Noema Magazine

26/09/2025

“Vietnam has refused to adopt either Chinese or American models of AI & instead is building its own ‘core tech stack’ of language models, cloud infrastructure & even training data.”

The emergence of virtual territories will reshape geopolitics.

26/09/2025

“Vietnam has refused to adopt either Chinese or American models of AI & instead is building its own ‘core tech stack’ of language models, cloud infrastructure & even training data.”

25/09/2025

“As the dismal trends in American test scores make clear, our current approach is no longer serving students’ needs.”

—Greg Easley

With thoughtful design, AI systems could move American classrooms beyond rigid curricula toward adaptive programs that respond to individual learners.

24/09/2025

“The durability of Africa’s multiethnic states, most of which project power unevenly over vast territories & possess relatively small militaries, has everything to do with African states’ tradition of multilateralism.”

—Alden Young

Why has Africa, long imagined as riven by ethnic and tribal conflict, preserved the arbitrary borders and multiethnic states it inherited from European colonial powers?

23/09/2025

What do computer science, quantum physics & Hindu tradition have in common?

It’s more than you might think, Swami Sarvapriyananda, Blaise Agüera y Arcas & Carlo Rovelli write.

Central concepts in three different domains — Hindu tradition, computer science and quantum physics — find analogies and reflect one another.

22/09/2025

Despite environmentalists' skepticism, there is reason to welcome the oil & gas industry’s entry into direct air capture of carbon, Christopher J. Preston writes.

Industrial carbon capture is a climate strategy environmentalists love to hate. Those committed to its development are trying to win back allies they sorely need.

21/09/2025

“In most of the world, humanity’s prevailing conception of health is dangerously constrained as a vision of the individual body.”

—Nils Gilman et al

The future of health will be planetary or there will be no future health at all.

20/09/2025

“All our scientific stories — & the technologies we build from them — must always include us & our place within the tapestries of life.”

—Adam Frank

To understand life, we must stop treating organisms like machines and minds like code.

19/09/2025

“Should China be regarded primarily as a geopolitical threat to the liberal world order or as a Green Giant that is the best friend of the planet; the enemy in a new Cold War or the vanguard in the battle against the existential challenge of a warming biosphere? Or both?”

—Nathan Gardels

China’s massive scaling of clean energy pays off for the whole planet.

18/09/2025

The revival of the Intervision Song Contest “is about more than pop & kitsch: It’s a soft power ploy by Putin, who has been using non-Western cultural events to strengthen Russia’s political alliances with countries in the Global South,” Lily Lynch reports.

As the West tries to isolate Russia for its war in Ukraine, the Kremlin is using cultural events like the Intervision Song Contest to strengthen its ties with the Global South.

17/09/2025

Issue VI is shipping out! Have you gotten your copy yet?

https://shop.noemamag.com/

17/09/2025

Climate change & advances like AI are both pushing us towards a world increasingly caught somewhere between technological transcendence & ecological collapse, Dan Zimmer writes.

The politics of left versus right no longer make sense when the future of all earthly life is at stake.