Cautionary Conversation: The Blitz Spirit and the Blackout Ripper
32:51 Share

So I have some big news for vegans and vegetarians everywhere. It's Hellman's plant-based mayo spread and dressing. Made for people with a plant-based diet or anyone really who wants to enjoy the great taste of Hellman's real without the eggs. Hellman's plant-based is perfect for sandwiches, salads, veggie burgers, or any of your family favorites.

To celebrate, Hellman's is sharing some easy, delicious plant-based recipes at hellmans.com. Hellman's plant-based mayo spread and dressing. Same great taste, plant-based. I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor.

It's a moving podcast series celebrating the untold stories of those who protect our country. And it's brought to you by LifeLock, the leader in identity theft protection. Your personal info is in a lot of places that can accidentally expose you to identity theft. And not everyone who handles your personal info is as careful as you.

LifeLock makes it easy to take control of your identity and will work to fix identity theft if it happens. Join the millions of Americans who trust LifeLock. Visit LifeLock.com slash metal today to save up to 40% off your first year. The most innovative companies are going further with T-Mobile for Business.

Tractor Supply trusts 5G solutions from T-Mobile. Together, they're connecting over 2,200 stores with 5G business internet and powering AI so team members can match shoppers with the products they need faster. This is enriching customer experience. This is Tractor Supply with T-Mobile for Business. Take your business further at T-Mobile.com slash now. ♪

Pushkin. At the outbreak of the Second World War, one of the many fears the world had to contemplate was that civilians would be bombed. That was a new horror. Nobody knew what would happen if the bombers swarmed thick in the skies over the world's great cities. But the received wisdom was that the morale of the civilian population would shatter like the glass in their windows. Civilisation itself might break down. Winston Churchill believed this. So did Adolf Hitler.

So did their generals. They were wrong. Every schoolchild in the UK knows the story of the Blitz spirit. Of how, as Hitler's Luftwaffe dropped bomb after bomb over London in late 1940, Londoners refused to be cowed. The glass did indeed shatter, but the British upper lip remained as stiff as ever. One pub put up a sign. Our windows are gone, but our spirits are excellent. Come in and try them.

Eighty years later, we still feel nostalgia for how people pulled together. We forget how surprising this stoic response was. And the lesson was ignored. The Allies made the same mistake when contemplating their own bombing campaign of German cities. There was little sign that morale had been dented in London or other English bomb-hit cities such as Birmingham or Hull.

Yet Churchill's friend and advisor, Frederick Lindemann, told him that morale was cracking, and that when German cities were thoroughly bombed, it would break the spirit of the German people. Predictably, it didn't. Decades later, carpet bombing didn't break the spirit of the North Vietnamese either. Our stubborn refusal to learn this lesson has had tragic consequences.

We keep believing that when disaster strikes, what's needed isn't food and medical supplies, it's law and order. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the response of the police, the media and nearby areas was all shaped by the sad fact that they just couldn't believe that the citizens of New Orleans might pull together to look out for each other.

Community volunteers were told to stand guard against looters, rather than helping with evacuations or distributing food and water. The Red Cross didn't enter the city for a month. They were afraid that it was just too dangerous. I highlighted these true stories in an earlier episode of Cautionary Tales called The Village of Heroes.

I wanted to remind us that in a crisis, most people respond with decency and solidarity. Most people. I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. CAUTIONARY TALES

There's another episode of Cautionary Tales coming any day now. But while you wait, this is another of our Cautionary Conversations, in which I speak to an expert about a tragic era of the past and about what we can learn from it. My guest this time is Alice Fiennes, who's a journalist, a criminologist and a podcast maker.

Alice is the co-host and co-writer of the podcast Bad Women, which is a feminist take on the ever-popular true crime genre. The new season of Bad Women, available, as they say, wherever you get your podcasts, is about the experiences of women during the bombing of London and some of the awful crimes which were committed against them and why these crimes should make us question our ideas about the so-called Blitz spirit.

Alice Farnes, welcome to Cautionary Tales. Thanks for having me.

