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I'm Stephen Metcalf, and this is the Slate Culture Gap Fest, bringing a gun to a puppy fight edition.

It's Wednesday, September 12th, 2012.

On today's program, Bob Dylan's Tempest is his 35th studio album.

We'll discuss it with Slate's own in-house Dylanologist, John Dickerson.

And then the movie Sneakers, it's 20 years old, is it also an underappreciated masterpiece?

And finally, the Harvard cheating scandal with Slate's own Farhad Manju.

All right, before we dig in, I should say that we're joining you today from the Mohunk, the magical Mohonk Mountain House in upstate New York, the home of the Slate Annual Retreat. So we're going to sound a little different today. Inevitably, we're recording in a conference room. You may hear the sounds of birds chirping or underpaid, hungover staffers wandering by. So be it. And we should say that Julia couldn't join us today.

So we're going to have a series of Slate colleagues come in and discuss each of these topics with us.

Joining me as every week, of course, is Slate's film critic, Dana Stevens. Hey, Dana.

Hello, Steve. And joining us for our first segment is John Dickerson, who those of you listening on the radio will have heard in the previous half hour. John, welcome to the show. Thank you, Steve. This is my maiden time, isn't it? I'm a huge fanboy of the CultureGow Fest, too, so I'm very nervous. All right, John, let's dive right in. Tempest is Bob Dylan's 35th studio album that came out this week. You've listened to this new album.

There's a new video, which is getting a lot of press attention. What do you make of it so far?

I guess the first thing I make of it is that there's a huge body count. The number of people who are dying or who the narrator is going to kill or, I mean, of course, when you have a song

about the Titanic,

you have, you know, a lot of bodies there. But all of the songs, almost I think all songs,

except for Duquesne Whistle, the first song, which also seems very much apart from the rest of the album,

have, and then it ends with a tribute to John Lennon, of course, another body.

It just, there's a, all Dylan's albums for the last, you know, 20 years have been focused in one way or another on death.

But the death here is, it's more physical, it's more corporal.

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