Raised mostly in Texas and New Mexico by bohemian parents who’d escaped anti-Semitic violence in Europe, he’s been a young disciple of Richard Feynman, an employee at Atari, a scholar at Columbia, a visiting artist at New York University, and a columnist for Discover magazine. He’s also a longtime composer and musician, and a collector of antique and archaic instruments, many of them Asian.

His book continues his war on digital utopianism and his assertion of humanist and individualistic values in a hive-mind world. But Lanier still sees potential in digital technology: He just wants it reoriented away from its main role so far, which involves “spying” on citizens, creating a winner-take-all society, eroding professions and, in exchange, throwing bonbons to the crowd.

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Boyd wrote about the British ‘60s in the beautifully crafted memoir "White Bicycles," which Brian Eno calls "a gripping piece of social history and the best book about music I've read in years."

But for many music fans, Boyd will remain the guy who discovered Nick Drake -- the depressive English genius who recorded three heavenly folk records in obscurity before dying of an overdose in 1974, at the age of 26.

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They’re just for hard hats. They peaked around the time Elvis was getting big. They killed Detroit. They’ve got nothing to do with you or me. They’re a special interest – and they hate our freedom.

That’s the kind of noise you pick up in 21st century America – in politics and popular culture alike – when you tune your station to the issue of trade unions. Union membership, and ensuing muscle, have been in steep decline in both the public and private sectors. Just look at Wisconsin’s “right to work” push, the anti-teachers union “reform” movement, corporate union-busting, P.R. “messaging” firms hired by management to smear striking workers, hostility from the Republican right and indifference from a Democratic Party that’s reoriented itself around professionals and Silicon Valley.

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It’s the kind of thing jazz can do at its best — but something the music may be doing less and less of. Or too often and not well enough. The various factions that make up the jazz world — audiences, musician, writers, plus the teachers and students who seem to be the only groups growing in number — don’t have a consensus on the matter. But the jazz fraternity seems to know two things: Despite continued artistic quality, the audience around the music is dying. And the choice of what songs jazz musicians play — and what they don’t play — may be part of the problem.

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As with Hurricane Sandy, it will take a little while to discern the long-term consequences of the Penguin and Random House merger, the news of which was somewhat obscured by the storm and the election. But the short-term impact is not pretty -- and it follows other recent bad news from the books world. The Free Press, known primarily for smart, contentious nonfiction from Emile Durkheim and Francis Fukuyama but also the publisher of Aravind Adiga’s best-selling Indian novel “The White Tiger,” just collapsed. Several well-regarded editors are now out of jobs as the imprint is merged into Simon & Schuster.

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He focuses these concerns in the aptly named new book "Do the Movies Have a Future?," which kicks off with an introduction (“The Way We Live Now”) and first chapter (“Conglomerate Aesthetics: Notes on the Disintegration of Film Language”) that do not seem to answer his title in the affirmative. The book also offers sections on independent films, stars, genres (including a perceptive piece on what he calls “the slacker-striver comedy”), directors from Otto Preminger to David Fincher, critical models (James Agee and Pauline Kael) and hopes for the future. Some of the work originally appeared in the New Yorker; some is new or newly revised.

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In “Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace,” New Yorker writer D.T. Max tracks the novelist from his Illinois boyhood through triumphant and troubled years as an Amherst College philosophy student to a period of wandering from school to school, city to city, searching for emotional stability and purpose.

Wallace, of course, made his boldest mark with 1996’s “Infinite Jest,” the gargantuan novel set around an addiction facility and a tennis academy. In a period in which Wallace struggled to follow up its achievement, he moved to Pomona College in California, where he taught and lived with his wife, Karen Green. Some of his efforts went into “The Pale King,” an unfinished novel finally published in 2011.

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A good Spain song is like falling into a trance: It’s a blend of disparate, vibrato-rich sounds that, when played right, sounds inevitable. It’s also a sound very few people have heard lately: This band broke up more than a decade ago.

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But instead of being allies, Emily White, an NPR intern and general manager at American University’s WVAU, and Camper van Beethoven/Cracker singer David Lowery, are after each other.

The dissonance here between fan and musician emerges from one of the key conflicts of our time: How should we pay for culture in the Internet era, and if we don't pay, what happens to the producers of culture? It was only a matter of time before an exchange like this would make the terms of the debate clear.

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This what we hear about artists, architects, musicians, writers and others like them. And it’s part of the reason the struggles of the creative class in the 21st century – a period in which an economic crash, social shifts and technological change have put everyone from graphic artists to jazz musicians to book publishers out of work – has gone largely untold. Or been shrugged off.

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Brash, individualistic “starchitects” – cerebral urbanist Rem Koolhaas, Iraq-born diva Zaha Hadid, gracious, serene Renzo Piano and others hailed in the press as visionaries – became the new rock stars. Though much of the cast was international, the image built on a long-standing heroism of the architect in the United States, dating back to the magnetic Frank Lloyd Wright and the valiant, uncompromising Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.” New shelter magazines like Dwell brought sustainable and modernist design to a wider public, and websites reveled in the eye candy. Graduate programs in architecture and design swelled with applicants.

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A few weeks later, the inevitable closing party arrived on its stretch of La Brea Boulevard. “There was shock,” recalls Miller, a native of steel-belt Pennsylvania originally drawn to movies by old horror films and Abbott & Costello. “There were women who came in crying. There were people who wanted to take photos of their family with me because they’d grown up with Rocket.”

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Levine, a former Billboard executive editor who has also contributed to Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and the New York Times, asks, effectively: Can the culture business survive the digital age? It’s a welcome reconsideration after the cheerleading that has greeted the Web and the structural changes in the U.S. economy. We spoke to the Berlin- and New York-based Levine about how we got here and where we go next.

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Thanks to laptops, cheap Internet connections and structural changes in the world economy, we’re living in a world of “free agents” – “soloists” who are “self-branding” and empowered to live flexible and self-determining lives full of meaning. We are all citizens of Freelance Nation -- heirs not to the old-school stodgy, gray-flannel-suit Organization Man but to the coonskin-capped pioneers and rugged, self-made types who built this country.

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For many computer programmers, corporate executives who oversee social media, and some others who fit the definition of the "creative class" -- a term that dates back to the mid-'90s but was given currency early last decade by urbanist/historian Richard Florida -- things are good. The creativity of video games is subsidized by government research grants; high tech is booming. This creative class was supposed to be the new engine of the United States economy, post-industrial age, and as the educated, laptop-wielding cohort grew, the U.S. was going to grow with it.

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