Gratitude for the super curators

and valuing the practices of rereading and review

Every one of those reviews was like a half-open door of something you might well do with your young life. A lot of people went through those doors.

—Stewart Brand, founder, Whole Earth Catalog

If you’ve ever visited my brief bio page on Substack, you’ll notice I list one of my superpowers—curation. I remember when this superpower emerged in me…I was the parent of a four-year-old, living in a cabin in the woods, situated in an oak dell at the base of a mountain on an old mineral springs with a few other dear friends and their kids, from babies to teens. You could say we were rewilding ourselves from life as city dwellers. It was a formative time in my life—learning parenting skills, interpersonal skills, community skills, land skills, self-awareness skills, and becoming a writer.

Ironically, the year was 1984. It was very pre-internet, and the mobile phone was just invented. Stewart Brand and the crew at the Portola Institute had published the first Whole Earth Catalog in 1968 when I was still in high school, followed by several other editions, and the Last Whole Earth Catalog in 1971 (it wasn’t the last). According to the Wikipedia page, 

The so-called Last Whole Earth Catalog (June 1971) won the first U.S. National Book Award in the Contemporary Affairs category.^[4] It was the first time a catalog had ever won such an award. Brand's intent with the catalog was to provide education and "access to tools" …

Also published by the Portola Institute was a catalog I treasured called the Big Rock Candy Mountain—Resources for Our Education. A Learning to Learn Catalog (Winter, 1970).

A related journal named CoEvolution Quarterly followed, published from 1974-85. And this was followed in January, 1985 by Whole Earth Review, published through Spring, 1996.

These “catalogs” and journals were extraordinary works of curation. Living as remotely as we were at that time, they brought a world of learning to me. They not only inspired me. They demonstrated how to develop a curation superpower.

I remember a persistent vision beginning to incubate for a project I called Quality—curating excellent learning and play materials—from books and games to software for kids (and their parents, caregivers, and teachers). The first educational software I curated was Reader Rabbit, an innovative series created by The Learning Company in 1984. 

In my rereading practice, as I look back over what I’ve written here on Substack to consider what I’d like to write next, I think the intention of this post is to give some appreciation to the editors and curators who have inspired and nurtured me. There have been many since the Whole Earth lineage, but I owe a lot to these pioneers. (It’s no accident that a core group of them started The Well (‘85), an online community and my first home base on the internet, and several of the Whole Earth crew helped bring Wired magazine to life.)

[Note: The full Whole Earth collection has been digitized and is hosted by the Internet Archive. The landing page is wholeearth.info. Explore!]

Big Rock Candy Mountain cover, Portola Institute, 1970

Review as practice/tags as tool

I value review. I think it’s an essential practice, especially with all the content we engage with in our lives today.

I started The Interconnect on Substack in September, 2023, and I’m still learning how to use it beyond the basics. In my previous newsletter, Mindful Digital Life, my email newsletter application (ConvertKit) included my tags in each post. For example, click on the tag Nature and Well-being at the bottom of the post, Look to the roots. I find this approach to tagging a great way to explore topics I’m interested in.

So far, I have not discovered a way to reveal my Interconnect tags to readers beyond adding them to my navigation bar…with 167 tags, that’s not workable. I do prefer ConvertKit’s approach. So here is a hack for Substack:

Go to my archive page here.

Choose a tag and pop it in the search icon at the top of the archive list.

Here are a few tags to try this week:

• AI Ethics

• Awe

• Citizen Science

• Generative AI

• Kindness

I will include tag recommendations in the future in my posts.

Sitting on my desk to read

Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect, 10th anniversary edition, (2004, Island Press). By David Orr. From the back cover copy:

“As a rule economists understand economics, ecologists the environment, and educators teaching. David Orr is one of the rare authors who understands all three, and in these finely etched and admirable essays he delivers the revolutionary credo necessary, in my opinion, for the long-term survival of our species.” —Edward O. Wilson

And the curation superpower award of the month goes to…

Austin Kleon, a Substack writer (and parent) with an inspiring curation superpower—I always like to see what the awesomely creative Austin Kleon is up to. I regularly read his 10 Things Worth Sharing.

Thanks so much for reading. Be well. And please consider sharing this post with family, friends, teachers, and/or colleagues who might appreciate it.