, a charge she found particularly distressing. She published an appeal in her magazine asking children to let her know if they heard such stories and, after one mother informed her that she had attended a parents' meeting at her daughter's school during which a young librarian had repeated the allegation, Blyton decided in 1955 to begin legal proceedings. The librarian was eventually forced to make a public apology in open court early the following year, but the rumours that Blyton operated "a 'company' of ghost writers" persisted, as some found it difficult to believe that one woman working alone could produce such a volume of work.


title: Enid Blyton

text: Enid's Conservative personal politics were often in view in her fiction. In "The Mystery of the Missing Necklace" (a The Five Find-Outers installment), she uses the character of young Elizabeth ("Bets") to give a statement praising Winston Churchill and describing the politician as a "statesman".


title: Enid Blyton

text: Blyton felt a responsibility to provide her readers with a positive moral framework, and she encouraged them to support worthy causes. Her view, expressed in a 1957 article, was that children should help animals and other children rather than adults:


title: Enid Blyton

text: Blyton and the members of the children's clubs she promoted via her magazines raised a great deal of money for various charities; according to Blyton, membership of her clubs meant "working for others, for no reward". The largest of the clubs she was involved with was the Busy Bees, the junior section of the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals, which Blyton had actively supported since 1933. The club had been set up by Maria Dickin in 1934, and after Blyton publicised its existence in the "Enid Blyton Magazine" it attracted 100,000 members in three years. Such was Blyton's popularity among children that after she became Queen Bee in 1952 more than 20,000 additional members were recruited in her first year in office. The Enid Blyton Magazine Club was formed in 1953. Its primary objective was to raise funds to help those children with cerebral palsy who attended a centre in Cheyne Walk, in Chelsea, London, by furnishing an on-site hostel among other things.


title: Enid Blyton

text: The Famous Five series gathered such a following that readers asked Blyton if they might form a fan club. She agreed, on condition that it serve a useful purpose, and suggested that it could raise funds for the Shaftesbury Society Babies' Home in Beaconsfield, on whose committee she had served since 1948. The club was established in 1952, and provided funds for equipping a Famous Five Ward at the home, a paddling pool, sun room, summer house, playground, birthday and Christmas celebrations, and visits to the pantomime. By the late 1950s Blyton's clubs had a membership of 500,000, and raised £35,000 in the six years of the "Enid Blyton Magazine"'s run.


title: Enid Blyton

text: By 1974 the Famous Five Club had a membership of 220,000, and was growing at the rate of 6,000 new members a year. The Beaconsfield home it was set up to support closed in 1967, but the club continued to raise funds for other paediatric charities, including an Enid Blyton bed at Great Ormond Street Hospital and a mini-bus for disabled children at Stoke Mandeville Hospital.


title: Enid Blyton

text: Blyton capitalised upon her commercial success as an author by negotiating agreements with jigsaw puzzle and games manufacturers from the late 1940s onwards; by the early 1960s some 146 different companies were involved in merchandising Noddy alone. In 1948 Bestime released four jigsaw puzzles featuring her characters, and the first Enid Blyton board game appeared, "Journey Through Fairyland", created by BGL. The first card game, Faraway Tree, appeared from Pepys in 1950. In 1954 Bestime released the first four jigsaw puzzles of the Secret Seven, and the following year a Secret Seven card game appeared.


title: Enid Blyton

text: Bestime released the Little Noddy Car Game in 1953 and the Little Noddy Leap Frog Game in 1955, and in 1956 American manufacturer Parker Brothers released Little Noddy's Taxi Game, a board game which features Noddy driving about town, picking up various characters. Bestime released its Plywood Noddy Jigsaws series in 1957 and a Noddy jigsaw series featuring cards appeared from 1963, with illustrations by Robert Lee. Arrow Games became the chief producer of Noddy jigsaws in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Whitman manufactured four new Secret Seven jigsaw puzzles in 1975, and produced four new Malory Towers ones two years later. In 1979 the company released a Famous Five adventure board game, Famous Five Kirrin Island Treasure. Stephen Thraves wrote eight Famous Five adventure game books, published by Hodder & Stoughton in the 1980s. The first adventure game book of the series, "The Wreckers' Tower Game", was published in October 1984.


title: Enid Blyton

text: On 28 August 1924, Blyton married Major Hugh Alexander Pollock, DSO (1888–1971) at Bromley Register Office, without inviting her family. They married shortly after his divorce from his first wife, with whom he had two sons, one of them already deceased. Pollock was editor of the book department in the publishing firm George Newnes, which became Blyton's regular publisher. It was he who requested her to write a book about animals, resulting in "The Zoo Book", completed in the month before their marriage. They initially lived in a flat in Chelsea before moving to Elfin Cottage in Beckenham in 1926 and then to Old Thatch in Bourne End (called Peterswood in her books) in 1929. Blyton's first daughter, Gillian, was born on 15 July 1931, and, after a miscarriage in 1934, she gave birth to a second daughter, Imogen, on 27 October 1935.


title: Enid Blyton

text: In 1938, she and her family moved to a house in Beaconsfield, named Green Hedges by Blyton's readers, following a competition in her magazine. By the mid-1930s, Pollock had become a secret alcoholic, withdrawing increasingly from public life—possibly triggered through his meetings, as a publisher, with Winston Churchill, which may have reawakened the trauma Pollock suffered during World War I. With the outbreak of World War II, he became involved in the Home Guard and also re-encountered Ida Crowe, an aspiring writer 19 years his junior, whom he had first met years earlier. He made her an offer to join him as secretary in his posting to a Home Guard training center at Denbies, a Gothic mansion in Surrey belonging to Lord Ashcombe, and they began a romantic relationship. Blyton's marriage to Pollock was troubled for years, and according to Crowe's memoir, she had a series of affairs, including a lesbian relationship with one of the children's nannies. In 1941, Blyton met Kenneth Fraser Darrell Waters, a London surgeon with whom she began a serious affair. Pollock discovered the liaison, and threatened to initiate divorce proceedings. Due to fears that exposure of her adultery would ruin her public image, it was ultimately agreed that Blyton would instead file for divorce against Pollock. According to Crowe's memoir, Blyton promised that if he admitted to infidelity, she would allow him parental access to their daughters; but after the divorce, he was denied contact with them, and Blyton made sure he was subsequently unable to find work in publishing. Pollock, having married Crowe on 26 October 1943, eventually resumed his heavy drinking and was forced to petition for bankruptcy in 1950.


title: Enid Blyton

text: Blyton and Darrell Waters married at the City of Westminster Register Office on 20 October 1943. She changed the surname of her daughters to Darrell Waters and publicly embraced her new role as a happily married and devoted doctor's wife. After discovering she was pregnant in the spring of 1945, Blyton miscarried five months later, following a fall from a ladder. The baby would have been Darrell Waters's first child and the son for which they both longed.


title: Enid Blyton

text: Her love of tennis included playing naked, with nude tennis "a common practice in those days among the more louche members of the middle classes".


title: Enid Blyton

text: Blyton's health began to deteriorate in 1957, when, during a round of golf, she started to feel faint and breathless, and, by 1960, she was displaying signs of dementia. Her agent, George Greenfield, recalled that it was "unthinkable" for the "most famous and successful of children's authors with her enormous energy and computerlike memory" to be losing her mind and suffering from what is now known as Alzheimer's disease in her mid-60s. Worsening Blyton's situation was her husband's declining health throughout the 1960s; he suffered from severe arthritis in his neck and hips, deafness, and became increasingly ill-tempered and erratic until his death on 15 September 1967.


title: Enid Blyton

text: The story of Blyton's life was dramatised in a BBC film entitled "Enid", which aired in the United Kingdom on BBC Four on 16 November 2009. Helena Bonham Carter, who played the title role, described Blyton as "a complete workaholic, an achievement junkie and an extremely canny businesswoman" who "knew how to brand herself, right down to the famous signature".


title: Enid Blyton

text: During the months following her husband's death, Blyton became increasingly ill and moved into a nursing home three months before her death. She died in her sleep of Alzheimer's disease at the Greenways Nursing Home, Hampstead, North London, on 28 November 1968, aged 71. A memorial service was held at St James's Church, Piccadilly and she was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium, where her ashes remain. Blyton's home, Green Hedges, was auctioned on 26 May 1971 and demolished in 1973; the site is now occupied by houses and a street named Blyton Close. An English Heritage blue plaque commemorates Blyton at Hook Road in Chessington, where she lived from 1920 to 1924. In 2014, a plaque recording her time as a Beaconsfield resident from 1938 until her death in 1968 was unveiled in the town hall gardens, next to small iron figures of Noddy and Big Ears.


title: Enid Blyton

text: Since her death and the publication of her daughter Imogen's 1989 autobiography, "A Childhood at Green Hedges", Blyton has emerged as an emotionally immature, unstable and often malicious figure. Imogen considered her mother to be "arrogant, insecure, pretentious, very skilled at putting difficult or unpleasant things out of her mind, and without a trace of maternal instinct. As a child, I viewed her as a rather strict authority. As an adult I pitied her." Blyton's eldest daughter Gillian remembered her rather differently however, as "a fair and loving mother, and a fascinating companion".


