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 lead 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 Twitter at @mileskathleen.

Nils Gilman is the deputy editor of Noema Magazine. He is also the vice president of programs 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 senior editor of Noema Magazine. He was an Arthur F. Burns Fellow on the foreign desk at Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany’s largest newspaper, in 2014. Before that, Mellgard 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.

Rosa O’Hara is a staff writer at Noema Magazine. She previously worked as a reporter in Indonesia.

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.

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

Nicolas Berggruen is an investor, philanthropist, and the Chairman and founder of the Berggruen Institute. Established in 2010, the institute is a non-profit, non-partisan think tank that works to develop foundational ideas about how to reshape political and social institutions in our rapidly changing world. It is focused on Great Transformations in the human condition, restructuring of global economics and politics, and advances in science and technology. The Berggruen Institute seeks to connect deep thought in the human sciences—philosophy and culture—to the pursuit of practical improvements in Nicolas’s efforts have been furthered by the formation of the 21st Century Council, the Council for the Future of Europe, and the Think Long Committee for California; all dedicated to the design and implementation of good governance—drawing from practices in both East and West.

Nicolas’s dedication and commitment to art and architecture have inspired him to actively participate in such communities, sitting on the boards of the Museum Breggruen, Berlin as well as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in order to leave an enduring legacy. He is a member of the International Councils for the Tate Museum, London, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the President’s International Council for The J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles. He has collaborated on projects with such renowned architects as Richard Meier, Shigeru Ban, and David Adjaye; and is presently planning the Institute’s new headquarters in the Santa Monica mountains with Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron and Los Angeles’ Gensler.

Mr. Berggruen is a published author, having co-written Renovating Democracy: Governing in the Age of Globalization and Digital Capitalism (University of California Press) with Nathan Gardels, and Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century, a Financial Times Book of the Year. He is the co-publisher of Noema Magazine and sought after contributing author to numerous publications as an industry thought leader.

Nicolas Berggruen is also Chairman of Berggruen Holdings, the investment vehicle of the Nicolas Berggruen Charitable Trust.

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.