“Apple today considers Google its No. 1 competitor. But tellingly, so do Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, and a long list of lesser-known tech firms. ‘I don’t think we’ve seen a company like Google in technology,’ says John Battelle. ‘It’s the whole package: the financial results, the reach in terms of what markets they touch, and the ambition.'” Fortune’s Miguel Helft on Larry Page, the most ambitious CEO in the universe.

+ “I am thirteen and in a private discussion with my coach that was set up after nationals. Ripping pain, grunts that sound like the monster in a horror movie, blood, my hair pulled out lying on the ground, the smell of fear. It smells like fresh chlorine and metal.” Outside’s Rachel Sturtz on American competitive swimming’s continuing legacy of sexual abuse.

+ “She is used to her cage. It’s been her home since she was two years old. Jenny, who has been diagnosed with autism, lives in a state-run institution for disabled children in Lechaina, a small town in the south of Greece, along with more than 60 others, many of whom are locked in cells or cages.” And we’re not talking about ancient Greece. From BBC: The disabled children locked up in cages

+ “The world’s largest restaurant company is losing market share, losing sales, and suffering one heck of a corporate identity crisis.” Can McDonald’s get its mojo back? Hey, if Chipotle can convince us that those are burritos, anything is possible.

+ “Humans take great pride in the fact that we dominate all other species with our sophisticated cognition. Yet while virtually all other species instinctively flee from smoke, we choose to suck it into our lungs.” The rise and (not quite) fall of the nicotine fix.

+ Pricenomics has a fun piece on the invention of sliced bread. (I’m old enough to remember when bread was considered a positive.)