Welcome to The Faster Times update. In today's edition, we bring you virtual ditterence, the unfortunately named Benjamin "Ben" Laden, the magic of in-person selling, a YA novel without vampires, and baseball trends. Enjoy!

Virtual deterrence, while not new, has gained some currency in recent years as a means to both avert nuclear war and expedite nuclear disarmament. “Virtual,” in this instance, means abolishing nuclear weapons, which the United States maintains primarily to deter, or prevent, other states from attacking us with theirs. Instead, only the know-how and production capacity (as well as the fuel) to reconstitute them would be retained in case of a perceived national security emergency.

Bin Laden is dead, but Ben Laden lives on. I caught up with one, Benjamin “Ben” Laden, Pennsylvanian, bandleader, and all around good guy, to talk about the ten years he spent sharing a name with the world’s most reviled terrorist. In our first email correspondence, Ben Laden said it’s been, “an interesting ride since 9/11,” but he imagines this will be the, “last hurrah.” Laden has taken the coincidence in good humor, but in many ways these have been trying years filled with absurd, disturbing, and Kafka-esque difficulties for a man whose only crime is to have been born with an unlucky name.

This weekend we visited an upstate Farmer’s Market in Great Barrington, MA and enjoyed walking from stand to stand, chatting with the folks about their bread, dairy, jams or meats they were selling. In most cases, the people were the farmers or owners themselves. I’m no stranger to farmer’s markets, and they’re a growing trend in both cities and country for good reason.

I am a recovering teenage girl with a YA novel, Sister Mischief, coming out on July 12. In the early stages of conceptualizing SM, I realized that writing the book was a way of putting my money where my mouth was: giving young people access to candid, high-quality literature is important to me, so I figured I should try to produce some. Inevitably, at least once a week, I’ll provide a description of my book (“It’s an interracial gay hip-hop love story for teens,”) to a stranger and they’ll ask, “Does it have vampires in it?”

The baseball season is long, lasting 162 games and more than six months, but there is a rhythm to it, just as there is a rhythm to most baseball games. On Opening Day in late March or early April the season ahead seems almost infinite in both length and possibilities. Experienced baseball fans and analysts are quick to caution about reading too much into exceptionally fast starts by players or teams. Serious fans know that a team that wins seven of its first ten games or a hitter who has three home runs in the first 12 games are not guaranteed to be destined to greatness.