For this special crossover episode, Tim is joined by the one and only Roman Mars to discuss his new series, A History of the United States in 100 Objects. From a safe that stayed locked away for a ...

A few months ago, Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, mused on stage about the impact of generative AI on society. “I don’t know how we’ll respond,” he told Kenny Malone of NPR’s Planet Money. “A ...

In the late 1970s, Yorkshire miner Chris Campbell sees something that terrifies him. The spirit of a miner who died in a collapse is calling to him. Is the ghostly figure a waking dream, a trick of ...

Isaac Merritt Singer was an unlikely feminist. While married to Catherine for 30 years, he had 10 children with another partner (Mary Ann) and seven with a third (also called Mary). When Mary Ann ...

Should the government hire people to bury banknotes down disused mine shafts, thus stimulating the private sector to dig them up again? Keynes argued that there were circumstances in which even ...

There is a gap between the calm, rational decision-makers we often aspire to be and the overwrought, sentiment-tossed creatures we often are. Rarely is that gap wider than in the political arena.

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 ...

Panic has erupted in the cockpit of AirFrance Flight 447. The pilots are convinced they’ve lost control of the plane. It’s lurching violently. Then, it begins plummeting from the sky at breakneck ...

“Thanks to Tim Harford’s characteristic wit and magnetic storytelling, you may not realize you’re getting an advanced course in how to understand the kinds of statistics we’re all faced with every day ...

For years, people had warned that New Orleans was vulnerable – but when a hurricane came close to destroying the city, the reaction was muted. Some people took the near miss as a warning – others, as ...

Did you know that a toy spaceship can teach you about inflation? Or that a pooping cow can show you how to invest your pocket money? And that even the greatest detectives have been fooled by fake news ...

He’d played with Miles Davis and Art Blakey and this was to be the biggest solo concert of Keith Jarrett’s career – but the Virtuoso pianist was in for a shock when he entered Cologne’s opera house.