title: Enid Blyton

text: The Enid Blyton Trust for Children was established in 1982, with Imogen as its first chairman, and in 1985 it established the National Library for the Handicapped Child. "Enid Blyton's Adventure Magazine" began publication in September 1985 and, on 14 October 1992, the BBC began publishing "Noddy Magazine" and released the Noddy CD-Rom in October 1996.


title: Enid Blyton

text: The first Enid Blyton Day was held at Rickmansworth on 6 March 1993 and, in October 1996, the Enid Blyton award, The Enid, was given to those who have made outstanding contributions towards children. The Enid Blyton Society was formed in early 1995, to provide "a focal point for collectors and enthusiasts of Enid Blyton" through its thrice-annual "Enid Blyton Society Journal", its annual Enid Blyton Day and its website. On 16 December 1996, Channel 4 broadcast a documentary about Blyton, "Secret Lives". To celebrate her centenary in 1997, exhibitions were put on at the London Toy & Model Museum (now closed), Hereford and Worcester County Museum and Bromley Library and, on 9 September, the Royal Mail issued centenary stamps.


title: Enid Blyton

text: The London-based entertainment and retail company Trocadero plc purchased Blyton's Darrell Waters Ltd in 1995 for £14.6 million and established a subsidiary, Enid Blyton Ltd, to handle all intellectual properties, character brands and media in Blyton's works. The group changed its name to Chorion in 1998 but, after financial difficulties in 2012, sold its assets. Hachette UK acquired from Chorion world rights in the Blyton estate in March 2013, including The Famous Five series but excluding the rights to Noddy, which had been sold to DreamWorks Classics (formerly Classic Media, now a subsidiary of DreamWorks Animation) in 2012.


title: Enid Blyton

text: Blyton's granddaughter, Sophie Smallwood, wrote a new Noddy book to celebrate the character's 60th birthday, 46 years after the last book was published; "Noddy and the Farmyard Muddle" (2009) was illustrated by Robert Tyndall. In February 2011, the manuscript of a previously unknown Blyton novel, "Mr Tumpy's Caravan", was discovered by the archivist at Seven Stories, National Centre for Children's Books in a collection of papers belonging to Blyton's daughter Gillian, purchased by Seven Stories in 2010 following her death. It was initially thought to belong to a comic strip collection of the same name published in 1949, but it appears to be unrelated and is believed to be something written in the 1930s, which had been rejected by a publisher.


title: Enid Blyton

text: In a 1982 survey of 10,000 eleven-year-old children, Blyton was voted their most popular writer. She is the world's fourth most-translated author, behind Agatha Christie, Jules Verne and William Shakespeare with her books being translated into 90 languages. From 2000 to 2010, Blyton was listed as a Top Ten author, selling almost 8 million copies (worth £31.2 million) in the UK alone. In 2003, "The Magic Faraway Tree" was voted 66th in the BBC's Big Read. In the 2008 Costa Book Awards, Blyton was voted Britain's best-loved author. Her books continue to be very popular among children in Commonwealth nations such as India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malta, New Zealand and Australia, and around the world. They have also seen a surge of popularity in China, where they are "big with every generation". In March 2004, Chorion and the Chinese publisher Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press negotiated an agreement over the Noddy franchise, which included bringing the character to an animated series on television, with a potential audience of a further 95 million children under the age of five. Chorion spent around £10 million digitising Noddy and, as of 2002, had made television agreements with at least 11 countries worldwide.


title: Enid Blyton

text: Novelists influenced by Blyton include the crime writer Denise Danks, whose fictional detective Georgina Powers is based on George from the Famous Five. Peter Hunt's "A Step off the Path" (1985) is also influenced by the Famous Five, and the St. Clare's and Malory Towers series provided the inspiration for Jacqueline Wilson's "Double Act" (1996) and Adèle Geras's Egerton Hall trilogy (1990–92) respectively. Blyton was important to Stieg Larsson. "The series Stieg Larsson most often mentioned were the Famous Five and the Adventure books."


title: Enid Blyton

text: A.H. Thompson, who compiled an extensive overview of censorship efforts in the United Kingdom's public libraries, dedicated an entire chapter to "The Enid Blyton Affair", and wrote of her in 1975:


title: Enid Blyton

text: Blyton's range of plots and settings has been described as limited, repetitive and continually recycled. Many of her books were critically assessed by teachers and librarians, deemed unfit for children to read, and removed from syllabuses and public libraries. Responding to claims that her moral views were "dependably predictable", Blyton commented that "most of you could write down perfectly correctly all the things that I believe in and stand for – you have found them in my books, and a writer's books are always a faithful reflection of himself".


title: Enid Blyton

text: From the 1930s to the 1950s the BBC operated a "de facto" ban on dramatising Blyton's books for radio, considering her to be a "second-rater" whose work was without literary merit. The children's literary critic Margery Fisher likened Blyton's books to "slow poison", and Jean E. Sutcliffe of the BBC's schools broadcast department wrote of Blyton's ability to churn out "mediocre material", noting that "her capacity to do so amounts to genius ... anyone else would have died of boredom long ago". Michael Rosen, Children's Laureate from 2007 until 2009, wrote that "I find myself flinching at occasional bursts of snobbery and the assumed level of privilege of the children and families in the books." The children's author Anne Fine presented an overview of the concerns about Blyton's work and responses to them on BBC Radio 4 in November 2008, in which she noted the "drip, drip, drip of disapproval" associated with the books. Blyton's response to her critics was that she was uninterested in the views of anyone over the age of 12, stating that half the attacks on her work were motivated by jealousy and the rest came from "stupid people who don't know what they're talking about because they've never read any of my books".


title: Enid Blyton

text: Despite criticism by contemporaries that her work's quality began to suffer in the 1950s at the expense of its increasing volume, Blyton nevertheless capitalised on being generally regarded at the time as "a more 'savoury', English alternative" to what some considered an "invasion" of Britain by American culture, in the form of "rock music, horror comics, television, teenage culture, delinquency, and Disney".


title: Enid Blyton

text: According to British academic Nicholas Tucker, the works of Enid Blyton have been "banned from more public libraries over the years than is the case with any other adult or children's author", though such attempts to quell the popularity of her books over the years seem to have been largely unsuccessful, and "she still remains very widely read".


title: Enid Blyton

text: Some librarians felt that Blyton's restricted use of language, a conscious product of her teaching background, was prejudicial to an appreciation of more literary qualities. In a scathing article published in "Encounter" in 1958, the journalist Colin Welch remarked that it was "hard to see how a diet of Miss Blyton could help with the 11-plus or even with the Cambridge English Tripos", but reserved his harshest criticism for Blyton's Noddy, describing him as an "unnaturally priggish ... sanctimonious ... witless, spiritless, snivelling, sneaking doll."


title: Enid Blyton

text: The author and educational psychologist Nicholas Tucker notes that it was common to see Blyton cited as people's favourite or least favourite author according to their age, and argues that her books create an "encapsulated world for young readers that simply dissolves with age, leaving behind only memories of excitement and strong identification". Fred Inglis considers Blyton's books to be technically easy to read, but to also be "emotionally and cognitively easy". He mentions that the psychologist Michael Woods believed that Blyton was different from many other older authors writing for children in that she seemed untroubled by presenting them with a world that differed from reality. Woods surmised that Blyton "was a child, she thought as a child, and wrote as a child ... the basic feeling is essentially pre-adolescent ... Enid Blyton has no moral dilemmas ... Inevitably Enid Blyton was labelled by rumour a child-hater. If true, such a fact should come as no surprise to us, for as a child herself all other children can be nothing but rivals for her." Inglis argues though that Blyton was clearly devoted to children and put an enormous amount of energy into her work, with a powerful belief in "representing the crude moral diagrams and garish fantasies of a readership". Blyton's daughter Imogen has stated that she "loved a relationship with children through her books", but real children were an intrusion, and there was no room for intruders in the world that Blyton occupied through her writing.


title: Enid Blyton

text: Accusations of racism in Blyton's books were first made by Lena Jeger in a "Guardian" article published in 1966. In the context of discussing possible moves to restrict publications inciting racial hatred, Jeger was critical of Blyton's "The Little Black Doll", originally published in 1937. Sambo, the black doll of the title, is hated by his owner and other toys owing to his "ugly black face", and runs away. A shower of "magic rain" washes his face clean, after which he is welcomed back home with his now pink face. Jamaica Kincaid also considers the Noddy books to be "deeply racist" because of the blonde children and the black golliwogs. In Blyton's 1944 novel "The Island of Adventure", a black servant named Jo-Jo is very intelligent, but is particularly cruel to the children.


title: Enid Blyton

text: Accusations of xenophobia were also made. As George Greenfield observed, "Enid was very much part of that between the wars middle class which believed that foreigners were untrustworthy or funny or sometimes both". The publisher Macmillan conducted an internal assessment of Blyton's "The Mystery That Never Was", submitted to them at the height of her fame in 1960. The review was carried out by the author and books editor Phyllis Hartnoll, in whose view "There is a faint but unattractive touch of old-fashioned xenophobia in the author's attitude to the thieves; they are 'foreign' ... and this seems to be regarded as sufficient to explain their criminality." Macmillan rejected the manuscript, but it was published by William Collins in 1961, and then again in 1965 and 1983.


