The Awl asks, and Sam Anderson of the NYT Magazine channels a young Blattman:
Oh man, I suspect you're going to be hearing this answer a lot, but: the complete works of Ayn Rand. I discovered them toward the end of high school and walked around for a couple of years giving Howard Roark-like speeches to everyone about "the highest blazing good of selfish free-market epistemology" or something. In retrospect, it seems pretty clear that my Objectivist phase had more to do with the subjective agonies of post-adolescence (insecurity, narcissism) than it did with pure reason.
Also (and I'm just speculating here) it helps to be a middle class white male from an upwardly mobile family who has never faced a real obstacle in his life harder than a suburban fast food job where you actually had to do something dirty for the first time in your life. But if you go from cleaning a grease trap to A's in college, then obviously you've pulled yourself up by your bootstraps and ye are a veritable superman!
Or so I've heard.
Meanwhile, to the list of cringeworthy things I used to love reading, I will add this: every opinion piece by The Economist ever.
No comments:
Post a Comment