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

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.

To be sure, the key to Fiona Apple, who plays the Governors Ball festival on Randall’s Island on June 24, will always be petulance. “This world is shit,” she told the world, after it gave her an MTV award now nearly half her lifetime ago. But, in hindsight, her petulance was—and is—closer to the operatic self-regard of, say, Anna Wintour or Bill Clinton than to the junior high narcissism, the Disney Channel insecurity, of all the Carlys and Mileys and Amys (to say nothing of the Justins) who have intervened since her brief reign on top of the charts.

She will always be the rail-thin, panty-clad 19-year-old slinking around the “Criminal” video, crooning “I’ve been a bad, bad girl” with preternatural husk. That was 1997. (Making Ms. Apple a still shockingly young 34, or closer in age to Britney Spears than to Alanis Morrisette.) But pop historians would be wise to keep her seminal come-on—or, rather, put-on—in perspective. This wasn’t a fallen girl, ruing the day she let boys and stardom and the Devil waylay her virginity, or seduce her into rehab. This wasn’t, like so much top-40 confessional then and now, a matter of cataloging the artist’s constitutional weaknesses; it was an acknowledgement of her own capacity, and taste, for malice aforethought.

Why a bad girl? Because she’d “been careless with a delicate man.” Why a sad world? Because “a girl would break a boy just because she can.” Watching HBO’s Girls—mechanically entranced, unable to evaluate the show on its merits or turn away for fear of missing the zeitgeist and dying alone—one can’t help but want to reach through the screen and knock a bit of “Criminal” free will into voice-of-her-generation Lena Dunham. (To say nothing of Lana Del Rey, today’s Fiona-aping naïf.)

Not that Fiona Apple’s ever been interested in anything so vulgar as empowerment.

Her debut Tidal (1996) was swept into the Lilith Fair wave; she played that acoustic-feminist festival (once), but wasn’t of it. We might say she failed the movement’s categorical imperative: Jewel, Sheryl Crow, Sarah McLachlan, even Erykah Badu and the Indigo Girls, were each reasonably universal models for modern womynhood and post-grrrl self-actualization. But neither genius nor madness has much truck with solidarity. If any half of the population wakes up one day and starts behaving and thinking like Fiona Apple, civilization would implode by noon. By pedigree—Upper West Side, musical theater, piano lessons—she actually recalls this era’s arch-self-helpist; indeed, when recordings surfaced in 2009 of the former Stefani Germanotta’s snoozy singer-songwriter days at NYU, simpletons threw around the phrase “Fiona Apple-type ballads,” pejoratively.

But Lady Gaga’s great crime isn’t “inauthenticity,” a Lilith-style square turned electropop freak in a craven bid for popularity. (As if someone could actually be born that way). Her fatal mistake was, rather, populism: Offering her performance-art metamorphosis as an emancipatory path open to every mildly oppressed, minutely talented girl and boy in glee club, Ms. Germanotta scripted her own obsolescence. In these days of participatory fandom, when stars seem compelled to demystify themselves 140 characters at a time, who can really pull off the aloof danger, the demigod caprice, that was the true mark of David Bowies and Graces Joneses past? Having domesticated her quirks and her traumas to adolescent archetype—having insisted on being special just like us—Gaga fates herself to spending years and millions never quite recreating her early outré magic. Meanwhile, after a six-year hiatus Fiona Apple last week reappeared in a video for “Every Single Night” wearing, for a few seconds anyway, an octopus on her head. Totally inexplicable, those seconds remain as unnerving and truly weird on repeated viewings as all five minutes of “Bad Romance” seemed at first blush.

Which is to say, empowerment, like enfranchisement, presupposes a lack. Even on Tidal, which had a few tired Lady Gaga-type ballads among the gems, Fiona Apple took her own peculiar power as given. That at the time this power was manifest most obviously in sex—“I decided if I was going to be exploited, then I would do the exploiting myself,” she said of the jailbait “Criminal” clip—would set in motion 15 years of misinterpretation. The error is basic. Not least among her greatest supporters, the tendency remains to read Fiona Apple precisely through the lens of a certain all-consuming psychic girlhood, what we might define as the condition (diagnosable in every age and gender) of a semiformed chrysalis desperately seeking agency. Thus, her ironic melancholy is taken for morbid sullenness; her ambivalence and intransigence, for others’ coercion; her literary intent, for literal comment.

Produced by the film scorer Jon Brion, When the Pawn … (1999) was nothing if not fully formed, a perfectly sequenced chamber-pop spectacle devoid of filler. It was also insanely funny, provided you were willing to drop the notion of Fiona Apple as sullen girl above all else. No one was, and so that album’s full title—90 words in doggerel verse—became a folly of self-seriousness to be indulged rather than the self-mocking, throwaway joke it was. Ms. Apple was still sad, mad, and deeply petulant on When the Pawn … but anyone who dismissed (or celebrated) her as a raw, stream-of-diary-entry songwriter simply wasn’t paying attention. Over Mr. Brion’s baroque instrumentation, she laid rococo lyrics dripping with whimsy: “My derring-do allows me to / dance the rigadoon around you” or “If you wanna make sense / What you looking at me for / I’m no good at math.” But in the darker recesses of the Internet, it was an out-of-context fragment ripped from the archly beautiful breakup number “Paper Bag” that became enshrined as the line of the album. By all accounts, “hunger hurts, but starving works” remains the battle-cry of whatever “pro-ana” forces are left; who would doubt Fiona Apple as the patron saint of anorexia nervosa, that hallmark of young female psychological fragility that conveniently lets everyone else moralize about young female bodies?

(These days, Ms. Apple looks even gaunter, but also age-appropriately womanly, with skyscraping cheekbones. Perhaps she always was, as she always protested, just skinny—the way various delicate men are allowed to be without attracting self-righteous comment.)

By early 2005, the world hadn’t heard from Fiona Apple in four years. That those years coincided with the Spears/Timberlake bubblegum peak merely primed us further for the inevitable interpretation. Hers couldn’t be the absence of a wizened misanthrope or obsessive perfectionist; this was a damsel under duress! So began the Extraordinary Machine affair. Ms. Apple, we learned, had re-entered the studio with Mr. Brion in 2002. The resulting follow-up was essentially complete in April 2003, but the record-label patriarchs were shelving it for lack of commercial appeal. Against Sony/Epic fans organized a “Free Fiona” campaign. Here, finally, was Fiona Apple as Rapunzel, her paucity of musical output equated with a lack of bodily autonomy. In March 2005, the entire album leaked online—incredibly polished for a bootleg, and also incredibly good, period.

It may take a congressional inquiry or at least a few Freedom of Information Act requests to get the whole story, but it now appears Fiona Apple was as much behind the delay of the third Fiona Apple album as any Sony suit. Given how magisterially brilliant the leaked record was—tracks like “Not About Love” and “Red, Red, Red” brought the orchestral drama of When the Pawn … to a new plane—this was difficult to believe at the time. Stranger still was her decision to completely re-record and re-sequence Extraordinary Machine for official release. Its new producer was Mike Elizondo, best known for work with Dr. Dre and Eminem; with some strings pulled out and electronics brought in, the result was murkier and more bass-heavy than the Brion version, but hardly radio friendly or different enough to make one forget the superior bootleg. (Mr. Brion found work in 2005 helming Late Registration, by avowed Fiona-fan Kanye West.)

Another seven years on, and Extraordinary Machine finally makes sense. Released on Tuesday by Epic (without incident), The Idler Wheel … marks out its predecessor—the one that actually made it on sale—as a classic transition album. The 23 words in its full title aside, Wheel … completes the de-Brionization of Fiona Apple. This isn’t an obviously auspicious move. After all, it was Mr. Brion’s carnivalesque maximalism that brought both the humor and the pathos of her songwriting to its mature form. But one now suspects that Ms. Apple already recognized in 2005 (or 2003) that the idiom risked being a dead end, and she risked becoming just the lead instrument on quirky soundtracks for nonexistent indie films. Indeed, if the Extraordinary Machine bootleg was a terrific Fiona Apple album, it was a career-defining Jon Brion one.

Co-produced with the percussionist Charley Drayton, The Idler Wheel … drops the strings, the horns, the pretty symphonic melodies. Recorded factory noises supplement Mr. Drayton’s array of organic beats. Ms. Apple’s keyboards remain, of course, but here you’re reminded pianos are as much percussion as anything else—hammers striking metal. Above all, it’s her voice that fills the vacated space, stretching, straining, simmering, seething. Phonology replaces phonographs. There’s always been a latent hip-hop element to Fiona Apple, and the new album finds her a lyricist as interested in the materiality of words—their physical, voice-box (or beat-box) production—as in their meaning.  

She has her favorites. “I am the baby of the family, it happens, so / Everybody cares and wears the sheep’s clothes while they chaperone,” she sang on the sly, twinkly Extraordinary Machine title track. The closest “Daredevil” on Wheel … has to a chorus is a multitracked Ms. Apple rumbling, “But don’t let me / Ru-in me / I may need a chap-er-one.” Each repeat of those last three syllables brings more relish. “Seek me out,” she taunts in the same song, “Look at, look at, look at me / I’m all the fishes in the sea.”

The effect is stark, and startling—petulance with a devastatingly adult punch.

Elsewhere, “Left Alone” is a moody free-jazz freak-out that wonders, “How can I ask anyone to love me / When all I do is beg to be left alone?” “Every Single Night” fills in the hypnagogic details the 19-year-old Fiona left out when she declared that she didn’t go to sleep to dream: “Every single night / I endure the flight / Of little wings of white-flamed / Butterflies in my brain.”

The Idle Wheel … might be called relentlessly experimental if it weren’t so alarmingly, alluringly immediate. Indeed, the woman who wrote “Criminal” in 45 minutes retains the knack for a pop hook, whatever her more protective fans may think. With its roiling repetition and tribal drums, album-closer “Hot Knife”—“I’m a hot knife / he’s a pat of butter …”—could easily be repurposed as a club hit; I thought immediately of Beyoncé’s “Girls.”

Fiona Apple may not be one, but a decade and a half into a bizarre career, it’s still her world.

editorial@observer.com

Beame & Mencher LLP

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, newsboy cap. “I play a nerdy instrument from my high school symphony, so I don’t talk about it,” he joked, running through his early musical c.v., VH1 Storytellers-style.

“What is it?” urged the committed late-afternoon crowd, about 20 strong.

“I call it the baritone, but some people say when it’s got the four valves, it’s the euphonium. Yeah, it looks like a tuba, but it sounds like a trombone.”

Joining Mr. Mencher onstage was David Beame, whose hair was a bit longer and curlier and voice slightly more adenoidal. He too spent over 10 years of his youth studying classical music—“but don’t hold it against me. I don’t even actually appreciate it that much anymore.” Mr. Mencher and Mr. Beame met as students in Florida, partnered up back in New York in 2007, and this fall have hit venues in San Francisco, Nashville and Los Angeles, in addition to their three sessions at the Living Room. According to their website, they also sometimes “tour” solo; David appeared at last year’s South by Southwest festival in Austin, and Brian has been invited to next year’s.

But Mr. Beame and Mr. Mencher aren’t a Brooklyn-based folk duo; they’re a Brooklyn-based law firm.

