Another excellent Paul Graham essay. It was written in May 2008, and the financial crisis (among other things) did a tremendous amount to change the calculus that he describes, but the themes are still quite interesting.
A city speaks to you mostly by accident—in things you see through windows, in conversations you overhear. It’s not something you have to seek out, but something you can’t turn off. One of the occupational hazards of living in Cambridge is overhearing the conversations of people who use interrogative intonation in declarative sentences. But on average I’ll take Cambridge conversations over New York or Silicon Valley ones.
Musings 