This episode is sponsored by the new Color Revolution exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford,

which looks at the way scientific breakthroughs in the Victorian period enabled dramatic changes in the use of colour,

in fashion, painting and other objects.

You can hear one of the exhibition's curators, Charlotte Rieberon, a professor of 19th century British literature at the Sorbonne, explaining more about the exhibition and some of the objects and ideas it podcast, I'm Thomas Jones. Later in this

episode, we'll have the first in a series of short conversations with some of our writers about

their favourite pieces by other writers from the LRB

archive. This week, I'll be talking to Rosemary Hill. But before that, I'm joined by John

Lancaster, whose many books include Whoops, Why Everyone Oars Everyone and No One Can Pay on the 2008

Financial Crisis, How to Speak Money, and most recently a short story collection, reality and other

stories. He has a piece in the last issue of the paper on the disgraced cryptocurrency billionaire

Sam Bankman-Fried. It's a review of two books, Going Infinite, The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon

by Michael Lewis, and a number go up inside crypto's wild rise and

staggering fall by Zeke Fox. Hello John and thank you very much for joining me again.

Right Tom. Thanks for having me on. So last time we spoke on this podcast a couple of months ago,

we were talking about unreliable numbers and that's sort of our subject again today.

Since your piece went to press, Sam Bankman-Fried, who was on trial in New York on several

counts of fraud, has been found guilty, and is awaiting sentencing.

In theory, he could face a sentence of more than 100 years.

The jury reached their verdict in a matter of hours.

Presumably, you weren't surprised by that guilty verdict.

I was surprised by the speed, and I noticed that lots of newsrooms were

because several of the people you'd have expected to cover it, you know,

...