One of my favourite books of the year was Randall Munroe’s What If? 2, which like its predecessor offers serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions. For example, “What would happen if the solar system was filled with soup out to Jupiter?” The short...
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...
In January 2020, the Harford family filled a spare cupboard with pasta and tinned food. Our “Brexit cupboard” was intended to protect us in case there were disruptions to trade after the UK left the EU on January 31. As I pointed out to my wife, it was probably...
“I am a fighter and not a quitter,” said Liz Truss, the day before quitting. She was echoing the words of Peter Mandelson MP over two decades ago, although Mandelson had the good sense to speak after winning a political fight rather than while losing one. It’s a...
“I was really taken aback,” Dr Dilip Mahalanabis recalled of arriving at Bangaon’s city hospital in 1971. Bangaon is now on the border between India and Bangladesh. At that time, though, it was in the middle of a refugee crisis and a vicious cholera outbreak...
"Christmas is coming”, laments Ellen Stuart, “and I have got to think up presents for everybody . . . Dear me, it’s so tedious!” Her aunt sympathises and recalls her youth, a time before gift-giving became excessive. “Presents did not fly about in those days as they...
Thanks to Elon Musk’s rather erratic approach to free speech, employee relations, subscriptions, parodies and disinformation, a lot of people have taken to Twitter to declare that they are leaving Twitter. They will find it hard. This is not because Twitter is...
You can’t always get what you want, a young man once sang. It’s a simple aphorism, but one worth remembering. Boris Johnson was widely — and rightly — mocked in 2016 for announcing that “our policy is having our cake and eating it”. That was a dishonest refusal to...
In 1789, an octogenarian Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter containing the famous opinion that “in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”. Franklin was mistaken. Many taxes are easily and legally avoided by the simple expedient of not...