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 ...

In these pages, and in my last book, I’ve written about the lessons we should learn from Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill’s investigations in the 1950s into the link between cigarettes and ...

I previously wrote about predictions here and about Dan Kahan’s work here. For more on “badges of membership” see “Climate-Science Communication and the Measurement Problem”, Advances in Political ...

It was one of the most astonishing displays of persuasion I have ever seen. In the audience, a group of Midwestern agribusiness types, who by profession should have been well attuned to climate ...

Harford is smart. Scary smart. So smart he can illuminate, in clear, entertaining English, ideas and forces of mind-boggling complexity The Undercover Economist is a rare specimen: a book on economics ...

We all seem to be worried about the robots taking over these days — and they don’t need to take all the jobs to be horrendously disruptive. A situation where 30 to 40 per cent of the working age ...

In Tudor England, the line between mathematics and the mystic arts is vanishingly thin. Straddling both worlds is John Dee, a brilliant scholar and astrologer whose intellect grants him access to ...

Mike Lynch was often lauded as Britain’s answer to Bill Gates. Born into a working-class family, Lynch’s incredible intellect and passion for computers led him to become a billionaire tech ...

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 ...

It may seem strange to celebrate, but let’s hear it for oil-price shocks. Admittedly, there is little reason to rejoice in a disruption to the world’s energy system. The price of oil is linked to the ...

Brand new submarine HMS Thetis is the pride of the British Navy. In 1939, she sets out for a test dive with 103 men on board. But a tiny flaw in her construction has gone unnoticed, and the crew of ...

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 ...