After getting some good emails re Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand, I poked around the Internet to read more about her. I had mentioned my new discovery of humor in Atlas (perhaps unintentional, I now learn), but what could be funnier than Murray Rothbard talking about Randians, smoking, and Atlas in The Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult?
"The official justification for making smoking a moral obligation was a sentence in Atlas where the heroine refers to a lit cigarette as symbolizing a fire in the mind, the fire of creative ideas. (One would think that simply holding up a lit match could do just as readily for this symbolic function.)"