Monomial ideals, almost complete intersections and the Weak Lefschetz property

Many algebras are expected to have the Weak Lefschetz property, although this is often very difficult to establish. We illustrate the subtlety of the problem by studying monomial and some closely related ideals. Our results exemplify the intriguing dependence of the property on the characteristic of the ground field and on arithmetic properties of the exponent vectors of the monomials.