Earth from space

A photo that inspired a lot. Plus, 7 other things worth your time.

In the summer of 1966, a man named Stewart Brand—a Stanford graduate, former soldier, and self-described "loafing artist"—set off on a quest. 

The Space Race was nearly a decade old, and Brand had been seized with the realization that NASA had yet to release a photograph of the whole Earth taken from space.

He started a public campaign, and hitchhiked across the country promoting it.

Soon enough, NASA did in fact release the first such "whole Earth photo," taken at the end of 1967, from a satellite called ATS-3. And, Brand was inspired to it on the cover of an idiosyncratic new magazine he started, called the Whole Earth Catalog.

What was the Whole Earth Catalog? Well, it could best be described as—actually, let’s let the late Steve Jobs explain it, as he did in his iconic speech at Stanford University in 2005:

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not…