Blog Posts

In February, I traveled to and from California three times in as many weeks (with a break in the middle to run a marathon. At the end of that red eye-inducing run, I decided that I could provide greater value to my colleagues, my wife, and myself right here in New York. So I put…

I received an interesting email from an Editor at a Major Online Publication last week. “We’re collecting a number of short pieces written by people that have been written about in the New York Times ‘Modern Love’ series,” it said. “We are basically looking for a response to the original Modern Love piece — either…

If I remember correctly (and I have a hunch my mother will correct me if I’m wrong), my Grandma (Mildred Lawrence) Bolster’s lineage traces back to Cork County, Ireland. My grandfather, William Bolster, named his Waterloo, Iowa-based women’s clothier Sweeny’s after his Irish partner. The store’s logo was a bright-green shamrock. Aaaaah, Ireland. Few places…

Frankly, my mind had been blown nearly half a dozen times already, and that was before I waltzed past the well-guarded barricades outside the Somerville Theater and bumped into U2 sound checking “Magnificent” just a few feet in front of me. First, there was getting tapped for the trip to begin with. It happened like…

The Proust Questionnaire has its origins in a parlor game popularized (though not devised) by Marcel Proust (1871–1922), the French essayist and novelist who believed that in answering these questions, an individual reveals his or her true nature. Since July 1993, Vanity Fair has devoted the back page of its magazine to the Proust Questionnaire,…

My brother, Christofer, willed me two things when he went off to college: a periodically empty house with an immediately unsuspicious mother (and, ergo, the license to throw frequent though reasonably-sized parties; there were no pizzas on the turntable at my house), and a handmade wooden lock box. Chris built the simple, stained-pine rectangle in…