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 results are extraordinary: listeners score far better than chance can...
A miscellany for your delectation. "Tomorrow, I will be going across channels with zero views, going into their chat, and pumping people up." But it might not end up quite how you expect... Amygdala, a short film by Joe Edmundson Foot and Stella Harford....
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/playlists/podcast https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/when-aliens-landed-in-wiltshire-halloween-season In 1980s Southern England, intricate crop circles are appearing overnight, and people are...
Last week’s column, with the aid of a pink romantasy bookshop, discussed the way a healthy economy offers “disciplined pluralism”. Discipline means that sooner or later, uneconomic ideas fail. Pluralism means that many different ideas are attempted, the economy...
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/the-mummys-curse-halloween-classic One hundred years ago, on 16th February 1923, the Tomb of the Pharaoh Tutenkhamun was officially opened. Disturbing the remains of the Egyptian pharaohs is known to incur a...
There are some ideas so self-evidently bad that as you see the seeds being sown, it’s all you can do to restrain yourself from staging an intervention. So it was with Bad Girl Books, which earlier this year announced plans to open a short distance away from Oxford’s...
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/when-muhammad-ali-met-henry-s-hammer Before he became Muhammad Ali, Cassius Clay was known as the “Louisville Loud-mouth”, as famous for his sharp taunts and poetic put-downs as he was for his skills in the...
In the genius’s playground that was Bell Labs in the 1950s, Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, built an outguessing machine. The machine’s task was simple: a human would choose one of two levers, left or right, and the machine would guess which lever...
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/how-a-broken-arm-improved-my-french-with-david-epstein Last week, Cautionary Tales described the rise and fall of General Magic, the startup with too much money and too few constraints. Was General Magic really...