Uncle J crossed over about a week ago, during a big storm that knocked out the power. He’d spent the week prior tangled up in the veil, same as Uncle C had, and to save …
“I wrote 63 songs this year. They’re all about Jeter.” Just kidding. The game we love, the players we hate, and more.
From Norman Mailer to Wendy Pepper — everything on film, TV, books, music, and snacks (shut up, raisins), plus the Girls’ Bike Club.
Helping public schools, winning prizes, sending a crazy lady in a tomato costume out in public.
Monologues, travelogues, fiction, and fart humor. And hens. Don’t forget the hens.
The Tomato Nation advice column addresses your questions on etiquette, grammar, romance, and pet misbehavior. Ask The Readers about books or fashion today!
Let’s think about something else for a minute, besides how we’re all going to come down with something called yaws probably. I’ve got two reading recs and a question. Let’s start with the question.
When you wake up, and there’s a substance in the corner of your eye…
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Trying to determine whether gesturing at a loved one’s face and saying “you have sleep in your eye” was specific to my family, a regionalism, which regionalism, etc. Hop down to the comments and say more if you like!
“Well, I’ve got end-times insomnia, WHY NOT.” Yeah, I feel you. I have a couple of reading recs that might help. The first is James Baldwin’s The Evidence of Things Not Seen, which should be required reading for all Americans, and if we ever get out of this dystopian pickle, I hope I’ll live to see it happen. I wouldn’t call it cheery or heartening, Lord knows, but Baldwin’s crisply furious prose has a clarifying effect, I find.
Quite a bit more invigorating is Aaron Lansky’s Outwitting History. I reviewed Lansky’s account of his and his team’s quest to preserve Yiddish literature years ago, and adored it then; I’d like to reread it now, because I recall a determined bailing-with-a-teaspoon hopefulness that a culture that fascists tried to exterminate could survive. We need stories like that right now, so we can get psyched to live them ourselves.
That’s all I got: eye gunk and reprints. Hope y’all are hanging in.
Thanks to Reader Gretchen, I have more Bob Uecker-iana than some Brewers fans: multiple bobbles, a Uecker Magic 8 Ball, and an old-school alarm clock that ticks so loudly I had to banish it from …
Dear Sars,
Welcome back! Dear cracking dry hands season, not so much. I’m here to ask you/the readers about a product I could swear I saw mentioned on the Vine ages ago, but I can’t find …
Hey. I don’t know what we do now either. I DO know that we’ll need each other going forward, as we always have, for support, mutual aid, and information on where to get high-quality wide-calf …
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a lonely girl in possession of a library card must be in want of a twin. The child who spends a lot of time in books also spends a lot of time thinking about the lost or secret twin she must have – “must have” meaning surely has, but “must have” in the sense of “needs,” also – that mirror child who loves her, IS her, holds her hand always.
I found it while researching a murder (…this is a sentence I have more frequent use for than most), the true story of a neighborhood legend from my childhood. I grew up in a leafy, …
(David Denby on Norman Mailer’s wartime experiences)
Hey, folks. Just a quick periodic round-up of stuff I’ve gotten up to of late…I guess I could use Linktree but I’m still paying for hosting for TN, so: …
The bond between sovereign and subjects is a strange and mostly unknowable thing. A nation’s life becomes a person’s, and then the string must break. Sam Knight on Operation London Bridge
Monarchies want abolishing, …
Once upon a time, in the world before Tomato Nation, I worked in an antiquarian bookshop in Chelsea. I made seven dollars an hour. I learned how to “spine up” a shelf, tweaking the books …
