https://playlist.megaphone.fm/?p=CAD6536215675 (Self promotion: the paperback of How To Make the World Add Up is now out worldwide (except North America). Please consider an early order, which is disproportionately helpful in winning interest and support for...
Blowing the whistle on wrongdoing risks your job, your friends and even your life. So why do it? Financial expert Ray Dirks (played by Jeffrey Wright) exposed one of the biggest corporate crimes of all time - and yet he was the one who ended up in front of the Supreme...
Why parents, politicians and doctors would be wiser to sometimes do nothing. Lady Sale (played by Helena Bonham Carter) was part of a bloody and ignominious British retreat from Afghanistan in 1842. The arrogant colonial invaders had thought intervening in Afghan...
How the hunt for a missing teen saw a role-playing game denounced as a demonic and deadly pursuit. When James Dallas Egbert III was reported missing from his college dorm - one of America's most flamboyant private detectives was summoned to solve the case. "Dallas"...
Pepsi twice ended up in court after promotions went disastrously wrong. Other big companies have fallen into the same trap - promising customers rewards so generous that to fulfil the promise might mean corporate bankruptcy. Businesses and customers alike are...
How assuming others understand exactly what we are thinking gets people killed. Why were soldiers on horseback told to ride straight into a valley full of enemy cannon? The disastrous "Charge of the Light Brigade" is usually blamed on blundering generals. But the...
The height of stupidity is being too stupid to know you are stupid... and it's more common than you think. The hijackers of flight 961 wanted its pilot to fly them to Australia - and wouldn't listen to his pleas that there simply wasn't enough fuel for the mammoth...
A doctor who killed hundreds of patients left us clues... but why couldn't we see them? Family doctor Harold Shipman got away with murdering his patients for decades. He was one of the most prolific serial killers in history - but his hundreds of crimes went largely...
Being clever doesn't protect us from scams... sometimes knowledge helps us fall for an intricate deception. "The Pope" was a revered Dutch art expert - and yet he fell for a not very convincing forgery of a "lost" Vermeer masterpiece. The forger had duped other art...