Traffic jams, heatwaves and hidden charges: you know they’re coming but somehow they are impossible for the holiday-maker to dodge. This summer, after online comparison shopping, we paid a vast ...

A funny thing happened to me this week. After trusting a dating app to arrange dinner with a suitably vivacious and intelligent lady, I arrived at the restaurant at the appointed time to find that ...

In 1998, an art gallery gets a mysterious phone call. The caller claims they have been fooled by a master forger and that many of their prized paintings are fakes. Or are they? This is the story of ...

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 ...

Do you want more Cautionary Tales episodes in your life? Do you want behind the scenes stories and bonus conversations with me? Or do you want to support us in making the show? On behalf of the whole ...

In 1923, legendary navigator Captain Dolly Hunter led a squadron of warships into America’s worst peacetime naval catastrophe. The mission was supposed to be a speed trial, a display of the squadron’s ...

William McGonagall’s poems are something else. The jarring meter, the banal imagery, the awkward rhymes: they made him a laughing stock in 19th Century Scotland and are still derided to this day. How ...

This episode is released exclusively on Pushkin+. Episodes are released on the main feed each Friday. Robert Propst is more than an inventor: he is a visionary, an innovator dreaming up how to make ...

Pepsi twice ended up in court after promotions went disastrously wrong. Other big companies have fallen into the same trap – promising customers rewards so generous that to fulfil the promise might ...

As artificial intelligence becomes ever more capable, is any job secure? “I’ve sort of convinced myself that the safest job in the world is probably gardener,” the FT’s chief economics commentator ...

A radical thought experiment transforms the lives of a new breed of philanthropists, as they follow the logic of altruism to extraordinary lengths. The most famous convert to the Effective Altruism ...