Glimpses of the other lives

So what to make of Paul Graham and his essays? His brand of thinking can be dismissed as a mixture of libertarianism/entrepreneurial-speak/pragmatism, but there's more there, I think. Cynical* moments have me recoiling when he begins to sound like he's in full motivational speaking mode, but other times, there are great insights that could inform a most devoted humanist.

A good place to start is this essay meant for a high school assembly audience, but there are other good pieces on the essay form itself, wealth (this one particularly hard to deal with, for me), and on writing.

*Cynical: I found an Oscar Wilde quote on cynicism that I like a lot in Said's Representations of the Intellectual: "cynics know the price of everything and the value of nothing." Unrelated to anything, but pretty true, huh.

My computer is still not fixed but hopefully it will be soon and this place will be less dormant.