"Number five, Vertigo. I had to go with one old movie. It’s a movie about obsession. I think it probably captures obsession better than any other movie before or since that I’ve seen. It’s got incredible rewatchability. I think — of all the movie’s I’ve ever watched — it’s the movie that gives me goosebumps most frequently from start to finish. If you could describe a movie as being funny or scary, funny is supposed to provoke laughter and scary is supposed to provoke your heart to race. That movie is just the right amount of goosebumps. It is the movie that produces goosebumps and that’s the reason I love it and I’ve watched it many, many times. It’s gorgeous, too — in San Francisco — and there are other reasons, but it’s just so wonderfully creepy and cool. The score of Vertigo, too, is so phenomenal — Bernard Herrman. It’s very, very memorable, and it gets to the point where, even after I’ve seen the movie, I’m humming the score. Anyway, that’s my number five."

"I’m a huge fan of Nagisa Oshima, and Empire of Passion and Violence at Noon are two of my favorites of his that Criterion has released. They give a good example of both his shifting stylistic capabilities as well as his consistently provocative and trenchant thematic tendencies. While both these films deal with elements of sexual obsession, predation, and social hegemony, on the surface they are totally distinct, Empire being a gorgeous, classically styled ghost story and Violence at Noon being a fractured, modernist New Wave masterpiece."

"I’m a huge fan of Nagisa Oshima, and Empire of Passion and Violence at Noon are two of my favorites of his that Criterion has released. They give a good example of both his shifting stylistic capabilities as well as his consistently provocative and trenchant thematic tendencies. While both these films deal with elements of sexual obsession, predation, and social hegemony, on the surface they are totally distinct, Empire being a gorgeous, classically styled ghost story and Violence at Noon being a fractured, modernist New Wave masterpiece."

"This is a curious little book I picked up while I was working at the Neuegalerie in New York, a very formative period in my life. It was published in the early 1900s, and chronicles the author’s attempt at making a perpetual motion machine. Part musings, part diary entries, it’s a trial and error novella about the author attempting to devise a perpetual motion machine and how that obsession illuminates the problems in his real life. It’s a story that’s riddled with failure, but stubbornly optimistic in a way I can relate to."

"Undergirding so much of the discourse surrounding resentment in America right now is the conversation about race. While the notion of “blackness” is often at the forefront of such discussions, the idea of “whiteness” is frequently left unexamined. In her surprising new book, Isenberg goes into the history of how the “white trash” identity is directly related to social caste and economic realities that are perpetually unacknowledged in American castings of itself, its character and its history. White Trash is at once informative, painful and enlightening in how complex our obsession with social-standing-by-virtue-of-color has evolved."