I’m pleased to report that the latest issue of Reason Papers, vol. 39:1 (Summer 2017), is now out. Individual articles can be accessed through the Archives link by scrolling down to the issue. Alternatively, the full issue can be accessed through this link, which takes you to a 152 page PDF.

The issue begins with a symposium on Douglas Den Uyl and Douglas Rasmussen’s recent book The Perfectionist Turn: From Metanorms to Metaethics (Edinburgh, 2016), with commentaries by Elaine Sternberg (University of Buckingham), Neera Badhwar (George Mason), and David McPherson (Creighton), and a response by Den Uyl and Rasmussen. If you’re into (or interested in) neo-Aristotelian libertarianism–and who isn’t?–this is the symposium for you.

The issue then proceeds to a discussion of Stephen Kershnar’s Gratitude toward Veterans: Why Americans Should Not Be Very Grateful to Veterans (Lexington, 2014), with commentaries by Michael Robillard (Oxford) and Pauline Shanks Kaurin (Pacific Lutheran), along with a response by Kershnar. If you thought my criticisms of Khizr Khan here at PoT were annoying, I’m sure you’ll love Kershnar’s book and this symposium even more. Just in time for the 16th anniversary of 9/11 and talk of an American troop surge in Afghanistan….

Following the Kershnar symposium is the second installment of a series by Gary James Jason (Cal State U, Fullerton) on films about genocide–which, despite the gravity of the subject, made me laugh a bit because I sometimes think we’re actually in one of those.

I mean, who needs an essay on “the later films” on genocide when we’re all playing cameo roles in the latest one? Or to turn that around: who knew that an essay series on “selling genocide” would be so timely?

I’m sorry. I realize how fucked up that all is, and I’m turning it into a joke. It’s not funny! Stop laughing! This is the Nazis we’re talking about! Never again!

Anyway, after Jason’s genocide piece, we’ve got Carrie-Ann Biondi (Marymount Manhattan) reviewing Allan Gotthelf and Gregory Salmieri’s much-awaited (well, in some circles much-awaited) A Companion to Ayn Rand, a title that (in my current mood) I can’t help taking the wrong way, but which should under no circumstances be taken that way, at least by serious scholars operating at a higher moral level than your humble correspondent. (And I have literally no comment on the fact that the book is published by a company called “Wiley.”)

The Afterwords section includes a shout-out to this very blog, Policy of Truth, care of PoT’s own DJR, David “Don’t Mess with Texas” Riesbeck, schooling all and sundry on the mistranslated Latin in so many goddamn editions of J.S. Mill’s Subjection of Women; in six brief pages, Riesbeck hates on the ill-educated editors that pollute our intellectual landscape (ahem), dishing it out like the classically-trained bad-ass that he is. Finally, there’s Vinay Kolhatkar defending a Rand-influenced “theory of fictional narrative.” Kolhatkar, I might add, is the author of a bunch of scary-ass and eerily topical novels, including one in which the Mafia fights radical Islamists in London, and another “about a billionaire who disrupts a U.S. presidential election by running as an independent”–which he wrote in 2012.

Yeah, so I think you want to read the issue.