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!

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 …

23/31: Kansas City
December 25, 2011 · 8 Comments
23/31: <I>Kansas City</I>

Watching Kansas City for the plot is probably not the best way to enjoy the film, for two reasons. The first is that the plot is primarily an excuse to take the audience on an …

The Vine: December 23, 2011
December 23, 2011 · 45 Comments
The Vine: December 23, 2011

I have a culinary question for the readers. My diet is probably around 25% popcorn. I’m shoving fistfuls of it in my mouth for dinner at least three times a week. I make it on the stove …

22/31: The Woodmans
December 22, 2011 · 4 Comments
22/31: <I>The Woodmans</I>

The Woodmans is a really interesting movie and also an uncomfortable mess, much like one of its subjects, and I don’t quite know how to go about reviewing it, or even describing how I reacted …

21/31: Albert Nobbs
December 21, 2011 · 7 Comments
21/31: <I>Albert Nobbs</I>

Albert Nobbs has two big secrets. One is that he’s socking away money, farthing by painstaking farthing, under a floorboard in the servant’s quarters, at the hotel where he works as a butler.
The other, and …