Cambridge researcher Luke Kemp's new book, Goliath's Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, presents the case that past instances of societal collapse often benefited the 99%. After five ...

Historian Arnold Toynbee once observed, “Great civilizations are not murdered; they take their own lives.” More often than not, societies unravel from within—through a slow accumulation of political, ...

In “Goliath’s Curse,” Luke Kemp crunches the numbers to see exactly how far we are from the fate of once-great empires. A detail from Samuel Colman’s “The Edge of Doom” (1836-38).Credit...Samuel ...

This year’s Oscar-nominated international feature films—especially The Secret Agent and Sirāt—tackle what it means to live and die under tyranny. In Sirāt, a band of ravers drive deep into the ...

👋 Hi, everybody! Once again, shoutout to all of our geography guessers! Y’all are on top of this. We’ve got three more to go (including today’s prompt), so read on, friends. And for this week’s main ...

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Societal collapses happen more often than you think, and there’s much we can learn from the past to avoid or, at least, delay another one. This week’s guest on Zero is Luke Kemp, author of Goliath's ...