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 ...

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 ...

Well, it’s been a long road since I raced the dinosaurs at a New Year’s Day parkrun. I’ve managed various niggles (knee, glute, achilles… yawn). I’ve run around the amazing Ladybower Reservoir, across ...

Dick and Mac are content with their lives: they enjoy making burgers by day and stargazing by night. Ray Kroc is a workaholic chasing success at any cost. When the brothers’ folksy charm collides with ...

Bobby Bonilla is known to baseball fans of a certain age as one of the best batters in the sport back in the 1980s and 90s. To grumpy fans of the New York Mets, he is known as the man who fooled the ...

There is a gap between the calm, rational decision-makers we often aspire to be and the overwrought, sentiment-tossed creatures we often are. Rarely is that gap wider than in the political arena.

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 ...

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 ...

Cautionary Conversation: Steve Jobs hated his phone so much that he smashed it against a wall. He also referred to mobile carriers as “orifices”. Yet he went on to invent the world’s most popular ...

Just before Christmas 1953, the bosses of America’s leading tobacco companies met John Hill, the founder and chief executive of one of America’s leading public relations firms, Hill & Knowlton.