Leonard Cohen never liked touring. "It's like being dropped off in a desert," he once said. "You don't know where you live anymore." By the time he hit his late 50s, he hated it so much that, after supporting his 1992 record, The Future, he moved into a Zen monastery and all but retired from the music business. Even after he returned with More Best of Leonard Cohen (1997), a wonderful celebration of his mid-career prime, he refused to cash in with a fresh calendar of live shows. Then, in 2005, he discovered that his bank account had been nearly emptied by his business manager.
Cohen spent months in rehearsal with a band, fine-tuning his songs as he now wanted to play them more quietly, more elegantly than ever. In 2008, at 73, he went back out on the road. Other than at a book signing, he hadn't performed live in more than a decade. But something had happened in the interim.
His audience was larger-lines curving around blocks, scalpers demanding hundreds above face value.
More striking, though, was the depth of feeling. Leonard Cohen, master of a cool, ironic, deadpan remove, had come to signify something new that mystified the performers themselves. "I saw people in front of the stage shaking and crying," a backup singer noted after opening night. "You don't often see adults cry, and with such violence." The highlight of the tour came at the Glastonbury Festival, where Cohen played the main stage in front of listeners young and old. As the sun set and Cohen sang "Hallelujah," concertgoers "sang along, clutching each other's arms," an Australian journalist reported, "and many were openly weeping." Cohen hadn't been dropped off in a desert.
How to account for such emotion, felt across generational divides? Where does the widely perceived authenticity-hardly an untroubled term-of this music come from? And why has its power to move listeners sustained itself so forcefully, turning Cohen's afterlife into one long canonization?
Esta historia es de la edición October 2024 de The Atlantic.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor ? Conectar
Esta historia es de la edición October 2024 de The Atlantic.
Comience su prueba gratuita de Magzter GOLD de 7 días para acceder a miles de historias premium seleccionadas y a más de 9,000 revistas y periódicos.
Ya eres suscriptor? Conectar
Catching the Carjackers - On the road with an elite police unit as it combats a crime wave
On August 7, 2022, Shantise Summers arrived home from a night out with friends around 2:40 a.m. As she walked from her car toward her apartment in Oxon Hill, a Maryland neighborhood just southeast of Washington, D.C., she heard footsteps behind her. She turned and saw two men in ski masks. One put a gun to her face; she could feel the metal pressing against her chin. He demanded her phone, wallet, keys, and Apple Watch. She quickly handed them over, and they drove off in her 2019 Honda Accord.
The Most Remote Place in the World - Point Nemo is Earth's official "middle of nowhere." A lot seems to be going on there.
It’s called the “longest-swim problem”: If you had to drop someone at the place in the ocean farthest from any speck of land—the remotest spot on Earth—where would that place be? The answer, proposed only a few decades ago, is a location in the South Pacific with the coordinates 48 52.5291ᤩS 123 23.5116ᤩW: the “oceanic point of inaccessibility,” to use the formal name. It doesn’t get many visitors. But one morning last year, I met several people who had just come from there.
You Are Going to Die - Oliver Burkeman has become an unlikely self-help guru by reminding everyone of their mortality.
"The average human lifespan," Oliver Burkeman begins his 2021 megabest seller, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, "is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short." In that relatively brief period, he does not want you to maximize your output at work or optimize your leisure activities for supreme enjoyment. He does not want you to wake up at 5 a.m. or block out your schedule in a strictly labeled timeline.
Washington's Nightmare - Donald Trump is the tyrant the first president feared.
Last November, during a symposium at Mount Vernon on democracy, John Kelly, the retired Marine Corps general who served as Donald Trump's second chief of staff, spoke about George Washington's historic accomplishments— his leadership and victory in the Revolutionary War, his vision of what an American president should be. And then Kelly offered a simple, three-word summary of Washington's most important contribution to the nation he liberated.
The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books - To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.
Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University's required greatbooks course, since 1988. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading, College kids have never read everything they're assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames's students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem.
What Zoya Sees
Long a fearless critic of Israeli society, since October 7 Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi has made wrenching portraits of her nation's sufferingand become a target of protest.
Malcolm Gladwell, Meet Mark Zuckerberg
The writer’ insistence on ignoring the web is an even bigger blind spot today than it was when The Tipping Point came out.
Alan Hollinghurst's Lost England
In his new novel, the present isnt much better than the past—and its a lot less sexy.
Scent of a Man
In a new memoir, Al Pacino promises to reveal the person behind the actor. But is he holding something back?
THE RIGHT-WING PLAN TO MAKE EVERYONE AN INFORMANT
In Texas and elsewhere, new laws and policies have encouraged neighbors to report neighbors to the government.