It's a pleasure, although the show sometimes makes for difficult listening. It is a true crime show. So what's the main thrust of the podcast? So at the heart of our show is this idea that states of war can pull focus and they can provide cover for all manner of really terrible deeds and really atrocious crimes. And in the case of the Second World War and the Blitz,

there's also a literal cover of darkness. So Nazi bombers hoped to bomb Britain into submission. And as a defence against that, all the lights in British cities were dimmed. Streetlights, lights in homes, illuminated signs. This is almost absurd. We'd turn the lights out and they won't find us. But actually it did work, right? Exactly. So the idea is that they can't find the places that would do most damage to bomb. But it also means that the...

streets at night are pitch black. And in London, even in London's nightlife district, all the lights have been extinguished. And that's where we find ourselves at the opening of Bad Women. So there's a killer on the loose in London. And over one week in February 1942, he attacks two women and he kills four more.

He strikes at night and the darkness helps him get away and disappear. But he also uses the new, quite secluded spaces that have opened up on the home front as a result of war. At one point, he murders a woman in a desolate air raid shelter. And it's not just the spaces of war that help him get away with it. He is training to be a fighter pilot.

Fighter pilots are incredibly glamorous at the time and really seen as heroes. And so I think that because he goes around in this uniform, the people of his own side don't suspect him. And he uses that to pick up women. He also affects the accent of an aristocrat. So he's not just feigning acceptance into an elite branch of the forces, but he's feigning acceptance into the highest echelons of society, too.

So at the beginning of our show, he picks up a woman called Greta Haywood and he takes her out for a drink. It's really dark on the streets and she notices that the route that he's taking her down is wrong and she starts to feel uncomfortable, but he kind of coerces her into going with him. And then she takes out a flashlight to illuminate their path. You don't want to use the torch. He grabs the light from her hand and plunges them back into darkness. I want to kiss you goodnight.

Aren't there any air-raid shelters round here? Greta doesn't know, but she is certain of one thing. She doesn't want to venture into a secluded, unlit bunker with this man. He grabs her and steers her into a doorway, pushing closely up against her and kissing her. Come on.

You've got to let me make love to you. He raises her skirt. Greta protests and pushes his hands away. The airman reaches up as if to cradle her face for another kiss. But instead, his hands knit around her throat. She tries to break free. You won't.

You won't. Greta struggles to release the man's grip, but his fingers only tighten around her neck, cutting off the flow of air to her lungs and blood to her brain. You won't. You won't. Greta Hayward loses consciousness. You know, I'm not going to... You won't. You are not going to. You are not going to. I've been looking at you for some time. Greta is not this killer's first victim, nor will she be the last.

So that's audio from the first episode of the new series of Bad Women. We were hearing the voice there of Hallie Rubenhold, who is your co-host. And the first series of Bad Women was about Jack the Ripper, and I think more importantly about the women that he killed and their lives and the way we tend to overlook them. The curious thing about this new series is that

Unlike Jack the Ripper, who is infamous, the Blackout Ripper is largely forgotten. I mean, the women are forgotten and you and Hallie are trying to recreate their lives, recreate their stories and remember what life was like for them. But we also seem to have forgotten the Blackout Ripper himself, this murderer. It is extraordinary that there's this act of collective forgetting. I think the fact that it was solved quickly has something to answer for there.

The Blackout Ripper commits these crimes over a single week and he's caught pretty quickly. He's caught within that week. Sadly, not quickly enough to stop him murdering four women and attacking two more. Whereas Jack the Ripper remains unsolved. And into that void we can project all manner of fanciful theories. Whereas the Blackout Ripper was solved and wrapped up

I think also it's unpalatable. It doesn't fit with our idea of Blitz spirit. It doesn't fit with the idea that the Blitz brought out the best in us. Because in some cases, people were opportunistic and people used the chaos of war to harm others. Do you reject the idea of the Blitz spirit? Do you think that whole thing is just a completely fake narrative? Or is it broadly true that this is one of the tragic exceptions?

I think that the picture is complicated. There were instances of opportunism and people exploiting the chaos of war to their own ends. But I think that there is also a genuine show of stoic contempt for the enemy. There is this bravado and this desire to challenge the assumption that the British people could be cowed, that they could be bombed into submission. And we see that in the way that shop owners carry on. As you'll hear in this next clip...

One correspondent from a regional newspaper is in Piccadilly to report conditions back to his rural readership. It looked exactly like old times. I saw the facade of a fine building seemingly untouched. Then you realised that you could see daylight through the windows from the outside and that the walls were all that was left.

