In March, three months before the assassination of the Sikh separatist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Canada, the Indian government turned the Sikh-majority Punjab into a police state. Its internet was cut and messaging services restricted, gatherings of more than four people banned in some places, and a state-wide cordon and manhunt launched — all just to find one man, a 30-year-old fellow Sikh agitator called Amritpal Singh.  Over the previous year, Singh had been advocating for a separate homeland for Sikhs in northern India. He toured villages and towns in Punjab, a longstanding focal point ..read more

KIRUNA, Sweden — Every night, sometime between 1 and 2 a.m., everyone feels it, right on schedule: a deep, rhythmic rumbling that reverberates through their floors, shaking their walls and their beds. Three-quarters of a mile below the ground, miners have just detonated a massive quantity of explosives. They’re blasting out iron ore from the bedrock — around six Eiffel Towers’ worth. In this northern Swedish mining town of around 23,000, most people are used to the feeling of reverberating dynamite. But a newcomer may find themselves jolted awake, night after night. The signs of the groun ..read more

by yasuo-range for “The Disappearing Art of Maintenance” in Noema Magazine Issue IV, Fall 2023 by SERIFA for “The Bold Idea To Move Millions To Climate Havens” by Rob Juárez for “There Is No Such Thing As Italian Food” in Noema Magazine Issue IV, Fall 2023 by Petra Cortright for Noema Magazine cover, Issue IV, Fall 2023 by Jesse Stone for “Climate Lessons From A Lost Land” by Facultative Works for “How Seawater’s Teeming Life May Change Our Own” by Alex Valentina for “The Extraordinary Green Promise Of A Tiny Molecule” in Noema Magazine Issue IV, Fall 2023 by Ibrahim Rayintakath for “The ..read more

Jonathan Zawada for Noema Magazine How Modernity Made Us Allergic Our very old immune systems can’t keep up with modern lifestyles and diets, leading to increases in all sorts of chronic health problems like allergies and obesity. by Theresa MacPhail Anthony Gerace for Noema Magazine What AI Teaches Us About Good Writing While AI can speed up the writing process, it doesn’t optimize quality — and it endangers our sense of connection to ourselves and others. by Laura Hartenberger Lucas Foglia for Noema Magazine Finding Awe Amid Everyday Splendor A new field of psychology has begun to q ..read more

This week U.S. President Joe Biden sat down face-to-face in California with Chinese President Xi Jinping to dampen escalating tensions and, in Biden’s words, “ensure that competition does not veer into conflict.” For his part, Xi acknowledged that “turning their back[s] on each other is not an option,” but was explicit about the underlying cause of confrontation as he sees it, saying that it is “unrealistic for one side to remodel the other.” For China and the U.S. to arrive at this modus vivendi is not so much a sign of warming ties as a recognition of the intractable nature of strategic riva ..read more

Mongla, BANGLADESH — I’m floating down the Pasur River in southwest Bangladesh. This wide and murky channel winds its way toward the Bay of Bengal past fields of melons and vibrant green rice paddies. As our diesel-driven wooden boat putters by, barefoot farmers stand atop crumbling earthen embankments, their plaid skirt-like lungis wrapped around their waists, hands resting on their hips. They watch us indifferently while their goats munch on grass. The land we cut through is a broad and flat muddy plain built up over eons by infinitesimally small pieces of the weathering Himalayan Mount ..read more

The impending threat of climate calamity is forging a new breed of subnational statesmen from California guided by a political philosophy that could be called “planetary realism.” Their view departs from the old “realist” school of foreign policy that regards nation-states as the principal actors on the world stage engaged in an endless struggle against others in pursuit of securing their own national interests. Reality these days dictates that this new realism supplants the old when it comes to the convergence of critical common challenges that are beyond the scope of remedy by any one nation ..read more

During a reading project I undertook to better understand the “third wave of democracy” — the remarkable and rapid rise of democracies in Latin America, Asia, Europe and Africa in the 1970s and 80s — I came to realize that this ascendency of democratic polities was not the result of some force propelling history toward its natural, final state, as some scholars have argued. Instead, it was the result of American political influence spreading around the world after the U.S. had established itself as the sole global superpower. However, the U.S. endeavor to impose its political system in foreign ..read more

At the G-20 meeting in September, participants and observers were surprised by a particular dinner invitation sent on behalf of India’s president that referred to her as the “President of Bharat” — a racially tinged callback to the Indian king, Bharata, who is featured in Hindu mythology as an ancestor of the Hindu race. That same day, a tweet by a senior spokesman of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) referred to India’s Narendra Modi, who was attending a summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in Indonesia, as the “prime minister of Bharat.” Meanwhile, on the global st ..read more

Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of DeepMind and former vice president for AI products and policy at Google, offers some deep thoughts in his just-released book, “The Coming Wave: Technology, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma” (written with Michael Bhaskar). The “wave” he sees washing over all aspects of society, for better and worse, is propelled by generative AI and another general-purpose technological innovation — synthetic biology, which, powered by the processing prowess of intelligent machines, can read and rewrite genetic code and then boot up life in the lab. “For the first ..read more