title: Enid Blyton

text: Blyton's depictions of boys and girls are considered by many critics to be sexist. In a "Guardian" article published in 2005 Lucy Mangan proposed that "The Famous Five" series depicts a power struggle between Julian, Dick and George (Georgina), in which the female characters either act like boys or are talked down to, as when Dick lectures George: "it's really time you gave up thinking you're as good as a boy".


title: Enid Blyton

text: To address criticisms levelled at Blyton's work, some later editions have been altered to reflect more politically progressive attitudes towards issues such as race, gender, violence between young persons, the treatment of children by adults, and legal changes in Britain as to what is allowable for young children to do in the years since the stories were originally written (e.g. purchasing fireworks); modern reprints of the Noddy series substitute teddy bears or goblins for golliwogs, for instance. The golliwogs who steal Noddy's car and dump him naked in the Dark Wood in "Here Comes Noddy Again" are replaced by goblins in the 1986 revision, who strip Noddy only of his shoes and hat and return at the end of the story to apologise.


title: Enid Blyton

text: "The Faraway Tree"'s Dame Slap, who made regular use of corporal punishment, was changed to Dame Snap who no longer did so, and the names of Dick and Fanny in the same series were changed to Rick and Frannie. Characters in the Malory Towers and St. Clare's series are no longer spanked or threatened with a spanking, but are instead scolded. References to George's short hair making her look like a boy were removed in revisions to "Five on a Hike Together", reflecting the idea that girls need not have long hair to be considered feminine or normal. Anne of "The Famous Five" stating that boys cannot wear pretty dresses or like girls' dolls was removed. In "The Adventurous Four", the names of the young twin girls were changed from Jill and Mary to Pippa and Zoe.


title: Enid Blyton

text: In 2010 Hodder, the publisher of the Famous Five series, announced its intention to update the language used in the books, of which it sold more than half a million copies a year. The changes, which Hodder described as "subtle", mainly affect the dialogue rather than the narrative. For instance, "school tunic" becomes "uniform", "mother and father" and "mother and daddy" (this latter one used by young female characters and deemed sexist) become "mum and dad", "bathing" is replaced by "swimming", and "jersey" by "jumper". Some commentators see the changes as necessary to encourage modern readers, whereas others regard them as unnecessary and patronising. In 2016 Hodder's parent company Hachette announced that they would abandon the revisions as, based on feedback, they had not been a success.


title: Enid Blyton

text: In 1954 Blyton adapted Noddy for the stage, producing the "Noddy in Toyland" pantomime in just two or three weeks. The production was staged at the 2660-seat Stoll Theatre in Kingsway, London at Christmas. Its popularity resulted in the show running during the Christmas season for five or six years. Blyton was delighted with its reception by children in the audience, and attended the theatre three or four times a week. TV adaptations of Noddy since 1954 include one in the 1970s narrated by Richard Briers. In 1955 a stage play based on the Famous Five was produced, and in January 1997 the King's Head Theatre embarked on a six-month tour of the UK with "The Famous Five Musical", to commemorate Blyton's centenary. On 21 November 1998 "The Secret Seven Save the World" was first performed at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff.


title: Enid Blyton

text: There have also been several film and television adaptations of the Famous Five: by the Children's Film Foundation in 1957 and 1964, Southern Television in 1978–79, and Zenith Productions in 1995–97. The series was also adapted for the German film "Fünf Freunde", directed by Mike Marzuk and released in 2011.


title: Enid Blyton

text: The Comic Strip, a group of British comedians, produced two extreme parodies of the Famous Five for Channel 4 television: "Five Go Mad in Dorset", broadcast in 1982, and "Five Go Mad on Mescalin", broadcast the following year. A third in the series, "Five Go to Rehab", was broadcast on Sky in 2012.


title: Enid Blyton

text: Blyton's "The Faraway Tree" series of books has also been adapted to television and film. On 29 September 1997 the BBC began broadcasting an animated series called "The Enchanted Lands", based on the series. It was announced in October 2014 that a deal had been signed with publishers Hachette for "The Faraway Tree" series to be adapted into a live-action film by director Sam Mendes' production company. Marlene Johnson, head of children's books at Hachette, said: "Enid Blyton was a passionate advocate of children's storytelling, and The Magic Faraway Tree is a fantastic example of her creative imagination."


title: Enid Blyton

text: Blyton's "Malory Towers" has been adapted into a musical of the same name by Emma Rice's theatre company. It was scheduled to do a UK spring tour in 2020 which has been postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.


title: Enid Blyton

text: In 2019, "Malory Towers" was adapted as a 13 part TV series for the BBC. It is made partly in Toronto and partly in the UK in association with Canada's Family Channel. The series went to air in the UK from April 2020.


title: Enid Blyton

text: Seven Stories, the National Centre for Children's Books in Newcastle upon Tyne, holds the largest public collection of Blyton's papers and typescripts. The Seven Stories collection contains a significant number of Blyton's typescripts, including the previously unpublished novel, "Mr Tumpy's Caravan", as well as personal papers and diaries. The purchase of the material in 2010 was made possible by special funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the MLA/V&A Purchase Grant Fund, and two private donations.


title: Kirby Howell-Baptiste

text: Kirby Howell-Baptiste (born 7 February 1987) is a British actress. She has appeared as a series regular on "Downward Dog" (2017), "Killing Eve" (2018), "Why Women Kill" (2019), and "The Sandman" (2022). Her television appearances also include recurring roles on "Love" (2016–2018), "Barry" (2018–2019), "The Good Place" (2018–2020), and the fourth season of "Veronica Mars" (2019), and a starring role in the second and third books of the animated series "Infinity Train" (2020) as Grace Monroe.


title: Kirby Howell-Baptiste

text: Howell-Baptiste is from London. Her mother owned clothing stalls in Camden. Howell-Baptiste began acting at the Anna Scher Theatre.


title: Kirby Howell-Baptiste

text: Howell-Baptiste's acting career has included many appearances in guest and recurring television series roles, in addition to several short and feature-length films. Her earlier television work includes the IFC sketch comedy series "Comedy Bang! Bang!" and the Showtime series "House of Lies". She was also a series regular in the short-lived ABC series "Downward Dog" in 2017. Howell-Baptiste followed in 2018 with her role as Elena in the first season of the BBC America series "Killing Eve". She currently has a recurring role as actress Sasha Baxter in the HBO comedy-drama series "Barry", and has appeared as neuroscientist Simone Garnett on the NBC series "The Good Place", beginning in the third season. On streaming television platforms, Howell-Baptiste has had recurring roles on the Netflix series "Love" and the fourth season of "Veronica Mars" for Hulu, and appeared in the main cast of the CBS All Access series "Why Women Kill" for its first season. She booked the role of Anita Darling in Disney's "Cruella" in 2021.


title: Exclamation mark

text: The exclamation mark, , or exclamation point (American English), is a punctuation mark usually used after an interjection or exclamation to indicate strong feelings or to show emphasis. The exclamation mark often marks the end of a sentence, for example: "Watch out!". Similarly, a bare exclamation mark (with nothing before or after) is often used in warning signs. The exclamation mark is often used in writing to make a character seem as though they are shouting and/or excited/surprised.


title: Exclamation mark

text: Graphically, the exclamation mark is represented by variations on the theme of a full stop point with a vertical line above. One theory of its origin posits derivation from a Latin exclamation of joy, namely , analogous to "hurray"; copyists wrote the Latin word at the end of a sentence, to indicate expression of joy. Over time, the "i" moved above the "o"; that "o" first became smaller, and (with time) a dot.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In the 15th century, the exclamation mark was introduced into English printing to show emphasis. It was later called by many names, including "point of admiration" (1611), "note of exclamation or admiration" (1657), "sign of admiration or exclamation", "exclamation point" (1824), and finally, "exclamation mark" (1839).


title: Exclamation mark

text: Many older or portable typewriters did not have the exclamation mark. Instead the user typed a full stop and then backspaced and overtyped an apostrophe.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In the 1950s, secretarial dictation and typesetting manuals in America referred to the mark as "bang", perhaps from comic books – where the ! appeared in dialogue balloons to represent a gun being fired – although the nickname probably emerged from letterpress printing. This "bang" usage is behind the names of the interrobang, an unconventional typographic character, and a shebang, a feature of Unix computer systems.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In the printing world, the exclamation mark can be called a screamer, a gasper, a slammer, a dog's cock, or a startler.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In hacker culture, the exclamation mark is called "bang", "shriek", or, in the British slang known as Commonwealth Hackish, "pling". For example, the password communicated in the spoken phrase "Your password is em-zero-pee-aitch-bang-en-three" ("em-nought-pee-aitch-pling-en-three" in Commonwealth Hackish) is codice_1.