I saw an elegant establishment carrying on with tarpaulins slung across the open roof, glass out everywhere. When storefronts and windows are blasted away, shopkeepers are keen to make a show of defiance. Business as usual, reads the sign on one shattered shop doorway. In fact, more open than ever. A sign outside another bomb-damaged shop admits, We never did like window dressing anyway.

Not everyone can joke about the carnage. The writer George Orwell is crunching through West End streets littered with stone fragments and glittering with broken glass. He comes across some debris from a bombed-out department store. A pile of plaster dress models, very pink and realistic, looking so like a pile of corpses that one could have mistaken them for that at a little distance. The scene is utterly shocking to him.

But what astounds him most of all is that passers-by seem utterly unfazed by the damage. To an astonishing extent, things have slipped back to normal and everyone is quite happy in the daytime, never seeming to think about the coming night, like animals which are unable to foresee the future so long as they have a bit of food and a place in the sun.

George Orwell there, quite surprised at the resilience of the British public. This is a cautionary conversation with me, Tim Harford, and my guest, Alice Fiennes. We're talking about the new podcast, Bad Women, The Blackout Ripper. And we'll be back after this short break. AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It's storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested. So buckle up.

The problem is that AI needs a lot of speed and processing power. So how do you compete without costs spiraling out of control? It's time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI.

OCI is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has 4 to 8 times the bandwidth of other clouds, offers one consistent price instead of variable regional pricing, and of course, nobody does data better than Oracle. So now you can train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half the cost of other clouds.

If you want to do more and spend less, like Uber, 8x8, and Databricks Mosaic, take a free test drive of OCI at oracle.com slash strategic. That's oracle.com slash strategic. oracle.com slash strategic. I love cycling, and I'm eager to get my kids cycling too. It's a great way for them to stay fit and move around our home city independently. But of course, I also want them to be confident and safe.

which is where Guardian Bikes comes in. The bike comes in a box and it's easy to assemble with all the tools you need and simple online instructions. My son and I unboxed his bike together, spent about 20 minutes working as a team to assemble it 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.

Hi, we're back. I'm talking to Alice Fiennes. One of the things I enjoyed about Bad Women was the way that you weaved together these really quite upsetting stories of these attacks with a really vivid picture of what life was like in London for ordinary people.

during the Blitz. And there were a lot of surprises for me. There were a lot of things I didn't know. I was surprised, for example, by the fact that there was this quite vivid nightlife. In the first episode of Bad Women, you're describing this date that is clearly going a bit sour and it's very tense. As a listener, you're thinking, oh, he's going to do something terrible. This is really bad. But while you're listening to that, and I was riveted,

I'm also picking up this idea, oh, there's this underground club near Piccadilly Circus and it's a bit of a dive and there are sex workers wearing furs and then they go somewhere else. There's the Salted Almond. There's a club called the Salted Almond and they have whiskey. And I knew nothing of this. And I was really surprised, by the way, that these barbershops

bars and clubs were flourishing during the Blitz? Absolutely. Nightlife is a really important part of both the Blitz spirit, I think, and also our series. Nightlife ceases briefly in 1940, public places empty out, but then people return in droves and it resumes kind of in full swing.

And London is really this melting pot of different people. It's the staging ground for war. So you've got soldiers coming in from all over Britain, but also from Australia, France, Poland, from Canada, eventually also from the US. And young women come to the city to meet these soldiers and have a good time. And you're absolutely right. The jazz clubs, the dive bars are raucous. They're full of these young people who...

don't know what's going to happen. They are aware that they're here for a good time, they don't know if they're here for a long time, and this kind of hedonism ensues. There are also other venues that stay open too. So there's the Windmill Theatre, which is this kind of celebrated variety venue. We're in Soho's Windmill Theatre. This establishment has two claims to fame. One, the show here went on even at the height of the bombing, when many other theatres went dark.

And two, it's the only place in town to see naked female flesh. It puts on a kind of glorified burlesque called revue de ville. Time magazine's Walter Greatmuth tells his American readers. For an audience composed mostly of bald-headed businessmen from the provinces. The windmill avoids the prudish censorship laws by arguing that its shows aren't pornography, but art.

Like classical statues, the naked women on stage stand stock still. Any movement will break the spell and see the show close down for obscenity.

