Spy Magazine:

Whenever a traveler from the East Coast announces that he is making a trip to California, he is expected to express revulsion if his business trip takes him to the cultural cesspool of Los Angeles but to leap into paroxysms of ecstasy should his business to him to the shining city on the hill where little cable cars run halfway to the stars. (Should he announce that his business is taking him to San Diego, people will usually tell him to visit the zoo.)

We hold no brief for, nor have any ax to grind against, the burgeoning municipality of San Diego; it certainly has a nice zoo. Yet on the question of San Francisco vs. Los Angeles, we feel compelled to advance a minority view and admit that we generally like LA, while finding San Francisco, a quaint hamlet that has somehow confused itself with Byzantium, has long benefitted from an uninterrupted stream of booster-spawned propaganda that has hornswoggled the American public. Consequently they believe that what is basically a glorified Austin, a slightly less nippy Ann Arbor, a boho Vancouver, a New Hope writ large or a seismically suspect Charlottesville is actually a first-tier municipality, one that can take its place alongside such world-class North American cities as New York, Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, Montreal, and, of course, Los Angeles. Frankly we find this idea quite ludicrous. In our view, San Francisco is Quebec with more Chinese restaurants.

Siobhan Gorman and Adam Entous:

Visiting North Korea, James Clapper said, was "kind of on my bucket list."

TK:

Sweetness is the cancer that is slowly killing Korean cuisine.

A representative at the Jianning Cold Warehouse:

All lamb skewers right now are not real. There aren't any real lamb skewers anymore.

Lan Guijun:

China has such serious food safety issues these days that you need years of experience to buy well: you have to be like an antique collector who can sniff out genuine articles among all the fakes.

Zhao Lu:

I had some stomach convulsions, but I'm OK now. I wouldn't recommend that normal people try this.

Nicola Twilley:

Nearly half of everything that is grown in China rots before it even reaches the retail market.

Americans, too, throw away 40 percent of their food, but nearly half of that waste occurs at the consumer level, meaning in retail locations and at home.