To celebrate - or commiserate - this year's Valentine's Day, Tim has something a little different. Straight from the Cautionary Library of misadventures comes a bumper crop of romantic blunders, featuring super glue, a lost hotel deposit and a very wet explosion....
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/the-angels-the-stones-and-the-dead In the final days of the Sixties, The Rolling Stones join forces with other rock legends to plan a free concert at Altamont that will rival Woodstock.The "bad boys of rock"...
In February 1912, noted scientist Arthur Woodward received an intriguing letter from Charles Dawson, a country lawyer with a growing reputation as an amateur geologist. Dawson told Woodward that he had found fossilised fragments of human skull in the flint beds of...
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/powered-by-orgasm-the-rise-and-fall-of-a-sex-cult-with-ellen-huet? Run by the charismatic Nicole Deadone, OneTaste billed itself as a sexual wellness startup celebrating the power of...
As a way of dealing with high demand, the age-old practice of forming a long, orderly queue has something to be said for it: simplicity, transparency and equal treatment for all. But no matter how much the British are said to love a queue, you can have too much of a...
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/the-wow-machine-stops-pt-2 https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/shoes-booze-and-the-pursuit-of-happiness-pt-1 Tony Hsieh, the billionaire CEO of Zappos, is passionate about community. He pours...
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/shoes-booze-and-the-pursuit-of-happiness-pt-1 https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/the-wow-machine-stops-pt-2 They say the company Zappos is harder to get into than Harvard. The company may...
Say what you like about the tenets of populism, it certainly seems to be, well, popular. But what are the tenets of populism? It’s easy enough to say what a centre-left party is likely to stand for, or a libertarian. But a populist? Maybe it is a mistake to describe...
In 1942, eight men are sent from Nazi Germany to infiltrate America. Their mission: to sabotage critical infrastructure. Their problem: they're idiots. Operation Pastorius soon devolves into one of the most baffling failures of World War II. This episode is available...