One of the most regrettable things about cancel culture is the way it deprives us lowly lovers of art for art’s sake of those things that we have come to expect.
ZeroGravity_062122.jpgBy all rights, we should be able to go to the local art house theater to see the latest film by Roman Polanski, swing by the neighborhood library to check out any book of our choosing from the canon of Dr. Seuss, and pick up the latest copy of the New Yorker to find, from time to time, a new short story by Woody Allen.

In the absence of such reliable pleasures, life becomes a little blander, and in the case of Allen, the loss is especially palpable: Although the 86-year-old filmmaker continues to toil behind the camera, albeit on films that receive increasingly haphazard releases, including his recent comedy Rifkin’s Festival, he has, in recent years, been altogether AWOL from the New Yorker, a magazine to which he began contributing in 1966. No piece bearing Allen’s byline has appeared in the fabled magazine since 2013.