During the week, I'm a magazine editor. But sometimes, on the weekend, I'm a farmer. WWOOF, which stands for Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farming, is an international organization that connects volunteers with homesteads and farms for an outdoor education. How it works: Sign up to be a WWOOF member (there's a $30 yearly fee) and view online profiles… Read More >>

Quick: take a fast guess at this dinner party-worthy math problem. How many people would I have to invite to my party if I wanted a 50 percent chance that two people would have the same birthday? 366 people would give me a 100 percent chance, but what about a 50 percent chance? I guessed 100. It turns out, thanks to the magic of probability, that you'd only need… Read More >>

Sure, it might be a great weekend for Frankenweenie, Tim Burton's latest multimillion dollar 3D flick from Disney, but rest assured: It'll be around for many more to come. Less accessible are three critically acclaimed documentaries that are worth your cash and full attention. Seek these moving stories out now if you can:

• Searching for Sugar Man: This is the almost unbelievable, inspiring true story of Detroit musician Sixto Diaz Rodriguez, who became a legend in South Africa for his accidental contributions to the anti-apartheid movement, despite being virtually unknown in America. I saw this film when it was released in July and can't recommend it highly enough: It's still opening in more…

• The Queen of Versailles: Here's another true story about larger-than-life characters: David and Jackie Siegel are billionaires who decide to build the largest mansion in America—and run into financial disaster when the recession hits. It's the American dream seen through a fun house mirror, and the result is thought-provoking and often hilarious (if cringe-inducing). This…

• The House I Live In: Here's one I'm headed to tonight, a well-reviewed film about the "War on Drugs" that's hitting theaters now. It may be a bit heavier than Frankenweenie,  but what's wrong with a little edu-tainment on Friday night?

Every once in a while, you come across something on the internet that serves no real purpose at all and provides you with utterly useless information and yet somehow demands to be shared with the rest of the world immediately.

This slideshow from Forbes about celebrities whose homes have been in foreclosure in the past year is a classic example. Who among us has the power to resist an item that combines tales of multimillion dollar financial disasters with names like Burt Reynolds, the Octomom, Rihanna and David Cassidy? Not me, I must confess.

It's old hat that support for Obama and Romney breaks strongly along lines of gender, race, income (even marital status) -- but did you know that a person's first name could also predict which candidate they're more likely to get behind? That's what Yahoo!'s Chris Wilson exposes in this totally addictive interactive graphic. Using publicly available donor data (the parties are required to report anyone whose… Read More >>

Inspired by the statistical and the goofy ways to predict the presidency—Halloween mask sales, cookie contests, coffee cups, and Redskins winsto name a few—our editor-in-chief Liz Vaccariello decided, Reader's Digest style, to challenge the presidential nominees to tell their best joke (spontaneously!) during her interviews with each. Here are the jokes, folks: We edited and posted them below. Vote for… Read More >>

In the moving video below, news anchor Jennifer Livingston, of CBS affiliate WKBT  in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, boldly speaks up on air against a viewer who wrote in to comment maliciously on her weight. Her action has sparked a national wave of support across all media, including newspapers, broadcast and online news outlets, and social media like her…. Since… Read More >>

You can't help but  love a novel that starts with a wedding invitation. Yona Zeldis McDonough's A Wedding in Great Neck opens by requesting the honor of our presence at a tony to-do on Swan's Grove Road in Great Neck, New York.  On the very next page, the mother-of-the-bride's dog is barking wildly, and a madcap all-day drama begins to unfold throughout the grounds of the…

Weddings (and funerals) bring out  both the best and the worst in people, and the soon-to-be-joined families play out their rivalries, jealousies, fears, and desires in spectacular fashion—complete with flagrant cheating and an over-the-top plot to sabotage the entire ceremony. And yet there are better impulses at work here, too, and a smart, if…

This page-turner is at once a very funny comedy of manners (complete with a rogue party planner named Pippa...hmmmm) and a testament to the power of love.  It's as extravagantly delicious as the lime mousse, petit fours, sugar cookies, and handmade chocolates to be served with the cake inside the fairy tale tent.

Some guy was on his cell leaving a voicemail for his boss when he noticed a traffic accident. The following is his hysterical play-by-play of the confrontation between an irate young guy and the equally angry elderly women whose car he bashed into. What makes it so funny is his I-can’t-catch-my-breath-because-I’m-laughing-so-hard depiction of what happened next.

The video's a bit old, but it's good enough that I shared it recently with a friend who was recuperating from a broken leg. He insists it’s a fake. He thinks it never happened and that the guy is making it up. I’m not so sure. I think my friend’s just cranky, what with having to stay home with nothing else to do but rain on my parade and watch General…. But…

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The verdict is in, and Mitt Romney gets the win. As we noted in a previous post, for all the attention they get presidential debates rarely have a significant impact on the election. But there's no denying that Romney had a big night and President Obama came up woefully short in the first of their three clashes. We've combed through the mountains of morning-after…

Leading off is this piece from factcheck.org, which nails both candidates for the many misleading statements they made in the course of their 90-minute exchange. As the editors put it, "We found exaggerations and false claims flying thick and fast..."

Over at Slate, David Weigel skewers the Obama team for their desperate efforts "in the big dumb swirl of a spin room" to re-frame the president's poor performance as a success.

The Washington Post offers a concise assessment in the aptly named "Six Reasons Mitt Romney Won the First Debate."

Finally, the editors of Bloomberg View have a smart take on what the win means for Romney and what he and Obama need to do in the days and weeks ahead. "As [Romney] basks in his victory this morning," they write, "he should also note how he won: by playing more to the center than to the right, appealing more to reason than to partisanship."

With 32 days until the election, the serious fun has just begun.