Noema Magazine

ABOUT NOEMA Noema is a magazine exploring the transformations sweeping our world. We publish essays, interviews, reportage, 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 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…

As the poet Archibald MacLeish understood, a world ends when its metaphor has died. At the moment of such a rupture, a new space opens up in place of the shattered status quo. Illusions about an old order vanish, making way for what has been incubating to emerge. Above all, a rupture demands choices about the foundations of the future. We are experiencing such a deep breach today, as a consequence of the convergence of several breakpoints at once. This confluent rupture will only turn out to be a caesura, or pause, along a moribund path if we don’t seize the opportunity to abandon patterns of the past that brought us to this point. It will take both hard-headed realism and leaps of imagination for open societies to build the kind of…

Bruno Maçães was Portugal’s secretary of state for European affairs from 2013 to 2015 and is now a senior adviser at Flint Global and a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations. His two most recent books are “History Has Begun” and “Geopolitics for the End Time.” KYIV, Ukraine — Samuel Huntington, who is often thought of as having written about civilizations, in fact wrote about identity. The two concepts have nothing in common, and the confusion between them explains why Huntington argued that Russia and Ukraine were part of the same civilization. Therefore, he thought, any conflict between them was essentially impossible. But while Russians and Ukrainians may well share a certain religious identity as Orthodox Christians, this war reveals the priority of national identity in a secular world. Ukrainians…

Avoiding One World, Two Systems “There is a lack of support in Asia and Africa for the Euro-American bloc against Russia after its invasion of Ukraine not because there is a pro-Russia bloc, but because these countries are alienated from and cynical about Western-led institutions. For this reason, the West should turn its attention to remodeling existing multilateral institutions to better accommodate their concerns and interests. China has already established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and has long contemplated an Asian Monetary Fund that would supplant the International Monetary Fund. If the West does not act, we will end up where we are already headed: one world, two systems.” Gordon Brown Former prime minister of the United Kingdom The Cost Of Siding With Russia “The enemy of my enemy is my friend. This logic was…

Joe Zadeh is a writer based in Newcastle. On the damp and cloudy afternoon of Feb. 15, 1894, a man walked through Greenwich Park in East London. His name was Martial Bourdin — French, 26 years of age, with slicked-back dark hair and a mustache. He wandered up the zigzagged path that led to the Royal Observatory, which just 10 years earlier had been established as the symbolic and scientific center of globally standardized clock time — Greenwich Mean Time — as well as of the British Empire. In his left hand, Bourdin carried a bomb: a brown paper bag containing a metal case full of explosives. As he got closer to his target, he primed it with a bottle of sulfuric acid. But then, as he stood facing the Observatory,…

Byung-Chul Han is a South Korea-born German philosopher and cultural theorist whose latest books include “The Burnout Society” and “The Disappearance of Rituals.” He recently spoke with Nathan Gardels, Noema’s editor-in-chief. NATHAN GARDELS The German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once commented that: “When eras are on the decline, all tendencies are subjective; but, on the other hand, when matters are ripening for a new epoch, all tendencies are objective. Each worthy effort turns its force from the inward to the outward world.” By that definition, ours is an era of decline that has turned from the outward to the inward obsession with identity and “authenticity,” both personal and tribal, fueled by digital connectivity. Paradoxically, social media in this sense is antisocial, leading to the disintegration of community through a kind of connected…