Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog was a counterculture magazine from the 1970s. Ostensibly it was about DIY and self-sufficiency, with a focus on product reviews, but flip through an issue and there’s almost no subject you won’t find. It reflected the publisher’s holistic, systems philosophy.

The Whole Earth Index is an archive of Whole Earth as downloadable PDFs, hosted by the Internet Archive.

Here lies a nearly-complete archive of Whole Earth publications, a series of journals and magazines descended from the Whole Earth Catalog, published...

If you don’t follow Cultural Tutor on Twitter, I’d highly recommend. One of the few threadposters who consistently sends me down unrequested-but-fascinating rabbit holes. Architecture, classical history, music, art — always something interesting.

And if you like the social media feed, check out Areopagus, his weekly newsletter that goes deeper on a few topics each week.

Read any news that intersects with politics, culture, technology, or economics, and you’d believe we’ve come to the end of the road. You find the occasional optimist pointing out how things aren’t so bad, or that they’ve also been real bad in the past (definitely true!).

Brink Lindsey paints his own bleak picture of our current set of crises — of dynamism, inclusion, and politics – but acknowledges a fear of overblowing the threats presented by these issues. In this piece he offers some hope here with confidence that we can muddle through with solutions as we...

Of this year’s reads so far, Martin Gurri still holds the crown on my favorite with his 2014 book The Revolt of the Public.

That book has the best diagnosis of the current state of politics, the culture war, polarization, and the media’s inability to make sense of all of it (while contributing themselves to the chaos).

This is a wide-ranging interview on public trust, social media, and the state of our institutions:

I would not say that our institutions are mired in a period of secular incompetence and decline. That is actually...

Great piece from Tanner Greer on the evolution of online discourse from the early days of the internet to today’s firestorm of Twitter.

First, a fond look back on the early days of online conversation — the days of the blog, the forum, the pseudonymous publisher, the rule of the idea and its impassioned, argued defense:

There were two aspects of this older internet ecology that set it apart from the current get up. The first was its clear division into hundreds of separate communities. This was most explicit in the forums, which usually did not allow users to comment...

Mark Andreessen’s piece from a couple months back drove a flood of response, both in support and disagreement.

This piece from Tanner Greer agrees with Andreessen’s sentiments in general, but more interestingly dives into why American progress has slowed so dramatically, tying the root causes to change in the culture of ownership, self-reliance, and self-organization.

We live in a culture today of management hierarchy, bureaucratic approvals, designs-by-committee, taking little risk without consensus, and regulatory restriction (and, just...

This was a fascinating interview with Dr. Michele Gelfand from Jonah Goldberg’s The Remnant podcast. It mostly covers the subject of her book Rule Makers, Rule Breakers, on the differences between “tight” vs. “loose” cultures — think Singapore or China vs. Spain or Italy. It’s a timely subject in this time of global response to a pandemic, seeing how different cultures respond to the crisis.

The physicist Richard Feynman’s famous 1974 commencement address on theories that pretend to be scientific:

“But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves—of having utter scientific integrity—is, I’m sorry to say, something that we haven’t specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you’ve caught on by osmosis.

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to...