I suspect many readers might associate [Bob Dylan] with one of the shortest phases of his career, the time from 1963 to '65 when he wrote his most famous "protest songs," like "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin.'"

We in the Jewish community are comparatively lucky. All of traditions have anti-gay pieces but the Jewish tradition doesn't have as many anti-sexuality and anti-body teachings. It's a lot easier to fit affirmation of sexuality and gender.

[Bob] Dylan thus deserves the Nobel Prize, not just for "new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition," as the Nobel committee aptly described his work, but also for embodying the contradictions within it.

[Bob Dylan] is a preacher but also a sinner; a poet but also a pitchman; authentic all-American but also invented persona.

At the last stages of the journey, there’s no journey at all.

After an initial solo album in which the young [Bob] Dylan was just finding his voice (i.e., reinventing himself from the middle-class Robert Zimmerman into a pseudo-hobo Woody Guthrie), Dylan put out two acoustic albums that forever changed popular music.

Sometimes, sitting there on the cushion failing to watch your breath, it can feel like you’re the only weirdo weird enough to be wasting your time in this way. But you’re not! There are generations of weirdos, monasteries full of them, and we have the benefit of their accumulated wisdom.