Ann Marie Hall sat next to her husband on the green sofa, trying to talk the gun out of his hands. "You know you can't kill yourself," she said. "Think about the boys, and your mother, and your brother and me. How will we feel?" Michael admitted he wasn't thinking straight. "It's not about anything but you and me," he said. Even as cops' marriages go, theirs was badly bruised. They had fallen in love fast; he proposed five months ...

Simran Kaur got married last December in what she terms a "medium-sized Punjabi wedding". "There were only a thousand guests," she says amidst the colour, bling and music of her wedding video. "And the four days of ceremonies before the wedding were attended by only relatives and close family friends," says the 26-year-old homemaker from Chandigarh, the capital of the prosperous state of Punjab, adding, not without a hint of irony, "which made up some 250 people." Weddings ...

The people who pay attention to weekend box office reports usually have some financial stake in what comes out on top. While I have zero prospect of gaining monetarily from the success of director Paul Feig's raunchy, smart Bridesmaids, I will nonetheless watch the weekend numbers with bated breath. I'm vested because I want to know how America feels about women both defecating on screen and discussing it. This might be a turning point in feminism and ...

To get in shape for her October wedding, Dawn-Samantha Cahill, 25, a production coordinator in New York City, tried every exercise routine she could think of. But the upended positions that yoga required made her feel self-conscious. Running on a treadmill was a bore. And lifting weights was just too difficult. Frustrated, Cahill started overeating instead of exercising, and her weight, on a petite, 5-ft. 2-in. frame, ballooned to 212 lb. Cahill was nearly ready to give up, ...

Love is all Prince William and Kate Middleton need: they've asked that charitable donations be made in lieu of gifts. But that doesn't mean the rest of town isn't cashing in. Economists predicted the royal wedding would give London a business boost, and already there's no shortage of swag for sale in anticipation of William and Kate's April 29 nuptials, from the classy to the ... less classy . "People want to be a part of this wedding, and ...

In Britain, all is not as it seems, nor ever has been. As they viewed the preparations for the royal wedding, with all its pomp and circumstance, the non-British seemed to willingly buy into the idea that the monarchy — and popular reverence for it — has been a fixed point in the British firmament for centuries, a source of stability however the nation's fortunes may have ebbed and flowed. Nothing could be further from the truth. ...

I enjoy a good royal wedding as much as any other straight guy. It's an amazing alchemy in which two things I already don't care at all about — royalty and weddings — become even less interesting when combined. The only thing worse would be a royal-wedding awards ceremony. We fought a war specifically so I wouldn't have to watch this crap. But since my editor told me not watching it was not an option, I did the ...

On Friday morning, walking through the Alberta area of Tuscaloosa, I saw a man sifting through the rubble of what used to be Affordable Mini Storage. He was going through the remains of his storage unit, searching for anything salvageable in the post-apocalyptic landscape of our home town. He picked up a toy from the debris, a still-sealed Ozzy Osbourne action figure and tossed it into his "save" pile. "At least he's in good shape, huh?" the ...

At the Portmeirion pottery works at Stoke-on-Trent, in Staffordshire, the kilns are fired up to get out the Kate and William commemorative cups and saucers. And so too at the Tangshan Hengrui Ceramics factory outside Beijing, where tens of thousands of "happy couple" plates are in production. At the TUI travel agency in Hanover, Germany the guided "Will and Kate Royal Wedding Tour" has done good business enticing tourists into London this balmy April. And ...

While the mainstream media were having lunch, members of the audience made other plans. They scattered and are still on the move, part of a massive migration. The dynamic driving it? It's all about you. Me. And all the various forms of the First Person Singular. Americans have decided the most important person in their lives is ... them, and our culture is now built upon that idea. It's the User-Generated Generation. For those times when the 900 digital options awaiting ...