Dave Gilson

Senior Editor

San Francisco native, word wrangler, data cruncher, chart drawer, pun maker. Recent areas of interest: campaign finance, income inequality, prison riots.

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Dave Gilson has worked at Mother Jones since 2003. Previously, he worked for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and the Northern California bureau of the New York Times.

Your Weekend Longreads List on Ayn Rand

Take some me time to catch up on the personal history and philosophy of the writer Paul Ryan called "required reading."

—By Dave Gilson

| Fri Aug. 17, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

Seth Tisue/Flickr, Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Commons, Seth Tisue/Flickr

"I grew up on Ayn Rand," Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) recounted in a speech before the Atlas Society in 2005. The future vice presidential nominee went on to explain how the author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead inspired him to enter public service, adding that her books were "required reading" for his Congressional staff and interns. "There is no better place to find the moral case for capitalism and individualism than through Ayn Rand's writings and works," he concluded.

Though Ryan has since tried to distance himself from Rand, his youthful devotion to the founder of Objectivism is not uncommon. Celebrities, a former Federal Reserve chairman, tech entrepreneurs, and tea partiers have claimed her as an inspiration, citing her unapologetic advocacy of selfishness, the pursuit of wealth, and unfettered capitalism. Rand's writings and ideas are arguably more influential now than ever.

Here are some longreads about Rand's personal history, her philosophy, her fans and foes, and her impact. For more longform stories from the pages of Mother Jones, check out our longreads archive.

"Possessed" | Thomas Mallon | The New Yorker | November 2009

If anything can be said about Rand, it's that she evokes strong reactions from readers. Reviewing two recent biographies of Rand, Mallon explores the cultish devotion she inspired, starting with the acolytes who began following her in the 1950s.

The young libertarians beginning to gather at Rand's feet in her Murray Hill apartment called themselves, with less irony than they believed, the Collective. Among them was Alan Greenspan, whom Rand nicknamed the Undertaker. By most accounts, the future Federal Reserve chairman behaved with less slavish subordination than the other self-professed individualists, who regarded Rand, according to Burns, "as a genius without compare." The philosopher's most famous directive was "Check your premises," but those in her orbit never dared question hers. They adopted Rand's tastes in everything from furniture to music (Rachmaninoff, good; Brahms, bad), and tightened themselves into a circle that came to be governed by loyalty tests and living-room show trials.

[Read the full article]

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Just How Libertarian Is Paul Ryan?

—By Dave Gilson

| Mon Aug. 13, 2012 1:41 PM PDT

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), Mitt Romney's new running mate, has been hailed as the closest thing to a libertarian on the Republican ticket since Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas). "Ryan is going to be very attractive to the broad libertarian voters," the Cato Institute's David Boaz told Buzzfeed. But aside from his Ayn Rand-reading, entitlement-busting ways, just how libertarian is Ryan?

Thankfully, MoJo's Josh Harkinson made this handy Venn diagram showing the various flavors of American libertarianism, from cranky Ron Paulism to traditional free-market and social liberalism. Sticking Ryan on the diagram shows that while he has a lot in common with small-government, antitax libertarians, he has a lot in common with mainstream conservatives. He has supported extending the Patriot Act, voted to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and voted for the bank bailout—all big no-nos for old-school libertarians.

Ryan is hardly the purists' pick, but as Reason noted before Romney tapped him, "For advocates of limited government, Ryan remains one of the most important allies in Congress."

Quick Reads: "Ascent of the A-Word: by Geoffrey Nunberg

—By Dave Gilson

| Mon Aug. 13, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

Ascent of the A-Word: Assholism, the First Sixty Years

By Geoffrey Nunberg

PublicAffairs

It's hard to say what makes an asshole an asshole, but you know 'em when you see 'em—from Donald Trump to that guy in the SUV who refuses to use his freakin' turn signal. Here, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg of the University of California-Berkeley briskly and entertainingly traces how a bit of World War II GI slang became an ubiquitous epithet and a moral category that's come to embody our polarized politics. Though he doesn't buy into simplistic notions of civility, Nunberg is concerned about the toxic side of assholism: When we declare someone an asshole, we're usually giving ourselves leave to act like one.

This review originally appeared in our September/October issue of Mother Jones.

Charts: Which Countries Are the Real Olympic Winners?

Faster, higher, smaller? A different way of measuring who does best at the summer games.

—By Dave Gilson

| Fri Jul. 27, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

Update, 8/7/12: The most current data from the 2012 games has been added to the charts.

