When Parakeets Plundered New York
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Take your business further at T-Mobile.com slash now. Pushkin. It's nice to have visitors from time to time, especially cute visitors. So it was in America in the 1950s. Who wouldn't want an adorable little parakeet for a pet? In Argentina, the parakeet was an agricultural pest. Rats with gaudy wings, brightly feathered, chattering locusts.

The Argentines were happy to ship them up north as an exotic pet. And for a while, America was happy to receive those parakeets. Except, parakeets can be gratingly annoying. All that talking and talking. It's cute until it isn't.

And so people started releasing them into the wild. And then in 1969, catastrophe. A shipping crate fell apart at JFK airport. Hundreds of parakeets escaped, maybe thousands, maybe. Everyone could see what would happen next. They would breed and breed and soon there would be parakeets everywhere, marauding and pillaging like cute little flying Vikings.

I'm Tim Harford, and this is a special cautionary conversation about the Great Parakeet Panic. ♪

Today, our cautionary conversation is with Ben Nadaf-Haffrey, the longtime producer and the new host and writer of our sister podcast, The Last Archive. Hello, Ben. Hey, Tim. How you doing? I'm doing very well. Welcome to Cautionary Tales. I loved the story about the parakeet panic. We should probably start with a little bit about you. You're a self-confessed bird lover. Am I right? I am. I am a bird lover. It's true. It sort of struck during the pandemic.

It actually involved an episode of The Last Archive.

In our first season, there's a story about the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which has this amazing archive of birdsong. And we were doing an episode about that lab. I was working with a lot of the birdsong from it. It was one of the last trips I took before the pandemic struck. So I was in this mixing hole, listening to tons and tons of birdsong and not really leaving my apartment. And then one morning, a mourning dove started to show up on our fire escape.

and would coo in the way that morning doves do and sort of whinny when it flew away, which is another kind of funny thing about these rather absurd birds. And there's a term in birding called spark bird, which is the bird that kind of kicks off your fascination with birds the moment when you stop seeing them as an undifferentiated population and start to see them as individual magnificent creatures. And that morning dove was my spark bird.

Swiftly followed by a family of bluebirds and of tree swallows, who I was lucky enough to live in close proximity to and watch grow up. So I sort of became fascinated by birds in 2020. And it was that love that led me to the parakeets.

I think you're not alone in having had this appreciation for birds and for birdsong during the pandemic in particular, those strange lockdown months. Although I love the fact that you basically, you were seduced by the audio. You're listening to tape of birdsongs and that's what softened you up.

Yeah, and even with the morning dove, you know, we keep the curtains closed overnight. And so it would be in the morning when the morning dove would land, and I would hear it rather than see it at first. So it was the audio, and then it became more typically visually oriented. And I remember that episode of The Last Archive. We should probably explain to loyal Cautionary Tales listeners, the few of them who don't listen also to The Last Archive, that The Last Archive is a wonderful podcast, also produced by Pushkin. Like Cautionary Tales...

aims to tell these really rich stories, although it has a slightly different air to it and lots of beautiful, beautiful archive audio among other things. Like you said, I do consider Cautionary Tales like our sister podcast. I love Cautionary Tales. I feel like it's very much in a similar vein. But one thing that we always try to do on the show is use a lot of archival tape.

So we should talk about parrots and parakeets. Are they the same thing? This is a terribly ignorant question. They're kind of like little parrots or what?

Yeah, so parakeets are a parrot. And there are many different kinds of parakeets. This specific story is about monk parakeets. They, similar to other kinds of parrots, have the capacity to mimic human speech, though it's not as pronounced in a monk parakeet as it is in an African gray, for instance. But they're kind of your classic parrot-looking bird in that they're bright green and they have a hooked bone-colored beak and they're sort of gorgeous and have...

extremely gregarious, larger-than-life personalities, which is part of why you might want them as a pet. And also part of why you might not want them anymore after a while. Not want them as a pet, yeah. So in the 1950s and 60s, there was a huge market for monk parakeets. I think there was something like 60,000, more than 60,000 monk parakeets purchased in the United States in a period of three years in the 1960s. And it was part of this broader...

exotica craze that was happening. Like you got Pink Flamingos, Hawaiian shirts, tiki torches. A lot of what it was is GIs coming back from the war who had been stationed in the South Pacific and then bringing this love of other parts of the world, but also this kind of comforting fiction of kind of everywhere that wasn't America mashed up into one place. So you had this Polynesian culture, but also South American culture and

The parakeets kind of fit in there right alongside your pink flamingos with the added bonus that you could try and teach these birds to talk. Like people made records of training birds how to speak that you were supposed to use as instruction or even just play so that your bird could learn from the record how to talk.

