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Jonathan Liu

By Jonathan Liu 6/19/12 7:10pm

Apple. (Courtesy Susan Goldman/AFP/Getty Images)

Tangy Apple: The Anti-Gaga Bad Girl Returns

Fiona Apple is not a girl. Come to think of it, she never was.

In our present cultural moment—when, out of opposite corners of YouTube, the two indomitable pop breakouts of the year are a quasi-teenager (Carly Rae Jepsen) discovered by Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez and a real teenager (Kitty Pryde) who raps about marrying Justin Bieber (and running over Selena, twice); when the one popularly unassailable part of Obamacare is the provision that allows keeping offspring medical dependents till age 26—that may be the most incongruous thing about her. Read More

By Jonathan Liu 1/03/12 5:54pm

Music

Play It Again, Sam…But Don’t Forget to Pay the 9.1-Cent Mechanical Reproduction Royalty

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

By Jonathan Liu 8/09/11 8:11pm

Changes

Kimmelman. Courtesy: Suren Manvelyan for Yerevan Magazine.

Times Art Critic Michael Kimmelman to Take Over as Paper’s Architecture Critic

“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

By Jonathan Liu 7/12/11 6:00pm

Art

Barclays Center rendering (2011), SHoP Architects.

Are Architects Performance Artists? A Conference Addresses 'Performativity'

“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

By Jonathan Liu 5/31/11 11:37pm

Art

Simon Dinnerstein Says: Lethem, Lahiri, Turturro and Others Write a Painter’s Gospel

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 Read More

By Jonathan Liu 5/03/11 11:50pm

Philosophy

Dinner With the Unknowers: The NYC Skeptics Break Bread

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

By Jonathan Liu 4/12/11 11:39pm

Dudes

It’s Raining on Men: Balls Deep at the Conference on Male Studies

“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 Read More

By Jonathan Liu 2/23/11 12:48am

Book Review

An Urgent Ode to the Urban in Edward Glaeser’s ‘Triumph of the City’

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

By Jonathan Liu 12/14/10 11:10pm

books

Bubble Nation: Inflated Could Be the Das Kapital of the Tea Party Revolution

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

By Jonathan Liu 11/30/10 11:25pm

Observatory

The ‘Radiolab’ Effect

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

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