Neil Bar-or is a photographer, writer, academic and sometime athlete who lives on Manhattan’s Upper East Side amid designer boutiques, generic brunch joints and bitchy women whose sour temperament can be traced to the lingering pain of a botched facelift.

A native of Israel by way of Los Angeles, Bar-or, 31, first moved to New York in May 1997 after graduating from Boston University with a bachelor’s degree in communications. For the next several years, he plied his skills for clients as varied as the Body Shop, Adidas, Sprint, Heinz and the National Wildlife Federation.

An inveterate world traveler, elitist-in-training and irrepressibly snobby SOB when the mood strikes, Bar-or would seem to be a perfect fit for the Ivory Tower. And thus he left the workaday world in 2002 to pursue a master’s degree in international relations from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. That he would graduate with newfound expertise in the dark art of diplomacy is a rich irony, given that he barely gets along with even his closest friends. He received his degree in 2004 after a spell in the Middle East spent reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

His travels have also taken him to Central America, southern Africa, the Asian subcontinent and, on weekends, the wilds of Vermont, where he indulges his passions for downhill skiing, sumptuous food and high-octane drink. His bizarre and emasculating ardor for the music of Sarah McLachlan — a granola-fed chanteuse whose principal audience is comp-lit coeds with vegan-diet acne and dreadlocks in their underarm hair — seems to have cooled of late, but after a few of those drinks he can reliably be counted on for a breathtaking a cappella medley of her greatest hits.

A charming hybrid of West Coast lassitude, East Coast ambition and Middle Eastern combativeness, Bar-or is always ready with an unvarnished opinion. He can be reached at neil@plushcreative.com. Yeah, he’ll write you back.