Odd Lots

Today's guest Mariana Mazzucato is one of our most requested. Mazzucato, who is the director of the University College London Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, specializes in the political economy of technological development and public sector investment. In our conver ...  Show more

Today's guest Mariana Mazzucato is one of our most requested. Mazzucato, who is the director of the University College London Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, specializes in the political economy of technological development and public sector investment. In our conver ...  Show more

The residents of Allentown are still sore about that Billy Joel song. While it's true the Pennsylvania city became synonymous with deindustrialization after the US steel industry began its decline in the 1970s, Allentown should be known for more: In the 1950s, for instance, some ...  Show more

Since Mayor Brandon Scott took office in 2020, he's fixated on a very visible problem in Baltimore: the tens of thousands of vacant homes that dot the city. It's hard to build new houses when there are so many that sit empty and unused. And the process of tracking down owners, co ...  Show more

Two years ago, Citadel's Ken Griffin paid almost $45 million for a stegosaurus skeleton, making it the most expensive fossil ever sold at auction. So why are dinosaur bones joining the collections of millionaires instead of museums? How does the private market for fossils actuall ...  Show more

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has highlighted the potential for long-running theoretical chokepoints to turn into reality, with dramatic results for both geopolitics and the global economy. But the hypothetical scenario that policymakers have arguably been losing the most s ...  Show more