Author name: Boris

MIDLIFE SPICES             “We are drenched in cynicism, psychologisms, explanations, but life is still there, its essence quite beyond spin, its cycle as surely set as it always has been,” the late, great novelist and gourmand Jim Harrison once wrote. I was thinking a lot about this line last fall. I was mired in what you’d […]

The Supreme Court decision on affirmative action has returned the spotlight to another tilt in the playing field: Legacy admission, the process by which certain schools, especially in the Ivy League, give preferential treatment (by a factor of six, in some accounts) to applicants who are children of alumni. It’s just another way for wealthy

NB: RIP AirbnbMagazine, which commissioned this essay for a group feature on… I forget now, in 2020, right before folding. (But they paid for it! Honorable, that.) Little did they know how good the pandemic would be for the business. But that’s another story. + The Law of Wisdom (Wasted) posits that two young men

NB: Spec-reported for The New Yorker‘s Talk of the Town, which… did not have the courtesy to reply. + In Western Montana, where wildfire smoke pollution has succeeded in doing what even winters do not – chase people indoors – Treasure Staters have been reading to make sense of the end times. Surely, it’s Revelations

NB: Invited to and then, like a misbehaving lout, kicked out of an anthology from Vintage on the occasion of the book’s anniversary. Perhaps fair given that I really don’t love this book, much as I scientifically admire it. I’ve perhaps never wrestled with an essay more. (Favorite line, though: “More than a decade after

NB: This wasn’t written for anyone — that I couldn’t imagine even where to pitch it is a sign of the sad scarcity of venues for short-form personal essay in journalism today. Travel + Leisure was kind enough to consider it, but it was altogether too dark for them, I’m sure. + I miss the

You could say I moved to South Beach because of the Betsy Hotel. That may sound counterintuitive—living in the same town as your favorite hotel would seem to make staying there unnecessary. But the Betsy, a colonnaded rarity of Georgian-Floridian architecture in Art Deco South Beach, is much more than just a very lovely luxury

It was when one character told another that Russian operatives had implanted a poison ampoule in her lover’s body, set to implode should she prove disloyal, that I began to feel like Occupied, the Norwegian political thriller whose third season has just started streaming on Netflix, had made the full turn to soap opera. Occupied

NB: RIP Tony Hoagland. My editor at The New York Times liked it, but “Verdict from colleagues: Would love to have something more straightforward from him on impending fatherhood–or really anything. Love his voice. But this is a little too muse-y and just not right for us.” This led to “My Daughter’s America — And

Tablet: “Hunting Pokemons in Moscow’s religious institutions? Consider the Jewish Community Center. After the arrest of a colleague for playing the popular augmented reality game in the Orthodox Church, a Russian TV reporter wanted to see how rabbis would react. Just as you’d expect: With a heavy-shouldered shrug. Though “it would be good to turn