Jackson Arn
By Jackson Arn
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Culture Is Neil Simon still funny? (Hint: This may be a trick question.)
Feeling cheerfully kvetchy about Neil Simon is a very Neil Simon way to feel
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Culture Embracing Trump’s politics, David Mamet has become the Kanye West of American letters
The author of 'Recessional' offers up a bevy of conspiracy theories
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Culture Why Peter Bogdanovich’s overlooked masterpiece still matters (and so does the rest of his career)
In 1961, Peter Bogdanovich convinced the film curators at the Museum of Modern Art that they should a) organize an Orson Welles retrospective, and b) let him write the accompanying monograph. These were no small achievements, since a) there had never been an Orson Welles retrospective in the United States and b) Peter Bogdanovich was…
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Culture Is the most popular song about New York really a stealth Jewish anthem?
Inspired in part by all the Jewish artists on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs, the Forward decided it was time to rank the best Jewish pop songs of all time. You can find the whole list and accompanying essays here. “New York, New York,” the theme song from Martin Scorsese’s musical of…
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Culture Is it possible to love the world’s most ubiquitous Jewish intellectual as much as he loves himself?
One of the sweetest privileges of living in the United States of America is the ability to go decades without knowing what a “Bernard-Henri Lévy” is. My own honeymoon of ignorance ended a few years back, when the latest storm of Roman Polanski takes swept across the internet and it came to my attention that…
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Culture Aaron Sorkin has done his homework on ‘I Love Lucy’ — does that mean we have to do ours?
The films Aaron Sorkin writes and directs — so far those would be “Molly’s Game” (2017), about the real-life poker organizer Molly Bloom; “The Trial of the Chicago 7” (2020), about the real-life trial following the 1968 DNC riots; and now “Being the Ricardos,” about the real-life marriage of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, the…
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Culture How a severely underrated movie turned Steven Spielberg into a 21st century Andy Warhol
Editor’s Note: The director Steven Spielberg turns 75 on Dec. 18. To mark that momentous occasion, the Forward is running a series of essays reassessing his films. Read more of our “Spielberg at 75” series here. What is “Ready Player One” trying to say? It’s a silly question, but an inescapable one. Steven Spielberg’s 28th…
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Culture Why the Jewish laureate of prose-poetry has more in common with Eminem than you might think
If he hadn’t learned to rap — quite the “if,” considering he was a white, midwestern teenager at the time — we might not be talking about him decades later. As it turned out, rap changed his life. More precisely, rap inspired him to find a way to make sense of his life: to take…
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