In 2008, Paul Graham mused about the cultural differences between great US cities. Three years earlier, Graham had co-founded Y Combinator, a “startup accelerator” that would come to epitomize Silicon Valley — and would move there in 2009. But at the time Graham was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which, as he saw it, sent a different message ...

The end of the Cold War didn’t have obvious consequences for everyday life in Ireland. The great battle with communism seemed irrelevant to a country that had only gently been brushed by the forces of industrialized capitalism and affected a threadbare neutrality in international politics. Farming was the thing, even if it had gradually become ...