RECORDED BEFORE AN AUDIENCE AT THE BRISTOL FESTIVAL OF ECONOMICS (17 November 2022) The Dutch went so potty over tulip bulbs in the 1600s that many were ruined when the inflated prices they were paying for the plants collapsed - that's the oft-repeated story later...
I have a special start to the year for you: two cracking shorter Cautionary Tales, previously only available to Pushkin+ subscribers. (Pushkin+ remains the place to hear other exclusive titbits, and perhaps most obviously to listen to the show uninterrupted by any...
More than 100,000 families - many of them amongst the poorest in Britain - put money aside for Christmas gifts and other seasonal treats in a savings club called Farepak. It wasn't a bank, and it wasn't great value for money... and it went bust. Kids went without...
There are eight American turkeys painted on the walls of Schleswig's Cathedral of St Peter - which is odd... since the frescoes were created two centuries before Columbus even crossed the Atlantic. How did the creatures come to be added to the medieval...
Thomas Midgley's inventions caused his own death, hastened the deaths of millions of people around the world, and very nearly extinguished all life on land. Midgley and his employers didn't set out to poison the air with leaded gasoline or wreck the ozone layer...
Candy laced with cyanide and needles in marshmallows, we've long been warned to be suspicious of the sweet treats handed out by strangers at Halloween. But it seems that most stories of "Halloween sadism" are just that, stories. No child seems to have been killed by...
The Cautionary Tales Halloween special is coming next week; while you wait, the wonderful David McRaney talks to me about his new book How Minds Change (UK AMZ BKSHP) (US AMZ BKSHP), and the conspiracy theorist who changed his mind.
Single and looking for love, Dr Robert Epstein found himself chatting with a slim, attractive brunette online. She seemed perfect... perhaps even too good to be true. Dr Epstein is an expert on artificial conversation - so surely he'd be the last person to fall...
Inventor Franz Reichelt wants to test his novel "parachute suit" from as tall a structure as possible - and the Eiffel Tower seems ideal. Previous trial runs used a mannequin strapped to the chute and have not ended well. Despite this, his plan is to make the Eiffel...