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You would think all the antibiotics in the fast food would even things out, but maybe they do things differently in Britain: "The obesity epidemic in children could be cutting the effectiveness of penicillin treatment – because the doses were worked out for a slimmer generation. Guidelines have remained unchanged for almost 50 years, but children are now up to 20 per cent heavier. Experts want the guidelines to be revised amid concern that some children are getting too little medication to treat their ailments." Speaking of Britons, more than three quarters of the pictures they post of themselves to Facebook show them under the influence of alcohol. In the rest they are just stroking knives affectionately.

During Hurricane Irene weekend, while holed up in a friend’s apartment and looking for some stimulation, I got friend-requested and emailed by an obvious scammer on Facebook. The con artist, under the name “Claire Anrie,” used a few professional photos of an attractive young woman (whom I later reverse-image-searched and discovered was a personal trainer in New York) and a typo- and contradiction-filled profile. READ MORE

Let's play compare and contrast! READ MORE

Everyone has been going crazy about "frictionless sharing" for the last week. That's Facebook's cute new term for what happens when you give permission for something new and fun to enter your life and then it takes you to a party and "auto-shares" your activity with the world. You drunk slag. What to do? Short version long... you should probably get off the Internet now while the getting is good. (Well? At least consider it!) READ MORE

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Here's a good question: what if the discomfort expressed, on different fronts and with rationales, by the Malcolm Gladwells and Bill Kellers and the Zadie Smiths and whoever else hates the Face-Twitters now, was mostly just a love of (or addiction to?) narrative? Facebook stories don't really have any endings, and neither do they always have multiple conflicting sources (not like the newspapers have much of that either anyway). "At the end of every magazine article, before the "■," is the quote from the general in Afghanistan that ties everything together. The evening news segment concludes by showing the secretary of State getting back onto her helicopter. There's the kiss, the kicker, the snappy comeback, the defused bomb. The Epiphanator transmits them all. It promises that things are orderly. It insists that life makes sense, that there is an underlying logic." Newspapers, magazines and procedurals are the last forms hanging on to tidy endings. The rest of us are just, like, living here.

Credit was heaped on social media as the tool that won Obama the 2008 election. The New York Times described it as "an unforeseen force to raise money, organize locally, fight smear campaigns and get out the vote that helped them topple the Clinton machine…" Some told everyone to take a pill, calling the crediting of social media a "big snake oil spotlight." READ MORE

Now the Internet has everything: please welcome Matchmakering! It's the website that lets you pair off your Facebook friends! It's like, hmm, Chatroulette meets eHarmony meets total laziness.