Richard Ekstract turns 92 on February 20th. After a brilliant career as a magazine publisher, art collector and real estate developer, he is now on a mission to stamp out fake news. You can join in.

Richard and Eileen Ekstract are working with Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication to create the Ekstract Center for News Credibility to address how misinformation and disinformation continue to plague our society on a national level. Temple University said. “Named in the honor of alumnus Richard Ekstract, the goals for the proposed Center are to 1) strengthen local news-community relationships and invigorate an industry that is facing challenging times and 2) grant people a stable resource of quality reporting on the issues taking shape in their immediate surroundings.”

If you are interested, there will be a two day reception in Palm Beach February 27th and 28th on this exciting new initiative. Please RSVP to: Karen Gallagher, Asst. Dean, Development and Alumni Relations
karen.gallagher@temple.edu.

Photo of Eileen and Richard Ekstract

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🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺🌺

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E Street Band’s Steven Van Zandt gifts Raskin a head cover as congressman battles cancer

BY JARED GANS – 02/11/23 6:36 PM ET

Musician and E Street Band member Steven Van Zandt gave Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) a head cover as a gift, as the congressman continues his battle with cancer. 

Raskin tweeted on Saturday about receiving the cover and posted a picture of himself wearing it.

“Look what I received from one of the greatest musicians on earth, a gift I will treasure almost as much as his song ‘I am a patriot,’” he said. “You are about to see a step up in my chemo head-cover fashions for the next few months. Rock on Stevie, keep spreading the light.”

Van Zandt retweeted Raskin’s post, thanking him for his service in Congress and work to promote “justice.” 

“That gift is from all of us who want to thank you every day for giving us hope that there is a politician that cares about justice! Here’s to a rapid complete recovery,” he wrote.

Raskin announced in December that he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which affects white blood cells in the body’s immune system. He said it was “serious but curable” at the time. 

The Maryland lawmaker said last month that he was “very optimistic” about his prognosis. He noted that he was losing his hair likely as a result of receiving chemotherapy. 

The E Street Band has been rock singer Bruce Springsteen’s primary band for decades. Some of the group’s top hits include “Born to Run” and “Born in the U.S.A.”

I’m sharing this story with you because so many of us wondered about the status of Salman Rushdie. Here is a detailed explanation.

Profiles

The Defiance of Salman Rushdie

After a near-fatal stabbing—and decades of threats—the novelist speaks about writing as a death-defying act.David Remnick

February 06, 2023 Photograph by Richard Burbridge for The New Yorker

“I’ve always thought that my books are more interesting than my life,” Rushdie says. “The world appears to disagree.”

When Salman Rushdie turned seventy-five, last summer, he had every reason to believe that he had outlasted the threat of assassination. A long time ago, on Valentine’s Day, 1989, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, declared Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” blasphemous and issued a fatwa ordering the execution of its author and “all those involved in its publication.” Rushdie, a resident of London, spent the next decade in a fugitive existence, under constant police protection. But after settling in New York, in 2000, he lived freely, insistently unguarded. He refused to be terrorized.

There were times, though, when the lingering threat made itself apparent, and not merely on the lunatic reaches of the Internet. In 2012, during the annual autumn gathering of world leaders at the United Nations, I joined a small meeting of reporters with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, and I asked him if the multimillion-dollar bounty that an Iranian foundation had placed on Rushdie’s head had been rescinded. Ahmadinejad smiled with a glint of malice. “Salman Rushdie, where is he now?” he said. “There is no news of him. Is he in the United States? If he is in the U.S., you shouldn’t broadcast that, for his own safety.”

Within a year, Ahmadinejad was out of office and out of favor with the mullahs. Rushdie went on living as a free man. The years passed. He wrote book after book, taught, lectured, travelled, met with readers, married, divorced, and became a fixture in the city that was his adopted home. If he ever felt the need for some vestige of anonymity, he wore a baseball cap.

Recalling his first few months in New York, Rushdie told me, “People were scared to be around me. I thought, The only way I can stop that is to behave as if I’m not scared. I have to show them there’s nothing to be scared about.” One night, he went out to dinner with Andrew Wylie, his agent and friend, at Nick & Toni’s, an extravagantly conspicuous restaurant in East Hampton. The painter Eric Fischl stopped by their table and said, “Shouldn’t we all be afraid and leave the restaurant?”

“Well, I’m having dinner,” Rushdie replied. “You can do what you like.”

Fischl hadn’t meant to offend, but sometimes there was a tone of derision in press accounts of Rushdie’s “indefatigable presence on the New York night-life scene,” as Laura M. Holson put it in the Times. Some people thought he should have adopted a more austere posture toward his predicament. Would Solzhenitsyn have gone onstage with Bono or danced the night away at Moomba?

For Rushdie, keeping a low profile would be capitulation. He was a social being and would live as he pleased. He even tried to render the fatwa ridiculous. Six years ago, he played himself in an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in which Larry David provokes threats from Iran for mocking the Ayatollah while promoting his upcoming production “Fatwa! The Musical.” David is terrified, but Rushdie’s character assures him that life under an edict of execution, though it can be “scary,” also makes a man alluring to women. “It’s not exactly you, it’s the fatwa wrapped around you, like sexy pixie dust!” he says.

With every public gesture, it appeared, Rushdie was determined to show that he would not merely survive but flourish, at his desk and on the town. “There was no such thing as absolute security,” he wrote in his third-person memoir, “Joseph Anton,” published in 2012. “There were only varying degrees of insecurity. He would have to learn to live with that.” He well understood that his demise would not require the coördinated efforts of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or Hezbollah; a cracked loner could easily do the job. “But I had come to feel that it was a very long time ago, and that the world moves on,” he told me.

In September, 2021, Rushdie married the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, whom he’d met six years earlier, at a pen event. It was his fifth marriage, and a happy one. They spent the pandemic together productively. By last July, Rushdie had made his final corrections on a new novel, titled “Victory City.”

One of the sparks for the novel was a trip decades ago to the town of Hampi, in South India, the site of the ruins of the medieval Vijayanagara empire. “Victory City,” which is presented as a recovered medieval Sanskrit epic, is the story of a young girl named Pampa Kampana, who, after witnessing the death of her mother, acquires divine powers and conjures into existence a glorious metropolis called Bisnaga, in which women resist patriarchal rule and religious tolerance prevails, at least for a while. The novel, firmly in the tradition of the wonder tale, draws on Rushdie’s readings in Hindu mythology and in the history of South Asia.

“The first kings of Vijayanagara announced, quite seriously, that they were descended from the moon,” Rushdie said. “So when these kings, Harihara and Bukka, announce that they’re members of the lunar dynasty, they’re basically associating themselves with those great heroes. It’s like saying, ‘I’ve descended from the same family as Achilles.’ Or Agamemnon. And so I thought, Well, if you could say that, I can say anything.”

Above all, the book is buoyed by the character of Pampa Kampana, who, Rushdie says, “just showed up in my head” and gave him his story, his sense of direction. The pleasure for Rushdie in writing the novel was in “world building” and, at the same time, writing about a character building that world: “It’s me doing it, but it’s also her doing it.” The pleasure is infectious. “Victory City” is an immensely enjoyable novel. It is also an affirmation. At the end, with the great city in ruins, what is left is not the storyteller but her words:

I, Pampa Kampana, am the author of this book.
I have lived to see an empire rise and fall.
How are they remembered now, these kings, these queens?
They exist now only in words . . .
I myself am nothing now. All that remains is this city of words.
Words are the only victors.

It is hard not to read this as a credo of sorts. Over the years, Rushdie’s friends have marvelled at his ability to write amid the fury unleashed on him. Martin Amis has said that, if he were in his shoes, “I would, by now, be a tearful and tranquilized three-hundred-pounder, with no eyelashes or nostril hairs.” And yet “Victory City” is Rushdie’s sixteenth book since the fatwa.

He was pleased with the finished manuscript and was getting encouragement from friends who had read it. (“I think ‘Victory City’ will be one of his books that will last,” the novelist Hari Kunzru told me.) During the pandemic, Rushdie had also completed a play about Helen of Troy, and he was already toying with an idea for another novel. He’d reread Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” and Franz Kafka’s “The Castle,” novels that deploy a naturalistic language to evoke strange, hermetic worlds—an alpine sanatorium, a remote provincial bureaucracy. Rushdie thought about using a similar approach to create a peculiar imaginary college as his setting. He started keeping notes. In the meantime, he looked forward to a peaceful summer and, come winter, a publicity tour to promote “Victory City.”Cartoon by Edward Koren

“We bought the place sight unseen and then were informed it came with at least nine endangered species.”

On August 11th, Rushdie arrived for a speaking engagement at the Chautauqua Institution, situated on an idyllic property bordering a lake in southwestern New York State. There, for nine weeks every summer, a prosperous crowd intent on self-improvement and fresh air comes to attend lectures, courses, screenings, performances, and readings. Chautauqua has been a going concern since 1874. Franklin Roosevelt delivered his “I hate war” speech there, in 1936. Over the years, Rushdie has occasionally suffered from nightmares, and a couple of nights before the trip he dreamed of someone, “like a gladiator,” attacking him with “a sharp object.” But no midnight portent was going to keep him home. Chautauqua was a wholesome venue, with cookouts, magic shows, and Sunday school. One donor described it to me as “the safest place on earth.”

Rushdie had agreed to appear onstage with his friend Henry Reese. Eighteen years ago, Rushdie helped Reese raise funds to create City of Asylum, a program in Pittsburgh that supports authors who have been driven into exile. On the morning of August 12th, Rushdie had breakfast with Reese and some donors on the porch of the Athenaeum Hotel, a Victorian pile near the lake. At the table, he told jokes and stories, admitting that he sometimes ordered books from Amazon even if he felt a little guilty about it. With mock pride, he bragged about his speed as a signer of books, though he had to concede that Amy Tan was quicker: “But she has an advantage, because her name is so short.”

A crowd of more than a thousand was gathering at the amphitheatre. It was shorts-and-polo-shirt weather, sunny and clear. On the way into the venue, Reese introduced Rushdie to his ninety-three-year-old mother, and then they headed for the greenroom to spend time organizing their talk. The plan was to discuss the cultural hybridity of the imagination in contemporary literature, show some slides and describe City of Asylum, and, finally, open things up for questions.

At 10:45 a.m., Rushdie and Reese took their places onstage, settling into yellow armchairs. Off to the side, Sony Ton-Aime, a poet and the director of the literary-arts program at Chautauqua, stepped to a lectern to introduce the talk. At 10:47, there was a commotion. A young man ran down the aisle and climbed onto the stage. He was dressed all in black and armed with a knife.

Rushdie grew up in Bombay in a hillside villa with a view of the Arabian Sea. The family was Muslim, but secular. They were wealthy, though less so over time. Salman’s father, Anis Ahmed Rushdie, was a textile manufacturer who, according to his son, had the business acumen of a “four-year-old child.” But, for all his flaws, Rushdie’s father read to him from the “great wonder tales of the East,” including the stories of Scheherazade in the “Thousand and One Nights,” the Sanskrit animal fables of the Panchatantra, and the exploits of Amir Hamza, an uncle of the Prophet Muhammad. Salman became obsessed with stories; they were his most valued inheritance. He spent countless hours at his local bookstore, Reader’s Paradise. In time, he devoured the two vast Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata; the Greek and Roman myths; and the adventures of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves.

Nothing was sacred to young Rushdie, not even the stories with religious origins, but on some level he believed them all. He was particularly enraptured by the polytheistic storytelling traditions in which the gods behave badly, weirdly, hilariously. He was taken by a Hindu tale, the Samudra Manthan, in which gods and demons churn the Milky Way so that the stars release amrita, the nectar of immortality. He would look up at the night sky and imagine the nectar falling toward him. “Maybe if I opened my mouth,” he said to himself, “a drop might fall in and then I would be immortal, too.”

Later, Rushdie learned from the oral traditions as well. On a trip to Kerala, in South India, he listened to professional storytellers spin tales at outdoor gatherings where large crowds paid a few rupees and sat on the ground to listen for hours. What especially interested Rushdie was the style of these fabulists: circuitous, digressive, improvisational. “They’ve got three or four narrative balls in the air at any given moment, and they just juggle them,” he said. That, too, fed his imagination and, eventually, his sense of the novel’s possibilities.

At the age of thirteen, Rushdie was sent off to Rugby, a centuries-old British boarding school. There were three mistakes a boarder could make in those days, as he came to see it: be foreign, be clever, and be bad at games. He was all three. He was decidedly happier as a university student. At King’s College, Cambridge, he met several times with E. M. Forster, the author of “Howards End” and “A Passage to India.” “He was very encouraging when he heard that I wanted to be a writer,” Rushdie told me. “And he said something which I treasured, which is that he felt that the great novel of India would be written by somebody from India with a Western education.