More specifically, Beame & Mencher LLP is, in Mr. Beame’s words, “a boutique law practice [that] represents creative and entrepreneurial people.” He clarified, with a soupçon of irony, “Usually that’s one and the same—creative and entrepreneurial,” and ran through their areas of practice: “recording agreements, publishing agreements, producing agreements, any kind of licensing agreement. Actors, actresses, films, TV, all distribution-type of agreements. Anything concerning the transactional aspects of entertainment law.” Major-label record deals they’ve negotiated have run to over $5 million.

“And recently we’ve expanded into food artistry,” Mr. Mencher added. “I have a background in cheffery and both of us love cooking”—enough to want to “bring some legal expertise” to the world of TV chefs.

Guitars and amps strewn around the stage went untouched; Beame & Mencher’s instrument would be a 90-minute PowerPoint deck. The professionals were their audience—musicians not yet established but far enough past aspiring to be initiated into the peculiar hazards, occupational and statutory, of their chosen craft. The Songwriters Law Seminar lasts three classes. (Tuition is $40 each, or $100 for the course.) The final session, aimed at songwriters who perform their own material, is called “Verse Three: Singer-Songwriters and Recording Agreements—Implications on Publishing.”

If Beame & Mencher were a boutique liberal arts college instead of a boutique law practice, it might have been “The Work of Mechanical Reproduction in the Age of Spotify.”

Indeed, the affable attorneys quickly turned rock-star dreams into a nightmare of Orwellian contract terms, Kafkaesque paperwork regimes and byzantine legal fictions hammered out with the advent of the player piano and barely updated since. A stream of semi-monopolies and quasi-government agencies spilled out in acronym and camel case: SoundScan and SoundExchange; Limelight and Harry Fox; ASCAP, BMI and SECAP, the three “performance-rights organizations” that together control essentially every music copyright in North America—and whose new members are the main student pool for Beame & Mencher’s seminar. (They’re the mysterious entities said to demand royalties from Girl Scout troops for singing “Happy Birthday.”)

Given the copyright violation wars currently raging in the art world—see under Richard Prince—the seminar had added resonance.

The first principles (and first slides) made sense enough. The average new pop song has two “bundles of rights.” The songwriter, typically in partnership with a music publisher retained to promote his catalog, owns the copyright to the musical work—Mr. Mencher called this song in Platonic form “the sheet music,” even if “you freestyle [it] straight into a ProTools rig” or just jot down lyrics on a scrap of paper. The copyright to the sound recording—the actual phonograph grooves, or ones and zeroes, or sound waves, that become the hit—belongs to the singer, with his record label. (Singer-songwriters, or performer-freestylers, get both copyrights, but were encouraged to think of them as separate beasts.)

Dolly Parton, he explained, owns the copyright to “I Will Always Love You,” the musical composition. Whitney Houston owns the copyright to “I Will Always Love You,” the sound recording on The Bodyguard soundtrack.

It was in discerning Dolly’s rights from Whitney’s that the bewilderment started. As the artist, Whitney has absolute control over the distribution and reproduction of her recording of “I Will Always Love You” for the life of the copyright; no one can sample it or press extra copies without working out a deal with her people. As the songwriter, Dolly’s absolute control is exhausted with the first commercial use—in this case, her own 1974 single “I Will Always Love You.” After that, anyone, including Whitney or a Whitney impersonator, has a statutory right to record Dolly’s composition in exchange for a “mechanical reproduction royalty” on units sold. The current rate, set by Congress, is 9.1 cents per song—which is, theoretically, what Dolly gets whenever you buy The Bodyguard album or the CD single. (Actually Dolly shares proceeds 50/50 with her publisher, less the latter’s expenses.) Dolly (and her publisher) is also entitled to “public performance” royalties every time Whitney’s version of “I Will Always Love You” is played on the radio, performed in a football stadium or sung around a campfire—this is what ASCAP, BMI and SECAP are around to track and extract payment for. To the disconcertion of the Living Room crowd, Whitney, as the singer, does not get public performance (call them radio-play) royalties, which go only to the songwriter. (Except when she does—more later.)

It was pop quiz time. “So, mechanical license: are we talking about a musical work or a sound recording when we talk about a mechanical license?”

Nervous chatter among the students. “Sound recording?” someone guessed.

Buzzer noise from Mr. Mencher.

Someone else from the back: “Sound recording?”

Another buzzer sound, and another answer: “Sound recording?”

“Remember, mechanical license.”

Finally, a voice in the front of the room, with very little conviction: “Musical work … ?”

“That’s right! That’s—one of two choices. So if you’re asking for the mechanical license, you’re actually asking for the license for the sheet music so you can go ahead and make a recording for yourself.”

This was inexplicable, but true: Whitney’s sound recording was, in legal terms, a “mechanical copy” of Dolly’s song. Anyone wanting to record her own cover version could go the U.S. copyright office and receive a license, in return for paying Dolly 9.1 cents per unit produced. In actuality, HFA, or the Harry Fox Agency, handles almost all mechanical-rights requests and payments for American music publishers; apparently, private-sector bureaucracy is superior enough to government bureaucracy to be worth HFA’s 7.7 percent royalty collection fee. But, came further questions: how mechanical is mechanical?

The compulsory license, Mr. Mencher said, “is only for a mechanical reproduction, and that generally looks like an exact replica of the song, although the arrangement could be different. If it’s a jazz song and you want to make it heavy metal, well you have that discretion within a mechanical license.”

Change the lyrics, however, and your version becomes a “derivative work”; the license will have to be negotiated directly with the publisher, who can refuse or name a price well north of 9.1 cents. (This may finally solve the mystery of why Michael Jackson or Britney Spears hits attract so many more speed-punk retreads than Weird Al-style parodies.)

The room remained uneasy about Whitney’s predicament: every interminable spin on 106.7 FM means more money for Dolly, but none for her.

Happily, Congress intervened (in 1995). Now, when “I Will Always Love You” is played on satellite radio or streamed from Pandora—that is, through “digital audio transmission” only, as opposed to terrestrial broadcast—Dolly collects royalties (via ASCAP, BMI or SECAP) and so does Whitney. Yet another organization, SoundExchange, has been set up to collect digital transmission royalties for artists, though how they survey every streaming service and blog and YouTube video is anyone’s guess.

But lest one start noticing a historical or conceptual pattern, digital downloads are regarded about the same as phonograph cylinders: your 99 cent download of “I Will Always Love You” on iTunes pays out 69 cents to Whitney’s record company. (That’s Apple fiat, not law.) The label gives Whitney whatever cut she negotiated in her contract (usually 14 to 18 percent) and pays out 9.1 cents—no more, no less—to Dolly and her publisher for the “mechanical reproduction” of the mp3.

At this point, the slides and instructors turned to the main lesson: negotiating a contract. Mr. Beame ran through the terms—variously draconian—to expect as a songwriter signing a publishing deal. He did the same for the artist singing a record deal. The singer-songwriter should, again, think of herself as two people—because, it turned out, the record companies will try not to.

Enter the ubiquitous “controlled composition clause.” Mr. Beame broke the news lugubriously: “A controlled composition is any song you write, or anyone in your band writes, or any producer that works with your writes.” Such self-created material would mean one person, or band, or business interest getting both Dolly and Whitney’s share of every “I Will Always Love You” unit. Typically, record companies cap their mechanical-reproduction payment on controlled compositions to 75 percent or less of the 9.1-cent statutory rate—essentially, if you play your own material, your singer half is expected to pay, out of sales or advance, some of the remit legally due the songwriter alter-ego. Worse, some labels will cover only 75 percent of the statutory rate, even for third-party songs, and many producers will insist on their 9.1 cents even if they’re close enough to the artist to be considered a “controlled composer.” And in the age of Beyoncé’s hoarding the prestige of honorary “co-writer” credits, some labels go much further.

Mr. Mencher, late of the euphonium, took over proceedings again, and began a wondrous Wagnerian march of scenario modeling and scared-straight arithmetic: “But the label says we’re only paying 75 percent on 10 songs. You want to put 12 songs on the album, good for you, but we’re not going to be responsible for more than 10. So they cap it and say we’re only paying 68.75 cents [on a $10 album] in the bank. We have to pay the four outside songwriters first—they’re 100 percent statutory rate. And that leaves 32.35 cents to [eight songs by the] songwriter that happens to be the artist. Or now, 44.5 percent of statutory rate.”

A hush came over the club, over which it was just possible to hear the cash-register gears of yet unknown terms. What percentage to the manager? What percentage to the lawyers? The session musicians? The entourage? (Indeed, the rush of Beyoncés and Katy Perrys claiming “cowriter” credits may yet be as much about protection and payback as quasi-rockist pride.)

“As sad as this may look,” a man in the crowd asked, “you still want a record-company contract because of the marketing part, right? Right? If you did this on your own, you won’t make this kind of money?”

It was a good question. Earlier Beame & Mencher had injected the seminar with bits of industry news: Universal had just come to an agreement to buy EMI, which if approved, would reduce the “major labels” to three. (Sony and Warner are the others.) That same week, the 19-year-old rapper Mac Miller became the first artist not signed to a major to score a Billboard number-one album since 1995—by way of Facebook, Twitter and free downloadable mix tapes.

The would-be pop stars eventually got up and floated out of the club in a haze. Near the exit, a long-haired Lilith Fair type struck up a conversation with an aspiring rap producer.

“I do jazz and piano. No hip-hop, though I do beatbox on one song.”

editorial@observer.com

Kimmelman. Courtesy: Suren Manvelyan for Yerevan Magazine.

“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 every exhibition. Every program. Every building, obviously. Every significant city-planning move … You realize every story you choose to write is also five important stories that go unwritten.

“People were reasonable when negative things were said,” Mr. Goldberger recalled. “What they didn’t want was to be ignored.”

Since 1963, there have been seven mayors of New York City, eight governors of New York State, nine U.S. presidents and four architecture critics at The New York Times. The longevity of its incumbents hints at the singularity of the office: they’ve shaped what counts as architecture to the masses—housewives and students, investment bankers and construction workers—who don’t consciously think about architecture until it shows up on their block. Like a Japanese emperor or the most imperial of those aforementioned pols—think Rockefeller Era, Giuliani Time, Reaganomics—the name of the reigning Times critic is easy shorthand for the fashions and passions of the epoch, and not just in buildings.

It’s a mystique that holds up, even in broadband, high-resolution, comments-enabled retrospect. Ada Louise Huxtable is credited with inventing architecture criticism at The Times—and thus the daily newspaper—and, as important, with introducing an adolescent city to historic preservation. “People know she’s an angry woman with a big mouth,” said a Madison Square Garden exec on Mad Men, in one of that program’s glibly ironic historical glosses. And indeed, Ms. Huxtable’s early pieces on the dismemberment of old Penn Station cut with righteous fury and no small amount of what we’d later call snark.

