“I Dream a Highway,” 

Gillian Welch

“Robert Plant (of Led Zeppelin) called the album ‘a masterpiece of the infinite’ and the epically long closer, ‘I Dream a Highway’ epitomizes that praise in a poignant reflection on an individual life and art and America more broadly. When everything and everyone seems to have sold out and gone wrong, what’s a person to do? The song drifts through memory and longing and despair, from Welch’s home of Nashville to her birthplace of Los Angeles, but the refrain always pulls it back to melancholy but enduring hope: ‘A silver vision come and bless my soul / I dream a highway back to you.’ As Welch’s allusion to Lazarus suggests, something can always come back to life.”  

“Never Let Me Go,”

 Kazuo Ishiguro

“Ishiguro, whose family emigrated to the U.K. from Japan when he was a child, won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2017, and this is perhaps my favorite of his novels, though since he’s a genre-hopping virtuoso, it’s hard to pick. This apparent dystopian alternate history features a trio of clones destined for organ donation and death, but under this sci-fi premise is a melancholy meditation on what makes us human, what constitutes the soul, and what an education is really for, even if one never gets to ‘use’ it.  Ishiguro’s handling of ethics is understated, but the heartbreak he ends with is not.”  

 “The Third Man”

“This noir film is the second collaboration between director Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene (yes, that Graham Greene) with a scene-stealing supporting turn by Orson Welles. In addition to a memorable soundtrack, stunning cinematography, and a tense third-act sewer chase, it’s a meditation on ethics and opportunism in post-war Vienna, divided between various Allied occupiers. Welles’s monologue to his old pal Holly Martin on the Ferris wheel brilliantly captures the seductiveness and bankruptcy of his worldview. Like every good noir, it ends in disillusionment, and sticks with you (all this in a compact 104 minutes, no less).”