title: Exclamation mark

text: The exclamation mark is common to languages using the Latin alphabet, although usage varies slightly between languages. It has also been adopted in languages written in other scripts, such as languages written with Cyrillic or Arabic scripts, Chinese characters, and Devanagari.


title: Exclamation mark

text: A sentence ending in an exclamation mark may represent an exclamation or an interjection (such as "Wow!", "Boo!"), or an imperative ("Stop!"), or may indicate astonishment or surprise: "They were the footprints of a gigantic hound!" Exclamation marks are occasionally placed mid-sentence with a function similar to a comma, for dramatic effect, although this usage is obsolete: "On the walk, oh! there was a frightful noise."


title: Exclamation mark

text: Informally, exclamation marks may be repeated for additional emphasis ("That's great!!!"), but this practice is generally considered unacceptable in formal prose.


title: Exclamation mark

text: The exclamation mark is sometimes used in conjunction with the question mark. This can be in protest or astonishment ("Out of all places, the squatter-camp?!"); a few writers replace this with a single, nonstandard punctuation mark, the interrobang, which is the combination of a question mark and an exclamation mark.


title: Exclamation mark

text: Overly frequent use of the exclamation mark is generally considered poor writing, as it distracts the reader and decreases the mark's significance.


title: Exclamation mark

text: Some authors, most notably Tom Wolfe, are known for unashamedly liberal use of the exclamation mark. In comic books, the very frequent use of exclamation mark is common—see Comics, below.


title: Exclamation mark

text: For information on the use of spaces after an exclamation mark, see the discussion of spacing after a full stop.


title: Exclamation mark

text: Several studies have shown that women use exclamation marks more than men do. One study suggests that, in addition to other uses, exclamation marks may also function as markers of friendly interaction, for example, by making "Hi!" or "Good luck!" seem friendlier than simply "Hi." or "Good luck." (with periods). However, use of exclamation marks in contexts that are not unambiguously positive can be misinterpreted as indicating hostility.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In English writing and often subtitles, a (!) symbol (an exclamation mark within parentheses) implies that a character has made an obviously sarcastic comment e.g.: ""Ooh, a sarcasm detector. That's a" really useful" invention(!)"" It also is used to indicate surprise at one's own experience or statement.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In French, as well as marking exclamations or indicating astonishment, the exclamation mark is also commonly used to mark orders or requests: (English: 'Come here!'). When available, a 'narrow no-break space' () is used between the last word and the exclamation mark in European French. If not, a regular non-breaking space () is currently used. In Canadian French, either no space is used or a small space () is inserted if available. One can also combine an exclamation mark with a question mark at the end of a sentence where appropriate.


title: Exclamation mark

text: Cantonese has not historically used dedicated punctuation marks, rather relying on grammatical markers to denote the end of a statement. Usage of exclamation marks is common in written Mandarin and in some Yue speaking regions. The Canton and Hong Kong regions, however, generally refused to accept the exclamation mark as it was seen as carrying with it unnecessary and confusing Western connotations; however, an exclamation mark, including in some written representations of colloquy in Cantonese, can be used informally to indicate strong feeling.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In Modern Greek, the exclamation mark (, ) has been introduced from Latin scripts and is used identically, although without the reluctance seen in English usage. A minor grammatical difference is that, while a series of interjections each employ an exclamation mark (e.g., , , 'Oops! Oh!'), an interjection should only be separated from an extended exclamation by a comma (e.g., , , 'Oops! I left the stove on.').


title: Exclamation mark

text: In Hungarian, an exclamation mark is put at the end of exclamatory, imperative or prohibitive sentences, and sentences expressing a wish (e.g. – 'How beautiful!', – 'Keep off the grass', – 'If only my plan had worked out.').


title: Exclamation mark

text: The use of the exclamation mark is also needed when addressing someone and the addressing is a separate sentence. (typically at the beginning of letters, e.g. – 'Dear Peter,').


title: Exclamation mark

text: In Spanish, a sentence or clause ending in an exclamation mark must also begin with an inverted exclamation mark (the same also applies to the question mark): , 'Are you crazy? You almost killed her!'


title: Exclamation mark

text: As in British English, a bracketed exclamation mark may be used to indicate irony or surprise at a statement: , 'He said that he's not going to a party tonight(!).' Such use is not matched by an inverted opening exclamation mark.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In Turkish, an exclamation mark is used after a sentence or phrase for emphasis, and is common following both commands and the addressees of such commands. For example, in the ('Armies! Your first target is the Mediterranean') order by Atatürk, ('the armies') constitute the addressee. It is further used in parentheses, , after a sentence or phrase to indicate irony or sarcasm: , 'You've done a very good job – Not!'.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In Limbu, an exclamation mark is used after a Limbu sentence or phrase for emphasis, and is common following both commands and the addressees of such commands. For example, in the Limbu sentence "ᤐᤚᤢ᥄ ᤄᤨᤘᤑ ᤂᤥᤆᤌᤙ Mediterranean, ᤚᤦᤛᤅ᥄" — "Paṡu! Ghōwapha khōcathaśa Mediterranean, ṡausaṅa!" (Armies! Your first target is the "Mediterranean"!). It is further used in parentheses, (᥄), after a sentence or phrase to indicate irony or sarcasm: "ᤖᤥᤂᤌ ᤔᤚᤗ ᤐᤤ ᤊᤇ ᤃᤦᤄ (᥄)" — "Rōkhatha maṡala pai yancha gaugha (!)" (You did a very good job — Not!).


title: Exclamation mark

text: In Khoisan languages, and the International Phonetic Alphabet, the exclamation mark is used as a letter to indicate the postalveolar click sound (represented as "q" in Zulu orthography). In Unicode, this letter is properly coded as and distinguished from the common punctuation symbol to allow software to deal properly with word breaks.


title: Exclamation mark

text: The exclamation mark has sometimes been used as a phonetic symbol to indicate that a consonant is ejective. More commonly this is represented by an apostrophe, or a superscript glottal stop symbol ().


title: Exclamation mark

text: Although not part of dictionary words, exclamation marks appear in some brand names and trade names, including Yum! Brands (parent of fast food chains like Taco Bell and KFC), Web services Yahoo! and Joomla!, and the online game Kahoot!. It appears in the titles of stage and screen works, especially comedies and musicals; examples include the game show "Jeopardy!"; the '60s musical TV show "Shindig!"; musicals "Oklahoma!", "Mamma Mia!", "Oliver!" and "Oh! Calcutta!"; and movies "Airplane!" and "Moulin Rouge!". Writer Elliot S! Maggin and cartoonist Scott Shaw! include exclamation marks in their names. In the 2016 United States presidential campaign, Republican candidate Jeb Bush used "Jeb!" as his campaign logo.


title: Exclamation mark

text: The English town of Westward Ho!, named after the novel by Charles Kingsley, is the only place name in the United Kingdom that officially contains an exclamation mark. There is a town in Quebec called Saint-Louis-du-Ha! Ha!, which is spelled with two exclamation marks. The city of Hamilton, Ohio, changed its name to Hamilton! in 1986, but neither the United States Board on Geographic Names nor mapmakers Rand McNally recognised the change. The city of Ostrava, Czech Republic, changed its logotype to Ostrava!!! in 2008.


title: Exclamation mark

text: On warning signs, an exclamation mark is often used to draw attention to a warning of danger, hazards, and the unexpected. These signs are common in hazardous environments or on potentially dangerous equipment. A common type of this warning is a yellow triangle with a black exclamation mark, but a white triangle with a red border is common on European road warning signs.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In elementary mathematics, the symbol represents the factorial operation. The expression ! means "the product of the integers from 1 to ". For example, 4! (read "four factorial") is 4 × 3 × 2 × 1 = 24. (0! is defined as 1, which is a neutral element in multiplication, not multiplied by anything.) Additionally, it can also represent the uniqueness quantifier or, if used in front of a number, it can represent a subfactorial.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In linear logic, the exclamation mark denotes one of the modalities that control weakening and contraction.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In computing, the exclamation mark is ASCII character 33 (21 in hexadecimal). Due to its availability on even early computers, the character was used for many purposes. The name given to "!" by programmers varies according to their background, though it was very common to give it a short name to make reading code aloud easier. "Bang" is very popular. In the UK the term pling was popular in the earlier days of computing, whilst in the United States, the term shriek was used. It is claimed that these word usages were invented in the US and "shriek" is from Stanford or MIT; however, "shriek" for the ! sign is found in the "Oxford English Dictionary" dating from the 1860s.


title: Exclamation mark

text: Many computer languages using C-style syntax use "!" for logical negation; means "not A", and means "A is not equal to B". This negation principle has spread to ordinary language; for example, the word "!clue" is used as a synonym for "no-clue" or "clueless". The symbol in formal logic for negation is but, as this symbol is not present as standard on some keyboards, the C convention has spread informally to other contexts.


