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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is just a statistic. If Stalin ever said such a thing, he wasn’t the first — but the ghoulish claim has stuck to him because he is one of very few ...

Lying on the cold metal table, Voyne Ray Cox knew the drill. This was his ninth round of cancer treatment – which is why he was certain that what happened next couldn’t be right. He hea… ...

Smoking kills. A few people had suspected as much before the second world war, but it was not until 1950 that the scientific evidence began to accumulate that smokers were at dramatically higher risk ...