Yet what’s most striking about vintage Huxtable (at 90, she still writes regularly for The Wall Street Journal) is the absence of the atavism that, in guises sentimental and cynical, nowadays mars landmarking and “contextual” sensitivity. (See the “Ground Zero Mosque” imbroglio.) Ms. Huxtable liked distinguished old buildings not because they were old, but because they were distinguished. When writing about new buildings, she was a thoroughgoing functionalist, and her reviews are surprisingly exacting about loads, floor plates and dollars per square foot. The Huxtable Age was, we might say, invested in imparting “esthetic” rigor (as The Times used to spell it, without the “a”) to the aspirational citizens and corporations of midcentury New York—in explaining the purity of structure and concept that made, say, Mies van der Rohe and McKim, Mead, and White more like each other than their respective knockoffs.

By the time Mr. Goldberger inherited the mantle in 1982—they’d overlapped for several years before then, he working the week and she on Sundays—historical preservation of the old had extended, and transmogrified, into a historicism of the new. Where Ms. Huxtable had reliably dismissed embellishment as frivolity, the Goldberger Years sustained a serious conversation with the “post-modern” moment (as The Times used to render it, with a hyphen) of “Gothic” spires, “Romanesque” arches and “Chippendale” pediments.

The late Herbert Muschamp (he passed away in 2007) took over in the early 1990s, when both modernism and its discontents were fading from relevance. Wild, computer-aided form became its own economic function, and Muschamp celebrated favorites like the Bilbao Guggenheim with the florid prose and omnivorous interests that might best be called fin de siècle.

Nicolai Ouroussoff, a Muschamp protégé, has held the post since 2004. He announced his resignation June 6. A month later, The Times named his replacement, Michael Kimmelman, the paper’s chief art critic, who will be returning to New York from four years in Europe. Unlike his predecessors, Mr. Kimmelman, who takes the reins at the end of this month, doesn’t have formal training in architecture, or much of a track record as an architectural critic. He will continue to cover art.

Instant reaction soon appeared on the real estate website Curbed, via Twitter. “NYT to Architecture of NYC: Drop Dead,” opined Greg Allen, artist and widely read blogger at greg.org.

Added Amanda Kolson Hurley, the executive editor of Architect magazine: “So Kimmelman will be an all-purpose culture critic à la [Philip] Kennicott of WaPo. Architecture: you’ve been demoted.”

The designer Sawad Brooks wrote, “Might as well have named Judy Miller.”

“I’m keeping an open mind,” the critic and historian Alexandra Lange told The Observer.

“[Kimmelman’s] profiles of architects have been very good, but they aren’t criticism. But his hiring is insulting for the sense one has that The Times doesn’t think it is worth spending a whole salary on an architecture critic, and for the very old-fashioned idea that any educated person can do it. I’m not going to argue that you have to be an architect, but there is a body of knowledge, history, travel, reading that helps. Maybe Kimmelman has that, but it obviously hasn’t been a ruling passion.”

According to Julie Iovine, executive editor of the Architect’s Newspaper, “An effective arch critic is not a messenger from the occult, sometimes cultish, world of parametric modeling, interstitial planning, void filling, and impenetrable whatevers. But the critic does need to understand that stuff in order to better explain how architecture not only shapes the city but manifests our values, identity and legacy as a culture.”

But does the public still need the New York Times critic, in particular, to do all that?

For Ms. Lange, “the power of the Times critic job is in the fact that their reviews may be the only architecture criticism many people read. This is still true.” Yet when future generations consider the Ouroussoff Era, the defining text—assuming they still use Google—may be Alexandra Lange’s.

“Why Nicolai Ouroussoff Is Not Good Enough,” Ms. Lange’s February 2010 article for the Design Observer website, is a devastating takedown of the “slipperiness” of Mr. Ouroussoff’s arguments, the “lack of artistic ambition” of his prose and the cocoonlike isolation he maintains in “the floating world of the international architectural profession.”

A measure of the article’s effectiveness is how impossible it is to read Mr. Ouroussoff’s valedictory Times review of Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV Building—with its Beijing dateline, celebrity architect and insouciance to politics—and not see the talons of Ms. Lange’s dissent (“He’s slippery”; “He doesn’t care”).

Indeed, the dissent has become more like conventional wisdom, which puts additional pressure on Mr. Kimmelman: to fix a staggering brand. “Reading Herbert,” Ms. Iovine said, “was like riding a roller-coaster with a hot-house orchid,” while Ada Louise Huxtable “combined gold standard aesthetics … with a no-stone-unturned journalistic integrity and a deep-six knowledge of how things got done in NYC.”

Mr. Ouroussoff, by contrast, “was never a must-read and in that way lowered the bar.”

Or as Mark Lamster, an Architectural Review editor (and co-blogger of Ms. Lange), told The Observer in an email: “[Kimmelman] will need to stake out some critical territory for himself, a voice on the subject. …

“Ada Louise has a voice (acerbic defender of the city); Goldberger has a voice (the artful company man); Muschamp had a voice (champion of glamour). Nicolai, alas, has no voice.”

The most easily misinterpreted of Ms. Lange’s gripes is finally the most fatal: Nicolai Ouroussoff doesn’t sound like he’s writing from anywhere, besides the centripetal solar systems of starchitecture.

“A lot of people,” she explained, “thought it was retrograde of me to want the Times critic to write more about New York, and maybe it is. But I see [Chicago’s Blair] Kamin, [San Francisco’s John] King, [Boston’s Robert] Campbell, L.A.’s [Christopher] Hawthorne doing that, so it is not like a lost art.

“I want to feel the Times critic has been to Brooklyn,” she said. “Lots of times.”

There is, of course, a certain irony to the voices of the web demanding that a dead-tree journalist return to earth—or indeed, the five boroughs. Ironic, but historically sensible.

For Alexandra Lange and Julie Iovine, the deterritorialization of the Times architecture critic began immediately after the departure of Ms. Huxtable, with her indomitable knowledge of zoning laws, block-level history and City Council minutiae.

Naturally, Mr. Goldberger sets it later: “I think in Ada Louise’s time, and I hope in my time, the person in that job was a critical force—a very central presence in the dialogue about the future of New York. That’s less true today. … Herbert Muschamp and Nicolai Ouroussoff were both somewhat less interested in that and somewhat more interested in architecture as an object and artifact. … Whatever the reason, it is a very real loss.”

His successors, Ms. Goldberger noted, may have simply followed the general trend at The Times—that to survive, it would have to be a national, or international, paper. It’s perhaps a sign both of the success of that effort and of the prestige Ms. Huxtable’s original creation still commands that people in Beijing and Bilbao and Dubai and Detroit care what a critic in New York thinks about their built environment. Yet, at a time when scores of qualified Twitterers can publicly weigh in, in real-time, on the Times’s hiring decisions, what the world needs from its papers of record may be coming full (if imperfect) circle.

In other words, Ada Louise Huxtable brought worldly architectural literacy to a provincial readership; can the next Times critic bring the dense, on-the-ground realities of its province to a global audience—that is, the global audience?

After all, however cosmopolitan their makers, buildings ultimately have to live somewhere.

“There’s a worry now,” Ms. Iovine noted, “that someone who is known as an art critic—an appraiser of the object—will be tempted to also treat architecture as an object. It ain’t so! Especially right now—the idea of the starchitect is entirely passé. No one practices that way anymore. It’s over, done, good riddance.”

Wanted: intellectually brilliant, stylistically inimitable critic; must be sensitive to history, get along with the neighbors and come in under budget. If Michael Kimmelman doesn’t appreciate the pressures and passions of architecture now, he may soon enough.

editorial@observer.com

Barclays Center rendering (2011), SHoP Architects.

“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,” he reiterated. “We know more than the developer, we know more the contractor, we know more than the inspector, we know more than the guy installing something. We know a lot about all the stuff. It’s the integrator and the communicator role that’s the most important thing: We don’t build buildings, we make instruction sets for buildings.”

At a time when even flat-box furniture is morphed by amateurs into “Ikeahacks,”  has our civilization forgotten how to properly follow instructions—and defer to instruction-makers?

A principal of SHoP Architects, the burgeoning firm at work on Barclays Center and the South Street Seaport redevelopment, Mr. Pasquarelli was the keynote speaker at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s Teachers Seminar 2011. The theme of this year’s three-day conference was “Performative Practices,” which begs a bit of clarification. Borrowed from linguistics, by way of sociology, ethnography and much else besides, “performance” is perhaps better known as one of those terms of academic art whose very amorphousness—to the uncharitable, meaninglessness—is the intellectual and political point. And in a way, the advent of architecture-as-performance did free thinking from the entrenched, and perhaps as meaningless, rivalry between the formalist and functionalist. Is the “performer” in question the architect, the inhabitant, or the building itself? Yes.

Like many coinages of the 1960s, performativity is an ideal that seems just as free-associational nowadays—but that’s been astutely monetized, or should be. In Mr. Pasquarelli’s telling, architects must assert their parochial interests as “the last great generalist profession.”

“It’s about grabbing those territories back that have systematically been given away by our profession over the past 30 years,” he said at the conference. “For us, that is the core of performance-based design. Think about what the buildings do, how they work, how they’re put together. What are the politics behind it? What’s the finance behind it? What’s the technology behind it? How’s it going to engage a city?”

Mr. Pasquarelli’s favorite slide was a quasi-Venn diagram, without the productive overlaps: architects deal with clients and general contractors as would-be advisories, while outsourcing details—facades, fabrication, zoning, finance—to an orbit of specialist consultants. SHoP’s solution has been rear-guard vertical integration, morphing over 15 years from a five-person design firm to a boutique conglomerate with hands in planning, construction, software, and even real estate itself. (Developers are apparently apt to listen to architects that take equity stakes in their condo projects.)

Above all, SHoP is concerned with materials.

“I’m not talking about sitting down with your mechanical engineer, early in a project,” Mr. Pasquarelli said. “I mean actually, like, actually talking to the tinknocker who’s bending metal when you’re building a building and finding out how big are the sheets are that can fit on a truck, and what the turning radiuses are, what are the eight ways they can be clipped together.”

SHoP Construction is managing the fabrication of the Barclays Center’s rust-steel skin, cut from digital files, weathered in an Indianapolis warehouse, and tagged by barcode; SHoP Applications has unleashed an iPhone app so that “everyone from Bruce Ratner to the guy turning the screwdriver” can track the status of each of thousands of unique panels.

A drumbeat of opportunity—or countdown of crisis—animated much of the ACSA seminar.

“We are out ahead of the construction industry by about three or four years,” Mr. Pasquiarelli told the room. “But if we don’t grab those territories really fast, they’re going to grab them first and we’re going to get even more relegated to the sidelines.” SHoP, he insisted, was to remain “firmly rooted in the academic,” despite the branded subsidiaries, commitment to large-scale building, and general interest in making money. This wasn’t just playing to the bookish crowd.  Performance theory in the 20th century exploded architecture into the realm of the phenomenological, the discursive, the dramaturgical. Performative practices in the 21st seems to be about architects realigning themselves with the ancient and decidedly un-theatrical realities of engineering—while maintaining the self-dramatizing ideas (and language) of “capital-A Architecture.”

This language, of an exceptional tradition losing its “territory,” betrayed real professional pride tempered by severe vocational anxiety. Might architects really be at risk of irrelevance?

In a mildly controversial article this April, Slate critic Witold Rybczynski took to task the sort of dense, insular architecture speak—“assemblage,” “tectonic,” “spatiality”—favored by, say, participants at ACSA conferences. (Sample presentations at the New School event: “The Architectural Detail in Inter/Trans-disciplinary Practice,” “Historical Problematics of the Collaborative Divide.”)

