Johan Karlsson

Economists used the lighthouse to show markets can't supply public goods. Coase found private lights paid for by port dues. They were state-enforced monopolies.

Strong social ties go with 50% higher odds of survival. How loneliness harms the body, what the trends show, and why governments treat it as private misfortune.

Rivers mark nearly a quarter of the world's inland international borders. They also move, flood, and feed both banks — which is why river borders keep turning into disputes that last for generations.

From Caesar's siege lines at Alesia to the burned farmland around El-Fasher, starvation has been one of war's oldest and most effective weapons. How hunger has been used — and why the law built to stop it so rarely bites.

The Svalbard vault and a few genebanks hold the crop diversity that monoculture threw away. From Ireland's Lumper to the Cavendish banana now under attack by TR4, here is what the backups can do, what they can't, and who pays for them.

196 states have ratified the Geneva Conventions, yet violations are routine in more than 120 armed conflicts. Follow the enforcement machinery to see why.

In 1882 a sailing ship carried frozen mutton from New Zealand to London. The trade it opened decided what whole countries would produce, and who would feed whom, more durably than any of the century’s wars.

From the Enabling Act of 1933 to Orbán's Hungary, democracies rarely die in a coup. They are dismantled step by legal step by leaders who keep winning elections — until, sometimes, they don't.

Rome, the Ottomans, Britain and the Soviet Union all showed the same economic warning signs decades before they fell: debased money, unaffordable frontiers, untaxed elites, hired armies and reforms nobody could implement.