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Carol Burnett rang a CBS vice president over the holidays in 1966 to say she wanted to use a clause in her contract. He asked her what clause she was talking about. Four years earlier she had signed a ten-year deal with the network that guaranteed her one hour-long special a year and two guest spots on their sitcoms. It was steady, comfortable work. Her agent had put in one more line. Within the first five years, if Burnett decided she wanted an hour-long comedy variety show, CBS had to put thirty of them on the air, pay or play, whether the network wanted to or not. Nobody expected her to use it, including her. She had spent years on somebody else's variety programme and doubted she could carry one of her own, so the clause sat there unused while the deadline came closer. In the final week of the fifth year she and her husband looked at each other and decided to make the call. She was 33. The executive had to send lawyers to find the clause. He rang back the next day and told her that comedy variety was a man's game, then listed the men who owned it, from Sid Caesar and Jackie Gleason through Milton Berle to Dean Martin. Then he offered her the alternative the network had lined up, a sitcom called Here's Agnes. She said she did not want to be Agnes. She wanted sketches, guest stars, a repertory company, a 28-piece orchestra and the costume changes that went with all of it. The contract was the contract, so they put it on the air. The Carol Burnett Show ran eleven years, 279 episodes and 25 Emmys, and she got it by reading a contract back to a man who had forgotten he signed it. https://t.co/BxPcWFbtwM

Christopher Plummer, who was a concert standard pianist with a fine musical ear, was furious when his singing voice was dubbed in “The Sound Of Music” (1965), and went on a drunken rampage through Salzburg. (He told me in an interview that the dubbing incident was one of the reasons he was rude about the film.) This is Plummer’s original vocal performance of “Edelweiss” - a chance to hear the song as he recorded it.

A self-taught nurse in rural Queensland was called to a child with polio around 1910 and had no idea what the standard treatment was, so she made one up. The standard treatment was plaster. Splint the limbs, immobilise them, sometimes for a year, on the reasoning that rest protects damaged muscle. Elizabeth Kenny looked at a child in pain with limbs pulling inward and decided the muscles were in spasm. So she wrapped them in hot woollen cloths to relax them, then moved the joints gently, then got the child moving as soon as possible. She also made her patients learn the names of their own muscles and how each one worked. Doctors told her she was violating the accepted rules of treatment. In 1938 a Royal Commission in Queensland investigated her and reported that abandoning immobilisation was a grievous error, fraught with great danger, and would be particularly damaging in young children. Her patients kept getting better anyway. She went to America in 1940 with a reputation for being difficult and wrong. Minneapolis took her seriously, the university adopted her techniques, and by 1942 there was an institute with her name on it. In a 1951 poll Americans named her the most admired woman in the world. Immobilisation is gone now, and her principles of applying heat and re-educating the muscle became the basis of modern physiotherapy for these cases. She was a bush nurse with no formal training who happened to be right, and it took the profession thirty years to catch up with her. https://t.co/f1PwzFpHzT

In the dead of night at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, a garbage truck stopped behind a women’s barracks. Its cargo was not trash. One by one, 54 children were dumped into the freezing mud before the truck drove away, leaving them crying in the darkness. Inside the barracks, 26-year-old Luba Tryszynska heard the commotion through the thin walls. A former nurse from Kamenets-Litovsk, she had arrived at Bergen-Belsen only weeks earlier. When she stepped outside, she found terrified children between the ages of four and twelve. Earlier that day, their mothers had been separated from them and transported to another camp near Hamburg. The children had been loaded onto a different vehicle, driven around for hours while officials decided their fate, and ultimately abandoned like unwanted cargo. For Luba, the sight was unbearable. Two years earlier, at Auschwitz, she had been forced to watch her own family disappear. During the selection process, an SS guard noticed her young son, Isaac. Knowing mothers with small children were often sent directly to the gas chambers, Luba’s mother-in-law pulled the boy from her arms in a desperate attempt to save her life. Isaac, her husband Hersch, and her mother-in-law were all taken away. None returned. Luba survived, but the loss haunted her every day. She often wondered why she had been spared when the people she loved most had not. That night at Bergen-Belsen, standing before dozens of abandoned children, she finally found a purpose for her survival. Without hesitation, she gathered the children and brought them inside. The other prisoners were terrified. Sheltering children could have resulted in severe punishment or death for everyone in the barracks. Luba did it anyway. She arranged bunks for them, tucked the youngest children into the safest corners, and reassured them with quiet words: “You’re safe now. Stay quiet, and I’ll take care of you.” Then she took an even greater risk. Luba approached Fritz Klein, an SS doctor at the camp, and told him directly that she intended to keep the children hidden and under her care. Against all expectations, Klein agreed and allowed her to use a separate wooden hut. Why he consented remains unclear. With that small concession, Luba created something almost unimaginable inside one of the most horrific places on earth: a refuge for children. Over the next four months, she and a handful of other women worked tirelessly to keep them alive. Hermina Krantz, a Slovak prisoner, helped clean and prepare whatever scraps of food could be found. Dr. Ada Bimko, another prisoner, cared for the sick and injured. Luba became the heart of the operation. Every day she searched for food, traded possessions, begged for supplies, and sometimes stole whatever was necessary to feed the children. Bread, water, bits of soup, and occasionally milk became precious treasures. Remarkably, some German guards even began assisting her. They quietly provided firewood, extra bread, and on one occasion, an entire bucket of fresh milk. As the months passed, more orphaned children arrived. By April 1945, Luba was caring for 94 children, including an infant less than a year old. Then, on April 15, British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen. The soldiers entered a camp filled with death, disease, and starvation. Everywhere they looked were bodies and prisoners barely clinging to life. But when they opened the door to Luba’s hut, they encountered something extraordinary. Inside were dozens of children who had survived. A British officer reportedly asked who was responsible for them. Luba stepped forward and answered simply: “I am.” Thanks to her determination, nearly all of those children lived through the war. After liberation, she personally helped return many of the children to their home countries. Some were escorted back to the Netherlands, while others were taken to safety in Sweden. Eventually, Luba married fellow survivor Sol Frederick and settled in Washington, D.C., where she built a new life far from the horrors she had endured. Yet the children never forgot her. In 1995, fifty years after the war, many of those she had saved gathered in Amsterdam for a reunion. They arrived as adults—doctors, teachers, engineers, parents, and grandparents. One after another, they embraced the woman who had protected them when no one else would. The child Luba lost at Auschwitz could never be replaced. The pain of that loss stayed with her forever. But through her courage, compassion, and refusal to look away, nearly one hundred other children were given the chance to grow up, build families, and live full lives. Luba Tryszynska passed away in 2009 at the age of 91. Her story remains one of the most powerful reminders that even in humanity’s darkest moments, a single act of love can become a lifeline for countless others.