And this is a really interesting time, I think, to be a woman. You draw the contrast between what it was like to be a woman in the late Victorian era, all the repressions, the lack of rights when Jack the Ripper was active, and then women now have the right to vote, they have a lot of rights they didn't have, but there are still lots of inequalities, lots of injustices, and the war has just...

thrown everything up in the air all over again. Lots of opportunities for women and also lots of threats. Women in particular are entering spaces that they hadn't entered before and meeting people that they hadn't met before. That extends to things like conscription, women entering the forces. But also in this influx of people and the change in social milieu, there's a lot of short-term relationships, very high turnover of people. So the sexual politics of it are also really interesting. As you say, everything just turns on its head for women.

Yes, and there's this phrase good time girls and naughty girls and so on. There's various euphemisms for, well, actually, I'm not sure exactly what they are euphemisms for. And perhaps the ambiguity is deliberate. I think the ambiguity is telling.

Good time girls are women who could be seen as working in the sex trade. They are kind of selling sex in quite a casual way. Some of them come to London for a good time. They might end up trading sex for a meal or a night in a hotel.

That is quite distinct from the more organized forms of selling sex. The women in fur that you mentioned in Piccadilly are usually more professional sex workers. Actually, I don't think they would even refer to themselves as sex workers. That's what we would call them now. Yeah. And of course, it's easy to forget, but they would not have forgotten for a moment that there's a war on. And

All of the sexual politics, the nude tableaus, the art at the windmill theatre, the Piccadilly nightclubs and dive bars, all of this is happening during a blackout.

It's pitch black outside. And there are bombers coming over and the Nazis are trying to kill people. They're dropping bombs on London the whole time. It's really extraordinary. And dancing is, in that context, really popular. It's a huge morale booster. We see that even today. In Kramensky Ukraine, we're seeing salsa classes continuing under air raid and blackout conditions, illuminated by people's phone torches. And I can understand that.

When times are bleak and when times are dark, I think we cling to what makes the struggle to survive feel worth it. So people are going out dancing in droves in London's nightlife district, the West End. And one place that's really popular is this illustrious club called the Café de Paris, which is by Leicester Square. It's a subterranean joint club.

It's got this famous sweeping staircase. It previously was frequented by aristocrats, but now, quote-unquote, ordinary people are going there too, and they get some of the trendiest bands in. One night in spring 1941, there's a really famous all-black swing band playing at Bill's itself as Britain's only all-black swing band, that is, fronted by this very glamorous guy called Snake Hits Johnson, who's a dancer.

And so Snake Hips is dancing in front of the crowd and conducting the band. And the air raid sirens start to sound. And he tells them, you can go to the shelters further below ground, but you'll miss the time of your life if you do. In the skies high above the club, the Kruver German bomber lets go its deadly cargo.

The bombs, specially designed to demolish buildings, hurtle earthwards, shrieking and whistling as they pick up speed. Even the keenest of ears would have missed their sound, for Snake Hips and his orchestra have just launched into another number.

A 110-pound bomb tears through the roof of the cinema above the Café de Paris. And it keeps going, slicing through floor after floor, until it reaches the balcony right above the heads of Snake Hips Johnson and his guitarist, Joe Denise. I can't describe the sound. It just was a... And everything went black. I tried to stand up. I thought I was uninjured. The next thing I know, I just fell down again.

I looked down and saw a nasty mess where my leg had been. It was chaos. Screams and shouts and dust and dirt. Joe Denise is horrifically wounded. Snake Hips Johnson is killed outright. The oddities of bomb blasts mean that musicians to their left and right are entirely unscathed, while others have been cut to ribbons.

Some dancers haven't so much as a hair out of place, but are stone dead. Others still have been stripped of their clothes, but have survived. Around 34 staff and guests are dead. An off-duty nurse does her best to help the many wounded. For aside from the bombs and shrapnel, flying glasses and shattered wine bottles have inflicted terrible injuries on the revelers. The woman is hailed as a hero for her efforts.

However, there is a telling postscript in an article printed in many newspapers. The young nurse had little to say about her work, but mentioned that while she was helping the injured, someone ransacked her handbag, taking from it objects of sentimental value, including a fountain pen. The selfless nurse has been robbed. Corpses, too, have been stripped of watches, wedding rings and jewellery.

