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humanoid looking at earth tommaso durante

Coding the Global Mind: The Algorithmic Global Imaginary

Editors Pick, Philosophy / /

What happens when the systems through which we understand the world begin to shape the world we are capable of imagining?

This essay examines the emergence of the Algorithmic Global Imaginary, a techno-symbolic order in which algorithms, platforms and datafication increasingly influence how knowledge is produced, how people are represented, how social behaviour is governed and how the future itself is imagined. Drawing on Arjun Appadurai’s theory of global imaginaries, Sheila Jasanoff’s concept of sociotechnical imaginaries and Tommaso Durante’s work on the global imaginary and global iconology, the essay reads an AI-generated image of a humanoid robot contemplating the Earth as an allegory of this transformation. The image brings together the central tensions of the algorithmic condition: human and machine, local and planetary, agency and determination, connection and extraction. What emerges is not a single technological future, but a contested field of competing imaginaries in which corporations, states, communities and civil society are all struggling to determine what the digital world should become.

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Editors Pick, Philosophy

Microphilosophy: A Minor Manifesto in the Movement of Thought

Editors Pick, Philosophy / /

In this essay, Alessandro Umberto D’Aloia introduces microphilosophy, a method of using philosophical concepts as tools rather than treating philosophers as authorities. The approach starts with the problem itself and draws from different thinkers only when their ideas are useful to that particular problem. Using his own work on film, time and experience as a starting point, D’Aloia argues for a form of philosophical thinking that can move beyond established systems and recognise philosophy as something that happens in everyday life, research and problem-solving.

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Editors Pick, Philosophy
delhi electric vehicle policy 2026 by faiz hasan

When New Technologies Meet Old Habits: Lessons From Delhi’s EV Policy

Editors Pick, Society / /

At a Glance Delhi’s Electric Vehicle (EV) Policy 2026 marks a shift from encouraging voluntary EV adoption to actively reshaping consumer mobility choices. Through purchase incentives, scrappage benefits, tax exemptions, expanded charging infrastructure, and phased restrictions on new fossil-fuel vehicle registrations, the policy seeks to make electric vehicles more affordable, accessible, and socially accepted. Rather

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Editors Pick, Society
medieval monastic library

The Ceiling of Reason: A Thousand-Year Argument Over Intelligence and Wisdom

Editors Pick, Philosophy / /

At a Glance From an eighth-century definition of intellect to the rise of artificial intelligence, the question of what reason can and cannot do has never really settled. This article traces a thousand-year argument within Islamic thought—from Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq to al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd—and brings it into conversation with contemporary thinkers who have arrived

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Editors Pick, Philosophy
Rhizome in the Digital World

A Thousand Feeds: Knowledge, Authority and the Rhizome in the Digital Age

Editors Pick, Society / /

From the spider’s web of the social media feed to the printing press of Gutenberg, this article traces how knowledge has always travelled through unstable, branching pathways — and how the digital age has intensified that instability into something genuinely new. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, it argues that authority over knowledge no longer resides in identifiable institutions but flows through constantly shifting networks, where expertise competes with opinion and evidence with virality. Moving from the Protestant Reformation to Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and India’s Cockroach Janta Party, the piece shows how old struggles over power, identity and trust resurface in new technological form. It contends that the real crisis of the digital age is not a shortage of information, but a deepening uncertainty about how to evaluate it — and who, or what, gets to decide.

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Editors Pick, Society
man woman children tossing disposable plastic items into the air

The Undying Miracle: The Strange Afterlife of Plastic

Editors Pick, Science / /

From the optimism of postwar consumer culture to contemporary concerns about microplastics and environmental persistence, plastics have become one of the defining materials of modern industrial society. This article traces the history, chemistry, and cultural legacy of synthetic polymers, examining how a material once celebrated for its durability and convenience became associated with some of the most complex environmental challenges of the twenty-first century.

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Editors Pick, Science
Making vaccinations in labs

Immunity Explained: What We Know and What Remains Uncertain

Editors Pick, Science / /

Few biological encounters have shaped human history more subtly than surviving disease. Long before immunity became measurable in laboratories, societies had already observed its effects in uneven patterns of survival. Thucydides, writing about the plague of Athens, noticed that those who recovered could tend to the sick without falling ill again. Centuries later, Ottoman inoculation practices would travel through diplomatic correspondence into England, while exposure itself increasingly came to be understood not simply as danger, but as a form of biological instruction. Vaccination emerged from this slowly accumulating recognition, that is, the body can be altered by encounter long before it understands what it has encountered.

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Editors Pick, Science
how to identify research gaps types and methods Qurtuba Circle guide

How to Identify Research Gaps in a Research Paper

Resources / /

Understanding how to identify research gaps in a research paper is what separates a descriptive paper from a focused academic study. Many students read extensively and summarise existing work, yet struggle to define what their research actually contributes. The difficulty is not the topic itself, but the inability to locate a precise gap within existing

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Resources
foreign student in india

Foreign Students in India: Discrimination and the Question of Academic Self-Efficacy

Editors Pick, Mind, Social Psychology / /

Discrimination and the Academic Self-Efficacy Discrimination takes many forms, often subtle and difficult to name. As a foreign student in India, I came across a very particular one that may not be immediately identifiable. In conversations with other foreign students I had befriended in India similar experiences began to surface. They recounted repeated encounters within

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Editors Pick, Mind, Social Psychology