When the Luddites smashed factory frames in a bid to defend their craft and livelihoods, the machines came out on top. Today, AI and automation threaten to wipe out skilled jobs and flood us with ...

For those of us frustrated that the UK chancellor Rachel Reeves has been offering the wrong solution to the right problem, there has recently been progress, of a kind: she is now offering the ...

For an academic researcher who first trained as a philosopher, then as a psychologist, Robyn Dawes was a practical fellow. He would tell a story from his time working in a psychiatric ward in the ...

The children of North End, Boston, play in the shadow of an enormous steel tank of molasses. The thick, sticky sugar syrup is being used to make munitions for the First World War. When a worker ...

The marathon, the algorithm and me Twenty-five centuries ago, after the Greeks shattered the Persian army at Marathon, brave Pheidippides ran 26 miles to Athens with the news. Robert Browning’s poem ...

In the early 1900s, Sir Arthur Vickers keeps the magnificent Irish Crown Jewels safe under lock and key at Dublin Castle. When the jewels disappear, the King rages, the police investigate, and ...

We heard a lot about “greedflation” in the post-pandemic years, when prices were increasing at a rate of 8 or 9 per cent a year. We hear a lot less about the subject now, when inflation rates are ...

Panic has erupted in the cockpit of AirFrance Flight 447. The pilots are convinced they’ve lost control of the plane. It’s lurching violently. Then, it begins plummeting from the sky at breakneck ...

“Thanks to Tim Harford’s characteristic wit and magnetic storytelling, you may not realize you’re getting an advanced course in how to understand the kinds of statistics we’re all faced with every day ...

He’d played with Miles Davis and Art Blakey and this was to be the biggest solo concert of Keith Jarrett’s career – but the Virtuoso pianist was in for a shock when he entered Cologne’s opera house.