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The 2024 Baseball Trivia Extravaganza: Take our mega quiz to test yourself!

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The 2024 Baseball Trivia Extravaganza: Take our mega quiz to test yourself!

When last we saw a Major League Baseball game, the Los Angeles Dodgers were celebrating a World Series title at Yankee Stadium. If you’re a trivia lover like me, you might have noticed a historical oddity: The Dodgers have now clinched a championship at three different versions of Yankee Stadium — the original (in 1955), the renovated original (in 1981) and the current one (in 2024).

Yet how many times have the Dodgers clinched on their home field? Just once, in 1963 — also against the Yankees, naturally.

Those kinds of connections are everywhere in this wonderfully zany sport. To score well on our annual holiday Trivia Extravaganza, it’s best to keep them in mind. Good luck with the nifty fifty questions for 2024, my baseball friends. You may need it.

(For the best results on mobile, you may want to take the quiz directly at this link.)

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(Top illustration: Will Tullos / The Athletic; Luke Hales, Nick Cammett, Mark Cunningham / Getty Images)

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Test Your Memory of These Classic Books for Young Readers

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Test Your Memory of These Classic Books for Young Readers

Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s tests your memory of books you may have read during your school days — specifically, the plots of much-loved novels for young readers. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books.

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Test Yourself on These Cartoons and Comics Adapted for the Screen

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Test Yourself on These Cartoons and Comics Adapted for the Screen

Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights cartoons and comic strips that were later adapted for the screen. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and some of their filmed versions.

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I Want This Jane Kenyon Poem Read Aloud at My Funeral

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I Want This Jane Kenyon Poem Read Aloud at My Funeral

You can hear a reading of this poem at the bottom of the page.

“The Pond at Dusk”: It’s a title that presents an image of calm, touched with the faintest shimmer of dread. You might picture a peaceful summer evening in the countryside somewhere, but you might also feel the tug of a somber metaphor in the word “dusk.” Night is falling, and this poem proceeds, nimbly and observantly, toward an unsentimental confrontation with death.

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Jane Kenyon in 1992.

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William Abranowicz/Art + Commerce

In one called “Twilight: After Haying” — there’s that dusk again — she writes that “the soul / must part from the body: / what else could it do?” What else indeed. This fatalism provides its own kind of solace. “The day comes at last.” The end is inevitable, inarguable, and there may be a balm in acknowledging that fact.

Not that “The Pond at Dusk” quite dispenses such consolation. It isn’t Kenyon’s style to offer homilies or lessons. Instead, she watches, with sympathetic detachment, standing back from the implications of her words and letting them ripple outward, toward the reader.

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This is not the kind of nature poetry that gazes in wonder at the glories of creation, taking the world as a mirror of the poet’s ego. Kenyon parcels out her attention carefully, removing herself from the picture as rigorously as a landscape painter at her easel.

Listen to A.O. Scott read the poem.

THE POND AT DUSK by Jane Kenyon

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The Pond at Dusk by Jane Kenyon 

A fly wounds the water but the wound 

soon heals. Swallows tilt and twitter 

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overhead, dropping now and then toward 

the outwardradiating evidence of food. 

The green haze on the trees changes 

into leaves, and what looks like smoke 

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floating over the neighbors barn 

is only apple blossoms. 

But sometimes what looks like disaster 

is disaster: the day comes at last, 

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and the men struggle with the casket 

just clearing the pews. 

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