Sixteen years have passed since Ferdinand De Lesseps’ catastrophic failure in Panama, and the dramatic collapse of the French Panama Canal company. Now, President Theodore Roosevelt has picked up ...

Beneath all the tariff craziness — the taxes on islands inhabited only by penguins, the pseudo-profound mathematical definition of “reciprocal”, the idea that the settled trade policy of every ...

In 1978, a dredging gang working for British Waterways was struggling with a problem. They were trying to clear obstacles on the Chesterfield Canal so they could stabilise a concrete wall — not an ...

In 1978 the world is on the brink of declaring victory over smallpox. No cases have been seen for months, and it looks like the end for a deadly, painful disease. When a photographer in Birmingham ...

“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 ...

Two of the greatest economists who ever lived, Irving Fisher and John Maynard Keynes, thought they could predict the future and make a killing on the stock market. Both of them failed to see the Wall ...

Of all the dubious claims uttered recently by Elon Musk, I have yet to see a more interesting one than his tweet asserting that “a more accurate measure of GDP would exclude government spending.

John von Neumann — the man who created game theory, advanced many branches of mathematics and physics, and did more than anyone to design the modern computer — was someone who attracted a certain ...

“Down Under” was huge. This jokey ode to legendary Australian wanderlust helped Men at Work win a Grammy and was a key part of the band’s creative legacy. It had also been earning “Men At Work” a ...

In the bleak Russian winter of 1959, nine experienced hikers set out on an expedition. None of them made it back alive. When their campsite was finally discovered, it told a chilling story: tents ...