When Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to receive the Nobel memorial prize in economics, in 2009, she quipped: “I won’t be the last.” Although she has since been proved right, it was nonetheless astonishingly late in the day for such a landmark. Adding to the...
Various exciting books are now out, or imminent. Steven Pinker's "Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce" is just around the corner, and as you might expect it is erudite, entertaining, and packed full of ideas (some new to me and some not). I'm doing an event...
Travel these days requires an awful lot of paperwork. On a recent trip to Italy, I needed to produce proof of vaccination, proof of three different negative lateral flow tests, proof of the booking of a PCR test, a passenger locator form for the EU and a passenger...
I hope you've had a wonderful summer - or winter, if you're reading this in the southern hemisphere, or in early 2022. I've held off posting lots of August updates but now I'm back, and with a lovely little review of The Next Fifty Things That Made The Modern Economy...
I confess, as a boy, to wearing a Leonardo da Vinci T-shirt. Da Vinci was my idea of cool, and the attraction lay not in the Mona Lisa’s smile or his sketches of natural phenomena. It was the helicopter. Nothing could be more awesome than a 15th-century thinker...
In July 1995, a hot, humid, slow-moving mass of air rolled over Chicago and stayed there for a week. Roads and railway tracks buckled. Lifting bridges were hosed down to prevent thermal expansion from locking them in place. Shops sold out of air conditioners. Demand...
Piedmont, in North West Italy, is celebrated for its fine wine. But when a young Englishman, John Lombe, travelled there in the early eighteenth century, he wasn’t going to savour a glass of Barolo. His purpose was industrial espionage. Lombe wished to figure out how...
As the northern hemisphere limps to whatever summer tourism it can muster, I am starting to dream of the epic holiday I will enjoy when I am finally able. What will yours be? And will you truly live your holiday — and indeed your life — to the max? Will you see dawn...
‘It should be remembered, that in few departments have important reforms been effected by those trained up in practical familiarity with their details. The men to detect blemishes and defects are among those who have not, by long familiarity, been made insensible to...