Mike Franklin

She suffers from a fear known as lachanophobia, which leaves her sweating and stricken with panic attacks at the merest sight of a sprout or a pea.

How does this AFC differ from the fast food joints of your ‘hood? For a start - a guard with a submachine gun loitering outside, fast food being an obvious target for being ‘foreign’.

This removable-roof version of the Veyron coupe costs 1.4 million euros, or roughly $2.1 million. I say roughly, because the Bugatti’s price can fluctuate about $14,000 a day simply from one-cent adjustments in exchange rates.

In his old married apartment in the financial district, he said, two walls were devoted to shelves showcasing his vast sneaker collection. In his new single-again apartment, shared with a pug puppy called Brooks Junior, he needs a penlight to help him excavate footwear from the mountain of clothing jammed into his small closet — though he says it’s only one-eighth of what he owned in more prosperous times.

One standard reference, from 1905, lists more than 6,500 distinct varieties. There are apples for keeping, cooking, eating and the making of ciders, with names as colorful as they are various: Scollop Gillyflower, Red Winter Pearmain, Kansas Keeper…

And even in formerly great apple-growing states, including New York, the number of different apples has greatly diminished. According to one estimate, only 11 varieties make up 90 percent of all the apples sold in this country, and Red Delicious alone counts for nearly half of that.

“Then along came a cyclist. And I thought, ‘Good, he’s a big bloke,’ and shouted, ‘Can you help me please?’

“He stopped and turned around and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, it’s Boris Johnson.’

Moreover, there is one American health statistic that is strikingly above average: life expectancy for Americans who have already reached the age of 65. At that point, they can expect to live longer than the average in industrialized countries. That’s because Americans above age 65 actually have universal health care coverage: Medicare.

Yet another study, cited in a recent report by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Urban Institute, looked at how well 19 developed countries succeeded in avoiding “preventable deaths,” such as those where a disease could be cured or forestalled. What Senator Shelby called “the best health care system” ranked in last place.

The figures are even worse for members of minority groups. An African-American in New Orleans has a shorter life expectancy than the average person in Vietnam or Honduras.

New research from mobile phone firm T-Mobile reveals nearly a quarter of [British] men (22 percent) regularly include a kiss on texts to their male mates …

“Metrotextuality” is most widespread among 18-24 year old males with three quarters (75 percent) regularly sealing texts with a kiss and 48 percent admitting that the practice has become commonplace amongst their group of friends.

Just a decade? We went back and forth on it for a while and finally Adam said his bosses just would not go along with calling me the CEO of the Century, since it would not even be clear which century we were talking about, and if it was the last century then what was the point of writing about it now, and the whole point was to do a story about the decade that is just ending, and we came back and said okay how about best CEO of the past quarter century, and again we got hit with this thing about the premise being just to talk about the decade that’s ending — so fine.

We try to keep these guys in a culturally significant place.