Do we care too much about food? Do we care too much about Bob Dylan? Those are two of the questions our writers ask in this week’s week's magazine, which is a special issue on food. On Out Loud, the editor of the issue, Amelia Lester, talks to the journalist and reformed foodie John Lanchester about the value of professional restaurant critics, how food trends reflect anxieties in the wider culture, and whether our collective obsession with food has gone too far. Later in the episode, Sasha Weiss, the literary editor of
newyorker.com, hosts a discussion about Dylan’s music with one ambivalent fan—Sasha Frere-Jones, the magazine’s pop-music critic, who writes about the basement tapes in this week’s issue—and two die-hards: the longtime New Yorker editor John Bennet and the editor-in-chief, David Remnick. Speaking of his first encounter with Dylan's music, Remnick says, “It set my hair on fire.”