Randy Boyagoda

In the span of his infant papacy, Robert Prevost hasn’t had time to make many decisions besides what to say from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, what to wear when he said it, and what name to take as pope. This last choice is the most instructive. As the novelist Laurence Sterne once wrote, names exert “a strange kind of magick bias” on their subjects.

Salman Rushdie was stabbed repeatedly yesterday at the Chautauqua Institution, in western New York. He is on a ventilator. He has wounds to his neck, stomach, and liver; severed nerves in one of his arms; and, according to his literary agent, Andrew Wylie, will probably lose an eye. This singular symbol of daring artistic ambition has become, suddenly, a flesh-and-blood person in grave suffering.