Sure. Among interviewed subjects - Bertrand Russel, Jawaharlal Nehru, Albert Schweitzer, Nabokov, Dali, Martin Luther King, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frederico Fellini, Fidel Castro, Arnold Toynbee, John Kenneth Galbraith, Ralph Nader, William Buckley, Jr., Albert Speer, George McGovern, R. Buckminster Fuller, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Milton Freedman, Tennessee Williams, Walter Cronkite, Jimmy Carter, Edward Teller, William Shockley, Lech Walesa, Ansel Adams, Yasser Arafat, Carl Sagan, William Safire, Bill Gates, Salman Rushdie, Pope John Paul II.
I am no fan of Rand, but I reflexively downvote any comments like yours. Answering faulty reasoning with sheer dumbassery isn't helpful.
The fact is, Rand's work was a legitimate reaction to some very real abuses, and it was extremely influential in economic and political circles throughout the second half of the twentieth century. The fact that you don't like her ideas doesn't alter the first fact.
Oh getting all frothy at the mouth in an essentially joke thread is absurd. And 'reflexively downvoting' is a lot closer to dumbassery than replying to a comment. Whatever I think of her ideas, I don't think Ayn Rand is remotely in the caliber of people I put on the list, in terms of importance. That's why I didn't put her on the list and that's what I was explaining to the responder.
I have that issue (March 1964). Authors and essayists/interviewees included Rand, Shel Silverstein, P. G. Wodehouse, J. Paul Getty, Arthur C. Clarke, Lenny Bruce, and the Greek humorist Apuleius. It's just plain jaw-dropping to see how much cultural deterioration we've undergone since then, going by a then-and-now comparison of the magazine's table of contents.
Back in the day, when someone claimed they only read Playboy "for the articles," there was a good chance they weren't lying. It was well worth the 75-cent cover price.
It's not cultural deterioration at all. It just happened that the first guy to put real production money into a skin magazine had serious intellectual pretensions. We're all better off for the nice interviews, but there's a reason they had to be bookended with lots and lots of porn for the project to be sustainable.
Now that Playboy is a relic instead of the only game in town, they can no longer indulge such expensive tastes. It says nothing about the wider culture except that we've become more accepting of pornography.
Close. Actually it was more a case of Comstock-era blue laws requiring serious artistic or literary merit, or at least a semblance thereof, before the magazine could legally be mailed.
When the legal climate improved, the need for all of that expensive content went away, at least in Playboy's mind. Which is unfortunate... if someone published a magazine like that today, I'd subscribe to it.
Ok, I made one of those up. But just one.