Late last fall, Brian Mencher took the stage in the main performance space at the Living Room, the acoustic-rock incubator that hatched Norah Jones a decade ago, and a brood of well-regarded singer-songwriters since. He wore the uniform of the neighborhood (Ludlow Street) and season (the weekend before Thanksgiving): plaid shirt, vest, moderately distressed jeans, Read More
“The Times stands at the nexus of a whole bunch of forces,” says architecture critic Paul Goldberger, who left the paper (for The New Yorker) in 1997. “And in this job they’re all sort of acting upon you. The most difficult part of the job is this sense of obligation to do everything. To cover Read More
“We understand more than anyone else on the job site,” Gregg Pasquarelli told a second-floor conference room one recent Thursday evening inside the New School’s Arnhold Hall. His audience peered at him through a remarkable selection of eyewear—surely the most impressive array of cantilevers, arches and trusswork west of the East River. “We truly do,” Read More
Can a work of art be described as a religious experience at a time when, if not dead, God has at the very least ceded sole proprietorship over that sprawling diocese of human language that for centuries was used to necessarily invoke him?
Painted between 1971 and 1974, the three panels of Simon Dinnerstein's The Fulbright Read More
It's a well-trod truism of folk science that you can't prove a negative. But can you build a popular movement--or at least a well-received dinner party--around one?
"We probably should ask for them to bring the menus. People can order, and then we'll get started."
Massimo Pigliucci was planted at the Da Vincian midpoint of a Read More
"The Greatest Generation were men," insisted Gordon E. Finley, a professor of psychology at Florida International University. He was onstage last Wednesday in a second-floor meeting room at the New York Academy of Medicine, where the Male Studies Foundation convened its Second Annual Conference on Male Studies.
"The Greatest Generation was men who fought in World Read More
It's been said that Parisians romanticize the French countryside and the rural French deify Paris as fervently as New Yorkers dismiss the rest of America and real Americans disavow New York. Edward Glaeser, who was raised in Manhattan and is now an economist at Harvard, has made turning our provincials on to the metropole a Read More
R. Christopher Whalen is not a historian. He's not an economist, either, at least not in the peer-reviewed sense. This shouldn't preclude his writing a credible economic history, except that he's the scariest sort of non-scholar: the wide-ranging, not to say dilettantish, practitioner who thinks himself a polymath. That is, an anti-scholar.
Histories that depend Read More
Melissa Stanley went to school for music--or rather, Music Industry. The 26-year-old recalls "taking maybe one physics class in college, and that was it" for her formal science education. After graduation, she became a director of A&R and booking at Jezebel Music, a concert-promotion outfit for unsigned acts in Williamsburg. Then, at the office sometime Read More
For the academician planning a cutting-edge survey in Manliness Studies, fall 2009 provides a fine reading list. Start with two new novels from the modern masters of professional boyhood: Juliet, Naked, Nick Hornby’s latest adult-contemporary fable, features Apple ear-buds on its cover and, in its plot, a character called Tucker Crowe, described as “a reclusive Read More
Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachieverby Walter KirnDoubleday, 211 pages, $24.95
If you were out to assemble the Platonic ideal, the parodic prototype, of the Great American bildungsroman—wherein a middle-class, top-of-his-class lad from the Middle West is saved, then savaged by the North Atlantic and, specifically, the Ivy League—how might you proceed?
You’ll Read More
Sag HarborBy Colson WhiteheadDoubleday, 273 pp., $24.95
On this past January’s third Tuesday, Barack H. Obama was sworn in as president of the United States. On its fourth Tuesday, John H. Updike died at the age of 76.
I have no doubt the old man savored the gravity and relief of life in that first and Read More
Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism By Michael Burleigh Harper, 577 pages, $29.99
Nearly a decade has passed since this country declared war on terror, and still, I’m afraid to report, the definitive history of modern terrorism remains to be written.
But that’s not to say it doesn’t exist. Whatever consolation Read More
Whatever you think of his philosophy, or his celebrity, give Simon Critchley this: He’s a courageous writer. It takes an author possessed of true courage (or utter folly) to follow these sentences—“Philosophy begins, then, with … the cultivation of a love of wisdom. Philosophy is Read More
Getting to Death by Leisure, Chris Ayres’ fascinating and rather off-putting new book, will require a detour through death by combat. Bear with me.
Erich Maria Remarque, author of All Quiet on the Western Front, was drafted into the Kaiser’s Read More