Nineteenth-century architects, claimed Mr. Rybczynski, invented all manner of filigreed terminology to elevate themselves from mere builders. With their universalist and functionalist commitments—and unquestioned prestige—modernists swept away the linguistic ornament with jargon-free simplicity. After the collapse of modernism, “paper architects” moored in universities reinvented their practical discipline as high theory based on “arcane historical tracts and the writings of French literary critics in hermeneutics, poetics, and semiology.”

This account makes sense genealogically—to use a term as popular and despised as “performative”—but misses the special, incongruous charm of architectural overstatement over the last quarter century. The latest monograph from the leading light in post-colonial Queer Marxist semiology tends to suffer the tediousness of the inconsequential—however “radical” the argument, it’s not as if the author’s at risk of becoming secretary of the treasury. Meanwhile, Peter Eisenman spent the 1980s conceptualizing deconstructivist architecture with Jacques Derrida and the naughties building a stadium for the Arizona Cardinals.

In SHoP’s hometown, capital-A Architecture would seem to be more ascendant than ever. Surely this is the first time in history that the most significant New York buildings are being named—or branded, anyway—after their architects: see Nouvel Chelsea (100 11 Avenue) or New York by Gehry (8 Spruce Street). Puritans might blanch about the condofication (or in the case of the Gehry tower, high-end rentalization) of serious architecture, but the residential pretensions of the hyper-rich seem to be privileging design in a way eight decades of corporate benevolence maintained only fitfully, and temporarily. (Chrysler and Lever Brothers have long cleared out of their gleaming headquarters; unlike makers of soap and sedans, the financial-services industry hardly seems interested in the chimerical goodwill of an eponymous landmark.)

Look beneath the starchitect marquees, however, and Gregg Pasquarelli’s unease about architects’ ghettoization as merely “the people who make the pictures of buildings” seems more prescient. Linking the wild menagerie of high-profile, high-status Manhattan towers are a small number of faceless megafirms, tasked with translating the visionaries into concrete and steel. (SHoP was added to Atlantic Yards to do something similar, if converse: add a modicum of vision to Kansas City McStadium specialists Ellerbe Becket.) What does it mean for advancing—or arresting—the “performance” or “practice” of making buildings that Mr. Nouvel’s sleek 40 Mercer shares its architect of record, SLCE, with Robert A.M. Stern’s classicist behemoth 15 Central Park West and dozens of condo projects totaling some seven million square feet a year? Or that the ubiquitous structural-engineering outfit Cantor Seinuk is behind Mr. Gehry’s metallic waveforms at 8 Spruce, Herzog & de Meuron’s glass-wall cubism at 56 Leonard Street, and that most banal specter of un-architecture, 1 World Trade Center?

Developers value architects like never before— the “value-add” of name brand design is more tangible in the Condo Age—but this may have the ironic effect of further reducing architecture to just another consultant specialty. Skyline connoisseurs rejoiced when Rem Koolhaas, the architecture-speak icon who wrote Delirious New York, received his first Manhattan commission in 2007, for a whimsical, inverted-ziggurat on 22nd Street. By 2009, scandal-plagued developer Slazer Enterprises had quietly cancelled Mr. Koolhaas’s tower but was still touting his interior-design work on neighboring 1 Madison Park, the hubristic obelisk since foreclosed and still unfinished. Here was, literally, the architect as window dressing.

Of course, architects—even starchitects—eventually die (Mr. Nouvel is 65, Mr. Gehry is 82); will architecture live? The second day of the ACSA seminar turned, naturally enough, to pedagogy. Cornell architecture professor Kevin Pratt described his collaborations with computer scientists and engineers.

“In my mind it has to go to some basic fundamentals,” he said. “Like how does a computer work? How do you program it? What the heck is it doing? What are the basics of thermodynamics? It would be really hard for us to talk to each other if one of us didn’t know what an integral is.”

Mr. Pratt bemoaned his department’s recent abolishment of its calculus requirement. Parts of the crowd stirred with skepticism.

“Mathematics is important. It just is,” he insisted. “We need a common language…. For some reason, the language in architecture is the language of badly translated French continental philosophy, which I think is unfortunate.”

editorial@observer.com

Painted between 1971 and 1974, the three panels of Simon Dinnerstein's The Fulbright Triptych are a combined 14 feet long and seven feet high. They demand from even casual viewers a proportionately big reaction. Under the painting's spell, certain words spring inexorably to mind: rapturous and beatific, a monist revelation assembled from dozens of small-scale epiphanies; a summer shrine and relic offering the spiritually parched parishioners of New York art a site of pilgrimage and object of veneration. Such language has long since been drained of theological content--novels can be rapturous, dinners revelatory and pilgrims drawn to athletic halls of fame without tugging on long chains of signification that leave them cuffed to the hands of an angry god. With its overt symbology--a bearded man, a modest woman and a knowing infant stare back at us with the otherworldly gazes of Byzantine icons--this holy family, Jewish like the original, is dressed in the diaphanous plaid skirt, stripped bell-bottoms and work boots of late hippiedom; the child is a girl; the pastoral landscape outside isn't Nazareth but post-Holocaust Germany--The Fulbright Triptych doesn't let its secular admirers off the hook so easily. 

"I think it would take a certain kind of painting to warrant this," Mr. Dinnerstein said. "For instance, the painting by van Eyck called The Adoration of the Lamb, the Ghent Altarpiece. It's massive. It's all about parts of the Bible, about Adam and Eve and the Last Judgment. It has a big story--and what's the big story [in contemporary art]?"

Mr. Dinnerstein was sitting about 15 feet away from The Fulbright Triptych at the Tenri Gallery, where it will be on display until June 9, when it moves uptown for a three-month show at the German Consulate that opens June 16. (Its permanent home is the Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State University.) 

"Here, there is a big story," Mr. Dinnerstein said. "It's about art. About the making of art. It can't be a religious story. A lot of that has been shattered. People don't have the same unanimity of belief. But art is a religion--that's something. So I had a feeling this would work."

"This" is The Suspension of Time (Milkweed Editions, 360 pages, $35.00), also out June 16, an anthology that, by its publisher's reckoning, is the only full-length art book entirely devoted to a single work by a single living artist. In the artist's telling, how The Fulbright Triptych--so boldly figurative, with its family trinity surrounded by postcard prints of old masters--became the first recipient of such a treatment in an era dominated by abstraction resembled, in itself, a series of Old Testament coincidences.

In 2005, Mr. Dinnerstein found himself seated at a Chinatown wedding banquet next to Daniel Slager, then an editor at Harcourt; their wives were a consultant and the principal, respectively, at P.S. 150 in Tribeca, but the men had never met. In the midst of acrobats and fire-eaters--it was a Chinese-French wedding--and in a cab shared back to Brooklyn, Messrs. Dinnerstein and Slager discussed European literature (the latter's authors included Umberto Eco and Jose Saramago) and became fast friends. 

Mr. Slager eventually moved to Minneapolis to become the publisher of Milkweed. Familiar with that independent house's art output--and its new boss's admiration for his work--Mr. Dinnerstein proposed a volume on The Fulbright Triptych. Needing to get his bearings at Milkweed, Mr. Slager put him off for a few months, then a few more.

"A strange thing happened right around then," Mr. Dinnerstein told The Observer. "I teach a class in drawing and painting in my studio in Brooklyn. And in that class, just around when Daniel Slager was coming [to New York on a visit], I was talking about someone I know who is very well-educated but had never gone to college. I said that I thought that that was very interesting, very appealing, that someone self-educates." The autodidact, a former art student of his, became a professional mathematician after being admitted into Columbia's Ph.D. program without an undergraduate degree.   

"And so this woman in my class said, 'My husband never went to college. You'll never guess what he does.'" The long-time student was married to David Rosenthal, then-publisher of Simon & Schuster.

"So I called him up and he said present the book as an anthology of writing. Don't present it as an art book because it's really a book about writing and that will focus the whole thing. He said, 'Make up a wish list of writers you think would find this intriguing. Put together a list of 70 names and maybe seven or eight will respond. I'll help you.'"

Repackaged as Mr. Rosenthal's anthology, Mr. Slager and Milkweed immediately agreed to the project. The contributors list eventually ran to nearly 50, from film theorists and museum directors to Brooklyn literati (Jhumpa Lahiri, Jonathan Lethem), an actor (John Turturro) and the former head of the German Fulbright Commission, giving the finished product the feel of a set of gospels, that is, a bunch of people telling the same story, embellished by hearsay, exegesis, hindsight. In brief, Mr. Dinnerstein--a somewhat provincial American Jew, from the time when Brooklyn was still the provinces--moves with his young wife to a small town in Germany on a Fulbright grant to learn printmaking. Three years, an immersion in the northern Renaissance tradition and the birth of a daughter later, the Triptych is back in New York, and completed.

   Though the beard is gray and the thick brown hair largely gone, Mr. Dinnerstein, at 68, is instantly recognizable as the male figure in The Fulbright Triptych. He occupies the right panel. His wife and infant daughter--teacher Renée and Simone, now a noted concert pianist--occupy the left. The center portion features twin windows, looking out on a deep-perspective view of a nondescript German village. It's the table below, show in even more extreme perspective, with a glowing flat disk at its center, that summons and flummoxes.

Like a Hogswartsian real-estate agent, Mr. Dinnerstein began an impromptu tour of his painting. "If you're right here, you can take in your right, take in your left, but when you go closer than this, you're almost in the space." We moved toward the table, into the artist's studio, and Mr. Dinnerstein pointed out the tools of the printmaker's trade: burins, scraper, burnisher. Back "out" in the Tenri Gallery, Angela's Garden, the copper plate "made" on this table, hangs on a wall--more tangible than its painted counterpart, but not by much. 

"And you get even closer"--we move closer--"you can literally read a lot of the stuff, like letter-by-letter, word-by-word, and so forth. It's kind of like an obsessive's obsessive."

The postcard van Eycks, Vermeers and Seurats make visual and narrative sense from the middle distance--a young painter pasting up inspirations. Only with a nose to the paint does the rest of the paper ephemera, arrayed around the figures like halos, give up their secrets: Handwritten aerograms. Typed quotations from Wittgenstein and Moby Dick. Drawings by Renée's students--crayon, watercolor and ballpoint pen, all uncannily transposed to oil paint.

Most remarkable of all, two tiny photo-booth strips of the mugging couple, one with Simone as a toddler and one before she was born. They evoke the early church's notion of acheiropoieta ("icons not made by hand")--a run-around of the graven-images commandment that proclaimed true icons, like the Shroud of Turin and many even less plausible examples, weren't paintings but rather mechanical and spiritual reproductions of the subject. 

A cell phone rang to the tune of Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car." Renée was on the line, and wondering when Simon would be back in Park Slope. Either The Fulbright Triptych had come to life, or life had come, again, to the Triptych. Either way, the effect was celestial.

editorial@observer.com

"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 long, white-clothed supper table set for just over a dozen. The restaurant was, appropriately, Italian; the neighborhood, regrettably, Kips Bay; the time, just after 7 last Tuesday night. The chair of the philosophy department at Lehman College--and possessor of second and third doctorates in botany and genetics, besides--Mr. Pigliucci looks like the Platonic ideal, or at least the Wachowskian archetype, of a modern epistemologist of science: wire-frame glasses (silver), close-cropped hair (silver), round, surgical-steel stud in his left lobe (black).

