Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford

Minnie Smith grew sick quite suddenly. She had been young, fit and healthy - and the doctors were baffled when she died. "A peculiar wasting illness," they called it. Then, her sister Anna went missing. Her rotting corpse was found a week later, a bullet hole through her skull. When a third sister, Rita, was blown up in her own bed, a grim pattern was clear: the family was being targeted...

This week, we've twice the storytelling fun for you: two Cautionary Tales shorts, previously only available to Pushkin+ subscribers.

A Monkey for Mayor: It was supposed to be a publicity stunt, but when the man who dressed as Hartlepool United’s monkey mascot stood in a mayoral election... he won. Actual politicians predicted disaster - since thousands of workers and millions of dollars were now in the hands of a complete novice...

Why are board games so popular in Germany? What’s Tim Harford’s top tip for productivity? And where do all those sound effects come from?

Tim is joined by Cautionary Tales’ very own wizard of sound Pascal Wyse, to read your emails and answer your questions.

Do you have a question for Tim? Please email any queries you might have, however big or small, to tales@pushkin.fm.

Please note that some emails in this episode have been edited for length.

See omnystudio...

The longest running television series of the 20th century was Gunsmoke, a western set in the notorious Dodge City, Kansas. Malcolm sweeps away mountains of legal scholarship to make a bold claim: The simplest explanation for the Supreme’s Court’s puzzling run of gun rights decisions may be that the justices watched too much Gunsmoke when they were growing up. Enjoy this episode from Revisionist History, another Pushkin Industries podcast.

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1957. Jørn Utzon receives a phone call: he's just won an international competition to design a brand new opera house for the Australian city of Sydney. Utzon is unknown in the field, so this is a triumph. The young architect couldn’t have imagined what a bitter victory it would turn out to be...

The Guggenheim in Bilbao; the Burj Khalifa in Dubai; the Shard in London. These days, everyone seems to want an iconic building...

Cautionary Book Club: When Morgan Stanley offered to lease Chicago's parking meters for the princely sum of $1 billion, the City Council were convinced that they had struck gold. They hastily signed the deal. But they soon learnt that they hadn't just traded away parking revenue - they had traded away the streets themselves...

In this hybrid episode of Cautionary Tales, Tim Harford first tells the story of the Chicago parking metres fiasco of 2008...

1812. A band of "Luddites" is laying siege to a textile mill in the North of England, under cover of night. They plan to destroy the machines that are replacing their jobs. But mill owner William Cartwright is prepared: he's fortified his factory with skilled marksmen, fearsome eighteen-inch metal spikes and barrels of sulphuric acid.

Today "Luddite" is a term of mockery — a description for someone who's scared of technology...

Cautionary Conversation: Andy Warhol’s assistant, Gerard Malanga, is facing a long prison sentence in Italy. He’s forged several Che Guevara portraits and tried to pass them off as genuine Warhols. What happens next is a landmark event in the history of art and authenticity…

Tim Harford is joined by Alice Sherwood, author of Authenticity, to discuss truth and fakery in modern times...

Heroic explorer Frederick Cook has just returned from the very roof of the world, the first man to reach the North Pole. Or so he says. Journalist Philip Gibbs has been watching him, and he’s convinced he’s lying.

When Gibbs publishes that belief, he stands alone. Cook has a gripping manner and an excellent reputation: his winning tale must be true. Diners boo Gibbs at a restaurant, newspapers publish sly-looking caricatures of him, and he even receives threats of violence...

Cautionary Conversation: Did a Nazi put America on the moon? To celebrate the launch of his mini-series on the V-2 rocket, Tim Harford sits down with Pushkin’s resident V-2 expert, Ryan Dilley. They discuss the so-called “Father of Space Travel”, Wernher von Braun, and satirist Tom Lehrer’s musical lampooning of him.

A three-part mini series on the V-2 rocket is available now for Pushkin+ subscribers...