On a remote island, a former airline executive and his wife are preparing for the world to end. Others are starting to join them.

A utopian German settlement in Chile had already turned darkly cultish by the time it became a secret torture site for enemies of the Pinochet regime.

On the holy city of Canudos, and other attempts at better living “by the dispossessed and marginalized the world over.”

Why utopias are best understood as fiction games, and how they quickly become dystopias when realized.