“I hugely admire ‘A Passage to India,’ because it was an anti-colonial book at a time when it was not at all fashionable to be anti-colonial,” he went on. “What I kind of rebelled against was Forsterian English, which is very cool and meticulous. I thought, If there’s one thing that India is not, it’s not cool. It’s hot and noisy and crowded and excessive. How do you find a language that’s like that?”

As an undergraduate, Rushdie studied history, taking particular interest in the history of India, the United States, and Islam. Along the way, he read about the “Satanic verses,” an episode in which the Prophet Muhammad (“one of the great geniuses of world history,” Rushdie wrote years later) is said to have been deceived by Satan and made a proclamation venerating three goddesses; he soon reversed himself after the Archangel Gabriel revealed this deception, and the verses were expunged from the sacred record. The story raised many questions. The verses about the three goddesses had, it was said, initially been popular in Mecca, so why were they discredited? Was it to do with their subjects being female? Had Muhammad somehow flirted with polytheism, making the “revelation” false and satanic? “I thought, Good story,” Rushdie said. “I found out later how good.” He filed it away for later use.”

After graduating from Cambridge, Rushdie moved to London and set to work as a writer. He wrote novels and stories, along with glowing reviews of his future work which, as he later noted, “offered a fleeting, onanistic comfort, usually followed by a pang of shame.” There was a great deal of typing, finishing, and then stashing away the results. One novel, “The Antagonist,” was heavily influenced by Thomas Pynchon and featured a secondary character named Saleem Sinai, who was born at midnight August 14-15, 1947, the moment of Indian independence. (More for the file.) Another misfire, “Madame Rama,” took aim at Indira Gandhi, who had imposed emergency rule in India. “Grimus” (1975), Rushdie’s first published novel, was a sci-fi fantasy based on a twelfth-century Sufi narrative poem called “The Conference of the Birds.” It attracted a few admirers, Ursula K. Le Guin among them, but had tepid reviews and paltry sales.

To underwrite this ever-lengthening apprenticeship, Rushdie, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Heller, and Don DeLillo, worked in advertising, notably at the firm Ogilvy & Mather. He wrote copy extolling the virtues of the Daily Mirror, Scotch Magic Tape, and Aero chocolate bars. He found the work easy. He has always been partial to puns, alliteration, limericks, wordplay of all kinds. In fact, as he approached his thirtieth birthday, his best-known achievement in letters was his campaign on behalf of Aero, “the bubbliest milk chocolate you can buy.” He indelibly described the aerated candy bar as “Adorabubble,”

But advertising was hardly his life’s ambition, and Rushdie now embarked on an “all or nothing” project. He went to India for an extended trip, a reimmersion in the subcontinent, with endless bus rides and countless conversations. It revived something in him; as he put it, “a world came flooding back.” Here was the hot and noisy Bombay English that he’d been looking for. In 1981, when Rushdie was thirty-three, he published “Midnight’s Children,” an autobiographical-national epic of Bombay and the rise of post-colonial India. The opening of the novel is a remarkable instance of a unique voice announcing itself:

I was born in the city of Bombay . . . once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it’s important to be more . . . On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clockhands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds. . . . I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate.

Perhaps the most distinct echo is from Saul Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March”: “I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way. . . .” When Rushdie shifted from the third-person narrator of his earlier drafts to the first-person address of the protagonist, Saleem Sinai, the novel took off. Rushdie was suddenly back “in the world that made me.” Forster had been onto something. In an English of his own devising, Rushdie had written a great Indian novel, a prismatic work with all the noise, abundance, multilingual complexity, wit, and, ultimately, political disappointment of the country he set out to describe. As he told me, “Bombay is a city built very largely on reclaimed land—reclaimed from the sea. And I thought of the book as being kind of an act of reclamation.”

“Midnight’s Children” is a novel of overwhelming muchness, of magic and mythologies. Saleem learns that a thousand other children were born at the same moment as he was, and that these thousand and one storytellers make up a vast subcontinental Scheherazade. Saleem is telepathically attuned to the cacophony of an infinitely varied post-colonial nation, with all its fissures and conflicts. “I was a radio receiver and could turn the volume down or up,” he tells us. “I could select individual voices; I could even, by an effort of will, switch off my newly discovered ear.”

The novel was quickly recognized as a classic. “We have an epic in our laps,” John Leonard wrote in the Times. “The obvious comparisons are to Günter Grass in ‘The Tin Drum’ and to Gabriel Garcia Márquez in ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude.’ I am happy to oblige the obvious.” “Midnight’s Children” won the Booker Prize in 1981, and, many years later, “the Booker of Bookers,” the best of the best. One of the few middling reviews Rushdie received was from his father. His reading of the novel was, at best, dismissive; he could not have been pleased by the depiction of the protagonist’s father, who, like him, had a drinking problem. “When you have a baby on your lap, sometimes it wets you, but you forgive it,” he told Rushdie. It was only years later, when he was dying, that he came clean: “I was angry because every word you wrote was true.”

Shortly after the publication of “Midnight’s Children,” Bill Buford, an American who had reinvented the literary quarterly Granta while studying at Cambridge, invited Rushdie to give a reading at a space above a hairdresser’s. “I didn’t know who was going to show up,” Rushdie recalled. “The room was packed, absolutely bursting at the seams, and a large percentage were Indian readers. I was unbelievably moved. A rather well-dressed middle-aged lady in a fancy sari stood up at the end of the reading, in this sort of Q. & A. bit, and she said, ‘I want to thank you, Mr. Rushdie, because you have told my story.’ It still almost makes me cry.”

“Midnight’s Children” and its equally extravagant successor, “Shame,” which is set in a country that is “not quite” Pakistan, managed to infuriate the leaders of India and Pakistan—Indira Gandhi sued Rushdie and his publisher, Jonathan Cape, for defamation; “Shame” was banned in Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s Pakistan—but politics was hardly the only reason that his example was so liberating. Rushdie takes from Milan Kundera the idea that the history of the modern novel came from two distinct eighteenth-century streams, the realism of Samuel Richardson’s “Clarissa” and the strangeness and irrealism of Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy”; Rushdie gravitated to the latter, more fantastical, less populated tradition. His youthful readings had been followed by later excursions into Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Italo Calvino, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Mikhail Bulgakov, all of whom drew on folktales, allegory, and local mythologies to produce their “antic, ludic, comic, eccentric” texts.

In turn, younger writers found inspiration in “Midnight’s Children,” especially those who came from backgrounds shaped by colonialism and migration. One such was Zadie Smith, who published her first novel, “White Teeth,” in 2000, when she was twenty-four. “By the time I came of age, it was already canonical,” Smith told me. “If I’m honest, I was a bit resistant to it as a monument—it felt very intimidating. But then, aged about eighteen, I finally read it, and I think the first twenty pages had as much influence on me as any book could. Bottled energy! That’s the best way I can put it. And I recognized the energy. ‘The empire writes back’ is what we used to say of Rushdie, and I was also a distant child of that empire, and had grown up around people with Rushdie-level energy and storytelling prowess. . . . I hate that cliché of ‘He kicked I hate that cliché of ‘He kicked open the door so we could walk through it,’ but in Salman’s case it’s the truth.”

At the time, Rushdie had no idea that he would exert such an influence. “I was just thinking, I hope a few people read this weird book,” he said. “This book with almost no white people in it and written in such strange English.”

I first met Rushdie, fleetingly, in New York, at a 1986 convocation of pen International. I was reporting on the gathering for the Washington Post and Rushdie was possibly the youngest luminary in a vast assemblage of writers from forty-five countries. Like a rookie at the all-star game, Rushdie enjoyed watching the veterans do their thing: Günter Grass throwing Teutonic thunderbolts at Saul Bellow; E. L. Doctorow lashing out at Norman Mailer, the president of pen American Center, for inviting George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, to speak; Grace Paley hurling high heat at Mailer for his failure to invite more women. One afternoon, Rushdie was outside on Central Park South, taking a break from the conference, when he ran into a photographer from Time, who asked him to hop into a horse carriage for a picture. Rushdie found himself sitting beside Czesław Miłosz and Susan Sontag. For once, Rushdie said, he was “tongue-tied.”

But the pen convention was a diversion, as was a side project called “The Jaguar Smile,” a piece of reporting on the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. Rushdie was wrestling with the manuscript of “The Satanic Verses.” The prose was no less vibrant and hallucinatory than that of “Midnight’s Children” or “Shame,” but the tale was mainly set in London. “There was a point in my life when I could have written a version of ‘Midnight’s Children’ every few years,” he said. “It would’ve sold, you know. But I always want to find a thing to do that I haven’t done.”

“The Satanic Verses” was published in September, 1988. Rushdie knew that, just as he had angered Indira Gandhi and General Zia-ul-Haq, he might offend some Muslim clerics with his treatment of Islamic history and various religious tropes. The Prophet is portrayed as imperfect yet earnest, courageous in the face of persecution. In any case, the novel is hardly dominated by religion. It is in large measure about identity in the modern world of migration. Rushdie thought of “The Satanic Verses” as a “love-song to our mongrel selves,” a celebration of “hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs.” In a tone more comic than polemical, it was at once a social novel, a novel of British Asians, and a phantasmagorical retelling of the grand narrative of Islam.

If there was going to be a fuss, Rushdie figured, it would pass soon enough. “It would be absurd to think that a book can cause riots,” he told the Indian reporter Shrabani Basu before publication. Three years earlier, some British and American Muslims had protested peacefully against “My Beautiful Laundrette,” with its irreverent screenplay by the British Pakistani writer Hanif Kureishi, but that ran its course quickly. What’s more, in an era of racist “Paki-bashing,” Rushdie was admired in London for speaking out about bigotry. In 1982, in a broadcast on Channel 4, he said, “British thought, British society, has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism. It’s still there, breeding lice and vermin, waiting for unscrupulous people to exploit it for their own ends.”

In India, though, ahead of a national election, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s government banned “The Satanic Verses.” It was not immediately clear that the censorious fury would spread. In the U.K., the novel made the shortlist for the Booker Prize. (The winner was Peter Carey’s “Oscar and Lucinda.”) “The Satanic Verses” was even reviewed in the Iranian press. Attempts by religious authorities in Saudi Arabia to arouse anger about the book and have it banned throughout the world had at first only limited success, even in Arab countries. But soon the dam gave way. There were deadly riots in Kashmir and Islamabad; marches and book burnings in Bolton, Bradford, London, and Oldham; bomb threats against the publisher, Viking Penguin, in New York.

In Tehran, Ayatollah Khomeini was ailing and in crisis. After eight years of war with Iraq and hundreds of thousands of casualties, he had been forced to drink from the “poisoned chalice,” as he put it, and accept a ceasefire with Saddam Hussein. The popularity of the revolutionary regime had declined. Khomeini’s son admitted that his father never read “The Satanic Verses,” but the mullahs around him saw an opportunity to reassert the Ayatollah’s authority at home and to expand it abroad, even beyond the reach of his Shia followers. Khomeini issued the fatwa calling for Rushdie’s execution. As Kenan Malik writes in “From Fatwa to Jihad,” the edict “was a sign of weakness rather than of strength,” a matter more of politics than of theology.

A reporter from the BBC called Rushdie at home and said, “How does it feel to know that you have just been sentenced to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini?”

Rushdie thought, I’m a dead man. That’s it. One day. Two days. For the rest of his life, he would no longer be merely a storyteller; he would be a story, a controversy, an affair.

“Is it too matchy-matchy?”

After speaking with a few more reporters, Rushdie went to a memorial service for his close friend Bruce Chatwin. Many of his friends were there. Some expressed concern, others tried consolation via wisecrack. “Next week we’ll be back here for you!” Paul Theroux said. In those early days, Theroux recalled in a letter to Rushdie, he thought the fatwa was “a very bad joke, a bit like Papa Doc Duvalier putting a voodoo curse on Graham Greene for writing ‘The Comedians.’ ” After the service, Martin Amis picked up a newspaper that carried the headline “execute rushdie orders the ayatollah.” Rushdie, Amis thought, had now “vanished into the front page.”

For the next decade, Rushdie lived underground, guarded by officers of the Special Branch, a unit of London’s Metropolitan Police. The headlines and the threats were unceasing. People behaved well. People behaved disgracefully. There were friends of great constancy—Buford, Amis, James Fenton, Ian McEwan, Nigella Lawson, Christopher Hitchens, many more—and yet some regarded the fatwa as a problem Rushdie had brought on himself. Prince Charles made his antipathy clear at a dinner party that Amis attended: What should you expect if you insult people’s deepest convictions? John le Carré instructed Rushdie to withdraw his book “until a calmer time has come.” Roald Dahl branded him a “dangerous opportunist” who “knew exactly what he was doing and cannot plead otherwise.” The singer-songwriter Cat Stevens, who had a hit with “Peace Train” and converted to Islam, said, “The Quran makes it clear—if someone defames the Prophet, then he must die.” Germaine Greer, George Steiner, and Auberon Waugh all expressed their disapproval. So did Jimmy Carter, the British Foreign Secretary, and the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Among his detractors, an image hardened of a Rushdie who was dismissive of Muslim sensitivities and, above all, ungrateful for the expensive protection the government was providing him. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper remarked, “I would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring his manners, should waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them. If that should cause him thereafter to control his pen, society would benefit, and literature would not suffer.”

