The Best of Noema Magazine

China’s leaders are building a new economy oriented to state-driven technological solutions to the climate crisis. In the process, they aim to construct an entirely different world order that at last…

Despite their great-power rivalry, America and China are more similar than most people think. Both are living through a Gilded Age and struggling to end excesses of capitalism.

Users flocking to the platform will need to shift their expectations for social media and become engaged democratic citizens in the life of their networks.

«the anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing calls “scalability.” This doesn’t just mean large scale. It means, according to Tsing, “the ability to expand — and expand and expand — without rethinking basic elements.”»

In Mexico, people who are “tocado” — “touched” — reveal that geological time can emerge through fissures in the land to alter the way we relate to our homes, cities and even ourselves.

A new field of psychology has begun to quantify an age-old intuition: Feeling awe is good for us.

«Francis Bacon, described wonder as “broken knowledge” — a facet of the human condition, in other words, that defied his scientific method»

Our democracies are already gamified. Our goal should be to do it better.

The notion that they can follow their own standards overlooks the need for universally accepted norms to sustain world order.

New interpretations of the laws of thermodynamics suggest the infamous “heat death” hypothesis, which foretells the end of all life and organization in the universe, might not hold.

For millennia, scientists and technologists have been scouring the natural world for clues on how to live longer. But is anyone any closer to finally defeating aging?

The clock is a useful social tool, but it is also deeply political: It benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of our own bodies and the world around us.

«Clock time is not what most people think it is. It was created, and it is frequently altered and adjusted to fit social and political purposes.»

The noble but undervalued craft of maintenance could help preserve modernity’s finest achievements, from public transit systems to power grids, and serve as a useful framework for addressing climate…

For decades, America gave China a vision of future prosperity. But today, America has mostly ceased to offer a model for China or anywhere else, leaving China’s leaders without a guide as they chart a…

Pandemics aren’t just for humans — they can sweep through the plant world too. As the planet warms, devastating diseases are being carried to new lands by the infrastructure of global capitalism,…

The debate over whether LaMDA is sentient or not overlooks important issues that will frame debates about intelligence, sentience, language and human-AI interaction in the coming years.

Democracy itself will have to be reinvented in the age of planetary crises, the philosopher Achille Mbembe argues. We need a new generation of rights that do not depend on the nation-state.