Jen Poyant

It's our final installment of our Do It Yourself Bailout series. Takeaway contributor Beth Kobliner has taken us on a financial journey; she's helped us learn how to invest the right way, trick ourselves into saving, and understand the art of negotiating. Today, we talk about a big piece of your financial and personal life: your spouse or partner. 

Writer Brady Udall caused a stir more than twelve years ago when he wrote an article for Esquire about the predicament of being a polygamist dad. He wrote about a lonely polygamist named Bill who had four wives and thirty-one kids and explored how Bill kept his wives and himself afloat in the modern world.

NASA has begun counting down to its last scheduled launch of the space shuttle Atlantis. We wanted to know: Do all the shuttles have the same type of cup holders and is taking off on Atlantis any different from launching in Discovery?

We are closer than ever to getting our financial life in order here on The Takeaway. This is week nine of our series, Do It Yourself Bailout. Since the beginning of the series Takeaway contributor Beth Kobliner, author of "Get a Financial Life" has tackled our trickiest money issues in order to help us all get on sound financial footing. We have talked about how to trick yourself into saving more money and whether you should prioritise your retirement savings over saving for your kid's college, among many other money questions.

It's been 40 years since The Beatles released "Let It Be." The song ended up as the title track of the last album the group ever released together. "Let it Be" was named number 20 on Rolling Stone's "Top 500 songs of All Time List" and continues to be covered, even as recently as a few months ago by Jennifer Hudson during the Haiti recovery effort. 

Today is the National Day of Prayer; it's an official observance from Congress, and has been around since 1952. This year's event, however, could be the last time the federal government remains officially involved.  Last month a federal district court judge ruled that the government's involvement in the day violated the Constitution, by conflating church and state.  Should we have a National Day of Prayer?

Nominations for theater's Tony awards have been announced, and three productions have taken the majority of the nominations. The revival of August Wilson’s “Fences” received 10 nominations, the musical version of the classic drag comedy “La Cage aux Folles” snapped up 11: the same number as “Fela!” It's a depiction of the life of Nigerian composer and political activist Fela Kuti.

It's week eight of The Takeaway's Do It Yourself Bailout with our friend Beth Kobliner, author of "Get a Financial Life", and we're taking a good long look in the mirror at our spending habits: where we're saving, if we're saving enough and whether we can do more to bail ourselves out of the financial mess that many of us are in.  This week's question to ask yourself: are you spending too much on insurance? Or not enough?

Actress Pam Grier is best known for her roles as a blaxploitation star in the 1970s films "Coffy" and "Foxy Brown." Two decades later, she made a comeback, playing "Jackie Brown" in Quentin Tarantino's homage to her early career. She's written a new memoir, "Foxy: My Life in Three Acts," detailing her rise to fame and her struggles as a young girl dealing with sexual violence and racial prejudice.

In May 1960 the Food and Drug Administration approved 'The Pill' as a legal contraceptive. It was soon marketed as a symbol of freedom and power for American women, who up until then had little power to completely control the way they planned for pregnancy.

It's been fifty years since the Pill touched off feminist debates over sexual freedom and family planning.  We talk with feminist writers (and mother and daughter) Erica Jong and Molly Jong-Fast about their personal histories and how the Pill shaped their perception of feminine power.

After several days of successful attempts by Republicans to block the formal debate over financial reform in Washington, the debate has now begun on the Senate floor. One person who will certainly have the Obama administration’s ear as it negotiates with members of the Senate and House over the bill is Elizabeth Warren, Harvard Law professor and chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel that keeps an eye on the Troubled Asset Relief Program or TARP fund.

Author Jeffrey Eugenides was born and raised in Detroit and the city often becomes a central character in his writings. (He lives in Princeton, New Jersey, these days.) He’s based both of his novels, Pulitzer Prize-winning "Middlesex," and "The Virgin Suicides," in the Motor City. He says as a native Detroiter it's still easy for him to love his home town: more so, perhaps, than the average outsider.

We've been talking with Takeaway contributor Beth Kobliner, author of "Get a Financial Life", about how to get ourselves on strong financial footing, with our Do It Yourself Bailout series. This week, Beth helps us with a big dilemma: If we can't afford to do both, should we sock away money every month for retirement or save for our kids' college?

The number of American troops in Afghanistan will outnumber those in Iraq by late May or early June, according to new reporting from the Brookings Institution. That news comes as the U.S. and Iraq mark five years of democratically elected government in Iraq and as U.S. and NATO allies prepare for an upcoming offensive against the Taliban in Kandahar.

The Takeaway talks to Zalmay Khalilzad, former U.S. ambassador to both Iraq and Afghanistan during the Bush Administration. He is now the President of Khalilzad Associates.

Even though many economists are proclaiming the "Great Recession" ending or over, the nearly 10 percent of Americans who are unemployed probably find it difficult to imagine exactly what a prosperous, post-recession America will look like. Richard Florida, author of "The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity," says that's because the crash has fundamentally altered how we feel about spending and saving. He says we're all in the process of resetting the way we work and live.

We started the conversation by asking the question: Have you remade your life because of this recession?

A few weeks ago, a poll from our partner, The New York Times, gave us a closer look at who, exactly, makes up the Tea Party. The biggest demographic is older, white, educated, Republican men.  But there are still major aspects of the movement that are less clear. Is anyone actually leading it? Where is it headed?

25 years ago, Coke switched its famous secret recipe to "New Coke." The change caused Coke fans everywhere to break out in hysteria until the soft-drink company brought back Classic-Coke a few months later. We look at how Coke has managed to keep its fans so devoted to its secret recipe over the years. We also take a look at why America’s great secret recipes remain compelling from one generation to the next.

It's been 40 years since activists got together to set aside a special day to encourage people to think about our environment. Denis Hayes, the principal organizer of the first Earth Day back in 1970, says this day wove together some of the disparate agendas within the fractious environmental movement. But Heather Rogers, journalist and author of the new book "Green Gone Wrong: How Our Economy Is Undermining the Environmental Revolution," says that while Earth Day was originally a good idea, a new tension exists today in how the movement should move forward.

Everyone has at least one family member who loves to negotiate, whether they fight for a good deal on a new car or a free dessert: They just don't stop until they've gotten a concession on the price. Well, Takeaway contributor Beth Kobliner, author of "Get a Financial Life", thinks we should look to that family member for inspiration in making our very own DIY Bailout. She says everyone should aspire to the art of deal making.

These days, we're hearing profanity from the mouth of an 11-year-old girl in a box office hit and from the Vice President of the United States. Is cursing becoming more acceptable?