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Impervious: A Tale of Two Attempted Murders
On August 12, 2022, author Salman Rushdie was stabbed nearly to death while he was giving a speech at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. As he spoke, a man dressed in black came running down the aisle, leaped onto the podium, and began wildly stabbing Mr. Rushdie as the crowd looked on in shock. Mr. Rushdie is alive today because of the intervention of the onlookers, the work of medical personnel, and the love of his wife. But he now lives his life with permanent scars – both physical and emotional – and is blind in one eye.
Almost thirty years prior to the attempted murder at Chautauqua, David Gelernter, at the time a relatively obscure professor of computer science at Yale, opened a package delivered to him through the mail and was blown up by a bomb the package contained. He survived the attempted murder by the Unabomber and, like Mr. Rushdie, now lives with the permanent scars.