Back to the Fortress of Brooklyn and the Millions of Destroyed Men Who Are My Brothers

Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude was heralded as an Important Novel. Yet no critic or essayist has confronted it’s central theme: an exceptionally candid obsession with blackness in the white mind. Mingus, the central black character, is the story’s only true love, blackness its only beating heart. This is the most important work on race in 50 years — since Invisible Man — and no one has bothered to notice.

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Wes Anderson and the Aesthetics of Autism

Anderson's films are a valentine to his own uniqueness, their subject increasingly the Andersonian aesthetic itself. What began as honest whimsy has lately become so rich and thick it could clog the arteries.

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Hipster Cop

His tousled dandy's hair and matching pose, one foot up against the door, made me imagine him assuming his badge and uniform for the benefit of his Ludlow street cronies, themselves dressed as sundry blue collar types, the lot of them promenading through the new Lower East Side's costumed bars.

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