title: Exclamation mark

text: Early e-mail systems also used the exclamation mark as a separator character between hostnames for routing information, usually referred to as "bang path" notation.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In the IRC protocol, a user's nickname and ident are separated by an exclamation mark in the hostmask assigned to him or her by the server.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In UNIX scripting (typically for UNIX shell or Perl), "!" is usually used after a "#" in the first line of a script, the interpreter directive, to tell the OS what program to use to run the script. is usually called a "hash-bang" or shebang. A similar convention for PostScript files calls for the first line to begin with , called "percent-bang".


title: Exclamation mark

text: An exclamation mark starts history expansions in many Unix shells such as bash and tcsh where executes the previous command and refers to all of the arguments from the previous command.


title: Exclamation mark

text: Acorn RISC OS uses filenames starting with pling to create an application directory: for instance a file called codice_2 is executed when the folder containing it is double-clicked (holding down shift prevents this). There is also codice_3 (executed the first time the application containing it comes into view of the filer), codice_4 (icons), codice_5, and others.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In APL, is used for factorial of x (backwards from math notation), and also for the binomial coefficient: means formula_1 or .


title: Exclamation mark

text: BCPL, the precursor of C, used "!" for pointer and array indirection: is equivalent to in C, and is equivalent to in C.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In the Kotlin programming language, "!!" ("double-bang") is the not-null assertion operator, used to override null safety so as to allow a null pointer exception.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In the ML programming language (including Standard ML and OCaml), "!" is the operator to get the value out of a "reference" data structure.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In the Raku programming language, the "!" twigil is used to access private attributes or methods in a class (like codice_6 or codice_7).


title: Exclamation mark

text: In the Scheme, Julia, and Ruby programming languages, "!" is conventionally the suffix for functions and special forms that mutate their input.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In the Swift programming language, a type followed by "!" denotes an "implicitly unwrapped optional", an option type where the compiler does not enforce safe unwrapping. The "!" operator "force unwraps" an option type, causing an error if it is nil.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In Geek Code version 3, "!" is used before a letter to denote that the geek refuses to participate in the topic at hand. In some cases, it has an alternate meaning, such as "G!" denoting a geek of no qualifications, "!d" denoting not wearing any clothes, "P!" denoting not being allowed to use Perl, and so on. They all share some negative connotations, however.


title: Exclamation mark

text: The exclamation mark can be used in video games to signify that a character is startled or alarmed. In the "Metal Gear" and "Paper Mario" series, an exclamation mark appears over enemies' heads when they notice the player.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In massively multiplayer online (MMO) games such as "World of Warcraft", an exclamation mark hovering over a character's head is often used to indicate that they are offering a quest for the player to complete.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In "Dota 2", an exclamation mark is shown above the head of a unit if it is killed by means not granting enemies experience or gold (if it is "denied").


title: Exclamation mark

text: In the 2005 arcade dance simulation game "In the Groove 2", there is a song titled "!" (also referred to as "bang") by the artist Onyx.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In Internet culture, especially where leet is used, multiple exclamation marks may be affixed with the numeral "1" as in "!!!!!!111". The notation originates from a common error: when typing multiple exclamation points quickly, the typist may fail to hold the combination that produces the exclamation mark on many keyboard layouts. This error, first used intentionally as a joke in the leet linguistic community, is now an accepted form of exclamation in leet and derivative dialects such as Lolspeak. Some utterances include further substitutions, for example "!!!111oneeleven".


title: Exclamation mark

text: In fandom and fanfiction, ! is used to signify a defining quality in a character, usually signifying an alternative interpretation of a character from a canonical work. Examples of this would be "Romantic!Draco" or "Vampire!Harry" from Harry Potter fandom. It is also used to clarify the current persona of a character with multiple identities or appearances, such as to distinguish "Armor!Al" from "Human!Al" in a work based on Fullmetal Alchemist. The origin of this usage is unknown, although it is hypothesized to have originated with certain Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures, for example, "Football Player! Leonardo", "Rockstar! Raphael", and "Breakdancer! Michelangelo".


title: Exclamation mark

text: Some comic books, especially superhero comics of the mid-20th century, routinely use the exclamation point instead of the period, which means the character has just realized something; unlike when the question mark appears instead, which means the character is confused, surprised or they do not know what is happening. This tends to lead to exaggerated speech, in line with the other hyperboles common in comic books. A portion of the motivation, however, was simply that a period might disappear in the printing process used at the time, whereas an exclamation point would likely remain recognizable even if there was a printing glitch. For a short period Stan Lee, as editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics, attempted to curb their overuse by a short-lived ban on exclamation points altogether, which led to an inadvertent lack of ending punctuation on many sentences.


title: Exclamation mark

text: Comic book writer Elliot S! Maggin once accidentally signed his name with an exclamation due to the habit of using them when writing comic scripts; it became his professional name from then on. Similarly, comic artist Scott Shaw! has used the exclamation point after his name throughout his career.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In comic books and comics in general, a large exclamation point is often used near or over a character's head to indicate surprise. A question mark can similarly be used to indicate confusion.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In chess notation denotes a good move, denotes an excellent move, "?!" denotes a dubious move, and "!?" denotes an interesting, risky move. In some chess variants such as large-board Shogi variants, "!" is used to record pieces capturing by stationary feeding or burning.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In "Scrabble", an exclamation mark written after a word is used to indicate its presence in the Official Tournament and Club Word List but its absence from the "Official Scrabble Players Dictionary", usually because the word has been judged offensive.


title: Exclamation mark

text: In 2008, the pop-punk band Panic! at the Disco dropped the exclamation point in its name; this became the "most-discussed topic on [fan] message boards around the world". In 2009, the exclamation mark was re-inserted following the band's split.


title: Exclamation mark

text: The band Bomb the Music Industry! utilizes an exclamation mark in its name, as well as several album and song titles and promotional material. Examples include their songs "(Shut) Up The Punx!!!" and the album "".


title: Exclamation mark

text: American musician Pink stylizes her stage name "P!NK", and uses three exclamation points in the subtitle of her 2010 release, "Greatest Hits... So Far!!!".


title: Exclamation mark

text: The exclamation mark was included in the title of Dinah Shore's TV series, "Dinah!" The exclamation mark was later the subject of a bitter argument between Elaine Benes and her boyfriend, Jake Jarmel, in the "Seinfeld" episode, "The Sniffing Accountant". Elaine got upset with Jake for not putting an exclamation mark at the end of a message about her friend having a baby. Jake took extreme exception to the trivial criticism and broke up with Elaine, putting an exclamation mark after his parting words: "I'm leaving!"


title: Exclamation mark

text: In musicals, an exclamation mark is usually used when the title of the show has the same title of a song within the act. Examples of this are shows like "Oklahoma!" and "Mamma Mia!".


title: Objectivism

text: Objectivism is a philosophical system developed by Russian-American writer and philosopher Ayn Rand. She described it as "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute".


title: Objectivism

text: Rand first expressed Objectivism in her fiction, most notably "The Fountainhead" (1943) and "Atlas Shrugged" (1957), and later in non-fiction essays and books. Leonard Peikoff, a professional philosopher and Rand's designated intellectual heir, later gave it a more formal structure. Peikoff characterizes Objectivism as a "closed system" insofar as its "fundamental principles" were set out by Rand and are not subject to change. However, he stated that "new implications, applications and integrations can always be discovered".


title: Objectivism

text: Objectivism's main tenets are that reality exists independently of consciousness, that human beings have direct contact with reality through sense perception (see direct and indirect realism), that one can attain objective knowledge from perception through the process of concept formation and inductive logic, that the proper moral purpose of one's life is the pursuit of one's own happiness (see rational egoism), that the only social system consistent with this morality is one that displays full respect for individual rights embodied in "laissez-faire" capitalism, and that the role of art in human life is to transform humans' metaphysical ideas by selective reproduction of reality into a physical form—a work of art—that one can comprehend and to which one can respond emotionally.


title: Objectivism

text: A limited number of academic philosophers support Rand's philosophy, but most others ignore or reject it. Nonetheless, Objectivism has been a significant influence among libertarians and American conservatives. The Objectivist movement, which Rand founded, attempts to spread her ideas to the public and in academic settings.


title: Objectivism

text: Rand originally expressed her philosophical ideas in her novels—most notably, in both "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged". She further elaborated on them in her periodicals "The Objectivist Newsletter", "The Objectivist", and "The Ayn Rand Letter", and in non-fiction books such as "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology" and "The Virtue of Selfishness".


title: Objectivism

text: The name "Objectivism" derives from the idea that human knowledge and values are objective: they exist and are determined by the nature of reality, to be discovered by one's mind, and are not created by the thoughts one has. Rand stated that she chose the name because her preferred term for a philosophy based on the primacy of existence—"existentialism"—had already been taken.


title: Objectivism

text: Rand characterized Objectivism as "a philosophy for living on earth", based on reality, and intended as a method of defining human nature and the nature of the world in which we live.


title: Objectivism

text: Rand's philosophy begins with three axioms: existence, consciousness, and identity. Rand defined an axiom as "a statement that identifies the base of knowledge and of any further statement pertaining to that knowledge, a statement necessarily contained in all others whether any particular speaker chooses to identify it or not. An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it." As Objectivist philosopher Leonard Peikoff argued, Rand's argument for axioms "is not a proof that the axioms of existence, consciousness, and identity are true. It is proof that they are "axioms", that they are at the base of knowledge and thus inescapable."


