Cults! Sexbots! Con artists! So it's another Monday roundup.

Mr. Levy:

Perhaps I wasn't clear in my posting, but you seem to have misread me: I wrote that the REVIEW didn't reference Lars. But then, I added, the BOOK itself didn't mention the other art works I listed. (Read those two particular sentences again in my post, and you'll see what I mean). I'm well aware that Lars was released too recently for the book to acknowledge it, but my general point still stands: Love and Sex with Robots hardly counts as a cultural study.

As for Steve: I am extremely sorry, but I have read both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead -- rather, I am sorry I ever opened those pages.

OK, I skipped some pages, but the rest of the books and their fatheaded, hamfisted pronouncements that we must free ourselves from altruism and that raw, free-market capitalism is the solution to just about everything -- this nonsense, plus the style that The New Yorker once called "a triumph of English as a second language" convinced me I could miss a few pearls of wisdom. I might add, I wasn't the only one who cited Rand (and Hubbard) as a cult author. I was responding to the Telegraph's list -- where The Fountainhead appears as #22. Just below Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, an association and a position Rand would doubtlessly have gone into a frothing fit over.

Oh, and I notice you didn't try to defend her total lack of humor. Smart move.

How un-intellectual of you to dismiss something out of hand by labeling it a cult and never even attempting to define what a cult is. A basic definition of a cult is a group of people that accept on faith what the leader tells them is the truth. Usually the leader claims to be divine or at least divinely inspired. Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism has nothing to do with anything close to that. She advocated reason and logic and using one's mind to discover truth and to gain knowledge. She denounced taking things on faith. Maybe you should actually read her writings and not just learn about her second hand. I refer the reader to Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead for evidence of Ayn Rand's advocating reason as one's means of knowledge.

book/daddy is a little surprised that a review of a book about sex with robots never makes reference to the recent, wonderfully understated film, Lars and the Real Girl.

You just checked the wrong part of the book. The preface is dated August 2005, a little early for all but the most prescient writer to know of a small indie film released in late 2007.