"I want Today to be good. I want it to be in-depth and have an interesting agenda. I want it to be the radio equivalent of, say, the very best of broadsheet newspapers (not the highest bar in the world, but you’d think it might be possible). Instead, it all too often ends up as the radio equivalent of mid-market tabloids."

"London: Another Country? will explore what happens when 7.5 million people, speaking over 300 languages, try to live together in a city that has a population density ten times higher than anywhere else in the UK, but is the greenest city of its size in the world."

Alain de Botton's thoughts on a world without air travel, sparked by the current lack of flights across much of Europe.

"Mike Parker, author of Map Addict, will present the ten, 15-minute programmes. They will go out on Radio 4, Monday to Friday at 3.45pm in the weeks beginning 22nd and 29th March. The series looks at maps and map-making since the beginning of the twentieth century and will cover the use of maps for everything from leisure and motoring to propaganda and story-telling."

"The curious case of the carbolic smoke ball forced companies to treat customers honestly and openly and still has impact today." On why a quack cure still influences our law.

A nice post about the difficulties of synchronising the FM news report with the LW news and shipping forecast at noon.

'Can this new mood of "conspicuous austerity" really challenge a consumer culture in which thriftiness has long been seriously out of fashion?' Thankfully, Analysis has transcripts, so you can skim for the good bits hidden in the waffle (like 'rebranding thrift').

Iain M Banks gets adapted for radio. I thought it worked fairly well.

Lots of goodies, but particularly "5 Mar 2009 14:15: The State of the Art - Dramatisation of an Iain M banks story in which the Culture, a spacebound utopian civilisation, encounters Earth" Also Rendezvous with Rama, The Death of Grass.

"Where is the happy medium? Too much travelling and we endanger the planet, not enough travelling and we risk becoming depressed, the wrong sort of travelling - commuting - and we suffer from stress, so how can we marry our behaviour to our innate travelling needs?" Handily, Analysis has lovely support materials: an MP3 (for a week, anyway) and a transcript. `There's also a related magazine article (under See Also).

" 'Where's Zeb Soanes?' And I said, “That's me.' And she said, 'No it's not.' “I said, 'I'm sorry?' And she said, 'You have a beard.' And I said, 'I'm sorry?' And she said, 'In my head you have a beard.'" He doesn't have a beard in my head, but I am surprised at how young he is.

" The scientist Graham Farmelo argues that Dirac has been overlooked due to his extreme distaste for publicity, which may have been a manifestation of his autism." A day left to download. Also that week, Ben Goldacre.

The first section of BBC Radio 4's latest Book of the Week sounded pretty good when I heard it before the shipping forecast last night. How to: wash clothes. "Read by Shaun Dooley" who sounds just right.

"The Pope has said that "saving" humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour is just as important as saving the rainforests." At least one of the two Catholics the BBC (bafflingly) chose to debate this nonsense is reasonably sane. Joanna Bogle, on the other hand, seems to have some sort of problem with a strawman version of science that believes there are no gender differences and that because men are women and vice versa we're dying. Please, keep her off the radio in future.

"Shaun Ley examines the work of the people who actually write our country's legislation - the Parliamentary draftsmen - and whether laws should be gender-neutral, simpler and fewer." I know it's easy to draw parallels between law and code, but there were moments in this short radio show when it was unavoidable.

"86% of British people live in the suburbs, but almost nobody admits it. The term has become pejorative. Rather than a euphemism treadmill-style replacement of the term, though, people pass in silence over generic descriptions of where they live" On Thinking Allowed on the suburbs

A great interview in the Independent. I agree with a great deal of what he has to say about the BBC and radio, but then maybe I would; I don't have a TV either and far prefer news online or on the radio.