Stewart Brand Marvels at Hippie Perfectionist Jobs’ Results

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Stewart Brand. Source of photo: online version of the NYT interview quoted and cited below.

(p. 3) Stewart Brand is best known as the editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, a counterculture compendium published twice a year between 1968 and 1972 and the only catalog to win the National Book Award. Its credo, “Stay hungry. Stay foolish,” influenced many of the hippie generation, most notably Steve Jobs.
. . .
READING I’m devouring “Steve Jobs,” by Walter Isaacson. Steve’s life and interests intersected with mine a number of times, so revisiting all that in sequence is like galloping through a version of my own life, plus I get to fill in the parts of his life I wondered about. Take a hippie who is also a driven perfectionist at crafting digital tools, let him become adept at managing corporate power, and marvel at what can result. The book I’m studying line by line, and dog-earing every other page, is Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels of Our Nature.” It chronicles the dramatic decline of violence and cruelty in human affairs in every century. Now that we know that human behavior has been getting constantly gentler and fairer, how do we proceed best with that wind at our backs?

For the full interview, see:
KATE MURPHY, interviewer. “DOWNLOAD; Stewart Brand.” The New York Times, Sunday Review (Sun., Nov. 6, 2011): 3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date November 5, 2011.)

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