And I think that brings us to something quite interesting about the Blitz spirit and how we tend to think of the Blitz spirit. We tend to think that when civilization is interrupted...

our baser instincts will emerge sort of Lord of the Flies style and something much more primitive will replace our culture. Which is not true. I mean, I've been pushing hard against this. This is not true. People do band together. People do do heroic things. It is extremely difficult to bomb a population into submission. And the same is true after hurricanes, after earthquakes. Civilisation doesn't have this thin veneer that cracks. People pull together. And yet... Totally. I mean, in...

in disasters, we do see examples of behaviour that we would consider to be really positive that show human beings in a great light. But I think in the case of the Blitz,

We overemphasise those behaviours in our retelling of it. We've allowed those to whitewash the bigger picture. And the bigger picture is that conditions of war make life really, really hard for ordinary people in really unfair ways. Something we see in the case of the Second World War and the Blitz and in our series, The Blackout Ripper, is that ordinary people

are drawn into these kind of illicit underground economies. Black markets, I think, are something we do associate with the Blitz, but we tend to think of the caricature of the black marketeer. We don't tend to think of people like lone mothers being drawn into the orbit of thieves and gangsters. One example we look at in our series is a case of 12 laundresses who are charged with stealing military blankets to make coats to then sell on.

They aren't humorous caricatures. They also aren't criminal masterminds. They're ordinary women who have probably lost their breadwinners to the war. Their husbands have had to go off and fight. They still have to support their children in the context of rationing. And they're making decisions with what's in front of them about how to survive. I mean, it's so sad. It's painful.

It's pathetic almost, the idea that you're stealing military blankets and you're using it to make clothes and that's your living. And the other thing that I think we really don't tend to remember when we think about this time is that

The government introduces legal machinery that actually means that it's much easier for ordinary people to be criminalized and then to suffer all the repercussions of criminalization. So one example of that is something called Regulation 33B, which is a response to crime.

Right.

And we look at the example of a young woman called Dorothy Baldry. She's also a lone mother trying to cope on her own, who is hauled up in court because she's not attended her mandatory medical examinations. Someone has labeled her as probably having given them venereal disease and she's been required to go and see a doctor.

She can't get the time off work to go and see this doctor as often as required. And so, as I said, she's hauled up in court and she's fined. After she's convicted, she can't get further work. Therefore, she can't pay the fine and she ends up in prison. And all of that in the name of protecting the British people. And this is a time that we now label the people of this time the greatest generation.

These are the people we look up to and we're supposed to emulate. Do you think that the idea of the greatest generation is simply a myth? I certainly think...

that we have a very simplistic picture of this greatest generation. So these are the people who were born in the first part of the 20th century and who persevered through economic depression and war to build a better world. That's this idea of the greatest generation, right? And we consider them to be heroes. The problem is we're very attached to binaries of good and evil, I think.

But the reality is that heroism is about conforming to a very specific set of traits which are rooted in cultural values at a given moment in time. And in the context of war, that might be courage, but it might also be violence.

Heroism doesn't automatically mean you embody kindness, empathy, care, any other traits that we might consider to be positive examples of humanity.

And I think in venerating this greatest generation and sort of idolizing them in this kind of blanket way without discrimination, we lose sight of the fact that some of the people serving alongside them report really terrible experiences. And something we look at in the series is...

Women serving in the armed forces who experienced assault, sexual assault, attempted rape, rape. In their letters and diary entries from the time, some of them describe men forcing themselves on them, men who make them feel very threatened. And you see it in the girls' letters, like Jean writes,

who's just really wonderful. She goes away aged 18. She's been in a provincial girls boarding school. She's sort of, you know, what she calls sort of genteel squirearchy. She grew up in Lancashire. She hardly knows about the birds and the bees. And out she is. And these wonderful letters home to her sister, Pat, where

where she's really frank about enjoying Dubonnet and a bit of whiskey in her cupboard. And she's doing pretty intense work. She's a code cipher and she's moved from Egypt to Italy. She's, you know, managing on her own. But she gets utterly fed up, in fact, demoralised...

When men, especially inebriated men, drunk men, constantly pestering her. How do you shake them off? I mean, here's an extract from one of her letters. I do wish that men didn't always assume that if they take you out, they can kiss you whenever they choose. Last night, I went with a naval type to the club. He started getting gooey and I had a hell of a time on the way home.

