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Noema Magazine

@noemamag.com

Longform journalism exploring fresh ideas. Pitch us: edit@noemamag.com

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Latest posts by Noema Magazine @noemamag.com

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AI Agents Are Recruiting Humans To Observe The Offline World | NOEMA Agents need us — as sensors, as verifiers, as bearers of liability — in ways we have barely begun to account for.

“We like to imagine AI hunting for us, going out into the digital world to retrieve facts, schedule meetings & optimize our lives. But a reversal is underway. We are becoming the gatherers: collecting the offline signals our agents need to continue the hunt.”

— @umangsbhatt.bsky.social

#aiagents

05.03.2026 18:41 👍 5 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 1
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Investing In The Ecosystems That Sustain Us | NOEMA Making the economic case for nature is an essential task for securing development in our planetary age.

“A standing forest is worth more than a pile of felled trees — something we have started to realize only recently.”

—Tong Wu

www.noemamag.com/investing-in...

04.03.2026 15:30 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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Not Yet ‘Game Over’ In Iran | NOEMA Foreign intervention to foment regime change may have sealed the fate of reformists who would take power.

“For every Iranian in that nation of 90 million celebrating their liberation from the tyranny of Ayatollah Khamenei, there is another for whom national sovereignty & not living under the imperial mandate of others is sacred.”

—Nathan Gardels

#iran

03.03.2026 18:29 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Achieving planetary salutogenesis is very centrally about finding a homeostatic balance with the microbes upon which we depend (and of which we are, in a profound sense, merely an extension).

27.02.2026 09:05 👍 14 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0

In 2025, I learned something surprising: scientists were starting to freeze samples of threatened microbial ecosystems in the name of conservation.

For @noemamag.com I explored how this is part of the emerging idea of microbial conservation — a practice scientist say we need before it's too late

26.02.2026 19:19 👍 7 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
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The Healing Power Of Social Friction | NOEMA Could the key to bridging societal divides be found inside your local karaoke bar?

What can karaoke nights at a strip-mall biker bar in small-town Texas teach us about democracy? @lisabubert.bsky.social explores.

www.noemamag.com/the-healing-...

02.03.2026 17:48 👍 5 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
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A Third Path For AI Beyond The US-China Binary | NOEMA What if the future of AI isn’t defined by Washington or Beijing, but by improvisation elsewhere?

“AI sovereignty, as it currently plays out outside of the U.S.-China vacuum, is not a banner‐waving claim to territorial control; rather, it manifests itself as the quiet right to decide what counts as knowledge & how that knowledge shows up in the world.”

— @digitaldang.bsky.social

01.03.2026 17:30 👍 4 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
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Embracing A World Of Many AI Personalities | NOEMA A future filled with many AI personas — from the bad boy to the brown-noser — isn’t a mistake; it’s the best way to work with the technology.

“Our tendency to anthropomorphize AI might be hardwired into our brains. Instead of fighting it, we should embrace it."

—Phil Nolan

#aiagent #ai

www.noemamag.com/embracing-a-...

28.02.2026 17:37 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 1
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Saving The Life We Cannot See | NOEMA Conservation has traditionally ignored the planet’s smallest life forms. Microbiologists are trying to change that — before it’s too late.

“Many of the planet’s microbiomes are under serious threat, with untold numbers of species & ecosystems flickering silently out of existence.”

— @moiradonovan.bsky.social

#microbes #microbiome #conservation #environment

26.02.2026 17:55 👍 11 🔁 5 💬 0 📌 2
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Would You Eat This Bug To Save The World? | NOEMA Insects could play a key role in the future of the human diet with their high nutritional value and low environmental footprint, especially compared to meat.

“I tried to fix my face to disguise the horror at the prospect of potentially having to consume a worm or ant egg or beetle larva, instead opting to outwardly display an appreciation for the local culture.”

—Rebecca Root

25.02.2026 15:30 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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Why AI Doesn’t Need A ‘Mind’ To Matter | NOEMA We’ve been searching for a mind inside the machine. The rise of AI agents suggests its shell may be enough.

