When the Luddites smashed factory frames in a bid to defend their craft and livelihoods, the machines came out on top. Today, AI and automation threaten to wipe out skilled jobs and flood us ...

For those of us frustrated that the UK chancellor Rachel Reeves has been offering the wrong solution to the right problem, there has recently been progress, of a kind: she is now offering the ...

For an academic researcher who first trained as a philosopher, then as a psychologist, Robyn Dawes was a practical fellow. He would tell a story from his time working in a psychiatric ward in the ...

The children of North End, Boston, play in the shadow of an enormous steel tank of molasses. The thick, sticky sugar syrup is being used to make munitions for the First World War. When a worker ...

For those of us frustrated that the UK chancellor Rachel Reeves has been offering the wrong solution to the right problem, there has recently been progress, of a kind: she is now offering the wrong ...

The marathon, the algorithm and me Twenty-five centuries ago, after the Greeks shattered the Persian army at Marathon, brave Pheidippides ran 26 miles to Athens with the news. Robert Browning’s poem ...

It could cure almost any ‘female ailment’ – even cancer – said the adverts. But Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound was, in fact, just a concoction of herbs and alcohol of no proven medicinal merit.

Thomas Midgley’s inventions caused his own death, hastened the deaths of millions of people around the world, and very nearly extinguished all life on land. Midgley and his employers didn’t set out to ...