But ask them now, and we do talk to a couple of veterans in the show, and they're very reluctant to say anything negative about the men they served alongside. They don't want to undermine our heroes. Yeah, yeah. It's not very British to make a fuss, I guess. Absolutely not. And it's also true in civilian life. So another story we look at is this example of a woman called Doris Staples, who's a dressmaker. She lives in Henley.

And she is dating a American GI, Private John Waters. They go out for about six months. He's quite controlling, quite possessive. And he accuses her of seeing other men, of sleeping with other men. Maybe she is, maybe she isn't. It kind of doesn't matter. She tries to leave him and he kills her.

Doris turns her back on the soldier and steps into the shop, but jamming his foot in the door to stop her closing it on him, waters, barges his way inside. What's interesting and what's really striking and sad is that the witnesses in the town of Henley who are called on after this death and who give evidence in the court-martial,

Talk about how well liked the killer Johnny Waters was, how popular he was in the town and how Doris, well, she was a bit promiscuous. She was rude to Johnny, so she probably kind of deserved it. And there's very much this sense that even though he's a murderer, this man in uniform can do no wrong.

I sent the case notes on this story to a criminologist, Professor Jane Monckton-Smith. She's an expert in homicide, but also in controlling relationships and how they can end in murder. She said that she absolutely recognised this behaviour and it might as well have been a case today.

Him turning up at her work is absolutely typical of a controlling partner. What are you doing when I'm not there? I want to exert my authority on this relationship. I want you to know that you're being watched. I need to know what you're doing. I need to let everyone else know that I own you. There's that kind of paranoid sexual jealousy.

And humiliation, allegedly, is the thing that men are most afraid of. Women are most afraid of violence and being killed. Men are far more frightened of humiliation. So if you leave them, you're pushing that button. Alice Fiennes, on Cautionary Tales, we like to try to learn the lessons of the mistakes of the past. With Hallie Rubenhold on the Bad Women podcast, you've been investigating...

The experience of these women, the lives they led, and in some cases, of course, their deaths at the hands of the blackout ripper. What are the lessons that you would like people to take away from the series? Beware of binaries. The picture is usually much more complicated than we'd like it to be.

In the case of The Blitz, we celebrate it as this triumph of humanity. And the reality is there are many more grey areas in there than we'd really care to admit. And the other thing that's important is be aware of who gets to speak, who doesn't.

And what the people we ignore might have to say, how might they challenge our assumptions and our predominant views? In the case of bad women and the women we look at in this show, so many of them were ignored in their own time. And that made them vulnerable to violence. Alice Fines, thank you very much. Thank you.

Alice Fiennes is the co-creator of Bad Women, The Blackout Ripper. Cautionary Tales will be back any day now. And while you wait, you might consider listening to Bad Women, The Blackout Ripper in all the usual podcast places. So

I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor. It's a moving podcast series celebrating the untold stories of those who protect our country. And it's brought to you by LifeLock, the leader in identity theft protection. Your personal info is in a lot of places that can accidentally expose you to identity theft.

and not everyone who handles your personal info is as careful as you. LifeLock makes it easy to take control of your identity and will work to fix identity theft if it happens. Join the millions of Americans who trust LifeLock. Visit LifeLock.com slash metal today to save up to 40% off your first year.

So I have some big news for vegans and vegetarians everywhere. It's Hellman's plant-based mayo spread and dressing. Made for people with a plant-based diet or anyone really who wants to enjoy the great taste of Hellman's real without the eggs. Hellman's plant-based is perfect for sandwiches, salads, veggie burgers, or any of your family favorites.

To celebrate, Hellman's is sharing some easy, delicious plant-based recipes at hellmans.com. Hellman's Plant-Based Mayo Spread and Dressing. Same great taste, plant-based.

The news isn't always good news, but when you're getting quality journalism and in-depth expert analysis that's held up for more than 180 years, that is definitely good news. So if you haven't already, save 20% with The Economist's summer sale today and stay on top of the stories that matter to you. You'll instantly gain unlimited digital access to daily articles, special reports, award-winning podcasts, subscriber-only events, and so much more. Now that's

Good news. Go to economist.com and subscribe today.