Baseball

“I wrote 63 songs this year. They’re all about Jeter.” Just kidding. The game we love, the players we hate, and more.

Culture and Criticism

From Norman Mailer to Wendy Pepper — everything on film, TV, books, music, and snacks (shut up, raisins), plus the Girls’ Bike Club.

Donors Choose and Contests

Helping public schools, winning prizes, sending a crazy lady in a tomato costume out in public.

Stories, True and Otherwise

Monologues, travelogues, fiction, and fart humor. And hens. Don’t forget the hens.

The Vine

The Tomato Nation advice column addresses your questions on etiquette, grammar, romance, and pet misbehavior. Ask The Readers about books or fashion today!

El Secreto de Sus Ojos
March 7, 2010 · 2 Comments

This is a great movie. Here’s how I could tell: the version I saw had, bar none, the worst subtitling I’ve ever seen, and I have watched a fair amount of bootleg kung-fu in my …

Nine
March 6, 2010 · 3 Comments

Everyone looks beautiful, the acting is good (with one semi-exception), and Nine successfully evokes Fellini, but I don’t think I see the point of the exercise, here or in the stage original. That the dialogue …

The Vine: March 5, 2010
March 5, 2010 · 15 Comments

Hi,

This isn’t the typical book question, but I know that the readers are an observant and helpful bunch so hopefully this isn’t too weird for them.   Here goes.
I got a coupon off Facebook …

The White Ribbon
March 4, 2010 · 5 Comments

This is, I believe, the presumptive favorite for Best Foreign Film, with good reason. I’ve only seen one of the other nominees, and it’s good, but The White Ribbon is in another class entirely; it’s …

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
March 4, 2010 · 4 Comments
<I>The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers</I>

For my tenth birthday, my mother got me a framed copy of the front page of the New York Times from the day I was born. The big headline is about food costs pushing up …

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
March 4, 2010 · 22 Comments

I actually enjoyed it, because I expected to hate it, and while it is definitely bad — buys into its own pompous mythos, takes too long to explain a conflict nobody cares about, thinks it’s …

The Vine: Ask The Readers Book-a-thon #10
March 3, 2010 · 6 Comments

Hi Sarah,
Seeing so many reader entries about children’s books has gotten me nostalgic for the books of my childhood. I remember a lot of them, but there were two I loved but cannot remember the …

The Vine: Ask The Readers Book-a-thon #9
March 3, 2010 · 13 Comments

Hello!
So, I am beginning to think I might be crazy, because I am looking for a book I loved but I am having no luck at all.
I read it in the 1970s; it was about …

The Vine: Ask The Readers Book-a-thon #8
March 3, 2010 · 3 Comments

Sars —
I’m hoping the readers can help me out with my search for a beloved childhood read.   It was a YA novel about a teenage girl in post-Revolutionary America (I think Jefferson was president …

The Vine: Ask The Readers Book-a-thon #7
March 3, 2010 · 10 Comments

I’m looking for a book I read in the mid-to-late 1980s.   It was a young adult book and involved a teen boy who has an amulet that causes a portal to another world to …