Noema, Issue 6

About Noema:

Noema is an award-winning magazine exploring the transformations sweeping our world. We publish essays, interviews, reportage, videos and art on the overlapping realms of technology, philosophy, governance, economics, geopolitics and culture. In doing so, our unique approach is to get out of the usual lanes and cross disciplines, social silos and cultural boundaries. From artificial intelligence and the climate crisis to the future of democracy and capitalism, Noema Magazine seeks a deeper understanding of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century.

In ancient Greek, noēma means “thinking” or the “object of thought.” And that is our intention: to delve deeply into the critical issues transforming the world today, at length and with historical context, in order to illuminate new pathways of thought in a way not possible through the immediacy of daily media.

Published online and in print by the Berggruen Institute, Noema grew out of a previous publication called The WorldPost, which was first a partnership with HuffPost and later with The Washington Post. Noema publishes thoughtful, rigorous, adventurous pieces by voices from both inside and outside the institute. While committed to using journalism to help build a more sustainable and equitable world, we do not promote any particular set of national, economic or partisan interests.

About this issue:

When a concept that organizes our reality is replaced by an entirely different and incommensurate worldview, it is called a “paradigm shift.”

The theme of this edition of Noema was conceived in early 2024. At that time, we had in mind the epochal shift from the paradigm of globalization, in which markets, trade and technology cross borders, to “the Planetary,” where we recognize that the whole Earth system embeds and entangles human civilization in its habitat.

This deeper awareness has been enabled by the emergence of a technological exoskeleton of satellites, sensors and cloud computation that expands the heretofore limited scope of human understanding of the world, repositioning our place in the natural order. Neither above nor apart from nature, we have now come to realize we are part and parcel of one interdependent organism comprised of multiple intelligences striving for sustainable equilibrium.