Would you like to read a book with your best friends William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson and Lord Byron and William Blake and T.S. Eliot? How fortunate for you that this dream will soon become a reality. Thanks to the combined and industrious efforts of Kate McKean (agent of self) and Allison Adler (editor of self) at Holt, the day is not too far off that you will be…

Some of the greatest songs in the world all have conditional titles. Anything that starts with "If" is almost certainly going to be good. Here are two of Merle Haggard's greatest "If" songs, both of which coincidentally happen to be about December and Mondays and are thus particularly relevant to us. "If We Make It Through December" is a very good song; almost every song that is set at Christmastime but is not cheerful is…

'Tis the season for rejoicing -- but beware! One too few glasses of eggnog at the office party, or a little less champagne than you'd planned on having for New Year's Eve, and you might just find yourself waking up at your usual hour the morning after, feeling more or less like your usual self, with no excuse to stay in bed shivering and running hot and cold all morning, then throwing up blearily for…

Making Life Right When It Feels All Wrong

Cold Feet

The Mythic Tarot

How Men Feel

I Love You: Let's Work It Out

Men Who Can't Love

Since today seems to have sort of turned into an unofficial John Candy Day of Remembrance, let's close things out with John's unbelievably on-point Orson Welles impression on the old Billy Crystal show.

Juan Dulce (Spanish)

Giovanni Caramelle (Italian)

Džonas Saldainiai (Lithuanian)

キャンディ助音 (Japanese)

Jean Bonbons (French)

Johan Suikergoad (Dutch)

Previously: The best line readings in When Harry Met Sally. Planes, Trains, and Automobiles is the greatest movie about Thanksgiving ever made, and John Candy is one of the greatest things the human race has ever produced. He was a funny man, and he was a good person, and he often wore hats with furry ear flaps on them; today let us remember him. Neal (in dawning horror): Those aren't pillows. Car rental agent…

The sound of a door shutting is heard from below.

They do not move.

She waits, at the end of patience.

Half-dressed, comes to the door.

Gropes distractedly about, seizes HELMER'S domino, throws it round her, while she says in quick, hoarse, spasmodic whispers.

Laughing.

She holds her face up to his.

He stifles her.

As you know, The Toast takes an extremely high view of When Harry Met Sally, and would even go so far as to call Bruno Kirby the John Cazale of comedy (died too young, appeared in almost exclusively perfect movies). And yet there is a flaw. A single flaw, but a flaw nonetheless, and one that niggles at me more and more every time that I see it. Consider the following two scenes, both of…

Today is American Thanksgiving! You may have some feelings about it, or you might have already celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving, or you might just really like stuffing. Here is your place to talk amongst yourselves about that.

1. Issa Rae in Ever After. Dougray Scott is already perfect in his role -- and you know what, so is Anjelica Huston, so it would have to be just some sort of stop-motion capture situation where Issa Rae has to green-screen herself over Drew Barrymore and insert herself into the 1998 version. Not that Drew Barrymore wasn't perfect for that role, obviously, I just think that Issa Rae would look amazing in that butterfly-wing…

Previously: The Hunger of the Caterpillar and The Giving Tree. A mother bird sat on her egg. The egg jumped. "Oh, oh!" said the mother bird. "My baby will be here. He will want to eat. I must get something for my baby bird to eat," she said. "I will be back!" So away she went. The egg jumped. It jumped and jumped and jumped. Out came the baby bird. "Where is my…

I will go to my grave maintaining two things: that "Pancho and Lefty" is the saddest song ever sung in this wide and lonely world, and that Toby Keith is a congenitally underrated musician and person.

The best, the definitive version, against which all other versions are ranked: Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. 

One need not be a fan of Audrey Hepburn to consider it a moral outrage that My Fair Lady ends with a continuation of Henry Higgins' weirdly critical, sexless relationship with Eliza Doolittle (you can always pretend it's the Julie Andrews stage version, if that helps). No man who wears hats that unbecoming has any right to be such a prescriptivist in matters of dialect (what is that brown, shapeless mess he has on his head…

Dear Applicant,

Thank you for submitting your recent inquiry. According to our records, on September 27th, you interrupted a conversation with your request: "Look, if I could just play devil's advocate for a second here..."