Podcast Rec: 50 Things That Shaped the Modern Economy
For years, I worked on the theory that I was not built for podcast listening. I didn’t like the formats people used, and the signal-to-noise ratio didn’t add up when I looked at fitting them into my schedule. Then I discovered the genre of podcasts I really enjoyed: short, topic-focused essays and the interview series, as exemplified by Writing Excuses, the Allusionist, and Chris Jericho’s wrestling interviews. Recently a whole host of the podcasts I listen to regularly went dormant, so I started searching for things to replace it. The one that’s really captured my attention: BBC World’s 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy. The series is everything I want from the format: short, informative, and generally built around a seemingly innocuous topic that ultimately changes the way you see or understand the world around you. Which isn’t a bad result for something which spends 8 minutes charting the history of things like barcodes and spreadsheets. The transition from
