Chris Bohjalian's Blog
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Mar.03.2013
I love it when presidential aspirants have what we in the media call a “town meeting” style debate. Those debates are not town meetings — and not simply because there are no school board officials there we can pretend are slow-moving zombies in an Xbox game designed for violent teens with 666...
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Feb.24.2013
A couple of weeks ago, I had one of the single most rewarding days of my life: More satisfying than even when I decided there was just no point in ever again frying a grilled cheese sandwich in anything but butter.
Here’s what I did: I brought 58 cans of paint from the dirt floor in my basement...
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Feb.17.2013
A broken record? Not so fast.When Apple introduced the iPod eleven years ago, it boasted that you could carry a thousand songs in your pocket. To put this in perspective, that was roughly a hundred record albums – or 65 pounds of vinyl and cardboard. To this day, I still use what the company now...
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Feb.10.2013
Valentine’s Day is coming, that day in February when we are supposed to buy or wear stripper lingerie to remember the life of a third-century Roman saint who died on the Via Flaminia. In truth, not all couples celebrate with thongs or chocolate or chocolate thongs.
As a public service, a few weeks...
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Feb.03.2013
Among the Super Bowl storylines we have followed this week with a tenacity we usually reserve for nipple slips and ingenue wardrobe malfunctions is this: The head coaches of the two teams squaring off later today are brothers. That’s right, after the nation has consumed somewhere in the...
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Jan.27.2013
There are a lot of reasons why I respect my 19-year-old daughter’s moral compass and one of them is her years at the United Church of Lincoln Sunday School here in Lincoln, Vermont. It was that hour she spent after church week after week over the course of a decade with such teachers as Lorraine...
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Jan.20.2013
When my daughter was a little girl, she would occasionally ask me to build her a fairy house: A home for tiny, winged creatures – not cluster flies – constructed of moss, a couple of twigs, and architecturally precise, large-scale post-and-beam framing. This was always stressful for me as a dad,...
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Jan.13.2013
It wasn’t one of those pitching duels for the ages — the final score was 4-2 — but it was two hurlers facing off who between them have an astonishing 615 Major League wins. It was likely Hall of Famer and Yankees ace C.C. Sabathia against Walter Johnson. Yup, that Walter Johnson: the Washington...
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Jan.06.2013
I went to the movies four times between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Here, as a public service, is all you need to know about “Les Miserables,” “Zero Dark Thirty,” “The Silver Linings Playbook” and “Hyde Park on Hudson.”
I saw “Zero Dark Thirty” with my wife and daughter, and you must see this...
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Dec.30.2012
When I was 13 years old, my parents moved from a suburb of New York City to Miami, Fla., and we moved there the Friday before Labor Day Weekend. I started school the following Tuesday at Palm Springs Junior High and the first thing we did at gym was take a physical fitness test.
There must have...
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Dec.23.2012
Every year in November or December I spend a few hours rereading one of my favorite Christmas novels: “The Joyous Season,” by Patrick Dennis. It’s the tale of a pair of Manhattan siblings whose parents’ marriage implodes over one Christmas in the mid-1960s, and over the years it has had me laughing...
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Dec.16.2012
The main reason I went to Beirut earlier this month was so I could see “The Dark Knight Rises” four more times at 35,000 feet. Four of the six flights I was on offered the movie as an entertainment option, and I figured if I watched the ending four times, I could finally decide once and for all...
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Dec.09.2012
Among the papers and documents and newspapers that Mark Redmond wedges into his briefcase is a Christmas card he received a few years ago. While the papers come and go, that card remains. Redmond is the executive director of Spectrum Youth and Family Services. On the front of the card is a colorful...
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Dec.02.2012
Christmas is fast approaching, which means that somewhere in the North Pole, Santa and his elves are loading his great red sleigh. One toy you will not see amidst the Barbie dolls, Skylanders, and boxes of Lego are lawn darts – a.k.a., Jarts. Lawn darts were the scud missiles of my childhood. They...
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Nov.25.2012
This is, to quote a classic Christmas ditty, the most wonderful time of the year – assuming, of course, that you have not been trying to find a parking space at the shopping mall since Friday. It has now been two full days since “Black Friday,” that moment each year when retailers and consumers...
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About Chris
Lincoln, Vermont’s Chris Bohjalian is the critically acclaimed author of 16 books, including eight New York Times bestsellers. His work has been translated into over 25 languages and three times become movies.
His epic novel of the Armenian Genocide, The...
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