When Billy Joel agreed to let dance legend Twyla Tharp turn his songs into a Broadway musical it seemed like a surefire hit. But in previews, Movin’ Out was panned by the critics. It was soon headed for Broadway and was set to be an expensive and embarrassing...
As the virus spread across the world and authorities started imposing lockdowns, problems became obvious. There was resistance to the closure of religious services, few people were keen to postpone weddings and funerals could not wait. Young singles wanted to party....
Cautionary Tales will be back next Friday (and every other Friday thereafter). For Pushkin+ subscribers, I proudly present another Cautionary Tales “Short”. Shownotes The ideal source on Maintenance Guy and his travails is Matt Parker's wonderful book Humble Pi;...
After two decades of digital titans hogging the limelight, the physical economy has spent the past two years reasserting itself. From the supply of toilet paper to the price of wheat, shortages of personal protective equipment in early 2020 and columns of Russian...
I loved this book. Fast, funny start, and absolutely fizzing with interesting ideas from art, science, history, commerce, fashion and beyond. Sherwood tells a great story, but one of the things that delighted me was the sheer range of stories that I'd not encountered...
An airline captain thought he was giving his children a harmless thrill by letting them "fly" his packed airplane - the young cockpit visitors weren't really in control... the autopilot was doing the real flying. Until it wasn't. Do safety features actually lull us...
On the surface, April 2020 was apocalyptic. You could walk the sunny streets of Oxford and barely see a soul: shops closed, roads empty, just the occasional pedestrian nervously crossing to the other side of the street. Of course, it wasn’t just Oxford. The...
Cautionary Tales episodes are released every other Friday, and so there will be one appearing again next week. Meanwhile, for Pushkin+ subscribers, I proudly present another Cautionary Tales “Short”. Shownotes The main sources on the Hartlepool elections were...
In 1989, several years before the world watched the chess-playing supercomputer Deep Blue vanquish the world champion Garry Kasparov, a computer notched up a different milestone in artificial intelligence that was all but unnoticed. This was largely because the...