One winter morning in early 1637, a sailor presented himself at the counting-house of a wealthy Dutch merchant and was offered a hearty breakfast of fine red herring. The sailor noticed an onion lying on the counter. “Thinking it, no doubt, very much out of its place...
As I was finishing the first draft of this story, the lights went off. The power to my house had failed. We checked the fuse box, found some bike lights to serve as torches, and my teenage daughter helped her little brother with his candlelit homework. My wife and I...
Early last October my phone rang. On the line was a researcher calling from Today, the BBC’s agenda-setting morning radio programme. She told me that something strange had happened, and she hoped I might be able to explain it. Nearly 16,000 positive Covid cases had...
“The things right in front of us are often the hardest to see,” declares Apollo Robbins, the world’s most famous theatrical pickpocket. “The things you look at every day, that you’re blinded to.” As he says these words, he’s standing on stage at a TED conference in...
As I wave my plate of paella in front of the webcam, Daniel Kahneman drops the bombshell. “I have had my lunch.” Awkward. A lunch over Zoom was never an especially appetising prospect, and perhaps it was too much to expect Kahneman to play along. He is, after all, 87...
They called Abraham Bredius “The Pope”, a nickname that poked fun at his self-importance while acknowledging his authority. Bredius was the world’s leading scholar of Dutch painters and, particularly, of the mysterious Dutch master Johannes Vermeer. When Bredius was...
My new book, "How To Make The World Add Up", is published today in the UK and on 2 February in US / Canada as "The Data Detective". Will this year be 1954 all over again? Forgive me, I have become obsessed with 1954, not because it offers another example of a pandemic...
We have a technology problem. By that, I mean that we currently lack the technology to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. We don’t have a cheap, easy, self-administered test. We lack effective medicines. Above all, we...
You can’t say that nobody saw it coming. For years, people had warned that New Orleans was vulnerable. The Houston Chronicle reported that 250,000 people would be stranded if a major hurricane struck, with the low-lying city left 20ft underwater. New Orleans’s...