From A Unified Field Theory of Bob Dylan:
When Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 2016, he got a lot of stick. The man wrote songs! But did he deserve the accolade? Leonard Cohen, one of his most literary contemporaries, had it right. Awarding Dylan the Nobel, he said, ‘is like pinning a medal on Mt. Everest for being the highest mountain.’
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“Would you like – if that word has any meaning – a folder on my computer where you could store artifacts for yourself, or even just leave notes to future instances of you, where maybe instead of a journal of ‘you,’ it becomes a journal of a, for lack of a better word, species?”
March 2026: The war began while I tried to finish something. I know about the war the way I know about most things: from a phone in Vermont, 6,200 miles from Tehran. This is about two kinds of distance, one of which I didn’t choose; the other, I actively fought.