The horror was that, thanks to Khomeini’s cruel edict, so many people did suffer. In separate incidents, Hitoshi Igarashi, the novel’s Japanese translator, and Ettore Capriolo, its Italian translator, were stabbed, Igarashi fatally; the book’s Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, was fortunate to survive being shot multiple times. Bookshops from London to Berkeley were firebombed. Meanwhile, the Swedish Academy, the organization in Stockholm that awards the annual Nobel Prize in Literature, declined to issue a statement in support of Rushdie. This was a silence that went unbroken for decades.

Rushdie was in ten kinds of misery. His marriage to the novelist Marianne Wiggins fell apart. He was consumed by worry for the safety of his young son, Zafar. Initially, he maintained a language of bravado—“Frankly, I wish I had written a more critical book,” he told a reporter the day that the fatwa was announced—but he was living, he wrote, “in a waking nightmare.” “The Satanic Verses” was a sympathetic book about the plight of the deracinated, the very same young people he now saw on the evening news burning him in effigy. His antagonists were not merely offended; they insisted on a right not to be offended. As he told me, “This paradox is part of the story of my life.”

It was part of a still larger paradox. “The Satanic Verses” was published at a time when liberty was ascendant: by late 1989, the Berlin Wall had fallen; in the Soviet Union, the authority of the Communist Party was imploding. And yet the Rushdie affair prefigured other historical trends: struggles over multiculturalism and the boundaries of free speech; the rise of radical Islam and the reaction to it.

For some young writers, the work proved intensely generative. The playwright and novelist Ayad Akhtar, who is now the president of pen America, grew up in a Muslim community in Milwaukee. He told me he remembers how friends and loved ones were gravely offended by “The Satanic Verses”; at the same time, the novel changed his life. “It was one of those experiences where I couldn’t believe what I was reading, both the beauty of it and, as a believing Muslim, I grappled with the shock of its extraordinary irreverence,” he said. “By the time I got to the end of that book, I was a different person. I suppose it was like being a young believing Irish Catholic in the twenties and encountering ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.’ ”

Amid the convulsions of the late nineteen-eighties, though, the book was vilified by people who knew it only through caricature and vitriol. A novelist who had set out to write about the complexities of South Asians in London was now, in mosques around the city and around the world, described as a figure of traitorous evil. Rushdie, out of a desire to calm the waters, met with a group of local Muslim leaders and signed a declaration affirming his faith in Islam. It was, he reasoned, true in a way: although he did not believe in supernaturalism or the orthodoxies of the creed, he had regard for the culture and civilization of Islam. He now attested that he did not agree with any statement made by any character in the novel that cast aspersions on Islam or the Prophet Muhammad, and that he would suspend the publication of the paperback edition “while any risk of further offense exists.”

Ayatollah Khomeini had died by this time, and his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was unmoved. His response was that the fatwa would remain in place even if Rushdie “repents and becomes the most pious man of his time.” A newspaper in Tehran advised Rushdie to “prepare for death.”

He was humiliated. It had been a mistake, he decided, to try to appease those who wanted his head. He would not make it again. As he put it in “Joseph Anton”:

He needed to understand that there were people who would never love him. No matter how carefully he explained his work or clarified his intentions in creating it, they would not love him. The unreasoning mind, driven by the doubt-free absolutes of faith, could not be convinced by reason. Those who had demonized him would never say, “Oh, look, he’s not a demon after all.” . . . He needed, now, to be clear of what he was fighting for. Freedom of speech, freedom of the imagination, freedom from fear, and the beautiful, ancient art of which he was privileged to be a practitioner. Also skepticism, irreverence, doubt, satire, comedy, and unholy glee. He would never again flinch from the defense of these things.

Since 1989, Rushdie has had to shut out not only the threats to his person but the constant dissections of his character, in the press and beyond. “There was a moment when there was a ‘me’ floating around that had been invented to show what a bad person I was,” he said. “ ‘Evil.’ ‘Arrogant.’ ‘Terrible writer.’ ‘Nobody would’ve read him if there hadn’t been an attack against his book.’ Et cetera. I’ve had to fight back against that false self. My mother used to say that her way of dealing with unhappiness was to forget it. She said, ‘Some people have a memory. I have a forget-ory.’

Rushdie went on, “I just thought, There are various ways in which this event can destroy me as an artist.” He could refrain from writing altogether. He could write “revenge books” that would make him a creature of circumstances. Or he could write “scared books,” novels that “shy away from things, because you worry about how people will react to them.” But he didn’t want the fatwa to become a determining event in his literary trajectory: “If somebody arrives from another planet who has never heard of anything that happened to me, and just has the books on the shelf and reads them chronologically, I don’t think that alien would think, Something terrible happened to this writer in 1989. The books go on their own journey. And that was really an act of will.”

Some people in Rushdie’s circle and beyond are convinced that, in the intervening decades, self-censorship, a fear of giving offense, has too often become the order of the day. His friend Hanif Kureishi has said, “Nobody would have the balls today to write ‘The Satanic Verses,’ let alone publish it.”

At the height of the fatwa, Rushdie set out to make good on a promise to his son, Zafar, and complete a book of stories, tales that he told the boy in his bath. That book, which appeared in 1990, is “Haroun and the Sea of Stories.” (Haroun is Zafar’s middle name.) It concerns a twelve-year-old boy’s attempt to restore his father’s gift for storytelling. “Luck has a way of running out without the slightest warning,” Rushdie writes, and so it has been with Rashid, the Shah of Blah, a storyteller. His wife leaves him; he loses his gift. When he opens his mouth, he can say only “Ark, ark, ark.” His nemesis is the Cultmaster, a tyrant from the land of Chup, who opposes “stories and fancies and dreams,” and imposes Silence Laws on his subjects; some of his devotees “work themselves up into great frenzies and sew their lips together with stout twine.” In the end, the son is a savior, and stories triumph over tyranny. “My father has definitely not given up,” Haroun concludes. “You can’t cut off his Story Water supply.” And so, in the midst of a nightmare, Rushdie wrote one of his most enjoyable books, and an allegory of the necessity and the resilience of art.

Among the stories Rushdie was determined to tell was the story of his life. This required a factual approach, and when he published that memoir, “Joseph Anton,” a decade ago, he intended to be self-scrutinizing, tougher on himself than on anybody else. That is not invariably the case. He is harsh about publishers who, while standing fully behind Rushdie and his novel, felt it necessary to make compromises along the way (notably, delaying paperback publication) to protect the lives of their staffs. Some of the passages about his second, third, and fourth wives—Marianne Wiggins, Elizabeth West, and Padma Lakshmi—are unkind, even vindictive. He is, in general, not known for restraint in his public utterances, and his responses to personal and literary chastisements are sometimes ill-tempered. In some ways, “Joseph Anton” reminded me of Solzhenitsyn’s memoir “The Oak and the Calf,” not because the two writers share similar personalities or politics but because both, while showing extraordinary courage, remain human, sometimes heroic and sometimes petulant.

At the end of “Joseph Anton”—the title is his fatwa-era code name, the first names of two favorite writers, Conrad and Chekhov—there is a movement into the light, a resolution. His “little battle,” he wrote in the final pages, “was coming to an end.” With a sense of joy, he embarks on a new novel.

This in the end was who he was, a teller of tales, a creator of shapes, a maker of things that were not. It would be wise to withdraw from the world of commentary and polemic and rededicate himself to what he loved most, the art that had claimed his heart, mind and spirit ever since he was a young man, and to live again in the universe of once upon a time, of kan ma kan, it was so and it was not so, and to make the journey to the truth upon the waters of make-believe.

Rushdie moved to New York and tried to put the turmoil behind him.

On the night of August 11th, a twenty-four-year-old man named Hadi Matar slept under the stars on the grounds of the Chautauqua Institution. His parents, Hassan Matar and Silvana Fardos, came from Yaroun, Lebanon, a village just north of the Israeli border, and immigrated to California, where Hadi was born. In 2004, they divorced. Hassan Matar returned to Lebanon; Silvana Fardos, her son, and her twin daughters eventually moved to New Jersey. In recent years, the family has lived in a two-story house in Fairview, a suburb across the Hudson River from Manhattan.

In 2018, Matar went to Lebanon to visit his father. At least initially, the journey was not a success. “The first hour he gets there he called me, he wanted to come back,” Fardos told a reporter for the Daily Mail. “He stayed for approximately twenty-eight days, but the trip did not go well with his father, he felt very alone.”

When he returned to New Jersey, Matar became a more devout Muslim. He was also withdrawn and distant; he took to criticizing his mother for failing to provide a proper religious upbringing. “I was expecting him to come back motivated, to complete school, to get his degree and a job,” Fardos said. Instead, she said, Matar stashed himself away in the basement, where he stayed up all night, reading and playing video games, and slept during the day. He held a job at a nearby Marshall’s, the discount department store, but quit after a couple of months. Many weeks would go by without his saying a word to his mother or his sisters.

Matar did occasionally venture out of the house. He joined the State of Fitness Boxing Club, a gym in North Bergen, a couple of miles away, and took evening classes: jump rope, speed bag, heavy bag, sparring. He impressed no one with his skills. The owner, a firefighter named Desmond Boyle, takes pride in drawing out the people who come to his gym. He had no luck with Matar. “The only way to describe him was that every time you saw him it seemed like the worst day of his life,” Boyle told me. “There was always this look on him that his dog had just died, a look of sadness and dread every day. After he was here for a while, I tried to reach out to him, and he barely whispered back.” He kept his distance from everyone else in the class. As Boyle put it, Matar was “the definition of a lone wolf.” In early August, Matar sent an e-mail to the gym dropping his membership. On the header, next to his name, was the image of the current Supreme Leader of Iran.

Matar read about Rushdie’s upcoming event at Chautauqua on Twitter. On August 11th, he took a bus to Buffalo and then hired a Lyft to bring him to the grounds. He bought a ticket for Rushdie’s appearance and killed time. “I was hanging around pretty much,” he said in a brief interview in the New York Post. “Not doing anything in particular, just walking around.”

In Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth,” a radicalized young man named Millat joins a group called kevin (Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation) and, along with some like-minded friends, heads for a demonstration against an offending novel and its author: “ ‘You read it?’ asked Ranil, as they whizzed past Finsbury Park. There was a general pause. Millat said, ‘I haven’t exackly read it exackly—but I know all about that shit, yeah?’ To be more precise, Millat hadn’t read it.” Neither had Matar. He had looked at only a couple of pages of “The Satanic Verses,” but he had watched videos of Rushdie on YouTube. “I don’t like him very much,” he told the Post. “He’s someone who attacked Islam, he attacked their beliefs, the belief systems.” He pronounced the author “disingenuous.”

Rushdie was accustomed to events like the one at Chautauqua. He had done countless readings, panels, and lectures, even revelled in them. His partner onstage, Henry Reese, had not. To settle his nerves, Reese took a deep breath and gazed out at the crowd. It was calming, all the friendly, expectant faces. Then there was noise—quick steps, a huffing and puffing, an exertion. Reese turned to the noise, to Rushdie. A black-clad man was all over the writer. At first, Reese said, “I thought it was a prank, some really bad-taste imitation attack, something like the Will Smith slap.” Then he saw blood on Rushdie’s neck, blood flecked on the backdrop with Chautauqua signage. “It then became clear there was a knife there, but at first it seemed like just hitting. For a second, I froze. Then I went after the guy. Instinctively. I ran over and tackled him at the back and held him by his legs.” Matar had stabbed Rushdie about a dozen times. Now he turned on Reese and stabbed him, too, opening a gash above his eye.

A doctor who had had breakfast with Rushdie that morning was sitting on the aisle in the second row. He got out of his seat, charged up the stairs, and headed for the melee. Later, the doctor, who asked me not to use his name, said he was sure that Reese, by tackling Matar, had helped save the writer’s life. A New York state trooper put Matar in handcuffs and led him off the stage.

Rushdie was on his back, still conscious, bleeding from stab wounds to the right side of his neck and face, his left hand, and his abdomen just under his rib cage. By now, a firefighter was at Rushdie’s side, along with four doctors—an anesthesiologist, a radiologist, an internist, and an obstetrician. Two of the doctors held Rushdie’s legs up to return blood flow to the body. The fireman had one hand on the right side of Rushdie’s neck to stanch the bleeding and another hand near his eye. The fireman told Rushdie, “Don’t blink your eye, we are trying to stop the bleeding. Keep it closed.” Rushdie was responsive. “O.K. I agree,” he said. “I understand.”

Rushdie’s left hand was bleeding badly. Using a pair of scissors, one of the doctors cut the sleeve off his jacket and tried to stanch the wound with a clean handkerchief. Within seconds, the handkerchief was saturated, the blood coming out “like holy hell,” the doctor recalled. Someone handed him a bunch of paper towels. “I squeezed the tissues as hard as I possibly could.”