Do people used to teach their parakeets to scream obscenities? Because I mean, that's really what the British like to do with parrots. They would teach them to say rude things. I'm sure there are plenty of Americans, probably a lot of the New York parrots especially were being taught how to how to swear loudly. There's a lot of colorful swearing around here.

And I'm curious, Ben, are you a monk parakeet fan? I would never own a monk parakeet. I actually do think that would drive me insane. But there's a cemetery in Brooklyn about a mile from where I live. I found out that there was a colony of bright green monk parakeets living in the front gate of the cemetery. I love living near them, but no, I would not want to own one. I really wanted to talk about this idea of the parakeet panic, but the sense that the parakeets were going to take over

and that something had to be done. So tell us about that. So basically over the course of the 60s, a lot of these birds are up in the United States, and people very swiftly get sick of them and start to release them. It's not known at first that the bird can survive quite well in New York City or that it's as flexible as it is, but it turns out monk parakeets are able to sort of change the kinds of things they eat, and they're also really good at keeping warm in their nests because they have these sort of

complicated nests of little cubby holes that they fit into and they keep each other warm because they have high body temperatures.

So it turned out that the monk parakeet was quite able to survive in New York City. It was in 1971 that a woman was walking in Long Island and noticed a sort of speck of bright green in the grass. A strange-looking bird called an ornithologist who came and identified it as a baby monk parakeet. And this was proof that monk parakeets were reproducing in the wild in New York State. This sort of led to...

mass campaign on the state level in partnership with the Audubon Society and the Sierra Club, and even with some involvement from the federal government to stamp out the bird before it established itself as a large population because in Argentina and other South American countries, the monk parakeet was thought to be an agricultural pest.

And so the fear was it's going to kill native birds. It's going to eat up crops from our cropland. It's going to cause tons and tons of damage and have really significant agricultural costs and also just be really annoying. And the model for this was sort of thinking about other invasive species, but in particular the starling, which is another bird that was introduced famously in New York State in the late 19th century.

and has become a significant population since then and was thought to be a major agricultural pest. There's a crazy subplot there to do with Shakespeare, which we won't get into. People should listen to the episode. But look, forgive me, maybe this is my ignorance, but when I think of the major problems facing the United States in 2023...

Even if I limit myself to the major environmental problems facing the United States in 2023, I do not think to myself, monk parakeets, they're the guys. If only we didn't have the monk parakeets, it would all be fine. But you found, I mean, it's hilarious. You found this 700 page document in the New York State Archives and they were really, really worried about the parakeets, it seems. Yeah.

Yes, they were extremely concerned. It's important to note, I think, that this is happening right at the birth of the environmental movement in the United States. First Earth Day is April 22nd, 1970. It's basically within a year of that that the monk parakeet panic really gets going. The New York State Department of Conservation is a newly formed organization.

body the same way the Environmental Protection Agency's newly formed body, and they're part of managing the parakeet population.

So there's this sense that we are destroying the planet and the small things we do are spiraling wildly out of control. And the parakeet is sort of a paradigmatic example of this. It's like, oh, my God, look what we've done. You know, we've got rivers catching fire and also we let this bird loose and now that's going to go crazy and we're just going to be overwhelmed by a booming parakeet population. In addition to all of the other things we've started that have spun wildly out of control.

So the state was really concerned about this, and they mounted a campaign for people to write in and say if they'd seen monk parakeets, where they'd seen them. And they had, you know, employees who were going out and trapping and killing these birds by various means.

But I found this folder in the state archives that has 783 pages of correspondence and research and wanted posters and just all manner of things related to this campaign to completely annihilate the population of monk parakeets in New York state, which was thought to be 400 to 600 birds and was feared that it was going to double every three to four years. Can you give us a flavor of what was in this archival folder?

Sure. I thought I'd show you first, this is a wanted poster from Virginia that says wanted information relating to escaped alien at the top and then has this sort of sketch of a monk parakeet on it. Escaped alien, I love it. I know. There's this sort of undertone of xenophobia to it that I think the poster captures very effectively. If you should see this bird, please report your observation to your VPI extension officer.

