Noema Magazine Issue IV: Passage (Digital)

The Clash Of Civilization States Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. Shortly after 9/11, I sat down for a conversation with Samuel Huntington, the Harvard professor famous for his “clash of civilizations” thesis. “Osama bin Laden has given the West back its identity,” he declared summarily. The assertion of incommensurate values by others entails reaffirmation of one’s own. Against this amorphous threat from the margins of modernity, the West pushed back with invasions and wars in the Middle East that went on for some 20 years, culminating in the defeat of loosely aligned and outgunned jihadists who sought to establish an “Islamic state.” Today, the challenge that affirms the values defining open societies no longer comes from scattered fanatics chasing a medieval mirage in the sands of Arabia.…

Lachlan Summers is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. MEXICO CITY — In the middle of 2018, nine months or so after the city had last shaken with a major earthquake, Elena lay in bed in her apartment, wide awake for what must have been the fourth night in a row. “It was as if I could hear the walls,” she would later tell me, noting that such sleepless nights had become routine since the quake. That quake was a magnitude 7.1 temblor — comparatively moderate for Mexico, but because it was centered in the capital, one of the deadliest. It had frightened Elena, but she was fine, as were her friends and family. Her building too was ostensibly unharmed. And yet,…

Henry Wismayer is a writer based in London. We were halfway down the Point Reyes peninsula when Dacher Keltner wandered off-trail. He stopped at an outcrop of granite boulders, where the ground fell away toward Driftwood Beach and the wide expanse of the Pacific beyond. A coastal fog bank was moving in, shrouding the horizon. Wisps of condensation swept up and over the promontory, bathing my legs in cold air. Out west, the sun was starting to drop into the ocean, its beams casting a wide band of light on the water. The reflected shards glimmered through the vapor in the far distance, producing an irresistible illusion of endlessness. “I love that highway of sun,” I said to Keltner, who was standing on my left, looking out to sea. “Yeah,…

John Last is a journalist based in Padua, Italy. ARQUÀ PETRARCA, Italy — In the mirror-flat valley of the Po River, the Euganean Hills stick out of the vast landscape, their shallow peaks topped by sloping vineyards and groves of olive trees. Nestled between them is the tiny medieval village of Arquà Petrarca, where a microclimate created by the shaded hills and their abundant water produces perfect conditions for one of Italy’s rarest crops. The giuggiole, or jujube fruit, resembles an olive and tastes, at first, like a woody apple. After withering off the vine, it takes on a sweeter flavor, closer to a honeyed fig. Among the medieval elite, the fruit was so popular that it gave birth to an idiom: “andare in brodo di giuggiole” — “to go…

Sara Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist. She is the deputy director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science and a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University; external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute; and a fellow at the Berggruen Institute. Toward the end of August 1924, the orbits of Mars and Earth carried the two sister planets closer to each other than they had been in around a century. Enthusiasm for the event spread across the United States. An article in The New York Times anticipated that astronomers “may definitely solve the question [of] whether Mars is inhabited.” The government requested five minutes of complete radio silence, on the hour every hour, across the nation over the days when…

Lois Rosson is a historian of science and technology based in Los Angeles. In 1835, William Henry Fox Talbot finally succeeded in producing a crude photograph of his country estate. He triumphantly declared that his was the first house ever known to have taken its own picture. Fox Talbot described the calotype, his contribution to the photomechanical process, as an eradication of human intervention. In Talbot’s description, the photogenic drawing was formed “by the mere action of Light upon sensitive paper.” Photography offered nature a “pencil” to render herself through optical and chemical means alone. Fox Talbot’s house is a useful reminder that the development of the photograph is an automation story. By the mid-19th century, rendering a detailed image no longer needed to be outsourced to a draftsman because…

Yuen Yuen Ang is the Alfred Chandler Chair of Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of “How China Escaped the Poverty Trap” and “China’s Gilded Age.” In 2021, Apolitical named her among the world’s 100 most influential academics in government. “Yet for all the advances in material and cultural life, there remained a feeling that things had gone wrong … a screw had come loose and the wheels fallen out of balance. Prosperity was precarious, as the recent [crisis] had revealed. Inequality … was more obvious than ever. The capitalists controlled the government.” In this passage from “American Colossus,” the historian H.W. Brands was describing America’s Gilded Age (1865-1900), but he could just as well have been describing present-day China, where soaring income inequality has exceeded…