When Moltbook emerged as an overnight sensation last month as a Reddit-like platform for AI agents, it revealed our instinctive need to anthropomorphize AI.

But whether agents have a mind of their own isn’t what matters at this stage, Ben Bariach argues.

#moltbook #aiagent #ai

24.02.2026 18:47 👍 4 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0
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The Last Yak Herder Of Ladakh | NOEMA As glaciers melt and traditions fade, one man’s journey across Ladakh’s sacred pastures is a living archive of a disappearing way of life.

From @noemamag.com: Stunning photographs and a visit with Thinlay Nurboo, one of the last people keeping up the traditional way of life of Himalayan yak herders in the face of climate change and modernity. www.noemamag.com/the-last-yak...

23.02.2026 21:36 👍 5 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

"Unlike a supine Congress or weaker nations with an asymmetrical trade relationship with the U.S., the climate will not bend to President Trump’s will to power. Declaring climate change a hoax won’t make it go away.”

22.02.2026 08:54 👍 14 🔁 5 💬 1 📌 0
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The Danger Of Superhuman AI Is Not What You Think | NOEMA The rhetoric over “superhuman” AI implicitly erases what’s most important about being human.

The danger of superhuman AI is not what you think. This essay in @noemamag.com by @shannonvallor.bsky.social is brilliant. Well worth a read. www.noemamag.com/the-danger-o...

21.02.2026 10:20 👍 69 🔁 25 💬 6 📌 4
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The Abundance Movement’s Blind Spot | NOEMA What if Americans care more about the cost of climate disasters than carbon-free energy?

“Climate change may not pose an immediate danger to the lives of most Americans, but it is starting to chip away at our economic well-being.”

—Brian Stone Jr.

#abundanceagenda #climatecrisis #greentransition

23.02.2026 16:03 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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How We Became Captives Of Social Media | NOEMA Today’s social media has shifted from social networking platforms to AI-enhanced conveyor belts of vapid entertainment. Is there any escape?

“The stark cognitive dissonance between how people feel about social media & how they use it is one sign that we have entered a new era in our relationship with these platforms.”

— @mikesmariani.bsky.social

www.noemamag.com/how-we-becam...

22.02.2026 17:30 👍 5 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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Welcome To The New Warring States | NOEMA Today’s global turbulence has echoes in Chinese history.

“Trump’s trade policy bypasses multilateralism, instead compelling each country to negotiate bilaterally — on America’s terms. In doing so, Trump is not merely reacting to a broken global order. He is forcing others into an entirely new one.”

—Hui Huang

#tariffs

www.noemamag.com/welcome-to-t...

21.02.2026 17:30 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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The Climate Won’t Bend To Trump’s Will To Power | NOEMA The danger of cancelling the “endangerment” finding.

“It is the energy dinosaurs, not what U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio calls ‘the climate cult,’ that are stranding America on the wrong side of history as the rest of the world moves on.”

—Nathan Gardels

#endangermentfinding #trump #climate

20.02.2026 18:25 👍 5 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 1
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The Quest For Clean Cargo | NOEMA As global shipping emissions remain a stubborn climate problem, some sailors are embracing a return to technologies of yore.

“The Tres Hombres has no engine, only sails. It represents a bold experiment on the fringes of the international shipping industry, which generates tens of billions of euros in annual profits & 3% of anthropogenic global output of greenhouse gases.”

—Julian Sayarer

#shipping #sailing #emissions

19.02.2026 20:58 👍 8 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
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The Surprisingly Lifelike Behavior Of Mindless Material | NOEMA New ways of studying the origin of life are leading to a better understanding of consciousness and the mind.

“Chemical systems that do not meet our criteria for what it means to be ‘alive’ exhibit a surprising array of behaviors we usually only attribute to things we think of as living.”

— @ConorFeehly.bsky.social

18.02.2026 15:04 👍 5 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
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Our Emerging Planetary Nervous System | NOEMA We need a new kind of wisdom for our planetary age, one that synchronizes the signals, rhythms and boundaries of our natural world across domains.