This is from New York State. This is a second grade class in Bellport, New York, who were writing to the state about their parakeet sightings. So it's got this amazing double-spaced lined paper, child's handwriting, Dear Mr. Brown, the monk parakeet is all over Bellport. I have seen about 30 of them underlined. And one nest, and the one is written backwards. The

Very truly yours, Lee.

Wow, so Lee sounds really worried. Lee was very concerned. And then this I love is a letter from a corrections officer on Rikers Island, which is a famous and much hated island prison in New York. It says, Mr. Trim, I am an NYC correction officer assigned to Rikers Island. My post as work gang officer takes me over most of the island, which is still wooded and undeveloped. I was pleased to find that remote areas of the island are overrun with pheasant.

One day in February, while on my outside patrol, I saw feeding on slices of bread that inmates throw from the windows the usual accumulation of local birds and what I identified as a half-moon parrot. I observed him for several minutes, and he was then joined by others. I counted—counting is my business—27 birds in all. I made inquiries of other COs and inmates and could not come up until now with a logical explanation."

An inmate truck driver told me that at our abandoned ferry house there were hundreds. I checked this out and found this to be true. For obvious reasons, the island is restricted and cameras are forbidden. However, if the proper requests are made, it just might be permitted to check out the sanctuary of what I believe to be monk parrots. And then the state actually does go to Rikers Island to capture the parrots and seems to have failed in that endeavor. And all stored for posterity. Incredible. Incredible.

I'm speaking to Ben-Nadav Hafri, the host of The Last Archive. Cautionary Tales will be back after the break.

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Now, this all reminds me of something, and it clearly reminded you of something similar, which is these worries about overpopulation.

human overpopulation, which were catching on at around the same time. And the person I always think of is the ecologist Garrett Hardin, who wrote a very influential piece in the social sciences about the tragedy of the commons. There's Paul Ehrlich, famously, 1968, the population bomb. You actually take it back in...

to the work that inspired Paul Ehrlich, this guy Charles Elton, who I'd never heard of. Totally. There's this big concern about human overpopulation. Like these are the parakeet years, they're the human overpopulation years. And people were concerned about that at Earth Day as well. But a lot of our ideas about population booms and busts, they're informed at least by how we think about animalism.

animal population cycles. And that work has been around for a while. There's Thomas Malthus at the end of the 18th century talking about human overpopulation already. And a lot of these people in the 70s are thought of as like neo-Malthusians. But there's also the ecologists and the animal population people, including this guy, Charles Elton, who founds Oxford's Bureau of Animal Population in the 1930s and is the guy who in 1958

writes a book called The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants, which is actually first done as a three-part program on the BBC in 1957. So it's written for a popular audience and is one of the first places where this idea about invading animal populations booming and growing wildly out of control becomes popularized.

Even though the field of invasion biology doesn't really take off until the 1990s, he's still to this day the most cited person in the field. And he's been doing this research on animal populations over the 20th century. But interestingly, there's this kind of cross-pollination between how we think about animal populations and human populations, like

There's a guy, William Vogt, an ornithologist, who writes a book called The Road to Survival, I believe in the 1940s, that inspires Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb. There's this kind of shared anxiety about growth in natural things, like whether they're animals or people that are happening at the same time, and this confusing work of basically

how to manage populations because the fear is that they're going to overwhelm the natural limits of the planet, which is sort of a harmful idea for the environmental movement in those eras.

I think it's done a lot of damage. I think about Garrett Hardin, for example, the tragedy of the commons guy. I remember coming across him as a young economics student. The basic idea is if you don't have ownership over common land, then people will just let their livestock overgraze the common land. Too many cows on the common land, too many sheep on the common land. Common land gets used up, everybody dies. It's a disaster.

And I remember explaining this to my girlfriend at the time, happily mansplaining away. And she was outraged because I was basically saying, oh, and this is why it's a good idea that we don't have commons anymore. And she was much more interested in medieval history than I was. And she's like, no, they privatized the commons. They drove all the peasants off. They all starved. The commons worked. This is a willful misreading of history. Hardin had basically made this

purely mathematical argument, write down the equations and this is what happens. And when I looked into it more closely, I realized that social scientists who had looked at this with more interest found that in fact people did find ways to manage common property. These things didn't inevitably happen.

end in collapse. I became fascinated by Eleanor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, who basically looked at the same problems as Garrett Hardin, but actually looked at how those problems were solved in reality. And she found, oh, actually, these can be tough problems, but communities for centuries, for millennia, have been figuring out how to solve them.

