Category: Retired

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Crimetown - S1 E17: The Trial of Buddy Cianci

Buddy Cianci faces justice. His lawyers say he’s the Renaissance Mayor, too busy rebuilding Providence to notice a few bad apples in his administration. The prosecution says he’s just another crooked politician, running a massive corruption ring out of City Hall. Which story will the jury believe?

For a full list of credits, and more information about this episode, visit our website at crimetownshow.com.

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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Cuneiform

The Egyptians thought literacy was divine; a benefaction which came from the baboon-faced god Thoth. In fact the earliest known script – “cuneiform” – came from Uruk, a Mesopotamian settlement on the banks of the Euphrates in what is now Iraq. What did it say? As Tim Harford describes, cuneiform wasn’t being used for poetry, or to send messages to far-off lands. It was used to create the world’s first accounts. And the world’s first written contracts, too. Producer: Ben Crighton Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon (Image: Close-up of clay tablet, Credit: Kotomiti Okuma/Shutterstock)
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Crimetown - S1 E16: Operation Plunder Dome

Dennis Aiken is an FBI agent from Mississippi. Anthony Freitas is a businessman from Portugal. Together, they’re Providence’s best hope in the war on corruption—and they just might take down Buddy Cianci once and for all.

For a full list of credits, and for more information about this episode, visit our website at crimetownshow.com. 

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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Air Conditioning

Tim Harford tells the surprising story of air conditioning which was invented in 1902 to counter the effects of humidity on the printing process. Over the following decades “aircon” found its way into our homes, cars and offices. But air conditioning is much more than a mere convenience. It is a transformative technology; one that has had a profound influence on where and how we live. Producer: Ben Crighton Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon (Image: Air conditioning vent, Credit: Dorason/Shutterstock)
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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Elevator

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)
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Crimetown - S1 E15: Family Ties

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.

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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - Contraceptive Pill

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)
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50 Things That Made the Modern Economy - TV Dinner

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)