Works in Progress Podcast
Episodes
Issue 24: Rats, The Glorious Revolution and the secret to ultra-Orthodox fertility
17 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Alberta is the only part of the world that has people but not rats. Rats came to the new world on ships to New York, Boston and Philadelphia during th...
The lost art of building cities
03 Jun 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In the nineteenth century, cities often grew a thousandfold while increasing wages, the size of homes, and delivering great public goods like electric...
Inventing the second malaria vaccine with Katharine Collins
27 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Malaria is caused not by a virus or bacterium, but by a complex, shape-shifting parasite that has evolved alongside us for millennia. This has made va...
Where did all the good sculptors go?
20 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The Trump administration wants to bolster traditional art. Their attempt to revive sculpture, a mass statue-building program, is doomed. America doesn...
The evolution of bacteria
08 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Generations of microbes evolve in hours, not millennia. By speeding up Darwin’s clock, scientists have watched evolution happen in real time, and it...
What is local government good for?
06 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Local government works best when areas can compete with each other and capture some of the upside of economic growth. Ben sits down with Judge Glock t...
Washer woman: The invention of dishwashers
01 May 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In 1965, married American women did 34 hours of housework weekly. By 2010, that had fallen to 18 hours. The dishwasher wasn’t the only cause, but it...
The triumph of logical English
24 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
English prose has become much easier to read. But shorter sentences had little to do with it. You can see the images, graphs and read the article at h...
How to speed up clinical trials
22 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In terms output per dollar spent, drug development has never been as slow as it is now. As we have so many more scientific techniques than in previous...
How to spot a monopoly: Measuring competition
17 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Competition makes capitalism work. A new method for measuring it may be the holy grail of economic regulation. You can see the images, graphs and re...
The death rays that guard life: We can use ultraviolet light to disinfect public spaces
10 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
We disinfect water before we drink it. Germicidal ultraviolet could make airborne disease as rare as those carried by water. You can see the images, g...
Issue 23: Egg freezing, Australian refugee policy and ASML
08 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
You should freeze your eggs. Contrary to popular myth, egg freezing works very well and if you freeze your eggs in your twenties or early thirties, yo...
Inflatable space stations: Creating artificial gravity so we can live in space
03 Apr 2026
Contributed by Lukas
If we ever want to live in space, we need to work out a way of creating artificial gravity.You can see the images, graphs and read the article at http...
The algorithm will see you now by Deena Mousa
27 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Radiology combines digital images, clear benchmarks, and repeatable tasks. But replacing humans with AI is harder than it seems. You can see the image...
Did status signaling ruin architecture?
25 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
There are basically no ugly buildings from before 1930. There are definitely none from before 1830. Why? Is it survivorship bias? Have we demolished a...
Sunscreen for the planet by Daniele Visioni & Dakota Gruener
20 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
The world is warming faster than we can cut emissions. Volcanoes are already cooling the planet, with particles that reflect sunlight. Maybe we can ...
How to redraw a city by Anya Martin
13 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Japan faced some of the world’s toughest planning problems. It solved them by letting homeowners replan whole neighborhoods privately by supermajori...
Longevity
11 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
There are some animals that can live for hundreds of years. Do the secrets to human longevity live from a lobster's ability to regrow felled limbs, in...
Two is already too many by Phoebe Arslanagic-Little
06 Mar 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Every hundred South Koreans today will have only six great-grandchildren between them. The rest of the world can learn from Korea’s catastrophe to a...
Should everyone be taking statins?
27 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, but it’s also one of medicine’s biggest success stories. Since the 1950s, the risk of dying...
Why Europe has stagnated
25 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Europe is now much poorer than America. Is it because Europe doesn’t have a big tech giant? Can we blame the bureaucrats in Brussels? What happened ...
Inflation in Rome, Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia with Mark Koyama
11 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
People hate inflation. It undermines faith in the government so people obstruct policies that require faith in the state, like nuclear power, and in d...
The nuclear renaissance
30 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
In the mid twentieth century, nuclear power was meant to be the cheap and clean energy of the future. Now, nuclear power is expensive, maligned and un...
The first cancer vaccine
22 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Hepatitis B is a tiny virus that causes hundreds of thousands of deaths from liver disease and cancer each year. The vaccine against it became the fir...
The history of vaccines
26 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Before vaccines became routine, they were risky experiments. In this episode, Jacob and Saloni travel back to the world of smallpox, cowpox, and cow-b...
Should we ban ugly buildings?
24 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The YIMBY movement is divided about whether there is a tradeoff between building more homes and building beautifully. Ben, Sam and Samuel talk about h...
The economics of the baby bust with Jesús Fernández-Villaverde
06 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why are birth rates plummeting across the developing world? Why should we even care about the baby bust? Where can we find the most elastic baby? Jesú...
Will AI solve medicine?
29 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Artificial intelligence is transforming how we discover and develop new medicines. But how far can it really take us? In this episode, Jacob and Salon...
Treating cost disease with Congressman Jake Auchincloss
24 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How can we build new cities in America? Which historical president is Trump most like? Why did immigration policy go so wrong? Sam and Pieter sit down...
The art of protein design with AI
15 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What if you could design a protein never seen before? In this episode, Jacob and Saloni explore how researchers are using new tools like RFDiffusion, ...
Hacking proteins with AI
01 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Nature didn’t evolve all the proteins we need, but maybe artificial intelligence can help. Jacob and Saloni explore how tools like AlphaFold and Pro...
How traffic modernism ruined cities with Nicholas Boys Smith
26 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Nicholas Boys Smith joins Ben and Sam to explain how to plan spaces that people like; dense, sociable and, above all else, beautiful. He says people d...
100 years of insulin in 15 minutes
16 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A hundred years ago, insulin was scraped from pig pancreases. Today, it’s made by bacteria in giant tanks. In the second part of a mini series on pr...
Why feminism worked best in the West with Alice Evans
10 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Social scientist Alice Evans talks about why, despite a superficially similar feminist movement in East Asia, Western feminism has been much successfu...
Proteins: Weird blobs that do important things
03 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
This episode kicks off a mini-series on proteins, drug development and AI. Saloni and Jacob explore the world of proteins, including how proteins fold...
How to become President of China with Dan Wang
27 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Is it better to be run by engineers, lawyers or regulators? Can you build an economy on luxury handbags or do you need advanced manufacturing? Dan Wan...
The underrated economics of land with Mike Bird
15 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why is Chinese housing so expensive despite being oversupplied? How did land reforms in Russia lead to the Bolshevik revolution? What killed Georgism?...
How Henry VIII accidentally started the Industrial Revolution, with Anton Howes
29 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Historian Anton Howes discusses how Henry VIII turned Britain into an economic backwater – making it the unlikeliest place for the Industrial Revolu...
Stian Westlake on the intangible economy and paying for social science
11 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why does London dominate Britain's economy, whereas Germany's is spread out across the whole country? Why don't restaurants scale well? What kind of s...
Samuel Hughes on The Great Downzoning
27 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Before the twentieth century, most cities were highly permissive about what people were allowed to build on their land. Nearly all Western householder...
Lenacapavir: The miracle drug that could end AIDS
11 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Lenacapavir is a new HIV drug that blocks infections with an efficacy rate of nearly 100%, and it could completely change the fight against HIV worldw...
Coming soon: The Works in Progress Podcast
07 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Coming soon: the Works in Progress Podcast. Featuring underrated ideas to improve the world – for bigger, more beautiful cities; clean energy that's...