Ben McGrath:

The first time Sheila McClear had lunch with Nick Denton, she returned to the office afterward and threw up. She attributed this to food poisoning, but it happened again the second time they had lunch.

Jonathan Blaustein:

Just because we can put something in our mouths, does that make it food? At what point do we decide that something isn't food?

Frank Rich:

More than 60 percent of Twitter users abandon it after a single month.

Ronald Bailey:

Half the crime in Seattle occurs on 4.5 percent of that city's streets; just over 3 percent of street addresses and intersections generated half the crimes in Minneapolis; and 8 percent of street blocks accounted for 66 percent of robberies in Boston.

Vanda Felbab-Brown:

To get all its extra supplies out of Afghanistan, NATO needs to send one container over the Afghan border every seven minutes from now until 2015.

Elizabeth Dickinson:

Roughly 50,000 lives have been lost since Mexico's experiment with a Colombian-style militarized drug war began in 2006. The Citizen's Council for Public Security in Mexico recently estimated the kidnapping rate at three times that of Colombia's darkest days. By November 2011, 80 percent of the population ... said they believed security to be worse than just a year ago. A mere 14 percent believed that the government could beat the drug gangs.

Brad Stone:

Google+ has attracted 100 million members, who spent an average of 3.3 minutes on the service in January, according to ComScore (SCOR). Facebook's 850 million users spend an average of 7.5 hours a month on that site.

Lizette Alvarez:

The I.R.S. receives 100 million tax returns a year, most filed within a short period of time and a vast majority legitimate.

From 2008 to 2011, the number of returns filed by identity thieves and stopped by the I.R.S. increased significantly, officials said. Last year, it was at least 1.3 million ...

This year, with only 30 percent of the filings reviewed so far, the number is already at 2.6 million.

Peter Fader:

Among financial academics, chartists tend to be regarded as quacks. But a lot of the Big Data people are exactly like them. They say, "We are just going to stare at the data and look for patterns, and then act on them when we find them." In short, there is very little real science in what we call "data science," and that's a big problem.

Actuaries can say with great confidence what percent of people with your characteristics will live to be 80. But no actuary would ever try to predict when you are going to die. They know exactly where to draw the line.