Like Jesus, Mr. Pigliucci tends to gesticulate when welcoming or admonishing his dining companions; unlike Jesus, one of his hands is constrained in a cast, and he finds the idea of God and believers in God--not to mention homeopathy--insipid, violently ignorant and begging for forcible conversion.

The first point occupied a pre-dinner chat with his nearest tablemates (if not quite disciples), including Joel, a retired psychologist, and John and Daryl, heretofore strangers but, implausibly enough, both poets. Mr. Pigliucci's hand was recently operated on, and he told them he'd only taken one of the pain pills his doctor prescribed. He joked about making a fortune selling the rest on the street.

"What are they--Percocets, Vicodins?"

"No, it was--something better."

When he remembered they were OxyContins, the conversation shifted seamlessly, inexorably, to Rush Limbaugh. For New York City Skeptics, the sect that sponsors the monthly dinner, Rush Limbaugh is something like the Pilate of rapacious, idolatrous mass culture.

After the waitress took the drink orders--perhaps three-fourths white wine--Mr. Pigliucci laid down the ground rules and, so to speak, broke the bread, rapidly.

"So, the topic for this week's discussion is, 'Is there anything unique about human beings?' Not individual human beings, because you can argue easily that each one of us is of course unique--in the trivial sense of being unique.

"But the question--the other way to put it is--'Is there such a thing as human nature?' Is there such a thing as some characteristic or characteristics that distinguish human beings from the rest of the living world?

"Now, there's a long history of people saying yes, and an equally long history of people being wrong, no matter what the criteria that they suggest. You can go back all the way to Aristotle, who said that we are the rational animal. So maybe we are the rational animal, though recent research in cognitive science suggests we are more than anything the rationalizing animal."

The table laughed the especially heartening kind of laugh brought on by an inside joke.

After Mr. Pigliucci's breathless introduction, the Skeptics erupted with enough Big Questions to account for the average bourgeois New Yorker's last three group dinners--or 30 white wines. Hai-Ting Chinn, an opera singer, wondered whether considering oneself a humanist necessarily implied a belief in human exceptionalism. Computer developer Bill, co-organizer of the dinner, asked what the neuro-atypical--read: retarded--do to generalizations about species difference.

A definitional note: The "Skeptic" in N.Y.C. Skeptics is not a relational or situational term, any more than the "Believer" in The Believer is. "Skepticism" about anthropogenic climate change is a classic anti-Skeptical position, like believing in Hayekian neo-liberalism is a classic anti-Believer one.

It is also not, as The Observer discovered the hard way, what's known as "philosophical skepticism," the very ancient and very Matrix-y idea that it's impossible to know whether we actually know the things that we know. This type of argument tends to be considered indulgent, finicky and perverse by movement Skeptics; for instance, saying at dinner that one can't be sure if anyone else at dinner actually thinks the way he does--that is, like a human and not an automaton or elephant seal--is liable to draw a dozen or more simultaneous guffaws.

To the contrary, Skepticism starts with the feeling of being under siege by the nonthinking. It becomes Skepticism with the faith that there must be people out there who think like you do--that is, who think. 

"I got into Skepticism in the '90s," Mr. Pigliucci wrote in an email, "after I moved to Knoxville, Tennessee. I was freshly appointed assistant professor of evolutionary biology, and during my second semester there the Tennessee legislature tried to pass an equal-time-for-creationism law. I got involved with colleagues and graduate students, and pretty soon I was writing op-eds, giving talks and eventually writing books. It is an involvement that has immensely enriched my life and added meaning to it."

One becomes a Skeptic, he said, as a "reaction against superstition and unreason"; the mission of Skepticism is "to further the role of reason and evidence in our society."

For a movement that seems to attract a disproportionate number of scientists, technologists and artists, Skepticism is surprisingly indebted to stage magicians--at least the ones who admit that they're in the business of physical and cognitive illusion and not spiritual divination. James Randi (the amazing one) became the godfather of the movement in the 1970s by accusing the psychic Uri Geller of fraud; Penn & Teller's Showtime series Bullshit carries on the tradition today.

Yet the transformation of Skepticism in the past decade from a niche hobby debunking specific lunacies--telepathy, yogic flying, ancient astronaut theory, anti-vaccine activism, 2012 Armageddon--to something like a distinct, aggressive and almost messianic mentality has been a distinctly Net-roots affair. Perhaps no subculture supports more podcasts per capita: Skeptoid, Skepticality, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, Conspiracy Skeptic, The Skeptic Zone, Quackcast, Skepchick, to name a few.

In 2006, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP)--the preeminent UFO-, ghost- and goblin-debunking outfit founded in 1976--changed its name to the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, reflecting the movement's new ecumenism, and ambition.     

Back at the Italian restaurant, most of the table decided early on that language must have something to do with distinguishing the human from everything else.

Leslie, a psychotherapist, was having none of it.

"Whales can communicate 10,000 miles away," she said. "They have a larger vocabulary than human beings. It's a recent finding. They are now keying in to the code of the sounds of the whale, and they have a much wider range of communication patterns than we do."

Slack-jawed, the other diners tried to move on politely, but Leslie sulked and eye-rolled all night.

At one point N.Y.C. Skeptics regular Mitchell Lampert, about half her size, bravely and semi-seriously challenged her to "take it outside." Mr. Pigliucci does not appreciate side conversations at dinner.

The Observer caught up with Mr. Lampert at a Greenwich Village bar the next night. It was Drinking Skeptically, another monthly meet-up. The crowd here, about 15-strong, was younger and, among the males, much more likely to be pony-tailed.

Mr. Lampert runs an annual "open conference" (all topics are determined, and all discussions hosted, by attendees) called Skepticamp. This is distinct from the more formal Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism, which drew more than 500 Skeptics, including most of the podcast luminaries, to Baruch College last month. 

Apropos Leslie, Mr. Lampert said, a bit ruefully, "We don't ban people until they actually break the rules."

This gets at the core difficulty of the Skeptics movement, by all measures booming. Julia Galef, cohost of Rationally Speaking, N.Y.C. Skeptics' own podcast, said she made a conscious decision to move beyond the baldly paranormal and  to "try to influence science itself." Can you do that while remaining interested in reprimanding--not to say, shaming--the fuzziest of fuzzy minds? Put another way, how often does an enlightened New Yorker really have to come up against the messy particulars of superstition unless he's somewhat titillated by seeking them out?

Put another way still, what better way to attract kooks than to say you are constitutionally devoted to unveiling their kookiness?

Not that the Skeptics are entirely unaware of this themselves. "We're kind of like a deviant subculture," Larry Auerbach, another regular, explained over a beer.

He would know. "I spent my 20s in a cult. I'm now devoted to Skepticism because I want to understand how I ever could have believed the things I believed."

editorial@observer.com

"The Greatest Generation was men who fought in World War II. Those who survived, when they came home, they were given adulation—the war to end all wars [sic]—and they were given the G.I. Bill. They took the G.I. Bill, and they ran with it. ... And this helped to propel the economic prosperity" of the 1950s.

Indeed, it's no longer so easy to be male. If you're a frog, this is literally true—modern environmental toxins can actually turn you into a female. If you're a human, they've merely halved your sperm count since the 1940s and zapped 15 percent of your testosterone since the 1980s. Also, you've never been less employable, both absolutely and relative to women, and you now account for just 42 percent of college students, and falling. (Campus gender ratios may be a small boon for undergraduate men, but they're a giant economic impediment for menkind.)

Wednesday's program was called "Looking Forward to Solutions," which brings to mind a semi-repentant World War II collaborationist (a Dane, say) assuring the local Nazi, "but we don't have a Male Problem." But you do, you really, really do: such was the takeaway of four hours and six lectures of Male Studies.

"The point of thinking about the Greatest Generation," said Mr. Finley, is to "weaken all arguments about boys being inferior, about men being inferior, that they can't handle academic work, and so forth."

But if boys have been pushed (relatively) down by malevolent forces, might we at least give girls the credit for pulling themselves up? Of course not. "What made girls and women so successful," Mr. Finley continued, "was basically social engineering. Girls and women claimed they were being discriminated against. ... They got a lot of positive feedback, they got tons of resources, they got the educational system readjusted to their learning style."

One wonders, did the G.I.'s beat back Hitler because of all the positive feedback their soldiering got?

Boys, Mr. Finley affirmed, are being humiliated and tortured daily by the sight of T-shirts that say "Girl Power" or "Girls Rule." "The message is, you're not one of them, and you don't rule, and you don't have power."

For the uninitiated, the comical dotage of the conference's septuagenarian attendees (and speakers)—40 or so in the room, with "hundreds" more said to be watching via webcast—suggested a particularly snoozy Kiwanis Club chapter. Their politics turned out to be more like that of an exceptionally militant Nation of Islam temple.

That is to say, every manifest deficiency of the oppressed group is taken to be an artifact and construct of all-pervasive, willful injustice—socially engineered with conspiratorial intent. At the same time, there is one fully natural condition—so natural, in fact, that attempting to nurture away the difference is as morally repugnant as the aforementioned prejudice. Boys are, like African Americans used to be, set up by society to fail; they're also endowed by nature with special powers—the will to "breadwinning," for instance—simply incommensurable with girl-bodies.

The Black Muslims needed a cosmology of UFOs and mad scientists to fashion an internally coherent theology (and render external coherence moot). The Male Studiers have loud, media-savvy and youngish stigmatics like Guy Garcia, a journalist and former AOL executive who wrote The Decline of Men: How the American Male Is Tuning Out, Giving Up, and Flipping Off His Future. 

Mr. Garcia perhaps lacked the academic fig leafs to be an actual presenter at the conference, but he was a smashing emcee (or "moderator"). "When I was a staff writer at Time magazine in the '80s and '90s," he dangled, early in the day, "the magazines at Time Inc. that made the most money catered to males; the most respected editors at Time Inc. were men; the president and CEO of Time Inc. was a man. Within the course of five or six years, this completely changed. [Now] they don't know why men aren't reading magazines and what's disturbing is they don't care."

Was he saying a cabal of editrixes plotted a coup? (Incidentally, showing solidarity by demanding that more of your people be employed in magazine journalism seems altogether perverse.) Are wives actually hen-pecking husbands into dropping their This Old House subscriptions for Real Simple? Happily, the gentility (and clannishness) of quasi-academia means never having to say you're saying what you're saying.

"In the media," Mr. Garcia threw out a bit later, "men and testosterone are blamed for the failure of institutions and industries that they had built." Really? The media, as such, have scapegoated men, as such, for the Great Recession? Either he's a mediocre fabulist or a hard-core masochist: Even with mighty Time Inc. laid low by skirts, one doesn't have to only read Maureen Dowd.

"Emasculation," by the way, "is a national blood sport."

Mr. Garcia's greatest hit came some time later, an off-the-cuff theory on the scandal of male underemployment. "As we all know," he said, "when boys are growing up, the way teenage males define themselves is against their mothers. They want to be not-Mom. So what do you think happens when Mom works?"

