Read free. 10 Years of CoEvolution Quarterly: News That Stayed News 1974-1984, 1986
Excerpt
Stewart Brand has two talents common to all great magazine editors: the ability to gather together a family of brilliant contributors, and the ability to piss them all off from time to time. co-EVOLUTION’s extended family included luminaries and arrogant ex-hippies (“some of us are famous and some are smug,” Stewart once wrote in the magazine’s Gossip section)—but the magazine was rarely cowed by any of them. Stewart’s first loyalty was always to the readers, as represented by his own emphatic but open-minded judgment.
COEVOLUTION experimented constantly, in ways that a magazine with advertising can’t. Stewart was always trying something that no other magazine publisher would dream of doing. Guest editors, for instance: every four issues or so, Stewart would relinquish his normal ironclad control over the entire magazine, find someone with a special topic to cover, put the staff into their hands for the quarter, and disappear. Or the financially unsuccessful Bold/Lite experiment: to avoid offending readers with explicit sex, yet not feel hamstrung, Stewart created a “Bold” section of the magazine with raunchy material intact, and gave subscribers a choice of CQ with or without it.
CQ opened up many debates and topics for the first time. Space colonies: By printing Gerard O’Neill’s and his own arguments in their favor, Stewart annoyed many of his ecologically minded contributors and readers. So he printed their arguments. The controversy lingered for several issues (some old CQ readers can still get angry when they think of it) and ultimately modified the ideas of some of the space-colony planners. Other themes got early notice in CQ before becoming prominent elsewhere. The Gaia hypothesis. Voluntary simplicity. Arguments against metric conversion. Personal computers. The resurgence of the antiwar movement. The flat tax. Critical evaluation of magazines. The effects of chemicals on the human gene pool.
Most importantly, COEVOLUTION published a lot of material—essays, reporting, and story-telling—that will endure as “news that stays news,” to quote Ezra Pound’s definition of literature. Hence this book—a collection, in one place, of what we think is the most lasting work COEVOLUTION published.
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