We tell our children unsettling fairy tales to teach them valuable lessons, but these Cautionary Tales are for the education of the grown ups – and they are all true. Tim Harford (Financial Times, BBC, author of “The Data Detective”) brings you stories of awful human error, tragic catastrophes, and hilarious fiascos. They'll delight you, scare you, but also make you wiser. New episodes every other Friday.
131 episodes transcribed1812. A band of "Luddites" is laying siege to a textile mill in the North of England, under cover of night. They plan to destroy the machines that are...
Cautionary Conversation: Andy Warhol’s assistant, Gerard Malanga, is facing a long prison sentence in Italy. He’s forged several Che Guevara portraits...
Heroic explorer Frederick Cook has just returned from the very roof of the world, the first man to reach the North Pole. Or so he says. Journalist Phi...
Cautionary Conversation: Did a Nazi put America on the moon? To celebrate the launch of his mini-series on the V-2 rocket, Tim Harford sits down with...
Henry Petroski is one of Tim Harford's favourite fellow nerds. His study of engineering failures has profoundly influenced Tim's own writing, includin...
Cautionary Conversation: An invasive parakeet species began spreading in New York City - and the government decided to kill every last bird. Tim Harfo...
“If you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss..." Those words - from Rudyard Kipling's poem "If" - were bas...
Today, the idea of controlling the weather is controversial. Scientists who research geoengineering have even received death threats. But once upon a...
Today, we're sharing an episode of the gripping Pushkin series Lost Hills: The Dark Prince. The brand-new season takes a deep dive into the surf world...
CIA agents in Havana complaining of mental fog, dizziness and ear pain in 2016. Children in Miami in 1974, hyperventilating and wracked with abdominal...
Why does economics get a bad rap? How did a small Hungarian airline wreak havoc in the 2000s? What cautionary tales can we glean from Tim’s own life?...
You can gamble on horses or on the turn of a card - but Daniel Gould made a living betting on the outcome of the annual Eurovision Song Contest. Danie...
Anna Marie Jarvis wanted a national holiday to honor the dedication and sacrifice of America's mothers. She wasn't the first person to propose a Mothe...
It could cure any 'female ailment' - even cancer - said the adverts. But Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound was, in fact, just a concoction of herb...
Cautionary Conversation: In 1990, a small extremist group launched a nerve gas attack on passengers riding the Tokyo subway. Thousands of people were...
Air traffic controllers are meant to stop aircrafts from flying into one another... and if they fail, computer systems are installed to warn pilots of...
Cautionary Conversation: When a small-town detective gets a tip about a missing woman, he believes he's uncovered a highly-trained chameleon: a foreig...
In the early 90s, cutting-edge advertising agency Chiat/Day announced a radical plan, aimed at giving the company a jolt of creative renewal. They wou...
With the 95th Academy Awards just around the corner, Tim Harford looks back at a basic lesson. Galileo tried to teach us that adding more and more lay...
Cautionary Conversation: Celebrated physicist Professor Paul Frampton was on his way to Brussels to meet the love of his life, swimwear model Denise M...
