My favorite response to my announced plans to spent the last two weeks in and around Abkhazia came from a guy I work with: “say hi to Borat for me.” It’s funny, of course, because Abkhazia is nowhere near the real place that the fake Borat supposedly came from. But it is a gentle reminder, …
Author Archives: Nathan
From Russia, with Child Experimentation
Forget my headline. I actually have a huge sense of admiration for this man, Clifford J. Levy, after reading his story of throwing his children defenseless into the icy waters of Slavic education in the upcoming NYT Magazine. Here’s him setting the stage: My three children once were among the coddled offspring of Park Slope, …
Operation 9/11 Evasion
This weekend past was a successful one for our city of New York, inasmuch as we were not victims of a new devastating attack. And my wife and I celebrated our own little triumph. We successfully lied, evaded and obfuscated enough to keep our kids completely ignorant, at least for this weekend, of 9/11, of …
Enter Autumn
This day, the one after Labor Day, always has a bit of that fin de siècle feeling. One thing ends, another begins. This was true, of course, during my long and stuttering journey through schooling, right up until I (finally) finished college and then saw that the life of a working adult makes no differentiation …