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!

31/31: Pariah
December 31, 2011 · One Comment
31/31: <I>Pariah</I>

Get me a beer, please.
It’s Sunday morning!
It goes with the spaghetti!
Pariah is in many ways a standard sexual-identity coming-of-age story. Teenager Alike (Adepero Oduye) (and it’s pronounced “ah-LEE-kay”…geddit?) is gay, and outside the …

30/31: Red Riding: In The Year Of Our Lord 1974
December 30, 2011 · 10 Comments
30/31: <I>Red Riding: In The Year Of Our Lord 1974</I>

I get to a point in a film-watching sprint where I begin to wonder if I can recognize a good film any longer. I’ll hit a C-minus/D-plus patch, which is usually only two or three …

The Vine: December 30, 2011
December 30, 2011 · 13 Comments
The Vine: December 30, 2011

After seeing the Vine readers find so many lost books, I’m hoping they have enough arcane knowledge to help with this. I’m looking not for a lost book, but for a lost joke.
My family …

29/31: The tin ear of The Iron Lady
December 29, 2011 · 8 Comments
29/31: The tin ear of <I>The Iron Lady</I>

“One must be brave if one is to take the wheel.” — Margaret Thatcher, teaching her daughter to drive, and the rest of us how not to write
Imagine the movies that the life of Margaret …

28/31: My Week With Marilyn
December 28, 2011 · 10 Comments
28/31: <I>My Week With Marilyn</I>

“…Actors.” — everyone
Marilyn Monroe and her myth: spare me. I just really don’t care. I have compassion for her, for what she must have gone through that opened that maw of insecurity and narcissism, but …

The Vine: December 28, 2011
December 28, 2011 · 68 Comments
The Vine: December 28, 2011

Backstory: childhood best friend and I have been good friends for about 23 years now. We were in preschool together, most of the same classes until we graduated high school, sleepovers, the whole “golden childhood …

27/31: Jane Eyre and the art of getting to the point
December 28, 2011 · 19 Comments
27/31: <I>Jane Eyre</I> and the art of getting to the point

Cary Fukunaga’s adaptation of Jane Eyre is gorgeous — and savvy. Fukunaga and adapter Moira Buffini understand what everyone’s come for, which is what everyone’s come for since the nineteenth century: a woman who is …

26/31: The Interrupters
December 27, 2011 · 3 Comments
26/31: <I>The Interrupters</I>

Steve James documentaries get you inside. By the end of a James film — Hoop Dreams, Stevie, the inexplicably non-shortlisted The Interrupters — you know the subjects like cousins. You care what happens to them, …

25/31: Midnight in Paris
December 26, 2011 · 10 Comments
25/31: <I>Midnight in Paris</I>

Woody Allen stand-ins work best when played by Woody Allen himself. Allen’s voice is so distinctive, and his heroes generally so him despite cosmetic name changes (Alvy Singer, Larry Lipton), that in other hands the …

24/31: Win Win
December 26, 2011 · 7 Comments
24/31: <I>Win Win</I>

Suburban-Jersey lawyer Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti), who seems to represent seniors exclusively, is floundering. The office needs a new boiler and a new toilet, a dead tree on his front lawn needs removing, he’s got …