Welcome to The Faster Times update. In today's edition, we bring you grad school confessions, E. coli dangers, the new hippies, The Tree of Life, and television of the future. Enjoy!

I want to avoid being too general about “the state of education” in the US, because really, what the f*ck do I know? Maybe this is just what college education means to most people: half-assed work, moderate literacy, and little chance of job placement after graduating with C’s from a university no one’s heard of.

Look out, world! A new threat to health and veggie sales has surfaced in Europe in the form of a new strain of E. coli. The World Health Organization released information that of the near 1,500 reported sicknesses, 470 have developed a rare kidney failure complication, and 18 people have died, the most recent overnight. The WHO explains that this strain has “never been seen in an outbreak situation before.”

We have a new type of hippie in 2011, only our modern hippies are much more lovable and productive for society at large than whatever was rolling around in its own filth 50 years ago.

With only his fifth film in 38 years, here again now is Terrence Malick, extreme partisan of The Big Picture. That “The Tree of Life” comes with an epigraph from the Book of Job seems almost like a joke at the expense of Malick’s appreciators: Oh, how we suffer and wonder and struggle to forgive.

I’ve long thought that the mobile devices we have in our home (tablets, iTouch, phones) would be our remotes. In fact, we use them everyday for that now. We use the Sonos app on the iPad to control the music in our house. We use the Boxee remote on the iTouch to control our TV. We all have apps on our androids and iPhones that control various devices in our home.