#noema magazine

[saintmaudes]

Sacred odors then were notably complex. As in the graves of would-be saints, the smell of sanctity often mingled with the stench of decay and death. Ancient cities, Thurkill wrote, were characterized by “the stench of human excrement, refuse and disease, accompanied with soothing floral scents and perfumes.” Sacred smells like frankincense and myrrh were used over the centuries to demarcate sacred space—but also to disinfect and disguise putrid areas. […]

This gave holy smells a fundamentally paradoxical nature. In a world where breathing foul-smelling air was seen as the cause of many diseases, incense was seen as a barrier against illness, and, with its holy associations, against demonic possession. But equally, powerful scents could be used to disguise a deeper decay, or to tempt the pious with worldly delights and bodies. Even bad smells had an ambiguous quality. After all, the rotting stench of a starved ascetic’s mouth was simply more proof of his profound holiness.

It’s this ambiguity about smell, […] that gives scent its power as a theological tool. In addition to its flexible moral significance, the experience of an odor often reflects our understanding of divinity. Like God, smell can surround you from an indeterminate source, filling spaces with its invisible presence. But unlike sound, which might do the same, to experience a smell it must first be taken within, in an act–breathing–that is both life-giving and volitional.

—John Last, The Centuries-Long Quest for the Scent of God, Noema Magazine

[rivertalesien]

One of the most thoughtful pieces I've read in a long time: the difference between "repair" and "maintenance" and how a change in perspective could make the difference between catastrophic human failure to address climate change and learning how to adapt. An appreciation for expertise and ingenuity and a reminder that we are capable of better. How proactive thinking as the antidote for our current reactionary backslide.

"Repair is when you fix something that’s already broken. Maintenance is about making something last."

[debutart]

“The Clash of Two Gilded Ages” by Xinmei Liu for Noema Magazine.

[biglisbonnews]

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week This week's edition highlights stories by Peter Flax, Abigail Edge, Jesús A. Rodríguez, Henry Wismayer, and Elif Batuman. https://longreads.com/2023/02/03/the-top-5-longreads-of-the-week-451/

[heavenlyyshecomes]

misc readings pt. 11

tech edition

It's not your fault you're a jerk on twitter, katherine cross, wired

Becoming human again: a reading list for the extremely offline, lisa bubert, longreads

The internet is rotting, jonathan zittrain, the atlantic

ambient cruelty, linda besner, real life magazine

Searching for lost knowledge in the age of intelligent machines, adrienne lafrance, the atlantic

Ghosts of the future: the smart home is a haunted house, julia foote, real life magazine

The internet is flat, charlie warzel, galaxy brain

How TrueCaller built a billion-dollar caller ID data empire in India, rachna khaira, rest of the world

Vivid hues: what does it mean to think of the internet as a color? anna rose kerr, real life magazine

Singapore’s tech-utopia dream is turning into a surveillance state nightmare, peter guest, rest of the world

The $2 per hour workers who made chatgpt safer, time

I cut the 'big five' tech giants from my life. It was hell, kashmir hill, gizmodo

Social media is not self-expression, rob horning, the new inquiry

The narcissism of queer influencer activists, jason okundaye, gawker

On losing perspective, or, why i don't give a fuck about geronimo the alpaca and nor should you, rachel connolly, novara media

The exploited labour behind artificial intelligence, noema

The class politics of the instagram face, grazie sophia christie, tablet

Google, amazon, and meta are making their core products worse on purpose, ed zitron, business insider

All advertising looks the same these days. Blame the moodboard, elizabeth goodspeed, eye on design

Seen by, megan marz, real life

[fatehbaz]

In other words, the planetary evokes what we call in French le vivant, which in English is something like “the living world.”

Le vivant is, for me, the planetary in its multiplicity [...]. It is true that a key driver of the process of planetarization is capitalism. [...] To some extent, the market has become a totality, or in any case our core moral experience. [...] Can we rely on infrastructures that have, to some extent, contributed to turning the world into a burning house? [...]

We need to begin by agreeing on what is at stake. From an African perspective, the core of the problem is the precariousness of life. [...] When I look at cosmologies of existence among the Dogon in Mali, or among the Yoruba in Nigeria or other communities in the Congo Basin, what strikes me is the central place these cultures give to the principle of animation — with the sharing of vital breath. Breath is a right that is universal, in the sense that we all breathe [...]. We also share the vital breath. [...] In that sense, we have here cosmogonies that are not at all convinced that there is a fundamental difference between the human subject and the world around it [...]. Everything is an effect of power, an agency that is shaped by all. [...]

