Nicole Ouimette always knew her father was different. He was in and out of prison for most of her childhood. He had a lot of money but no job. And then, one night, the FBI showed up.
For a full list of credits, and more information about this episode, visit our website at crimetownshow.com.
In 1853 Elisha Otis climbed onto a platform which was then hoisted high above a large crowd of onlookers, nervy with anticipation. A man with an axe cut the cable, the crowd gasped, and Otis’s platform shuddered – but it did not plunge. “All safe, gentlemen, all safe!” he boomed. The city landscape was about to be turned on its head by the man who had invented not the elevator, but the elevator brake. As Tim Harford explains, the safety elevator is an astonishingly successful mass transit system which has changed the very shape of our cities.
Producer: Ben Crighton
Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon
(Image: Modern Elevator, Credit: iurii/Shutterstock)
It’s 1979 and containerization is sweeping through the San Francisco waterfront, leaving the old docks in ruins. As global trade explodes, a group of longshoremen band together to try to preserve the culture of work that they knew. They take pictures, create a slide show, and make sound recordings. Those recordings languished in a basement for 40 years. In this episode, we hear those archival tapes as a way of exploring the human effects of automation.
Charles “the Ghost” Kennedy and his sister Gloria took very different paths in life. She became a state senator. He became a drug smuggler. And as his empire starts to crumble, the people close to him suffer the consequences.
For a full list of credits, and for more information about this episode, visit our website at crimetownshow.com.
The contraceptive pill had profound social consequences. Everyone agrees with that. But – as Tim Harford explains – the pill wasn’t just socially revolutionary. It also sparked an economic revolution, perhaps the most significant of the late twentieth century. A careful statistical study by the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz strongly suggests that the pill played a major role in allowing women to delay marriage, delay motherhood and invest in their own careers. The consequences of that are profound.
Producer: Ben Crighton
Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon
(Image: Oral contraceptive pill, Credit: Areeya_ann/Shutterstock)
Buddy Cianci left City Hall in disgrace after torturing a man in his living room. Now, he attempts the impossible: running for mayor of Providence again.
For a full list of credits, and for more information about this episode, visit our website at crimetownshow.com.
The way educated women spend their time in the United States and other rich countries has changed radically over the past half a century. Women in the US now spend around 45 minutes per day in total on cooking and cleaning up; that is still much more than men, who spend just 15 minutes a day. But it is a vast shift from the four hours a day which was common in the 1960s. We know all this from time-use surveys conducted around the world. And we know the reasons for the shift. One of the most important of those is a radical change in the way food is prepared. As Tim Harford explains, the TV dinner – and other convenient innovations which emerged over the same period – have made a lasting economic impression.
Producer: Ben Crighton
Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon
(Image: TV Dinner, Credit: Shutterstock)
American companies pioneered container shipping, but now the ocean freight business is dominated by foreign firms. Thanks to the Jones Act, a 1920 law, all cargo between American ports must be carried on American-made ships, so we do still have a fleet. But the ships are old and outdated. In episode five, we explore the tragic consequences of this "America-first" trade policy, beginning with the El Faro, which sank in October 2015.
When master burglar Tony Fiore gets out of prison, he decides to try something different: robbing armored cars at gunpoint. His new hobby will bring him head to head with an old adversary one last time.