title: Objectivism

text: Rand said that "existence" is the perceptually self-evident fact at the base of all other knowledge, i.e., that "existence exists". She further said that to be is to be "something", that "existence "is" identity". That is, to be is to be "an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes". That which has no nature or attributes does not and cannot exist. The axiom of existence is conceptualized as differentiating something from nothing, while the law of identity is conceptualized as differentiating one thing from another, i.e., one's first awareness of the law of non-contradiction, another crucial base for the rest of knowledge. As Rand wrote, "A leaf ... cannot be all red and green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time... A is A." Objectivism rejects belief in anything alleged to transcend existence.


title: Objectivism

text: Rand argued that consciousness is "the faculty of perceiving that which exists". As she put it, "to be conscious is to be conscious of "something"", that is consciousness itself cannot be distinguished or conceptualized except in relation to an independent reality. "It cannot be aware only of itself—there is no 'itself' until it is aware of something." Thus, Objectivism posits that the mind does not create reality, but rather, it is a means of discovering reality. Expressed differently, existence has "primacy" over consciousness, which must conform to it. Any other type of argument Rand termed "the primacy of consciousness", including any variant of metaphysical subjectivism or theism.


title: Objectivism

text: Objectivist philosophy derives its explanations of action and causation from the axiom of identity, referring to causation as "the law of identity applied to action". According to Rand, it is entities that act, and every action is the action of an entity. The way entities act is caused by the specific nature (or "identity") of those entities; if they were different they would act differently. As with the other axioms, an implicit understanding of causation is derived from one's primary observations of causal connections among entities even before it is verbally identified, and serves as the basis of further knowledge.


title: Objectivism

text: According to Rand, attaining knowledge beyond what is given by perception requires both volition (or the exercise of free will) and performing a specific method of validation by observation, concept-formation, and the application of inductive and deductive reasoning. For example, a belief in dragons, however sincere, does not mean that reality includes dragons. A process of proof identifying the basis in reality of a claimed item of knowledge is necessary to establish its truth.


title: Objectivism

text: Objectivist epistemology begins with the principle that "consciousness is identification". This is understood to be a direct consequence of the metaphysical principle that "existence is identity". Rand defined "reason" as "the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses". Rand wrote "The fundamental concept of method, the one on which all the others depend, is logic. The distinguishing characteristic of logic (the art of non-contradictory identification) indicates the nature of the actions (actions of consciousness required to achieve a correct identification) and their goal (knowledge)—while omitting the length, complexity or specific steps of the process of logical inference, as well as the nature of the particular cognitive problem involved in any given instance of using logic."


title: Objectivism

text: According to Rand, consciousness possesses a specific and finite identity, just like everything else that exists; therefore, it must operate by a specific method of validation. An item of knowledge cannot be "disqualified" by being arrived at by a specific process in a particular form. Thus, for Rand, the fact that consciousness must itself possess identity implies the rejection of both universal skepticism based on the "limits" of consciousness, as well as any claim to revelation, emotion or faith based belief.


title: Objectivism

text: Objectivist epistemology maintains that all knowledge is ultimately based on perception. "Percepts, not sensations, are the given, the self-evident." Rand considered the validity of the senses to be axiomatic, and said that purported arguments to the contrary all commit the fallacy of the "stolen concept" by presupposing the validity of concepts that, in turn, presuppose the validity of the senses. She said that perception, being determined physiologically, is incapable of error. For example, optical illusions are errors in the conceptual identification of what is seen, not errors of sight itself. The validity of sense perception, therefore, is not susceptible to proof (because it is presupposed by all proof as proof is only a matter of adducing sensory evidence) nor should its validity be denied (since the conceptual tools one would have to use to do this are derived from sensory data). Perceptual error, therefore, is not possible. Rand consequently rejected epistemological skepticism, as she said that the skeptics' claim to knowledge "distorted" by the form or the means of perception is impossible.


title: Objectivism

text: The Objectivist theory of perception distinguishes between the "form" and "object." The form in which an organism perceives is determined by the physiology of its sensory systems. Whatever form the organism perceives it in, what it perceives—the object of perception—is reality. Rand consequently rejected the Kantian dichotomy between "things as we perceive them" and "things as they are in themselves". Rand wrote


title: Objectivism

text: The aspect of epistemology given the most elaboration by Rand is the theory of concept-formation, which she presented in "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology". She argued that concepts are formed by a process of measurement omission. Peikoff described this as follows:


title: Objectivism

text: According to Rand, "the term 'measurements omitted' does not mean, in this context, that measurements are regarded as non-existent; it means that "measurements exist, but are not specified". That measurements "must" exist is an essential part of the process. The principle is: the relevant measurements must exist in "some" quantity, but may exist in "any" quantity."


title: Objectivism

text: Rand argued that concepts are organized hierarchically. Concepts such as 'dog,' which bring together "concretes" available in perception, can be differentiated (into the concepts of 'dachshund,' 'poodle,' etc.) or integrated (along with 'cat,' etc., into the concept of 'animal'). Abstract concepts such as 'animal' can be further integrated, via "abstraction from abstractions", into such concepts as 'living thing.' Concepts are formed in the context of knowledge available. A young child differentiates dogs from cats and chickens, but need not explicitly differentiate them from deep-sea tube worms, or from other types of animals not yet known to him, to form a concept 'dog'.


title: Objectivism

text: Because of its characterization of concepts as "open-ended" classifications that go well beyond the characteristics included in their past or current definitions, Objectivist epistemology rejects the analytic-synthetic distinction as a false dichotomy and denies the possibility of "a priori" knowledge.


title: Objectivism

text: Rand rejected "feeling" as sources of knowledge. Rand acknowledged the importance of emotion for human beings, but she maintained that emotions are a consequence of the conscious or subconscious ideas that a person already accepts, not a means of achieving awareness of reality. "Emotions are not tools of cognition." Rand also rejected all forms of faith or mysticism, terms that she used synonymously. She defined faith as "the acceptance of allegations without evidence or proof, either apart from or "against" the evidence of one's senses and reason... Mysticism is the claim to some non-sensory, non-rational, non-definable, non-identifiable means of knowledge, such as 'instinct,' 'intuition,' 'revelation,' or any form of 'just knowing.'" Reliance on revelation is like reliance on a Ouija board; it bypasses the need to show how it connects its results to reality. Faith, for Rand, is not a "short-cut" to knowledge, but a "short-circuit" destroying it.


title: Objectivism

text: Objectivism acknowledges the facts that human beings have limited knowledge, are vulnerable to error, and do not instantly understand all of the implications of their knowledge. According to Peikoff, one can be certain of a proposition if all of the available evidence verifies it, i.e., it can be logically integrated with the rest of one's knowledge; one is then certain within the context of the evidence.


title: Objectivism

text: Rand rejected the traditional rationalist/empiricist dichotomy, arguing that it embodies a false alternative: conceptually-based knowledge independent of perception (rationalism) versus perceptually-based knowledge independent of concepts (empiricism). Rand argued that neither is possible because the senses provide the material of knowledge while conceptual processing is also needed to establish knowable propositions.


title: Objectivism

text: The philosopher John Hospers, who was influenced by Rand and shared her moral and political opinions, disagreed with her concerning issues of epistemology. Some philosophers, such as Tibor Machan, have argued that the Objectivist epistemology is incomplete.


title: Objectivism

text: Psychology professor Robert L. Campbell writes that the relationship between Objectivist epistemology and cognitive science remains unclear because Rand made claims about human cognition and its development which belong to psychology, yet Rand also argued that philosophy is logically prior to psychology and in no way dependent on it.


title: Objectivism

text: The philosophers Randall Dipert and Roderick T. Long have argued that Objectivist epistemology conflates the perceptual process by which judgments are formed with the way in which they are to be justified, thereby leaving it unclear how sensory data can validate judgments structured propositionally.


title: Objectivism

text: Objectivism includes an extensive treatment of ethical concerns. Rand wrote on morality in her works "We the Living" (1936), "Atlas Shrugged" (1957) and "The Virtue of Selfishness" (1964). Rand defines morality as "a code of values to guide man's choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life". Rand maintained that the first question is not what should the code of values be, the first question is "Does man need values at all—and why?" According to Rand, "it is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible", and "the fact that a living entity "is", determines what it "ought" to do". Rand writes: "there is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms. The existence of inanimate matter is unconditional, the existence of life is not: it depends on a specific course of action. [...] It is only a living organism that faces a constant alternative: the issue of life or death".


title: Objectivism

text: Rand argued that the primary emphasis of man's free will is the choice: 'to think or not to think'. "Thinking is not an automatic function. In any hour and issue of his life, man is free to think or to evade that effort. Thinking requires a state of full, focused awareness. The act of focusing one's consciousness is volitional. Man can focus his mind to a full, active, purposefully directed awareness of reality—or he can unfocus it and let himself drift in a semiconscious daze, merely reacting to any chance stimulus of the immediate moment, at the mercy of his undirected sensory-perceptual mechanism and of any random, associational connections it might happen to make." According to Rand, therefore, possessing free will, human beings must "choose" their values: one does not "automatically" have one's own life as his ultimate value. Whether in fact a person's actions promote and fulfill his own life or not is a question of fact, as it is with all other organisms, but whether a person will act to promote his well-being is up to him, not hard-wired into his physiology. "Man has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history."


