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!

The Vine: September 8, 2006
September 8, 2006 · No Comment

Dear Sars,
I think you have touched on this subject before but I couldn’t find it through Google.If you can’t help me, I know your wonderful readers can.
I am getting married in a year and through …

The Vine: September 7, 2006
September 7, 2006 · No Comment

Hi Sars —
In the same situation myself. BCBG (online) has some awesome dresses in
the brown, deep purple, and sage areas. Lots have empire-type
sillouettes which can be ultra-flattering on thicker-waisted ladies.
They’re going to run about $280, …

The Vine: September 6, 2006
September 6, 2006 · No Comment

Sars,
My boyfriend and I stayed at The Cosmopolitan Hotel (http://www.cosmohotel.com/)last September and it was fine — the rooms were perfectly clean, if a bit on the small side, the hotel was quiet, and there was …

The Vine: September 5, 2006
September 5, 2006 · No Comment

Sars,
I have had similar trouble with this book.I read it as a kid too, but I had a vague idea of the name.Recently I tracked it down, only to find that it is out of …

Dork: The Other White Meat
September 4, 2006 · One Comment

Summer is drawing to a close, and what better time than the back-to-school season for an “exposé” on the mainstreaming of nerd culture? It seems like we see a piece like this in the New …

The Vine: September 1, 2006
September 1, 2006 · No Comment

Hi Sars —
Perhaps someone
could help me find this book?
I read it in high-school, grade 10 or so, and
I can’t recall the title or author but have thought about it often enough
that some 20 years later …

The Vine: August 31, 2006
August 31, 2006 · No Comment

I don’t know what Irn means by non-preachy, but a dear athiest friend of mine recently joined a group called SOS. In his words, it is “an organization for those who don’t want to put …

The Vine: August 30, 2006
August 30, 2006 · No Comment

I would recommend checking out the works of Mikhail Bakhtin,
particularly Speech Genres and Other Late Essays and The Dialogic Imagination.
He’s a Russian literary critic/theorist/linguist who may well have
pioneered a lot of the understanding of …

The Vine: August 29, 2006
August 29, 2006 · No Comment

Two ideas:
1) Smell. If, for example, a lemon doesn’t smell lemon-y, it isn’t ripe yet.
2) http://yourproduceman.com/. It’s goofy, but he usually explains how to pick a ripe whatever he is raving about that day. …

Lucille
August 28, 2006 · One Comment

Katie found Mike standing motionless in the kitchen of the cottage, grocery bag on his hip, staring into a corner of the ceiling. She reminded him that he was supposed to look up into a …