Gray-haired, gray-mustachioed Tom Mortenson, from the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, was the first speaker proper. Capable of striking sanity, he unfolded the very real problems in about 10 minutes of charts, graphs and slow talk. Men have indeed been affected disproportionately by the most recent downturn, as well as longer-term economic trends that have seen jobs in agriculture and manufacturing move to the service sector. Unlike the old lifers in factories and mines, service jobs tend either to require a college diploma or to pay too little to raise a family on. And boys, for whatever reason, have been trailing behind girls in school performance—from kindergarten through bachelor degrees and perhaps beyond.

As you'd imagine, it's the whatever reason that brings out the cranky and crackpot in Male Studiers.

According to the men of Male Studies, people are constantly saying mean things about men. Which gets to the great paradox about the "discipline," and "masculinists" in general: As much as it is invested in (these are Mr. Garcia's words) the "strength, risk-taking and single-mindedness" unique to men and devalued in our "networking" or "collaborative" postindustrial economy, Male Studies imagines the average American male as having a psychological makeup closer to Lindsay Lohan than John Wayne.

For speaker Michael Gilbert, the author of The Disposable Male and a researcher at USC, even the intimation that girls might be equal—or, let's say, physiologically comparable—so scars young men that they no longer want to be "breadwinners." In the manner of gay marriage making weddings less awesome for everyone else, he thinks it a scandal that boys can't be the only ones to play sports now, or get bar mitzvahed.

"In the trendy '60s" Mr. Gilbert explained, Jewish feminists "begot the bat mitzvah. But girls already go through a whole series of powerful, female-affirming experiences. ... Regardless of their religion, boys don't get to flower or transform in the process of adolescence.

"Their bodies don't move to lunar rhythms—menstrual cycles. Jewish boys will not get a sweet 16. They won't be given away in marriage—which is a bride-centered ceremony—behind a mysterious veil. Jewish husbands will not get pregnant, they will not go through the tunnel of birth, they will not suckle infants at their breast. All these powerful, recurring, female-affirming passages aren't available to males."

As for gentiles, Mr. Gilbert believes high-school track and field was how the Greeks tested their young men (and how!), and the presence of women cheapens the experience. Likewise, foreign relations-even in Gilgamesh!-has always been a male vocation. His slide show ended with pictures of all the women involved in Middle East policy-from Hillary Clinton to some subconsular broad in Peshawar-and a delightfully open-ended query: Will the Arabs take us seriously? 

Note that nowhere is the claim that females can't do the job. Male Studies-as opposed to plain old manly pride-starts with the dispiriting idea that they appear to do most jobs better than males. But must unequal outcomes always imply "inequality," or even iniquity, in the moral sense? Yes, they're down on themselves, but how exactly are men being Jim Crowed or red-lined or denied suffrage?

"Go to any university Web site," Mr. Finley instructed the room, "and ignore the text and go to all the different pages. Count how many pictures of white males you see. ... Most of you will not need more than one hand." This reporter stopped counting at 64, but his alma mater's site is admittedly overstuffed.

Mr. Gilbert suggested even darker social control: Facing coed—but really, girl-centric-schools that care about things like "penmanship" and "sitting down and sharing values," "one in five Caucasian boys will be put on either Adderall or Ritalin during their schooling."

It's wondrous how, in certain crowds, "male" inevitably becomes a byword for "white." (Was the late Geraldine Ferraro-or Shirley Chisholm-right about what's really unspeakable in polite society?)

But what White Men! This dread demographic used to at least charm with rhetorical constancy: All we want is true color- and genital-blindness, a Western Civ that everyone can be proud of. No more. Allan Bloom, and William Buckley and David Horowitz would take the objective advance made by girls as yet more reason to abolish Women's Centers and Women's Studies programs from higher education.

The Male Studiers take it as reason to create Men's Centers that agitate for special privileges for men, because that's what they think—in 2011!—"gender" or "queer" studies does for ladies.

Men, Mr. Gilbert said, will obviously still dominate in "action fields"—"science, technology, the gaming industry and what's left of muscle work"—but the encroachment of women in what we might, crudely, call "women's work" (magazines, teaching, the humanities professoriate) threatens to demolish the whole evolutionary foundation of the species, which is "the eternal pair-bond bargain."

Put in other words, even if women are simply more capable at everything, they must accede to a sort of affirmative action for men lest the latter lash out for wont of things to do. "We know what happens," Mr. Garcia warned wanly, "when men have no hope—they turn to violence." (Women, you'll remember, already get to menstruate.) 

When a break was called, the degradations to the gender only continued. A sign informed that there were "ladies lounges" on the second, third, fourth and fifth floors, but just one men's room, on the ground level. Given the composition of the crowd, and the size of everyone's prostates, and the wideness of several stances, this made for very intimate waits at the urinals.

Back upstairs, foundation director Edward M. Stephens was reciting a plea straight to the webcast camera. "Today, as I stand before you, I would like to ask for the first million dollars. ... A million dollars would simply give us the tools to expand what we've done here [in] the direction of the creation of the body of scholarship necessary to reverse ... the international epidemic of the decline of men."

A grant from the Lily Endowment is already funding pilot Men's Centers on 14 college campuses-including, most notably and aggressively, at Wagner College on Staten Island.

After the bathroom break, the panel's only woman, Marianne Legato of Columbia Medical School, presented the only original empirical natural science of the day, about why men die so much earlier than women. Hers was also the only presentation that did not suffer a PowerPoint mishap.

Next, an ironical British ad man named Michael Wilcox explained his agency's "Wear the Pants" campaign for Dockers, with the look of someone who'd grossly misread an invitation. No, Mr. Wilcox answered a questioner, he did not think that ads depicting men being struck in the groin were one of the culture's most pernicious and ubiquitous evils. Another panel member asked him whether the anchor in the Dockers logo was a penis.

From the back row, looking at the sea of shiny pink scalps, it was easy to chalk up the whole scene to a category error: Someone mistaking the biographical decline of a man—namely himself—for a historical Decline of Men. Yet, strange as it may sound, grown men still have influence—if only on not-grown men—and should perhaps not be cut the slack reserved for the subjugated and infantilized.

Mr. Garcia concluded the conference with the story of an email he received from a young man. All his life, this young man wrote, he felt different, out of place at home or school. Then he read Mr. Garcia's book and the problem was clear—a society that "has deeply betrayed the modern male."

The young man, Fabio Botarelli, sent Mr. Garcia a poem, and Mr. Garcia read it out loud, wiping away a few tears in the process. It ran for about a dozen stanzas and was called "The Plight of the Modern Man": "The plight of the modern man/ Curtails the yang ambition/ For if a man says that he can/ He's mocked into submission. Nothing he does is ever right/ His own society hates his guts/ No matter how he tries to fight/ He won't escape this prison rut ..."

What is to become of Mr. Botarelli? Despite the poetry and the correspondence with men like Mr. Garcia, the boy doesn't seem entirely lost to learned helplessness. Just graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, he has a job in real estate, a head full of brown hair and, one suspects, the first inklings that what's for him just a phase becomes, in adulthood, a lifestyle.

"I especially took a half-day off from work to come to this," Mr. Botarelli told The Observer. "But I told them I was going to a creative-writing class."

editorial@observer.com

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (Penguin Press, 352 pages, $29.95) is provocative enough as a compendium of gee-whiz studies on development, housing and demography; we learn, for example, that it takes $100,000 in tax breaks to create one job in Detroit, where the average house is valued at $82,000. But Mr. Glaeser also pitches Triumph as a definitive apology for the urban writ large. He meanders through Shogunate Edo (Tokyo), Abbasid Baghdad and Athens in the fifth century B.C., places where the hard numbers of his stock and trade are hardly available. These detours are meant to undermine what Mr. Glaeser considers a deep-seated animus toward cities, afflicting even such progressive icons as Rousseau, Thoreau and Gandhi.

This purported anti-urban bias is, befitting its pastoral interests, rather full of straw. Who would deny that "cities, the dense agglomerations that dot the globe, have been engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace"? Who could possibly believe that the solution to third-world poverty lies in "plac[ing] our belief in rural life"? How could anyone falsify-or confirm-the claim that when human beings de-urbanize (as after the fall of Rome), "knowledge itself move[s] backwards"? 

But look past the rhetorical flourishes, and you see an ambivalent verdict on post-1960s urban policy: It is often the actors most philosophically "urbanist" in intent that are the most deleteriously anti-city in effect. Mr. Glaeser brings us, in striking detail, a gated subdivision in the Houston outskirts called "The Woodlands." The city dweller's inborn cultural revulsion to the place is the stuff of any number of Sundance dramas: the sterility of the McMansions, the moral vacuity of the micropolitics, the ecological nihilism of the SUVs. But the appeal of such prefab townlets—one million people have moved to the Houston area since 2000—has little to do with culture; the Sun Belt beckons because urban California and the Northeast have radically distorted the market for any city's most crucial commodity: property.

The old canard that New York real estate is expensive because Manhattan is an island is, well, a canard: "It doesn't take more land to add an extra story to a high-rise, so the lack of land can't explain why Manhattan prices are so much higher than the costs of adding an extra story. ... In America's expensive coastal regions, housing supply is restricted not by lack of land but because public policies make it hard to build."

Once the untamed capital of architectural phallicism, New York now has the nation's most absurdly specific zoning laws, with piranha community boards to match. Houston has none at all. You cannot believe that vertical New York is a superior model of urban development to Houstonian sprawl and remain supportive or neutral about codes that, in the long- and medium-term, effectively limit traditional city centers to the very rich and very poor. "Affordable housing" is a numbers game of growing demand and artificially constricted supply: Adding a hundred penthouses might impede a neighborhood's "character" (an upper-middle-class problem if there ever was one), but it'd make housing cheaper overall.

Numbers are hard, cold things. Still, humanists do their cause a grave disservice by yielding the ground of analytical rigor to the developers. To prod his caste's squishy left-liberalism of feelings over systems, Mr. Glaeser is a self-conscious extremist about the failures of American zoning and historical preservation. But, of course, Mr. Glaeser likes old American cities, and ancient European ones, too.

His laissez-faire prescriptions for development-roughly, architecture freed from the dictates of social engineering-thus have higher purchase for the global boomtowns that will decide our fate as a species. Salvation, if it comes, will be a skyscraper. Having emerged in the 19th century, the majestic avenues and uniform, filigreed facades of central Paris might justify that city's long-standing aversion to height-since 1974, restricted to 83 feet. But why do restrictions in Mumbai, "one of the most densely populated places on earth," limit buildings to "an average height of only one-and-a-third stories?" Certainly not for architectural splendor. The squat skylines of Mumbai represent a dangerous disjuncture between today's frenetically entrepreneurial India and the pastoralist leanings of a newly independent India influenced, ironically, by then "fashionable ideas of English urban planning." In short, "Limiting heights didn't stop growth; it just ensured that migrants had to squeeze into less space."