And it does remind me of the parakeet situation and the overpopulation situation because there's this thing in common to it all, which is you have this kind of brute force intellectual tool or this kind of overly simplified schematic for looking at things. And you lose some of the fine grain detail and individuality and flexibility that allows you to come to happier conclusions than the commons will always be a tragedy and the

population is the central problem we have to solve if we want to solve our environmental woes. So I do think there's a meaningful parallel there. Yeah. People got very interested in things like forced sterilization. There was a famine in sub-Saharan Africa, I think it was the early 1980s, and Garrett Harden basically said, look, we can't help these people. And the image he

conjured was of a lifeboat. Americans are in the lifeboat and these Africans are in the water drowning and asking to be pulled onto the lifeboat. But if we pull them onto the lifeboat with us, then the lifeboat will sink. There's a racist undertone to that. There's a very much like, you got to let those guys starve. And that may seem heartless, but actually it's really the right and ethical thing to do if you really think about it. Right. The mathematically necessary thing.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, really horrendous. And now, of course, people are worried that maybe population is falling. Right. So in a lot of rich countries, so South Korea, South Korea is crazy. 0.78 children per woman in South Korea at the moment. You need roughly two children per woman to maintain the population. So at that rate, the population of South Korea is collapsing, absolutely collapsing. And that's the most extreme example. But there are lots of

wealthy countries where the headache now is population falling, not population rising. Yeah, and here we are just a half century away from at least the most recent panic about this. And yeah, I agree, the narrative has completely flipped. What happened to the monk parakeets?

Basically, the state sought to eliminate all of the birds in the wild. And they, in 1974, really begin to wind this down. It's thought that there are fewer than 10 monk parakeets remaining in the wild. And so they declare mission accomplished. But of course, there are still monk parakeets in the wild. They did not succeed in getting every last one. And probably there have been subsequent introductions from the pet trade. So...

Now, there are monk parakeets living in New York City still. They live in Brooklyn College. They live in the spires of the main gate at Greenwood Cemetery. But they're pretty controlled populations. They aren't doing agricultural damage, at least that we know of. They're not competing with native species in any particularly egregious way. I actually believe that their nests provide housing for other birds.

So they're a neutral to positive impact on the environment. Those sort of initial projections about what the monk parakeet was going to do to this country were overblown. And, you know, anyone listening in the United States today will know that we are not living in the post-parakeet apocalypse. So it has a happy ending. And for me, it has this sort of greater significance about

how we think about the natural world. I think there's this urge to define what is natural

And to say these animals belong in this place and those animals don't. And of course, introduced species can absolutely become problems and often do for people or for other native species. But I think it's this sort of overzealous attempt to preserve one idea of what is natural against all of the changes that we have inevitably created on the planet that leads to this kind of Ahab and the white whale quality to the monk parakeet pursuit.

And I think that it's in the Ostrom way necessary to have a more finer-grained, nuanced attitude towards these things. But there's also this thing about parrots where they kind of blur the line between human and animal in a funny way. I think one of the reasons people are driven crazy by birds is because there's this

at first charming and then sort of unsettling way in which they approximate a lot of human behaviors and human speech. And I think being reminded of the fact that there's less than we'd like to think that separates us from animals is a thing people don't like very often. And so that is my conspiratorial view of what was going on on some level with the monk parakeets. They kind of stand in for us and for our place in the animal world and for the damage that we've done to the environment.

And so it must be stamped out. I loved listening to the story. As you can tell, it made me think, it sparked a lot of thoughts. And I hope people will look up this episode of The Last Archive, if only for the Shakespeare subplot. Stay with us, Ben. After the break, I want to talk about the greatest author of fantasy and science fiction in the 20th century, arguably. We'll find out who she is.

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And then he was on the bike and ready to ride. The bike looks great and with the SureStop braking system it brakes quickly and safely without locking the front wheel and sending you over the handlebars. Guardian bikes offer a 365-day money-back guarantee covering returns, repairs and spare parts. Join hundreds of thousands of happy families by getting a Guardian bike today.

