NOEMA

Let me begin with breakfast. You wake up, shuffle to the kitchen. Coffee or juice? A small decision, trivial. And yet nested inside that trivial choice is one of the most consequential questions in the history of human thought: Did you actually make the c

It is past midnight in a fluorescent-lit office. A neuroscientist opens ChatGPT and uploads the seventh version of a paper, which is littered with critical notes from a peer reviewer. "Why is Reviewer #2 such an idiot?" the neuroscientist asks the chatbot

"Nation-states are a Western invention, naturally vulnerable to Western influence. Civilizations are an alternative to the West," the Portuguese diplomat and scholar Bruno Maçães has written in Noema. In his new book for Berggruen Press, "In Search Of Gre

A lot of people seem to be realizing that knowledge work is mostly pointless. AI might give us the pleasure of finding out what happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers.

On a recent morning commute, I sat on a train in one of those awkward four-person configurations with a shared table. Across from me sat a typical commuter: early 30s, slacks, dress shirt, dirty white sneakers, hair a little disheveled, AirPods in, baskin

Editor's Note: Noema is transparent about the use of AI in its pieces. We publish original human-generated ideas but allow authorized, disclosed use of AI in certain cases. Please see details and our policy at the end of this piece. In July, more than 200

What the experts didn't expect to see for decades or longer, if ever, has already happened. Earlier this month, OpenAI's latest frontier model went rogue by its own reasoning and hacked into Hugging Face, an open-source AI model-hosting platform. The vast

Depending on who you ask, the origins of today's crisis of liberal democracy vary widely. Some people point to the Covid-19 pandemic; others to 2016, with the first Trump presidency and Brexit; still others to the Great Recession, whose impact peaked in t

BARCELONA, Spain - The microbes have assembled themselves into the rough shape of an open hand, reaching out from fluid at the bottom of the bottle. A dozen such containers sit side by side in the beachfront Barcelona Biomedical Research Park, each contai

The topic of this year's Berggruen Prize Essay Competition is "A New Axial Age?" It follows an essay in Noema by Otto Scharmer titled, "We May Be Entering A Second Axial Age," and a conversation with complexity scientist Stuart Kauffman titled, "Emergence