Joe Zadeh is a writer based in Newcastle. ZÜRICH — In the aftermath of World War II, the leaders of Switzerland decided that a remote and picturesque valley high in the Alps could be developed for hydropower to help with the urgent effort to modernize the nation. Nearly 350 square miles of alpine snow and ice there turned into liquid during the spring and summer months, a force of water that, if harnessed correctly, could turn turbines and generate electricity. And so a plan was hatched to conquer this “white coal” by building the tallest concrete gravity dam the world had ever seen: the Grande Dixence. At nearly 1,000 feet high, it would surpass the Hoover Dam and end up only slightly shorter than the Empire State Building, then the…

Alex Vuocolo is a journalist based in New York. The R32 trains, nicknamed the Brightliners for their shiny unpainted exteriors, were built to last 35 years. Imagine that: Your lifespan stamped into metal, your death prefigured. When they were finally retired from service last January, they had been riding the New York City rails for no less than 58 years and were, by most accounts, the oldest operating subway cars in the world. That’s 23 unplanned years of hauling people across New York. A whole generation got to see those stainless-steel beauties creaking down the tunnel to the platform, with their crinkle-ridged exteriors and faded advertisements. In a way, it was a small miracle that they lasted so long—an “anomaly,” as one mechanic told me. Except, it wasn’t really. It…

Karen Bakker is a professor at the University of British Columbia, a Guggenheim fellow and a 2022–23 fellow of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. On a chilly morning in January 1952, Alan Baldridge witnessed a murder. Sailing off the coast of California in pursuit of a pod of migrating whales, he heard screams in the distance. The pod abruptly vanished. Scanning the horizon, he spotted a large gray whale “spy-hopping” — swimming vertically and raising its head above the surface. Baldridge, a marine biologist at Stanford, decided to investigate. Drawing closer, he saw seven orcas singing hunting cries and circling a small gray whale calf. As its mother watched nearby, the orcas began devouring the lips, tongue and throat of the now dead baby. Baldridge’s story inspired a…

Holly Jean Buck is an assistant professor in the department of environment and sustainability at the University at Buffalo. Her most recent book is “Ending Fossil Fuels: Why Net Zero Is Not Enough.” ALABAMA, New York—Two vast steel spheres sit in a field here in the northwestern corner of New York State, not far from the shore of Lake Ontario. Sixty feet tall, perfectly round and held off the ground on sturdy pylons, they represent “liquid hope,” according to the local TV station. When complete, they will hold a million tons of hydrogen. The spheres look mysterious sitting by themselves behind a chain-link fence, surrounded by abandoned row-crop lots and pockets of woods. This part of the state is more like northern Ohio or Pennsylvania than the posh and developed…

Tim Georgeson is an artist working with film, photography, musical design and environmental storytelling, often in collaboration with Australian Indigenous communities. Caia Hagel is a writer and digital anthropologist who explores culture, innovation and new movements in technology in search of speculative futures. As long as we’ve been human, we’ve looked to the sky to find ourselves. Our view of the stars and planets has been crucial to the physical sciences, navigation, religion, mythmaking and identity. Every culture in history has made meaning from that world beyond — deciphering patterns, projecting stories, predicting futures and defining existential beliefs. Plant and animal wildlife depend on the night for their essential survival activities, too. On Earth, darkness is as essential as light. We know that the Earth is warming. But it is…

Introducing The Preferendum David Van Reybrouck is a cultural historian and archaeologist. He is the author of “Against Elections: The Case for Democracy.” Here is what it might look like: At the polling station during the next general election, you get not one but two ballot papers. The first is your usual list of candidates and their political parties. The second is something new — a document with different policy proposals that you are invited to analyze, one after the other. Underneath each idea are words evocative of those online questionnaires you’ve seen many times before: “strongly disagree,” “disagree,” “agree,” “strongly agree,” etc. You — and every citizen in your country — are invited to highlight the five proposals you care about most. The goal is to establish a list…

Renée DiResta is the technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory. One of the more remarkable artifacts of late-stage social media is the indelible presence of a particular character: the persecution profiteer. They are nearly unavoidable on what used to be called Twitter. These massive accounts with hundreds of thousands to millions of followers are beloved by the recommendation engine and often heavily monetized across multiple platforms, where they rail against the corporate media, Big Tech and elites. Sometimes, the elites have supposedly silenced them; sometimes, they’ve supposedly oppressed you — perhaps both. But either way, manipulation is supposedly everywhere, and the persecution profiteers are supposedly getting to the bottom of it. Many of these polemicists rely on a thinly veiled subtext: They are scrappy truth-tellers, citizen-journalist Davids, exposing…