'It's a subject I'm anxious to change,' the author Salman Rushdie told the Atlantic staff writer George Packer at the New Orleans Book Festival on Friday. If you know anything about Rushdie, and you probably do, the subject he's referring to is obvious. In 2022, Rushdie was publicly attacked onstage, and nearly stabbed to death, in front of an audience at the Chautauqua Institution, in New York'all because he wrote a book. Rushdie has been living under mortal threat ever since Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for the murder of the writer, in 1989. The theocratic ruler's objection was that Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses was offensive to Islam, and therefore punishable by death. Over years spent in hiding and many more living openly, Rushdie has become a physical manifestation of free expression'a role with which he seemed mildly annoyed at the book festival, sardonically calling himself 'Free Speech Barbie.' 'I don't feel symbolic,' he told Packer in...
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