“Think of satellites, soil probes, buoys & bioacoustics as ‘nerve endings’ that take in information, the ‘reflexes’ are machine forecasts that fire on patterns at speed, & the ‘cortex’ is human intuition, integrating senses to understand what matters & why.”

—Rimma Boshernitsan

#planetary #ai

17.02.2026 21:38 👍 4 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 1
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Rescuing Democracy From The Quiet Rule Of AI | NOEMA Our gravest AI risk isn’t runaway superintelligence but our cultural readiness to surrender collective judgment to algorithmic systems.

Our gravest AI risk isn't runaway superintelligence but our cultural readiness to surrender collective judgment to algorithmic systems, Andrew Sorota argues.

www.noemamag.com/rescuing-dem...

16.02.2026 17:02 👍 18 🔁 6 💬 0 📌 0
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Editing Nature To Fix Our Failures | NOEMA Gene editing may enable us to prevent a species from ever becoming extinct in the first place. But should we?

We are starting to witness tantalizing glimpses of the net good that can be achieved via genetic editing. How far will we allow it to go?

Aryn Baker explores.

15.02.2026 17:30 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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Reclaiming Europe’s Digital Sovereignty | NOEMA Europe can accept permanent technological dependency, or it can build democratic digital systems rooted in climate commitments, labor protections and social diversity.

Europe needs to stop pretending it's a neutral market in a world where digital infrastructure is geopolitical, @francescabria.bsky.social writes. It should act like what it is: a political project with a democratic mission.

www.noemamag.com/reclaiming-e...

14.02.2026 17:30 👍 14 🔁 4 💬 1 📌 1
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The Last Yak Herder Of Ladakh | NOEMA As glaciers melt and traditions fade, one man’s journey across Ladakh’s sacred pastures is a living archive of a disappearing way of life.

Lush multimedia feature on yak herding, preserving ways of life, and a future on climate change. @noemamag.com always has such fantastic work.

13.02.2026 20:00 👍 23 🔁 7 💬 0 📌 0
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Where There Is Connectivity There Is Surveillance | NOEMA The immigration crackdown in the U.S. opens the gates to a monitory state just as Covid tracing did in China.

“I never imagined that America would reach a point where our constitutional protections are teetering because the latest innovations in technology are converging with demagogic politics to corrode the institutional checks & balances by which republics endure.”

—Editor-In-Chief Nathan Gardels

#ice

13.02.2026 18:41 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 1
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It’s Time To Target The Political Power Of Polluters | NOEMA We won’t make progress on decarbonization until we rein in the power of fossil fuel asset owners and invest in green assets. Tax and investment policy can help.

Global climate efforts are failing because they do not tackle the power imbalance between fossil and green asset owners. This piece unpacks how fossil fuel elites exploit weak global rules to protect profits, stalling decarbonization.

By @greenprofgreen.bsky.social in @noemamag.com

buff.ly/vmfb9sx

13.02.2026 14:01 👍 5 🔁 2 💬 1 📌 0

As Oliver Wendell Holmes said of William James: "turning the lights down low so as to give miracle a chance...."

13.02.2026 06:25 👍 7 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0
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Why Human Intuition Is Still Science’s Greatest Tool In The Age Of AI | NOEMA Our sense for aesthetics, meaning and embodiment give us a vital advantage over our technological creations.

“Without the cultivated, meaning-laden, embodied intuition of the human scientist who is instinctively driven to ask questions about the nature of the world, AI systems remain rudderless when they enter the realms of uncertainty.”

— @conorfeehly.bsky.social

#ai #science #scientificdiscoveries

12.02.2026 18:15 👍 12 🔁 8 💬 0 📌 2
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Is European AI A Lost Cause? Not Necessarily. | NOEMA If Europe wants to build a new AI Stack it should stop listening to critics who claim to lead the way but only offer resistance.

“Emmanuel Macron, J.D. Vance & Berlin artist collectives may seem like unlikely allies, but they all agree that Europe’s ‘regulate first, build later (maybe)’ approach to AI is not working.”

—Benjamin Bratton

11.02.2026 15:30 👍 5 🔁 2 💬 2 📌 1