A survey of American schoolchildren found that ninety-six percent could identify Ronald McDonald. The only fictional character with a higher degree of recognition was Santa Claus. The impact of McDonald's on the nation's culture, economy and diet is hard to overstate. Its corporate symbol - the Golden Arches - is now more widely recognised than the Christian cross.

After four decades, our obsession with fast, cheap food has transformed our towns and flooded the labor market with low-paying, dead-end jobs. Is this a healthy menu?
Cheyenne mountain sits on the eastern slope of Colorado's front range, rising steeply from the prairie and overlooking the city of Colorado Springs. From a distance, the mountain looks beautiful and serene, dotted with rocky outcroppings, scrub oak and ponderosa pine. And yet Cheyenne Mountain is hardly pristine. One of the nation's most important military installations is located deep within it, housing operational units of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the United States Space Command and the Air Force Space Command. In the mid-1950s, high-level officials at the Pentagon worried that America's air defenses were vulnerable to sabotage and attack. Cheyenne Mountain was chosen as the site for a top-secret underground combat-operations center. The mountain was hollowed out, and about 700,000 tons of rock were removed. Fifteen buildings, most of them three stories high, were erected amid a maze of tunnels and passageways extending for miles. The four-and-a-half-acre underground complex was designed to survive a direct hit by a ten-kiloton atomic bomb. Now officially called the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center, the facility is entered through massive steel blast doors that are three feet thick and weigh twenty tons each. Pressurized air within the complex prevents contamination by radioactive fallout or biological weapons. A heavily armed quick-response team guards against intruders. The place feels like the set of an early James Bond movie, with men in jumpsuits driving little electric vans from one brightly lighted cavern to another.