Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute. His previous roles include editor-in-chief of The WorldPost and editor-in-chief of New Perspectives Quarterly. He has also served as editor of Global Viewpoint and Nobel Laureates Plus, both services of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune Media.

Gardels has written widely for The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s Magazine, U.S. News & World Report and The New York Review of Books. He has also written for foreign publications, including Corriere della Sera, El Pais, Le Figaro, The Straits Times (Singapore), Yomiuri Shimbun, O’Estado de Sao Paulo, The Guardian, Die Welt and many others. His books include “At Century’s End: Great Minds Reflect on Our Times” and “The Changing Global Order.” He is co-author with Hollywood producer Mike Medvoy of “American Idol After Iraq: Competing for Hearts and Minds in the Global Media Age.”

Gardels is co-author with Nicolas Berggruen of “Renovating Democracy: Governing in the Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism” and “Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century,” a Financial Times Book of the Year. Gardels holds degrees in Theory and Comparative Politics and in Architecture and Urban Planning from UCLA. 

Kathleen Miles is the executive editor of Noema Magazine. She leads the team that launched Noema both online and in print in the spring of 2020. Based in Los Angeles, Noema is published by the Berggruen Institute.

Previously, as senior editor of The WorldPost, Miles led a team of editors in New York, working closely with Washington Post editors in DC, to publish daily op-eds, features and videos from around the world in The Washington Post. Earlier in New York, Miles worked as an editor and reporter for HuffPost, covering politics, business and the environment. Before HuffPost, she was a news producer on Patt Morrison’s daily public radio program at the NPR affiliate KPCC.

Prior to venturing into journalism, Miles was a district representative for Congressman Adam Schiff; English, History and Humanities teacher with Teach for America; field investigator at the National Labor Relations Board; and political action coordinator for the International Ironworkers during the Kerry presidential campaign. She studied international political economy at U.C. Berkeley and is a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy. She can be reached on X at @mileskathleen.

Nils Gilman is the deputy editor of Noema Magazine. He is also the chief operating officer at the Berggruen Institute. He has previously worked as associate chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley and as research director and scenario planning consultant at the Monitor Group and Global Business Network. Gilman has won the Sidney Award (for longform journalism) from The New York Times and an Albie Award (for international politics journalism) from The Washington Post.

He is the author of “Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America” and “Deviant Globalization: Black Market Economy in the 21st Century” as well as numerous articles on intellectual history and political economy. He holds a B.A., M.A. and Ph.D. in history from U.C. Berkeley.

Peter Mellgard is a deputy editor of Noema Magazine and the editor of the Berggruen Press. He was an Arthur F. Burns Fellow on the foreign desk at Süddeutsche Zeitung in 2014. Before that, he was a staff writer at The American Interest and a research associate for Walter Russell Mead. He has also worked at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Tami Abdollah is a senior editor at Noema Magazine. She was previously a national correspondent at USA TODAY focused on the inequities and disparities of the criminal justice system, among other subjects.

A native Angeleno, Abdollah served as a senior reporter who helped launch a tech and business journalism startup called dot.LA, which was co-founded by Zillow founder Spencer Rascoff. Abdollah previously served as a national security/cybersecurity reporter for The Associated Press in its Washington, D.C., bureau. Prior to that, she was AP’s law enforcement reporter in its Los Angeles bureau. She has also worked for the Los Angeles Times and L.A.’s NPR affiliate KPCC, and has written for the Wall Street Journal and The Daily Beast while living and traveling abroad.

Abdollah spent nearly a year in Iraq as a U.S. government contractor. She has traveled the world on as little as $5 a day, taught outdoor advanced rock climbing safety classes and is an avid climber and mountaineer.

Jesselyn Cook is a senior editor at Noema Magazine. She was a 2025 Nieman Fellow at Harvard and teaches narrative journalism at Harvard Summer School. As an investigative reporter at NBC News and, before that, as a senior national reporter at HuffPost, she covered the intersection of tech, culture and politics.

Cook is the author of “The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family,” which won a J. Anthony Lukas Award from Columbia Journalism School and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. She holds an M.A. in journalism and international relations from New York University.

Amara Higuera is the art coordinator of Noema Magazine. A graduate of UCLA’s arts program, she is also a practicing artist who works with photography, video, sound and writing. She previously worked as the photography & visual editor of La Gente Newsmagazine.

Mani Chandy is the newsletter editor of Noema Magazine. He was previously the communications coordinator of the Berggruen Institute.

Alex Gardels is the video editor of Noema Magazine. An award-winning screenwriter and short film director, he has created a variety of short-form video content for Noema Magazine, The WorldPost and the Berggruen Institute.

Francis Wade is a London-based journalist and author and a commissioning editor for Noema. He writes on political violence, identity, borders and displacement.

Joe Zadeh is a contributing writer for Noema based in Newcastle.

Carrie Arnold is a contributing writer for Noema based in Virginia.

Jennifer Bourne is the director of fellowships at the Berggruen Institute and an associate editor of Noema Magazine.

Claire Isabel Webb directs the Berggruen Institute’s Future Humans program that investigates the histories and futures of life, mind and outer space. She is also an associate editor of Noema Magazine.

With Nathan Gardels, Berggruen is the co-author of Renovating Democracy: Governing in the Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism (2019) and Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century (2012), a Financial Times Book of the Year. He has also written for numerous publications.

Orhan Pamuk, (born June 7, 1952, Istanbul, Turkey), Turkish novelist, best known for works that probe Turkish identity and history. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006.