“I’m going to exaggerate the size of the fish.”

“What’s going on with my left hand?” Rushdie said. “It hurts so much!” There was a spreading pool of blood near his left hip.

E.M.T.s arrived, hooked Rushdie up to an I.V., and eased him onto a stretcher. They wheeled him out of the amphitheatre and got him on a helicopter, which transferred him to a Level 2 trauma center, Hamot, part of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Rushdie had travelled alone to Chautauqua. Back in New York, his wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, got a call at around midday telling her that her husband had been attacked and was in surgery. She raced to arrange a flight to Erie and get to the hospital. When she arrived, he was still in the operating room.

In Chautauqua, people walked around the grounds in a daze. As one of the doctors who had run onto the stage to help Rushdie told me, “Chautauqua was the one place where I felt completely at ease. For a second, it was like a dream. And then it wasn’t. It made no sense, then it made all the sense in the world.”

Rushdie was hospitalized for six weeks. In the months since his release, he has mostly stayed home save for trips to doctors, sometimes two or three a day. He’d lived without security for more than two decades. Now he’s had to rethink that.

Just before Christmas, on a cold and rainy morning, I arrived at the midtown office of Andrew Wylie, Rushdie’s literary agent, where we’d arranged to meet. After a while, I heard the door to the agency open. Rushdie, in an accent that bears traces of all his cities—Bombay, London, New York—was greeting agents and assistants, people he had not seen in many months. The sight of him making his way down the hall was startling: He has lost more than forty pounds since the stabbing. The right lens of his eyeglasses is blacked over. The attack left him blind in that eye, and he now usually reads with an iPad so that he can adjust the light and the size of the type. There is scar tissue on the right side of his face. He speaks as fluently as ever, but his lower lip droops on one side. The ulnar nerve in his left hand was badly damaged.

Rushdie took off his coat and settled into a chair across from his agent’s desk. I asked how his spirits were.

“Well, you know, I’ve been better,” he said dryly. “But, considering what happened, I’m not so bad. As you can see, the big injuries are healed, essentially. I have feeling in my thumb and index finger and in the bottom half of the palm. I’m doing a lot of hand therapy, and I’m told that I’m doing very well.”

“Can you type?”

“Not very well, because of the lack of feeling in the fingertips of these fingers.”

What about writing?

“I just write more slowly. But I’m getting there.”

Sleeping has not always been easy. “There have been nightmares—not exactly the incident, but just frightening. Those seem to be diminishing. I’m fine. I’m able to get up and walk around. When I say I’m fine, I mean, there’s bits of my body that need constant checkups. It was a colossal attack.”

More than once, Rushdie looked around the office and smiled. “It’s great to be back,” he said. “It’s someplace which is not a hospital, which is mostly where I’ve been to. And to be in this agency is—I’ve been coming here for decades, and it’s a very familiar space to me. And to be able to come here to talk about literature, talk about books, to talk about this novel, ‘Victory City,’ to be able to talk about the thing that most matters to me . . .”

At this meeting and in subsequent conversations, I sensed conflicting instincts in Rushdie when he replied to questions about his health: there was the instinct to move on—to talk about literary matters, his book, anything but the decades-long fatwa and now the attack—and the instinct to be absolutely frank. “There is such a thing as P.T.S.D., you know,” he said after a while. “I’ve found it very, very difficult to write. I sit down to write, and nothing happens. I write, but it’s a combination of blankness and junk, stuff that I write and that I delete the next day. I’m not out of that forest yet, really.”

He added, “I’ve simply never allowed myself to use the phrase ‘writer’s block.’ Everybody has a moment when there’s nothing in your head. And you think, Oh, well, there’s never going to be anything. One of the things about being seventy-five and having written twenty-one books is that you know that, if you keep at it, something will come.”

Had that happened in the past months?

Rushdie frowned. “Not really. I mean, I’ve tried, but not really.” He was only lately “just beginning to feel the return of the juices.”

How to go on living after thinking you had emerged from years of threat, denunciation, and mortal danger? And now how to recover from an attack that came within millimetres of killing you, and try to live, somehow, as if it could never recur?

He seemed grateful for a therapist he had seen since before the attack, a therapist “who has a lot of work to do. He knows me and he’s very helpful, and I just talk things through.”

The talk was plainly in the service of a long-standing resolution. “I’ve always tried very hard not to adopt the role of a victim,” he said. “Then you’re just sitting there saying, Somebody stuck a knife in me! Poor me. . . . Which I do sometimes think.” He laughed. “It hurts. But what I don’t think is: That’s what I want people reading the book to think. I want them to be captured by the tale, to be carried away.”

Many years ago, he recalled, there were people who seemed to grow tired of his persistent existence. “People didn’t like it. Because I should have died. Now that I’ve almost died, everybody loves me. . . . That was my mistake, back then. Not only did I live but I tried to live well. Bad mistake. Get fifteen stab wounds, much better.”

As he lay in the hospital, Rushdie received countless texts and e-mails sending love, wishing for his recovery. “I was in utter shock,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian novelist, told me. “I just didn’t believe he was still in any real danger. For two days, I kept vigil, sending texts to friends all over the world, searching the Internet to make sure he was still alive.” There was a reading in his honor on the steps of the New York Public Library.

For some writers, the shock brought certain issues into hard focus. “The attack on Salman clarified a lot of things for me,” Ayad Akhtar told me. “I know I have a much brighter line that I draw for myself between the potential harms of speech and the freedom of the imagination. They are incommensurate and shouldn’t be placed in the same paragraph.”

Rushdie was stirred by the tributes that his near-death inspired. “It’s very nice that everybody was so moved by this, you know?” he said. “I had never thought about how people would react if I was assassinated, or almost assassinated.”

And yet, he said, “I’m lucky. What I really want to say is that my main overwhelming feeling is gratitude.” He was grateful to those who showed their support. He was grateful to the doctors, the E.M.T. workers, and the fireman in Chautauqua who stanched his wounds, and he was grateful to the surgeons in Erie. “At some point, I’d like to go back up there and say thank you.” He was also grateful to his two grown sons, Zafar and Milan, who live in London, and to Griffiths. “She kind of took over at a point when I was helpless.” She dealt with the doctors, the police, and the investigators, and with transport from Pennsylvania to New York. “She just took over everything, as well as having the emotional burden of my almost being killed.”

Did he think it had been a mistake to let his guard down since moving to New York? “Well, I’m asking myself that question, and I don’t know the answer to it,” he said. “I did have more than twenty years of life. So, is that a mistake? Also, I wrote a lot of books. ‘The Satanic Verses’ was my fifth published book—my fourth published novel—and this is my twenty-first. So, three-quarters of my life as a writer has happened since the fatwa. In a way, you can’t regret your life.”

Whom does he blame for the attack?

“I’ve tried very hard over these years to avoid recrimination and bitterness,” he said. “I just think it’s not a good look. One of the ways I’ve dealt with this whole thing is to look forward and not backwards. What happens tomorrow is more important than what happened yesterday.”

“I blame him,” he said.Cartoon by Tommy Siegel

Anyone else? Was he let down by security at Chautauqua?

The publication of “Victory City,” he made plain, was his focus. He’s interested to see how the novel will be received. Will it be viewed through the prism of the stabbing? He recalled the “sympathy wave” that came with “The Satanic Verses,” how sales shot up with the fatwa. It happened again after he was stabbed nearly to death last summer.

He is eager, always, to talk about the new novel’s grounding in Indian history and mythology, how the process of writing accelerated, just as it had with “Midnight’s Children,” once he found the voice of his main character; how the book can be read as an allegory about the abuse of power and the curse of sectarianism—the twin curses of India under its current Prime Minister, the Hindu supremacist Narendra Modi. But, once more, Rushdie knows, his new novel will have to compete for attention with the ugliness of real life. “I’m hoping that to some degree it might change the subject. I’ve always thought that my books are more interesting than my life,” he said. “Unfortunately, the world appears to disagree.”

Hadi Matar is being held in the Chautauqua County Jail, in the village of Mayville. He’s been charged with attempted murder in the second degree, which could bring twenty-five years in prison; he’s also been charged with assault in the second degree, for the attack on Henry Reese, which could bring an additional seven. The trial is unlikely to take place until next year.

“It’s a relatively simple event when you think about it,” Jason Schmidt, the Chautauqua County district attorney, told me. “We know this was a preplanned, unprovoked attack by an individual who had no prior interaction with the criminal-justice system.” The prosecutor’s job is no doubt made easier by the fact that there were hundreds of witnesses to the crime.

Matar is being represented by Nathaniel Barone, a public defender. At a court hearing not long after the stabbing, Barone accompanied Matar, who wore handcuffs, a face mask, and prison garb with broad black and white stripes. Matar’s hair and beard were closely cropped. He said very little save for his plea of not guilty. Barone, wearing a suit and tie, stood by his client. He seems unillusioned. When I suggested that he had a near-impossible case, he did not dispute it: “Almost to a person they are saying, ‘What is this guy’s defense? Everyone saw him do it!’ ” Barone said he has hundreds of expert witnesses on file, and he will be consulting some of them on matters of psychology and radicalization. He also indicated that he might challenge the admissibility of Matar’s interview with the New York Post, saying (without supplying any evidence) that it was possibly obtained under false pretenses. (The Post said that its journalist had identified himself and that “Mr. Matar absolutely understood that he was speaking to a reporter.”

It is unknown if Matar was acting under anyone’s tutelage or instructions, but the Iranian state media has repeatedly expressed its approval of his attempt to kill Rushdie. Just last month, Hossein Salami, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, said Matar had acted “bravely” and warned that the staff of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which had been attacked by Muslim extremists in 2015, should consider “the fate” of Rushdie if it continues to mock Ayatollah Khamenei.

As for Matar’s mother and her remarks to the press about his behavior and their fraught relationship, Barone sighed and said, “Obviously, it’s always concerning when you see a description from the mother about your client which can be interpreted in a negative way.” He did not contest her remarks.

Barone has met with Matar on his cellblock and has found him coöperative. “I’ve had absolutely no problems with Mr. Matar,” he said. “He has been cordial and respectful, openly discussing things with me. He is a very sincere young man. It would be like meeting any young man. There’s nothing that sets him apart.”

Matar is in a “private area” of the cellblock. He spends much of his time reading the Quran and other material. “I’m getting to know him, but it’s not easy,” Barone said. “The reality of sitting in jail, incarcerated—it’s easy to have no hope. It’s easy to think things aren’t going to work out for you. But I tell clients you have to have hope.” He assured me that Matar “isn’t taking this lightly. Some people just don’t give a damn about things.”

Does he show any remorse?

Barone replied that he could not say “at this point.”

Rushdie told me that he thought of Matar as an “idiot.” He paused and, aware that it wasn’t much of an observation, said, “I don’t know what I think of him, because I don’t know him.” One had a faint sense of a writer grappling with a character—and a human being grappling with a nemesis—who remains frustratingly vaporous. “All I’ve seen is his idiotic interview in the New York Post. Which only an idiot would do. I know that the trial is still a long way away. It might not happen until late next year. I guess I’ll find out some more about him then.”

Rushdie has spent these past months healing. He’s watched his share of “crap television.” He couldn’t find anything or anyone to like in “The White Lotus” (“Awful!”) or the Netflix documentary on Meghan and Harry (“The banality of it!”). The World Cup was an extended pleasure, though. He was thrilled by the advance of the Moroccans and the preternatural performances of France’s Kylian Mbappé and Argentina’s Lionel Messi, and he was moved by the support shown by players for the protests in Iran, which he hopes could be a “tipping point” for the regime in Tehran.

There will, of course, be no book tour for “Victory City.” But so long as his health is good and security is squared away he is hoping to go to London for the opening of “Helen,” his play about Helen of Troy. “I’m going to tell you really truthfully, I’m not thinking about the long term,” he said. “I’m thinking about little step by little step. I just think, Bop till you drop.”

When we picked up the subject a couple of weeks later, in a conversation over Zoom, he said, “I’ve got nothing else to do. I would like to have a second skill, but I don’t. I always envied writers like Günter Grass, who had a second career as a visual artist. I thought how nice it must be to spend a day wrestling with words, and then get up and walk down the street to your art studio and become something completely else. I don’t have that. So, all I can do is this. As long as there’s a story that I think is worth giving my time to, then I will. When I have a book in my head, it’s as if the rest of the world is in its correct shape.”

It’s “depressing” when he’s struggling at his desk, he admits. He wonders if the stories will come. But he’s still there, putting in the time.

Rushdie looked around his desk, gestured to the books that line the walls of his study. “I feel everything’s O.K. when I’m sitting here, and I have something to think about,” he said. “Because that takes over from the outside world. Of course, the interior world is connected to the exterior world, but, when you are in the act of making, it takes over from everything else.”

