The New Yorker February 28, 2022

Dorothy Wickenden (“Late Harvest,” p. 32) has been the executive editor of The New Yorker since 1996. Her latest book is “The Agitators.” Edward Steed (Sketchbook, p. 30) has contributed cartoons to the magazine since 2013. Patricia Marx (“Getting Rid of It,” p. 26) is a staff writer. Her book “You Can Only Yell at Me for One Thing at a Time,” illustrated by Roz Chast, came out in 2020. Hilton Als (A Critic at Large, p. 66) won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for criticism. His exhibition “Toni Morrison’s Black Book” is on display at the David Zwirner gallery through February 26th. Solmaz Sharif (Poem, p. 38) is the author of the poetry collections “Look” and “Customs,” which is due out in March. She is an assistant professor at Arizona State University. Julian Lucas (Books,…

MURDER AND FORGIVENESS As the director of Just Alternatives, a nonprofit that supports survivors of criminal violence and helps enable dialogues between victims and offenders, I was inspired by Eren Orbey’s piece about Katie Kitchen’s forgiveness of Joseff Deon White, the man convicted of murdering her father (“Fault Lines,” January 24th). In my twenty-one years of working with survivors, I have found that most of the ones who initiate victim-offender dialogues (V.O.D.s), in the states that allow them to do so, aren’t necessarily looking to forgive. Rather, they are often seeking to express some of the anguish and trauma that they have endured, and to ask questions that only the offenders can answer. Those of us who facilitate these dialogues understand that we cannot compel offenders to tell the whole story;…

FEBRUARY 23 – MARCH 1, 2022 Neil Simon’s comedy “Plaza Suite,” from 1968, is a portrait of three marriages, set in one hotel room, with the same two actors playing a different couple in each act. A Broadway revival, directed by John Benjamin Hickey and starring the real-life married couple Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, was slated to open in early 2020 (when the above photo was taken), but it was, like the rest of the Broadway season, swept away by the pandemic. Now, just like that, the show is finally in previews, at the Hudson, beginning Feb. 25. ART “Charles Ray: Figure Ground” America’s most enthralling contemporary sculptor is an artistic and philosophical provocateur whose ever-startling creations look back in spirit, if rarely in appearance, to the sublimity of ancient Greek art.…

zazalazagna.com If you’d asked me, a couple of weeks ago, how I felt about caponata, the agrodolce (sweet-and-sour) Sicilian relish that is almost always made with eggplant, plus tomato, aromatics, olives, and capers, I would have shrugged. When had I last eaten it? On sad crostini, cold and clumpy? Ask me now and I’ll tell you that the other day I had caponata for lunch—not as a condiment or even a side dish, just straight caponata, directly from a plastic deli container, spectacular. The caponata was made by Zahra Tangorra, the chef behind the late, beloved Cobble Hill Italian restaurant Brucie, who now operates a takeout operation called Zaza Lazagna. Her interpretation featured butternut squash instead of eggplant, plus white sweet potato, cauliflower, San Marzano tomatoes, sage, rosemary, raisins, Castelvetrano and Kalamata…

January 22nd marked the forty-ninth anniversary of Roe v. Wade—and, likely, the last year that its protections will remain standing. In December, during oral arguments, the Supreme Court’s six conservative Justices signalled their intention to uphold a Mississippi law that, in banning almost all abortions after fifteen weeks of pregnancy, defies Roe’s protections. Most of those Justices seemed prepared to overturn Roe entirely. Without Roe, which prohibits states from banning abortion before fetal viability—at twenty-eight weeks when the law was decided, and closer to twenty-two weeks now—abortion could become mostly inaccessible and illegal in at least twenty states. Some of the potential ramifications are obvious. The majority of people who get abortions are already mothers, and seventy-five per cent live near or below the federal poverty line. It is the least…

Marcia Resnick was the last photographer to do a studio shoot of John Belushi before he died, of an overdose, in Los Angeles, in 1982. She was a friend and had for a few years been eager to take his picture, for a series of portraits of more than a hundred New York “punks, poets, and provocateurs” that she was calling “Bad Boys.” One night, in late 1981, she ran into Belushi at a club called AM/PM, and said, “How about now?” When she got back to her loft studio, on Canal Street, his limo was waiting outside. He and his entourage came upstairs. It was five or six in the morning. “He was pretty high,” she recalled the other day. The famous photo of Belushi in a ski mask,…