If Mumbai threatens to become a Houston with dysentery, other remnants of the British Empire offer a more salutary model. By building vertically and "taxing" the use of public goods with such measures as downtown congestion charges, Singapore and Hong Kong were able to burst from third to first world while remaining walkable and, more or less, affordable. That these 20th-century success stories were city-states-where the national was coterminous with the urban-leads to one of Mr. Glaeser's more supple insights: In any country with multiple, nested layers of sovereignty, NIMBY-ism becomes more than the ad hoc grievances of individual citizens but rather a structural constraint on political possibility.

The challenge of this generalized, institutional NIMBY-ism grows in step with the realization that the planet is both promiscuously interconnected and finite. For all its representative appeal, American federalism may simply be unequipped for our moment. When local governments shave 10 stories off a Manhattan condo or mandate a 2-acre minimum lot size for some Westchester hamlet, they reduce the infrastructural and ecological burden on their jurisdictions. But if the endgame of such restrictions is to encourage the marginal resident to leave the Northeast Megalopolis or Silicon Valley to new construction in Houston or Phoenix with many times the carbon footprint, the net effect on their constituents, as citizens of the planet, is sure to be negative.

He may not be the lone voice defending cities he imagines himself to be, but Mr. Glaeser is a defender uniquely unsentimental. The city is a means to an end, and when one outlives its purpose, our interventions should work on behalf of its people, not its material and affective memory. Triumph expels countless statistics, but the most shocking is also the most familiar: After Katrina, urbanists proposed spending $200 billion to rebuild a New Orleans in decline long before the storm. This amounts to $200,000 for every household in the metropolitan area-a figure that might rebuild lives elsewhere in the country and world if not spent on rehabilitating a conglomeration that "lost its economic rationale long ago."

Triumph of the City is, oddly enough, anything but triumphalist. The city is a delicate, miraculous process, it argues, and sustaining it is an act of measured, even counterintuitive reserve. I'm not sure if this satisfies. Mr. Glaeser's most strident passages involve the environmental parsimony of urban living-again, a fact not nearly as unappreciated as he suggests. (Anyone who's waited for a late-night G train knows that his lifestyle taxes our geological and moral resources less than most any other American's.) In a marvelous riff, Mr. Glaeser compares the environmentalism of former London mayor Ken Livingstone—who successfully imported Singapore's congestion charges—with that of his country's most profound dolt: Prince Charles, whose love of nature runs toward fox-hunting, boutique organic farming and faux-medieval villages.

And yet Charles-poor, imbecilic Charles-has, in pet-project Poundbury, a positive, and normative, vision of human habitation: a village people drive to with inexplicably winding pedestrian roads and chain stores housed in camp re-creations of Tudor barns. This is, of course, the crux of New Urbanism—an overwrought facade of city living self-importantly implanted into the endless sprawl. Mr. Glaeser is a scion of the old urbanism, the natural evolution of cities as opposed to the self-reference of cityness. But this means embracing Platonic Athens, and Haussmann's Paris, and speculative New York, and authoritarian-gonzo Dubai as refractions of the same urban impulse. Unlike suburbia or the New Urbania, the real city doesn't have an obvious physical or social end point, and it is both the laudable honesty and fatal difficulty of Triumph of the City that it doesn't try to give it one—to give us the formula of a perfected urbanism.

The city, alas, is what we make of it, and what it makes of us.

 editorial@observer.com

Histories that depend on the "practical"--commonsensically populist, tangentially hyper-technical, or both--tend to fly defiantly against ivory-tower consensus, then promptly off the rails. One thinks of the retired Royal Navy submarine commander Gavin Menzies, offering his facility with nautical charts and general able seamanship as authority enough to claim a Chinese fleet reached America 70 years before Columbus. Or Immanuel Velikovsky, the psychiatrist who interpreted ancient Near East myth, principally the Book of Exodus, as a record of Earth's catastrophic near-collisions with neighboring planets. Or, for that matter, Fred Leuchter, the notorious gas-chamber builder-turned-Holocaust denier.

Mr. Whalen is hardly a crank on this level. But the former Bear Stearns banker and managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics--a consultancy and bank-rating agency not unlike a psychoanalyst, executioner and celestial navigator--is just as invested in the heretic prestige of overwrought contrarianism. Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream, his omnibus treatment of American monetary policy from 1776 to the present, is a swaggering, incisive work, full of derision for the effete and ineffectual conventional wisdom he tends to call "the history books." What official volumes he's referring to is unclear, but they can't be above secondary-school-level: to wit, "FDR is lionized in many history books while Hoover and the Republicans are demonized. The truth is ..." Closer to the point: "Since most economists have never taken risk or traded securities in a hostile market environment ... [i]t may be unfair to criticize [them] for failing to understand the true precursors of the Great Depression."

Elsewhere, Mr. Whalen block-quotes the well-worn Teddy Roosevelt speech extolling "not the critic [but] the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood. ..." He continues, apropos of very little, for 12 lines.

The copious block quotes happen to be where one first suspects something like the lax--or rather, proudly insouciant--evidentiary standards of the true cranks. Hundreds of endnotes and a four-page bibliography notwithstanding, much of the history of Inflated draws on the words and facts of a disconcertingly limited, and often plain disconcerting, miscellany of sources. Its account of the politics of the early republic, for one, rests heavily and rather tenuously on David McCullough's John Adams. More problematic is the unabashed reliance, for the New Deal years, on Herbert Hoover's "tidy and beautifully organized memoirs." Elsewhere, the errors abound. Alexander Hamilton was not "of New England mercantilist stock." (As the general reader will vaguely recall--and then look up to confirm--Hamilton was born on Nevis in the West Indies and made on another island, Manhattan.) To take another example, Daniel Patrick Moynihan was not, contra Inflated, a "Rockefeller Republican," even if he was in the Nixon administration.

Mr. Whalen uses one nontextual source in his nearly 400 pages, but it's more tertiary than primary: "Richard Whalen observed in discussions about this book that FDR's decision to leave the gold standard 'was about keeping people out of the streets.'" Richard Whalen, born 1935, is R. (for "Richard") Christopher Whalen's father.    

AND YET FOR all the historical lacunae, for all the threadbare evidence and inexplicable filial piety, Inflated is a difficult polemic not to take seriously, as both a terrifically brazen popularization of an arcane topic and a distillation of the spirit of the age. In a time of extremes--in feelings and deeds--the crank becomes something like a prophet.

Is Inflated the Das Kapital of the Tea Party revolution? Mr. Whalen's meta-historical formula is--whatever its weak points as credible argument--nothing if not elegantly dialectical. On one end, we have "the American dream," never positively defined, but easily inferred as basically individualistic, localist and antiauthoritarian (whether the authority is the state or the private elites), to the point of conspiracism. Mr. Whalen doesn't really share this atavistic furor toward finance qua finance, but he understands it. He nicely explicates the Jeffersonian, then Jacksonian, mistrust toward central banking, and the sort of country it left, once the charter of the Second Bank of the United States was allowed to lapse in 1833. Namely, one in which the money supply was so illiquid and decentralized--with notes from private state-chartered banks accepted at one's own risk--that, for most of the 19th century, America's was "a barter economy."

Money was a moral issue--which we might describe as policy pursued against all practical or utilitarian concern. As his last presidential act, Andrew Jackson promulgated the Specie Circular of 1836, which required payment for government land (recently confiscated from the Indians, naturally) in gold or silver, and promptly caused the Panic of 1837. The impetus for the executive order was concern over the contravening national impulse in Inflated's telling: what we might call the American pipe dream. For Jackson, paper money fed rampant speculation--the sort of American delusion in the availability of something for nothing that was to find its apotheosis, Mr. Whalen reckons, in the Gold Rush, which saw thousands literally trying to dig wealth out of the ground. By the turn of the last century, gold had become the problem for populists like William Jennings Bryan, who argued for a "bimetallic" currency backed by silver as well. For this new populism, government inaction became the sign of elite conspiracy.    

As one might expect, Inflated is less sympathetic to the pipe-dream view of the state as guarantor of positive freedom--that is, welfare broadly conceived. But he recognizes it as no less grounded in moral sincerity. The unholy synthesis--let's call it the 20th century--arises when politicians, acting on no deeper moral basis than the next election cycle, turn fiscal and monetary policy toward a sort of simulacrum of the old rugged individualism, conjured into being by the state and propped up with ever escalating private and public debt. Thus, homeownership predicated on government guarantees and wanton speculation backstopped by "too big too fail."

Mr. Whalen's heroes are fighters--Teddy Roosevelt, trust-buster yet pro-business libertarian--and engineers--Herbert Hoover, who literally was one. His rogues are alchemists: Abraham Lincoln, who funded the Civil War by printing greenbacks and decreeing their universal acceptance as "legal tender"; Franklin Roosevelt, who upon taking office in 1933 immediately seized all private gold from "hoarders" in exchange for $2 billion of newly printed, unconvertible bills; and Richard Nixon, who finished F.D.R.'s work by withdrawing from the postwar Bretton Woods exchange-rate mechanism, thereby devaluing the dollar and destroying the last vestiges of the gold standard.

Mr. Whalen has been a tenacious critic of deficit spending (that is, printing money) since the early 1990s, often suggesting, for instance, that the Federal Reserve be abolished. Why his analyst's outlook gets its magnum opus today should be obvious--indeed, a YouTube search for "fiat currency" returns a library of cartoons and slide shows that suggest hard money has replaced 9/11 as the ground zero of American paranoia. At stake seems a basic fear of meaninglessness, of signifiers proliferating without anchor. In the moral universe of Inflated, the antagonists of Marx's day--the worker, laboring for a wage, and the capitalist, turning labor into commodities--are compatriots against monetary nihilism, which is poised to devalue wage and capital alike.  

Either America comes to grips with its profligacy, Inflated concludes, or the world will violently force us to, as the dollar recedes from its predominance as reserve currency. Like everything R. Christopher Whalen writes in this mostly smart, entirely self-satisfied book, he doesn't exactly convince, but, in the tradition of the best crank histories, he sure as hell scares.

editorial@observer.com

"I can't remember if they played the entire 'Musical Language' episode, or if it was just one segment ... but my coworker and I were just in awe. I think that was the turning point for me. Both of us became WNYC members that day, and I ordered both of Diana Deutsch's CDs, and I eventually found a copy of her textbook, The Psychology of Music."

Dr. Deutsch, a UC San Diego professor who's pioneered research into cross-cultural music perception and cognition and was on the air that day, is the sort of slightly whimsical academic--biostatisticians of bee colonies; pathologists in possession of famous historical tumors--Radiolab has adopted as its own. Yet for listeners like Ms. Stanley, secondhand access to the whimsy of the lab comes twinged with regret about the limits of the life they've chosen.

"I was always obsessed with music, but at 17 years old I had no idea that people were even studying the science behind music, or the way it affects people. ... When I heard the 'Musical Language' episode, it just opened up my eyes to this whole other world behind musicality. I began to read more and more about it. If my teachers had been as engaging as [Radiolab hosts] Jad [Abumrad] and Robert [Krulwich], I would probably have a completely different life right now."

Hoping eventually to make that alternate, scientific life happen, Ms. Stanley is in the meantime working on a play, with her friend and fellow diehard Erin Smith, based on research recounted in the Radiolab episode "Stress."

