» Mingling with the uncouples who gathered in Manhattan to celebrate the publication of Unmarried to Each Other: The Essential Guide to Living Together as an Unmarried Couple (Marlowe and Company) was New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead, who reported on the party in a December 9 Talk of The Town piece. The book’s authors, Dorian Solot ’95 and Marshall Miller ’96, met at Brown, Mead noted, and remain happily unmarried, running the Alternatives to Marriage Project, an advocacy group for the unwed-but-living-together. “Though both agree that everything is working really well as it is now,” Mead reported, “Miller said he did not rule out the possibility that things could end in un-unmarriage. ‘We joke that we can’t get married because we’ve written this book,’ he said. ‘But we never say never.’ ”

Not all the guests were as committed to unmarriage as Miller and Solot, however. Michael Oates Palmer ’96 told Mead he’d just ended a five-month unmarriage: “ ‘It was a relationship where I was hoping it would make the transition to not-being-unmarried status,’ ” he told Mead, “ ‘but she decided it should make the transition to not-being-in-a-relationship status.’ ” And Lockhart Steele ’96 said of his significant other, “ ‘I’m unmarried to her, but we’re not unmarried in Dorian and Marshall’s sense of it, . . . you might even say we’re just dating.’ ”

» Director Todd Haynes ’85 and producer Christine Vachon ’83, who are best known for their decidedly non-mainstream independent films, were on some very mainstream “Best of 2002” lists this winter and will be contending for four Oscars on March 23. Their latest collaboration, Far From Heaven, won several critics-association awards and was nominated for four Golden Globes. Time, Newsweek, and Entertainment Weekly all ranked it among 2002’s best films. » City of God (see opposite page), codirected by Kátia Lund ’89, made Reel.com’s top ten and was up for the best foreign-language Golden Globe. » At the Tony Awards, John Lee Beatty ’70 was nominated for set design in Morning’s at Seven. Kate Burton ’79 was nominated for her performance in The Elephant Man, and Laura Linney ’86 for The Crucible. The Crucible made EW’s best theater list, and The Sopranos, whose writers include Robin Green ’67, topped EW’s television rankings. » On the literary front, Dear Mr. President, short fiction by Gabe Hudson ’00 M.F.A., was among the Village Voice’s top picks. Newsweek put Blue Latitudes, by Tony Horwitz ’80, on its best-books list, as did EW, which also listed the novel Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides ’82.