Traffic jams, heatwaves and hidden charges: you know they’re coming but somehow they are impossible for the holiday-maker to dodge. This summer, after online comparison shopping, we paid a vast ...

A funny thing happened to me this week. After trusting a dating app to arrange dinner with a suitably vivacious and intelligent lady, I arrived at the restaurant at the appointed time to find that ...

Erika McEntarfer can console herself that things could be worse. When the agency she ran, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), produced disappointing employment numbers, Donald Trump gave ...

Can a kind word change your life? I know from experience that it can. More than three decades ago, during the summer vacation at the end of my first year at university, I received a handwritten letter ...

William McGonagall’s poems are something else. The jarring meter, the banal imagery, the awkward rhymes: they made him a laughing stock in 19th Century Scotland and are still derided to this day. How ...

Johnny Echols, lead guitarist for the 1960s rock band Love, is a fount of stories. In a podcast interview with superstar producer Rick Rubin a few years ago, he talked about happy accidents in the ...

A funny thing happened to me this week. After trusting a dating app to arrange dinner with a suitably vivacious and intelligent lady, I arrived at the restaurant at the appointed time to find that in ...

In the early 90s, cutting-edge advertising agency Chiat/Day announced a radical plan, aimed at giving the company a jolt of creative renewal. They would sweep away corner offices and cubicles and ...

Economists love to tell each other stories about perverse incentives. The “cobra effect” is a favourite. It describes an attempt by the British Raj to rid Delhi of its cobras by paying a bounty for ...

Pepsi twice ended up in court after promotions went disastrously wrong. Other big companies have fallen into the same trap – promising customers rewards so generous that to fulfil the promise might ...

As artificial intelligence becomes ever more capable, is any job secure? “I’ve sort of convinced myself that the safest job in the world is probably gardener,” the FT’s chief economics commentator ...

Why did audience members fail to flee a deadly fire… despite being told to escape? Flames are spreading through a Cincinnati hotel. The staff know it, the fire department is coming, and the people in ...