Christmas is the time of year to worry about two things: running out of money, and playing board games. To mark the festive season,  Tim is joined by creator of Magic: The Gathering, Richard ...

The first line of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is “Christmas won’t be Christmas without presents”, while Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1850 short story The Good Fairy is about Christmas presents ...

A megaplant near the small village of Flixborough, England, is busy churning out a key ingredient of nylon 6, a material used in everything from stockings to toothbrushes to electronics. When a ...

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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 ...

Windscale is supposed to be Britain’s big leap into the nuclear Age, bringing science fiction to life in 1950s Northern England. But in the race to catch up with America’s nuclear program, scientists ...

Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross suggested that there are five stages of grief, but nobody has the attention span for that any more. We have leapt instead from stage one, denial — “there is no ...

“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 ...

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 ...

Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross suggested that there are five stages of grief, but nobody has the attention span for that any more. We have leapt instead from stage one, denial — “there is no ...

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.