-
May 3, 2024 | 
tracksontracks.substack.com | Peter Baker
For a long time this was my official song for moving on: onward, upward, into my next chapter. This was partially because of the rancorous opening lyrics (Oh, get me away from here, I’m dying / Play me a song to set me free), but equally because of their juxtaposition with the jangly, jaunty music. This person, whoever they are, is trapped, stuck — but that’s not the whole story. Motion feels possible. I first heard the song in 2001. I was in high school in central Pennsylvania.
-
Mar 28, 2024 | 
nybooks.com | Peter Baker
“Today, the fifth of November, I shall begin my report. I shall set everything down as precisely as I can…. I don’t expect these notebooks will ever be found. At the moment I don’t even know whether I hope they will be. Perhaps I will know, once I’ve finished.” Already, before we’ve finished the first page of the Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer’s novel The Wall, we see that someone wants to write down what happened. There are obstacles in their way: memory is imperfect, precision impossible.
-
Jan 9, 2024 | 
architecturaldigest.com | Mayer Rus |Peter Baker |Tessa Watson
From the beginning, there was a meeting of the minds among architect Alexander Liberman of AML Studio and his clients, television director/producer Jesse Bochco and his wife, production designer Rae Bochco.
-
Dec 13, 2023 | 
newsbreak.com | Peter Baker
By signing up for our newsletter, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy
-
Dec 13, 2023 | 
newyorker.com | Peter Baker
This poses an interesting challenge for fiction. For sci-fi writers, driverless cars have long been a supremely efficient shorthand for dramatic change, an effective way of immediately grounding a story in the future, where things are different. The Czech American physician and author Miles J. Breuer’s 1930 novel, “Paradise and Iron,” is set largely on an island where most technology works without human input.
-
Jul 28, 2023 | 
newyorker.com | Peter Baker
It’s this period in emo history, often referred to as its “third wave,” that the music journalist Chris Payne takes up in “Where Are Your Boys Tonight?: The Oral History of Emo’s Mainstream Explosion 1999-2008.” He starts with an amusing methodological caveat: “It’s worth noting that approximately zero of the bands covered in this book—or the ones that came before them—owned up to the ‘emo’ tag” during the years when they were most popular.
-
Jul 7, 2023 | 
newyorker.com | Peter Baker
The book, titled “a, A novel,” was published in 1968. It slaloms in and out of coherence and feels like the most stressful party ever, full of squabbling, striving, self-consciousness, and exhausted sadness. The “a” of the title referred, apparently, to amphetamines, which explains a lot. But it just as easily could have stood for “Andy.” No one familiar with Warhol’s methods will be surprised to learn that there was only one name on the cover: his own.
-
Apr 16, 2023 | 
pressherald.com | Peter Baker
Daniel Knowles hates cars, and he wants you to hate them too. Or, to put a finer point on it, Knowles – the Midwest U.S. correspondent for the Economist magazine – hates what cars have done to the world, and especially to our cities. His new book, “Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It,” shows how they pollute the air, inefficiently consume enormous amounts of natural resources, take up too much space and kill and injure too many people.
-
Mar 28, 2023 | 
washingtonpost.com | Peter Baker
Comment on this storyCommentDaniel Knowles hates cars, and he wants you to hate them too. Or, to put a finer point on it, Knowles — the Midwest U.S. correspondent for the Economist magazine — hates what cars have done to the world, and especially to our cities. His new book, “Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It,” shows how they pollute the air, inefficiently consume enormous amounts of natural resources, take up too much space, and kill and injure too many people.
-
Mar 22, 2023 | 
newyorker.com | Peter Baker
She has perfected her argument—that Monster Energy drinks areprimarily a vehicle for Satan—into a crisp patter punctuated by foraysinto Hebrew, textual analysis, paranoid semiotics, and moments ofwell-timed eye contact. There is in her presentation a genuinelyremarkable union of speech and physicality. She is tremendously goodat this.
