Got Two Hours to Spare?
Good news (especially for all you oh-so-proud non-television owning types out there): the full-length video of the recent PBS special The Botany of Desire is now available online. Based on Michael Pollan's book The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World from 2002 (back before Pollan's writings prescribed how we should eat and were taken as gospel), the program shows "how four familiar species - the apple, the tulip, cannabis and the potato - evolved to satisfy our yearnings for sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control." 
The Botany of Desire is a fascinating read (you'll never think of witches and broomsticks the same again) and the program is a fascinating, well-executed documentary that looks at everything from domestication, evolution, and GMOs to the passionate (and, of course, endearingly oddball) cultivators of these crops today.
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