Adam Baer

Adam Baer
Born 1977 (age 37–38)
New York, NY
Residence Los Angeles, CA
Nationality American
Alma mater Johns Hopkins University
Sarah Lawrence College
Occupation Writer
Years active 2001–present
Website
adambaer.com

Adam Baer (born 1977)[1] is an essayist, journalist and music/culture critic whose writing appears regularly in top publications, and who is an outspoken voice for young adult cancer.

Early life and education

Baer was born in New York City, and raised in Queens and on Long Island.[2] Both his parents are Juilliard-trained concert pianists.[3] In his youth, Baer studied the piano and violin. In 1994, he won a scholarship to attend the Tanglewood Music Center's summer high school program, where he played violin in the orchestra and gave the program's first performance of Quasi una Fantasia, a contemporary composition by Henryk Górecki recorded by the Kronos Quartet.[1] Baer also attended the Manhattan School of Music's high school preparatory program, the Aspen Music Festival and School, and the Peabody Conservatory of Music.[1][4] As a senior in college, he wrote music reviews for the Washington Post.[5] He graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 2000 and later attended the Sarah Lawrence College MFA program in creative writing.[6]

Career

Upon graduation, Baer worked as a cultural producer at NPR,[7] while also writing regular columns about music for The New Republic from 2000 to 2001.[8] He worked as a music and culture critic for the New York Sun from 2002 to 2005,[9] and as a music critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2004 to 2008, where he wrote arts cover stories and features examining the intersection between music and film.[10] Baer also wrote regularly for Circuits, the former weekly technology section of the New York Times, including a 2002 technology section cover story about the national proliferation of Wi-Fi Internet access.[11] For Slate magazine, Baer has been both a regular Summary Judgment writer and occasional Culturebox and Music Box columnist.[12] Since 2009, he has written about technology and business for Inc. magazine, where he is a contributing editor.[13] He was a founding editor of the original version of the humor website The Faster Times, founded in 2009.[14] He has also been a correspondent for Travel + Leisure.[15]

Covering wide-ranging topics, such as personal and humorous experiences, music and film criticism, comedy, technology, food and drink, and book reviews, Baer has written essays, articles and criticism for the New York Times,[16] New York Times Book Review,[17] Harper's Magazine,[2] The Atlantic,[18] The New Yorker,[19] The New Republic,[20] McSweeney's,[21] Rolling Stone,[22] GQ,[23] Playboy,[24] Slate,[12] Salon,[25] Men's Journal,[26] Men's Health,[27] Newsday,[28] Travel + Leisure,[15] Town & Country,[29] Popular Science,[30] Details,[31] Saveur,[32] Gramophone,[33] Village Voice,[34] LA Weekly,[35] Virginia Quarterly Review[4] and NPR.[1] In a 2004 essay about Conan O'Brien for The New Republic, Baer predicted the late-night host's eventual Tonight Show debacle with NBC.[20] In 2012, in an essay for The Atlantic, he published a call for an annual "Best Soundtrack" award to be given to music supervisors at the Academy Awards.[36] In a 2004 feature for the New York Times, Baer wrote about the first attempts at reading digitized sheet music,[37] and in 2013, he followed up on that subject with a piece in the Virginia Quarterly Review about the first digital sheet music mobile apps, his family's experiences with sheet music, and the history and future of the sheet music business.[4] He has also written extensively about violinists.[38][39][40]

His essays have also appeared in books, such as Before & After: Stories From New York (2002), in which author and editor Thomas Beller curated personal stories from writers about their experiences of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City, and the 2007 collection A Leaky Tent Is a Piece of Paradise, in which writers under 30 reflect on their connections to nature.[41]

Baer's work has been excerpted and mentioned in the New York Times Magazine,[42] USA Today,[43] CNN,[44] Curbed,[45] LA Observed,[46] Jezebel,[47] by author and music critic Alex Ross,[48] and by Andrew Sullivan in The Dish.[49]

Bibliography

Selected articles

Essays in books

Radio

Personal life

Baer resides in Los Angeles with his wife.[45] They were married in 2007.[6] He has chronicled their adventures in leasing Los Angeles homes for the New York Times.[16]

