| Cautionary Tales | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Presentation | |
| Hosted by | Tim Harford |
| Genre | Educational |
| Production | |
| No. of seasons | 3 |
| Publication | |
| Original release | November 15, 2019 |
| Provider | Pushkin Industries |
| Related | |
| Website | www |
Cautionary Tales is a podcast produced by Pushkin Industries and hosted by economic journalist Tim Harford. Each episode presents a story of historical failure and analyzes it for patterns and lessons useful in the current day.
Prior to his work on Cautionary Tales, Harford authored books on economics and wrote a long-running Financial Times column called the Undercover Economist. [1]
Pushkin is a podcast company specializing in social science and the arts, founded by author Malcolm Gladwell and media executive Jacob Weisberg in 2018. [2] In addition to Cautionary Tales, the company produces Gladwell's podcast Revisionist History and author Michael Lewis's Against the Rules. [3]
The podcast launched on Pushkin on November 15, 2019. “We’ve always warned children by telling them unsettling fairy tales. But my Cautionary Tales are for the education of the grown ups. And my Cautionary Tales are all true,” Harford said of the new show. “Together we weave stories of human error, of tragic catastrophes and hilarious fiascos." [1]
In November 2022, Harford presented an episode live at the Bristol Festival of Ideas. [4]
Episodes of the podcast have covered failed scientific breakthroughs and inventions, redundant safety features, human error and other examples of oversights, mistakes and catastrophe. [5] [6] [7] Harford's analysis draws on disciplines such as economics, psychology and sociology. [8]
It often features voice actors who portray historical figures discussed in episodes; cast members have included British actors Alan Cumming, Russell Tovey and Rufus Wright. [9]
| Season | Episodes | Originally aired | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First aired | Last aired | |||
| 1 | 14 | November 15, 2019 | July 17, 2020 | |
| 2 | 16 | February 26, 2021 | October 29, 2021 | |
| 3 | March 25, 2022 | continuing | ||
Alan Cumming is a Scottish actor. Known for his roles on stage and screen, he has received numerous accolades including a BAFTA Award, an Emmy Award, two Tony Awards, and an Olivier Award. He received the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Comedy Performance for the West End production of Accidental Death of an Anarchist (1991). His other Olivier-nominated roles were in The Conquest of the South Pole (1988), La Bête (1992), and Cabaret (1994). Cumming won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical for reprising his role as the Emcee on Broadway in Cabaret (1998). His other performances on Broadway include Design for Living (2001), and Macbeth (2013).
Malcolm Timothy Gladwell is an English-born Canadian journalist, author, and public speaker. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He has published seven books: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (2000); Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (2005); Outliers: The Story of Success (2008); What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009), a collection of his journalism; David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants (2013); Talking To Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don't Know (2019) and The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War (2021). His first five books were on The New York Times Best Seller list. He is also the host of the podcast Revisionist History and co-founder of the podcast company Pushkin Industries.
Jacob Weisberg is an American political journalist, who served as editor-in-chief of The Slate Group, a division of Graham Holdings Company. In September 2018, he left Slate to co-found Pushkin Industries, an audio content company, with Malcolm Gladwell. Weisberg was also a Newsweek columnist. He served as the editor of Slate magazine for six years before stepping down in June 2008. He is the son of Lois Weisberg, a Chicago social activist and municipal commissioner.
Timothy Douglas Harford is an English economic journalist who lives in Oxford.
Gretta Cohn is an American media executive and cellist who currently serves as president of the podcast production company Pushkin Industries.
Russell George Tovey is an English actor. He is best known for playing the role of werewolf George Sands in the BBC's supernatural comedy-drama Being Human, Rudge in both the stage and film versions of The History Boys, Steve in the BBC Three sitcom Him & Her, Kevin Matheson in the HBO original series Looking and its subsequent series finale television film Looking: The Movie, and Patrick Read in American Horror Story: NYC.
Robert Valentine Braddock is an American country songwriter and record producer. A member of the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, Braddock has contributed numerous hit songs during more than 40 years in the industry, including 13 number-one hit singles.
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference is the debut book by Malcolm Gladwell, first published by Little, Brown in 2000. Gladwell defines a tipping point as "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point." The book seeks to explain and describe the "mysterious" sociological changes that mark everyday life. As Gladwell states: "Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do." The examples of such changes in his book include the rise in popularity and sales of Hush Puppies shoes in the mid-1990s and the steep drop in New York City's crime rate after 1990.
