Noema Magazine

01/01/2025

Be prepared for whatever 2025 brings — sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Noema Editor-in-Chief Nathan Gardels’s weekly column captures the zeitgeist behind global events by putting them into social, political and historical context.

31/12/2024

Close out the year with some fantastic reading!

Our best longform journalism and essays from 2024.

30/12/2024

Noema's Top 10 Countdown: “Unless regulators & enforcers eradicate the existing dominance of tech giants now, we’ll be living in today’s infrastructure monopoly for decades, perhaps even a century.”

—Maria Farrell & Robin Berjon

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

29/12/2024

Noema's Top 10 Countdown: “What if this bog-standard corner of England was actually full of surprises if only I bothered to go out & look?"

—Alastair Humphreys

What if this bog-standard corner of England is actually full of adventure, nature, wildness, surprises, silence, perspective — if only I bothered to go out and look?

28/12/2024

Noema's Top 10 Countdown: What if AI — used well — could actually help rebuild the middle class?

David Autor argues just that.

AI doesn’t have to be a job destroyer. It offers us the opportunity to extend expertise to a larger set of workers.

27/12/2024

Noema's Top 10 Countdown: Lithium is essential to way more than just the electric car batteries. It’s in medicine, ceramics, A/Cs, fireworks, nuclear weapons, pacemakers, toys; the list goes on & on.

How did it become so critical? Jacob Baynham explores.

One of the oldest, scarcest elements in the universe has given us treatments for mental illness, ovenproof casserole dishes and electric cars. But how much do we really know about lithium?

26/12/2024

Noema's Top 10 Countdown: Have you ever heard of “oneironauts?”

They’re dream explorers, people who aim to cultivate lucid dreams & ultimately control them.

Dive in with Claire L. Evans to explore dreamworld.

Recent research on lucid dreams suggests that consciousness exists along a spectrum between sleep and waking, between hallucination and revelation, between dreamworlds and reality.

26/12/2024

Happy holidays from the Noema team! 🎄✨🎁

24/12/2024

Noema's Top 10 Countdown: “How does an AI system without the human capacity for conscious self-reflection, empathy or moral intelligence become superhuman merely by being a faster problem-solver? Aren’t we more than that?”

—Shannon Vallor

The rhetoric over “superhuman” AI implicitly erases what’s most important about being human.

23/12/2024

Noema's Top 10 Countdown: “It seems to me that China in 2035 will be more like an aging relative, increasingly lost in memories & fantasies & complaining that you don’t take them as seriously as they take themselves.”

—Jacob Dreyer

China’s youthful urbanization changed the world. What will happen as the country ages and slows down?

22/12/2024

Illuminate your holiday season with the gift of Noema ✨

Noema is a magazine exploring the transformations sweeping our world. We publish essays, reporting, interviews, videos and art on the overlapping realms of philosophy, governance, geopolitics, economics, technology and culture. In doing so, our unique approach is to get out of the usual lanes and cr...

22/12/2024

Noema's Top 10 Countdown: If you could create a virtual replica of your body & track everything from nutrition to disease risk, would you?

Joe Zadeh explores that near-term possibility.

Digital twins offer humankind the ability to command virtual replicas of forests, oil fields, cities, supply chains — and even, maybe one day, our very bodies.

21/12/2024

Noema's Top 10 Countdown: We still don’t understand the role language plays in consciousness. The future of AI may upend what little we know, John Last writes.

What can we learn about AI from the rare children who grew up untouched by human language or society?

20/12/2024

Come work with us in LA or remotely!

Details: https://noemamag.com/careers/

20/12/2024

Noema's Top 10 Countdown: “My father, a Vietnam veteran, died of a brutal cancer that riddled his bones with holes. He was convinced that being exposed to Agent Orange in Vietnam had caused it.

Later, I learned he’d been exposed to it in our own backyard.”

—Laura J. Martin

Pesticides and herbicides made from fossil fuels that are freely available to unwitting consumers poison our land, our bodies and life all around.

19/12/2024

Two decades ago, Germany prospered as one of the most globalized nations on the planet, thriving in an increasingly integrated world.

But that interdependence has become a curse, writes Nathan Gardels.

The European powerhouse became dependent on interdependence.

18/12/2024

“The Kenya-led intervention stands a better chance of making a lasting difference than prior interventions, if it first sees Haiti’s current violence as not just a Haitian inheritance, but as part of the longer-term crisis that post-colonies share.”

—Matthew J. Smith

Haitians are caught between the grip of violent gangs and the messy legacies of foreign intervention.

17/12/2024

“Baby bonds” provide young adults with immensely valuable seed money they can use to invest in their future, from starting a business to purchasing a home, pursuing a college degree or saving for retirement, Julian Le Grand & Niels Planel argue.

“Baby bonds” can provide young adults with the seed money needed to invest in their futures.