In 1995, as a senior in high school, Baer was diagnosed with Stage IVB Hodgkin's disease. After undergoing treatment, the cancer returned two years into college; he underwent a stem-cell bone-marrow transplant, and took a year off before finishing up his studies. In 2006, he was diagnosed with a rare unrelated skull-bone tumor, chordoma, for which he underwent neurosurgery and proton-beam radiation.[7] He has written about his experiences with cancer, chronic illness, medical marijuana, and living in the wake of advanced medical treatments for Harper's Magazine,[2] FT Magazine,[50] New York Times,[51] Los Angeles Times,[52] The Awl,[53] NPR and Men's Health.[27]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Adam Baer, “Tanglewood, My Family’s Transcendental Homeland,” NPR, July 5, 2012.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Adam Baer, “Speak, Malady,” Harper's Magazine, May 2011.
  3. ↑ Adam Baer, “Ivory pure? Er, hardly,” Los Angeles Times, August 21, 2005.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Adam Baer, “Sound + Vision,” Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 2013.
  5. ↑ Adam Baer, “In Baltimore, A Romantic Crush On Bach,” Washington Post, March 8, 2000.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 “Lina D’Orazio, Adam Baer,” New York Times, October 21, 2007.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 “Cancer and the Media,” The Stupid Cancer Show, July 23, 2013.
  8. ↑ See, “Masterclasses for the Masses,” The New Republic, November 2, 2000.
  9. ↑ “Adam Baer – Archive,” New York Sun. Accessed June 18, 2014.
  10. ↑ Adam Baer, “Can you learn to love music you hate?” Los Angeles Times, May 25, 2013.
  11. ↑ Adam Baer, “The Wi-Fi Boom; Out and About, and Online,” New York Times, December 12, 2002.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Author page, Slate. Retrieved June 18, 2014.
  13. ↑ Author page, Inc. Retrieved June 18, 2014.
  14. ↑ “The Big Jewcy: Sam Apple, Adam Wilson, & Adam Baer of The Faster Times,” Jewcy, June 11, 2010.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Author page, Travel + Leisure. Retrieved June 18, 2014.
  16. ↑ 16.0 16.1 Adam Baer, “Leasing Los Angeles,” New York Times, November 16, 2011.
  17. ↑ “Books in Brief: Fiction,” New York Times Book Review, August 25, 2002.
  18. ↑ Adam Baer, “From Toronto With Love,” The Atlantic, June 3, 2004.
  19. ↑ “Goings On About Town: Classical Music,” The New Yorker, October 13, 2003.
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 Adam Baer, “Show Stopper,” The New Republic, September 29, 2004.
  21. ↑ “The Second Batch, 2004,” McSweeney's, 2004.
  22. ↑ Adam Baer, “Please Pick Your Ass,” Rolling Stone, September 18, 2008, p. 61.
  23. ↑ Adam Baer, “Are We Ready for ‘Post-racial’ Comedy?” GQ, January 2009.
  24. ↑ Adam Baer, “Rock Relic,” Playboy, March 2013.
  25. ↑ Adam Baer, “Uncurbed enthusiasm,” Salon, October 1, 2008.
  26. ↑ Contributor page, Men's Journal. Retrieved June 18, 2014.
  27. ↑ 27.0 27.1 Adam Baer, “Your Doctor Will Ignore You Now,” Men's Health, October 2007.
  28. ↑ Adam Baer, “Dishing the Divas,” Newsday, November 17, 2001.
  29. ↑ Adam Baer, “More Bang for Your Euro,” Town & Country, Winter 2008.
  30. ↑ Adam Baer, “Why Living Cells Are The Future Of Data Processing,” Popular Science, November 5, 2012.
  31. ↑ Adam Baer, “Zoe Saldana: Space Babe,” Details, December 1, 2009.
  32. ↑ Adam Baer, “Stars of the Season,” Saveur, May 8, 2008.
  33. ↑ Adam Baer, “Webwatch,” Gramophone, Vol. 79, No. 944, September 2001, p. 20.
  34. ↑ Adam Baer, “Songs for Mitya,” Village Voice, October 23, 2001.
  35. ↑ Adam Baer, “In the Company of Friends,” LA Weekly, November 4, 2004.
  36. ↑ Adam Baer, “Why the Academy Awards Need a ‘Best Soundtrack’ Category,” The Atlantic, February 23, 2012.
  37. ↑ Adam Baer, “At the Ready, Sheet Music Minus the Sheets,” New York Times, May 20, 2004.
  38. ↑ Adam Baer, “Itshak Perlman wears the years like a master,” Los Angeles Times, January 12, 2005.
  39. ↑ Adam Baer, “A generous violinist, especially in performance,” Los Angeles Times, November 1, 2005.
  40. ↑ Adam Baer, “The Mysteries of the Cremonese Luthiers,” New York Sun, April 5, 2005.
  41. ↑ “A Leaky Tent Is a Piece of Paradise: 20 Young Writers on Finding a Place in the Natural World,” Publishers Weekly, February 19, 2007.
  42. ↑ Virginia Hefernan, “The Burden of Interactivity,” New York Times Magazine, January 9, 2009.
  43. ↑ Whitney Matheson, “Hip Clicks,” USA Today, January 11, 2002.
  44. ↑ “Top-of-the-line toys for the high-tech traveler,” CNN, March 6, 2007.
  45. ↑ 45.0 45.1 Adrian Glick Kudler, “7 Best Parts of the New York Times’s Wacky LA Rentals Story,” Curbed, November 17, 2011.
  46. ↑ Kevin Roderick, “Film culture’s obsession with the LA architecture of John Lautner,” LA Observed, January 16, 2013.
  47. ↑ Cassie Murdoch, “A Producer Once Tried to Help Julia Louis-Dreyfus By Telling Her Curly Hair Wasn’t Fuckable,” Jezebel, April 22, 2012.
  48. ↑ Alex Ross, “The new masses,” The Rest Is Noise, November 9, 2004.
  49. ↑ Andrew Sullivan, “Should Sheet Music Change Its Tune?” The Dish, April 27, 2013.
  50. ↑ Adam Baer, “Using cannabis to treat health problems,” FT Magazine, April 16, 2010.
  51. ↑ Adam Baer, "Beyond the Boundary Principle," New York Times, April 21, 2015.
  52. ↑ Adam Baer, “A fight to say no to chemo,” Los Angeles Times, July 29, 2006.
  53. ↑ Author page, The Awl. Accessed June 18, 2014.

External links