Visit GuardianBikes.com to save up to 25% off bikes. No code needed. Plus, receive a free bike lock and pump with your first purchase after signing up for the newsletter. That's GuardianBikes.com. Happy riding! If you're listening to this right now, you probably like to stay on top of things, which is why I want to mention The Economist. Today, the world seems to be moving faster than ever. Climate and economics, politics and culture, science and technology, wherever you look,

Events are unfolding quickly, but now you can save 20% off an annual subscription to The Economist so you won't miss a thing. The Economist broadens your perspective with fact-checked, rigorous reporting and analysis. It's journalism you can truly trust. There is a lot going on these days, but with 20% off, you get access to in-depth, independent coverage of world events through podcasts, webinars, expert analysis, and even their extensive archives. So...

Whether you want to catch up on current events or dive deeper into specific issues, The Economist delivers global perspectives with distinctive clarity. Just to give an example, What's Next for Amazon as it turns 30? analyzes how Amazon's fourth decade looks like an area of integration for the company. Go beyond the headlines with The Economist. Save 20% for a limited time on an annual subscription. Go to economist.com and subscribe today.

We're back. I'm Tim Harford. This is a cautionary conversation with Ben Nadaf-Haffrey, who is the host of our sister podcast, The Last Archive. Ben, I was absolutely delighted when an episode of The Last Archive dropped into my feed and it revolves around Ursula Le Guin and an Ursula Le Guin story.

I don't want to say anything at all about this episode because it's just magnificent and I don't want to spoil any of it. But I do want to talk about Ursula Le Guin because I'm a huge fan. I would love to. And I've only read certain of her stories. When I say I'm a huge fan of Le Guin, I'm a huge fan of her Earthsea stories. So tell me, what am I missing? What else should I read by Le Guin?

My favorite of her stories is The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, which is the short story that the episode revolves around, kind of a utopian thought experiment. But of her novels, the one that I love that I actually, I suspect you would like as well is The Dispossessed. Do you know anything about the plot of that one?

I don't. The Dispossessed I love because it has a similar kind of anthropological attitude towards these different planets and how their societies are structured. But it's got a great story, too. And it's set in this galaxy where there's a capitalist planet called Urass.

And at some point in the distant past, there was an anarchist uprising on the planet. And the way that they resolved this tension is they shipped the anarchists off to a moon called Anaris. And so there is now an anarchist planet, Anaris, and a capitalist planet, Eras. And they just sort of keep their distance from each other except for the exchange of resources.

But on the anarchist planet, there is a young physicist named Shevik who is a genius. He's quite brilliant. I think he's modeled on Robert Oppenheimer, who was actually Ursula Le Guin's father's friend. And he is seeking to produce a kind of scientific truth that the economics of an heiress don't really support. And so he is the first man from an heiress to go to Euras in some very long period of time.

And the story is about his stay on the planet and the compromises that he makes and the kind of what his quest for knowledge and his experience of this capitalist planet do to him. And it's just a really great story. It's really, really rich and interesting stuff. Okay. I will read it. Can you tell me, like, what is Earthsea all about and why do you love it? There are several reasons.

books in the Earthsea sequence. So one interesting thing about them is that Le Guin wrote three in, I think, the 1970s, early 1970s, and then came back 20 years later and started writing more. And the later books...

are almost a repudiation of the earlier books in a way that is quite upsetting. If you loved the earlier books, which I did, she is almost attacking her own creation. There's some really interesting politics there. So if you think about all the best bits of Star Wars and all the best bits of Harry Potter before either Star Wars or Harry Potter existed, plus a whole lot of awesomeness that...

George Lucas and J.K. Rowling couldn't even dream of. That's Earthsea. So it's about a boy who is a gifted, raw wizard talent who gets sent to wizard school, but it does not unfold in the way that you think it might unfold. I mean, as with any great novel, you have to read it to appreciate it. But there are a couple of lovely touches. One is that the first book, he's an adolescent. The second book is he's

middle-aged and the book is told from the perspective of an adolescent girl who meets him and the third book he's an old man and the story is told from the perspective of an adolescent boy who is watching him move through the world as a great and accomplished archmage he's also a person of color so our hero is a person of color and it's barely mentioned and in fact often

not correctly depicted on book covers. I've talked too much about it already. You should just read it. I really want to read it. I'm first curious to know what you think the best bits of Star Wars are. And I also, I actually am really curious to know how she repudiates it in her later work. So the echo of Star Wars is that the magicians in Earthsea have this tremendous power

to control the natural world. So it's like the Force. And again, this is before Star Wars ever existed. So they control magic, but it can be abused or it can be used wisely. And I think she delivers a much more subtle and interesting take on the consequences of

misusing that power? What does it mean to have such control over the world through your magic and then to abuse that control? And it's so much more unsettling than Darth Vader. And don't get me wrong. I mean, I'm a Star Wars kid. I like Star Wars. That's good. But Earthsea is even better in that sense of what corruption looks like.

