Curation

“And now you ask in your heart, ‘How shall we distinguish that which is good in pleasure from that which is not good?’

Go to your fields and your gardens, and you shall learn that it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower,

But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee.

For to the bee a flower is a fountain... See more

The shift isn’t just about the aesthetic, it’s structural. As loneliness become endemic and public life becomes performative, people seek spaces with intention, coherence, and shared values. Curators, whether they’re running book clubs, shaping playlists, hosting salons, or steering micro-communities, they are steeping into a vacuum left by... See more

In a world of perpetual data overload, [curation] implies information design and selectivity: the channeling, filtering, and organization into intelligible and usable information; the digging up of new or long ignored cultural corpora. Most of these corpora are simply sitting in storage: less than 1% of the Smithsonian Institution’s permanent... See more

not letting algorithms decide what deserves your attention. If you want to feel creatively and intellectually alive, stop mindlessly consuming the internet and start mindfully curating it. You need a space away from social media's compulsive rhythm, where your ideas can grow at their own pace

as the amount of slop increases — whether human or AI generated — the difficulty in finding the right stuff to read is only increasing

Curiosity creates the inquiry.

Knowledge populates the options.

Curation filters the right ones through.

Judgment makes the final call.

When knowledge becomes abundant, value migrates to the functions that exist upstream and downstream from it: framing the inquiry and acting on the output.

In this new architecture, curiosity, curation, and judgment... See more

This problem of overabundance is why I wrote my piece last year. As consumption of digital media increased, we began to see a larger volume of curators — coolhunters, just like Gladwell had outlined in ’97, but this time in a digital space. On Tumblr, this looked like blogs of curated art or photography; on Pinterest, we saw well-crafted... See more

Such proximity to information and audience gives the curator of the digital world an opportunity to wield substantial power. Influential online leaders gain credibility because, over time, they establish themselves as competent and credible through demonstrating a commitment to a group’s goals or purpose; by being centrally placed within a network... See more

We used to associate intelligence with accumulation. Who knew the most. Who could recall the fastest. Who sounded the smartest in a room.

But in a world where AI knows more than anyone—and everyone is shouting into the void—intelligence has quietly changed shape. It’s no longer about how much you know. It’s about how well you filter .