title: Objectivism

text: In "Atlas Shrugged", Rand wrote "Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive he must act and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch—or build a cyclotron—without a knowledge of his aim and the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think." In her novels, "The Fountainhead" and "Atlas Shrugged", she also emphasizes the importance of productive work, romantic love and art to human happiness, and dramatizes the ethical character of their pursuit. The primary virtue in Objectivist ethics is rationality, as Rand meant it "the recognition and acceptance of reason as one's only source of knowledge, one's only judge of values and one's only guide to action".


title: Objectivism

text: The purpose of a moral code, Rand said, is to provide the principles by reference to which man can achieve the values his survival requires. Rand summarizes:


title: Objectivism

text: Rand's explanation of values presents the proposition that an individual's primary moral obligation is to achieve his own well-being—it is for his life and his self-interest that an individual ought to obey a moral code. Ethical egoism is a corollary of setting man's life as the moral standard. Rand believed that rational egoism is the logical consequence of humans following evidence to its logical conclusion. The only alternative would be that they live without orientation to reality.


title: Objectivism

text: A corollary to Rand's endorsement of self-interest is her rejection of the ethical doctrine of altruism—which she defined in the sense of Auguste Comte's altruism (he popularized the term), as a moral obligation to live for the sake of others. Rand also rejected subjectivism. A "whim-worshiper" or "hedonist", according to Rand, is not motivated by a desire to live his own human life, but by a wish to live on a sub-human level. Instead of using "that which promotes my (human) life" as his standard of value, he mistakes "that which I (mindlessly happen to) value" for a standard of value, in contradiction of the fact that, existentially, he is a human and therefore rational organism. The "I value" in whim-worship or hedonism can be replaced with "we value", "he values", "they value", or "God values", and still it would remain dissociated from reality. Rand repudiated the equation of rational selfishness with hedonistic or whim-worshiping "selfishness-without-a-self". She said that the former is good, and the latter bad, and that there is a fundamental difference between them.


title: Objectivism

text: For Rand, all of the principal virtues are applications of the role of reason as man's basic tool of survival: rationality, honesty, justice, independence, integrity, productiveness, and pride—each of which she explains in some detail in "The Objectivist Ethics". The essence of Objectivist ethics is summarized by the oath her "Atlas Shrugged" character John Galt adhered to: "I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."


title: Objectivism

text: Some philosophers have criticized Objectivist ethics. The philosopher Robert Nozick argues that Rand's foundational argument in ethics is unsound because it does not explain why someone could not rationally prefer dying and having no values, in order to further some particular value. He argues that her attempt to defend the morality of selfishness is, therefore, an instance of begging the question. Nozick also argues that Rand's solution to David Hume's famous is-ought problem is unsatisfactory. In response, the philosophers Douglas B. Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl have argued that Nozick misstated Rand's case.


title: Objectivism

text: Charles King criticized Rand's example of an indestructible robot to demonstrate the value of life as incorrect and confusing. In response, Paul St. F. Blair defended Rand's ethical conclusions, while maintaining that his arguments might not have been approved by Rand.


title: Objectivism

text: Rand's defense of individual liberty integrates elements from her entire philosophy. Since reason is the means of human knowledge, it is therefore each person's most fundamental means of survival and is necessary to the achievement of values. The use or threat of force neutralizes the practical effect of an individual's reason, whether the force originates from the state or from a criminal. According to Rand, "man's mind will not function at the point of a gun". Therefore, the only type of organized human behavior consistent with the operation of reason is that of voluntary cooperation. Persuasion is the method of reason. By its nature, the overtly irrational cannot rely on the use of persuasion and must ultimately resort to force to prevail. Thus, Rand argued that reason and freedom are correlates, just as she argued that mysticism and force are corollaries. Based on this understanding of the role of reason, Objectivists claim that the initiation of physical force against the will of another is immoral, as are indirect initiations of force through threats, fraud, or breach of contract. The use of defensive or retaliatory force, on the other hand, is appropriate.


title: Objectivism

text: Objectivism claims that because the opportunity to use reason without the initiation of force is necessary to achieve moral values, each individual has an inalienable moral right to act as his own judgment directs and to keep the product of his effort. Peikoff, explaining the basis of rights, stated, "In content, as the founding fathers recognized, there is one fundamental right, which has several major derivatives. The fundamental right is the right to life. Its major derivatives are the right to liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness." "A 'right' is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context." These rights are specifically understood to be rights to action, not to specific results or objects, and the obligations created by rights are negative in nature: each individual must refrain from violating the rights of others. Objectivists reject alternative notions of rights, such as positive rights, collective rights, or animal rights. Objectivism claims that the only social system which fully recognizes individual rights is capitalism, specifically what Rand described as "full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism". Objectivism regards capitalism as the social system which is most beneficial to the poor, but does not consider this its primary justification. Rather, it is the only moral social system. Objectivism maintains that only societies seeking to establish freedom (or free nations) have a right to self-determination.


title: Objectivism

text: Objectivism describes government as "the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control—i.e., under objectively defined laws"; thus, government is both legitimate and critically important in order to protect individual rights. Rand opposed anarchism because she considered that putting police and courts on the market is an inherent miscarriage of justice. Objectivism claims that the proper functions of a government are ""the police", to protect men from criminals—"the armed services", to protect men from foreign invaders—"the law courts", to settle disputes among men according to objective laws", the executive, and legislatures. Furthermore, in protecting individual rights, the government is acting as an agent of its citizens and "has no rights except the rights "delegated" to it by the citizens" and it must act in an impartial manner according to specific, objectively defined laws. Prominent Objectivists Peikoff and Yaron Brook have since expressed endorsement of other government functions.


title: Objectivism

text: Rand argued that limited intellectual property monopolies being granted to certain inventors and artists on a first-to-file basis are moral because she considered all property as fundamentally intellectual. Furthermore, the value of a commercial product derives in part from the necessary work of its inventors. However, Rand considered limits on patents and copyrights as important and said that if they were granted in perpetuity, it would necessarily result in "de facto" collectivism.


title: Objectivism

text: Rand opposed racism and any legal application of racism. She considered affirmative action to be an example of legal racism. Rand advocated the right to legal abortion. Rand believed capital punishment is morally justified as retribution against a murderer, but dangerous due to the risk of mistakenly executing innocent people and facilitating state murder. She therefore said she opposed capital punishment "on epistemological, not moral, grounds". She opposed involuntary military conscription. She opposed any form of censorship, including legal restrictions on pornography, opinion or worship, famously quipping; "In the transition to statism, every infringement of human rights has begun with a given right's least attractive practitioners".


title: Objectivism

text: Objectivists have also opposed a number of government activities commonly endorsed by both liberals and conservatives, including antitrust laws, the minimum wage, public education, and existing child labor laws. Objectivists have argued against faith-based initiatives, displaying religious symbols in government facilities, and the teaching of "intelligent design" in public schools. Rand opposed involuntary taxation and believed government could be financed voluntarily, although she thought this could only happen after other reforms of government were implemented.


title: Objectivism

text: Some critics, including economists and political philosophers such as Murray Rothbard, David D. Friedman, Roy Childs, Norman P. Barry, and Chandran Kukathas, have argued that Objectivist ethics are consistent with anarcho-capitalism instead of minarchism.


title: Objectivism

text: The Objectivist theory of art derives from its epistemology, by way of "psycho-epistemology" (Rand's term for an individual's characteristic mode of functioning in acquiring knowledge). Art, according to Objectivism, serves a human cognitive need: it allows human beings to understand concepts as though they were percepts. Objectivism defines "art" as a "selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments"—that is, according to what the artist believes to be ultimately true and important about the nature of reality and humanity. In this respect Objectivism regards art as a way of presenting abstractions concretely, in perceptual form.


title: Objectivism

text: The human need for art, according to this idea, derives from the need for cognitive economy. A concept is already a sort of mental shorthand standing for a large number of concretes, allowing a human being to think indirectly or implicitly of many more such concretes than can be kept explicitly in mind. But a human being cannot keep indefinitely many concepts explicitly in mind either—and yet, according to Objectivism, they need a comprehensive conceptual framework to provide guidance in life. Art offers a way out of this dilemma by providing a perceptual, easily grasped means of communicating and thinking about a wide range of abstractions, including one's metaphysical value-judgments. Objectivism regards art as an effective way to communicate a moral or ethical ideal. Objectivism does not, however, regard art as propagandistic: even though art involves moral values and ideals, its purpose is not to educate, only to show or project. Moreover, art need not be, and usually is not, the outcome of a full-blown, explicit philosophy. Usually it stems from an artist's "sense of life" (which is preconceptual and largely emotional).