For now, he has set aside the idea for a novel inspired by Kafka and Mann, and is thinking through a kind of sequel to “Joseph Anton.” At first, he was irritated by the idea, “because it felt almost like it was being forced on me—the attack demanded that I should write about the attack.” In recent weeks, though, the idea has taken hold. Rushdie’s books tend to be imax-scale, large-cast productions, but in order to write about the attack in Chautauqua, an event that took place in a matter of seconds, he envisions something more “microscopic.”

And the voice would be different. The slightly distanced, third-person voice that “Joseph Anton” employed seems wrong for the task. “This doesn’t feel third-person-ish to me,” Rushdie said. “I think when somebody sticks a knife into you, that’s a first-person story. That’s an ‘I’ story.” ♦

I never thought the Robert Fontaine Gallery would ever be in my home. I chased him for years. He now opened a gallery two blocks away. We scored Ben Sack’s Graffiti Cosmopolitan, a Charcoal and Gold Leaf on Woven Cotton Paper. Ben we would love to meet you.

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After the Sensational Auction of Her Estate, Joan Didion’s Home of More Than 30 Years Has Quietly Entered the Market for $7.5 Million

The beloved author wrote several critically acclaimed works inside the Upper East Side apartment.

Artnet News, February 2, 2023Author Joan Didion in her Upper East Side apartment. Photo by Neville Elder/Corbis Sygma via Getty Images.

Following the blockbuster auction of Joan Didion’s estate in November, one large piece of the beloved author’s holdings remained unaccounted for. What was to become of her Upper East Side apartment, where she resided for over 30 years?

That question has now, partly, been answered. About a week ago, on January 27, the spacious four-bedroom co-op was quietly listed for sale. The home—located in one of the “most prestigious residential addresses in New York City,” according to the listing agent, Sotheby’s International Realty—comes with a price tag of $7.5 million.

Joan Didion’s apartment building at 30 East 71st Street. Courtesy of Street Easy.

Joan Didion wrote several critically acclaimed works inside the unit, including The Year of Magical Thinking, which chronicled her grief following the sudden death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, in 2003. Didion adapted the memoir for the stage, which debuted on Broadway in 2007, starring Vanessa Redgrave.

It was in this apartment, too, that she spoke candidly about her extraordinary life and career for the 2017 documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew, Griffin Dunne.

Didion and Dunne purchased the corner apartment in the limestone-faced building in 1988. They considered the spot on 71st Street between Madison Avenue and Park Avenue, a block from Central Park, their primary residence; Didion herself served on the co-op board.

Interior view of Joan Didion’s apartment for sale. Courtesy of Street Easy.

Buyers of the literary kind will have their pick of writing spaces. The unit comes equipped with a large den and step-up library, as well as a staff room. The kitchen, where Didion famously spent much of her time, boasts a professional-grade Viking oven range. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, beamed ceilings, herringbone flooring, and a wood-burning fireplace round out the amenities.

The listing comes two and a half months since Didion’s estate auction, “An American Icon: Property From the Collection of Joan Didion.” The sensational event allowed the public to snap up a wide selection of her personal effects, from her Le Creuset dishware to her Celine sunglasses. The sale netted nearly $2 million and benefited two charities, one of them a scholarship for women in literature in her hometown of Sacramento.

Kitchen view of Joan Didion’s apartment. Courtesy of Street Easy.

In late January, the New York Public Libraryacquired Didion and Dunne’s joint literary archives, purchasing the couple’s personal collection of letters, photographs, and manuscripts. The research files for Didion’s much-lauded essays in The White Album and Slouching Towards Bethlehem were included, as were notes and drafts of The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, her account of her daughter Quintana Roo Dunne’s death in 2005

BY LIAM HESS

Ever since I watched The Talented Mr. Ripley at an age that was, frankly, far too young—despite the film’s sophisticated trappings, Jude Law does get brutally clubbed around the head with an enormous wooden oar—I have been a sucker for the glamorous promise of an Italian vacation. It may be a cliché, but the reason I’ll always return to Italy’s boot is that it’s filled with places that feel like they could exist nowhere else in the world, from thigh to heel; from the mind-boggling engineering of the Venetian waterways to the devil-may-care energy of Naples with its whizzing motorcycles and crumbling Baroque churches. 

Still, nowhere in Italy has captured my imagination—and feels as uniquely its own place—like Sicily. A crossroads for various Mediterranean civilizations for centuries (and still to this day), its rich and incredibly varied landscapes serve as a backdrop for one of the country’s most strange and seductive cultures. The seafood pasta isn’t half bad, either. null

Last year, I was lucky enough to travel to this sprawling island to write a guide to its hotels, with a specific focus on two new openings. But one of these new openings, the Four Seasons San Domenico Palace, felt particularly magical: Situated on a rocky outcrop on the edge of the popular tourist hilltop town of Taormina, it seemed to capture everything that has made Sicily such an enchanting destination for travelers from the Grand Tour onwards. 

Housed in a former convent that was first constructed in the 14th century—indeed, an entire wing includes rooms housed in the former cloisters, albeit with a few of the nun’s cells knocked through to form more spacious living quarters—peeling back the layers of its past is a history lesson in and of itself. Converted into a hotel in the late 19th century as Italian tourism began to truly boom, a wing was later added in the Liberty style (an Italian variation of Art Nouveau) to house guests including Oscar Wilde and D. H. Lawrence. Throughout World War II, it served as a headquarters for the German army. (After the war, it returned to its function as a hotel, attracting a breathlessly star-studded array of jet-set guests including Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, and Sophia Loren.)

So imagine my delight then when I heard Mike White’s masterful upstairs-downstairs comedy The White Lotus, would be renewed for a second season—and this time set in Sicily. And imagine my further delight when it was announced that the setting for the show’s second season would be none other than the San Domenico Palace. Visions of Jennifer Coolidge in a jazzily-patterned muumuu lounging by the same pool in which I’d taken my morning swim raced through my mind. 

Of course, as soon as I came to the realization I’d stayed at the actual, real White Lotus—and I began sharing this with anyone who would listen, in a manner that in hindsight was probably extremely smug and annoying—the first question anyone asked in response was: Well, what was it like?

Reader, I’m here to tell you, it was just as beautiful as it looks. To start at the very beginning, in order to reach the hotel, you’re taken along a winding road that loops through and around the vertiginous cliffs from which visitors can take in Taormina’s peerless views of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Then, you’re deposited in the courtyard—now and forever known as the historic location where Sabrina Impacciatore’s frosty hotel manager Valentina conjectures that Coolidge’s Tanya may have dressed up as Peppa Pig. (They should really make it a UNESCO World Heritage Site for that line alone.)

Stepping through the first of the cloisters, you’ll pass the shop where Mia and Lucia went on their wild spending spree, and descend to the bar area where Ethan and Cameron got up to no good while their wives were away in Noto. (I can confirm, however, that the hotel’s real-life musical offering was far superior to the warbling of the sleazy lounge singer Giuseppe in the show.) Cross the threshold into the Principe Cerami restaurant, and you can wander further out to the almost comically beautiful terraces where you watched Harper and Daphne eat their breakfasts. 

Then, you can head through the perfectly manicured gardens awash with colorful lilies and scented with fragrant citrus trees, and down towards the hotel’s true pièce de resistance: the infinity pool with its widescreen view all the way from Mount Etna across to the Greek amphitheater that hovers above Taormina as a reminder of its illustrious history. Sadly, I did not spot Portia or Albie lounging by the pool and trading flirtatious glances, but if there’s anywhere you’d hope to find the spark of first love, it would be somewhere as impossibly romantic as this. 

The Four Seasons San Domenico Palace has that rare thing only the very best hotels possess, which is the feeling that simply by staying there—even without venturing beyond its four walls—you’re having an experience in and of itself, with its lush gardens and corridors that seem to radiate history feeling like a microcosm of Taormina. I saw plenty of chatter on Twitter about the myopia of the White Lotus’s guests never seeming to leave the hotel and only ever eating in its restaurants, but once you’re there, it’s not hard to understand why you wouldn’t necessarily want to leave. It may not be the realSicily, whatever that is, but it’s a slice of Sicilian paradise all the same. The only thing that could possibly make it better? Staying there with Jennifer Coolidge. In matching muumuus

This is scary, upsetting, frustrating and disturbing to read.—LWH

PERSONAL HISTORY

NOBODY HAS MY CONDITION BUT ME

Medical researchers find my genetic mutation endlessly fascinating. But being unique isn’t a plus when you’re a patient.

In early 2021, Dr. Michael Ombrello, an investigator at the National Institutes of Health, received a message from doctors at Yale about a patient with a novel genetic mutation—the first of its kind ever seen. A specialist in rare inflammatory and immune disorders, Ombrello was concerned by what first-round genetic tests showed: a disabling mutation in a gene, known as PLCG2, that’s crucial for proper immune functioning. It was hard to discern how the patient, a forty-eight-year-old woman, had survived for so long without serious infections. Even more puzzling was the sudden onset of severe joint pain and swelling she was experiencing after years of excellent health. He decided to bring her to the N.I.H. campus, in Bethesda, Maryland, to study her case first hand.

That’s how I ended up as a patient in his clinic on a sweet, warming day in April, 2021, just as the cherry blossoms in the Washington area were in full bloom. As a historian and a biographer, I am used to conducting research, examining other people’s lives in search of patterns and insights. That spring, I became the research subject. At the N.I.H., Ombrello’s team took twenty-one vials of my blood and stored a few of them in liquid nitrogen for future use. Scientists outside the N.I.H. began to study me, too. In the past few years, my case has been examined by specialists at Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania—by immunologists, rheumatologists, dermatologists, pulmonologists, and experts in infectious disease. It has been debated at hospital grand rounds and global medical conferences, and in high-powered conference calls. There are PowerPoint decks about it.

All of which makes me lucky, in one respect. Far too often, women who present with hard-to-diagnose illnesses are told that the symptoms are no big deal, that the problem is in their head. They spend years going from doctor to doctor, in a desperate search for someone, anyone, who’s willing to help. This has not been my experience. From the first, doctors took my condition seriously, sometimes more seriously than I did. They pushed me along to the nation’s greatest experts, at the finest medical institutions. My insurance paid large sums for tests and treatments; my family and friends were patient and supportive. All the while, I was able to keep doing what needed to be done: write a book, raise a child, teach my classes.

But none of this gets around a single, stubborn fact. “You are the only person known to have this exact mutation,” Ombrello explains. “I haven’t seen any reports in reference populations of this mutation, and I don’t have anyone that I’ve had referred to me or that I’ve seen in my patient cohort that has this mutation.” In other words, I am one of a kind, and therefore a medical curiosity. Doctors often blurt out that my situation is “fascinating” before catching themselves; they’re aware that nobody really wants to be fascinating in quite this way. Thanks to advances in genetic sequencing, though, researchers are increasingly able to identify one-offs like me.

That leaves them engaged in a process not so different from what I do as a biographer, trying to understand a life and its meaning based on deep research but incomplete information. My historical training pushes me to think in chronological terms: Where do we stand in the great saga of human history? How do grand structural forces and ideas and technologies shape what it’s like for an individual to live a life, day to day? But nothing has rooted me in history quite like the experience of getting sick. Though illness and death may be the universals of earthly existence, the way that we get sick—and, sometimes, get better—has everything to do with the luck of the moment.

Like any good historical narrative, mine has a day when it all began. On September 1, 2019, I went for a mile-long swim in the Long Island Sound, along a thin strip of Connecticut beach where distance swimmers like to gather. A few minutes in, I brushed up against a strange aquatic plant; it scratched my forearm and left me with angry welts that disappeared about an hour later. That night, my ankles started to itch—really itch, the maddening kind of sensation that blots out all thought and reason. By the next day, a hivelike rash was creeping up my calves and thighs, and I could barely turn my neck or open my jaw. By the following week, the symptoms had colonized the rest of my body, with the rash moving north along my trunk and arms while the pain in my neck and jaw descended south into my arms and shoulders.

As a chronically healthy person, I assumed that these were temporary annoyances, perhaps reactions to that odd plant. My doctors initially thought more or less the same thing. As a professor at Yale, I receive my medical care through the university’s health center, a private bastion of socialized medicine for faculty, students, and staff. After five or six days of worsening symptoms, I made an appointment with an advanced-practice registered nurse, who sent me to a dermatologist, who prescribed a steroid cream and told me that things would clear up in a few weeks.

The cream did the trick; the rash disappeared, never to return. But the joint pain stayed and grew steadily worse, soon accompanied by bouts of dramatic swelling as it migrated into my hands and ankles and knees. When the inflammation visited my shoulders, I could not raise my arms without yelping in pain. When it stopped off in a knee, I aged thirty years in a day, a hobbled old woman daunted by a flight of stairs. When it visited my hand, I suddenly had a thick, swollen paw.