---

[W]e are increasingly surrounded by multiple and expanding forms of calculation [...] . The integration of algorithms and big data analysis in the biological sphere is not only bringing with it a greater belief in techno-positivism, in modes of statistical thought, it’s also paving the way for regimes of assessment of the natural world, modes of prediction and analysis that are treating life itself as a computable object. This is [...] affecting not only our political imagination, but also the ways in which we understand what knowledge stands for, and what is it is all about. [...]

[W]e are experiencing a clash of temporalities: geological time, the deep time of those processes that fashioned our terrestrial home; historical time; and experiential time. All these times now fold in on one another. We are not used to thinking of time as simultaneous. We think of time as linear: past, present, future. So how do we begin to think about time in a way that takes these concatenations seriously? [...]

[T]hat’s what the Anthropocene shows us. As the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued, there’s no longer a social history separate from natural history. That is over. Human history and Earth history are now indivisible. The epoch we have entered into is one of indivisibility, of entanglement, of concatenations. [...]

---

And also, speaking for the planet and listening to the planet are not exactly the same things. Maybe the first step is to listen. The question then becomes, how do we listen to the planet? Does the planet speak for itself? [...] [W]e have to get out of a certain epistemology that has been premised on the fact that humans are the only speaking entity, that what distinguishes us is that we mastered language and the others didn’t. But we now have studies showing that plants speak, that forests speak: a de-monopolization of the faculty of speech, of language.

When we look into the archives of the whole world, not just the archives of the West, broadly speaking we find knowledges of how other-than-humans speak — and how humans, or some humans, have learned to listen to those languages. This requires a radical decentering, premised on the capacity to know together, to generate knowledge together.

The French term for knowledge is connaissance, a word that literally means “being born together.”

---

Text by: Achille Mbembe. As interviewed by Nils Gilman. “How To Develop A Planetary Consciousness.” Noema (Noema Magazine). 11 January 2022. [Some paragraph breaks added by me.]

[xumoonhao]

what i read in may 2023 💖

WHAT I READ THIS MONTH: MAY 2023

(entries marked with an * indicate favourites; entries marked with a ! indicate things i didnt like)

ONLINE ARTICLES

The Millennial Vernacular of Fatphobia by Anne Helen Petersen | Culture Study

The Medical Medium and the True Believer by Dan Adler | Vanity Fair

How Many Well Intentioned People Dehumanise Children by Racheous | Racheous

How Horror Reflects Societal Fears by Frankie Wallace | The Review Geek

* What If You Actually Cared About Tea? by Jordan Michelman | TASTE

Here’s How to Actually Be Kinder to Yourself by Jenna Ryu | SELF

Inside the Delirious Rise of ‘Superfake’ Handbags by Amy X. Wang | The New York Times

* Fish Are Not Insentient Dullards by Ben Goldfarb | Nautilus

Listening To The Creatures Of The World by Karen Bakker | Noema Magazine

The plastic road to Everest Base Camp by Madigan Cotterill| Canadian Geographic

! The 10 most iconic jewels through history by Daisy Woodward | BBC

The Titanic of the Pacific by Tyler Hooper | Atavist

TIMELINE: Deinstitutionalization And Its Consequences by Deanna Pan | Mother Jones [may 17]

World's Best--And Worst--Places To Be Mentally Ill by Allen Frances, MD | Psychiatric Times

BOOKS

! Son of a Trickster, Trickster #1 by Eden Robinson (2017)

! Blind Tiger, The Pride #01 by Jordan L. Hawk (2021)

* Tastes Like War by Grace M. Cho (2021)

! Don't Believe It by Charlie Donlea (2018)

! Untamed by Glennon Doyle (2020)

[yasuo-range]

Noema Magazine Issue IV, Fall 2023掲載　Alex Vuocolo「The Disappearing Art of Maintenance」挿絵

[gimmickbook]

The Intelligent Forest - Daniel Martin Diaz for Noema Magazine https://www.noemamag.com/the-intelligent-forest/

[wolfliving]

More Architecture-Fiction from "New Silk Roads"

"Infrastructural Horror"

Anna Engelhardt / Mark Cinkevich

In the nineteenth century, a ruin was a landscape for gothic horror. Today, monsters pervade infrastructure. With sprawling limbs and hulking frames, towering oil platforms, writhing wires, and bottomless mines are omens of contemporary dread. Infrastructural horror is a way to investigate and expose the infrastructure of colonial expansionism in its inherent monstrosity. As a genre, it aims to create discomfort, repulsion, or suspense by exposing the architecture of dispossession and destruction as an omen.

