My Life With Oliver Sacks

"Not long after I moved to New York, Michael Jackson died. O had no idea who Michael Jackson was. 'What is Michael Jackson?' he asked me the day after the news – not who but what – which seemed both a very odd and a very apt way of putting it, given how much the brilliant singer had transmuted from a human into an alien being. O often said he had no knowledge of popular culture after 1955, and this was not an exaggeration. He did not know popular music, rarely watched anything on TV