Based on these symptoms, I was sent to a rheumatologist. At first, I was charmed by the specialty’s anachronistic name, with its nod to an age when “rheums” and “vapors” and “humors” constituted the height of medical practice. Though scientific knowledge has advanced a good deal since then, rheumatology still relies on intuition and pattern recognition, as well as on definitive tests and cutting-edge therapies. Today’s rheumatologists deal regularly with autoimmune diseases, in which the body’s immune system attacks healthy cells and tissue. So perhaps it should have been no surprise when my first diagnosis fell into the autoimmune category. At our initial visit, the rheumatologist suggested that I might have serum sickness, a temporary allergic reaction (maybe to that plant in the Sound). Six weeks later, when the pain and swelling persisted, she switched to a diagnosis of seronegative rheumatoid arthritis, a chronic and incurable autoimmune disease that tends to afflict middle-aged women.

Already, though, there were aspects of my condition that did not quite make sense. I did not test positive for the usual markers of autoimmune disease. Nor did the pattern of my symptoms—random, asymmetric pain that moved from joint to joint; swelling of the tissues rather than of the joints themselves—follow the usual rheumatoid-arthritis course. And the frontline treatment for the disease, a powerful immune suppressant known as methotrexate, seemed to have no effect. We spent months cycling through other standard R.A. medications: Humira, Xeljanz, Actemra—many of them vaguely familiar from prime-time TV commercials.

The only drug that controlled my symptoms was the steroid prednisone, in substantial doses. The trouble is that prednisone has side effects dire enough to put even the most alarmist F.D.A.-mandated voice-over to shame. In the short term, the drug can cause mood swings, anxiety, sleep disruption, and even psychosis. In the medium term, it leads to weight gain and fat cheeks, also known as Cushingoid features, or moon face. In the long term, it rots your bones and teeth, thins out your skin, degrades your vision, and increases your susceptibility to diabetes. Plus, the longer you stay on it the harder it becomes to stop. Prednisone is sometimes referred to as “the Devil’s Tic Tac”: cheap and available and effective, but at potentially scorching long-term costs.

I got off easy, at least at first. I gained about ten pounds and my face puffed up a bit. My lower teeth started to chip after a lifetime of solidity. These developments bothered me, but they were nothing compared with the prospect of life without prednisone. On a high enough dose, I could function reasonably well; once, I even played basketball with a band of teen-age boys. Dip below a certain threshold, though, and the simplest activities became impossible; there was no more bending of knees, chewing of food, lifting of arms.

A few months into this back-and-forth, I began to keep a record of my symptoms and sensations, hoping to uncover clues that would break the steroid loop. I tried to be scientific, dispassionately recording dosage, symptoms, and external conditions such as food intake, exercise, and weather. Mostly, though, I complained. Entries included “oof,” “omg ouch,” “can barely move,” and “this sucks”—accurate depictions of my inner state, if not shining displays of literary merit. There were days, sometimes several in a row, when things seemed to improve. “Hooray. Gratitude + joy,” I wrote in February, 2020, after a largely pain-free day. Inevitably, though, the highs turned low. Even a single day could bring wild variation. “Bad in morn,” I wrote on January 14th. “Felt stoic + accepting midday. Eve am kinda miserable but have been worse.”

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, that spring, did not help. As a consumer of powerful immune suppressants, I was “immunocompromised,” part of that subset of Americans who definitely weren’t supposed to go to the grocery store or hug their friends. At the same time, the imposition of COVID restrictions allowed me to hide some of my physical ups and downs. My son and my partner and a few close friends knew what was happening, but the medication cycle was so dismal and repetitive that I feared boring them with too much detail. Instead, I tried to be my own witness. “For the record: I will do my best with this, and I will stick it out over these next months in the hope that we can stabilize the situation and find some relief,” I wrote in my journal. “But I’m not sure I’m up for it if this is the next 30 or 40 years. I reserve the right to bow out.”

I also spent hours ruminating on what I might have done to deserve my fate: Was it too much bourbon? The cigarettes I smoked in college? My inconsistent commitment to yoga? The stress of my divorce? My rheumatologist says this is typical of her female patients, who often turn to self-blame. In contrast, her male patients just show up and say, “Fix me.” The truth, though, was that she could not fix me. So in the summer of 2020, with her blessing, I went in search of a second opinion.

It was a stroke of luck that my right hand was swollen when the day of the consult arrived. The new rheumatologist took one look at it and said, “That’s not rheumatoid arthritis.” Based on the pattern of swelling, which involved the tissues rather than the joint itself, he speculated that I might have an atypical presentation of a rare disease known as acquired angioedema. It was the first time that the words “atypical” and “rare” entered my medical calculus. He prescribed yet another drug, itself rare and therefore outrageously expensive. My health insurance denied the request and demanded further testing.

That, too, was a stroke of luck—not something often said of insurance denials. As part of an in-depth workup, another Yale doctor, an immunologist, tested my levels of immunoglobulins, key proteins manufactured by the immune system to fight infections. It turned out that mine were wildly out of whack, with too many of some and not nearly enough of others. In a functioning immune system, the body responds to a pathogen by creating new immunoglobulins, also known as antibodies, which are specifically designed to combat a particular threat. When the immunologist tested my immune system by administering the pneumococcal vaccine, in the fall of 2020, I produced essentially no response.

This was an alarming discovery to make at a time when the COVID vaccine was about to enter mass production and supposedly save us all. But the numbers did not lie: according to the blood tests, I met the criteria for an immune disorder known as common variable immune deficiency (CVID), a grab-bag term for patients with low antibody levels and weak vaccine response. Despite its name, CVID is not especially common; it affects at most one in twenty-five thousand people. “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras,” the medical-school adage goes, counselling diagnosticians in training to think first of the most common scenarios. CVID patient advocates wryly refer to themselves as “zebras.”

But what sort of zebra was I? My tests showed the classic signs of CVID, including a paucity of B cells, the white blood cells that make antibodies, and, in turn, low levels of immunoglobulin G (IgG), the major class of antibodies that respond to infection. In other ways, though, the diagnosis did not fit any better than rheumatoid arthritis had. Most people who receive a diagnosis of CVID have a history of frequent, stubborn infections. I did not, at least as far as anyone knew. And there was also the imbalance in my immunoglobulins: though my IgG level was low, another type of immunoglobulin—IgM—was more than three times the normal level.

Then, there was the question of how any of this pertained to my actual symptoms: the pain and swelling that had begun so suddenly back in September, 2019. My doctors speculated that I might have a reactive arthritis related to mycobacteria discovered to be lurking in my lungs. Identifying infections in CVID patients can be difficult; many tests look at antibodies, which CVID patients don’t make a lot of. To complicate matters, such patients are often treated with infusions of donor antibodies—I myself started monthly intravenous IgG infusions in October, 2020—and it becomes impossible to sort out which antibodies are which.

But there was at least one important test that retained a high degree of precision. That fall, after seeing the alarming immunology results, my doctors ordered a round of genetic testing, which revealed my one-of-a-kind mutation. This was when we discovered that I was not only a zebra but one with polka dots.

From inside the gates, the N.I.H. looks like any suburban college campus: rolling green hills, a busy shuttle bus, a smattering of buildings, mainly brick, with no especially coherent architectural theme. It also features certain dystopian touches. To enter the campus, visitors must pass through a security station for an I.D. check and a full vehicle search, often conducted by armed police officers with canine assistance. The buildings are identified by numbers, designated in historical order of construction. When I arrived for my first visit, in April, 2021, I stammered to the security guards that I was there as a patient—you know, for medical research. “Oh, you’re Building 10,” they informed me.

Building 10, also known as the N.I.H.’s Clinical Center, is the largest hospital in the world devoted solely to clinical research. To be invited in, patients usually have either a rare or a refractory disease—in essence, one that is resistant to conventional treatment and thus a matter of medical interest. Ideally, they also have an illness of “national and international significance,” according to a Clinical Center handbook, with the potential to reveal something important about how the human body works. While N.I.H. investigators study a range of conditions, including common problems like COVID and cancer and alcoholism, many focus on conditions that afflict only a few people and therefore attract little attention from private industry. The federal government foots the bill for all of it. Most researchers do not apply for outside grants, and patients pay nothing for their treatment.

The N.I.H. broke ground on Building 10 in the late nineteen-forties, amid the burst of scientific optimism that followed the Second World War. During a dedication ceremony, President Harry Truman promised that the Clinical Center would be a place “for the people and not just for the doctors and the rich,” an oasis of democratic care. During those same years, Congress rejected his call for universal health insurance, though it appropriated plenty of money for the Clinical Center’s sophisticated research and high-tech experiments. Even then, Republicans and Democrats could not agree on the virtues of large-scale public-health investment, though they managed to press on with the Clinical Center, given its promise of dramatic medical breakthroughs.

In the aggregate, the idea of the Clinical Center has worked. Its walls are studded with exhibits touting the many pioneering discoveries made possible through the citizen-scientist-government triad. In the nineteen-fifties, N.I.H. researchers used plasma cells to show how antibodies evolve to fight thousands of specific infections. Around the same time, another N.I.H. team helped to break the genetic code. Since then, scientists there have made key discoveries in critical areas of medical research, from early tests of AZT in people with AIDS to recent success in curing patients with sickle-cell anemia.

Even so, today’s rhetoric is less lofty than Truman’s. Patients “come in the hope that we can cure them,” the cardiologist James K. Gilman, who runs the Clinical Center, says. “But we never promise that. If we could, it wouldn’t be research.” Hired in 2016 after a lifetime in military medicine, Gilman says that his job is to insure that the facility works as well for its research subjects as it does for researchers. This has been a challenge for the Clinical Center in recent years, as the rush to make and publish discoveries has sometimes overwhelmed the more human aspects of care. In 2016, a “Red Team” panel found lapses in patient safety that have led to a round of reforms. And patient advocates have criticized the N.I.H. for pushing incremental research ahead of more immediately useful clinical advances.

Still, to be treated at the Clinical Center is to feel awfully special, a member of a select group. It can also be a lonely experience; you wouldn’t be there if you had anywhere else to go. When I began planning for my first visit, COVID restrictions were in full force, so I had been instructed to come by myself. I wasn’t prepared, though, for just how alone I would feel. When you’re one of a kind, Facebook groups and solidarity ribbons and walks for a cure—the essential rituals of modern illness—don’t have much to offer. Becoming a patient at the N.I.H. accentuates that sense of isolation, even as it holds out hope for a medical miracle.

Like many N.I.H. patients, I stayed overnight at the Edmond J. Safra Family Lodge (Building 65), situated a few hundred yards from the Clinical Center—a Holiday Inn and an assisted-living facility rolled into one. The rooms contain the hotel standards: good enough beds, a tiny television with basic cable. They also come equipped with support bars and emergency-alert devices. In 2021, roughly seventy thousand people visited the Clinical Center on an outpatient basis, down from nearly a hundred thousand in pre-COVID years. Three thousand more were admitted to the on-site hospital, for an average stay of 9.4 days. The team studying my case, which Ombrello leads, has brought sixteen patients to Bethesda for in-person visits.

The Clinical Center itself is designed to impress, with a soaring, seven-story atrium as the chief point of entry. Where private hospitals often feature the names of donors, the walls bear tributes to politicians who have visited or otherwise supported the center. But government appropriations do not seem to be distributed evenly. While the main lobby aims for transcendence, most of the working facilities are far more quotidian. The lab where my cells are stored features a stained drop ceiling, wall-to-wall tiled flooring, and a line of cardboard boxes stacked along the hallway.

My appointment began with a formal registration process: document after document in which I signed my medical record over to the federal government. From there, after a brief check of my vitals, it was on to phlebotomy, where I donated those twenty-one vials of blood. The Clinical Center has its own lab on site, separate from the investigators’ research facilities. The fact that everyone works under the same roof—scientists and patients, bench researchers and clinical staff—is supposed to be one of the center’s key strategic advantages. After phlebotomy, I made my way up to the ninth floor, where a member of Ombrello’s team took a detailed case history. A few hours later, Ombrello himself appeared, along with another researcher. (The rest of the team was listening in by laptop.) We crammed into a tiny exam room, all of us wearing masks, determined to get to the bottom of this medical mystery.

Aside from a white lab coat and the deference of his staff, Ombrello might be mistaken for a grad student, all tousled hair and comfy clothes and eagerness to talk shop. He came to the N.I.H. to study systemic juvenile idiopathic arthritis (known, more briefly, as Still’s disease), a rare condition characterized by recurrent fevers, joint and organ inflammation, and a distinctive skin rash. Not long after he arrived, another researcher mentioned a family with an as yet undiagnosed inflammatory disorder; its members suffered from strange infections and swelling, along with a rash that occurred with exposure to the cold. Genetic sequencing revealed a PLCG2 mutation that caused disruptions in the immune system at low temperatures. Ombrello and his colleagues named the new disease PLAID (for PLCG2-associated antibody deficiency and immune dysregulation) and published their findings in The New England Journal of Medicine. With that, Ombrello became an expert on PLCG2 mutations and began receiving referrals.

