i'm behind you

Nearly done with this year's Xmas Show. Details to follow. Also, Marie and I are re-editing our podcast. We won't take them live till we've worked out how to replicate regularly. We're nearly there, I promise...

The labour-intensive world of moderating facebook.

Plant crime of the century. One of the scientists in the story sounds like the hero of an enviro-Indiana-Jones-style action series: The thermal water lily was only successfully grown from seed in 2009, after the last living specimen, which had been in Germany, had died. Its survival was down to Kew’s plant “codebreaker”, a charismatic Spanish horticultural scientist called Carlos Magdalena.

Also: “Personally I have no worries about what has happened,” one British collector said. “I feel there is an arrogance about Kew. They deserved what they got.” Carlos Magdalena told me that he had even been accused of staging the theft to increase publicity for his work.

I've said it before, but Brian Phillips is fantastic. He even feels fresh about the aeons-long rivalry between Tom Brady and Peyton Manning: If it weren’t for Brady, we’d have to think of Manning as a celebrity, but if it weren’t for Manning, we’d have to think of Brady as a guy doing a job — or worse: as a guy who signs paperwork, who wakes up worried in the middle of the night, who gets stuck in traffic, who waits on hold, who wonders where time is going, who feels unexplained pain in his tooth. Instead, we get to imagine Brady as the free citizen of a world of tuxedos, fine wine, lingering eye contact, and beautiful understated cars. We get to do this because there is never a moment, we imagine, when Manning is not signing paperwork, in traffic, while worried, with a toothache. That is how Peyton Manning contributes to our fantasies. That’s the sacrifice he makes for us.