"With Depeche Mode, the sounds intrigued me, but I never really cared about the band. I loved those records, and I collected them, and pretty much had every Depeche Mode studio record, but I never saw them live and I never wanted to marry Martin Gore. That was my next-door neighbour. She had Martin Gore, and I had Robert Smith. As alternative teenagers, we had to pick our alliances carefully. I liked Depeche Mode, but I loved the Cure. That was a very important distinction for me."

"I’m currently reading this book, which follows a matsutake mushroom, which is one of the most valuable mushrooms in the world and grows in the destruction and ruins of human disturbance. I’d been talking with my friend Bella about the power of mushrooms, then I saw this in a bookshop in New York and it caught my eye. It’s an anthropological and environmental study, but it’s almost written like a novel. It explores questions about how humans are going to survive in capitalist destruction, through collaborative survival and multi-species landscapes."

"We see this same edge space in this film, especially in the sequence at the end . . . new buildings facing barren open space and roads leading nowhere. I saw this at the Cinémathèque française recently. I was a little late for the screening, so I had to sit in the front row, in front of the sixty-foot screen, in the main cinema. An intense experience to be totally dominated by the images of this film. The last shot of Monica Vitti, where she stares into the camera, actually pinned me to my seat!"

"Holy fuck, Killing Joke still gives me chills. It can get dicey when you’re using synthesized sounds in music, they might not hold up through time, but this record is still so brutal and beautiful. If there’s too many light spaces in your life, the first Killing Joke record will fill ‘em up. I saw them last year and they were so good. Everyone sings every song at their gigs. Everyone you see there – even though you don’t know them – is suddenly your mate. They still have that power. "

"There is a bit of a theme to this list, it seems: almost all of these movies have at least one very juicy part for a woman. Much of this film has been lost to time for me since I last saw it—something something Chris Klein, blah blah Matthew Broderick—but I have never forgotten how perfect Reese Witherspoon is as Tracy Flick. She’s bossy, controlling, not very likable, but somehow deeply sympathetic. (I think Broadcast News’s Jane would have wanted to take Tracy on as an intern, and also possibly to kill her.)"