When all the medals from the 2012 Summer Olympics in London are tallied up, the top slots will likely be occupied by the usual suspects—the United States, China, and Russia. But what if we tried to measure countries' Olympic achievements without simply counting how many medals they bring home? What if we compared their athletes' performance against the size of their economies and populations?

That's what this interactive chart does. Click the play button at the bottom to see animated data starting in 1960. Hover over dots to see country names; click on a dot to turn on its label. (And scroll down to the bottom of this post for a customizable version.)

As you'll see in the chart above, looking at Olympic records this way produces some interesting results. For example, in the 2008 Beijing games, Jamaica only won 11 medals (or 32 medal points, if you assign 4 points to gold, 2 to silver, 1 to bronze). But it outperformed the big guns like the United States and China when it came to how many medal points it got relative to its developing economy and tiny population. While the US garnered 0.02 medal points per billion dollars of GDP and 0.8 medal points for every 1 million Americans, Jamaica picked up 2.2 medal points per billion dollars of GDP and 11.9 medal points for every 1 million Jamaicans. Not bad.

Mother Jones 2012 Summer Olympics Coverage

By this metric, other countries that outperformed the big medal winners in 2008 included the Bahamas, Cuba, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Mongolia, and Zimbabwe.

This isn't necessarily a sign that these countries are up-and-coming athletic powerhouses. In some cases it simply means that they have a handful of world-class athletes and terrible economies (e.g. Ethiopia and Zimbabwe). Doing well in events that award a lot of medals also helps (e.g., Cuba and boxing and judo.) Other factors that may help countries' overall Olympic performance: Being a former member of the Soviet Bloc or a country with a planned economy, since they are more likely to aggressively recruit and train athletes. Being the host country also provides a bump (e.g. Mexico in 1968).

[Read the full article]

Boats, Bottles, and Billy the Kid: The Other Koch Brother

—By Dave Gilson

| Mon Jul. 23, 2012 1:13 PM PDT

Bill Koch at an America's Cup press conference in 1992.

Now that he's given $2 million to the main pro-Romney super-PAC, William Koch has joined his brothers David and Charles as one of 2012's top conservative moneymen. Bill, David's twin, also made much of his money from his family's energy holdings, though he's not quite as rich as his better-known siblings. Forbes puts his net worth at $4 billion, versus his brothers' combined worth of $50 billion, the result of a drawn-out legal battle over the family fortune that left Bill and the eldest Koch brother, Frederick, behind.

Though he's given money to Republicans such as Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.) and has used his company, Oxbow Carbon, to lobby against wind turbines off Cape Cod, Bill has not gotten involved with his brothers' shadowy political fundraising operation. "Bill Koch isn't Charles Koch and he isn't David Koch," his spokesman told the Village Voice. "He's not his brother's keeper."

What Bill Koch does like to keep: Wine and art. According to Antiques and Fine Art, Koch's Florida house has a "computerized wine cellar" that provides "easy access" his collection, whose size has been estimated at somewhere between 35,000 and 43,000 bottles. Koch once believed he possessed bottles of French wine signed by legendary oenophile Thomas Jefferson, but he later claimed they were bogus and sued the dealer and Christie's auction house. Last year, Koch told the Economist that he has spent $4 to $5 million on fake wines. He did not say how much he has spent on his ongoing lawsuits (five at last count) against the alleged purveyors of counterfeit wine.

Koch also has an extensive and eclectic collection of fine art, including works by Monet, Chagall, and Winslow Homer. Not content to let his favorite pieces collect dust, Koch seasonally schleps them to and from his summer home. As AFA explains:

Koch annually chooses artwork from his 400-strong collection to transport from his 40,000 square foot primary residence in Florida to the Cape Cod beach house. At a third of the size, the summer home accommodates only a careful selection. Thus, favorites such as enormous Fernando Botero sculptures, Alfred Stevens's engaging The Coquette, and much of the maritime collection (excluding over 120 boat models of every defender and challenger in the America's Cup), travel north while the majority of Koch's trove stays behind.

Koch's other passion is sailing. In 1992, he won the America's Cup at a reported cost of $68 million. "Financially, I would say win or lose, it's not worth it," he told ESPN. "If you asked me…if I knew what I know now, would I do it, the answer to that would be no."

"Wild Bill" also has a thing for the Old West. In 2010, he quietly purchased Buckskin Joe, a Colorado town/movie set/tourist trap, and relocated its buildings to his ranch. Last June, he spent $2.3 million on the only authenticated photograph of Billy the Kid. That's still $300,000 more than he's spent on Romney, one of his cheaper hobbies.