Outliers: The Story of Success is the non-fiction book written by Malcolm Gladwell and published by Little, Brown and Company on November 18, 2008. In Outliers, Gladwell examines the factors that contribute to high levels of success. To support his thesis, he examines why the majority of Canadian ice hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year, how Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates achieved his extreme wealth, how the Beatles became one of the most successful musical acts in human history, how two people with exceptional intelligence—Christopher Langan and J. Robert Oppenheimer—end up with such vastly different fortunes, how Joseph Flom built Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom into one of the most successful law firms in the world, and how cultural differences play a large part in perceived intelligence and rational decision making. Throughout the publication, Gladwell repeatedly mentions the "10,000-Hour Rule", claiming that the key to achieving world-class expertise in any skill, is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing the correct way, for a total of around 10,000 hours, though the authors of the original study have disputed Gladwell's usage.
George Sands is a fictional werewolf in the comedy-drama television series Being Human, portrayed by Russell Tovey. The male lead for the duration of the show's first three series appeared in 24 episodes of the drama, as well as in three Being Human novels.
Laurie Renee Santos is an American cognitive scientist and professor of psychology at Yale University. She is the director of Yale's Comparative Cognition Laboratory, Director of Yale's Canine Cognition Lab, and former Head of Yale's Silliman College. She has been a featured TED speaker and has been listed in Popular Science as one of their "Brilliant Ten" young scientists in 2007 as well as in Time magazine as a "Leading Campus Celebrity" in 2013.
John Michael David Robins is an English stand-up comedian and radio presenter.
The Orbiting Human Circus (of the Air) is a fictional radio drama podcast written and created by Julian Koster, and published by Night Vale Presents. It is the fourth podcast to be released under the Night Vale Presents name. The podcast stars Koster as Julian the janitor, a shy, sensitive employee of the Eiffel Tower who dreams of joining the fictional radio show also titled The Orbiting Human Circus of the Air, which is broadcast from a large ballroom at the top of the tower. Listeners of the podcast hear Julian the janitor's inner thoughts as he discusses his situations with The Narrator, played by Drew Callander, an imaginary voice only Julian can hear. In addition to the conversations in his head, Julian interacts with the staff and talent of The Orbiting Human Circus of the Air, notably voiced by actors such as John Cameron Mitchell, Cecil Baldwin, Tim Robbins, Charlie Day, and Mary Elizabeth Ellis. One of the most prominent themes of the podcast is the pain of loneliness. The first season of the podcasts comprised eight episodes as well as a bonus question and answer episode in which Koster answers questions submitted by fans.
Revisionist History is a podcast by Malcolm Gladwell produced by Gladwell's company Pushkin Industries. It began in 2016 and has aired six 10-episode seasons.
Las Culturistas is a pop-culture and comedy podcast co-hosted by Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers, produced by Will Ferrell's Big Money Players podcast network and iHeartRadio. Started in March 2016, it was previously part of the Forever Dog podcast network.
The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War is a 2021 book by Malcolm Gladwell that examines the US Bomber Mafia of World War II, which advocated precision aerial bombing as a means to win a war. Gladwell stated the audiobook for The Bomber Mafia came about as an expansion of material from his podcast Revisionist History, and that the print book originated from the audiobook. The book follows the Bomber Mafia, especially Major General Haywood S. Hansell, and the development of a high-altitude precision aerial bombardment strategy in World War II as a means to limit casualties. After difficulties in applying the Bomber Mafia's theoretical strategy, Major General Hansell was replaced by Major General Curtis LeMay, who utilized tactical changes such as attacking Japanese population centers with napalm to ensure a Japanese surrender. Upon release, The Bomber Mafia was met with mixed reviews, with reviewers praising its audiobook version but criticizing the book for a lack of accuracy and for being light on details.
Pushkin Industries is an American publisher of podcasts and audiobooks. It was co-founded in 2018 by Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg. As of 2021, it hosts over 25 podcasts.
Hedwig Frida Ullmann, née Nathan, was a German Jewish art collector and refugee.
If Books Could Kill is a podcast hosted by Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri about popular nonfiction books about ideas in American culture and politics. It is based around criticising bestselling nonfiction books of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Books featured on the podcast include Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, and The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama. Released on November 2, 2022, the podcast has received largely positive reviews from critics.