for these superheroes, almost. I actually have the audiobook downloaded, so I'm excited to start listening to it. Yeah. And the repudiation. So there are a couple of things that I didn't notice as a boy when I first read these books. All the wizards are men or boys. There are no female wizards. And that's just something you sort of take for granted because, like, you know, it's a fantasy world and whatever. You just don't even notice it because so often, in particular, we men don't notice that actually there aren't really very many women in the story.

And that's interesting in that this story was written by a woman. And yeah, book four, suddenly she starts to chip away at, you thought these guys were the good guys, but are they the good guys? What happened to all the female power? What happened to all the female wizards? It really makes you start to rethink everything.

the people and the culture that you previously viewed as heroic. That sounds really cool. So she's dealing in a lot of ideas from anthropology, and I talked to a lot of anthropologists about Ursula Le Guin, and they love her because these science fiction societies and other planets, they're kind of anthropological exercises. Like you have these descriptions of other ways of being, and sometimes really intricately worked out language systems and symbolic systems

I guess I'm curious, do you feel like your love of Ursula Le Guin and or science fiction more generally has anything to do with your interest in economics? Yeah, it's a good question. But I think, well, I certainly was reading Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and Anne McCaffrey and Frank Herbert and Ursula Le Guin long before I even knew what economics was. So I think it predates that.

But Le Guin, she's a touchstone. While you were looking at birds and starting to really appreciate birdsong during lockdown in the spring of 2020, I was creating a role-playing game heavily inspired by Ursula Le Guin and Earthsea and running that over Zoom for my friends. So as the world was burning all around us, I was...

collectively spinning this fantasy universe inspired by Ursula Le Guin, because who better? Oh, cool. People should also look up this amazing Last Archive episode about, well, it's sort of about Ursula Le Guin, and it's about a much bigger topic than that. They should look up the episode about the Parakeet Panic. Tell us a little bit about the Last Archive in general. It's motivated by this question, who killed truth? So,

Where did that come from? The show began about, I guess, four years ago now. It was created by the historian Jill Lepore, who was my thesis advisor in college. And it was occasioned by the Trump administration, really, where there's all this panic about alternative facts and post-truth and deep fakes, this sort of epistemological chaos where it felt as if nobody knew what to believe anymore.

And there was a lot of media attention given to the idea that we were in this epistemologically unstable ground, all of us all the time. And I think something that bothered us about that, and Jill especially as an American historian, is that that epistemological instability just absolutely does not begin with Donald Trump.

There's a much larger history there. And there's especially a 20th century history there that has to do with technology, the history of science and the history of media, as well as rising polarization. And of course, this is not just a U.S. problem, but U.S. history is the focus of the show. Looking at

times people have created new ways of knowing things and how these new truths get worked into a democratic society and also new ways of doubting things. So there's a lot of history of science, a lot of history of technology, history of the media. But

It's also meant to be a celebration of the many different ways of finding truth, and especially of finding historical truth, even if it's a 700-page document about killing all the monk parakeets in the 1970s. So it's a celebration, it's an epistemological mystery, and hopefully it is a podcast people will enjoy. I'm sure they will. I love it. And one of many things I love about it is that it never really tells you what to think about

It just keeps surprising you and prodding your curiosity and inviting you to think for yourself. So people can find and subscribe to The Last Archive wherever you listen to your podcasts. Benadaph Hafri, thank you so much for joining Cautionary Tales. Thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it and I love the show, so it's very fun for me. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fiennes with support from Edith Russelow.

The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. The show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Julia Barton, Greta Cohn, Lital Millard, John Schnarz, Carly Migliori, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Murano and Morgan Ratner.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It helps us for, you know, mysterious reasons. And if you want to hear the show ad-free, sign up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at pushkin.fm slash plus.

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