Kale became a superfood because a publicist in New York invented a trade association that did not exist. Before all that, the biggest kale buyer in America was Pizza Hut. Not for the menu. They bought it by the ton, fourteen thousand pounds of it in 2012, and laid it round the salad bar to hide the ice. Nobody was meant to eat it. It was the doily. Then a PR firm called My Young Auntie went to work. Hermès on the client list, Givenchy, and kale. She chalked it onto boards around Manhattan. Got it onto the menu of a restaurant she already represented. Had T-shirts printed, because obviously. And she set up the American Kale Association, website, Facebook page, thousands of followers, and then rang journalists to tell them she had been hired by the American Kale Association. Actual farming bodies said they had never heard of it. They had never heard of it because it was her, at a desk, in New York. She owned up in 2015 and called it the proudest campaign of her career, which is fair enough. It went off like a rocket. Bon Appétit declared 2012 the Year of Kale. Dr Oz got hold of it. Paltrow made the chips on television. Beyoncé wore the word on a sweatshirt in a video, Michelle Obama ate the chips on Fallon, and Whole Foods was shifting twenty two thousand bunches a day. A leaf that was hiding ice in 2011 was a moral position by 2014. And the noble heritage everyone assumes it has is fodder. Kale is Brassica oleracea, same as cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower and sprouts, all of them the same wild cliff cabbage bent into different shapes over centuries. Kale is the one nobody bothered improving, because it was never for people. Britain grew it by the acre and called it cow cabbage. Fed it to stock to get them through winter. In Scotland it was so profoundly unremarkable that kail just meant dinner and the vegetable patch was the kailyard. Then the nutrition, which is where it falls apart completely. A hundred grams is thirty five calories. You could eat a kilo of the stuff, which would take you most of an afternoon and do something permanent to your jaw, and still not catch up with two eggs. The iron is the non-haem sort your gut mostly turns away at the door. And the whole superfood case runs on nutrients per calorie, a ratio that automatically flatters anything containing no calories, so the winner is always going to be something nobody could live on. Congratulations to the kale. The word means nothing, incidentally. Banned off packaging across Europe since 2007 unless you can back it with an authorised health claim, and nobody can, so it lives on menus and in headlines where the rules cannot reach. It is also so unpleasant raw that somebody had to invent a technique. You massage it. Grown adults stand at a worktop giving a hand rub to a leaf until it is theoretically chewable, then eat it anyway, because a woman with a fashion client list decided in 2012 that they should. Pizza Hut had it right the first time. It was decoration.

In May 2016, 15-year-old Karinya “Yaya” Chen was in hospice care in Austin, Texas after years of fighting cancer. She had tickets to see Florence The Machine, but by the night of the concert, she was simply too sick to go. So the people at Hospice Austin reached out to the band. And Florence Welch came to her. Florence and guitarist Rob Ackroyd walked into Karinya’s room and gave her the concert she couldn't make it to. They sang “Shake It Out” and “Dog Days Are Over,” with Karinya singing and harmonizing right alongside them. A few months later, Karinya lost her battle with cancer at just 15 years old. But for one afternoon, none of that seemed to matter. There was just a young girl, one of her favorite singers, a guitar, a room full of people who loved her... and music. Sometimes the smallest act of kindness can become one of the biggest moments of someone's life. This is what being human is supposed to look like.🙏