Your Spouse is Using You: Facebook and the Effects of Unemployment on Divorce

The Fallback Plan is a weekly column, offering advice to those undergoing a second adolescence, written by Leigh Stein, author of The Fallback Plan, newly released from Melville House. For an illustrated fallback plan of your own, write to Leighstein@thefastertimes.com

Dear Leigh,

I want…

Valentine’s Day is approaching, and this year you are in love. A day devoted to your loving, cherubs everywhere. You and Kanye have been official for what– 2 months? God, it doesn’t even matter! When you two are spontaneously grinding in his spice pantry, time is irrelevant. You…

Consider this: reality television is the perfected height of cinema. New forms of media depend on the introduction of one new technical element that is impossible to accommodate in an older form. When theater gave way to cinema, the one irreproducible element was editing, the technique that…

The benefits of being alive: Friends with Benefits(the movie), the NBA, and a new planet called Kepler-22b

Today I woke up in an inexplicably good mood, looking forward to the future. I’ll attribute my happiness to a number of things happening in the world that are pretty much indisputably…

The Occupy Movement Turns up at the London Stock Exchange

The news arrived via the Internet. Of course it did. There was to be a protest in London on Saturday, inspired by Occupy Wall Street, and it was going to be a global day of action. Many of us had felt a sense of identification with…

Maurice Halbwachs had a theory. His theory was about memory, and it went something like this:

A person has individual memories – memories of places, events, information, people. We all have these memories. But individual memory,coexists with another entitythat Halbwachs termed Collective…

We all fear intruders in our home.  But also, the idea of keeping a weapon around can be daunting. If you own a knife or bat, where’s the best place to keep it for your safety? Do you want it by the door or bed (providing easy access) or do you want it hidden (so your intruder doesn’t see it…

After a short period of time at Occupy Wall Street it becomes clear that Wall Street is not actually being occupied. A large group of people have moved into a park a few blocks away from it, where it seems their colorful tent city is, in fact, the thing being occupied–hemmed in by metal…