Our first appointment together consisted largely of talk. I recounted my story. We went over the parts of my situation that seem distinctive, including the high IgM, the weird pattern of symptoms, and, of course, my one-of-a-kind mutation. “When I said we’ve known about you for a while, I wasn’t kidding,” Ombrello told me that first day. “We’ve actually made the mutation that you have and tested it in the lab at this point.” Then he whipped out his phone to show me a graph with two lines. One rose sharply and then evened out, depicting the normal activities of the PLCG2 gene. Next there was my line, pancake-flat from start to finish. According to Ombrello, I have a severe “truncating” mutation, yielding a total loss of function in one copy of the gene. Of the eighty or so participants enrolled in his study, just two others have a similarly serious loss of function, and even the three of us differ considerably in the details.

It’s hard not to feel important when highly trained investigators are busy building your one weird gene. “Your cells are gold to us,” a member of Ombrello’s team told me during one visit. The Clinical Center does its best to feed this sense of purpose. “A Researcher’s most important discovery might be you!” a screen in the main lobby declares. Gilman, the Clinical Center’s chief, says, “Whether it’s a young man or woman on the battlefield or whether it’s one of our patients in the clinical trials, I think it’s hard to imagine making a bigger contribution at the end of life.” This is not what a research-study participant wants to hear: that the rewards will come later, maybe long after I’m gone. But research of this sort is by nature slow and tedious, a matter of piecemeal improvements and repeated failures rather than one big cure.

Thus far, my disease does not even have a name. Several well-informed experiments have failed, each with its own cycle of optimism and disappointment. After my first N.I.H. visit, I embarked on a yearlong course of antibiotics, in the hope that the drugs would not only kill off mycobacteria lodged in my lungs but also take care of my joint pain and swelling. At a second appointment, this past spring, I tested positive for exposure to bacteria that cause Lyme disease, necessitating a month of oral antibiotics, followed by two weeks of I.V. antibiotics. None of these attempts yielded the desired results. Mostly, I came away nauseated and discouraged.

Our latest experiment involves a drug called rapamycin, an immunosuppressant usually prescribed for kidney-transplant patients. As of yet, there have been no dramatic improvements, though this particular drug may have at least one upside. Among fitness types, rapamycin is reputed to have anti-aging properties. After years of feeling decidedly middle-aged, I am now imbibing from a pharmaceutical fountain of youth.

From Ombrello’s perspective, treating an odd case like mine can be intriguing and frustrating all at once. “If you think about people who get referred to the N.I.H., either you have something that someone is specifically interested in—a mutation or a disease—or you have something that’s flummoxed everyone you’ve come in contact with and you’ve received a referral to come here as the last center of hope. And so we’re a bastion of hope,” he says. “But at the same time we can’t always deliver what people are hoping for.”

What he can deliver, for the moment, is a research paper: an aggregate analysis of seventy-six patients with sixty distinct PLCG2 mutations. For such purposes, my set of one is not necessarily useful; professional journals tend to want the big picture, not the quirky individual case. And yet the new age of genetic testing seems to be producing a never-ending stream of one-off mutations, most of them “variants of uncertain significance,” as the medical designation goes. Ombrello says, “We’re now dealing with a fire hydrant,” spraying out vast and unmanageable quantities of information. This may someday yield a renaissance of personalized medicine, in which each patient’s genes can be tweaked and edited in boutique fashion. For now, though, we are a long way from that ideal.

At Yale, my doctors are forging ahead with their own research. In the fall, Dr. Mehek Mehta, an allergy-and-immunology fellow, condensed my saga into a presentation before the global Clinical Immunology Society—beginning with “Cool Breezy Labor Day weekend, 9/2019,” as she put it on one PowerPoint slide, and ending with what little is known about my PLCG2 mutation. Despite the assembled brainpower, she came away empty-handed. “We don’t have any answers for you,” she said during a recent conversation. “Which is the most unsatisfying part.” Her supervisor, Dr. Junghee Shin, is similarly baffled. “The tricky part is that it’s very new,” she says of my genetic mutation. “So nobody really knows what would be the best way to treat it.” Like Ombrello, Shin has studied my cells in her lab, hoping to figure out the relationship among the arthritis, the immune deficiency, and the genetic mutation.

With no clear answers to go on, it has been hard to stabilize a narrative about my current state: Am I healthy or sick? Is my condition alarming or just interesting? As a practical matter, I’m more or less fine on sufficient doses of prednisone, able to live my life without giving my medical-mystery status too much thought. The worst-case scenario seems to be that I will be stuck in this state for years, going about my daily business while my bones erode and my blood sugar spikes and my eyes cloud over with cataracts. Forty years ago, I would likely have ended up in the same situation, dependent on prednisone to function day to day. In that sense, all the tests and appointments, the poking and prodding, the resources of the federal government and the great marvels of twenty-first-century medicine, have not made much of a difference.

And yet it’s impossible to unknow what the tests have revealed: that I have one strange gene, with its own agenda. Ombrello says that he tries to avoid the “retrospectoscope,” in which patients and doctors reinterpret past symptoms through the lens of new knowledge. Historians often refer to this error as presentism, the tendency to read contemporary attitudes back onto history. For better or worse, I haven’t been able to avoid this way of thinking. If the mutation was always there, throwing my immune system off-kilter, what else might it explain: my overhyped and anxious nervous system, the ferocious muscle tension I fought for years, my lifelong unwillingness to work at night? Then again, how did I not know about it for so long? Dr. Shin once suggested that perhaps I’ve always been sicker than I recognized, that my baseline for pain and fatigue and discomfort might be radically different from the norm. “You might be a very tough person,” she offered, a narrative that I’d be happy to embrace, were it not for the impossibility of ever knowing for sure one way or another.

Ombrello says that the “hardest part” of his job is accepting the slow pace of medical research, when there is so much urgency to discover answers for his patients in the here and now. Our standard cultural narratives don’t offer much help. In an episode of “House,” the Fox network’s tribute to the power of diagnosis, the cranky but brilliant protagonist saves a dying Presidential candidate by determining that he has CVID and ordering antibody infusions, stat—at which point the patient heads back out on the campaign trail. But things don’t always work out so neatly, either for CVID patients, who must commit to a lifetime of treatment, or for the medical oddities who end up at the N.I.H. Beginning in 2015, the Discovery Channel spent about a year filming four patients at the Clinical Center, each of them suffering from a rare or refractory disease. Of the four, two died, one was cured, and the other was left somewhat improved but facing an uncertain future.

Learning to live with that uncertainty—staring it down, then letting it go—may be as good as it gets for most patients at the N.I.H. Despite everyone’s best effort, “you don’t have control over what it’s going to do going forward and it is what it is,” Ombrello says of rare disease. “For me, that’s the point that I want to help people to come to.” Such a measured assessment may not be quite what Truman envisioned when he dedicated the Clinical Center more than seventy years ago. But the sentiment seems true to our age of diminished expectations, when defeat and discovery so often coexist, when we have learned just enough to understand all that we do not and may never know. ♦︎

Hesty Leibtag’s (in colorful suit) blowout birthday party that was completely over the top last night.Speeches told a story of one terrific and accomplished woman. Everyone was overwhelmed. We are the Fountainhead Arts women united forever. Kathryn Quinlivan Mikesell Hesty LeibtagTeresa Lois Whitman-Hess

The Year in Quiet Quitting

A new generation discovers that it’s hard to balance work with a well-lived life.

By Cal Newport

Illustration by Liam Eisenberg

The whirlwind surrounding “quiet quitting” first stirred in July when Zaid Khan, a twentysomething engineer, posted a TikTok of himself talking over a montage of urban scenes: waiting for the subway, looking up at leaves on a tree-lined street. “I recently learned about this term called quiet quitting, where you’re not outright quitting your job but you’re quitting the idea of going above and beyond,” Khan says. “You’re still performing your duties, but you’re no longer subscribing to the hustle-culture mentality that work has to be your life. The reality is it’s not. And your worth as a person is not defined by your labor.” The #quietquitting hashtag quickly caught fire, with countless other TikTokers offering their own elaborations and responses.

Traditional media outlets noticed the trend. Less than two weeks after the original video, the Guardian published an explainer: “Quiet Quitting: Why Doing the Bare Minimum at Work Has Gone Global.” A few days later, the Wall Street Journal followed with its own take, and the traditional financial media piled on. “If you’re a quiet quitter, you’re a loser,” the CNBC contributor Kevin O’Leary declared, before adding, “This is like a virus. This is worse than covid.” Quiet-quitting supporters fought back, mostly with sarcasm. Soon after O’Leary’s appearance, a popular TikTok user named Hunter Ka’imi posted a video, recorded in the passenger seat of a car, in which he responds to the “older gentlemen” whom he had seen dismissing quiet quitting. “I’m not going to put in a sixty-hour workweek and pull myself up by my bootstraps for a job that does not care about me as a person,” he declares.

As we approach the sixth month of debate over this topic, what’s interesting to me is not the details of quiet quitting, or even the question of how widespread the phenomenon actually is, but our collective reaction to its provocations: we’re simultaneously baffled and enthusiastic. To understand this complicated reality, it helps to adopt a generational lens. Though quiet quitting has gathered diverse adherents, its core energy comes from knowledge workers who are members of Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2012). This is reflected in the movement’s emergence on TikTok, and in the survey data. A recent Gallup poll found that the largest group of workers reporting being “not engaged” are those born after 1989. Today’s young employees, however, are far from the first population to go through a period of sudden disillusionment about the role of work in their lives. Indeed, a look backward reveals that knowledge workers in every previous generation seem to have experienced a similar pattern of work crisis followed by reconceptualization.

The baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) entered a newly emergent knowledge-work sector that had been formed by a postwar migration to the suburbs. Their parents found a substitute for civic engagement in an Organization Man-ethos centered on loyalty to corporations that could offer lifetime employment in return. This subordination of the individual to the greater cause fit with the ethos of a generation that had banded together to fight fascism in the nineteen-forties, but to their children, surrounded by the social disruptions of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, the sentiment began to seem stiflingly conformist. The boomers responded with a countercultural movement that recast work as an obstacle to self-actualization. The rise of back-to-land, voluntary-simplicity, and communal-living experiments were all, in part, attempts to find meaning outside the structure of employment.

By the time the boomers began having kids of their own, in the nineteen-eighties, their countercultural dreams had long since crumbled. They had to figure out what new message about the meaning of work to pass on to their children, the so-called millennials (born between 1981 and 1996). In looking for a compromise between corporate conformity, which they still distrusted, and their own failed attempts to reject work altogether, the boomers came up with a clever solution: telling the millennial to seek work that they loved. This advice might sound timeless, but its arrival can be connected to this specific period. As I document in my 2012 book, “So Good They Can’t Ignore You,” it’s hard to find references to the phrase “follow your passion” in the context of career advice until the nineteen-nineties, at which point the adage explodes into common usage. This passion-centric perspective attempted to thread the needle between the extremes that the boomers had experienced: get a job, they told their kids, but make it one you love. Seek self-actualization, but also care about making your mortgage payments.

It’s hard to overstate the degree to which millennials—the generation to which I belong—were bombarded with this message during our childhood. This passion culture shaped our initial understanding of work and meaning, but, as with our parents, world events eventually disrupted its influence. The destabilizing impact of the 9/11 and the financial crises that followed cast doubt on the idea that our jobs should be our ultimate source of fulfillment. Employment had become too precarious to leverage in such a self-indulgent manner. When I finished graduate school, in the fall of 2009, American unemployment was near ten per cent. Millennials my age who had nurtured dreams of becoming journalists, or lawyers, or entrepreneurs retreated during this period into whatever fallback jobs they could find. Just a few years earlier, an author named Elina Furman had been making the TV rounds talking about her book “Boomerang Nation,” which documented the rising trend of young adults moving back in with their parents. Many in my generation responded by adopting a new and more pragmatic ethos of “hacking” work to serve a vision of the good life that expanded beyond the details of a particular job.

This was the decade of the blog-fuelled minimalism movement, which argued that if you simplify your life, you can simplify your career, leaving more time for other meaningful pursuits. It was also the decade in which a formerly burned-out entrepreneur turned life-style guru named Tim Ferriss dominated the best-seller lists with his surprise hit, “The 4-Hour Workweek,” which advanced a vision of using automated online businesses to support “mini-retirements” that included exotic travel and adventurous hobbies. In the early twenty-tens, the millennial philosophy of work as a means to an end was further boosted by the arrival of newer, slicker social-media platforms that made it easier to show off curated scenes of aspirational living.

Gen Z entered the workforce with a mind-set that was notably distinct from the millennials who preceded them. As the first group to fully come of age with smartphones and social media, Gen Z formed an understanding of the world in which the boundaries between the digital and real were blurred. Every experience was a potential cyber-palimpsest of self-documentation, and reaction, and reaction to the reactions. Whereas millennials, who had gained access to these tools later in life, used social media to keep track of the adventures and accomplishments of acquaintances and celebrities, this new generation embraced a voyeuristic digital vérité, characterized by the short video of a subject talking straight to camera about both everything and nothing at all. This new style of lo-fi influencer shifted the center of gravity of youth culture and began, for a small core of highly visible examples, to generate substantial financial rewards. “Every waking moment has become pertinent to our making a living,” the artist and writer Jenny Odell explained in a 2017 speech that, appropriately enough, went viral and which eventually turned into a book. For this generation, the personal had become intertwined with the economic.

