Arts and Culture

Robbie Robertson’s “The Weight,” the Band’s most beloved song, has the quality of Dylan’s impressionistic narratives. Elliptical vignettes that seem to make very little sense at first listen, with a chorus that cuts right to the heart of the human predicament. “Robertson admits in his autobiography,” notes Patrick Doyle at Rolling Stone , “that he struggled to articulate to producer John Simon what the song was even about.” An artist needn’t understand a creation for it to resonate with listeners. A read of the “The Weight”’s lyrics make its poignant themes evident—each stanza introduces characters who illustrate some sorrow or small kindness. The chorus offers what so many people seem to crave these days: a promise of rest from ceaseless toil, freedom from constant transactions, a community that shoulders everyone’s burdens…. “It’s almost like it’s good medicine,” Robertson told Doyle, “and it’s so suitable right now.” He refers specifically to the song’s revival in a dominan...

Many of us right now are sheltering in place, or in quarantine, dreaming of that day when we can once again travel the world. And that day will come, friends, that day will come. But until then, there are already several YouTube channels set up to provide you with a chance to go on walking tours around the world, with only the sounds of the environment in your headphones. I was alerted to this by good friend Phil Gyford , who found this via Sarah Pavis (via FaveJet ), and provided several links to this large selection of virtual traveler . Your mileage my vary, as they say, but here’s some trips I found particularly relaxing in these anxious times. Above, I started here with this walk through Pimmit View Park in Falls Church, Virginia. Despite an umbrella dipping into view, I found this a relaxing walking in the rain through a verdant wonderland, with occasional pauses to admire the flowing streams. Lovely. From here I was feeling a bit peckish, so I bopped over to the Pha...

The apotheosis of prestige realist plague film, Steven Soderburgh’s 2011 Contagion , has become one of the most popular features on major streaming platforms, at a time when people have also turned increasingly to books of all kinds about plagues, from fantasy, horror, and science fiction to accounts that show the experience as it was in all its ugliness—or at least as those who experienced it remembered the events. Such a work is Daniel Defoe’s semi-fictional history “A Journal of the Plague Year,” a book he wrote “in tandem with an advice manual called ‘Due Preparations for the Plague,’ in 1722,” notes Jill Lepore at The New Yorker . In 1722, Defoe had reason to believe the plague might come back to London, and wreak the devastation it caused in 1665, the “plague year” he detailed, when one in every five Londoners died. This was not a story of heroes making sacrifices to save the city. “Everyone behaved badly, though the rich behaved the worst," Lepore writes. "Having fai...

Imagine the pyramids of ancient Egypt, and a vivid image comes right to mind. But unless you happen to be an Egyptologist, that image may possess a great deal more vividness than it does detail. We all have a rough sense of the pyramids' size (impressively large), shape (pyramidical), texture (crumbly), and setting (sand), almost wholly derived from images captured over the past century. But what about the pyramids in their heyday, more than 4,500 years ago? Do we know enough even to begin imagining how they looked, let alone how people made use of them? Harvard Egyptologist Peter Der Manuelian does, and in the video above he gives us a tour through 3D models that reconstruct the Giza pyramid complex (also known as the Giza necropolis) using both the best technology and the fullest knowledge available today. "You'll see we've had to remove modern structures and excavators, debris dumps," says Der Manuelian as the camera flies, dronelike , in the directio...

Like an Old Testament prophet with smartphone, Bob Dylan has appeared the midst of catastrophe to drop a new previously unreleased track, “Murder Most Foul,” on Twitter. Ostensibly a 17-minute song about JFK’s assassination, it’s “the first evidence of original songwriting that we’ve had in eight years from one of the most original songwriters of our era,” writes Kevin Dettmar , Professor of English at Pomona College, for The New Yorker . The move seems like a weird one—“’weird’ with its full Shakespearean force, as in the ‘weird sisters’ of ‘Macbeth.’” Its title, however, comes from Hamlet . Uttered by the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the phrase shows us the murdered king pronouncing judgment on his own death. It is also the title of the third Miss Marple film, released in the U.S. in 1964, the same year (to the month) that the Warren commission submitted its report to Lyndon Johnson. Is Dylan pulling us into what may be the most bottomless of modern conspiracy theories, with a...

I never painted dreams. I painted my own reality. —Frida Kahlo You may be forgiven for assuming you already know everything there is to know about  Frida Kahlo . The subject of  a high profile bio-pic , a  bilingual opera , and numerous books for  children  and  adults , her image is nearly as ubiquitous as Marilyn Monroe’s, though Frida exercised a great deal of control over hers by painting dozens of unsmiling self-portraits in which her unplucked unibrow and her traditional  Tehuana  garb feature prominently. (Whether she would appreciate having her image splashed across  shower curtains ,  light switch covers ,  yoga mats , and  t-shirts  is another matter, and one even a force as formidable as she would be hard pressed to control from beyond the grave. Her immediately recognizable countenance powers every souvenir stall in  Mexico City’s Coyoacán neighborhood , where  Casa Azul,  the home i...

Many of us now find ourselves stuck at home, doing our part to put a stop to the global coronavirus pandemic. Some of us are taking the opportunity to write the ambitious works of literature we've long intended to. Such an effort of creativity in confinement has no more suitable precedent than the life of Marcel Proust, who wrote much of his seven-volume masterpiece  In Search of Lost Time  ( À la recherche du temps perdu ) in bed.  The   Paris Review 's Sadie Stein quotes Proust's biographer Diana Fuss describing him as having written "from a semi-recumbent position, suspended midway between the realms of sleeping and waking using his knees as a desk." He did it in a bedroom lined with cork, an addition meant, Stein writes, "not just to soundproof but to prevent pollen and dust from aggravating Proust’s allergies and asthma." Though the Spanish flu did make its way into France during Proust's last years, the writer had been worried about his own ...