Cautionary Tales Presents: Getting out of Dodge from Revisionist History
The longest running television series of the 20th century was Gunsmoke, a western set in the notorious Dodge City, Kansas. Malcolm sweeps away mountains of legal scholarship to make a bold claim: The ...
19 Sep 202344min
A Chorus of Contempt at The Sydney Opera House
1957. Jørn Utzon receives a phone call: he's just won an international competition to design a brand new opera house for the Australian city of Sydney. Utzon is unknown in the field, so this is a triu...
15 Sep 202340min
The City That Sold Itself To Wall Street
Cautionary Book Club: When Morgan Stanley offered to lease Chicago's parking meters for the princely sum of $1 billion, the City Council were convinced that they had struck gold. They hastily signed t...
1 Sep 202338min
General Ludd's Rage Against the Machines
1812. 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 replacing their jobs. But mill owner William Cart...
18 Aug 202336min
Andy Warhol's Factory of Truth
Cautionary Conversation: Andy Warhol’s assistant, Gerard Malanga, is facing a long prison sentence in Italy. He’s forged several Che Guevara portraits and tried to pass them off as genuine Warhols. Wh...
11 Aug 202336min
Poles Apart: How A Journalist Divided A City
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 Philip Gibbs has been watching him, and he’s convince...
4 Aug 202337min
The Father of Space Travel
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 Pushkin’s resident V-2 expert, Ryan Dilley. They d...
28 Jul 202326min
A Fascination with Failure: Death On The Dancefloor (Classic)
Henry Petroski is one of Tim Harford's favourite fellow nerds. His study of engineering failures has profoundly influenced Tim's own writing, including the classic Cautionary Tales episode Death on th...
21 Jul 202342min
