Fun fact: the Netherlands produces almost one billion tons of tomatoes on less than seven square miles of land. That astonished me, and my mind kept turning on that statistic long after I finished reading the full article. 

I initially kept my eyes squared for awe-inspiring numbers and world-stopping visuals (which these are not, but too funny / lame not to share). For instance, I know I'm biased because I work with and among some of the world's leading scientists, but 84 percent of Americans can't name a living one. That's way too close to the 87 percent in a different survey who couldn't name a living economist. About 21,000 economists work in the U.S. compared to an exponentially larger number of scientists.

Now, if you muddled those numbers a bit, I'd understand. Packing so many digits into one paragraph yields a scramble. However, insightful comments and commanding assessments tend to resonate more with readers. So that's what I collected along the length of May instead of stockpiling the worthy elements of mathematics.

Can I interest you in...

• books that have facilitated death on the seas:
"The book lover in me hates the fact that the pirates might have torn out a page from a book in order to fire their gun.”

• and on the shelves: 
"Most libraries, concerned about poisoning their patrons, destroyed their volumes."

• a musical riff you all have definitely heard: 
"The thing you can know immediately ... is that 50,000 people copied it."

• one significant part of my world as a journalist: 
"I wonder what other stories or facts the public isn’t reading because the questions at hand are too sensitive for staff writers and not worth reporting for freelancers."

• the absence of women in America's founding documents:
"The rejection of it is in some ways insulting."

• the impossibility of wistfulness: 
"I was able to do things that, you know, I searched for the rest of my career to try to do. I was chasing those moments for the next 15 years." 

• something technology can't improve: 
"What people really enjoy has nothing to do with efficiency."

• the conspicuousness of excellent poetry: 
A good poem demands your attention "the same way that a pebble would force you to stop and take it out of your shoe."
 

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