"I grew up with this album, and I remember being really sensitive to the different musical styles. It's quite a New York album, as well—all the different styles melting into one city. This is a really witty album. There's a true masterpiece in it, "Real Men," which was queer before it was a huge subject of conversation, quite gender-bending—questioning this idea of being a man and what that means. Musically, it's really rich, and very frilly as well: lots of long songs with improvisation. It's an interesting and empowering album."

"This is fiction, but it impressed the hell out of me even though I very rarely have time to read fiction these days. It is the New York Times book review “Notable Book of The Year,” as well. It gives the account of Germans who fought Nazism and were killed or put in jail for life by Nazis for it. A German citizen is killed just for dropping cards all over the city writing his objection of Hitler’s policies. His wife was also sentenced to death, and was in jail indefinitely"

"I really loved The Wiz with Diana Ross and Michael Jackson. I remember hearing that Stephanie Mills, who played the part of Dorothy on Broadway, wound up not getting the part. They had to change a lot of the details for the story to make sense for Diana Ross — that’s what got me interested to go see it. And then to see Michael and all the other stars in it. It was also really amazing how they transformed New York City into the fantasy world of an urban Oz."

"In the early ’80s, Seidelman made two of the coolest movies ever made back-to-back. First came this urgent, spiky punk-rock fable—with its striving outsiders and crazy rhythms—and then the great Desperately Seeking Susan. Both present a vision of Manhattan as a broken, semi-lawless amusement park in deep decline—a version of New York City that was long gone by the time I arrived there in 1999. Watching Smithereens is like being teleported to a far-off planet that’s about to be colonized."

"This is cheating because it’s four books in one. But Liebling wrote so well about so much, a compendium is merited. Two of these are reporting from World War II, where no other writer, in my opinion, could touch him. “The Road Back to Paris” is an epic dispatch full of hard times and the finest lyricism. The other two books are about France, food, wine, memory, boxing. I wouldn’t argue if you insisted that Liebling’s greatest subject was actually New York City, or even Louisiana. It’s too bad there’s not a twelve-pack."

"Some of the same forces have led Americans to believe that the recent success of black immigrants from the Caribbean proves either that racism does not exist or that the gap between African-Americans and other groups in income and wealth is their own fault. But Model’s meticulous study, emphasizing the self-selecting nature of the West Indians who emigrate to the United States, argues otherwise, showing me, a native of racially diverse New York City, how such notions — the foundation of ethnic racism — are unsupported by the facts."