Cautionary Tales – The DeLorean Saga: Fraud, Drugs and Marty McFly’s Car (with Business History)

This is a special crossover episode with Business History. John DeLorean was a visionary who wanted to create a futuristic new sports car – a stainless steel marvel with distinctive gull-wing doors. The British Government agreed to finance the project, provided DeLorean built his factory in a troubled part of Northern Ireland. Production stumbled, sales […]

8/21/2026
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Explain it to me like I’m ten

In 2012, the creator of the xkcd cartoon Randall Munroe unveiled Up Goer Five — a detailed diagram of the Saturn V rocket, annotated using only the most common 1,000 (sorry, “ten hundred”) words in the dictionary. It was a viral hit, as was the follow-up book, Thing Explainer (2015), and it produced an intriguing […]

8/21/2026
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Cautionary Tales – The She-Wolf of Wall Street Runs for President

Born into a poor, abusive household in 1838, Victoria Woodhull doesn’t have much hope of a comfortable life. But she’s smart, charismatic and has an uncanny ability to read people, managing to forge a path to Wall Street and the publishing world. When Woodhull decides to run for president, she understands that capturing people’s attention will […]

8/11/2026
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Cautionary Tales – The Weight of Fame: A Hollywood Tragedy

Talented and beautiful, Molly O’Day is a rising star in 1920s Hollywood. But when Molly’s teenage body starts to change and she can no longer fit into the dress she wore when she was 16, the studio wants nothing to do with her. As the scripts dry up and the money runs out, Molly faces […]

8/7/2026
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Lessons from a shipwreck

Four hundred years ago, in a Stockholm shipyard, work began on Vasa, the pride of the Swedish navy. King Gustavus Adolphus was at war, and gave orders to his shipwrights to build something impressive. In accordance with the king’s instructions, Vasa was ambitiously designed, heavily armed and lavishly decorated. Construction and rigging took two years, […]

8/7/2026
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Cautionary Tales – Arsenic and Lace: The Trial of the Yorkshire Witch, with Maddy Pelling

Mary Bateman lived in York in the late 18th Century, an age that prized rational thought. Many people still longed to believe in the old ways and Bateman used this to her advantage, selling spells and enchantments to the desperate. Maddy Pelling, co-host of the After Dark podcast and author of Hoax: Truth and Lies […]

7/31/2026
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Cautionary Tales – The Doors of Death: The Herald of Free Enterprise

The Herald of Free Enterprise is a new class of ferry that allows cars to drive directly into the ship. The doors protecting the ship must be closed before every departure, or the ship sails with a gaping hole at one end. One black night in 1987, on the freezing waters off Zebrugge, Belgium, a […]

7/24/2026
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Experts know less than they like to think

How do we know what works? In an uncertain world, full of untested treatments, disputed policies and untried inventions, it should be a pressing question. For an impoverished young tailor named Franz Reichelt, the answer was: we find out the hard way. In February 1912, on a cold Sunday morning, Reichelt persuaded journalists, a camera […]

7/24/2026
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Cautionary Tales – “What a bloody mess we’re in”

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 are tinkering with forces they don’t fully understand. When the reactor catches fire, no-one knows how bad it could be, or how […]

7/17/2026
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Can you keep a trade secret?

He didn’t go to sample the Dolcetto d’Alba, I’m fairly sure of that. John Lombe’s mission was industrial espionage. He travelled to Piedmont with the goal of learning the Piedmontese art of spinning silk into strong yarn. Nobody was likely to teach him — that would have been illegal — so instead he waited until […]

7/17/2026
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