Then the pandemic arrived. Though this disruption negatively affected knowledge workers of all ages, for Gen Z it delivered an extra sting. The depredations of pandemic-induced remote work—the crush of constant Zoom meetings, the sudden uptick of e-mail and chat, the loss of the redeeming social aspects of gathering in offices—stripped the last vestiges of joy from these jobs. For older employees, these conditions created a professional crisis. For Gen Z, which had so thoroughly mixed work and self, this suffocating grimness hit at a more personal level. It became clear to many that they needed to separate their personhood from their jobs. It is this transition that generates much of the angst exhibited in quiet-quitting videos. “Your worth as a person is not defined by your labor,” a defiant Zaid Khan concludes in the original quiet-quitting TikTok. To a millennial, with our work-as-a-means-to-an-end ethos, this statement sounds obvious and histrionic—like something you’d pronounce in a sophomore-year seminar. But, to Gen Z, declaring a distinction between the economic and the personal is a more radical act.

This is why so many older people are confused by quiet quitting: it’s not meant for us. It’s instead the first step of a younger generation taking their turn in developing a more nuanced understanding of the role of work in their lives. Before we heap disdain on their travails, we should remember that we were all once in this same position. For me and my fellow-millennials, it wasn’t that long ago that our own parents shook their heads at our confident plans to run an automated business from a laptop in Tulum. Our initial struggle to break free from the impossible demands of passion culture may have seemed excessive at the time, but it has, over the years, evolved into a more practical relationship between work and our sense of self.

Quiet quitting is not a life philosophy or policy proposal that needs logical scrutiny. It’s also not a political weapon to be wielded to prove how much more woke or conservative you are than everyone else. It’s both more incoherent and essential than all of that. Figuring out how work fits into a life well lived is hard, but it’s an evolution that has to happen. Quiet quitting is the messy starting gun of a new generation embarking on this challenge. The specifics of what a young engineer says in his TikTok video might annoy or confuse many of us, but it shouldn’t. The content here isn’t that important. What matters is that Generation Z is waking up to the fact that the unnatural melding of self and work induced by an adolescence lived within online spaces isn’t sustainable. They’re finally—thankfully—ready to ask what should come next. ♦

See photos of Tippi Hedren, William Daniels, Rita Moreno, Dick Van Dyke and other nonagenarian stars from the beginning of their careers and now

Tippi Hedren 

The Alfred Hitchcock muse (and star of The Birds) has had an incredibly interesting life, and her Hollywood legacy is strong: She’s mother to Melanie Griffith and grandmother to Dakota Johnson. She celebrated her 90th birthday in January 2020.

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James Earl Jones 

The esteemed actor turned 90 on Jan. 17, 2021.

“I’ll make an exception and enjoy a slice of strawberry shortcake, my favorite!” he told USA Today via email of the low-key festivities for his 90th birthday at his home in upstate New York. Jones, who said that he plans to continue acting “for as long as I can,” added at the time that he was “feeling fantastic and grateful.”

“Looking back at my life and extensive career, I am so proud of my work and accomplishments. I love growing older and wiser with time,” he said.

While Jones intends to continue acting, in September 2022 he announced that he would step back from performing the voice of one of his most iconic characters, Darth Vader. Moving forward, the franchise will use cutting-edge A.I. to voice the character by utilizing archival recordings of Jones’ previous performances.

Joel Grey

The Oscar and Tony Award-winning Cabaret star told PEOPLE on April 11, 2022, that he would be celebrating his 90th birthday “with good friends.”

But even after he entered his 10th decade, Grey has remained a busy actor, including making a cameo in Lin-Manuel Miranda‘s Tick, Tick… Boom! and appearing in three episodes of the 2022 FX thriller The Old Man, starring Jeff Bridges.

When asked if he ever imagined becoming such a prolific actor as a young boy growing up in Cleveland, Ohio, he told PEOPLE, “No! I didn’t. I’ve never thought about it, actually, and I never thought [about] this number that I’d be associated with: 9-0.”

William Daniels 

Daniels, who starred on the drama series St. Elsewhere and voiced the iconic KITT automobile in the action series Knight Rider, is perhaps best known as Boy Meets World‘s beloved Mr. Feeny.

Daniels still occasionally hangs with his former Boy Meets World castmates, joining them for a hilarious photo op at the Boston Comic-Con Fan Expo in August 2019.

Daniels, who turned 90 in March 2017, is also known for his longtime marriage to fellow actor Bonnie Bartlett. The pair celebrated their 70th anniversary on June 30, 2021.

Robert Wagner 

The actor had been working in film for nearly 20 years before hitting it big in the late ’60s and ’70s with roles on TV’s It Takes a Thief, Switch and Hart to Hart. 

In his later career, Wagner (who turned 90 in February 2020) played Number Two in the Austin Powers movies and had recurring roles on Two and a Half Men and NCIS

Rita Moreno 

One of the few stars to earn an EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Award), Moreno turned 90 on Dec. 11, 2021, with decades of iconic, groundbreaking work to her name.

She’s pictured here on the left attending the 1961 premiere of the original West Side Story, for which she won an Oscar for her portrayal of Anita, and on the right at the 2021 premiere of the Steven Spielberg version, in which she plays a new character, Valentina.

In addition to the West Side Story remake, Moreno has remained very active, including appearing in the 2023 films 80 for Brady and Fast X.

Barbara Eden 

“I feel young,” the I Dream of Jeannie star told Page Six shortly after her 90th birthday in August 2021.

In addition to maintaining an “active” social life, she credits regular workouts (she still has a trainer!) for her longevity.

Bob Newhart 

The esteemed actor turned 90 on Sept. 5, 2019 — and celebrated in Las Vegas! Days later he surfaced at the Emmy Awards in Los Angeles, playing a part in a bit about comedy legends that figured life-like statues of George Burns and Lucille Ball. When Ben Stiller, who did the segment, got to Newhart, the actor wryly reminded him, “I’m still alive.”

“You put me with George and Lucy and it’s weird,” Newhart said. “Like I was in some weird museum of comedy.”

“It’s more like legends of comedy,” Stiller insisted, riffing. “Alive, dead … all different types of comedy!”

But Newhart wasn’t buying it. “This legend is going to kick your ass, that way you’ll know I’m alive,” he said. “You thought I was dead!”

Though best known for starring in the sitcoms The Bob Newhart Show and Newhart, he has continued to occasionally appear on television in shows like The Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldon.

Iris Apfel 

The beloved, bespectacled designer turned 100 on Aug. 29, 2021. “Everything about turning 100 is fantastic, but I really do believe that I’m still the world’s oldest teenager,” she joked to InStyleahead of the big milestone.

And she’s still working. In 2022, Apfel released new collaborations with both H&M and Ciaté London.

William Shatner 

The Star Trek actor with the iconic voicecelebrated entering his 90s in March 2021 by joking on Twitter: “Well! I must say that the reaction to a 90th birthday is overwhelming. Don’t you people have better things to do?”

In October 2021, Shatner made history when he traveled on Jeff Bezos‘ Blue Origin space shuttle, becoming the oldest living person to go into space.

Harry Belafonte 

The actor-musician-activist, who turned 90 in March 2017, came out of retirement after a 2015 seizure to shoot a stirring scene for Spike Lee’s Oscar-nominated 2018 film BlacKkKlansman. “He walked onto the set, and we were all shook,” Lee told Deadline. “He shot the scene three times, shook hands and posed for pictures with everyone, gave me a hug and he was out of there.”

In 2022, Belafonte was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the Early Influence category. He became the oldest living person to have received the honor.

Gene Hackman 

The actor, known for roles in The French Connection, Hoosiers and The Royal Tenenbaums, retired from acting in 2004.

“I miss the actual acting part of it, as it’s what I did for almost 60 years, and I really loved that. But the business for me is very stressful,” he told Reuters in 2008. “It had gotten to a point where I just didn’t feel like I wanted to do it anymore.”

Hackman channels his creative energy into writing (his fifth book, Pursuit, came out in 2013) — but his fans are as ardent as ever, coming out en masse online to celebrate his 90th in January 2020.

Dick Van Dyke 

A beloved actor and comedian, Van Dyke charmed audiences across the decades with his television series The Dick Van Dyke Show and films like Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bangand Night at the Museum.

In his cameo in the 2018 film Mary Poppins Returns, Van Dyke showed that he hardly aged a day since he starred in the 1964 original. (This was also evident in the flash mob thrown for his 90th, in December 2015.)

Clint Eastwood 

The prolific actor/director joined the club on May 31, 2020, when he turned 90.

In a December 2019 chat with Ellen DeGeneres, he got candid about aging, saying, “I don’t think about it,” adding with a laugh, “I sometimes think, when I was a little kid and I used to hang out with my grandfather who was in his 90s, and I thought, ‘Jesus, who the h—- would want to live this long!'”

Eastwood continues to direct and occasionally star in films, including 2019’s Richard Jewell and 2021’s Cry Macho.

Eva Marie Saint 

The On the Waterfront and North by Northweststar is a true living legend. Saint is the oldest living winner of an Academy Award

In 2014 — the year she turned 90 — Saint lent her voice to Katara in the Avatar: The Last Airbender television spin-off The Legend of Korraand appeared in the film Winter’s Tale.

Bob Barker 

Though he left The Price Is Right in 2007 after doing more than 6,000 episodes of the beloved game show, the TV star has stayed busy behind the scenes, especially when it comes to his animal activism. He turned 99 in December 2022.

Norman Lear 

As the mind behind All in the Family, Maude, Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons and many other television hits, Lear has an unmatched resume in the history of television production.

Though he celebrated his 100th birthday in July 2022, he is still busy writing and producing. Incredibly, Lear told PEOPLE at the time that he had 23 projects in the works!

Gena Rowlands 

The actress, who turned 90 in 2020, hadbeen working since 1955 — but gained a whole new generation of fans with her memorable role as Allie in 2004’s The Notebook, which was directed by her son, Nick Cassavetes. Rowlandsretired from acting after the release of her 2014 film Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, and she received an Honorary Oscar in 2016.

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Mel Brooks 

The iconic funnyman, who has had blockbuster success on TV, films and Broadway, has shown absolutely no signs of slowing down since his 90th birthday in 2016 — in fact, he released a memoir, All About Me!, in 2021 and wrote and executive produced a sequel to his hit A History of the World, Part I for Hulu.

David Attenborough

A comrade of Queen Elizabeth II, beloved television host and natural historian, Attenborough won a Primetime Emmy Award for narrating the 2017 documentary series Blue Planet II. And he remains incredibly popular — in 2020, Attenborough (who turned 90 in 2016) became the fastest Instagram user to gain 1 million followers, achieving the feat in just four hours and 44 minutes.

Tony Bennett 

Despite an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, which his family revealed at the beginning of 2021 (and which has caused him to retire), Bennett still finds joy in singing. In the “One Last Time” Radio City Music Hall performances with Lady Gaga, the legendary crooner (who turned 90 in 2016) effortlessly recalls all the words to his greatest hits.

Berry Gordy

The founder of Motown Records, responsible for launching the careers of The Supremes, the Jackson Five and Stevie Wonder, among many others, turned 90 in November 2019, but still keeps busy: In the early 2010s, Gordy oversaw a musical about his life and successes that premiered on Broadway in 2013.

In 2023, Gordy was honored alongside longtime collaborator Smokey Robinson as the 2023 MusiCares Persons of the Year Honorees.

June Squibb 

The actress received an Oscar nomination at age 84 for her role in Nebraska and hasn’t slowed down since — you’ve seen her in Palm Springs, Godmothered, Life & Beth and Little America, all of which came out after her 90th birthday in 2019.

Johnny Gilbert 

Gilbert, whose career in entertainment has spanned nearly 70 years (and even included two albums), has been the voice you’ve heard introducing Alex Trebek on every episode of Jeopardy from the host’s first turn in 1984 to his last, filmed in 2020 before he passed away from pancreatic cancer — and beyond. The announcer turned 90 in 2018.

Dr. Ruth Westheimer 

A German Jewish refugee whose parents died in Auschwitz during the Holocaust, Dr. Ruthimmigrated to the United States in 1956 and began to pursue her post-doctoral studies in human sexuality. In 1980, she launched her radio career, eventually hosting the call-in show Sexually Speaking and becoming a phenomenon that changed the way Americans spoke about sex. In 2019, a documentary about her life debuted and as of her 94th birthday in 2022, she was still dishing out spicy life advice.

Buzz Aldrin 

The astronaut became the second human to set foot on the moon in July 1969, when his Apollo 11 mission landed on the lunar surface. Aldrinhas since earned a Presidential Medal of Freedom, written books and continues to promote space exploration. He turned 90 in 2020.