history-society

In 476 CE, Odoacer deposed the last Western Roman Emperor, a teenager named Romulus Augustulus. The date appears in every textbook as THE END OF ROME. The fall of civilization. The beginning of the Dark Ages. Here's what actually happened: almost nothing. No battles. No drama. A barbarian

Here's a sentence that will reframe how you think about collapse: the collapse phase isn't a bug—it's a feature. C.S. "Buzz" Holling spent decades studying forests. Why do forests burn? Why do some ecosystems recover quickly while others languish? Why

For twenty years, everyone knew how ideas spread. Malcolm Gladwell had explained it in The Tipping Point. Mark Granovetter had proved it with "The Strength of Weak Ties." The conventional wisdom was clear: information spreads fastest through weak connections—acquaintances, not close friends. If you want something to

Nicholas Christakis was a hospice doctor before he became a network scientist. He spent years watching people die—and watching how death affected the people around them. One pattern kept recurring. When someone died, their spouse often followed within months. Doctors called it "dying of a broken heart."

In 2012, Facebook ran an experiment on 689,003 users without telling them. For one week, the company manipulated what appeared in people's News Feeds. Some users saw fewer positive posts from their friends. Others saw fewer negative posts. Then Facebook measured what those users posted themselves. The

Epidemiologists have a number that captures everything about a disease's spreading power: R0, the basic reproduction number. It answers a simple question: on average, how many people will one infected person infect? If R0 is less than 1, the epidemic dies out. Each infected person generates less than