Early morning. The incessant, eerily soft hum of the engines barely resonates against the steel walls. The refinery is luminous in the window. I’m awake—not because a sudden noise ruptured my sleep, but because of a new and unusual quiet. Something’s not right. I strain to listen. I am frightened, but of what? Of the muted vehicles, distant voices, barking dogs? Up until now, I’ve been frightened of nothing. I listen. I listen, but to what? The smell of oil and metal hangs heavy in the air. I open my cupboards and go to the window.

I look down. My entire building is dark. How long will this blackout last? In the distance, the refinery towers over the landscape. The rain has just stopped, but water is still dripping from the steel framework. Bright lights cast long shadows across the metal walls and wet machinery. The structure looks familiar. Still, it doesn’t quite match its surroundings. It is not out of place, but rather, out of proportion. It has grown so much that it has become uncanny, unrecognizable.

It’s just a refinery, I say to myself. It shines like it always has. Everything is the same as yesterday. Except now, in the blackout, the red light stares right back at me. Its glow, hypnotic and dim, pierces through the deep gloom that has fallen over this edge of the city. I look away. Red reflections haunt me in the myriad of wet tankers, cargo trains, and railway tracks. Not a single person is around, neither on the streets nor looking out of the windows. If anyone else was to look at the refinery, they probably wouldn’t notice anything special, perhaps only ask: why isn’t the factory smoking? Is there a strike...

New Silk Roads is a project by e-flux Architecture in collaboration with the Critical Media Lab at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW and Noema Magazine (2024), and Aformal Academy with the support of Design Trust and Digital Earth (2020).

[elannert]

Introducing Noema Issue V: Threshold - NOEMA

[lounge]

Volta que a internet deu errado

A internet virou uma monocultura frágil e extrativista, e precisa ser reflorestada. Nós capinamos esse lote, podemos revitalizá-la usando técnicas aprendidas com ecologistas. O artigo We Need To Rewild The Internet, de Maria Farrell e Robin Berjon, publicado na versão digital da Noema Magazine, traz uma discussão interessantíssima sobre um movimento que a gente aqui no Mastodon já está fazendo,…

[washingtonposttoday]

Noema: The sustainable and stylish fashion brand to wear this summer | Luxury Lifestyle Magazine http://dlvr.it/SrffTr

[biglisbonnews]

China-Europe Relations Are Critical To World Peace - Noema Magazine China-Europe Relations Are Critical To World Peace  Noema Magazine https://www.noemamag.com/china-europe-relations-are-critical-to-world-peace

[heavenlyyshecomes]

misc reads pt. 11

The legend of the music tree, ellen rupell shell, smithsonian magazine

The depths she'll reach: freediving's alenka artnik, xan rice, longlead

Sufi Islam thrives humorous, eloquent and poetic as ever, nile green, aeon

Mars is a hellhole, sharon stirone, the atlantic

Obliterating the natural world, nathan j. robinson, current affairs

What lies beneath, julian sancton, vanityfair

A winelike sea, caroline alexander, lapham's quaterly

The centuries-long quest for the scent of god, john last, noema magazine

Hayao miyazaki and the art of being a woman, gabrielle bellot, the atlantic

The death of the ‘chic’ writer, barry pierce dazed digital

All about eve—and then some, lili anoulik, vanityfair

The archive of a vanishing world, grace linden, noema magazine

In the land of living skies, suzannah showler, harper's magazine

Daydreams and fragments: on how we retrieve images from the past, maël renouard, lithub

The haunted city, azania imtiaz khatri-patel, aeon

Princes of infinite space, kyle paoletta, baffler

Humans are overzealous whale morticians, ben goldfarb, nautilus

immortal by default, jared farmer, lapham's quaterly

Short fic:

Morning, Noon & Night, claire louise-bennett, the white review

Office hours, ling ma, the atlantic

Nights at the hotel splendido, sam munson, granta

shanghai murmur, te-ping chen, the atlantic

The hydraulic emperor, arkady martine, uncanny magazine

Goodnight, melancholy, xia jia, clarkesworld magazine

[laurengrabelle]

So amazing and satisfying to see my work (both Ranch Sightings and Listening To The Earth) take on another life, artfully illustrating this in-depth essay on the history of Rattlesnake Creek, and the impact of the land on the soul, in Noema Magazine. "Our lives are grand voyages, far more entangled with everything around us than we know. This is as true for a person as it is for a creek." ~ Jacob Baynham