All six parts of Laurie Anderson's Norton Lectures, Spending the War Without You: Virtual Backgrounds, are now available to watch again indefinitely. Given virtually over the course of the year on Zoom through the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard, the series examines the challenges faced by artists and citizens alike as culture is reinvented. "I tried to create, over these six talks, something that would be useful to you, a kind of portable philosophy," Anderson says in her introduction to the complete series. "And you can tell me if that worked at all." You can watch the introduction and all six lectures below via the Center's YouTube channel.

"Anderson plays Zoom like an instrument," writes Harvard Magazine's Lily Scherlis. "Holed up in her studio with a greenscreen and an arsenal of iPads, she composes and performs a complete audiovisual experience."

The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry was endowed in 1925. Harvard’s preeminent lecture series in the arts and humanities, the Norton Lectures recognize individuals of extraordinary talent who, in addition to their particular expertise, have the gift of wide dissemination and wise expression. The term "poetry" is interpreted in the broadest sense to encompass all poetic expression in language, music, or the fine arts.