title: Objectivism

text: The end goal of Rand's own artistic endeavors was to portray the ideal man. "The Fountainhead" is the best example of this effort. Rand uses the character of Roark to embody the concept of the higher man which she believes is what great art should do—embody the characteristics of the best of humanity. This symbolism should be represented in all art; artistic expression should be an extension of the greatness in humanity.


title: Objectivism

text: Rand said that Romanticism was the highest school of literary art, noting that Romanticism was "based on the recognition of the principle that man possesses the faculty of volition", absent which, Rand believed, literature is robbed of dramatic power, adding:


title: Objectivism

text: The term "romanticism", however, is often affiliated with emotionalism, to which Objectivism is completely opposed. Historically, many romantic artists were philosophically subjectivist. Most Objectivists who are also artists subscribe to what they term romantic realism, which is how Rand described her own work.


title: Objectivism

text: Several authors have developed and applied Rand's ideas in their own work. Rand described Peikoff's "The Ominous Parallels" (1982), as "the first book by an Objectivist philosopher other than myself". During 1991, Peikoff published "", a comprehensive exposition of Rand's philosophy. Chris Matthew Sciabarra discusses Rand's ideas and theorizes about their intellectual origins in "" (1995). Surveys such as "On Ayn Rand" by Allan Gotthelf (1999), "Ayn Rand" by Tibor R. Machan (2000), and "Objectivism in One Lesson" by Andrew Bernstein (2009) provide briefer introductions to Rand's ideas.


title: Objectivism

text: Some scholars have emphasized applying Objectivism to more specific areas. Machan has developed Rand's contextual conception of human knowledge (while also drawing on the insights of J. L. Austin and Gilbert Harman) in works such as "Objectivity" (2004), and David Kelley has explicated Rand's epistemological ideas in works such as "The Evidence of the Senses" (1986) and "A Theory of Abstraction" (2001). Regarding the topic of ethics, Kelley has argued in works such as "Unrugged Individualism" (1996) and "The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand" (2000) that Objectivists should pay more attention to the virtue of benevolence and place less emphasis on issues of moral sanction. Kelley's claims have been controversial, and critics Peikoff and Peter Schwartz have argued that he contradicts important principles of Objectivism. Kelley has used the term "Open Objectivism" for a version of Objectivism that involves "a commitment to reasoned, non-dogmatic discussion and debate", "the recognition that Objectivism is open to expansion, refinement, and revision", and "a policy of benevolence toward others, including fellow-travelers and critics". Arguing against Kelley, Peikoff characterized Objectivism as a "closed system" that is not subject to change.


title: Objectivism

text: An author who emphasizes Rand's ethics, Tara Smith, retains more of Rand's original ideas in such works as "Moral Rights and Political Freedom" (1995), "Viable Values" (2000), and "Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics" (2006). In collaboration with Peikoff, David Harriman has developed a theory of scientific induction based upon Rand's theory of concepts in "The Logical Leap: Induction in Physics" (2010).


title: Objectivism

text: The political aspects of Rand's philosophy are discussed by Bernstein in "The Capitalist Manifesto" (2005). In "Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics" (1996), George Reisman attempts to integrate Objectivist methodology and insights with both Classical and Austrian economics. In psychology, Professor Edwin A. Locke and Ellen Kenner have explored Rand's ideas in the publication "The Selfish Path to Romance: How to Love with Passion & Reason". Other writers have explored the application of Objectivism to fields ranging from art, as in "What Art Is" (2000) by Louis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi, to teleology, as in "The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts" (1990) by Harry Binswanger.


title: Objectivism

text: One Rand biographer says most people who read Rand's works for the first time do it in their "formative years". Rand's former protégé Nathaniel Branden referred to Rand's "especially powerful appeal to the young", while Onkar Ghate of the Ayn Rand Institute said Rand "appeals to the idealism of youth". This appeal has alarmed a number of critics of the philosophy. Many of these young people later abandon their positive opinion of Rand and are often said to have "outgrown" her ideas. Endorsers of Rand's work recognize the phenomenon, but attribute it to the loss of youthful idealism and inability to resist social pressures for intellectual conformity. In contrast, historian Jennifer Burns, writing in "Goddess of the Market" (2009), writes some critics "dismiss Rand as a shallow thinker appealing only to adolescents", although she thinks the critics "miss her significance" as a "gateway drug" to right-wing politics.


title: Objectivism

text: Academic philosophers have generally dismissed Objectivism since Rand first presented it. Objectivism has been termed "fiercely anti-academic" because of Rand's criticism of contemporary intellectuals. David Sidorsky, a professor of moral and political philosophy at Columbia University, writes that Rand's work is "outside the mainstream" and is more of an ideology than a comprehensive philosophy. British philosopher Ted Honderich notes that he deliberately excluded an article on Rand from "The Oxford Companion to Philosophy" (Rand is, however, mentioned in the article on popular philosophy by Anthony Quinton). Rand is the subject of entries in the "Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy", "The Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers", the "Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy", "The Routledge Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Political Thinkers", and "The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy". Chandran Kukathas writes in an entry about Rand in the "Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy", "The influence of Rand's ideas was strongest among college students in the USA but attracted little attention from academic philosophers." Kukathas also writes that her defenses of capitalism and selfishness "kept her out of the intellectual mainstream".


title: Objectivism

text: During the 1990s, Rand's works were more likely to be encountered in American classrooms. The Ayn Rand Society, dedicated to fostering the scholarly study of Objectivism, is affiliated with the American Philosophical Association's Eastern Division. Aristotle scholar and Objectivist Allan Gotthelf, late chairman of the Society, and his colleagues argued for more academic study of Objectivism, considering the philosophy as a unique and intellectually interesting defense of classical liberalism that is worth debating. In 1999, a refereed "Journal of Ayn Rand Studies" began. Programs and fellowships for the study of Objectivism have been supported at the University of Pittsburgh, University of Texas at Austin and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.


title: Second Congo War

text: The Second Congo War, also known as the Great War of Africa or the Great African War and sometimes referred to as the African World War, began in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in August 1998, little more than a year after the First Congo War, and involved some of the same issues. The war officially ended in July 2003, when the Transitional Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo took power. Although a peace agreement was signed in 2002, violence has continued in many regions of the country, especially in the east. Hostilities have continued since the ongoing Lord's Resistance Army insurgency, and the Kivu and Ituri conflicts. Nine African countries and around twenty-five armed groups became involved in the war.


title: Second Congo War

text: By 2008, the war and its aftermath had caused 5.4 million deaths, principally through disease and malnutrition, making the Second Congo War the deadliest conflict worldwide since World War II. Another 2 million were displaced from their homes or sought asylum in neighboring countries. Despite a formal end to the war in July 2003 and an agreement by the former belligerents to create a government of national unity, 1,000 people died daily in 2004 from easily preventable cases of malnutrition and disease. Major funding for this war, and for subsequent fighting, came from conflict minerals.


title: Second Congo War

text: The First Congo War began in 1996 as Rwanda increasingly expressed concern that Hutu members of Rassemblement Démocratique pour le Rwanda (RDR) militias were carrying out cross-border raids from what was then Zaire, and planning an invasion of Rwanda. The militias, mostly Hutu, had entrenched themselves in refugee camps in eastern Zaire, where many had fled to escape the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide of 1994.


title: Second Congo War

text: The Tutsi-dominated RPF government of Rwanda, which had gained power in July 1994, protested this violation of Rwandan territorial integrity, and began to arm the ethnically Tutsi Banyamulenge of eastern Zaire. The Mobutu regime of Zaire vigorously denounced this intervention, but possessed neither the military capability to halt it nor the political capital to attract international assistance.


title: Second Congo War

text: With active support from Uganda, Rwanda and Angola, the Tutsi forces of Laurent-Désiré Kabila moved methodically down the Congo River, encountering only light resistance from the poorly trained, ill-disciplined forces of Mobutu's crumbling regime. The bulk of Kabila's fighters were Tutsis, and many were veterans of various conflicts in the Great Lakes region of Africa. Kabila himself had credibility as a long-time political opponent of Mobutu, and had been a follower of Patrice Lumumba (the first Prime Minister of the independent Congo), who was executed by a combination of internal and external forces in January 1961, and was ultimately replaced by Mobutu in 1965. Kabila had declared himself a Marxist and an admirer of Mao Zedong. He had been waging armed rebellion in eastern Zaire for more than three decades, though Che Guevara in his account of the early years of the conflict portrayed him as an uncommitted and uninspiring leader.


title: Second Congo War

text: Kabila's army began a slow movement west in December 1996, near the end of the Great Lakes refugee crisis, taking control of border towns and mines and solidifying control. There were reports of massacres and of brutal repression by the rebel army. A UN human-rights investigator published statements from witnesses claiming that Kabila's Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (ADFLC) had committed massacres, and that the advancing army had killed as many as 60,000 civilians, a claim the ADFLC strenuously denied. Roberto Garreton stated that his investigation in the town of Goma turned up allegations of disappearances, torture and killings. He quoted , an aide to Mobutu, as saying that killings and disappearances should be expected in wartime.