The Radiolab effect on Gen-Y cultural production is widespread. In Edinburgh, Scotland, Jez Burrows, a 24-year-old designer and illustrator, was inspired to organize a collective art project called "In Radiolab We Trust," proceeds from which went to WNYC.

"I became very conscious," Mr. Burrows said, "that this was a program I was getting a huge amount out of--mentally, creatively--but I was yet to contribute anything in return. At the same time, I was aware of a lot of designers and illustrators who were fans. ...  So I asked four friends to create a piece of artwork inspired by an episode of their choosing--I provided one, too--and then sold them online."

The first printing, of 50 sets, was gone within a day, and the images soon found their way onto official tote bags and T-shirts. A new set of five is planned for release this month--courtesy of five new artists.

"It's funny," Mr. Burrows said of his success drawing artists as well as buyers. "The vast majority of the artists I know seem to spend a lot of time listening to podcasts. It used to be This American Life that was the touchstone, but more and more I'm hearing Radiolab."

In August, it was likewise Radiolab--and not This American Life--heard over the radio as Mary-Louis Parker tossed a croquet mallet (and murder weapon) out her car window on the season premiere of Weeds.

A September episode of Radiolab, "Falling," nicely captures the show's aesthetic appeal, and its appeal to the aesthete. The episode comes in the form of eight rapid-fire, free-associational segments: A neuroscientist has subjects free-fall 150 feet into a circus net to study their sensation of "slowing" time. A girl describes falling in, and out of, love with a prosopagnosic (face-blind) boy. Researchers analyze police reports of cats falling 8 or 10 stories and landing on their feet. Physicists struggle to answer why we fall, and fall more often as we age. The story of the first woman to clear Niagara Falls in a barrel. An evolutionary explanation for hypnic jerks. Walking as a form of controlled falling. What it feels like to fall in a black hole.

As you'd imagine, smiles ensue. But Radiolab is more than just a post-ironic, earnestly clever refashioning of findings for the literate and curious not apt to subscribe to Nature or The Lancet. What seems like dumbing-down harbors revelation: To listen to enough Radiolab is to see that scientists haven't simply replaced the theologians, the metaphysicians and the social critics as posers and answerers of the biggest questions. They've also become, in a time of gene-splicing and hadron-colliding and psychopharmacology, our true avatars of creative expression, the last radical artists left.

RADIOLAB IS A program only ostensibly about science and scientists. At a deeper level, its interest is in limning the full varieties of human wonder, while serving as a real-time chronicle of the triumph of Science.

"To tell you the truth, I hate science," Mr. Abumrad said. "The rigor you have to go through to be a scientist would drive me crazy."

When he started Radiolab in 2002, the subject matter wasn't strictly science, nor was the format settled at all. Each week, the show would air think pieces by Mr. Abumrad and other young NPR producers, often thematically--if tendentiously--linked. Thirty-one episodes ran that first year, from "Death Penalty and the Prison Economy" to "Race Relations, the Power of Pop, and the History of Rhythm 'n' Blues." Today, MP3s of this period are dug up and exchanged by fans like passed-down artifacts from the years just before one's parents met.

Radiolab took on its present form in 2005, with the arrival of Mr. Krulwich, a veteran science reporter for PBS and ABC News as well as NPR. To his 30-something co-host's experimental mélange of curious topics and more curious sounds, Mr. Krulwich, now in his 60s, brought a calming, erudite avuncularity, and the banter between the two soon became the most edifying bit of intergenerational male bonding on your radio dial.

With the on-air team in place, the weekly anthology of hodgepodge documentaries was sculpted down into immaculately edited seasons of five episodes each. The subject matter narrowed in scope, but broadened in outlook, to hour-long meditations on, and titled, "Time," "Race," "Diagnosis," "Sperm" and so on.

Without the pair ever really planning on it, research scientists became the main guests. "Science just seemed to be the place where really big ideas were floating to the surface," said Mr. Abumrad. And Radiolab, begun as a limited local series, turned into a premiere civilian springboard into scientific waters. The show is heard on more than 300 NPR stations. But radio itself is only a sideline--the real audience is online, where WNYC can whet listener appetites with short releases between episodes. With some 1.8 million subscribers, the Radiolab podcast is the first you'll find listed under "What's Hot" on the iTunes Store's Science and Medicine page.   

Of course, popular science has always been, well, popular, as the ubiquity of New Yorkers like CUNY string theorist Michio Kaku and Hayden Planetarium director Neil deGrasse Tyson attests. In fact, Radiolab features many of the same popularizers as a Discovery Channel or a Discover magazine, including Mr. Tyson and the Columbia professors Brian Greene and Oliver Sacks; it often seeks out more obscure experts but doesn't shy away from the popularizers of the popularizers (Malcolm Gladwell, etc.). What's unique about Radiolab is its popularizees: a devoted fandom less of suburban dads and rec-room tinkerers than of creative-class strivers like Ms. Stanley tuning in via white earbuds on the subway to underpaid jobs in galleries and design firms, on movie sets and in publishing houses.

"THIS SHOW IS a conversation between science and mystery," Mr Abumrad said. "You're right at the edge of what the science can tell you. Which to me is as much about, like, magical thinking and weirdness and poetry as the science itself."

In the studio one afternoon this fall, Professor Marcello Gleiser's thinking, however magical, was resisting an easy transition to poetry.

The interview, on the subject of symmetry, became a precisely orchestrated witness interrogation. Mr. Abumrad played the enthused and slightly callow investigator, quick to express wonder and eager to propel the discussion forward in intuitive hops. ("So, you're a self-hating physicist, then?") This made Mr. Krulwich a Scully to the younger man's Mulder: Soberly and systematically hitting the mileposts of Mr. Gleiser's latest book, he outpaced the author himself, once prompting his partner to interject, "That's interesting, but I want him to say it."

The prepared-cop-winging-it-cop routine has nothing to do with the hosts' personalities off the air--where Mr. Abumrad brims with insights on "departicularization" and the "liminal"--and just barely resembles their personas on it. But this unseen Radiolab--this play at getting "him to say it" himself--is the key to everything. At base, Mr. Gleiser's book, A Tear at the Edge of Creation, argues that the superstrings, unified fields and theories of everything he and his fellow cosmologists have spent decades pursuing amount to crypto-monotheism. It is a story of his conversion to heresy. In the professor's live recounting, it's also, to borrow the thermodynamic term, a hot mess--ponderous, imprecise and more than a little bit silly.

The nadir of his "radical new vision for life in an imperfect universe" came with a left-field anecdote: He's used software that doubles either the left or right side of his face to achieve perfect symmetry, and the results were unsettling. Thus our sense of selves, and human attractiveness, rests on minute imperfections. But, Mr. Krulwich protests, haven't numerous studies shown that we find the most symmetrical faces the most beautiful? This impasse was never really settled.    

Later in the afternoon, Messrs. Krulwich and Abumrad would do another interview, with the Cornell mathematician Steve Strogatz--like Oliver Sacks and Brian Greene, a regular guest, who knows the best way to explain the prisoner's dilemma amusingly and economically for NPR. But it's the relative mass-media virgins like Mr. Gleiser that really demonstrate the ambition and grandeur of Radiolab's project. When and if the 80-minute Gleiser conversation sees the light of day--a Symmetry/Asymmetry episode is planned for the winter--it will be pristine, flattering and likely three or four minutes at the longest. With a total staff of eight (including hosts and interns), Radiolab's bespoke, microbrewed construction may be what really sets it apart: Episodes take months, sometimes years, to come off, and there are perhaps a half-dozen active topics in play at any time.

A lot of time is spent on sound. Mr. Abumrad and his fellow producers work in a sonic idiom unlike anything else on the air or on the Web. The ingenuity of a scientist like Diane Deutsch or Steve Strogatz isn't simply told with an astutely edited interview; it's formally instantiated in the noises of a more familiar sort of creativity. New voices float in and out of scene, often before they're identified; accounts of field and lab work are enveloped in a stylized, hyper-real ambience.

"Sound design is what wakes me up in the mornings," said Mr. Abumrad. "There's the sense that these ideas are a little bit destabilizing--they bring you to a place where you're between what you know and what you don't know. ... A little weird, a little alien, definitely seductive and somehow on the edge: The sound is meant to evoke a kind of landscape just beyond the bounds, this sort of dreamy space."

The result turns the shock and awe of a guest's discovery into our own, deeply felt if not exactly understood.

"There'll be strategic silence and then no silences," said Mr. Krulwich. "There'll be periods where it's just back and forth and then periods when you hear someone talking for a long time. All those things are not accidents; there're about whatever's being said. And then the way it parses through is--and this is composer's logic--you keep surprising the audience. Keep a person alert below the level of understanding."

But the immense skill of these compositions may best be witnessed in the reactions of those decidedly above the level of understanding. Despite the radical cutting and remixing, a half-decade of Ph.D. guests have been almost universally pleased at the aestheticizing their science received on Radiolab.

For Mr. Abumrad, this comes down to his artistry emerging organically from theirs. "Herbert Spencer [the English philosopher] had this idea that if you recorded someone talking and you removed the words, essentially what you have is a series of musical gestures, contours of pitches rising and falling," he said. "If you take those sounds and amplified it, what you'd have is music. So in essence he's saying music is contained within human communication. So I think of the sound design as somehow locked within the things we record. It's just choosing the sounds--amplifying some kernel inside it. Whatever they're talking about should give birth to the sounds, based on their ideas."

SCIENTISTS AND SCIENTIFIC discovery can materially alter the course of any human life with an authority and rapidity never seen before. At the same time, American secondary-school students have fallen to 29th on a recent OECD survey of scientific literacy in 57 countries. In 1975, the United States was second only to Japan in the ratio of natural science and engineering degrees to the college-age population--a measure of the technical skill level of a workforce. In 2005, it was 21st out of the 23 countries surveyed.

A complex of forces--specialization and success putting ever more distance between scientific truth claims and the critical faculties of non-scientists--threatens the return of a certain kind of Victorian pseudo-reason. Indeed, if it's Darwin and 600 pages of The Origin of Species that is now remembered for revolutionizing the modern mind, it was then one Herbert Spencer, coiner of the phrase "survival of the fittest," who made metaphors of the vagaries of natural selection into ideas cultured intellects could wrap themselves around: "social" Darwinism, race and class as subspecies, eugenics and population hygiene.

Is Radiolab an unwitting heir of this tradition? Might unlocking the music within distract from and distort the real meaning of science--which, unlike today's music or poetry, has the power of life and death and truth? To be sure, WNYC is not alone in the dangers of, in the words of Mr. Abumrad, "dragging scientific ideas kicking and screaming into the narrative world." (Consider all the journalists who fell in love with Harvard's Marc Hauser and his evolutionary view of ethics, since found to rely on methodological chicanery and outright fraud.) But as the smartest and supplest of the draggers, Radiolab has an outsize potential to empower or deceive.

Ms. Stanley, the Williamsburg concert planner, has heard enough. She's decided to become a neuroscientist of music, a quarter-life change that will first mean getting a second bachelor's degree.

"It will probably be the toughest thing that I will have to face," she said. "I don't have any money; I won't get very much aid; and my family is not entirely on board with my plan. But I know it is what I have to do. ... I'm not going to give up on my dreams. I will figure it out."

editorial@observer.com