Raised in a wealthy and Western-oriented family, Pamuk attended Robert College, an American school in Istanbul, and went on to study architecture at Istanbul Technical University. After three years he dropped out and devoted himself full-time to writing. In 1977 he graduated from the University of Istanbul with a degree in journalism. From 1985 to 1988 he lived in the United States and was a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York and the University of Iowa.

Pamuk began writing seriously in 1974 and eight years later published his first novel, Cevdet Bey ve oğulları (“Cevdet Bey and His Sons”), a sweeping history of an Istanbul family during and after the establishment of the Turkish republic. He followed it with Sessiz ev (1983; Silent House), relying on multiple narrators to shape the story of a family gathering on the eve of the Turkish military coup of 1980. Pamuk first achieved international fame with Beyaz kale (1985; The White Castle), his third novel, which explores the nature of identity through the story of a learned young Italian captured and made a slave to a scholar in 17th-century Istanbul. His subsequent novels, which were widely translated, included Kara kitap (1990; The Black Book), a dense depiction of Istanbul, and the mysteries Yeni hayat (1996; The New Life) and Benim adım kırmızı (1998; My Name Is Red).

In Kar (2002; Snow) a Turkish poet living in exile in Germany faces the tensions between East and West when he travels to a poor town in a remote area of Turkey. Masumiyet müzesi (2008; The Museum of Innocence) investigates the relationship between an older man and his second cousin. Thwarted in his attempts to marry her, the man begins to collect objects that she has touched. Pamuk replicated the titular museum in reality, using a house in Istanbul to display a range of items amassed while plotting the story; it opened to the public in 2012, accompanied by the catalogue Şeylerin masumiyeti (The Innocence of Objects). The novel Kırmızı saçlı kadın (2016; The Red-Haired Woman) centres on the familial relationship that forms between a well digger and his apprentice. Among Pamuk’s other works were İstanbul: hatıralar ve şehir (2004; Istanbul: Memories and the City, also published as Istanbul: Memories of a City), a partly fictionalized memoir, and The Naive and Sentimental Novelist (2010), in which he explicated his theories on the novel as a literary form. Kafamda Bir Tuhaflık (2014; A Strangeness in My Mind) is a love story set in Istanbul. Balkon (2019; “Balcony”) is a collection of photographs Pamuk took from the balcony of his home.

Many of Pamuk’s novels, often autobiographical and intricately plotted, show an understanding of traditional Turkish Islamic culture tempered by a belief that Turkey’s future lies in the West. Pamuk drew criticism from some in Turkey for advocating the country’s integration into Europe and its accession to the European Union. In 2005, after a Swiss newspaper published an interview in which he repeated claims that Turks had deliberately killed a million Armenians in 1915 (see Armenian massacres) and 30,000 Kurds more recently, six nationalists filed a complaint, and Pamuk was charged with “denigrating Turkishness”; he was put on trial in Turkey in December. The charges, which produced international controversy, were later dropped. However, in 2009 a Turkish court allowed the case to proceed, and in 2011 Pamuk was ordered to compensate the six plaintiffs.

Kathleen Miles is the executive editor of Noema Magazine. She leads the team that launched Noema both online and in print in the spring of 2020. Based in Los Angeles, Noema is published by the Berggruen Institute.

Previously, as senior editor of The WorldPost, Miles led a team of editors in New York, working closely with Washington Post editors in DC, to publish daily op-eds, features and videos from around the world in The Washington Post. Earlier in New York, Miles worked as an editor and reporter for HuffPost, covering politics, business and the environment. Before HuffPost, she was a news producer on Patt Morrison’s daily public radio program at the NPR affiliate KPCC.

Prior to venturing into journalism, Miles was a district representative for Congressman Adam Schiff; English, History and Humanities teacher with Teach for America; field investigator at the National Labor Relations Board; and political action coordinator for the International Ironworkers during the Kerry presidential campaign. She studied international political economy at U.C. Berkeley and is a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy. She can be reached on X at @mileskathleen.

With Nathan Gardels, Berggruen is the co-author of Renovating Democracy: Governing in the Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism (2019) and Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century (2012), a Financial Times Book of the Year. He has also written for numerous publications.

Nathan Gardels is the editor-in-chief of Noema Magazine. He is also the co-founder of and a senior adviser to the Berggruen Institute. His previous roles include editor-in-chief of The WorldPost and editor-in-chief of New Perspectives Quarterly. He has also served as editor of Global Viewpoint and Nobel Laureates Plus, both services of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune Media.

Gardels has written widely for The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s Magazine, U.S. News & World Report and The New York Review of Books. He has also written for foreign publications, including Corriere della Sera, El Pais, Le Figaro, The Straits Times (Singapore), Yomiuri Shimbun, O’Estado de Sao Paulo, The Guardian, Die Welt and many others. His books include “At Century’s End: Great Minds Reflect on Our Times” and “The Changing Global Order.” He is co-author with Hollywood producer Mike Medvoy of “American Idol After Iraq: Competing for Hearts and Minds in the Global Media Age.”

Gardels is co-author with Nicolas Berggruen of “Renovating Democracy: Governing in the Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism” and “Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century,” a Financial Times Book of the Year. Gardels holds degrees in Theory and Comparative Politics and in Architecture and Urban Planning from UCLA. 

Dawn Nakagawa is the executive vice president of the Berggruen Institute, where she co-directs the Future of Democracy program.