In 1612, a young woman encounters a pedlar in the British countryside. A seemingly trivial quarrel spirals into chaos when the pedlar is struck down by an unknown force, leading to one of ...

Will the robots kill us all? Hard to say. As the Dude wisely opined in The Big Lebowski, “a lotta ins, a lotta outs, a lotta what-have-yous. And, uh, a lotta strands to keep in my head, man.” But ...

In the 1980s, the psychologist Philip Tetlock was struck by the fact that highly respected, highly credentialed geopolitical analysts often disagreed quite fundamentally about how the cold war was ...

Last week the British university system offered a record number of places. That sounds like good news — but do we really need more people to go to university? For that matter, does the world need more ...

A miscellany for your delectation. “Tomorrow, I will be going across channels with zero views, going into their chat, and ...

Every Sunday, in 1937, people all across American tune in to a strange broadcast. The Zenith Foundation is attempting an ambitious parapsychology experiment to test whether telepathy is real. The ...

In 1800s America, something terrifying is feeding on the quiet town of Exeter. As members of George Brown’s family succumb one by one, the town considers drastic measures to protect the living from ...

https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/playlists/podcast https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/a-tale-of-blood-and-ashes-the-exeter ...

The marathon, the algorithm and me Twenty-five centuries ago, after the Greeks shattered the Persian army at Marathon, brave Pheidippides ran 26 miles to Athens with the news. Robert Browning’s poem ...