Adam Baer

Early life and education

Baer was born in New York City. Both his parents are Juilliard-trained concert pianists. 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 his quartet gave the program's first performance of Quasi una Fantasia, a contemporary composition by Henryk Górecki. Baer also attended the Manhattan School of Music, the Aspen Music Festival and School, and the Peabody Conservatory of Music. As a senior in college, he wrote music reviews for the Washington Post. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University and later attended the Sarah Lawrence College MFA program in creative writing.

Career

Upon graduation, Baer worked at NPR, while also writing regular columns about music for The New Republic from 2000 to 2001. He worked as a music and culture critic for the New York Sun from 2002 to 2005, 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. 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. For Slate magazine, Baer was a regular Summary Judgment writer and occasional Culturebox and Music Box columnist. Since 2009, he has written about technology and business for Inc. magazine, where he is a contributing editor. He was a founding editor of the original version of the humor and news site The Faster Times, which launched in 2009. He has also been a correspondent for Travel + Leisure.

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, New York Times Book Review, Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New Republic, McSweeney's, Rolling Stone, GQ, Playboy, Slate, Salon, Men's Journal, Men's Health, Newsday, Travel + Leisure, Town & Country, Popular Science, Details, Saveur, Gramophone, Village Voice, LA Weekly, Virginia Quarterly Review and NPR. 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. 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. In a 2004 feature for the New York Times, Baer wrote about the first attempts at reading digitized sheet music, and in 2013, he followed up on that subject with a piece in the Virginia Quarterly Review about the history and future of sheet music. He has also written extensively about violinists.

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.

Baer's work has been excerpted and mentioned in the New York Times Magazine, USA Today, CNN, Curbed, LA Observed, Jezebel, by author and music critic Alex Ross, and by Andrew Sullivan in The Dish.

Personal life

Baer resides in Los Angeles with his spouse. They were married in 2007. He has chronicled their adventures in leasing Los Angeles homes for the New York Times.

In high school, Baer was diagnosed with Stage IVB Hodgkin's disease. He was later diagnosed with a rare skull-bone tumor, chordoma, for which he underwent neurosurgery and proton-beam radiation. 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, FT Magazine, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Awl, NPR and Men's Health.