Jackson Arn
By Jackson Arn
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Culture Why you never really saw the Velvet Underground — even if you think you did
I doubt I’m the only one who secretly loves it when a movie begins with a seizure warning. Fine, maybe I am, but hear me out. Most movies lack a single striking image. Visually overwhelming cinema, the kind you feel in your whole body and not just your head, is a rare thing. So when…
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Culture In honoring those who wage ‘humane’ war, has the Nobel Peace Prize become a force of villainy?
Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War By Samuel Moyn Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 416 pages, $25.49 Slavery is evil. It is also a part of human nature. Human beings are aggressive, violent creatures, which is why you find slavery in every society in human history. Ergo, attempts to get rid of…
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Culture A tale told by a Coen brother — full of sound and fury, signifying what all the other Coen Brothers movies have signified
Like a Technicolor noir or a Seth Rogen drama, a Coen brothers movie based on someone else’s writing is a rare and risky proposition. By my count, only one fully successful example exists: “No Country for Old Men,” adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel. Then there are the four others that nobody seems too eager to…
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Culture The gorgeous desperation of Tony Curtis — an actor who never played it straight
Long after he became rich and famous, he had a lean and hungry look. This look was his greatest gift as a performer. Few matinee idols played so many desperate men, and none was better at conveying a trembling, clenched-jaw desperation. His nastiest characters are ruthless; even the nice ones have, as the kids say,…
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Culture The glorious irrelevance of S. J. Perelman, the original remix artist
When I turned to a random page of the collected works of S.J. Perelman — newly available in a sleek, beetle-black edition, courtesy of the Library of America — here’s what I got: “Just in case anybody here missed me at the Mermaid Tavern this afternoon when the bowl of sack was being passed, I…
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Culture Noticing how one of the world’s great noticers notices
Depending on how you look at it, Geoff Dyer is either the prototypical contemporary English-language writer or the outlier. Awards committees love him, and publishers do, too: his pace (nine books in the last 10 years!) is as relentless as Twitter’s. His range is as vast as Wikipedia’s. His style is briskly lucid; while most…
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Culture Why I love Aaron Sorkin (really)
Here are some things I’ve learned from Aaron Sorkin. Harvard was founded in 1636, but there’s a statue on campus that says it was founded in 1638. The Bible forbids planting different crops side-by-side. The street name for chloroacetone is tear gas. The best way to seem smart and articulate is to rattle off obscure…
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Culture Activist, Professor, Politician, Aesthete — the many contradictions of Edward Said
You could read any of Edward Said’s books, but you couldn’t take them home with you. Looking back, this was obviously a metaphor for something or other. At the time it seemed like a simple-enough fact—but then, I was only a freshman. The Edward Said Reading Room opened in the spring of 2011, eight years…
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